Hello, anybody out there?

Hi, it's me, Cat's Meow.
I was going to start a new blog for keeping track of my daughter's homeschool, when I saw that my old posts were back. Not published, but visible to me.
I read through them and started missing blogging!

My daughter is now nearly 13 years old, a beautiful, intelligent, kind soul with ever deepening faith which has been tried and tested. Life has not been The Cat's Meow, for sure.
I will talk some more about everything, but for now I will let you know that we moved to another city with Indy, a small old city by the coast where my sister's family lives. I bought a small house of 63 square meters / 680 sqft. Or by my calculations, 71 square meters /760 sqft. We moved here with two of our four cats. The other two stayed with Indy's dad, who also decided to move to this city and lives downtown, about 4 kilometers/ 2,5 miles from us. They get to see each other as much as they want, but she wants to live with me. I was firm on the fact that none of this is her fault and I will not force her to travel between two homes. No. And luckily she is now old enough to have a legal right to pretty much decide by herself, so her dad accepted it, moved close to us, and he has actually said he is happy with this arrangement. He says he sometimes misses us but generally he likes living by himself.

We are still married, even though divorce was filed for the second time. Neither of us has somebody else now, and even though initially I told him I was going to get a divorce, I then decided to wait and see, let him carry the consequences of his actions for once, and maybe, maybe he could prove to me that he really has changed and that I could trust him again.

I'm not sure I ever can though, as he broke my trust over and over. At the end I felt like my sense of reality was getting compromised. I was a wreck, and I decided that I can't live like this, and I am not going to give this kind of example to my girl, that this is okay and this is what marriage is like, and you just take any abuse and forgive and stay. And I realized that I CAN forgive and still NOT stay. I do forgive, but I can not trust.

Just recently Indy wanted to know what happened. I'd told her some basics, and said that she can always ask more when she is ready to hear. I promised again that I will always be honest. She has the right to know why this happened to her family. She was okay with us moving out after the initial shock. But then we became sick, it was at the time the c-virus hit Finland. She didn't recover and started getting more and more symptoms, which is why I started to homeschool her. She was too sick to attend school, yet the doctor at the hospital told me basically that there is nothing wrong with her and she needs to go to school and activate herself. When I was homeschooling her, and I knew that she wanted to move to live closer to her cousins, I thought, why not? Why pay high rent in the city, when the only reason we were staying was her school, and now she is not attending? So I bought our little house and we moved a year ago.

I've been renovating and gardening, I have my small business of designing and selling fabrics (see our webpage at hellin.fi ) and I'm getting back to painting fine art as well. I just sold an old painting, and I noticed that after a long time being into print design, I miss painting. I published a pattern book as well, that was a fun project. The book is sold out but when I have money I'm planning on a second edition. Also I wanted to translate it to English, as I already have the patterns in English.
But we'll see.

So, I guess I have done a lot of things, objectively thinking, as I've also struggled with physical ailments, when I was fainting sometimes multiple times a day, extreme fatigue and things like that. Not to mention depression, anxiety, sometimes pure, unadultered desperation. Have you ever cried form a place so deep that the tears came out as screams? I was asking, how will I ever survive this? How will I ever have the strength to go on, to take care of my daughter, to be a stable, comforting mother to her in her sufferings? I have wished I could just give up. But because of her, I couldn't and I can't.

I cried out to my Lord to just hold on to me, to keep my head above the dark murky waters that were pulling me down so hard. Just keep me close, keep Indiana close. Let your will happen in our lives, Lord, I accept it, but just hold on to us. Let me praise you Lord, let me feel your joy and peace when I have none! If I must go on living, let me live ever closer to you Jesus!

So, I will try this blogging thing again. I will be writing about homeschooling, renovating, simple living, faith.. Things I used to write about, but also keep track of what we do for school. Indy has her own non-public homeschool blog where she posts things she does, things like essays from books she read and her drawings and animations, so I won't be sharing those here. Well, maybe some of her photos and artwork, as she is amazingly talented!
The photo of me at the beach, wearing a hooded denim jacket, was taken by her, by the way. I'm telling you she is more talented than I am at drawing, she has an ability to make stick figures convey emotions! But more about everything later. I hope to see you around!