Bad Mommy - Warning! Vent - might want to skip!

I look at all the work my friend Lisa does as a working single parent with a RAD daughter. Even when I'm single parenting it on the weekends when Hubby is teaching scuba diving, I'm still not alone, Grandma, the saint, takes all 4 kids almost EVERY Saturday night. I don't know how my friend Lisa does it. She's my idol!

I feel like the world's worst mom (not to be confused with the world's meanest Mom - a title I am honored to accept as the inventor of the FAIR Club). Now that my kids are not falling apart 24/7, I focus on them a lot less. I don't do all the fun things I remember my Mom doing with me. I just sit and stare at the TV or my computer screen - occasionally making a dinner, holding Ponito on my lap, and even more rarely, "beating" (tickling) a child.

Now that I'm taking meds for depression and bipolar disorder (and Bear and Kitty are stabalized too), I don't even have the excuse that I'm too stressed out to cope with the children. The meds really take the edge off the anxiety that comes from walking the line daily with whether or not we're going to make it through this recession. I admit, I've given most of that anxiety away, not to God, as I should, but to Hubby. Hubby is going to take complete responsibility for it whether I worry about it or not. I married him because of his big broad shoulders, but I worry too that he's going to work/worry himself to death.

Sometimes I feel that when I take my daughter, Kitty, to therapy that that is the only time she and I spend together - she prefers to play with Bob, or walk around outside talking to herself. When Bear talks to me, I feel cornered and irritated, before he even opens his mouth. The only other time I talk to him is to tell him to quit intimidating or parenting the kids. He has a deep man voice and his irritation is always right out there in the open. If Hubby is not around, he denies sounding this way, or tells me that's just the way it is.

When we attend Bear's therapy (almost always both Hubby and I, unlike Kitty where it's just me), I always get the feeling that the therapist thinks we are always yelling at Bear and criticizing him (we would never do this). He sees us as tired and apathetic too (this I will admit happens often). He's constantly asking me if I'm working on spending less time on the computer and more time with Bear. He doesn't understand that the kids don't WANT to spend time with me (I'm a PARENT, of course they don't). I might as well be on the computer all the time. Bear would rather be outside demolishing, I mean fixing, things, throwing a ball with Ponito and the little neighborhood boys, or flirting with the neighborhood girls out walking their dogs (- is it his bad boy image that gets him the girls? I mean he's attractive, but not THAT great looking.)

Life is too stressful right now. Hubby hasn't drawn a paycheck from our company since January. I haven't drawn a paycheck since March. Debt collectors call constantly - even on Sunday mornings. We've always been super responsible people who's only real debt was our mortgage. We'd paid both cars off and if we didn't have the money, we didn't spend it. But when we bought the company, we made some big mistakes. We had one company default on paying us over $30K in December and that was followed by a big recession. Now we owe tons in credit card debts and have borrowed huge amounts from my parents. Every time I turn around we have to borrow more just to make it through the week. We have even skipped paychecks on some of our employees (not the employee who went postal!).

Hubby was offered a fantastic job by a company in the UK who want him to open a USA branch of their company and be CEO. He was told the job would pay $250K plus a $150K bonus if he met his goals. We had recently decided that the company was never intended to support both of us, and Hubby was going to start looking for another job. This seemed like the answer to our prayers. The job was supposed to start mid-March or maybe April 1st. Every time we talked to the President of the UK company, he said he had just one more thing to do (meet with the board, meet with investors, have the bank sign off on something, get his products licensed here and in the UK...) and that he would be ready for Hubby to start, and for our company to do some major work for him - in a week or two. He's been saying next week or mid month for, well months now!

Hubby can't seem to find anything but engineering jobs which he hates (that's why he went back and got his MBA - because he was tired of being an engineer). This job is his dream job. It's all soooo frustrating.

We've put off so much until money started coming in. The girls going to private school, allowances, trip to Nebraska to see ours and the kids family, surgery on my thyroid, new contacts for Bob, buying a car that will hold the whole family (my 5 passenger Mazda Proteges was not designed to hold my big children - and anytime we want to go somewhere as a family we have to take 2 cars - which isn't exactly great for fuel consumption). On the bright side, the kids are learning a lot about budgeting. We've found an amazing Salvation Army where one of the staff has taken pity on me and only charges me $1-3 for tons of clothes!

OK, I'm whining. Time to stop. Sorry about that, but this way I don't have to dump as much on the shoulders of my support group. I really appreciate your getting this far, and prayers would be greatly appreciated. If you know anyone that needs product development done... hey, that would help too.

Mary