A Story About An ARIES

Aries: The Shepherd

I was constantly confused. Fighting myself every step of the way, it was exhausting. After spending so much time being wrapped up in what the others around me wanted that I got caught up in, big time too, feels like I’ve lost almost a decade of my life. My daughter’s life. I’ve battled so many obstical's for this lifetime that if I was a fucking cat I’d be crowned by the pharaohs for being the most infamous of felines. “Always beating the odds on this one,” they’d say some shit like that, definitely. If you’d ask anyone that knew the old me, they’d probably tell you they're glad I’m not dead yet. You could just roll with the religious saying as most people do, “God puts his strongest soldiers through the toughest battles,” sometimes when you're that strongest soldier alone, you tend to forget that phrase. I know very few that could’ve lived the life I’ve lived and be better than me now, with the same or better accomplishments too.

If you're anything like me you’ve had your fair share of great times as well as those times you’ve literally all but forgotten about but apparently not everyone else. It’s been a tough journey trying to recover from addiction, incarceration and shit parenting but some of us do make it. After my incarceration the landing back to society was going great until like most people with family trauma I went back home. It was all rainbows and sunshine until my family started bringing up my past and it went downhill from there. Oh did I mention, I hated therapy for a long time so all those young traumatic experiences got locked away in the kids closet as I grew up in the system.

As an Aries the need to assert dominance when starting something is some kind of second nature, so problems with authority yeah that's something serious alright. It doesn’t last forever I promise, I’ve come to the understanding that sometimes even though I know my ideas are better or that my opinion should be heard, it's sometimes better to keep my thoughts to myself. Not all battles need to be won at once in order to win the war, sometimes the means-to-an-end is literally just shutting the fuck up. It has taken a while for me to get to that conclusion in life but I got here. I’ve lost a lot, some blood, sweat and tears on others and myself in the process. Now that I look back at the shit I’ve done and the things I constantly kept putting up with in my life, there are some things that I look back to and ask myself, really Luz? I have very few regrets in life, and that’s simply put because if I did none of those things that got me caught up, I would’ve never met or done any of the great and shitty things I’ve done in my quarter of a century living in this corrupt world. I feel like I’m doing great, at least mentally that is. Well I guess you can say I'm still working on it. I don’t plan on leaving this earth anytime soon so this is the Great Luz in the making.

My daughter spent her 10th birthday in a psychiatric facility. That’s a year younger than I was when my mother put me in there because she just couldn’t handle me, I guess. Never really got that deep into it with my mother, hispanics are very hard at understanding what the true underlying causes of most mental health disabilities are. It’s typically because some parents were worse off and had it harder, meaning they want to teach you harder or however my dad used to tell me. Lets just say that my bloodline has a long list of self doubt and self destruction attached to it, so you can only imagine that someone was going to compare you to a bad cousin, aunt or uncle at least once in your childhood.

I’ve enjoyed most of my life as any other black sheep in the family would. Alone. That need for solitude is so profound in me that sometimes that’s the only way I thrive. Which sucks when your ADHD brain keeps reminding you that you need to show your daughter more love everyday. The underlying separation anxiety I deal with everyday is crippling. Well that's all a part of uncaging your inner demons sometimes, I went through my Ram stage for way too long in my eyes. I feel like it took longer for me to change just waking up every morning and just choosing violence like if I couldn’t just change my life if I wanted to, key word I. You know there’s that need for control coming in again, shit NEVER goes away!

After Leeyha’s hospital trip everything changed in me, along with meeting the person of my dreams. It was like bam found love then bam, Leeyha's breaking.

MOMMY TO THE RESCUE!!!

Omar came into my life when I was blinded by fear, pain, anger, and addiction. And one by one made all my inner demons lay to rest. All in time for me to be able to save my daughter from her inner demons almost destroying her. Seeing yourself in the face of your first born is a slow tearing of every vital nerve connecting from your womb, to your head then to your heart. The sight of my smile in her smile, her skinny body looking smaller than mine, in the same green scrubs and gray hospital chair. I hated myself. For letting what happened to me start over with her. I pledged to her that day to change everything I can to make sure she does what she’s meant to in life. I promised to stop taking prescription medication that hides my true emotions and nature. To not resort to isolating myself to get better, or get high like the old me would when things got hard. She needs me at 1,000% now, and I hate how long it's taken.

From being on Class C narcotic prescription medications all my life, to doing everything I wanted to get my hands on. I stopped it all, don’t get me wrong though I am mentally insane if you ask a judge. Just Kidding, maybe. But after seeing the type of treatment my daughter was getting from people that watched me grow up scared the shit out of me. As a mom you don't ever want someone else to tell you something about your child you don’t or didn’t already know yourself. I told my mother absolutely everything, she hated it. The way I love my daughter is unlike anyone else because as parents we all have recieved love differently. Giving us our own personal version of what we think they deserve.

After 3 years of probation and a few scares of being locked up again, I’m finally free. I can finally leave the place that's caused me so much pain for good but, I want my daughter back full time. I can’t leave her again, especially not voluntarily. She needs consistency that I can give her, I may have been gone or in and out of her life but at 10 she figured out why and she wants better for herself. Now for a 10 year old to know what it is to witness unfair treatment on their parents and be strong enough to stand and fight to stay together is a hard pill to swallow. She’s heard so much judgment on all sides about her parents that it’s a shame for some of these people to even say they love her.

So now the fight with my mother will commence, p.s grandmother drama is so much worse then baby daddy drama trust me. They go hard for themselves more than the kid sometimes, you know if they raised you and you did this then she’ll be worse with you. Umm no Ma’ am absolutely not it is literally the other way around. You’ve raised a Beast of a daughter like me and I had to go through shit to get this good and I’m still not at my best so I dont think you’ll do any better with a more strong willed little princess version of me. Paper work is in and my daughter spoke to her lawyer yesterday like they’ve been friends for years, that’s a shame but after an hour conversation on facetime my daughter took her headphones off and smiled at me and said don’t be sad mommy, WE got this.