Root and Rise

Welcome. You are safe here.

This blog answers the questions nobody prepared you for:
What do I do next?

Where do I find help?

How do I keep going when I’m exhausted?

You will find self-help, psychological wisdom, legal tidbits, parenting tools, faith and love after divorce, and mutual help  from a community of kind people sharing what worked for them.

I am not a lawyer or a therapist or a medical professional. I am a survivor who spent 23 years in an abusive marriage, survived a rough childhood, am a single mother who spent tens of thousands of dollars on paperwork fighting a vicious divorce through the family court system.

I have chosen to introduce struggles and solutions in the form of a story, with useful tidbits like the science, tools, links, articles, videos, etc. embedded within the storyline. I am just starting out, I am not sure where to start, but I know I want to share the resources and knowledge (even the painful, unnecessary knowledge, that I could have lived without) I have gained in my life that might be of use to someone out there. Because you see, when it comes to information, timing matters. What you know now; at a time of crisis, might make a whole lot of difference in your life. No wonder they say hindsight is 20/20, because in hindsight, you would have gained not only the emotional intelligence, but also the exposure and time to parse through things and analyze them.

I hope that if I share the things I did right, and the mistakes I made along the way with you, you would not only have applicable resources you need, but also make one less mistake that I made, and that I wish gives you the edge you need to get out of a challenging situation.

So here goes nothing, I’ll write to you everyday, sharing a little bit of my experiences in the form of a short story with related resources in every post. I hope this gives you the joy of reading both fiction and non-fiction in this living and growing blog.

Everything here is the flashlight someone had handed me, or I wish had handed me. You are not alone; Iet me hand you my flashlight, hoping it adds a little light along your path. Wishing you much happiness!

I like trees, something about them being able to root themselves in the hard ground, break open themselves as a seed, allow light and nutrients to nurture their breakthrough through the soil, and to come alive fragile and soft and then to grow into hardy, strong, and yet such giving creatures feels so fascinating to me. Each tree is an ecosystem in itself, capturing carbon from the atmosphere to build itself and giving oxygen, shelter, nutrients, and life to so many life forms feels so powerful! Here are a couple of images of the redwoods in California. These gentle stand for thousands of years and bear witness to history unfolding geologically and historically. They are upwards of 300 feet tall and 20 feet wide. They give so much life when they are alive and they give life through their disintegration for about 200-300 years after their death (that’s even longer than sperm whales whose carcasses feed ocean life for about 100 years after their death). They grow together in a ‘fairy circle’ and interconnect through their root systems. That allows them to grow strong and stand tall longer than most life on the planet. Wishing everyone much joy and happiness, and to Root and Rise in connectedness and community!