A Day In The Life...

Although I don't really have anything drastically deep to impart, no nuggets of wisdom to bestow, no burning desires I feel the need to extinguish, it's been a bit since my last post, so I thought I'd jump in and just let my mind wander as my fingers tap the keyboard.
I know one thing that's been surfacing over and over again lately is my marveling at how drastically different my life is these days. I know everyone experiences lifestyle changes of one sort or another, but at times I really have to shake my head in wonder, laughing at how I'm a complete universe away from, let's say, five years ago.
How 'bout I illustrate. Today was fairly typical of the way things are for me these days, so I'll list some of my activities...
6:30~ Got up with my husband and infant son, fed them both while watching the morning news. Packed a lunch for the man, packed the diaper bag for the boy. Hubby left for work, I did my morning ablutions and headed out with the baby as well.
9:30~ Bible study at my church (His Place). Laughed, prayed, drank coffee with around 35 other Christian women as we studied "Women of the Bible". Made a date for "Mom's Connect" later in the week- clothing exchange and chance to get together with other moms of little ones, yay!
11:45~ Will be turning in a shoebox for "Operation Christmas Child" this Sunday, so spent a few bucks at the Dollar Store on toys, toiletries and candy. I picked a boy, aged 4-9, to shop for. My shoebox will most likely be his only gift, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy to pack it up as I imagined the joy on this Third World child's face when he opens it.
Noonish to Five-ish~ Worked. In my home office, on my new desktop computer, on our satellite internet connection (read: expensive). I'm blessed with a super-flexible yet lucrative position with a natural foods company, doing a wide variety of online tasks. This allows me to stay home with my beautiful baby boy, instead of having to farm him off at some daycare, while making a necessary contribution to our finances.
5:30~ Dinner and a movie. Literally.
7:30~ Read a few chapters of a Tanenbaum novel. Played with my son, making him laugh until he got the hiccups (this brings me untold amounts of joy). Told myself repeatedly how great quitting smoking feels- it's been a month- and the urge to chew on my fingernails would soon pass.
9:00~ Hanky-panky with the man of the house.
9:07~ (just kidding) 9:45~ Made a cup of Apple Cinnamon tea (reading on the box while I waited for the kettle to whistle that in ancient Egypt cinnamon was valued more highly than gold- hmmm, learn something new every day). Wandered into the office, where I proceeded to mouse around until I landed here. My blog.

Interspersed with the above, there were lots of other miscellany: diaper changes, housework, errand running, chatty little phone calls, snacks. You know. Stuff.

Now, although I won't be able to retrieve an exact timeline of any particular day from my past, I can certainly remember enough gory details to give a convincing facsimile. So here goes....
3:17(a.m.)~ A carload of shady characters, spun out of their minds, show up at my run-down apartment's door wanting to buy some dope. Including all the other losers crammed about the premises, all in various states of intoxication, this makes 14 people in my house. My stress level is rising proportionally, and I put the meth pipe down long enough to search through my drug stores for some sort of downer. The phone won't stop ringing, so I assign someone (can't remember their name right offhand) the task of answering it for me while I step into my office (read: bathroom)in order to weigh out the tweek for the latest customers so they'll get the hell out.
4:20~ I throw a mini temper tantrum. I have the biggest sack of dope, so I feel entitled to do this. Only a couple things get broken, and the upside is that several scumbags are intimidated into leaving. An older guy with tattoos on his neck and track marks on both arms invites me to smoke some pot with him. I accept. The phone still won't stop ringing.
6:05~ Time to re-up. I assign the task of guarding what's left of my belongings to one of the more trustworthy crack whores, telling her I'll throw in an extra quarter gram if she does some housework while I'm gone, as the place is a freaking disaster.
I jump in my beat-up car (extremely well-known to the police by then) and screech off towards Spokane, digital scale hidden in a secret compartment under the hood, stereo thumping obscenely loud music from a top-shelf stereo system, every component of which was stolen. I justify this by saying, "It wasn't ME who stole it. I paid someone for it." The phone won't stop ringing, but as I'm out of "shit", I don't answer.
7:25~ I sit at some crack shack in SpoCompton, fidgeting because my dealer's too paranoid to come out of his closet at the moment. He shouts instructions from within to his many syncophants. I watch some fat guy covered in sweat surreptitiously masturbate in the car out front, a girl who looks all of fifteen try to shoot up in her neck with the aid of a mirror, and an emaciated dreadlocked black guy pick at what he says are bugs crawling out of holes in his dog. I feel sorry for only the dog. Finally get my ounce of meth and peel out, nose upturned at all those horrible addicts.
9:00~ Back in business. Deciding to answer the unceasing ringing of my cellphone, I rack up so many potential sales, I can't remember them all. Having run into this problem many times prior, I'm prepared with a dry-erase marker. I use this to write the customers' names on the inside of my windshield as I drive erratically back into town. They'll be wiped off as I make the stops. I'm swerving because it's hard to drive straight when I've been up for several days, as well as hit the pipe, apply makeup, and change CD's.
12:15~ Eight stops later and six hundred dollars richer, I realize I can't remember the last time I'd eaten or showered. I'm avoiding having to deal with all the riff-raff at my house, so I hole up at a motel for the hell of it, peeping out the window to make sure I wasn't followed. I become absorbed with the mindless task of blowing another glass pipe, and forget about everything except the hissing of the propane torch. Time gets away from me. Since the phone won't stop ringing, I shut it off.
7:29~ Cramped muscles and blistered fingers warn me it's time to stop messing around with the glass tubing. I've blown four pipes and ruined another six feet of tubing as I tweeked, as well as almost set fire to the motel room. Solution: handful of pills and a dozen hits off one of the new pipes, then slink off under the cover of darkness.
8:00~ Turn the phone back on. It immediately rings, with a collect call from my estranged drug-dealing boyfriend, currently a guest in Kootenai County Detention Center. He begs me to be careful, as I lie my head off regarding what I've been up to. I promise to visit, write, bail him out eventually and be faithful and careful until then. All are lies.
8:15~ Back on the road, this time to rescue a fellow dealer. It's kind of a "boy's club", but I do my best to fit in by pulling off crazy stunts such as the one I'm about to undertake: the guy's in an altercation with a rival, so I show up waving a butterfly knife around and threatening to cut off his nuts. It works, and we celebrate by another round of meth smoking. A couple people scamper off to go shoot up instead. I realize I've left my apartment full of people who I promised I'd see shortly, and by now it's probably been picked clean and someone might be cooking a batch of dope in it. I go to leave but someone has slashed my tires, busted my windows and stolen my stereo system. I freak out, raging about idiot thieves with knives... and the phone STILL won't stop ringing.

This is by no means a definitive description of how things were back then. No, it was WAY more psychotic. And x-rated. And sad. And exhausting. I think, no I know, when I was finally arrested and I knew it was over, it was with a feeling of relief that I crawled into that police car, like a great weight had been lifted from my skinny little shoulders.

So do you see what I mean? If it weren't for the publicity I've been afforded as of late, I doubt most people would ever even have the slightest inkling of how different my life used to be. I think even I forget sometimes, and I'm not sure that's so good. I think sometimes I need to be reminded of how crazy and sick it all was, how much better things are for me now.
Yeah, after all the nonstop excitement it gets a little monotonous sometimes these days. Yeah, I'm not a big-time power-tripping dope dealer anymore, I'm just a wife and mom who's just about done cleaning up the wreckage of her past, but has lots of mundanity ahead. But that's okay. Because with the mundane, there is also great joy, inner peace, and the gift of looking into the eyes of my innocent sweet son and knowing I'm doing right by him- that he'll never know that person who his mommy used to be.