It's Been How Long Exactly?

Wow, I had rather forgotten I even had this blog. If I had not been working over the last couple of days to clean up my social media, I may have not remembered it still. It has been just over 8 years since my last post. That is forever in the digital age, and yet these years have flown by at a speed that simply boggles the mind. So much has changed! 

When I started this blog, I was a 32 year-old married stay at home mom of 4. But, I was so much more even then. I was one of the millions of people in this country who was in a domestically abusive relationship. I lied, a lot. I hid it well. He would tell me when I tried to challenge how I or the children were treated that we could not be being abused because look at all the nice things we had. Um, yeah I forgot that's how that part works! If you read my last post from May of 2018, you know something about how this story continued to unfold. By May of 2015, I had 6 children between the ages of 2 and 10, and I reached a breaking point. I realize now that even in that 2018 update, I still had so much work to do. I thought I had healed, figured it all out (which is the funniest idea of all looking back), and knew the trajectory of my life. I see that I still avoided any real conversation about what life was like leading to that day, or what exactly happened that started changing everything. I know that's a story I still need to tell, to share with others who may find themselves in a similar situation to where I found myself that day in 2015. I know this will sound like avoidance, but it isn't because if I share everything today, this one post would be about a novel long!! 

So, this is my statement of commitment to get it all out there over the next few weeks, but for today, I want to provide a new and more honest introduction than the one I have shared in the past.

My name is Harli. I am 47 years old. 

I have 2 babies in Heaven and 7 here on Earth. My babies in Heaven have been there for 25 and 10 years. My babies here are 21, 19, 18, 16, 14, 13, and 6. In other posts, I will tell you all about each one of them, where they are now, what they are doing, etc, but for today, let me stay on track with my introduction.

In February 2025, I married the first truly good man I have ever been in a relationship with. Our story is as messy and complex as most any other part of my life, but it's also so different than my previous relational experiences. This is a man who loves and supports me as I continue to change and grow. He loves all the children as if they were his own and I am thankful every day to have found him. As with the children, this is a story for another day, but it will be told.

I am a Christian. That's something I never thought I would say. Over the years I have looked at most every religion one could imagine. In the end, I decided the very concept of God was a lie because no all powerful, just being would have laid out the life I had lived for anyone He supposedly loved. I had embraced atheism in name, but in my heart I was just incredibly angry. How that changed is also another story for another day. I feel like I will be saying that a lot in this post!

I am a survivor! I have suffered an assortment of abuses from my very earliest memories, yet here I am still. Not only have I lived, but as I have healed and changed, I thrive. 

I am a college graduate and also student. In May 2022, I returned to school to begin pursuing my BS in Psychology Pre-Counseling. I earned that degree in March 2022 and in April 2022 I began my MS in Marriage and

 Family Therapy. I earned that degree in March 2024. I have maintained a 4.0 throughout the entirity of my journey to date. In just 9 days, I start my PhD in MFT program. If all goes according to plan, in 2031 I will graduate with my Doctorate. 

I am currently waiting on the results of my national licensure exam. I am in the process of licensure in 2 states, Oklahoma and Texas. As soon as I recieve my passing score, I will be finishing the process and will hold an LMFT Candidate/Associate license in these states. Once I have my licenses, I will return to working at The Center for Christian Counseling and Care where I completed my internship.

I am a plus-sized woman. I'm nowhere near the size I was when I was last talking about my weight and constantly beating myself up over every ounce, but at 5'3 and 190 pounds, the label still fits. 

I have physical disabilities. I am certain that the abuses my body has endured over the years is a contributing factor as well as the large amount of weight I carried for so long. I have arthritis in many parts of my body including my spine. There are days when even getting out of bed feels like a challenge, but I have faced and overcome challeges before so I get up every day, regardless of how painful it may be. 

I'm a tattoed nerd! I currently have about 40 tattoos reflecting many of my passions. If you see my ink, there's not really any doubt of my nerdiness, lol My ink reflects my love of my family and fandoms. I attend comic conventions and cosplay. 

Even all of this is just a small glimpse of who I am and who I am becoming. This life was built on the remains of who I was and the healing I have done over the years. I am excited to be back at my keyboard and sharing this journey. I look forward to walking this path wherever God leads me. My hope is that in sharing this, you may find strength, hope, and inspiration. 

The Day The Force Was With Me

Today is an anniversary.  It's one that is very emotional for me from both positive and negative sides.  I try to stay focused on the positive aspects, but that isn't always easy.  I figured the best way to handle it was to get it out of my head and onto my blog since that really is why I started this whole thing anyway.

May 4, 2015 started out like most any other day with an alarm clock going off at 5:00 am.  I rushed out of bed and scrambled to pack a lunch made up of a sandwich on home baked bread, chips, Powerade, and a cupcake.  I then quickly heated a sub par breakfast of a frozen croissant sandwich and had everything sitting on the table by 5:15 am.  I walked into the living room and booted up my laptop, make sure his work bags were packed and sitting by the door then returned to the bedroom to make the bed.  He gave me instructions on what work I needed to get done before he arrived at work and walked out the door.

The morning was so ordinary.  Like a million that had come before and what I fully feared would be a million more to follow.  By 5:30 am he was on the phone with me asking constant updates on where I was with the grade book.  See, I may not have had a "real job" but everything that was done outside of the confines of the classroom were my responsibility.  It was my job to make him look good, competent, and exceedingly well prepared at all times.  I did my job and I did it well.  

Throughout the day, as always there were constant emails and check ins.  God forbid I not answer my phone or respond to a text or email within about a minute.  I also had housework to do, 10 kids to homeschool, and this year, I had been sneaking around and gotten a work from home job so I could make some money he didn't know about.  He had found out once that I had money hidden away and told me to quit immediately.  I also had to surrender the money tucked away in the work account.  He was very forceful in his request.  I'll leave that there and not go into detail.  Anyway, I was still sneaking and still working.  So, I had a deadline of my own to meet.  A post that needed to be up because it was May 4th, Star Wars Day.

Flash forward to the end of a very long day.  12 hours after I got up and at a full run all day.  My post is still not up.  In fact, I'm still working on it and he walks in the door.  Busted.  This lead to yelling, screaming, crying.  Him telling the kids how negligent and worthless I was before taking them outside with him.  In that moment something snapped.  I realized I was more afraid of him coming back into the house, of confining me in the bedroom, of what would follow than I was of dying.

I walked back into the bedroom and wrote out a detailed note.  It is amazing how calm and unemotional the whole thing was for me.  I talked about how much I loved the kids and how much I would miss them but mostly it was all business.  Passwords, websites, and due dates for bills so that it wouldn't be too hard to keep the house running without me.  I then took about 2 weeks worth of medicine in the space of 2 minutes or less.  I won't go into detail on what I took but I will say that I had done my research and this was no cry for attention.  All my research had shown this was a no fail method.  For a few minutes I just sat there.  Then, I was washed over with fear.  Not about what would happen to the kids without me there so much as what would happen if one of the kids found me and they were all alone for the day.  I couldn't bear the thought of that.

I walked out onto the porch in the back and told him what I had done.  It was all so calm.  Then I walked back into the house and climbed back into the middle of the bed to wait since I wasn't sure how long the medicine would take to work or what would happen when it did.  He started calling people.  The first call wasn't to 911 but to some people from church.  One must appear properly concerned after all.  As the children came in trying to figure out what was going on, I told them how much I loved them and said my goodbyes.  I refused to leave the bed.  I didn't see any reason why I should.  Eventually, someone from church with medical training convinced him that because I was refusing to get off the bed and into the car, he had to call 911.  In a different situation he may have well tried to force me to comply but with an audience, as always he was the picture of care and concern.

Police and EMTs finally arrived.  EMTs checked my blood sugar, heart rate, etc and found me to be in no immediate medical danger and therefore had to walk out the door because I was refusing medical treatment.  The police were a whole different story.  With the note and no denial of what I had done, they could take me into protective custody as it were and insist on medical treatment at the local ER.  I continued to refuse.  At that point I was told that if I didn't get up and walk out with them, I would be cuffed or tied and physically removed from the house and forced into the police car.  The thing that the officer said that got me to move is that he was sure I didn't want the kids to see me dragged out of the house in cuffs.  He was right, I didn't want that to be their last memory of me.

I walked out of the house with officer on either side fully expecting never to walk in again.  Once I was out of the house, I had no intention of being compliant and besides, my research had indicated that even with going to the hospital, there was little to nothing doctors could do to keep me alive once the medicine started working.  During the ER time, a police officer sat with me constantly and they wouldn't let him come back.  When the doctor and nurses wanted to do labs and other assessments, initially I refused.  The officer made it clear that I would be restrained and the hospital staff would be allowed to do what they thought was best regardless.  Some of the woman I was before the years of abuse popped up likely because at that point I felt I had nothing to lose anyway.  I literally told the officer I had never worn handcuffs when it wasn't for fun and hated to break my streak now.  

Shortly after, a most unexpected thing happened.  I threw up in a major way.  That isn't all that unexpected but the fact that all the pills I had swallowed were still completely whole all that time later was.  Over the course of the entire event, I was never in any danger although they did keep me overnight and monitored my blood sugar very closely.  I was moved from the ER to a regular room, still with police supervision and the next day I was transferred to a Crisis Center on a minimum of a 72 hour hold.  Before the police car left, I handed my wedding rings to him and told him I was done.  In that moment, I knew I couldn't survive any more of his abuse.  In that moment, I was confident I meant it.

I look back now and wonder if the next couple of days had gone differently if I would have been able to stick to what I was saying and feeling right then.  I was one in the past who was often too quick to judge others who were in an abusive relationship and didn't leave.  Or worse, those who left one and then came back to it again and again.  I didn't understand the power the abuser held, how they lived in your head even when they weren't there, until I was fighting it myself.

But, instead, God or the Force or whatever you believe in did for me and the kids what I don't know I could have done for myself or them at that time.  May 4, 2015 became a day that changed my life for the better.  Yes, it could and should have ended very differently than it did but it still freed me and the kids from him.  I think I will wait and go into more details on that in a couple of days but for now, I am feeling less emotionally raw and more in control of myself so this seems to be a very good place to stop for now.

Unwanted Memories

You ever come to a date and it triggers a memory that you don't necessarily want even if it's not a a bad memory per se?  That's where today is.  It's not so much that the memory is unpleasant as it is unwanted. 

On this day in 1997, I got married for the second time.  Anyone who wants to do the math can look at how young I was and also note that I said second time.  I don't regret it, but I do also acknowledge that I was very young.

The day was so full of excitement and promise.  Even now, 21 years later, I remember it in every detail.  But, though there was much good in that period of my life, there was also much heartache and all those promises were broken.  More than broken though, obliterated.  It became more than a pain, more than heartbreak.  It left me scarred and a different person than the one I was before.

Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the experiences.  The things I learned have added much value to my life.  At the same time, I am also wise enough to know that is the perspective of a 39 year old woman who has finally found the other half of her soul which is far different from the perspective of the girl I was at the time. 

The truth is an older, wiser me would have never married him in the first place.  But, older, wiser versions of ourselves often don't see the mistake ahead no matter how obvious it is to the rest of the world around us.  And, it's not like I would have listened to what anyone had to say anyway. 

He and I had known each other as small children.  I used to kill his GI Joe men.  I don't mean in a cute, let's play war way.  I would literally behead them and then try to melt them with my EZ Bake Oven.  Yeah, I was that sort of kid.  I moved away and that appeared to be the end of that story.

Flash forward to high school.  I was sick one day and that is the day lab partners were assigned.  I got stuck with the partner no one wanted.  Yay me.  But, that lead to a relationship, my first marriage, and my reconnection with my childhood friend.  See, his best friend was my old playmate.  Of course, I didn't know that at the time and it was quite a while before the connection was made in part because of a childhood nickname very different from his real name.

Even without knowing that old connection, the attraction for me was instant and intense.  It was the first time I even thought I might be in love.  Some may wonder if that is the case, how he was my second marriage and not the first.  There are so many details that probably don't need to be shared on that tangent and so many choices that were made from youthful impulsiveness.

With everything that came before the wedding day including the fact that we weren't even dating like 2 weeks before we got married, again I will state a wiser, older me would have never done it in the first place.  But, the me back then thought I was in love.  As is not unexpected, things just deteriorated over time.  The last few days we were in a house together were brutal.  And, in the days following the end, I wasn't always sure I would make it through.  But, as I said in my last post, I am a survivor.

Throughout my life, big changes always come with a theme song.  At the end of the marriage which lasted officially just over 4 years, my theme song was Trisha Yearwood's I Would Have Loved You Anyway.  It was fitting for so many reasons and even more fitting for even more reasons looking back across the years. 

About a year ago, I reached out to my ex on social media.  We talked a few times, some apologies were made, and some old wounds finally closed completely.  It helped heal the last traces of heartache.  Do some of the memories still hurt?  I suppose they do in a way but mostly they are just old scars that you feel sometimes when the weather is just right.

Today, I as I reflect on it all and as I sort through old files that have come unasked for and unwanted into my mind, I am glad for what that relationship was.  It taught me a lot and helped make me who I am now.  I am also glad that it ended and gave me the chance to move on, and make other mistakes. I know that without everything I experienced and learned in that relationship and the ones that came afterwards as well as before, I would not be the woman I am today.  I wouldn't have six amazing children. I wouldn't have the life I have found by traveling on a smooth and easy path.  Perhaps that is the real why of those unwanted memories, to remind us of just what it took to get to who and where we are now. 

Shining A Light

I know it has been forever since the last time I posted.  So many things have changed in so many ways and I let all of that get in the way of something I am truly passionate about.  But, it's more than that.  So much more.

This blog was started more than 7 years ago.  Yesterday, I went through editing and deleting posts.  That may seem like an odd choice but it was so cleansing and so very needed.  See, when this blog started I was not the person I am now.  Not even close.  I also wasn't me.

That may seem confusing to a lot of people, but understand it has been just as confusing to me.  See, I will tell you I'm not a good liar but that's not entirely true.  I hate to lie, but by the time I started this blog in August of 2010 I had become an excellent liar.  I had to if I wanted to survive.  I'll discuss that in more detail over the next several posts and I will shine a light into all the dark corners because those kinds of secrets and that kind of pain only thrive and survive in the darkness.  And, the time has come for all of that to die.

Don't worry, the blog is not going to become all doom and gloom.  But, for many of the things to come to make sense, you have to know where it started, how it progressed, and what the fallout really looks like.  Without going through the backstory, all of it, you can't understand or appreciate everything that the now is and everything that the future holds.  

For now, let me provide an introduction.  I think this is key because if you have been following me long, you will realize that even the names have changed. 

My name is Harli.  I am 39 years old.  That part was easy.  The rest, not as much.  How do I decide which aspect of who I am comes first?  Isn't that the question we all struggle with, the understanding of what part of us is the most important?  Does the order in which we introduce ourselves say how we see ourselves?  Does it denote which aspects we feel are most key?  Does it tell the story of what we hold most important or is it simply a formula that we have as a society decided delivers the information most succinctly?  Perhaps that is way too deep of a question at this time of the day.

I suppose the label that makes the most sense to start with for me is I am a survivor.  I know it may sound a bit cliche and often over used but to be fair and honest, nothing else would follow if not for that one.  Yes, we have all survived to this point.  I get that but we have not all survived the same things and some of us have had to work exceedingly hard at it.  I will get into the details of the what and how as we move forward but for now I think just the statement is enough.

I am a mom of 6 here on earth and 1 most spectacular angel.  The oldest is 13 and the youngest here with me is 4 although 5 is very quickly approaching.  They are all amazing and quite the characters.  My angel was born sleeping at 17w 3d on September 4, 2015.  Her full story can be found in one of the earlier posts.  As this blog progresses, you are sure to hear much about them all.

I am a writer.  Not simply a hobbyist or an enthusiast.  It is part of the very core of who I am.  In addition to making a new commitment to my personal blog, I freelance for a number of blogs.  When things get too deep on an emotional level, I am prone to turning to poetry.  I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember but during the dark years, that side of me all but disappeared.  In fact, all of me all but disappeared but again, that is for another time.

I am a plus size woman.  There have been times when I have not been okay with that at all.  There have been times when I have fought the hard fight to try to mold myself into something different.  Something society would deem to be acceptable.  Something that would take away the stereotypical viewpoint of those who don't know me or my story.  But, I have found a love and acceptance of who I am.  I don't own a scale and have no need or desire to have one in the house.  See, I have come to realize that the only thing a scale tells me is how much gravity pulls down on my mass.  It gives no indication of my worth or value as a person, a wife, a mother, a human being.  If there are people who want to make snap judgments about who and what I am, they are free to do so.  I, however, and comfortable in my skin and with who I am.  That is really all that matters.

I am a collector of teddy bears.  That makes me an arctophile which is one of my favorite words. Onomatopoeia is actually my very favorite word but that is a separate tangent entirely.  The oldest piece in my collection is a ratty little thing I have had since I was 6 years old.  I have restarted my collection fairly recently but there are a few pieces that have managed to make it through all the chaos.

There are tons more things that I want to share but I think this "quick post" has gotten more than a little long at this point.  It is my goal to share at least once a week.  Some stories will be old, some new.  There will be posts that help you see and better understand my journey and posts that simply entertain.  Regardless of the content, each will be a glimpse into what it is like to be me.  Whether it be  the good, the bad, and the indifferent, each will bring a clearer picture and it will all be the truth because the time for hiding and sculpting life into a pretty and acceptable picture has come to an end.  Life is messy and chaotic.  It isn't always sunshine and rainbows but it is the storms that make us appreciate the beauty and the triumph.

Do I Get A Frequent Use Discount?

Over the past couple of weeks, I have gotten to make 2 emergency room visits.  That's a lot.  But, having 6 kids things can happen.  However, in this case, both visits belonged to the same child.  And, both incidents were more than a little strange.

Of course these things happened to Dani who seems to be able to trip over air generally speaking.  But, these were more unusual accidents.  The first one was a bicycle crash.   She was riding too fast when her foot slipped off the pedal and slid into the front spokes while the bike was in motion.  It still took a few seconds to stop turning.  She managed a nasty looking cut and a bruise that is still causing her pain.  Overall, not too bad all things considered.

Today, she managed to hit herself in the head with a 5 pound hand weight.  She was exercising, clearly incorrectly, when she was no longer able to hold onto the handle and she dropped it onto her head.  A short time later, she was complaining of blurry vision, dizziness, extreme sleepiness.  So, once again off to the ER we went.  She is one very blessed little girl.  There is no fracture and no bleed.  She has a concussion and will likely feel like mud for a few days but she should otherwise be fine.

Seriously, who is going to believe how she does these things to herself?  This kid has had more breaks, accidents, leaps, slips, spills, etc than all 6 of the other kids combined.  No way one child can be this accident prone.  But, then I remember my childhood and I know she is my daughter.