I really like to focus on the positive side of things but sometimes, life just sucks. No matter how it's painted or candy coated, there's no escaping the gravitational pull of this dense ball of negative shit.
If I don't talk about this stuff then you don't have a true image of what our lives are like or the challenges we face while we're going through everything else. With that in mind, I'll share the shitty day I've had.
There were quite a few littler things that hit us today but the single biggest thing is that we lost the dispute with our bank over the $500+ in unauthorized transactions. It was two transactions and they found that no error was made.
We've appealed but it's gonna take another two weeks and that will take us into the days following Christmas.
The apparent problem is that the charges came through PayPal. They wiped out my balance there and then pulled the rest from my checking account because it was setup as the backup source.
The bank seems to feel there was no error because I've authorized PayPal to deduct from my checking account balance. PayPal seems like a dead end because the bulk of the funds came out of my checking account and not my PayPal. Does that make sense?
It's a very grey area but we are going to try again. I'm just waiting for the new set of paperwork to show up.
In the mean time, this is a huge problem. While we're in a much better place than this time last year, we've not been in a better place long enough to absorb this and it left its mark.
I'm feeling the stress from this because most of what we lost was Christmas and grocery money. I've been very preoccupied with this whole mess and it's consumed more of my time and energy than I'd like to admit.
Thankfully, we had already finished a large part of the holiday shopping but we still had to finish a few important items for the two youngest. I was also able to get some basic grocery shopping done as well. There's definitely a silver lining in here and I'm clinging to for dear life.
As for my final thoughts on this whole situation, I t sucks and it's frustrating but it's very much out of my hands at this point in time.
One thing I've learned from being a special needs parent is I can't control everything. Rather than dwell on the uncontrollable, I need to focus on what I can do instead.
I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do but I'm a creative and outside of the box thinker. I'll figure something out.
The whole point of this post is to provide insight but also to illustrate something I've been saying for a long time. Part of what makes Autism or Special Needs parenting so hard, is all the everyday things that the rest of the world has to deal with. Life doesn't slow down and it certainly doesn't discriminate when it deals out a really shitty hand.
All we can do is make the best of everything and play the cards we've been dealt.
