For a long time I have wondered how big of a crisis it will require to make me take the Kingdom by force. To make me love God above all others. I thought the gunshot, that gasping and soaked-sweating on the threshold of two rooms, beggint to live, would transform my character in remarkable ways but it did not. As I've noted elsewhere (Myspace, for example), it merely reinforced certain character traits I was already aware of. That I generally will endure anything, but I do it partly by making the people around me utterly miserable, bitching the whole way through; crying through the finish line. Or walking through it.
I do, generally, finish what I truly set out to do, and rather well, but I don't enjoy the process. I am certainly "neurotic" but in some ways the type that has a very hard time but presses on. Does this make me superior to those who give up in their frustration? Not at all, considering the hell I put the people who try to care for me through on a regular basis.
You see, I don't mean to. I never set out to hurt anyone. I don't think anyone did, except for perhaps after a certain point. How to reconcile this innocence of intention with original sin is a question for the philosophers and theologians but I don't think intention and nature are one in the same. We intend to be better than our nature, I think. Sometimes we succeed, and it's beautiful.
So much pain could have been spared, so many trials avoided. I never had to have this pregnancy under these circumstances. I never had to be hanging around with that guy who shot me. There were warning signs galore in these and many other of the situations I complain about and even garner sympathy for; plenty of opportunities to flee, and genuine rallying of the soul, to do so.
As the the leaders of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy teach, however, one bad choice does not doom one to keep making them. No situation utterly compels anyone to be miserable. For sure, many parts of life are unpleasant and annoying. They concede that when faced with the death of a loved one, there are no thoughts which can stop the grief process, and that this is part of our biology and what helps us survive. At the same time, we tend to react with our physiological alarms to trifles as though they were tragedies.
My current situation is perhaps in between (a trife and a tragedy), in transition?
I'm a little distracted because I lent my car, not that it's of great worth, but it's all I have, to someone without a license. That someone is my (again, my what? I can't call him my boyfriend, my fiance, or anything. Or I don't care to, at this point) he's my... co-producer in this freakshow, so to speak, and he's been rather awful these past few weeks, and then, so have I. But I'll be damned if I don't try to be civil.
So after several apologies from him, and several days without speaking, and a scenario yesterday in which I scored tons of free baby gear from his friend RF (which surprised me deeply; I honestly thought he wouldn't give it up, out of arbitrary spite. And then he did; he and his child's mother saved me -us? I'll say me, for now- hours and hours of hunting at the least and perhaps up to a thousand dollars). I got a state of the art crib, two strollers, a high chair, a changing table, a swing. It restored my faith in this process not a little. I will be honest in saying that I resent having to spend tons of money on a creature that cannot even socialize with me. I know some would condemn me for such an attitude. But sometimes I think these feelings are better expressed (in an appropriate context, not to the child or anywhere they will unearth... or maybe, I don't know; Anne Lammott wrote vividly in her best-selling memoir of single-parenting an infant of her homicidal fantasies in that postpartum haze, and many from those trenches - i.e., other parents- were relieved more than disgusted) then repressed.
My original point being that I am trying to be civil to the father of my child, and give him a thorough benefit of the doubt. On Thursday we had an awful scene and he snapped his cell phone in frustration and proclaimed, "Now I really won't be getting any jobs," or something of that manner.
He hasn't had a phone since, so I did something that is not in the vein of tough love. But he had given me a small amount of money, so I picked him up from his friend R's, where he and his younger brother C were painting (C for money, he for effing guitar pedals; that is another haunting tale) the kitchen. I brought him bologna and cheddar on a buttered and toasted sesame bagel and two plump donut holes, and I bought him a cordless phone and an answering machine, since the house he lives in co-owned by his father (and two uncles, inherited from his late grandmother) has phone service. That way he can use that line for jobs, and not pay for a cell if he doesn't.
He seems attached to the cell, I don't know why, but at least he has a more practical option now. I also let him drive. But than I let him take the car to get me a sundae by himself and he has been gone over half an hour and I am quite upset.
to be continued
