Kangatopia

I figure that my current spate of troubles start with my mother. It all started before her death, of course, but things were very different before she died. I was in a hopeless situation. I couldn’t afford to move out of my parent’s house either financially or emotionally, and I was in a relationship that had long since decayed. After she died, I no longer had a reason (emotionally) to stay in that house and (emotionally) it was far better to leave. A month after she passed, I finalized my divorce and then a whole new world of possibilities opened before me. I moved out into my own place, went through the faltering on again/ off again steps of my relationship with Monikerless and began the process that I am in now.

Living with my mother was very, very hard. She was depressed, sad, angry and sick. I tried to make her happy, but I never could and things were rarely harmonious. She wanted me to treat her a certain way, I would let my frustratations take over, there would be a fight. I have a lot to feel guilty about, but I tried. We all tried. We just always fell short for some reason or another. For months after her death, I was angry - am still, probably - but I was angry that she didn’t take better care of herself, that she had emotional problems that went unresolved, that her brother and sister were the way they were, that I was the way I was, that her life in the end seemed to be a mediocre tragedy. I have been grieving her as she was as a person, and not understanding that she was indeed a person - and also my mother.

My ability to articulate this is falling short, but if I am going to start the journey I see myself undertaking then I have to try. My mother was the one person in the world from whom I felt I had unconditional love. My father, I think, gives me this too but he wasn’t around very much when I was a child and I never have been able to love him the way I did my mother. If I needed comfort or love or support, I could go to her. So, as I grieve her, I am also grieving that comfort and closeness that I have only found in her.

It scares me that my children might also have this same kind of love for me. I will never be able to meet the expectations that I expect someone in this position to have. It’s very overwhelming. So, it occurs to me that maybe my actions lately might have something to do with both wanting to relieve the overwhelming responsibility of nurturing my children, and trying to find some substitution of what I lost when my mother died.

Huh.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Just Mommy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I guess I should mention that I’m not depressed… not in a sense anyway that would be generally applicable to how I might manifest depression. I am confused about what I’ve been doing and what I will do in the future. I am searching for something. I have considered taking flight, but not with any intention of doing so and as more of an exercise in determining how far I might go to quiet the demons which have reared their pointy little heads.

Dante wrote (loosely translated probably): “In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” I’ve read that this was a contemplation of suicide, but what it turns out to be is the commencement of his Hero’s Journey. When I considered this in college, I thought that it literally meant that he had lost his way spiritually - which, I suppose, is still relevant but it’s been too long since my experience with The Divine Comedy for me to go on about what Dante did or didn’t mean. The point is that when I first encountered this, I was seeking God and now, I guess, I’m still seeking the divine nature of God as manifested within humanity and the whole of nature - having given up on finding God through the conventional, every Sunday sort of means.

Basically, I feel that I have very little knowledge to share and that I am childlike in my ignorance. I am not seeking knowledge, so much as understanding and some sort of peace. We all experience pain no matter how much peace we find within. That will never change, nor probably should it. But, one of the things I’m trying to sort out is how do you put one foot in front of another when there is absolutely no light to illuminate your path? I frequently wonder to which direction I will turn.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 11:02 am and is filed under Just Mommy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I have been experiencing a sort of spiritual crisis. It’s not the same sort of spiritual crisis you might endure when you realize that you’ve begun to doubt your faith in God (I’ve been going down that road for awhile now.) It’s more the sort that you might experience when you realize that you are living your life in conflict with all the values, ways of being, etc that were imprinted upon you in childhood.

The intimate relationship that Monikerless and I had has officially ended. I can no longer continue to have a physical relationship with him and not lose my mind.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 11:01 am and is filed under Just Mommy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I have decided again to take down my profile on online dating sites that I tend to frequent. I’m going to leave it up on the ones I don’t frequent because that’s just easier than trying to figure out my username and password. I’m only saying all this because the interventions have been launched and I just want my friends to know that I love you and agree with you - and you’re right, I’ll be better off going a little more slowly and carefully.

The thing is I have to set the example. Even though my children are blissfully unaware of what Mommy does when she’s not at home, they are going to read this blog when they’re older and I want them to live their lives well. We all make mistakes, right? But if I am going to teach them by example then it would be better to teach them by a positive one.

I haven’t done anything all that bad, but it’s enough that I would never admit to a lot of it here - which, I guess, in and of itself is an admission of guilt. I think, certainly, that the way in which I have been behaving lately isn’t the way I want to live my life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Just Mommy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

You know, today has been so sucky in such a mediocre way that I’m a little afraid of driving home. I sense a fender bender or obscenely expensive ticket in my near future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Just Mommy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.