Questions. From the kids always the innocent queries, met with this insane and inexplicable love and appreciation I have always had for them. What's for supper, why are you that tall, why don't we ever see green flowers? Why do daddies work late, why do mommies cry when daddies work late? What does it mean when mommies cry, cry and cry but when we come into the room mommies say they have so many allergies and get us juice and popcorn? Most of these questions any mother can field, gently nudge to safer ground just so we can edge away from that precipice we instinctively know is peering back at us.
Some of us decide to push ourselves so far down that rabbit hole even the rabbits won’t pass you a flashlight for fear of setting off some long lost pocket of gas. Some of us decide to ‘do the grownup thing' and stick it out - do what you have to, forget who you are, what you want, be nice and polite and live life like your own mother did – but then you end up having more kids with a partner you know you shouldn’t be with. And yes, they are the ones paying for it. As much as we end up feeling sorry for ourselves, taking it out on one another, we really are the lucky ones out of this farce of a family.
What is ‘family’ though? A definition from Princeton I just found calls it ‘a social unit living together’, among others. This is the one I choose to use today. Mom, dad and 2.2 kids playing happily in the backyard while Bark runs around noisily after said 2.2 happy children simply never applied to us. Did I love him? Yes, deeply and for longer than what turned out to be healthy for any of us. Did he love me? I doubt it.
And there’s the one thought that niggled at my soul for longer than I care to remember, even after I made all the grownup decisions, all the grownup concessions – it’s part of married life, they say. Who wants to be unhappily married? Was I that dependent on him? What did he give me that I couldn’t give myself? These are the things I’m sure soured our relationship for him. It was never a partnership, never an equal opportunity to add to and build a unitary or even a complementary interconnection. Nope. Life doesn’t work that way, it turns out. Well, yes. I agree that it should, which is also why you don’t get married at 23. Do I regret anything? Not my kids, they kept me alive to fight for myself though that’s such an unfair job description for monkeys with only their toes in the water of life still.
Last year this time I felt empty, hopeless, useless, griefstricken and quite frankly ready to check out if the darkness would just come claim me. I’d never have done it myself; someone has to clean it up, after all. Waking up from your own emotional prison is something I’d recommend to everyone, even if it means to months later find yourself flailing about because you have no idea which direction to go into.
“I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…”
Dalai Lama
Last year this time I promised myself I’d never feel like that again. I still don’t. I’m nowhere near where I want to be but the difference between my last birthday and this one, I get to be me.
What was the question? How different is your life today, are you happy yet?
