Surviving versus Thriving

My refinance is complete, and my bank account reflects that.

I can not tell you what a relief this is!  My house repairs will happen, my financial picture is rosier, and I have room to breathe once again.  Maybe I can actually get some real sleep, all the way through the night, from the relief. 

I have been surviving lately, just trying not to drown.  I suppose that this was inevitable for part of the process - nobody ever says "my divorce was so pain free!" and there is good reason for that.  But still, merely surviving is not my style.  I have not worked this hard to be alive only to "survive" - I want to thrive.  I want to suck the marrow from life, I want to kneel in the grass in awe and wonder, and I want to carry the all the joy that life holds with me at all times.

I have high standards, clearly.  And I have had many people tell me that my standards are impossibly high, and then when I'm having a bad day, or week, or month, they tell me that my standards are making me miserable and that I ought to lower them like a normal person.

But I don't want to be normal.

I want an extraordinary life, and I am not settling for mere survival.  I am going to keep fighting to find the joys in my life.  The other day I stopped to smell a rose - a beautiful yellow one with a deep, old fashioned scent - that had not yet had frost, and the old cliche' came to me, and it reminded me that so few people actually stop to inhale fragrance in that way.  For fifteen or twenty seconds, I closed my eyes and breathed in its perfume, and it made me smile deeply, and it made me remember that there is beauty and joy in the world....but that you have to stop to find it.  How many times had I walked by that same rose without truly drinking it in?  How many people will actually stop for it - so beautiful and unexpected in the fall leaves?  I intend to be one of those who stops, and not just once.

The same people who tell me that my standards are too high, that life is full of challenges and that I can't possibly feel the joy I'm seeking, are the same ones who ask me "how do you do it?" and wonder aloud how come I'm so much happier than they are.


Here's the secret, the one they can't get.

I'm happier than they are because I decided to be.

I prioritize joy.  I refuse to give up on it.  When I'm in the dark, black hole of despair - we all get there sometimes - I don't stop seeking joy, even though I sometimes feel like I'm blindfolded in a snowstorm with no sense of home.  I just refuse to stop looking for happiness.....and that means that I find it.  I believe in it, so I just keep going.  It seems clear to me that though we all know that life has no guarantees, it pretty much guarantees that you won't get where you wish to be if you stop, so I keep going.

I can not remove life's obstacles (in case you've forgotten, cancer, divorce, and money woes are all on that list).  But in spite of them, there is joy, and I'm seizing it.

This weekend while my kitchen is being torn apart for my mini-remodel (a functioning dishwasher will cause nirvana-like bliss at this point; this is especially true today because yesterday I threw a trick-or-treating party with a dinner for 15 people and I still have dishpan hands as a result), Katherine and I are taking our dog and heading to the mountains for a night.  We're staying in a cheap hotel, but it's got an indoor pool, and it's in a gorgeous area.  Maybe we'll hike a bit, maybe we'll watch movies in the room, we'll certainly splash in the pool and hot tub.  Life's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be perfect.  I am going to get as much joy from my functioning dishwasher and new sink as any of the $100,000 remodels I've seen on HGTV, and I'm going to enjoy my cheap hotel as much as if it were five stars and world class.

Maybe one day, I'll get a "real" remodel or a five star vacation.  But I'm not waiting for "one day" to be happy.  It seems that the waves have died down a bit, and I can float in them.  Bliss.

Faith

I've been struggling with faith.

As a little girl, I wanted to be Mary - yes, that Mary, the mother of Jesus.  I knew that she was good and kind, and I wanted to be *that* good.  I felt my faith devoutly, and I wanted to be the best that I heard of Christ: infinitely kind and selfless.  I grew up in a household where the word "christian" was used as an adjective to describe exellent attributes; if we heard of someone doing a good deed, my mother would say, "oh, he's a good christian man."  I never really questioned it until I had a Jewish boyfriend, and my mother said, "He sounds like a good Christian man," and suddenly I realized that she really meant "he sounds like a person with good values" and she had it confused with theology.  It opened a crack, and the crack became a chasm.

So, in my twenties, I became an atheist.  I threw it all out: baby, bathwater, and the whole bit.  I grew disgusted with religion in general, and rolled my eyes at almost the mention of religion.  Opiate of the masses indeed, I decided.  Definitely not for me.  I was above all that.

When I got married, an Elizabeth Barrett Browing poem was read, and the line that caught in my throat in a romantic way was "I love thee with my childhood's faith."  I missed being a person of faith.  (The irony that my faith went away, and my love for my husband also went missing, is not lost on me.)

Having a baby brought some faith back into me.  I felt the little person inside me moving, and knew that it was a holy thing, nothing short of a miracle.  I looked into her eyes, and was certain of a presence larger than myself.  I started to call myself an agnostic.

Then cancer hit, and I started to pray, without premeditating such ideas: I did not decide to pray, I did not decide I believed in God, I simply prayed.  All of my prayers sounded like "pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease" as I begged for my life.  The more coherent prayers sounded like "I want to live, please let me live to see Katherine grow up, please let me live," but mostly they were whole body prayers that made me tremble in the wanting; they were wordless begging.

 

I still call myself an agnostic; I believe that the nature of God/god/gods/goddess is unknowable.  I actually find a great deal of comfort in the unknowability of the divine, because when I try to put it in a box, it never fits for me.

So, I continue to wrestle with my faith, but I find that I do have a kind of faith.  My faith in the divine and my faith in myself are tangled up together; a messy grouping beyond unraveling.  When I have a dark night, as I have lately, it feels that I am completely alone in the universe, and that there is no possibility of recovery, and that none of my dreams will come true.  But then something lets the light in, and that something feels divine, and it whispers to me that I will be able to make my dreams come true, and I feel comfort.

I have taken a huge leap of faith in asking for a divorce.  Faith that my career will revive, that my finances will revive, that my daughter will thrive in our home when it is without conflict.  Faith that I can trust that I really did try everything to save my husband from his depression, faith that I really did my absolute best to save our marriage.  Faith that the voice that tells me that I am more valuable to the universe when I am living my truest self, opening up my possibilities, instead of remaining small in a marriage that hurts my soul, is telling the truth.  Faith that somewhere in this lifetime, there is love waiting for me: romantic love that is tender and fierce, that accepts me as I am and draws out the best in me.

I wrestle with my faith daily, as much as Jacob with his angel...and for longer than a night.  It is wrestling with myself, and with the divine, all at once.  It is wearing, and I am weary.  I don't have a text to guide me the way Christians have The Bible or Muslims have the Qur'an.  I do have their stories, though, and I also have Mark Nepo and The Dalai Lama and Rumi and Mary Oliver, and I have the seasons that freeze and thaw.  I don't know what the result of my wrestling will be, but I continue to wrestle.  And I continue to hold on to the brave hope, faith, that somehow this is all going to work out.

Somehow.

Pulling myself up by my bootstraps

Monday morning - a fresh week, a chance to get it right.

PollyAnna is still missing today but I'm going to power through until she shows up again.  I'm determined to work harder until my life turns out the way I'm hoping it will.  I'm determined to fake it until I make it, and that is what I'm doing today.

I will make my life happen.  One foot in front of the other.....

Loaded holiday

Happy Mother's Day to all of the moms out there...

It has been a hard weekend.  I feel worn out by all that I need to do, a list that includes getting another job, getting Bryan to move out, figuring out my finances, and a million more petty items.

And Katherine just interrupted me for the ten billionth time today and I just need her to sleep so that I can get ten minutes to simply be....because the week ahead looks daunting. 

I am really really missing PollyAnna tonight.

PollyAnna MIA

It happens every now and then.

PollyAnna - that is, my belief that everything is going to be okay - goes completely missing.

This week I worked extra hours, and I went to a play in the middle of the week (which involved begging childcare favors and moving the sun, moon, and stars to make it all happen), and there was the coffee date, and the usual household things and caring for my girl.....and now I'm crashing, and it feels like I'm crashing hard.  I want to roll up into a little ball and wait for whatever this is to pass.

The little voice inside my head, the one that I've trained to say "you can do it!" and "this is all going to work out!" is saying "you'll never make it work" and "you can't do this" and I just wish it would shut the hell up.

I know that I'm tired; I'm bone weary and worn out.

And my date was rather depressing, despite my spin on it.

And I FELL ASLEEP at the play, one of those two second head bouncing jolting awake moments, and I was so damned tired I wished the play would just end so that I could go to bed.  (It wasn't riveting theatre, but more than that, I am just so tired after work and mama-dom.)

And work is not going smoothly, and then I get these moments of self doubt, and I think "my God I can't do this and yet I need to add MORE hours...." and my whole body just feels the fear in that one.

It was a hard week, even though I thought it "shouldn't" be.

I am really, really hoping that a good night's sleep, some catching up on my to-do list on the weekend, and I can make this all okay.

This is part of the single motherhood thing.  It's not glamerous, it's not pretty, it's not sexy, and it's not inspiring.  It's exhausting, and I feel like I'm in danger of losing my faith in my ability to keep it all together, financially, personally, and the rest.

I really am ready for a break.  I need a break, somehow, somewhere, to show me that I'm on the right path, that I can do this, that I can make it work.  God, are you listening?  I'm a little desperate here.  Help?  Please?

(sigh)

I like it better when PollyAnna is running the show, because right now there's a lot of Debbie Downer.

Getting Started

My marriage hasn’t exactly been a picnic.  Hindsight is fabulous, and if I knew then what I know now, I never would have married him.  Well, that would have been disastrous, because then I wouldn’t have the best child in the world, and she’s worth anything.  Anything at all.  Still, the marriage has been a bit of a nightmare, and the worst part is that it was one of those where I just couldn’t wake up to get a grip, so it kept going on.

What’s more, while it was often a nightmare, I was busy convincing myself that things were just fine.  There is a downside to being PollyAnna, and that downside often looks a lot like denial.  The writing was on the wall that we shouldn’t get married, that we were a pretty rotten fit in many ways, but I was sure that love would conquer all.  Needless to say, it didn’t.

The thing is, I don’t want to spring up in outrage against an Evil Ex-Husband.  He’s not a good husband, and I don’t want to be married to him, but I don’t want to vilify him.  He is the father of the most beautiful child in the world: our daughter has such a beautiful soul that I am routinely knocked out by its beauty, and since he helped me to bring her into this world, he can’t be all bad.

I repeat this sentiment to myself many, many, many times per day in the hope that it will help me to get past some of the rage that springs up in response to his idiocy.  Even PollyAnna gets mad sometimes.

I’m still trying to figure out how I can reconcile his idiotic behaviors and my intent to be compassionate.  I’m open to suggestions, but expect me to be a bit of a slow learner on that one; please be patient with me.  I am aware that the words “idiotic” and “compassionate” rarely belong in the same sentence, but there they are. 

The PollyAnna in me sees his humanity and the pain he must feel, but my desire for self-preservation is strong, and refuses to take on that pain.  It is his, not mine, and I can not help, so I must, in Mary Oliver’s words, save the only life that [I] could save.

I’m also trying to figure out where *I* went wrong.  I don’t know if everything happens for a reason, but a broken body (mid-marriage, I got a nasty case of breast cancer) and a broken marriage sound like pretty big signals to me.  No, I don’t think I deserved cancer, and no, I don’t own Bryan’s behavior in our marriage….but I do think I played a part in all of this, and I’m trying to figure it out.  Expect to hear painful ramblings on those topics in the months to come, and maybe we can figure it out together.

What’s done is done, and I am determined to be glad, to find my lessons, to learn them, and to make progress.  It’s a great big beautiful world, and I am going to make my way in it.  I’m going to come out of this stronger than ever before, and I’m going to scoop up all the joy I can find along the way.  I’ve decided that my life is going to be glorious because of these new twists and turns….and that’s the part of my PollyAnna self I like best.