And an almost diatribe on love......

Contemplation precludes tough decisions in my head, pounding relentlessly and in turn, sharpening my soul.  What does that mean?  I am a thinker, often times to my own detriment.  Fortunately, I am also a dreamer, which allows me to find some balance.  Of late, I am dreaming about my perpetual state of loneliness.


I have never really considered that I would find love. The only reason that I know what love is or how it feels is that I have a few people in my life who shower me with it.  Even so, it is not that same love that a man and a woman share.  I have always hoped to find that with a person would could be brave enough to love as complicated of a woman as myself.  The more that I know and accept that God is in control of the hearts of the universe, the more I can understand how he can fill me when I am lonely.  Even still, it leaves me wanting that intimacy that only comes between a man and a woman.  


My young marriage failed for a multitude of reasons, the least of which was that there was not love to hold it together.  It failed because I was an abused wife who had had enough.  It failed because I was young and immature and lacked the spirit of calmness. It failed because I had no idea of how to be a wife, not did I ever plan to be one.  I became a wife out of perfunctory obligation. It failed because my husband was a child of abuse and had wounds so deep that only God could heal, no matter how hard I tried to take that role upon myself.  It failed because he refused to get real help and to this day is still bearing the consequences of that decision, as am I.  Even with all of that, I know that God can be that glue to hold even something so fissured together and mend it with the clay of his hand.  For us, it just wasn't meant to be.

I was never really in love with my husband.  I needed an escape from my mother, the person of whom I couldn't trust.  He offered me a quick out.  She read my diaries and treated me as a servant and I couldn't wait to get out.   I used to hide notes and things that I wanted to keep private under the light switch and outlet covers in my bedroom. There was no safe place for me to express myself.    As a teenager, I was bulimic and she once caught me purging after a binge. Even as a bulimic, I could never get below 200 lbs purging three or four times a day.(Again, another story for another day).    Instead of loving me and trying to get me help, she told me to stop being an idiot.   Bulimia  is a battle that I still fight to this day.

Needless to say, marriage was not the saving grace that I thought it would be.  I would be lying if I said that I wasn't relieved that it came to an end.  I was more distraught that I had failed at keeping it going than I was because I had lost love.  I also felt that I was less of a Christian because I couldn't save it.  I now know that it wasn't my job to save it or him.

  

On the precipice of my "unmarried" life, I debuted as my role of single, divorced, dejected mother to a resounding series of epic fails.  My husband and and his co-dependent nature, remarried as soon as we had the court date, bruising my ego.  Using the internet as my best friend, I had to make sure that I could entice and satisfy a man so that in my mind, my husband didn't leave me because of a being totally inept as a woman.  I found that left me even more empty.  Even more, it left me ashamed, because I called myself a Christian during the whole thing, excusing this one area of my life, while trying to boost my effort in the others to overshadow my sin.  In the meanwhile, it was eating through me like an ravenous infection, taking over my heart.  I moved to another state with my young children, and entered a relationship that I thought was based on love.  It was not.  Recently, I had a chance to reconnect with this man after eight years, hoping that he might have changed.  He did not, and here I am still left wondering if there will ever be a true  instance of love in my life.  
  
I became convicted that being alone was the best compromise for both me and my kids.  Even so, God was protecting me, not without consequence, but still letting me know that his plan supersedes all others.  The best reward of this was living a life that would show my children that they are worth waiting for.  Also, I guarded their hearts against damage by not bringing in people that they would get attached to, then who would inevitably leave.  I see this with so many kids and it rips my guts out to see the hurt that these kids go through.  


Throughout the years, I know this to be true.  God had a perfect plan for me in the love of my life.  Had I followed what he envisioned for my life, there would be no doubt that I would have experienced that which he had set aside.  Even though I mucked it up, he can still use my sin for his good and my life for his glory.  He still brings me blessing in his own timing, even when I am too stubborn to see it clearly.  


So that brings me to this past week.  I met a man, much to my delight.    One who asked me out for conversation and dinner. We spoke on the phone and  I went and enjoyed his company, but found out that he is not "religious."  He says that he believes in God, but not preachers.  I had no response, for the cloth of my existence is woven with the fine strands of my faith.  He wants to see me again and I am torn.  I haven't dated in seven years...............which leads me back to precluding contemplation.  

The miracle of life, a true hallmark of man and his ability to procreate and fill the earth, continues to inspire those who have an insatiable calling to become parents. At the time the Bible was penned by the omnipotent hand of God the creator through his chosen proximal authors, the demands on society were precluded by a few solid ideals.  These ideals were predicated on survival, religion, legacy, honor, and family.  Today, we don't consider, as a human race,  the vast array of skills that it would take a person to live one day of their lives in the era when Christ walked the earth.  Even 100 years ago, before the invention of adolescence, MTV, ipods, cell phones, and Alexander Felming's creation of penicillin, young adults had depth and substance.  They assumed the roles of grown ups with pride.  


Today, starting from an early age, we do, however, fill our lives with things and people that inevitably cause us discontent and strife, resulting in lives full of stress and anguish.  I am as responsible for this in my own life as much as anyone else.  On a daily basis, I don't have to carry my clothes to a river to wash, make my own bread from grain that I ground myself, weave my own thread to loom together masterful garments to clothe my children.  Nor do I have to worry about dying from a rampant infectious disease, living with minor aches and pains, or dying before I'm 30 years old because I had exceeded my life span.  So the question lives obtusely, why are we (I)so miserable?  


Guilty am I of taking so many things for granted and allowing frustration and disillusionment to be conceived in my heart and mind.  I have a miniscule fraction of the responsibility that my predecessors had, yet I feel that I am drowning because I cannot keep up with all that there is to accomplish.  It is like a self-inflicted head wound that I keep stuffing with cotton balls and telling myself that it is really no worse than a mosquito bite while stopping every few seconds to wipe the stream of blood from my eyes.  Upon reflecting, I have decided that we do not inspire these thoughts for ourselves, because as Pavlovian ideals pervade us, we are conditioned to be the way that we are.  Unfortunately, I see that I have created these exact types of patterns in my own children through blind ignorance and a perpetual vortex of societal expectations to which I have semi-consciously acquiesced. ( I will discuss the parenting paradox of a teenaged mother in the near future.)


How did I get here--the almost forty, divorced mother of two kids in a world gone to hell?  Pardon me for a moment while I gather my tools for introspective thinking. Uh hmm....I got here through choices that I made.  I alone am responsible for the major decisions that have brought me to this precipice on which I feel I am resting.  I also feel that the I bear the weight consequences of decisions that my parents made on my behalf. 


Exodus 20:5 states: " You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me."   


Regardless of  God's grace, love,  and forgiveness for us, we must live out the consequences of decisions, even if we thought that we could renege and regroup.  My children will have to bear some of that burden for my decisions, just as I did with my parents.  


 I have never slowed down long enough to see the beauty and wonder of things. When I contemplate how my journey led me to this vast desolation of animosity, I often neglect the power of that journey and the lessons that lie just under the epidermis.  Now that I am older, I am grieved for those things that I cannot take back.  I want to take ever scourge that world and man has for backs of my children and keep them from the sting, but invariably, they will have to build their own calluses.  Even so, I wouldn't trade those seemingly tragic decisions for anything, for it is only once God has brought you to a place where he can convene with you, then you truly find out that he was there all along.  


There are two pivotal decisions that have changed my life immensely, reaping consequences that were everlasting and far reaching.  One was my decision to not abort my daughter and the other is when I divorced my husband.  












  

From Under A Rock

As a mother of teenaged children, one whom is just embarking on her own journey into adulthood, hindsight is a painful reminder of many things.  A young mother is a dangerous thing if she does not have the guidance of other strong women who had the guidance of other strong women.  Mothering is a lost art, that if done well, reaps rewards beyond measure and becomes a legacy unparalleled.  A mother of 19 does not value or appreciate these facts.  She has no time in her life for wisdom, advice, or integrity.

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WWF watching, infomercial ordering, beer drinking, pot smoking was the norm in my childhood universe. In oblivion, I watched the people that I thought hung the moon and stars, bumble their way through a rather unorthodox pedagogy of parenting. This parenting recipe, pretty typical of young parents who have kids before they have grown up for themselves, included :  planning nothing of significance for the future, living for the moment, and financial ruin.  These were secondary consequences of a delayed anticipation that life would just fall into place.  In my eyes, I would have preferred to have gained more powerful familial traits and traditions.  What if motherly wisdom had taught me to be a bit more self-sacrificial and humble?  Instead my familial legacy consists of trade secrets of a bit less importance--the family recipe for margaritas.  (In case you're interested, one can of Bacardi, two parts Pepe' Lopez clear tequilla, and one part pure grain alcohol.  You use the Bacardi can as your measuring cup.  Blend well and drink with a straw.)  Oh yeah, don't forget the other list leaders after the perfect margarita: If you go to jail, you get out the way you got there; by yourself.  Work yourself to death every day of your life even if it makes you sick and robs you of your joy.  And don't forget to party like there is no tomorrow.

Ironically enough, there was no advice on what to do about an unplanned, universe altering teenage pregnancy.  More to come on that topic at a later date.

I will offer this bit of positive in a world of negativity.   Thanks to God's grace, there are those of us who, as parents and despite our blind attempts at mucking things up, have come out of it with pretty great kids. That is a blessing that I didn't deserve, as I was ill equipped to be any semblance of a mother.

A social experiement

I have never been very scientific, as that would require more than my right-brained driven mind can handle.  I do find myself becoming these days more of a social experimenter than a scientific one. The roots of this run deep within as my life experience throughout my childhood which caused me to be cautious and contemplative.   I had to learn that there was more to life than just my young world view, and at age 18, I began to see things through prismatically spectrumed glasses that gave me vision far and wide.  It unlocked doors that I never knew existed, even if I didn't cross the thresholds.  I still carry the key around my neck.

Growing up on a backward Southern town in a lost part of the Tennessee Valley, I never found myself around who were different ethnically and culturally than myself.  I went to school with, worked with, shopped with, and struggled through life with the same type people for the first 18 years of my life.  Just like Socrates allegory of the cave, I had never really thought much about people on the outside.  It was given that we would all grow up, maybe go to college, but probably not, and live, work and contribute to our small town, as generations and generations had done.  A small town has a way of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates itself into a cycle of unrelenting pseudo-homogenized citizens.  Even within that paradigm, there were societal rules in place.

Every small town has its own social structure and pretenses and ours was no different.  There are the social elite who are legends in their own minds and pretty much nothing when it comes up to being measured against the world.  These are the people who strive for the excellence that they have conceived in their own minds.  They grow up to own the car dealership, sell insurance, sometimes become lawyers, teachers, doctors, and become esteemed members of the Lion's Club and Women's Auxiliary.  They are the minority, yet act as though they are the upper crust of the world.  As long as they stay in the boundaries of the town, there is no danger of them becoming less great in their own minds. They learned it from their parents, who learned if from their parents--a rite of passage.  If you were to take those same people and stick them in a foreign setting such as NYC or San Francisco, the world would laugh and point fingers, relentlessly calling those people out for being the impostors that they are.  So staying within their pre-con-scribed confines and reserving their rights to be masters of their own universe, those people coexist with an heir of entitlement that smells of resentment for those that are unlike them.

I was one of the "unlike" ones.  I never fit a mold.  I was like non-setting green Jello that oozed out of every conformist mold anyone poured me into.  I was a clumsy, fat, intelligent, nail-biting, clarinet playing, free-lunch eating, rag bag clothes wearing disaster.  I was the girl who was invited to slumber parties as the entertainment--the one who something "bad" would happen to.  The one who was asked out by a boy, only to find that it was a joke followed with a rush of laughter that swept across the cafeteria like a wild fire.  Then it would happen again and again, year after year, as I was stuck in this hellacious town with nowhere to go.  It not only thickened my skin, it cemented it to stone, creating impenetrable walls that I wouldn't even let God inside of.

In this environment, there were norms that everyone was expected to participate in, regardless of their level of class.  Everyone in the town hated blacks and seemed to be the point of no contention for most everyone that I knew.  I never understood it and had never even met black person the entire span of my childhood.   When we would venture to a large city for school clothes shopping,  I was scared of the black people that I saw.  There were some blacks that you could admire from afar.  On channel 3 news, there was Fred Johnson, a news anchor,  but he was an important black man because he wore a suit and spoke with proper English and Bill Cosby--how could Fat Albert be a bad thing?  Nobody ever explained to me why it was ok to like these black people, but hate others.

In this town, beyond caucasian, there was one family where a woman had adopted several Asian kids and one family of Jewish people, but that was the extent of our cultural experience.  It left me with invariably unanswered questions about so many things.  So, when I, the first person ever on my mother's side to ever go to college.....EVER, went to a local college, it was indeed a social experiment of epic proportions.  I came out of the cave and I became a careful observer of people.  I became fascinated and enamored with the fact that there were so many people of different backgrounds, races, and cultures.  In this collegiate environment, they all existed together and no one group was singled out above another.  I was thrilled beyond words to see that people's differences did not define or prescribe what they were capable of being in the world.  It gave me hope that I could be something other than what I was conditioned to be.

Which brings me to thoughts on where I am today.  I am again lost in my own life, deeply embedded--a small town of my own making, within my own skin.  I am looking to break free and find that courage and drive that helped me to walk away from my childhood.  My young, single, freedom of adulthood was short lived, as I became pregnant and a mother, then a wife by the age of 19 by the first man who ever gave me a second glance.  I had accepted less than what I deserved because society had taught me that it was the best that I could do.  After a lot of years of heartache, despair and abuse, I have found that there is much more to this journey than mere acceptance of circumstances.    It is time to start analyzing this and putting in the work that it takes make changes and begin to live a much more authentic and intentional life.

This will be a platform for me to think these things out and find my way.  Join me if you'd like as I try to work through these next steps, a sojourner for the truth that exists for my life.