The home that wasn't.

After writing just a few short days ago about relative happiness and contentment with my life, I spent most of Sunday bursting into random, unexpected crying jags.  Like an open palm smacking me dead in the chest, the reality of my broken home periodically knocked the wind out of me.  

Saturday I helped my mom clear things out of the home I grew up in, the same one my dad moved out of six months ago.  No matter how old you are, home is home.  And you want it there to go back to.  

You're never old enough to stop wishing it would all work out...somehow. 

You're never old enough to stop wanting the smell of roast at Sunday dinners, the security of your old bedroom (just in case), the safety of that one place in the world where you belong no matter what. 

I think about how hard each of my parents worked their whole lives, only to start over at (what should be) retirement age with half of what they had.  I think about the seven-year relationship I dragged myself out of, and wondered what kind of strength one has to conjure to close the door on forty years.  I think about how lonely it must feel to lose the partner you've had since you were a teenager.  

Their sadness, though well-hidden, makes me sadder than my own sadness.  

A divorce is the final decree on the matter of whether you get to have a happy family.  Until the decision is handed down, you are free to entertain the fantasy that one day - yes, one day - resentments will be abandoned, bitterness will be overcome, and wrongs will be forgiven.  

You're free to ponder the unknown because it's still unknown.

Until one day it isn't.  

One day the pre-existing factions within your family quake into full-blown fault lines.  The alliances that festered through the years persist long after the dust settles on the end of a marriage, splitting your family into divided loyalties.

There was no glamorous affair, no knock-down drag-out fight, just a fading gloom that quietly disappeared into the night.  Without a clear-cut reason, I sometimes find myself forgetting why it is they're not together anymore.  I wonder if they know, either.  

When the last box is taped shut and hauled away, you're left standing there with the reality of the situation.

What you thought was a broken home reveals itself, instead, to be an empty home.  

Where there could have been joy or love or happy times...

... is the ghost of a family that used to be...

...and a home that's never going to be -home- again.  

Holiday Blues

Tomorrow the relatives will all be at my parents’ house, and instead of avoiding the Christmas Eve charade as I’d planned, I’ll wear my fake smile and pretend I give a sh*t about all these people that have never given a damn about me.  Like Thanksgiving, my dad won’t be there, so reality’s creeping in.

I’m in a sour mood.  I didn’t anticipate this year being difficult as far as holidays go, because I’ve been feeling a little more even-keeled over all.  But then, I didn’t anticipate having to listen to my parents argue out the final details of the divorce settlement right before Christmas.  I thought this year I’d finally have a job and not have to feel like a failure once again when people ask what I’ve been up to.  I’m so sick of feeling like a loser.  Or else I’m sick of *being* a loser; one of the two.

Then there are the things you have no control over, like dreams about the past, and old memories creeping in.  Somehow the old pain flares up, like scar tissue that never quite healed right.  I try not to ponder too long on the happiness people from my past are experiencing in their lives; new babies and families that are celebrating instead of breaking apart.

Even still, the past hurts me.  The fact that my life fell apart over the holidays has hung over every Thanksgiving and Christmas since.  It’s easy to say that one shouldn’t allow things from so long ago to ruin the present, and I believe that if I were more satisfied with my current life I might have an easier time keeping the sadness out.  Instead, it’s one more unhappy year.  Maybe not quite as miserable as the few before, but gloomy nonetheless.

To top it off, my hip pain has really been flaring up, and I don’t know when I might be able to get insurance next.  Will life always be about coping with, and overcoming, and pulling through, and never about living?  I just want to be put into a drug-induced coma.  Srsly.

Merry Christmas: The Divorce is Final

With less than a week left ‘till Christmas, my parents are traipsing into their respective divorce lawyers’ offices today to make it official: their marriage is over.  After a year and 9 months of the back-and-forth, could it really not have waited a couple more days, I ask?  As much as I wanted the whole thing to be over with, having the reality slap you in the face in the midst of this “joyous” time of year is just too much for anyone involved....my parents, my sister and me, the grandkids. 

The timing makes the irony of our holiday plans all the more ironic: all of my dad's relatives will be at the house, but my dad won't.  This will be the first in a series of awkward holidays, tinged with the bitter sadness of what is missing.  

No one tells you how to deal with this as an adult.  There are a thousand books for little kids who have parents that are splitting up, and for grown-ups who survived divorce as kids.  But for those of us whose parents have been married for 20-, 30-, 40-odd years ... where’s the manual?  How do I keep this from feeding right into my cynical outlook on life and love?  Where do I look to see the plausibility of a happy ever after?

It’s gonna be a holly, jolly Christmas: that’s for sure.

One of those days. SOME of those days.

Sometimes I just wish I’d had the guts to get it over with the first time.  The thought crosses my mind a lot lately.

I am so tired of struggling.  I know I’m not the only one, but the only head I’m in is mine.  I just want ONE thing to start going right, instead of trying to cram pieces together that never seem to fit. 

Facing the reality of having accomplished so little to get my life back on track in (going on) four years now ... I just can’t effing stand it sometimes, and I want out.  I’m tired of playing this game and watching everybody else win.  A-holes that don’t deserve to win get to raise their trophies and gloat, and to be honest it makes me really friggin’ bitter sometimes.  Okay: a lot of the time. 

These are the feelings you’re not supposed to admit, that you don’t dare speak aloud, so I lay them out here where no one gives a damn ... much the same as in real life. 

Perched in a church pew at my cousin’s wedding this weekend, all I could think about was my parents’ dissolving marriage.  The start of a new family; the end of another.  This “impending” divorce just can’t seem to make itself happen.  Over a year later, there are no papers signed and appearances would suggest that nothing’s really changed.  And yet soon, I’ll be one of ‘those’ people (whatever that means, right?) from a broken family with no home to go back to.  Get it over with already, I think constantly. 

The difference between me now and me a few years ago is that naive old me believed without reason and beyond reason that things were going to get better.  If I just get through this, or make it to that, or accomplish the next most important goal, it’ll all work out in the end. 

It’s not the presence of happiness I long for, but the absence of misery.  And that sentiment epitomizes the core of depression that outsiders have no grasp of; in my mind I hear traces of a thousand know-it-all phrasings of the “well nobody’s happy all the time” line the blissfully ignorant throw around.  Only somebody who’s basically happy most of the time would be stupid enough to say something like that to people who think about killing themselves.  It’s ‘cause we believe we should be happy all the time and us self-obsessed whiners aren’t, gosh darn it! 

“I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”  That’s how my mother would put it, anyway; in a judgment-laden cliche purporting to be a comforting truism.