Category: Single parent

She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

Fear and Vacation

The kids have been back for the last few weeks and so has terrible fear.  Fear that things will go wrong at work. Fear that my ex will try to change our deal and will make my life miserable. Fear that illness will strike. Fear that my son will open the door to a stranger while I am on the toilet.

Tuesday night I had a dream that spiders were crawling all over a document that I was supposed to review for work and Ving Rhames and Dwight Eisenhower really wanted the document.  I think they were my client. Anyhow, they were like “C’mon… take care of this!”

I’ve signed up for a Sunday school class this fall about courage.  It’s corny, I know, but what am I supposed to do with this faith? My fears are indicia of my love for the world, and for my sinful pride in my own ability to fix things.

It not been all inky blackness.  The kids have been wonderful and we are getting ready to go on vacation.

Dead

My mother died 11 months ago today. My father died 11 years ago. Lately, the reality that one day I will die haunts me in the still of the night. Part of the fear is Calvinist fear, that I will stay dead for eternity never reunited with other saved souls. Underlying that fear is a more terrible feeling than fear, what Camus called “estrangement” but in less high-faluten terms: it is simply the terrible feeling of being very lonely.

In reflecting on her life, in these months after her death, I have probably given the most thought to how she raised me. She raised me as a single Mom under tremendous duress. And she raised me with a goal of becoming self-reliant. She made many sacrifices, raising me to become emotionally independent, is the sacrifice that made her the most sad. I know because she said so. Until recently, the scope and scale of the feeling and the impact that it had on her was lost on me.

Lyrics:

I will never say the word “procrastinate” again
I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed.

…

Did a large procession wave their torches as my head fell in the basket,
And was everybody dancing on my casket?
Now it seems that I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want,
Or I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do.