A Short Chance to Write

I haven't been writing much. I've felt words escape me as I've been caught up in a whirlwind of disorganization and as I've been trying to keep up with the expectations of my manager at work.

For some reason the things that I love and care about most deeply get buried in the back of my mind when confronted by such chaos.

I think of things to write, structure them in my mind and then sigh at the knowledge that my thoughts will soon be lost. Left to flit away because I'm so preoccupied or tired.

Then the blankness of the screen when I bring it up to write mocks me, and I lament the emptiness of my blog which symbolizes to me the emptiness of organized thought that I came to revel in when I had more time to jot them down here.

Interestingly enough this space has been a free medium for me to write than that of my diary which I am afraid that my children might find at some future point and complain to me of my pedantic thoughts and my blunders.

I've been battling these many months (during my blogging inactivity) the apathy that comes with exhaustion, the souls cry for what cannot be, the emptiness of the future when it has been ripped from the standard modality and even the shame of my situation. More especially the abject poverty that we were in and the struggle to break loose of it and the thoughts of poverty.

One thing I have noticed is that it is difficult to maintain a sense of what you do have; the blessings, the things material and immaterial, when you are battling the void. When poverty strikes the sense of loss can sometimes turn into a desperation to fill it with things, and there is the danger because the sense of things can be gained and lost so quickly.

I've been battling with loss, the loss of my marriage, which has still been dangled before me off and on over these many past months since my husband has put on this great show of things, ah and now he walks into my house like it is his own....

The perverseness of it is that though he is to most people and most of the time seems to be a simple guy who is just trying to do the right things in life, though he helps me sometimes around the house, though he has ceased to be (in many ways) the great negative and angry influence in my kids lives... still

and I don't know exactly what to say, it is difficult for me to place blame or talk negatively about people... and he's here playing with the kids, showing them a $5 dollar bill, throwing Roxie in the air, telling Sione to wear nicer clothes because it is Sunday and all... perhaps this is all innocently done, no prerogative... and I recall the rituals and routines of our previous life and think (or have thought in the past) that this is how life has been and is supposed to be. That he's the father of my children and being with him is how my life is supposed to be. At this point, I want to scream... it is the thought of what should have been and the thought of what is.

For I know of his perversity, I know of my sisters pain and her ruined life. I know how capable he is of lying and how deceitful he has always been. Then as he talks in his jolly way I am irritated by seemingly innocent things.... and it has been going on in this way for the past year. It's been since last March when I first filed the papers, and then July I believe when I updated them with all the information that was needed and I got his signature. Yet we are still not divorced, and why? Because he won't go take a class that the state requires! So I'm pulled on a string, where I know the boundary and the hidden subcontext but where I'm constantly held to the past and the present is but a tortuous moment where I'm trying to define what life I should be leading. We are not told what to establish when we are getting a divorce, and the lines we are told to draw get blurred when what needs to be done is confused with what shouldn't be done.

I have talked with the lawyer for the state (we've been involved with a DCFS case) and he said that he can file papers and he will spend a weekend in Jail if he doesn't take the class... he has until this Thursday...

In the meantime, what do I want now? I'm looking for strength and integrity, I'm looking for order and love... I'm looking for the peace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a bright future...