More Again?

My family continues to shrink. My sister's husband has abandoned their marriage after 9 years. They dated 5 years before they married in 2000. I would post a picture if it were not a violation of their privacy. And I have to say that although my sister is her own special snowflake, I couldn't be married to her for ten minutes. This post is not about blame. It is about grief.

Regardless of my feelings or opinions about Chiara and her marriage and her spouse, I am heartbroken.

Is it normal to feel heartbroken when a marriage fails? A marriage that is not your own?

I suspect I am suffering from transference; am I making all the sad I won't let myself feel about the loss of my mother and my father come out through this seemingly ordinary civic event.

So much loss. So much regret. So much sadness. So little to hold onto. My sister's husband was (is) just a regular guy, but once the gates of my family corral close behind you, they close behind you forever - or so I thought. It breaks my heart to think that anyone would want to get out, to no longer be one of us.

Then again

I don't want her to die. What a hateful thing to say. And not what I meant at all.

What I am resenting is that no one in my entire family is willing to confront her except me, and frankly I feel that since I have already told her off, I am no longer obligated. I should get to log off this problem.

Except that I don't, but for a different reason. It is a reason I don't like at all.

The reason is that forgiveness is a problem, and it is not a tiny little irksome fly in the ointment kind of problem. It is a genuine fat ass issue. And thinking about the issue has brought to my attention a certain defect of character that I can no longer avoid confronting.

I suck at forgiveness. For years I just didn't do it at all. People who wronged me got cold and stony irreversible nothing from me forever and ever and ever and ever. I did more than just hold grudges. I completely removed offenders from my life. (This is the reason why so very many of my ex-boyfriends haunt me for years after we break up - often well after they have married other people and had children and the whole show. It is because they hurt me and I shunned them and they feel... like... crap. As they probably should. Oh I am sorry. I am digressing. Let me stop that.

Oh wait just a little more digression. Please note that I still shun people who hurt me and I defend my right to do this because I don't think there is anything in the bible that says you have to let people kick you in the face twice. There is that thing about turning the other cheek but I think whoever put in the bible should have left it out. I hope it wasn't Jesus. Was it Jesus? Ugh).

Back to my story. One fine day, I made a great stride, a breakthrough in the forgiveness area. I was reading a book about the last words of Christ and some incredibly smart person pointed out that there is more than one way to take this one thing that Jesus said. Here is the thing:

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

At first glance, this just looks like forgiveness muckity muck. Nothing special. However, if you look carefully at the grammar of the sentence (which is exactly the kind of thing I like to do in my spare time), you will see that the word "for" in this case could be translated as "because". When one reads the sentence as "Forgive them, because they know not what they do" or even closer to today's vernacular "Forgive them, because, seriously, if they knew exactly how bad the thing they are doing right now was, WOW. They would SO not do it." Jesus put things with more elegance, even when in terrible pain. He was... well. Let me just get back to my point.


So I got much better at the business of forgiving because I got to apply the idea that the people who were kicking me in the face simply wouldn't do it if they were aware that they were hurting me so very badly. And so then by that logic, well, of course I could forgive them. No one who knew they were being such a total ass hole would behave in such a way, so obviously they were under the influence of a terrible portion of ignorance - a portion so enormous that I could even feel kind of sorry for the person who kicked me in the face.

So now I can forgive people. Some of them. The ones I can find ignorance or error with, the people whose real intention wasn't to kick me in face.

But her?

She knew. And my dad?

He knew too.

And they both did it anyway and I can't forgive them. And that is likely to be the biggest spiritual problem of my entire life. Good thing I got to it this early. If I live to be 100, I might maybe work it out. But I am not hopeful.

And anyway, is anyone else as sick of this subject as I am? I am so tired of it. I am tired of writing about it and I am sorry for continuing to dwell on it. The fact is, I am mentally better all the time. It just doesn't show here because it's hard to write about being happy or feeling better because everything is fine over here posts are pretty boring and I am pretty sure that is not what you come here for. Is that what you come here for? I don't even know.

Whatever your reason for coming here, thank you for reading.


Love,

Nina

Time again

What happens next?

Seven months after moving into Bob and Kate's Asylum, I have been thinking a lot - probably more than is healthy for a girl like me.

Everything I assumed would happen in my life did not happen, and a whole lot of other things happened instead. Let me assure you that this is not whining; it is a simple statement of facts.

I wanted to graduate from college without having learned anything temporally relevant, and for the most part, I succeeded. Byron, Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath - cool. I even composed a performance art piece during which I extinguished candles on various parts of my body. (I got an A on in that class).

I am not constituted to solve world famine, genocide, dirty terrible people of other cultures were the jurisdiction of other young idealists. I just wanted peace. Green grass. Leafy trees, waterfalls, smiling babies. This makes me a lightweight. Morally speaking, of course.

And of course, because on the very best of days, God thinks I am fit for... what? a spittoon? I find that I am the person my family and my therapist believe is responsible for confronting the evil of Erika. Why? Because of everyone in my family, I was the one most injured. Also, because no one else in my family wants to explain it to her because it's all so very untidy and Gosh, what to say? So Nina should just do it.

Normally I am up for a writing project, especially if I can be vituperative and profane.

But this time? This time... internet, I confess that I simply would not know where to start. I just want her to die. But before she does, I want her to know perhaps for the first time, what she did to me, my family, and my father, the love of my life.

Crazy train? I'll be at the bar.

Love,
Nina

Sweating in the Oldies

Kate returned from Sweden two days ago.

(I know I made a quasi-promise to post every day while she was gone, but I found myself the accidental participant in a medical experiment that required me to do nothing harder than take a few pills, try with all physical, moral, and spiritual resources applied, NOT to take some other pill, and the observe my behavior carefully to ensure I wouldn't throw myself off the roof. I am out of the woods. Thank you for your concern).

So Kate came home a few days ago; in fact, she came home twenty four hours before I expected her, so I was unprepared with the flowers and wine and fine foods I had planned to have ready for her. She did not seem to notice.

I thought we could use an outing, so I suggested we got to Lord & Taylor and buy work out clothes. Fun, healthy activity, no?

No.

She did not want to go. But if it's work out clothes I want, why not just go through the boxes of old clothing that belonged to her husband and wear his? He doesn't need them anymore. And I need something to sweat in. Fashionable considerations unimportant. So, I, uh, have a box of work out clothing recently belonging to a man who used to live two floors down and who is now dead.

Please someone tell me how to feel about this.

Love,

Nina


ps Next post I will explain the medical experiment in full detail.

Asia

Nina's Dewey Decimal Section:

495 Languages of East & Southeast Asia

Nina = 4941 = 494+1 = 495


Class:
400 Language


Contains:
Linguistics and language books.



What it says about you:
You value communication, even with people who are different from you. You like trying new things don't mind being exposed to unfamiliar territory. You get bored with routines that never change.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Huh. Ok.

Love,

Nina