Why Is Life So Fucking Hard?

Sisters…my heart is just overflowing with love and complete awe of how wonderful you all are.

I could not read your comments last night, every time I tried I started sobbing. Not sad sobs–loving sobs.

But, my sadness also needed to be heard and felt and released.

So, I decided to embrace it rather than fight it. A couple of glasses of great Bourbon, crying over my favorite chick flick (The Bridges Of Madison County), listening to a few sad songs and just allowing myself to ‘feel’ it and not think it to death or analyse it.

Just feel it.

How cleansing that is.

My day had been spiraling down when I started feeling first angry then guilty then overwhelmingly humiliated and embarrassed over the fact that I had let the poison of ‘(who?)’ touch my children’s and grand children’s lives.

The guilt was just suffocating. I took this monster into my home, into my bed. I took him to my children’s homes, I have pictures of him with his arms around my grandchildren. This tainted, sick, mentally ill fuckhead!

My children are my pride. The result of almost five decades of love and support and goodness. They are not ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. They never, ever should have even known (who?).

I just couldn’t get that anger and guilt out of my gut. My stomach screamed at me. Nausea came and went in huge waves. I paced and talked to myself. Tried to distract myself with work but could not concentrate.

At times I felt like a caged animal unable to get away from the emotions that bound me as securely as any chains.

Then, I just had to allow it to overwhelm me. I could not hold it in, it had to be. I had to feel the despair in order to free myself of it. I could not hide. It was in me and a part of me.

And it is. I cannot change the past. Larry will always be a part of my journey. If not for him I would not have all of you. If not for him I would not be who I am today.

I celebrate the fact that I can feel so deeply. I am saddened that Larry is unable to feel anything. It’s a part of his disease. I am capable of empathy for him.

But I will also honor my justifiable anger. And, I will forgive myself for allowing him to take so much of my precious life’s energy, to tap it like a parasite, to emotionally feed off of me, to vicariously feel alive through me because he is so empty.

I can and will forgive myself for caring more about him than myself. And I will learn from that lesson to never do that again.

I am once again balanced today. Drained, exhausted, but balanced. The sunrise took my breath away this morning, Phantom and Sashie greeted me with their usual exuberance and my e-mail had this video from my son in Switzerland–so I am going to share it with all of you.

If cute puppies don’t make us feel better I sure don’t know what will.

I love all of you so much ~ JoAnn