I’ve had three mornings this month where I’ve gotten out of bed easily. Otherwise, I lie there, telling myself it’s OK to go back to sleep again. Or, if I must get up to take the kids to school, I make promises, negotiations with myself, about when I can go back to sleep. Fortunately, all three good mornings have been in the last seven days, so I’m tentatively optimistic. I’m attending some sort of grief group therapy thing this week. I’m trying to stay away from the news, and engaging in self-care stuff. I’ve considered that if things don’t get better soon, I should probably go in and get on some meds. But I’m resentful as hell at the idea of it.
I don’t yet miss my dad. Maybe I’m still in shock? Maybe this will get even worse when I finally realize, on some level I’m apparently failing to grasp, he’s dead?
Here’s a lot of talk about a god I mostly don’t believe in.
A couple of times this month, I’ve felt so lost, I wanted to pray, which is something I’ve not done for years now. Here’s what stops me: I was actively praying over the month that Little’s fetus died, but I wasn’t specifically praying for the health of Little’s pregnancy.
To be perfectly honest, Middle had already had two kids by then (one of whom I prayed a TON for as he was a high risk pregnancy) and I’d had three, and everything had worked out, and Little’s pregnancy seemed to be going fine, and I also had nephews and nieces on my husband’s side and JFC, I’d be like one of those little blue haired ladies going to church from noon until midnight just to cover everyone. So I had this general prayer about keeping everybody healthy and safe, and then lots of specifics about things that were personally interesting to me. Selfish prayers!
I thought God and I had this all worked out, because (and this will be an extreme shocker, I’m sure, as outwardly I am so magnificently unflappable) I sometimes struggle with pretty bad anxiety. When my kids were babies, I would go through this litany of double-check prayers, making sure they were covered from any possible bad thing. It was exhausting, and after a few years, felt like I was no longer talking to God so much as mindlessly reciting a personalized list of potential horrors. Please let my children live through the night, please protect them from predators, please if I am not there to stop them, and they run while chewing gum, don’t let it lodge in their trachea and choke them to death, etc.
I swear, at one point, I heard the voice of God, and he said, “Hey don’t sweat it. I gotcha. You don’t have to keep asking.” Or something to that effect. But it released me from my anxiety, this immense relief of feeling heard. Permission to hope for good things, not to be tied only to fear, not to feel responsible for protecting everyone from everything. Like, I finally got that God wasn’t a terrifying deity waiting for me to step outside the lines so he could slap the shit out of me. So I stopped obsessively covering all the bases. And a few years later, God terminated Little’s pregnancy.
The easy conclusion is that if there’s a God, he’s some cosmic version of the Abusive Boyfriend, who occasionally fucks your shit up and still expects your love and loyalty, and maybe to mourn with you, the bad thing that ‘happened’ as if there was some third party involved.
Alternatively, he doesn’t have the power to protect anyone, in which case, he’s not a god so much as that friend you do brunch with and unload your worries on, which makes me feel he should be subject to the rules of friends, not gods.
Another easy conclusion: I, Anne, do not control the universe with the power of my spiritual To Do list. Therefore, it’s useless to waste time making one.
But lately, I’ve felt very lonely, and desperate for some kind of cosmic interference, fearful that maybe my current circumstance (Dad dying, estranged from my mother, Little’s bad news bonanza, my current love affair with sleeping) are punishments for my snooty, atheistic attitude*. Maybe, if I’d just get right with God, everything would be better.
Sometimes I think of it clinically. If I can allow myself some positive self-talk, some wishful daydreaming, I could help myself feel better. Like the good thoughts version of kombucha, I could make my insides better from ingesting some living positivity.
But when I open my head to pray, this thought stops me: “Hey, if you decide to double down on this bullshit that there’s a higher creature who influences your fate, you have to now pray for protection for every single bad outcome. Because I don’t know how we could live with each other if you were praying for something stupid and somebody else got killed on your watch.”
*Am aware that this fear is based on the assumption that God would do bad things to other people to punish me, and what kind of narcissist would believe in that kind of universe? Answer: the kind who keeps a blog like this one.
Here’s some other stuff
We took our season’s passes from Six Flags Discovery Kingdom and used them to go to Magic Mountain for Mother’s Day.
Let me tell you a little secret we discovered: Mother’s Day at Magic Mountain is DESERTED. Every ride was open, and there was no wait time. Look at how short the line is behind the turnstiles!
It was AMAZING. Here’s another unadvertised awesomeness: our season’s pass even covered our parking at Magic Mountain. The whole day was free, and it was fantastic. Maybe this is God reaching out with an apology for the craptacular time we had at DK? WHAT ARE YOU DOING, GOD? I DON’T FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOUR THROUGH LINE.
And finally, in a less than perfect parenting moment the other day, I wise-assed to my sulking teenager by saying, “Everybody’s childhood is terrible. It’s a unifying theory of humanity.” And my youngest child breezed through the room and shouted, “Not me. My childhood is AWESOME.” And I dunno what else to say, except DAY MADE.
I am not a God person. Visualizing the universe as one big mass of Mother Nature works better for me because a feminine deity can certainly be guilty of the whims of natural disasters right next to the beauty of butterflies. Visualizations, which it sounds like your nightly prayers were, are good things. They help refocus anxiety and I am guilty of using them this way. I would not waste your energy there just yet. Your body is manifesting the physical exhaustion that your emotions have been showing for MONTHS. I would sleep for a bit more and when that feels more wrong than right, I would go for the meds. I say this as a newbie to Prozac. Spent decades avoiding it and whaddyaknow? It *seems* to work. Which is a cosmic pisser when I think of all the self talk/vitamins/exercise/moodlights/therapists I have used instead. Pass the meds.
Hoo boy, the whole god / gods / God thing is so difficult, isn’t it.
I think it’s Stephen Fry who said he can’t believe in an omnipotent God because why bone cancer in children. I hear you about not punishing other people for one person’s fuckup. Not punishing other people to make one person learn. That kind of thing seems incredibly unfair and I prefer not to believe in it.
My feelings vary a lot. Sometimes I feel like there’s definitely something there, and maybe more than one, and maybe very much a small g god instead of an all powerful Christian God with a flaming sword and so on. Sometimes I feel like there very much isn’t.
Sometimes I feel like the reason I don’t want there to be an omnipotent god is because I know damn well I can’t help everyone (especially my kids) with everything, and I want to feel slightly less guilty about that. I can accept that my parents and teachers and friends and co-workers couldn’t fix everything for me. So why do I feel like I should be able to do that for everyone else I’ve ever met and if I can’t, I’ve failed?
Also, sometimes it’s actually really calming to me to think that no, everything’s random, and all we can do is make the best of what we have and try to be good to each other. That we’re not supposed to learn from a terrible experience, that it happened purely because the world is horrible sometimes.
I grew up Christian, though, because my dad’s a minister of religion. My mother was an atheist. Sometimes I feel very betrayed by Christianity and by the Christian God. Not because my dad sucks; he’s actually really good about being inclusive of all faiths and loving all people (even if he has terrible social skills sometimes, like the first time he brought his new love over to visit my place and meet me and my family, he said loudly, “Oh, Meg! You’ve cleaned up!” which made me laugh and cry).
Because my kids are in various kinds of pain. Because terrible things happen in the world. Because everything is so hard, and there’s no one to go to who will actually fix it all. That’s my betrayal, and that’s one of the big reasons why I don’t / can’t really believe in a Christian God. (But maybe it’s my fault for never really relaxing and accepting, etc. etc.)
(I can make anything my fault, given time. Ask me about the Fall of Rome.)
ANYWAY I am glad you had a good time at Magic Mountain, depression is a FUCKER and I feel for you, and religious stuff SUCKS ASS.
I understand the impulse to pray. I went through a period where I felt lost and was so envious of my friends who believed in God, who could pray and believe their prayers were heard — I considered practicing Judaism, my dad’s religion, and even started regularly attending services, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t believe. I don’t want to believe in a God who lets bad things happen, like what happened to Little or to you or to your dad, or like Meg said above about bone cancer in kids. If there’s a god who does those things, I don’t want any part of that god. But I know the feeling of WANTING to believe that there’s some greater purpose, that there is a deity who cares and will hear me, and if there’s a way for you to believe that and get comfort from it, well, then I want that for you. I think of you often and hope the depression eases soon.
I am an atheist and feel no conflict about that whatsoever. I mean, I’m not an angsty WHAT IF I AM WRONG atheist, if that makes sense. I am untroubled by the lack of deity. I also have some weird hippie shit ideas like EVERYTHING IS ALIVE IF YOU ARE ON THE CORRECT TIMELINE IN ORDER TO HOLD YOURSELF TOGETHER AS A MULTICELLULAR STRUCTURE YOU MUST HAVE AWARENESS EVEN IF YOU ARE PLANKTON OR A MINERAL THE EARTH IS OBVIOUSLY ALIVE THE SUN IS ALIVE WE ARE ALL ALIVE. I also think, like, obviously if radio waves and light waves and sound waves effect our world, so do brain waves. I feel like OBVIOUSLY people can be psychic, and I file it under ‘just because you don’t understand how it works, that doesn’t mean it’s not true’.
Anyway.
I don’t PRAY exactly, but I do….think my thoughts into the universe? Like if I think good thoughts at this person they will feel those good thoughts and that will help. Is that praying? Maybe.
I gave up on god when I was 15 because the 272947338 Bad Thing happened to me. So my mom forced me to talk to her pastor and I gave him a recap of the last year only and he said “yeah I don’t blame you.” He’s serving life in prison for Bad Things to smallish boys now so hey at least I’m not a boy? I say try the grief group, try meds for a bit (or longer with anxiety meds?) and I’m hoping school is out soon and you can lie in bed longer. Also, you have a kid who thinks their childhood is going awesome, holy crap that is a thing! A good thing! That will go away with puberty but whatever! Dads dying after a lot of fuckshit is a complicated thing. My dad was dying for a long time and it was hard and I was relieved when he was gone and that made me feel awful and now I miss him. Death is fucking complicated, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing it how you do it.
So, I have been uncharacteristically quiet over here … that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading… or thinking about what it is even possible to say.
All I have is that grief is a motherfucker. And it goes not in a straight line, in my experience. I swear i can be on year 6 and three months and still feel like it was yesterday, and then I can have a day where WOW everything is so much MORE since I survived this.
So, whatever gets you through the day … and if that is the worst parenting moment, don’t sweat it.
Sending you get you through the day thoughts, and wishes for wine (my drug of choice even though it is not an anti-depressant).