Successes and Failures

I prayed last night for the first time in a long time. OK, maybe it wasn't a prayer, except by the loosest definitions.  "God, grant me peace," was pretty much the extent of it. It was a plea for momentary peace from the kind of amorphous anxiety that sometimes overtakes me as I try to fall asleep.  Anxiety about things that can't be changed, mostly. Anxiety about the forward motion of life, but also about the past that I cannot change.

I wondered yesterday, for the first time ever (I'm pretty slow when it comes to things like this) if maybe I can change the past.  I'm a writer-- I don't believe in any story that can't be revised.  I'm constantly thinking well, if I moved the ending to the beginning, that really reframes the whole story-- it changes everything. I'm well aware of how just a slight shift in perspective can change the entire tale-- can make it a story about something I never knew it was about.

My whole adult life I've made decisions based on fear-- I don't want to end up like my mother.  GOD I hope she never reads this (prayer #2! I'm cooking with fire now!).  I don't mean I don't want to end up my mother-- I think my mother is fabulous.  I'd be blessed to end up my mother.  I mean, I don't want to be with an abusive partner who controls me. Nothing else mattered to me when I chose, not at the deepest core where I make my split second decisions. I don't want to end up a single parent with a bunch of rotten kids (of all the rotten kids-- I was the rottenest.  I mean the apple you find at the bottom of the fruit drawer in February, and when you pick it up it mushes into applesauce in your hand.  That rotten). I don't want to be lonely. I am lonely-- I'm lonely a lot, but I choose to be lonely (in the way we choose our bad behaviors-- I don't mean I choose to be lonely like I'm a sociopath.  Are sociopaths lonely?)

But yesterday I was thinking about this.  It's the Eat, Pray, Love epidemic.  YES I'm READING IT, OK? Yes, I find it annoying and a little boring, but every once in a while it is kind of interesting. Like a flash of lightning in an otherwise boring storm. Why do I choose, well into adulthood, to read my mother's story in this way? I don't think it's her interpretation of her story. I don't think it's even mine, if i really thought about it.  I mean, yes, my dad was abusive, controlling, crazy, ladie dadie. But my parents have been divorced for twenty-four years.  Longer than they were married. Not to mention my dad died fifteen years ago-- I mean, he's super-dead. Dead-dead. Deader than a doornail, if one would permit me. My mom has a great job, a nice house, a newish car, she travels to wonderful places at least once a year.  She has dinner with a friend she enjoys every Friday night.  Of her five children, one is a lawyer, one a successful businesswoman, an aspiring nurse, an entrepreneur, a writer (that's me!). Shit-- my mom's life is way better than mine.  What am I afraid of?  A good job? Freedom? Interesting friends? Successful, smart, good looking (that's me, too. The rest are ok) children? Whoo, I'm shaking in my shoes.

I make a lot of decisions based on stories from my past that I don't bother pulling out, dusting off, moving the end to the beginning, shit, giving it a better ending-- a happy ending (joking-- just joking.  I would never give a story a happy ending).

Quitting smoking.  Yeah, I'm working on it. Another story I've written that doesn't have the traditional narrative arc.  It's a disjointed story.  One with a lot of false starts.