Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?

Three or four posts over the last couple of months and already I can't stick to my resolve - I was going to blog every day, mostly about something I read in my daily Bible reading (failed at that too), and not use this blog to complain. I was going to be positive, sunny, inspiring......I suppose you could call it my Quarter Year's Resolutions.

I hate resolutions. So much added pressure. You could start the same diet on January 1st and September 12th (don't ask, it was arbitrary)and break that diet a week later and inevitably feel like you let yourself down far more by breaking your New Years Resolution to lose 10 pounds than some other random diet. Maybe that's why I give into my lack of impluse control so often - why try to deny the fact that failure is inevitable? (Relax, relax, I don't...really... believe that.....)

Can you tell I'm bitter? So much for positivity. So many things have gone wrong lately. So many things had started to go RIGHT, so it makes sense. All my life I have learned to expect that where happiness and contentment abound, disappointment is just around the corner. For every positive influence that encourages you on your way, there will be two scumbags who will try and tell you that you mean nothing, or worse. I've encountered a few of those scumbags lately. Let me tell you, I'm getting pretty tired of it.

I know that a single action is never the answer to a perfect life and that the grass isn't always greener on the other side, but I have a feeling that moving will make a lot of these issues go away. Literally. Some of the people here who are irrelevant but unavoidable will be a distant, annoying memory when I'm 3000 miles away. Oh, how the Old Laura cries out now and wants to say exactly who they are.....but no. It's not right to air the wrong committed by others against me when I'm guilty of so much. It's a wonder how anyone accuses/judges anyone else when sin is an unavoidable part of our lives. There's no way to get around it, it's something that we all do. It's the human condition. How dare any of us point out the speck in someone else's eye when we have a plank in our own (to paraphrase the Bible)?

I recently read an interesting book that begins with a dicussion about good and evil. One of the themes of the book is man's struggle between these two things. We are all good, and evil, and the man (or woman) struggling between them. We cry foul when someone says something mean to us, and yet the skeletons in our closets cry out against us. I'm not here to preach or offer a remedy - in fact there is no remedy for sin in this life - merely to speculate on the irony of focusing on other people's sin and the fact that we are all guilty of it.

Now, back to bitterness (isn't it always?). My divorce was final on June 10th. As I read the paper that freed me from my marriage, I felt mostly a sense of elation that it was all over with, that I was free. ("Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Too much? Yeah, maybe.)No more court dates, mediation, limbo. It's done. However, there was a small part of me that felt a little sad - I never expected to be in a position where I could say "my ex-husband" or even maybe someday "my first marriage". It makes me feel like a grown-up and a failure at the same time. A grown-up failure. It fits. It is what it is though, and it's better this way.

I'm torn. A public blog is no longer the place I can turn to to express my deepest thoughts and feelings - it never really was the appropriate place to express those things, but I use to do it all the time. Now that I've realized that airing my dirty laundry and the dirty laundry of those I interacted with that way is just plain wrong, I've put a block on myself that I haven't yet found a way through. I haven't said half of what I feel. I don't keep things to myself so much with the people that I'm closest to, but I still feel that block and the straining against it.

I've gotten to the point with everything that's falling apart around me that I don't even WANT to talk about it all. I will say this, though: I’ve been making a list of pros and cons relating to uprooting my life and my children’s lives, moving across the country, and making a go of starting over. So far there are 24 pros and 13 cons. One of the pros accidentally made it on the list twice, written once at least 6 months ago and once today. I’m not counting in twice, of course, but I think this particular thing is pretty important and no small matter that it ended up on the list twice.

I’ll leave you with this, which I think expresses many of my current feelings, once that have been on my mind/heart most in the last 10 months. It’s not meant to be self-pitying or anything. In fact, I didn’t write it to be seen and never expected to show it to anyone, but it seems fitting to share it now. I’m not even sure what to call it since it’s so short and wasn’t meant to be a blog or anything. A memo of the heart? Lol Call it what you will, take it for what it is.

It’s Out There (undated)

“My life is going to be what it is no matter where I am. Constantly reaching for greener grass is only going to continue to breed disappointment.
No. I refuse to accept that. SOMEWHERE, there is SOMETHING, SOME PLACE where I can find some sense of happiness. There is a place where I am wanted, where I am not a burden, where there will not be a lack of obstacles – I know that doesn’t exist – but less obstacles. There must be such a place. I have to find it – for myself, and for my girls. I just have to find it.
I know it’s out there.”

And therein lies the most important key: my girls. Everything I’ve chosen to do is for them. There are many people who may not understand why, who may think that what I believe is the right thing to do is the complete opposite of what I should do (and I respect their right to their opinion, whether or not it mirrors my own), but I share the same goal I think every parent does: that their childhood be better than mine was. Because of choices I made before they were born that goal has started a few steps behind where it should be, but I’m doing my best to change that. I am changing that. And what we’re going to do will make it so. I promise.

I started this blog with a song lyric that expresses how I feel, and I'll end with another one. From Hayley Williams to Miranda Lambert: "If I could just come in I swear I'll leave.....won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me."