Which is not to say that I don't have moments of happiness - I do. There is still plenty of laughter and enjoyment in my life. There's an Ani DiFranco song (to quote from my personal canon) that goes:
i think i could accept all these dark colors
as just part of some bigger color scheme
if it wasn't for that drippy string quartet of sadness
underscoring each smiling scene
And that's pretty much it. Not a drippy string quartet of sadness, exactly, but the creeping tense eerie straining hum that transforms a normal shot of life as you'd expect into the quiet-before-the-storm in a horror movie. There is a constant stress underlying every moment, and I am sick to death of all of it.
~~~
Part of it is Emily. She is hellish. I am continually astounded by how awful she is, how heartless and cruel and manipulative, how intent she is on punishing Jeff for moving away. It would be enough if she would just content herself with legal machinations to keep him from seeing the kids, or even from being able to Skype them regularly (both of which she's doing to the best of her ability). But on top of that, she sends emails that are obviously and explicitly meant to suggest that somehow it is Jeff's fault, that he should feel guilty because she is incapable of organizing her life or controlling her schedule, that someone his refusal to capitulate to her every whim is a failure on his part. She says she's "very surprised" that he hasn't called the kids in the past week, but then when he tries to arrange for time to talk to them she says their schedules are just too busy and the most she can do is a regimented hour-long conversation during which she sets a timer to allow each of them only fifteen minutes. That she doesn't even have the competency or control to actually enforce these idiotic plans just makes it worse! We have to deal with her constant self-justifications and cruelty towards Jeff while all along knowing that she has very little control over her own life. She is utterly unreliable even when it comes to her own stupid demands. I almost wish she would enforce such a regiment - since it's much more likely that she will instead fall into a habit of signing onto Skype later and later, finding excuses why she can't stick to the pre-arranged schedule, until we'll end up with a situation like when she first agreed to bring the kids over on Saturday mornings, and soon began to sleep in and not get them to us until lunch time. At that point, Jeff just had to start driving out to pick them up himself. With a Skype call, that's just not an option, there is no way he can compensate for her failure. Her weakness and learned helplessness just makes the times when she lashes out all the more frustrating, because you know that it is from her own weakness and incompetency that she draws on that secret fear that she projects towards everyone else. She does not know how to be a functional human being. The only way she knows how to get her way is to become a dead weight that everyone else must carry, a dead weight spewing insane accusations and guilt like a vile phlegm that covers everything.
I am so tired of carrying that dead weight around. Jeff and I want the best for the kids, but we also want the best for us. I want him to be the good, loving, involved father that he so wants to be and that he always has been - but I can't see any way of staying involved with the kids lives without also being forced to have dealings with their parasitic, selfish, manipulative mother. There is no reason why being a father should be a miserable duty that precludes personal happiness. There is no reason why being a stepmother has to be that way, either. I am not upset that it is hard - I knew it would be difficult, as learning how to adapt to and handle complex family relationships always are. But I'm angry and frustrated that there seems to be absolutely nothing we can do to stay in touch with the kids that Emily won't use as a means to abuse and punish Jeff. She is, in the most literal sense of the metaphor, like a fucking antiChrist. Instead of a loving, merciful bridge to the divine Father, she is the vindictive, hateful gulf that we have to cross as our only way of connecting with the kids. Having to go through her is almost worse than not being able to see the kids at all. The whole relationship gets twisted and warped, bent to her selfishness, dragged down by the gravity of her dead weight.
And I'm angry - at myself, and at Jeff and me together - for not being strong enough to do something about it. I'm angry that we even have to deal with this at all, that we don't have the financial resources to fight it, that the lawyers we hired to be on our side just drained us of all our money but accomplished exactly nothing for us except wasting our time. I'm angry that there seems to be no good solution, that a single dead-weight woman could so effectively ruin Jeff's relationship with his kids, that we can't just scream her into submission and make her see just how terrible a person she is. But she probably knows, in any case. I can't imagine all this guilt-tripping and manipulation is because she actually likes herself.
I don't want to indulge in the part of me that is angry and wants nothing more to be violent towards her, to reduce her to dust and sniveling worms. I'm not going to deny that part of me, but I know that it won't do any good. I suppose part of me wants the power to do such a thing simply because it would give me the opportunity to be merciful. I want so much for us to be the better people - but what is that, what would that mean in this case? I can't see how it's right for us to accept all of her conditions and demands and then allow her incompetence to slowly erode away our time with the kids and our relationship with them. How will that help anyone? But then, fighting the good fight, leaving us miserable, frustrated, exhausted in every sense of the word, staining our relationship with the kids with the constant strain and stress of it all? How is that any good? What is the good thing to do here, the merciful thing? How can you be merciful and kind to a parasite, someone who has made herself a parasite by her own choice because she is too afraid and weak to be anything else? And how do you protect the kids and their dream of family? How do you salvage that ideal and preserve the heart of it, to sustain their hope and optimism in a scenario like this? How can you come out and tell them everything their mother is doing out of her own selfishness and smallness, without destroying the mother archetype for them, or the father archetype for that matter? (On the other hand, how could it be any worse than the way Emily is warping and twisting that archetype into one of supremely powerful helplessness, the manipulative passivity that she models for them on a daily basis?)
~~~
When you are out of options about how to move forward on the mundane plane, that's when you turn to magic. Rereading Dion Fortune's novel Moon Magic recently, that's what I was reminded of. Work things out on what she calls the "Inner Plane" - work things out on the level of imagination, thought, intention, will, inspiration, the place where we connect most directly and most deeply with the gods and with Spirit and with the Song of the World - and they will work themselves out on the physical level. I always believed that love will work its own way out. I want to believe that. But I am at a loss as to what to do magically to help this situation. I'm not sure what kind of work can be done. Calling on Emily's higher self or whathaveyou.... Doing some kind of banishing or binding..... I don't know what work needs to be done. I'm unclear about where the problem lies, and unclear about our intentions and how we can or should shape them.
I don't know what work needs to be done on myself, either, for that matter. To make me stronger, calmer, better able to handle the strain of this work. I want to believe this is like the crucible where I am being melted down to be refined, shaped into a sharper instrument, a better vessel for Spirit. But instead, it just feels like a coffin, a tomb, with the pressure of earth - all the material weight of the world and its fucked up practicality - bearing down on me so that I can hardly breathe. I need to find a creative way to overcome this, to push through this. Or maybe not push, even, but simply to get through it somehow.
I've been doing a lot of crying recently. Weirdly, that seems to help. Just allowing myself to grieve over this situation - the whole situation - and its injustice and cruelty and frustration. I feel blocked creatively, it's been so long since I had that Fire in the Head, that spark of inspiration. I sit down to write, and nothing comes but the same dull old rote, the same superficial rot that everyone writes. I have nothing to say. I am in no position to say anything at all. I'm broken down into silence and sorrow.
Anne Lamott says there are only two prayers really that we say in our heart of hearts: Help me! Help me! Help me! and Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
It feels like so long since I was able to pray with gratitude - all my prayers are just the grunts and groans of the beast of burden trudging along beneath the yoke, asking for some leniency, for a rest, for a burst of energy to get me through, for a better way. I am not happy, I am just surviving, getting by. I worry about myself - that I might be in the midst of a depression. I know I've been here before, when I just can't see the end to the work and the work itself seems pointless and not any good or help to anyone, and all I want is to die. Not literally, but to die to this old, feeble self that isn't any good for the task at hand. To find some release from the blockage, to become some slip of a thing, a ghost that can pass through to a new place.
But then I get angry that I am always having to die, that this is such a never-ending process of being remade, that I should always have to be facing some new obstacle or problem instead of settling down into a stable, steady life of happy productivity and contentment. I resent that there should always be this pressure on me, that I should always be expected to use all my strength. What if I want to put my strength towards some purpose that I choose, pursue something that I love or want. It feels as though I didn't choose this, though I guess there is the argument that actually I did, at least at some level. That I might be the one putting the pressure on myself, and that it might go away if only I would just stop.... just makes me angrier. I don't know how to simply stop, especially when there seems to be no good solution and passivity just seems likely to make things worse. I feel chained down, and yet there's that part of me that wonders - that worries - that the chains are as thin as a spider's silk that I could break in a heart beat if I wanted to.... so why don't I? I know about freedom - and the very moment when you realize you are free is the same moment you see that you have been free all along - so why don't I feel free? What level of consciousness am I pushing towards, here? And why isn't it enough to just stay where I am? I do not believe in this eternal progression or working towards salvation - so what exactly is the point of all this pointless struggling?
~~~
Last night, I was up until at least midnight. Jeff was snoring, so he slept in the den, and I spent a good deal of time crying and praying and blowing my nose and watching the cat adjust and readjust himself in the next of blankets at my feet. I prayed to Brigid and Manannan, asking for their help and guidance, asking them what I should do.
And the thing is, simply crying, allowing myself to sob, I sank deeper even than the constant strain of stress and frustration that has been weaving through my life these days - and there, underneath, was still that inexplicable and strange pulse of fierce joy. Somehow, even that deep, there was fierce joy. How could there be joy there, and if it is there, why can't I bring it through, bring it up to manifest in my everyday life and the lives of those I love? Why should such a fierce joy wallow like a dark puddle at the very bottom of a dank and collapsing well - why shouldn't it rise with all its power and strength to overwhelm the stupidity and stress of the every day and open the way, like a surging wave or wellspring or an all-consuming fire? Why should I have to sink so low to dip my hands into a small and muddy pool? It is not fair! Why shouldn't love and joy rise up to wash everything clean and clear away the debris? Why shouldn't it break up this heavy fog of confusion and pressure with sunlight burning off the mist of morning? I know it's there! What keeps it from rising up to manifest?
Is it me? Am I keeping it down? How could I be responsible for that, when I feel so helpless and impotent so much of the time? When I've been working so hard to clear the way and nothing seems to help? This fierce joy that lies like a vast ocean beneath and in all things - how could I be enough to block it, and why would I? I just don't understand what I'm supposed to do, or how I'm supposed to do it. I don't know what will help, and what will hinder. I don't know how to stop being a blockage and become a better vessel.
That's what I want to know.