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August 11 - August 25, 2024
Whenever Lila is unsure of her answer or isn’t proud of a decision, she becomes angry when discussing it.
A few years later, my Papa left my grandmother for another woman, and my aunt’s husband became schizophrenic. In each case I watched women I thought were strong morph into shells of themselves, and the lessons I took from all this were complicated: you could not trust a man to be there indefinitely, and you couldn’t allow yourself to need one. My grandmother was the strongest woman I had known until a man took her money, her pride, and her heart.
I get an opportunity to stop feeling sorry for myself, to appreciate what I do have, and to stop focusing on the negatives. My behavior has been self-sabotaging, and before I can admit it to anyone else, I need to admit it to myself. So I do. The only way over pain is through it. I stop relying on things that momentarily numb my emotions, and I face them head-on. This feels awful, later difficult, and then eventually so simple,
There is no “right” way to parent, but I think children need things in moderation. Without moderation, they are presented with too much or too little,
The days are boring and hard and, above all, lonely. I wonder if this was how my young mother had felt. If this was, in fact, how all mothers felt, regardless of their social status, location, or race.
My friend list split into two categories: friends from the small suburban town where I grew up and friends I’d made in college or New York City. My hometown friends became very aggressive in their posts. Drain the swamp. No more freebies. Kill Hill. What I could not understand was that, similar to my father, the people posting these things were the same ones who would have benefited most from Hillary’s policies. I told my New York friends it made absolutely no sense to me, but that was a lie because just a few years earlier I would have been echoing them.
