Once again, it has been so long since I have posted that Blogger has forgotten me. It's not that hard to do.

It has been one of the hardest months ever. Physically it has seemed, from the outside, a little exhausting because there are so many things wrapping up. Softball season is winding to a close on Saturday. The dance recital and all its rehearsals are now behind us. Preschool graduation is tomorrow. Tennis is going full force. Swim and dive team have already started before other things have managed to finish up. The overlap in these few weeks is always unwieldy, and this year was no different in that regard. Everything wants to have some capstone event--an end of the year party, a ceremony, a big show. In some ways, I am happy letting the end of the routine be a punctuation mark in itself.

But what is really different is the attitude. My attitude, which is inflected so heavily by the attitude of burden all around me. Doing these things is "bad" because I'm being told that they are bad and too much. And what has made it so difficult is the realization that my fundamental beliefs and motivations are, at their very root, so terribly flawed. And that I am the one who must change.

The first thing that I have been having to come to terms with is that although I desperately wanted each of my children, to the point I was willing to subject myself to physical pain, an emotional rollercoaster, financial stress, I suppose I just have too many and I needed to heed my partner's desire to stop. It is, as they say, water under the bridge at this point, but the fact is, I should be feeling remorse for my desire for children, and I do not. I honestly don't know what to do with this set of information. How can you want something so very much, love people so very much, and yet have to acknowledge that they were, in fact, a bad idea? How can something so bliss-inducing, so sweet to you, be wrong?

The second issue deep on me is how I have chosen to help them grow. So much of our own attitudes come from our own upbringing, and most especially our overcompensations. As a child, I was exposed to fairly little. I had a happy, comfortable life, but we were so simple, so narrow in what we did. I always felt different, somehow inferior to the other people around me in the gifted program or at camp or in my academic high school classes. I never had the opportunity to play a sport as a child. I took piano lessons, but I did not do any other activities. I did not travel much. I did not spend time outdoors other than in my own small, suburban neighborhood. I went to college having never seen an animal in the wild other than a squirrel. I had never even seen roadkill other than a duck that has been hit by a car near the small borrow pit near our house. I had never seen a deer cross the road, never seen a raccoon, never even seen a woodchuck. I had never been hiking. Never been camping. Had never been off the East Coast until I was 14 and my Dad had been given a comp ticket after giving up a seat on a plane on the only business trip I ever remember him taking in my entire life. Even though my grandparents lived in Myrtle Beach during my early years and my other grandparents had moved to Florida right after I was born, I seldom even got to play in the waves at the beach because my parents couldn't walk on sand.

So I have tended to overcorrect. I have wanted my children to have the chances and experiences I didn't have. People often ask me if I did gymnastics as a child. Nope. But I wish I had. I wish I had played softball. I wish I had been on a team. I wish I had taken art classes. I wish I had been more places. Wish people had recommended more good books.

Now what I'm having to come to terms with is this: we're just as poor as my parents. Maybe a little more able-bodied, but we're still poor. If we want to retire, if we want to have savings, if we want to be responsible, we must pull it all back. I made the painful decision to give notice to Frances' piano teacher this week. We also will not be renewing the various classes and activities we have just finished. The music lessons will be something that we can perhaps continue with me as a teacher at home. I get tears in my eyes when I think about how I must do this in order to appease the person who is supposed to be my partner. Sometimes I wish that I could expect as little out of life as he does. To treat it simply as something to be endured until the day you die (alone).

Kerry and I have been seeing a marriage counselor, and the one thing that has become clear from the experience is that everything about me is wrong. Unfortunately, so far there hasn't been much focus on how I am supposed to grow and change, so I am still stuck in my old ways and feel unrepentant. I'm just not sorry for who I am, only for the fact that I am likely losing my children and a warm roof over my head. What I have learned is that the things I stand for: family, time together, adventures, trying to live in the now, are not what work. At least not for me in this relationshp. My greatest wish in the world is to feel that I have a place to call home, a place where I feel safe and loved and know that I can return even when I'm not perfect. I'm terrified of being alone in the world with no friends and no family. Right now I feel very much like I'm in that place. I don't have any close friends. I had unrealistic expectations of what marriage would be like. I don't know what I've done to cause not only myself but my whole family to be rejected by our families of origin. So, well, I'm a little scared. And also rather defensive. I feel like I should wish that I would just die, but that's the last thing I want to do. What I really want to do is survive despite the contempt and indifference around me because there's a big part of me that feels like it isn't wrong to want to build a family where one is lacking. I want to be somewhere where people are not afraid of my children, where they aren't seen as a burden or a mere financial liability or something so out of control that no one would want them to be where they are.

I actually have had bags packed for several days to set out on a totally crazy adventure. It would be considered kidnapping or legal abandonment, and the responsible streak in me knows that I would risk losing my children forever if I acted on my desires, but I'd love to just get in the car and keep driving until I get to California or Canada. Alas, it's a little hard to do with no money at all in my pocket (to make matters worse, I lost my ATM card and my credit card this weekend).

In the midst of my contemplation of my future, in our present we have been doing a lot of reading:

* My Louisiana Sky, which is probably the best book I've read in the past several months
* Be the Pack Leader, which we listened to in the car
* The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* Berries in the Scoop, a sweet story about a family from Cape Cod
* The Mystery in Old Quebec, which has me wanting to leave it all behind and run to a little piece of Europe in North America
* a book about a family that travels to see the Sphinx in 1898
* a book about two children who are trapped on an ice floe near Greenland
* The Breadwinner, a young adult book about a young girl in Kabul when the Taliban took over
* Milagros, the story written by local author Meg Medina, and the story behind this year's dance recital
* The Glass House, a book I unfortunately identified too much with right now in my life; I kept feeling horrified that I may not be very different than the mother and father in that book and that my children's lives are equally chaotic
* The Art of Racing in the Rain, very sad and also sweet in the way only dog books can be
* Ali and the Golden Eagle--just started today
* Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest, about a boy who searches out the truth about his father, who died in Vietnam