If I could just...

Let's just begin where we are: my life is not going how I would like it to. Or imagined it would.

I do not find myself surrounded by family. Whether biological or chosen.

I live in a town with fewer friends than I can count on one hand. And she is twice my age, and Mormon, if you're wondering.

My job in New Orleans, and the job I have here, both came with exceptional perks and incredible costs. Professionally, though, my life here is going about as well as it possibly could.

But, in the words of Bridget Jones, the patron saint of single thirty-somethings: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”

I stop myself frequently from saying "This was the worst year of my life," only because, no one was shot, raped, or hit by a car.

So: it was not the worst year of my life.

Still, I feel as if I've been watching a slow motion car crash that is going to send broken windshield glass two generations into the future. And I do not know how to time travel.

I have a whole list of things I do not know how to do.

I have a whole list of questions I cannot answer. 

Though believe me, I have tried.

If you fall in love with a man and a boy but they can never be in the same state as you, did it ever actually happen?

Define never. Define indefinite. Define uncertain.

Schedule a court date. Schedule three more. Pray in between. Cry in between. Scream in between. (But only silently, in your head, because you'd be terrified to do it out loud). Reschedule again. 

When does one cut her losses?

And what the hell does that even mean in this case?

And what if Solomon wasn't wise? What if the mother in the story who would have victoriously taken a half-broken child was the one who won all along? And someone just changed the story later, for posterity? Maybe Solomon was an idiot. I mean, what do we know? And look around at our country, do you see any Solomons anyway? Isn't it all very hypothetical and even a little dangerous to think things turn out OK in the end?

***

I have practiced a series of answers to all standard personal questions. "Do you have children?" "Did you move here alone?" opting regularly for the shortest, curtest, greatest deflection possible. However, unlike with inappropriate Bandit questions, I cannot shake my fist afterwards about ableist bullshit. Because, these are in fact completely ordinary, normal things to ask of another human being.

I just happen to not want to talk about it.

Mother's Day falls on a Sunday.
My mailbox was empty.
My table was silent.

I just don't want to talk about any of it.

I regularly ask myself what I am supposed to learn from all of this. Over a year. Over a year of waiting. Of fear. Of impotence. Of frustration. Of, at times, horror.

I suspect I will process for years to come. Years, and then generations, as I pick glass out of a child's forehead in two hundred years when the shrapnel stops falling.

But the one thing, I have learned, so far, is this:

You cannot wait until it is all fixed to live.

People tell me all the time about how they're waiting until something fundamentally changes, so they can be happy. Until he wants to move to Chicago. Or until she quits her terrible job. Or you meet someone. Or until they finally get engaged. Or buy a house. Or start all over again. Until it's all fixed. Until it's all perfectly wonderful. "If I could just meet the love of my life..." I hear, over and over, by people both married and single.

We will always have a worst thing in our lives. And if there is always a worst thing, how can you wait for the elimination of that perpetual thing to start living? You might as well at least try. However dark the day. Next to your pot-bellied husband, or in your mediocre job, or during your 40 days of rehab. Or alone with your dairy free ice cream. I acknowledge that there are different degrees of worseness. But the general dilemma holds.

I suspect in six months my life will look entirely different than it does now.
Because life happens and people live and bad days end and bad years end too.

But for now, it is not comfortable. No number of federal grants or articles coming out will make it gentler or easier or simple. Homeownership, and a good job, even with an incredible dog, doesn't feel like anything close to enough.

But also, sometimes it has to be.
Because that is all there is.
And this is where you are.