I am mulling my shrink's insistence until my last visit that my ego, wounded, is temporarily in charge of me. Not my spirit. Which is beginning to  reassert itself apparently. Finally. I do a lot of nidra, watching my mind until it looks like Kansas, all empty electric water air smelling, like Toto is about to go flying. I say to her, My power was stolen. She immediately jumps to defending Aaron. I'm not talking about that, about his motivations, I understand all that, I'm talking about something underneath all that, a siphoning that occurred. It's hard to describe. I use what language I have but it's not right. I'm casting a spell, I say. Because I don't know how else to describe how words write themselves in my mind let alone this, the wordless swells.

Meanwhile I think; God, is there any end to what you all wanted and thought I would be enough to provide? What made you think I was so HUGE in the first place? Give me a fucking break. Except Aaron. He is the one person who ever thought "you're not enough" at me, and then changed his mind. That's never quite happened before. So I am puzzling it out. Slowly, obviously. Trying not to make the same imposition.

He lies next to me sleeping, throwing off covers in the work of dreaming with his poolball boxers all bunched up,

and I watch him and half-grieve, which is not at all the same thing as grief-rage, wherein I let him go in my mind (bitterly but pretending it's nonattachment) knowing somewhere he is putting me away in a drawer in his soul where discarded things are stowed. Half grieving is closer to pulling a child back from nearly getting hit by a bus, a scolding frantic love-ill. 'Schadenfreude', he says, laughing at me for what I would imagine him engaging in. Somewhere about me over drinks with someone new, making myself mad to imagine the furious I'd feel to be imagining him doing that if he were now doing that and I were being forced to imagine that. Pissing myself off. If you throw schadenfreude shade at me I swear to Christ I will hunt you down and shove my tragic up your smug ass etcetc. 

In other news, Marilyn Robinson's new book redeems the others between Housekeeping and this one. I've slowed it way down by switching to reading it aloud. I love every word although there are losses galore and some of them of babies. (She had thought a thousand times about the ferociousness of things so that it might not surprise her entirely when it showed itself again. She wished she could warn him, even though he knew about it, too, and dreamed about it. This child must know about it, because it lived there under her scared, wild heart. It might not want the world at all.) When I read this author I remember I'm a Calvinist by at least half (TJ didn't come by that name for nothing).


He cleared his throat. “So. ‘Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.’ My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing. God is born of obedience,’ that’s Calvin, ‘and obedience has to be constantly attentive to the demands that are made of it, to a circumstance that is always new and particular to its moment.’ Yes. ‘Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God.’ I can’t read my own writing. No matter. ‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.’ So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. ‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.’ Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. ‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.’”

I believe all of that except the God part :(