Carman Isaiah

"Elissa's party's from 7 to midnight."
"Well, if you decide you want to leave earlier, you can call me."
"Mom. It's Elissa."
"Oh yeah. Okay, I'll come at midnight."

And then the ride home, on a steamy late August night:

"I really like Ian. I want to have him come over sometime."
"Good. I like it when your friends come over."
"Yeah. Ian's gay. I kinda thought he was, but he told me he was at the party. He's really funny. And he likes a lot of the same movies that I do."
"Well, you'll have to have him over."
Pause. "I'm not gay though."
"Yes, I realized that when you were about two years old and fell in love with Whoopi Goldberg. "
"Ian's really cool, though. I like him."

My 14-year-old, totally-accepting-of-different-lifestyles man child, I think I see Jesus inside of you. Here you are just loving people without putting any criteria on the loving. I'll be learning a lot from you these next four years, I think.

It's been a melancholy morning. My stepfather remarries tomorrow, and that's hard enough in itself. But money decisions he's made make it harder, especially feeling that Mom wouldn't have liked what he's doing. Especially because I feel rather adrift now. A woman can come along and suddenly her well-being is more important than the family you've had for 30 years.

Maybe if I had plenty of money, if it wasn't always a dripping faucet of worry in my life, this wouldn't effect me so much. But life has seemed too tenuous of late, or at least I'm not as good at pushing those feelings aside. And so I struggle with this God of mine -- wanting to draw even closer to Him, and yet wondering if He wants this perpetual struggle in my life. I can both love Him and want curl up in a corner sometimes and have nothing to do with Him, like a petulant child.

But maybe I just want/need/desire Him to take me with my arms crossed and my lip sticking out in a pout, and put me on his lap, and let me cry for a little while. I am tried of being strong.

5:48am is a heckuva a time to decide to start a blog. Especially when you've been up since 4am with nightmares, and finally gave up, got up, made coffee and sit bleary-eyed.

In my dream, my son's best friend was murdered, and it was my fault, really, because I let them go somewhere without really checking out what they were doing. They were going off to play good guys, really good and holy guys in clerical collars. Out to a park to talk to the dangerous people living there. Al was killed when he went in the tunnel. And there were other components -- my oldest children's dad, Carman's dad -- both of them were in the dream and wouldn't help Carman when he needed help.

There's more, but this is enough. It seems to me that I am feeling a tremendous burden being a single parent whose father is almost completely out of the picture. But why now? I've been a single parent for oh so many years. Most years. And neither father has been around much, so I'm used to shouldering the responsibility on my own. I wonder if it's age? I've turned 50, and this youngest child of mine is over a decade younger than his siblings. Perhaps my own mortality creeps into this. Perhaps I'm afraid I won't be here long enough. Perhaps it's because we're scanty on relatives, with both parents growing up as only children, and both my parents now dead. Maybe life seems more tenuous than I consciously realize. Maybe it's that living paycheck to paycheck existence of mine.

Actually now that I type all those factors out I realize my life is rather tenuous in age, finances, people to lean on. All I can think to do is pray more....