I pray God it's our last ...
So Christmas Eve Eve is upon us and I'm generally feeling well, which, is a marked improvement from yesterday about this time.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, my mom had a fall and I called the ambulance. The doctor thought she had broken her hip, so she was flown to Rapid City. As it turns out, she did not break her hip (for which I am grateful) but we found out she was severely over-medicated. She had spent a week in the Rosebud hospital about two weeks prior to Thanksgiving because the doctor said she had dangerously low sodium and ended up prescribing a new medication for her, Gabapentin which is a seizure medication. We still have no idea why he prescribed it, but it turned out that was why she was sleeping for 12-18 hours a day. The week in Rapid City was a little scary, mostly because she was completely out of her head and speaking nonsense half the time. Turns out, she was withdrawing from the medication.
After that week, she was doing much better and getting set for physical rehab and I had work, so my nephew and I came back to Rosebud. Where upon, my car decided to quit working. Then, followed three weeks of arranging rides to work, back and to the store. Basically, it was hell.
And it brought back a ton of resentment for me.
I resented my niece who stays with us when she's sober for not being here when we needed her in an emergency and for taking personally, my priorities of putting my mother first and not keeping her intimately involved in the daily updates. I resented my father for never teaching me auto mechanics because he had chosen his favorite son (my older brother) to do that with him and thought of me as a dandy fop for most of my childhood and teen years. I resented my brother for not having the wherewithal to deal with the emotional trauma of losing our father unexpectedly and going on a year-long drinking binge and ending it all by getting himself arrested and convicted in Federal court and effectively abandoning his family. I resented him for continuing to guilt our mother -- who is on a fixed income -- into sending him money on a monthly basis and for not having any foresight at all in these matters. I resented my nephew for not listening to me when I asked him to fix the car when it first started acting up, because my brother had conditioned him to think of me as the useless, faggot uncle. And I resented God for trying to make me a stronger person by throwing all this randomness and chaos in my life.
But, through all of this, I have riddled out that I am a resourceful person who can keep a tight lid on his emotions when they want to run wild and that prayer is no sign of weakness.
The one thing I have come away with is that my faith is stronger than I thought.
I still don't believe that God is intimately involved in the daily struggles of the average human being. That doesn't make me an atheist or secular humanist; I still think human beings are generally horrible to one another because we haven't bothered to accept the universal truth that we all seek security and love. It just means that I respect God's position: you can't intercede on every little thing because then, you have dependent children and not free-thinking, resourceful ones; but, it would be nice to open up the heavens every now and then complete with angels and trumpets and reveal your ability to be effective. I suppose I'm the cynical middle child in that respect.
Nonetheless, Christmas is soon upon us.
On Facebook, it's been an interesting mix of reactions to my, apparently heretofore secret and unknown, faith. I love Christmas, I always have. Like any child, I grew up thinking of it as a gift-giving season filled with candy and pretty things. Then, and I don't know when it happened, I started celebrating it as a religious holiday. I have an ongoing list of favorite Christmas carols/hymns and "O, Holy Night" is my top choice because it encapsulates my faith. My faith is that Christ was born to free us from our chains and the slave -- interpret as you like -- is our brother. My faith is that the only law He gave us was to love each other and that his message is peace to one another.
So, I look at Advent and Christmas as the most holy time of year for me. It's a time when I need to check myself before I wreck myself. Maybe that's why I've kept my resentment to myself instead of blowing up whenever it came bubbling. The challenge, though, is to transform that resentment into love. And, I have to make peace with the fact that is going to be a lifelong process; it won't happen overnight. I've managed to come through my wild and borderline sociopathic days with the realization that everything is a process and everything takes time. When something seems to change overnight, the change rarely lasts long, it's more of an immediate reaction than a meditation on the merits and challenges of shifting one's paradigm.
In that spirit, for whoever still reads my ramblings, regardless of what holiday you celebrate, know that my thoughts for you from my perspective are love, peace and joy. Now go and spread it out in the world.