Happy Birthday Blog

Three years ago today, I started an online journal. I weighed more than three hundred pounds, then.

From the first entry: "I have this evil fantasy. You have some poor parent being booked for murder. The murder of their own child, what crime could be more low, put em in with the really hard guys and throw away the key. Only then it comes out that the child was an adolescent, and under these special circumstances the parent is freed for having killed either in self defense (of their sanity) or for having been provoked beyond the ability of any human being to endure. They then enact all new adolescent murder laws that have these kids quaking in their boots for about five seconds before they snort contemptuously and rebel against it by setting out to provoke every adult they come across, only this time packing Uzi's to defend themselves. Then there is this whole underground railroad kind of thing they use to travel safely from place to place until they are adults, at which point all their crimes are forgiven for having been committed by the obviously insane and they are then allowed to rejoin society as productive members who then help to hunt down other adolescents."

Two years ago : "My daughter saw a neurologist today who told me that if we did not find out what was causing the build up of CSF in her brain there *would definitely* be brain damage, blindness and then death."

One year ago: "Vigilance keeps me awake. I'm often afraid to fall asleep lest one of the kids make a noise in the night I am thus unable to hear which leads to their death or abduction, and I always have an ear listening to the windows and doors lest someone should attempt to come through them, or the tell tale rumble of an approaching earthquake."

Six months ago: "There aren’t a lot of things I would change in my life. I wouldn’t change all the abuse, the violence, the rape any of it because it all brought me to my kids and who knows what element, which step was the one which would have taken me in a different direction? But if I could, I would change what I did to that girl. I would re-wind and not have done that."

One month ago: "One minute it seemed like things were being controlled, the next I'm having to hold her down again and my arms are bruised with her teeth marks. She insisted the people from the psych hospital were coming to get her, that she could hear them and I couldn't reach her, I couldn't make her see there was no one there."

I've been counting on stumbling upon the path of the Fount Of Wisdom that is supposed to come with middle age. You tell me: has anything really changed in the last three years? Do I have more answers than I started out with? Getting married didn't solve anything. Giving the children a decent, loving father didn't change anything. Spiritual enlightenment, karmic awareness and lighting candles hasn't kept my kids from suffering. Losing eighty pounds didn't keep me from getting cancer.

I think the only profound difference in me now from who I was three years ago is that I no longer believe that the world is fair. I don't believe in justice. I no longer believe that right matters at all. 'Shit Happens' is not just a bumper sticker. I have learned about randomness. I have learned that there isn't anything special about me that protects my kids. Not my love for them, not my force of will, not a zillion obsessive compulsive rituals. What common sense and vigilance can't do I have to leave to random circumstance, and no amount of railing at myself or the Universe will change that.

I've learned there is no point in our lives when we know the answers. Maybe that is what middle age really is about? Coming to terms with the fact that you control nothing, it's all a crap shoot, and you have to make your own answers as much as you can.

In any case. Happy Birthday to my journal.

Three years later and I am at the point most of us online journalists reach right about now, when visions of the book deal have begun to dance in my head. Someone stop me.