Something

Let's just throw the following on the big giant pile of "Stuff is sucking for lots of people right now" (In the hopes that we may someday get to set that whole big pile of suck alight, and that the fumes blow in the direction opposite of where we are standing).

I'm going to have to tell my mom I can't hear the story of her friend's daughter's impending divorce any more.

My mom has a good friend (like me, my mom seems condemned to have friends older than she is). My mom's friend is somewhere in her 80s, she's divorced (her ex is still alive), she had (I think) five kids. One of them is a daughter who is something like 15 years older than I am.

Daughter's husband had knee replacement surgery. Afterwards, it was like his personality changed. He became difficult, distant, emotionally abusive. Daughter has bought a condo and is trying to move some of her treasured items (family photos, some of her personal stuff) over there before she drops the divorce bomb. (Because, I suspect...once she tells her husband he's going to be her EX husband, if she had any Hummel figurines left at that house, they'd be quickly and in short succession hurled at a wall).

It's just one of those horrible sad situations. I can't do anything about it but pray for the woman and her husband and for my mom's friend. And you know what? My "prayer concerns" list is SO long these days. SO LONG. So many people going through bad stuff. I'm almost kind of frozen. I just say, "God, you know all these people have bad junk going on. I don't have the energy to concentrate on each one."

And I know on some level my mom needs to talk to someone about this. My dad isn't the ideal person for this. Not that there's anything wrong about this, he just has difficulty understanding and dealing with these kinds of situations. (Perhaps, like me, he's had too many students going through this agony and having used him as their "trouble tree."). My mom's BFF in the town where they live passed away a few years ago; she lost her sister this summer. I recognize that she doesn't have too many people she can share this with - people she would trust not to gossip about it.

but it's just something that's hard to hear and that makes me sad.

And it's another one of those situations where I kind of despair...if this couple can't make it, what chance would there be for me if I ever were to "meet" anyone? Why are people so broken?

And in my more positive moods, I think, well, it's a good thing I didn't "settle." It's better to be alone than to be in such a soul-crushing situation.

But you know? There are times I wake up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. Or times when I've had one of those days where everything's gone wrong, and I just want to cry on someone's shoulder a little. Or times when something really good is happening and I'm just bubbling over with joy and need to share it. And there's no one to turn to. And it's hard. I don't know if it's harder than trying to build a life with someone, because I've never really been in that situation. I just know it's hard. I know it's humanity's lot to suffer (for whatever reason you believe), but it just seems there's way too much to go around right now.

And this summer and into this fall, there have been a lot of little "I'd really love to have someone that I felt like I could cry on the shoulder of" moments where I've just had to suck it up and plod on. And I wonder if maybe in the long run that isn't good for a person, if maybe 20 years down the road I'm going to be facing heart disease or some kind of chronic condition and it's going to turn out to be "my" fault in the sense that I didn't have someone else there....and I don't know.

I literally don't know how to date any more. How to go out and meet people. The rules are so different and so convoluted and to be honest, the "third date expectation" makes me want to puke because the third date is, in my humble opinion, waaaaaaaaaay to early for that sort of thing. And so I've kind of walled off that part of my life behind a barrier of Not Possible And I Don't Want To Deal With It. And so though I avoid the difficult and icky stuff (like telling the guy that I won't be "ready" by the third date), I also wind up avoiding some of the wonderful stuff.

And I don't know if that's an OK tradeoff.

Then on the other hand I see people with relationship trouble and I decide maybe it is.

And I don't know any more.