Bitches, Part II

I’m bitching.  I’m a bitch.  And you know what?   I’m a whiner too.  I complain about things and then never make them happen.  Absolutely.  Yes.  True.  Astounding insight.

Reality check.  People can actively choose to change their lives.  They do it every day.  They uproot themselves and change jobs and change cities and leave their mundane life behind.  How wonderful for them.  “Starting over” … good, god; it’s a John Lennon song, so it must be important socially, right? 

Here’s a fairly essential conflict when a person subscribes to an existential philosophy of life:  There is no higher power guiding me in the right direction.  All of my actions are my own.  I will feel the happiness and grief which arises as a direct result of my actions.  I will own those consequences and live with them. 

Here is something with which I am not willing to live:  making my children suffer as a result of my inability to stay with and raise them properly.  I would never leave my children, under any circumstances.   Ever.  Secondarily, I am not quite ready to leave my husband.  So when a person decides to fundamentally alter the course of his or her life, a marriage of 14 years ought to be a fundamental consideration.  Something, perhaps, that requires a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of toast and tea.  (T.S. Eliot wasn’t fucking around when he wrote about the viscosity and velocity of the passage of time.) 

The social contract:  I will give up some of my rights and privileges in exchange for some safety.  Translated:  I will give up some of my personal happiness in exchange for the immediate happiness of the people I brought into this world.  Is that cowardly?  Maybe.  But it serves the common good of the people I have chosen to spend my life with, and they deserve my consideration.

Maybe I will stick my head in an oven like Sylvia Plath (not likely), or maybe I will shoot myself in the stomach and fester like Kurt Cobain (given the fact that I don’t like physical pain … probably not).  Or …  maybe I will use a social media site to express my feelings until the time comes to act in such a way which not destroy the people around me.  Hmmm…. Which one sounds better?  Such a dilemma.