Stay Tuned for the Pity Party
I just watched an episode of Brothers and Sisters, and despite it’s soap opera-ness and it’s melodrama, I love it. At the end of tonight’s episode, Kevin and Scotty go to an adoption fair and find a little girl (or she finds them, as the hokey dialogue goes) to adopt. I immediately burst into tears.
See, I’ve always wanted kids. More specifically, I’ve always wanted to adopt kids. Thus far, life has not worked out so that this was feasible for me. Hence the tears. . .
And as it is with me, once I begin to start feeling sorry for myself about one thing, I get going on the full out Pity Party (with two capital Ps). I think about how I’m not married. How I’m living with my father and sleeping in my little brother’s old room. I think about how I don’t have a job or any financial income at all. I think about how I am shaped like a manatee and have the hair of Bozo if he went brunette. I think I will die alone in a home with 9 cats . . . and then, well, then, I make myself stop and think about what is true.
I have been blessed with a place to live and write where I don’t need income. I get to be here with my dad at a time when we both could use support from someone who has known us a long time. I am not married to men who – for many reasons – were not a good match for me. I do not have children who I need to support on my lack of income. I have four cats to love and a dog who demands affection. I may be able to talk my dad into a puppy if I try hard enough. I have TV access so I can watch Brothers and Sisters.
But most of all, I have time. As this wonderful painter Peg Redd reminded me today, we only have so much energy and time, and we must seize the time and energy we have been given to do what we really, truly dream of doing.
So tomorrow, when I get up and my eyes are a little puffy from crying, I will remember that I have all day to write and think and walk and wander. I have “world enough and time.”
