why ask why

...
Thinking today about the futility of trying to understand other people's motivations. Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on understanding everyone's feelings and the rationales behind every action. There's really no point in most of it, is there? What matters is what we say, what we do. Our feelings are our own, and can be wholly inappropriate at times, but they are not something we can control. What we can control is how we deal with them...

So many people cling to that illusion of control, it's pointless. I work on this every day with my own stubborn self. Certain things bother me for no reason, just because they are not the way I want them to be. Not important things. I must be doing better because I'm trying to think of an example of one and I can't. Hee! Now the only things I can think of that annoy me have to do with the children being unkind to each other and/or making work for me. There's work I have to do -- normal cooking, cleaning, shopping, driving, etc -- that I don't mind. The rest? Major resentment piles up. I try to keep my expectations realistic (a 3 year old that pukes all over the floor is excused, the 7 year old? Not so much) but even so, I can't help but resent it when the 3 year old just drops his toys on the floor and leaves them there, and stares at me blank-faced ("Are you talking to me, woman?") when I tell him to pick up the toys, don't leave them in the middle of the floor. The kid has the temerity from time to time to say things to me like, "You can do it," which of course earns him an earful... of course I can do it, but I'm not going to, they're your toys, you look after them or they will end up in the trash!

See, there's one of those times when I could ask "why?" Why does he do that? It's pretty obvious, he likes to push my buttons. He wants the control. I have a lot of sympathy for him. When you're 3, you don't have control over much. It's difficult. So I feel I have a good understanding of why he does it. But it doesn't really matter why, it just matters that he does it, and he has to learn not to. Lord, I am worn out by the sheer repetition of some of these lessons.

At Mass I was thinking about all the medical problems I've been having since I my pregnancy with DS2, for the past 4 years or so it has been literally one thing after another, starting with the pre-term labor and rather severe (undiagnosed, untreated) depression, seguing into the thyroid and adrenal problems, which gave way to the uterine prolapse, multiple skin biopsies (no actual melanoma yet), and gallbladder removal... I know there will be more skin biopsies coming, and I've a thyroid biopsy in just a few weeks, plus my mammogram. At this point I'm afraid to go for all these tests because it seems every time we go looking for something we find it.

Topic, topic: why am I experiencing all these things? None of it's going to kill me (right off, anyway), but it is definitely impacting my quality of life. Does it make sense to even ask why? Yes, it does, if I could find something in the answer that I could change, that I could control, to make sure these things don't happen again or continue... I have changed the things I can, my diet, my supplements and prescriptions, my computer chair, the stretching exercises I do -- and yet so many things I'm dealing with have no answer, no cut-and-dried "this is what you need to do to fix/prevent this" solution. So there's no point in asking Why, is there?

From a spiritual sense, there may be a point in asking Why? I wonder, what lessons am I supposed to learn here? (Other than that, when depressed, I am a bad mom.) I've got responsibilities, and a few cut-and-dried priorities, after that, I'm pretty much adrift. I try to tie all the medical irritations into some bundle of meaning and fail. Are my multiple conditions supposed to push me towards my eventual purpose? More likely, I see myself struggling to overcome them to achieve the goals I have set for myself, which seem to be constantly slipping away.

I want to say, I never finish anything, but that's definitely not true. I do have the kick-ass embroidery I finished literally days before DD was born, having worked on it for over 4 years. I'm just thinking about whether or not I've finished anything since then. The FarscapeWeekly site is languishing, I should take a good month and patch it up, fix up all the links, upload everything... there's so much content that isn't linked, it's not even funny! Depressing. I'd still like to do a Farscape book, or books... one per season. The question is, when? Perhaps the mini will take off and then I can finally write my books when DS2's in full-time school.

So, Farscape writing? Fizzled. The MILC column? Stalled for now, but doesn't have to stay that way? The freelance work? I have no idea... still have to send that invoice... ah, I can't seem to stick to much of anything, although I stuck with Farscape for four years, that's not bad, eh?

Then I spend hours here, or reading other blogs and commenting, when I should/could be doing something productive, or at least sleeping... my choice. Is it the best choice? Maybe not, but there it is. This entry took 27 minutes to write. That's not too shabby. At least I'm getting writing practice.