...on my latest chapter.
I have officially been working for three days. I've written three grants and started a fourth, I've learned (and, I think, forgotten) more acronyms and government agencies than I knew existed, and I'm completely overwhelmed. I can't keep track of my to-do lists because of how fast they grow.
I love it, of course.
I work for a small nonprofit, but it's powerful. POWERFUL. I watch it change people's lives, right in front of me. I sit in my shabby little office (it's not bad, but it's certainly not fancy!) with recycled furniture, pulling up spreadsheets and donor reports and grant applications and trying to sort it all out...and I hear children waiting in the lobby around the corner, waiting with their parents to go through "the line" to pick up food. Seniors come in so frail. Women come in with such wide eyes, and men come in with such slumped shoulders.
They're all treated with dignity. They all get food - real food, too, not just prepackaged junk, but meat, vegetables, eggs, dairy. They get sustenance, and I think it's from more than the calories.
***
My child support is drying up, because Bryan lost his job a while back and is really, really struggling right now. Dear readers, however much I may have complained about him in the past, I'm not angry with him right now, even though I could really use his contributions (and am not quite sure what to do without them, frankly, but I'll manage somehow). He looks broken: I know he's not managing his depression, and his work history over the past decade is spotty, and he's gained a great deal of weight and lost friends along the way, and looking at him makes me feel sad. This is my daughter's father, and he's a human being, and I can see that he's really suffering. Shaking my finger at him and telling him all the ways he's gone wrong and all the things he could have done to do better isn't the answer. I feel like he needs lovingkindness, and I feel compassionate toward him. Bryan needs dignity right now, too.
***
Maybe this is what it feels like to be healed from my divorce. When I look at Bryan, I no longer see a man who wronged me in so many ways, and I no longer see the man who dashed my dreams, and I no longer see the bright future that I once wished we had, but nor do I feel the darkness of the pain that he caused me. I just see a man, and he looks sad and lonely, and I feel compassionate towards him. I really, truly hope that he finds happiness. I hope that he gets on his feet with a new job, and that somehow his life comes together. I hope that he finds things that bring him joy. I hope he reconnects with the world.
I hope these things for Katherine's sake, too, of course. She needs her dad to be healthy and whole.
But I also hope them just for the man I once loved.
***
And on another note....back to online dating.
One interesting conversation, but our politics don't mesh. (sigh) I really can't imagine being with someone who perceives politics differently than I do.
I believe in love. I believe that what I want is out there, and he's waiting for me, too, and that maybe one or both of us has work to do first and then we'll find each other.
I'm swamped at work and adjusting to the working parent thing (again!) and so I have no time to date, of course. But I'm going to keep putting myself out there, because one never knows...
***
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
― ~Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"
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