God I love that line. Thanks Will Farrell. You have my undying admiration.
I saw mommy dearest today. Yeah, my mother. She was in a good mood. We went junk shopping. I talked to her about the possibility of me adopting a child someday...no, not necessarily Niece. I find that when we talk around the white elephant in the room, all goes well and I can just be her daughter and she can just be my mom.
I just think it would be cool to adopt a child out of foster care, of any ethnicity or race. Who cares? All children need love and stability. But that's not all they need.
Mom said, "Why do you want to do that?"
"Because I'd like to have a family."
"I just think you need to have more than that going for you."
"Like what?"
"Well, your situation might change in the future and that might cause problems."
"You mean like I might marry someone and have my own child?"
"Yeah...but not just that...you have to want to dedicate yourself to taking care of someone else for a long time. You have to want to give of yourself. You can't be selfish." Sometimes my mom does have wisdom to impart.
She didn't mean them to, but her words brought up many feelings of selfishness for me. I remembered back to last November, when I gave Niece up to the foster care system. What did that do to her? I don't know. But it felt like it was totally against my grain at the time. I question that decision often, and feel that it was rather a selfish decision. It had its merits, but there were also some things wrong with it. I can't change it now, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to.
So I now just question my decision to adopt Niece should she become available for adoption. Is that what I really want? Is that what's really best for Niece? Am I being selfish about this? Sometimes I just pray and pray for this cup to pass from me. Sometimes I sit and think about how rewarding raising her will be, about how cool it will be to see her grow and mature, and how good it'll feel to teach her things, encourage her to achieve, and most of all, to see my family's cycle of addiction, abuse, neglect, and poverty broken.
Those are pretty high hopes. Sometimes I forget not to allow myself to hope so much. It is my experience that high hopes are typically dashed and turned into resentment, sadness, disappointment, and, ultimately, depression. A simpler way to say that would be to utter, "Life's a bitch," and move on.
Today was kinda productive, I suppose. My food wasn't too disciplined, though. I was up till 5am last night/this morning and ended up spending some of that time eating metered out bits of food...a hamburger bun there, a hot dog here. Not five buns or five hot dogs, but still, it was food that I didn't need and my body hadn't asked for. Therefore, it was not gentle or loving. Then tonight, I made another food faux pas.
None of these are abstinence-breakers, but they're not loving or gentle. It is just very easy to fall back into comfortable old patterns. I can count my progress if I want, I can claim that if I want to, but I should not spend so much time counting and claiming the good things that I don't learn from the mistakes. Nor do I need to beat myself up about my mistakes. Just need to learn from them. My lesson today is don't stay up until 5am; if you do, spend some time journalling so you can keep your head straight.
Alrighty, lessons learned. On we go to Monday and the appointment with Niece's counsellor.
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