Well, it's been happening for years but I can go weeks without thinking about it while I'm abroad; when I come back here it comes into sharp relief. Heartbreaking shit. You know. The sort that involves a kid and his dad and some really poor parental decisions. It was always heartbreaking and now that I have a Godzilla it's so heartbreaking that it's actually giving me the shits, because of all that maternal instinct newly present in my bosom.
(As an aside. I'm always fascinated by the physical symptoms of stress, probably because I don't have a lot of stress so I can take an academic attitude toward it. Isn't it interesting? Hard thing to measure but the statistical negative health impacts are compelling. Makes cigarettes look like apples. And I'm eternally grateful that I get the shits when I'm stressed, and not, say, getting the opposite. Or sleeplessness, or eczema, or whatever. I knew this one girl who would lose her hair almost in clumps around exam time. But abstract thinking about stress and poo is probably a blog post for another time.)
So I will just trot a bit of a cri de coeur about how fucking terrible it is that parents will make their children pay for the other parent's mistakes or misdeeds, more or less on a conscious level. I mean, in degrees of blame or culpability, I know a lot of justifiable victimized feelings float around, particularly when the pregnancy was unplanned, or possibly even underhandedly planned, and with a partner who it was obviously not going to work out with. But seriously, the child is not even on the fucking continuum of blame or culpability. And yet ultimately, if you just walk away feeling bad for yourself he's the one who pays, and for the rest of his life, even if you're feeling all fucking victimized because a bunch of years ago you stuck your dick in a nasty bitch who turned out to be batshit crazy.
I take a huge amount of comfort these days looking at the F-word, and knowing that even if he really pissed me off one day and I tried to take an axe to him, there's no way he'd abandon Godzilla*. He would fight me tooth and nail in the courts and he would tolerate whatever batshit craziness to make sure that he was part of Godzilla's life; indeed, the more batshit crazy I was, he'd fight all the harder to have and maintain custody because YOU DON'T FUCKING LEAVE YOUR KID WITH A BATSHIT CRAZY PERSON, DO YOU?
* If he survived of course. I'm pretty handy with an axe.
(As an aside. I'm always fascinated by the physical symptoms of stress, probably because I don't have a lot of stress so I can take an academic attitude toward it. Isn't it interesting? Hard thing to measure but the statistical negative health impacts are compelling. Makes cigarettes look like apples. And I'm eternally grateful that I get the shits when I'm stressed, and not, say, getting the opposite. Or sleeplessness, or eczema, or whatever. I knew this one girl who would lose her hair almost in clumps around exam time. But abstract thinking about stress and poo is probably a blog post for another time.)
So I will just trot a bit of a cri de coeur about how fucking terrible it is that parents will make their children pay for the other parent's mistakes or misdeeds, more or less on a conscious level. I mean, in degrees of blame or culpability, I know a lot of justifiable victimized feelings float around, particularly when the pregnancy was unplanned, or possibly even underhandedly planned, and with a partner who it was obviously not going to work out with. But seriously, the child is not even on the fucking continuum of blame or culpability. And yet ultimately, if you just walk away feeling bad for yourself he's the one who pays, and for the rest of his life, even if you're feeling all fucking victimized because a bunch of years ago you stuck your dick in a nasty bitch who turned out to be batshit crazy.
I take a huge amount of comfort these days looking at the F-word, and knowing that even if he really pissed me off one day and I tried to take an axe to him, there's no way he'd abandon Godzilla*. He would fight me tooth and nail in the courts and he would tolerate whatever batshit craziness to make sure that he was part of Godzilla's life; indeed, the more batshit crazy I was, he'd fight all the harder to have and maintain custody because YOU DON'T FUCKING LEAVE YOUR KID WITH A BATSHIT CRAZY PERSON, DO YOU?
* If he survived of course. I'm pretty handy with an axe.
