Latter Day Sinner

With the divorce looming I am regularly asked how I’m doing.

Materially I’m in good shape. Stephanie and I agreed that since I’d be staying in the house with our disabled children and she would not that I would get the bulk of the caregiving hours. I can afford everything we need and have modest savings for emergencies.

Spiritually I’m working out my own salvation. I am regularly attending church and keeping up with my daily prayer and scripture study. My conscience is fairly clean. I take some responsibility for the divorce but my attempts to make amends for the sins I actually believe I have committed have been rebuked by her. Perhaps Jesus will accept my repentance but true repentance is changed behavior. We will all see how much change God can actually accomplish in me.

Mentally I am alert but tired. Of all the things I miss probably the biggest is the feeling that I am intelligent. Stephanie and I used to have very “smart” conversations. Those are long in the past. I honestly believed that I was deep when we waxed philosophical with each other. Brandon’s mother used to call my philosophizing “dingy.” Perhaps she had been right all those years ago and pseudo intellectual conversations were all I’ve really been capable of participating in. Right now my brain power is focused on surviving divorce and there’s little room for pretending I’m deep or something.

Emotionally I’m not even doing as well as I am mentally. I’ve described my emotions as throwing up in my mouth and choking it back down so I don’t contaminate everything in front of me. I’m falling back to a time before I was married to cope. Long play records and DOS video games are helping me get continuity in a life that seemed to go off course after highschool.

I was once told that I am a human being not a human doing. That seems pretty hollow this evening. I am doing.