People that make you go "huh?"

A wierd day for a few reasons.  First, it seems I have a permanent case of PMS (I've been told it's pregnancy, though I don't remember being this irate with Anja, and with the others I was too tired) and Kirk is the most annoyingly messy person in the whole wide world.  Ok, maybe I'm being unfair, but unfair is allowed when you just get fed up with being a glorified maid-cook-laundry-washer-grocery shopper-handily free child-care provider - child picker-upper- who also happens to bring in her own income-and-is-now-pregnant and quivering ball of fear and jelly beans (in fact, I bought gourmet jelly bellies today in a moment of weakness.  I need a picture of a 14 pound baby on my pantry, as it seems 9 lb 10 ounces of Anja wasn't big enough for me) . Harumph.

It seems I am always holding the whip in my hand, ready to lash out.  Today, I read the blog of a friend who is grieving her husband.  Someone commented that she needed to pick herself up out of this and find God because he could help her.  Whereas I have a tendency to think "Where was God when her husband died?"  Quick as a sperm meets egg, I replied to the comment with a jolly good tongue-lashing that said, in essence, back off. 

And, after picking up Anja from school today, we went grocery shopping and entered the check out line at 4:40 pm, which, as anyone who frequents grocery stores knows, is the universal time of day when the most people are waiting in line and the least amount of cashiers are at the checkouts.  We waited.  We waited.  I was tired and hungry, but I was not morose and was valiantly staving off annoyance.  I must have, however, looked morose, because a genteel old man in a plummy red sweater leaned into me and told me that whenever I felt blue or overwhelmed, I should make Jesus my friend and he would help me. I was rendered speechless, though I politely smiled.  What can you possibly say here besides a very polite fuck off, which, as intellegent as a comeback as that is, I didn't even think of until he had finished patting me on the shoulder and was well on his way.  The thing is, this man was making many assumptions about me.  First, that I wanted him to whisper platitudes in my ear while waiting in a grocery line after having a three-year-old insist on pushing the cart herself around the store for an hour, second that he knew what I was thinking or my situation in life, third that I was a person with no faith and thus needed to be evangelized to.   

The truth is, I am a person who has a very rocky faith in some kind of God, though not one that supports making others feel small and inadequate because they suffer and grieve, or one that foists itself on others in unsuspecting moments. I don't know even know exactly what I believe, only that there is something indelible about the human spirit, and I am increasingly grateful for the beauty of joy, compassion and hope, though I am an inadequate practitioner.  I recently read a book by novelist David Adams Richards called God Is, which served less of a defense of religion and more as an indictment of intellectualism at the expense of real emotion and humanity.  This skeptical intellectualism is a position I contantly find myself in - looking for the wrongs in people's behaivour, or examples of what I judge to be stupidity or self-righteousness.  And yet I myself am, more often than not, stupid and self-righteous.

After the last baby-loss, I was given a gift certificate for a massage.  By chance, my massage therapist was also a yoga teacher, and when he found out I had been a yoga teacher, asked if he could help do some energy-work/healing.  So, he hummed the chakras while he massaged, and part of me felt ridiculous and thought he was ridiculous.   Part of me, though, was grateful that other people had it in them to help a stranger in need in whatever way they knew how.  Maybe I need to be more generous with other people, even if their help feels more like an assault.  Maybe they are helping - if anything, they got me to try to think my way out of judgement and annoyance, which are probably more poisonous to me than their words.