where is the poetry, where are those lines
where flows so much pretty prose
or painful bleeding valentines
Monday, November 16, 2009
Sacrifice
Where am I to go with this? How about I start here, with sacrifice. What is sacrifice? The agreement to deprive oneself of something one needs or wants for a higher purpose, something one sees as greater, more important than what is in the moment, more important than oneself. It's so hard to see past the moment.
I've known my share of sacrifice. So many times, I run into people who have children, and don't even know what it means to sacrifice, usually men. They do, they know it on their own level, they aren't completely oblivious, but I mean in this case, the sacrifice in the name of children. After sixteen years in a relationship which produced three children, one can stand astonished at a man who was hardly ever home telling a woman, me in this case, that not only should she have been raising three kids alone, running the household, but she should have been working, which I did mind you, and going to school as well. I could look through this man as if he wasn't even there, too flabergasted to believe those words could leave his mouth, that he could really believe that. It's not enough that I was to have sacrificed all my time and energy, my sleep, money, sometimes my sanity and my social life I was to have sacrificed my children's one parent that they had most of the time with the little time I had left, and used up my last reserves on school instead of them. It was as if he never lived here, as if after thirteen years of being a parent he had no idea what it took to be a full time parent. That only means that I did my job so thoroughly and willingly that an outsider just saw that things were done, as if they were never undone. Who keeps the threads together? Who ties the strings?
I'm over it, I guess. But I run into it all the time. There is nothing to say to someone who thinks like that, there is no way for them to know until they have been there and there is no way to tell them what experience has told me. But I know I am better for it, and I got the better end of the deal. I got the through the rough times with my sanity and my strength, and I also got to build a bond that is incomparable. Take that. ;)
I've known my share of sacrifice. So many times, I run into people who have children, and don't even know what it means to sacrifice, usually men. They do, they know it on their own level, they aren't completely oblivious, but I mean in this case, the sacrifice in the name of children. After sixteen years in a relationship which produced three children, one can stand astonished at a man who was hardly ever home telling a woman, me in this case, that not only should she have been raising three kids alone, running the household, but she should have been working, which I did mind you, and going to school as well. I could look through this man as if he wasn't even there, too flabergasted to believe those words could leave his mouth, that he could really believe that. It's not enough that I was to have sacrificed all my time and energy, my sleep, money, sometimes my sanity and my social life I was to have sacrificed my children's one parent that they had most of the time with the little time I had left, and used up my last reserves on school instead of them. It was as if he never lived here, as if after thirteen years of being a parent he had no idea what it took to be a full time parent. That only means that I did my job so thoroughly and willingly that an outsider just saw that things were done, as if they were never undone. Who keeps the threads together? Who ties the strings?
I'm over it, I guess. But I run into it all the time. There is nothing to say to someone who thinks like that, there is no way for them to know until they have been there and there is no way to tell them what experience has told me. But I know I am better for it, and I got the better end of the deal. I got the through the rough times with my sanity and my strength, and I also got to build a bond that is incomparable. Take that. ;)
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