Ok, so I've a plan to start writing a little bit each day, or each week.  Some of this stuff may seem like nonsense, some of it may be comical, some of it may seem serious, but none of that matters.  If something I write helps a reader in some far corner of the world, that is wonderful.  But honestly, this endeavor hardly aspires to such heights.  I just want to sift through some of the BS in my head, because that BS has filtered into my life now for years and I don't always like the results.

Take for example, my marriage to an Egyptian foreign national last fall.  It was so much easier getting into that mistake than it has been getting out of it.  But the stuff that goes on in my head is what got me there, and I'll be damned if I make that mistake again.  People are not always who they present themselves to be.  Correction:  People are rarely who they present themselves to be.  Advice to the cautious:  find out who someone really is before you marry them.  If you have doubts, talk to someone, preferably a professional.  If he is nice to you, but isn't nice to the waiter, or the taxi driver, or the penniless vagrant who happens to catch his eye, chances are he's an asshole.  And you're next. Conversely, if he's nice to the waiter, the taxi driver, and the penniless vagrant, but he isn't nice to you, he's still an asshole.  If his mother has waited hand and foot on him and systematically put his needs before her own for the better part of his life, you're next.  So if you're like me, don't just look before you jump.  Take a few steps back first, like, in the form of a few years.  Cuz seriously, divorce is a major pain in the ass, even if you can prove that he entered into the marriage solely for citizenship.

Sometimes I wonder about places that still arrange marriages, and I think how much simpler that would be.  But don't fool yourself, arranged marriages require a certain mindset, a cultural backdrop, that we just don't have anymore in the States.  I've been friends with boys since I was a child, dated several, loved a few.  After that, arranged marriage just doesn't work.  I want a husband that respects me as his equal, loves me as his friend, wants me as his partner and wife.  Am I asking too much?  The not-so-quack therapist offers a resounding "NO".

Today though, on my way to the courthouse, I started to think really hard about the situation.  This whole divorce thing is really overwhelming.  I find that I resent him more and more for doing his best to make this difficult for me.  So I started wondering about that.  God works in mysterious ways.  So if this man is presenting me with a challenge, a road block, it is because somehow, in some way, I have road blocked myself.  In some way, i have created in my life an impasse, and the real task for me here, is to carefully deconstruct the mental and emotional barricades that for years I have used to protect myself.  And when I look at it that way, I cry, and I pray, and I give thanks to a God that never burdens His children with more than they can bear.  Keep my feet on the straight path to You, and I will do my best to help someone along the way.

Miguel Ruiz, author of "The Four Agreements", writes in one of his books about the mental agreements we form as children that shape the way we believe, the way we see and relate to the world.  So apparently, I made some agreements about our male counterparts that just don't jive with me anymore.  And I'm on the road to change that, and to change me, and to hopefully help bring a little more light into an otherwise shady world.

Life lessons to reflect on:

It's easy to be nice to someone that holds a key to something you want.

Ask questions.  Demand answers.  Settle for nothing short of transparency.

When life seems difficult or hopeless, look around you for someone who is also faced with a difficult or seemingly hopeless situation(even if it looks nothing like yours), and do something to help relieve that, if only for a brief moment.
--"When we hurt one person, it is as if we hurt all of humanity.  When we help one person, it is as if we help all of humanity." (adapted from the Holy Qur'an)
--Err on the side of light.

Try.... just a little bit harder

I grew up the daughter of an Air Force officer.  Both my parents were immigrants to the United States, so in addition to their respective childhood experience, my siblings and I were raised with the added difficulty of the immigrant mentality.  Don't get me wrong, I associate only pride in my parents and their once-immigrant, earned citizenship status.... but let's face it, it's hard to make a new start, in a foreign place, with no one to depend on but yourself.  And I think that is where the  "me against everyone" mental backdrop took root, at least for myself.

I never knew who I was, or how I was supposed to be.  In addition to the handicaps already presented, I was also raised Catholic, where there seems to be some underlying emphasis, that whatever you are, it is definitely shameful and most probably NOT what you are supposed to be.  My poor parents were just kids, trying to raise five of their own, and moving back and forth across the Atlantic with the scratch of a pen.  Between piles of laundry, dirty dishes, feed bills, and report cards, I don't think my parents ever had a moment to consider, "who are these little monsters we're raising?"  I mean, obviously we were "Sally, Matt, Michael, Sindy, and Ken Jones, born to Mr. and Mrs. Jones"..... but who WERE we?  Who gave us the right to be born with ideas and opionions?  How did we each, individually, and irrespective of the other, feel about the moon, the stars, colors, trees, and what we were learning in Bible school?  Those crazy Mr. and Mrs. didn't have time to slow down and find all that out, and I find it very unlikely that anyone had ever slowed down enough to ask them when they were children either.  Like my siblings and I, they had learned how to survive as a child in a grown up's world.

Since no one at home was asking who I was, "paying attention to my personhood" as my not-so-quack-therapist would say, I set about seeing what other people had to say about who I was, and I learned the skill of the chameleon.  Not knowing who I was, I had no way to define myself.  Not knowing who I was, meant I didn't know who I wasn't, either.  It also meant not knowing where in this big grown up world I was supposed to fit, what role I was meant to play, and whether I had anything of value to share at the table with all these people who seemed to know exactly who they were and where they belonged.

I chameleoned through life, from multi-lingual pubs in downtown Brussels, to impoverished ghettos in the States, to ranches in Arizona, to the streets of Cairo.  Wherever I found myself, I fit.  I could be whatever I saw around me, and I almost drown in that mirror.  Funny thing is, that it was the reflection of alcoholism in the people around me, that consumed me, that defined me, that saturated me to the point where I had lost all touch with whoever I was born to be and all hope that life could ever be okay.... all so that I could finally take a few sober steps in life, and start down the road to finding out what I look like when I'm not trying to look like you.