turbulence

last night on the way home from DFW we hit a lot of turbulence and while my seat mates were tense and worried, I just sat and smiled.  I went with the flow, like the roller coaster.  I think that is what it is like to put your life in God's hand.  I can sit there and white knuckle the armrest, but I can't really "will" the plane to stay in the air. 

I used to fly to see my grandmother every summer and was fine with the experience until my senior year.  I flew back and we hit a cold front.  I literally thought the plane was going to fall out of the sky.  I flew with my mother and she drank rum and coke until the world looked flat.  I thought we are going to die and she isn't going to have a clue.  That incident made me nervous to fly until the year I went to Florida and cluelessly rode a roller coaster.  I was scared to death on that as well, but when I got on the plane to come home, I learned to just go with the flow of the plane, that fighting it or cerebrally trying to control it was not going to do anything productive.  I cannot control the world that I live in and after spending most of my life trying to do so, I am exhausted.  I am stressed out, filled with anxiety of what may or may not happen, filled with depression, and have all the baggage to go with it. 

I had the opportunity to sit yesterday and talk with a coworker about my childhood.  His wife was married for 20 years and she left when her husband cheated on her. Her children want nothing to do with her and worship the ground their father walks on.  I was confused as to why her children hadn't had enough life experience to understand that there were two sides to every story.  I shared my story about how my adoptive father was a womanizer and my mother had enough and left.  It absolutely killed me to watch a man that I adored sit and cry.  I will forever be confused as to why he was so upset when she left when he did everything in his power to make her leave. 

I have spent a lot of time thinking about my childhood (as we all know). I was collateral damage, raised by two people who are broken (thank goodness, my mother married a man who put me first).  I am not at the point where I feel as if I was the prize in that divorce.  Butch trying to prove to the world that he wasn't that bad of a person because he was raising a daughter, that wasn't even his, all alone.  Do I think that he did any of the things that he did with malice, no.  I just don't think that he thought of anyone else's well being but his own.  I am guilty of that too, which is why I don't have children.