My Heart Hurts: The Low-down

I grapple from time to time with what I should / should not post here, mostly as it relates to what people want to read, but also as it relates to what should remain private and what might incriminate (for lack of a better word) or alienate people who are involved. And, of course, how much of my soul do I really want to bare?

So I'm just going to give this disclaimer right now: if you want fun or heartwarming or hilarious or profound or inspirational, this isn't it. This post is mostly for me. It's kinda like my falling tree. No one is around to hear it, but it makes a noise, believe me.

Among other things, my parents' marriage is perpetually coming to an end. I say perpetually because this is not a new thing - it's been threatening ever since I can remember. It's just that there's been a new eruption and now that I am an adult, I see and understand so much more. Every new crisis brings up so much anger frustration, and a lot of the hurt and confusion from being a child at home resurfaces at the same time. Plus worry about my little brothers who are still there.

There are so many other aspects and parts of this story, but it all just hurts. And at the same time, here I am in my nice little home with a functional marriage and a clear perspective and can go through each day relatively untouched by the ugliness in my parents' home, so I feel this strange sense of (for lack of a better word) survivor's guilt or something. Like I need to be involved and try to fix or do something, but I can't. No one really wants me to, anyway. But I remain torn between love for the people in the home I grew up in and trying to function happily in the home that I have to build with my own children.

I think that's what weighs me down - I have some answers, I have so much joy in my life, I can see what could be and what should be changed, and I have this painful kind of hope, even as I see hearts broken and expectations ruined and potential squandered in codependency and moot issues and selfishness.

And then there is the supreme frustration of trying to communicate with two people who should know better than they are acting, who don't care about anyone else's hurt, and then ending up somehow becoming the enemy because I won't choose sides.

Last year sometime, I read this little verse, and it actually describes some of what I feel quite well:

My feet, so deep in the earth!
My wings, so far into the heavens!
—And so much pain
in the heart torn between!
- Juan Ramon Jimenez

There really is so much heavenly about my life, but wow - I'm about knee-deep in mire from the past and present and that's all I can say: My heart hurts.