Incongruent Rationalizations

I usually try to type in the morning before I do anything else. It is not from a love or dedication to my writing. Nor is it because I am a morning person that is eager to fill the world with my inner sunshine and have developed a routine that allows me to more freely tap my creativity in order to do so: No, I write in the morning because it is the only time to write without being bitter or angry. I have to write before I spend forty-five minutes trying to floss my teeth with an arm that will not listen to me, before I repeatedly fall or stub my toes on door jams, bed posts, table legs, rugs and sometimes, nothing at all. I have to write before I become too frustrated by trying to type with only the use of my poky left hand that can never catch up to my thoughts fast enough to make my sentences coherent and before I become too frustrated by the day to actually care. Before I become so overwhelmed and angry at my own incompetence that I physically lash out and try to punch a wall with my stupid arm that doesn’t work or kick the wall with my stupid leg that doesn’t work and before I eventually give up, slide down the wall and weep, from the pent up frustrations of not actually being able to hit or kick the wall. I am a bottle that has been shook up and forgotten about and I just want the ability to explode one more time. I want to be violent, I want to be savage, I want to chew the face off of a living creature.

I am not so zen or mature as people like to boast. I am not accepting or well adjusted. I am not handling this well; I am just ineffectually angry. I want to swallow my tongue and drown in the blood, bite through my arm, take an ax to my leg. I want to torture my stupid non-responding fingers because they deserve it. I want my leg to scream out in pain, because it has abandoned me. My violence should be a choice. My temperament should be by decision. I just want to walk with purpose and direction the way a man should be able to walk. I want to be a protector and provider. I want to frighten my children by throwing them into the air and show them how strong I am by catching them easily as they fall. I want to blow their minds with my physical capabilities and give them something sturdy to lean against when they are afraid. No child should have to hear the phrases “be careful around your dad! Pay attention, you are going to hurt your dad! Don't trip your dad! Your dad is too weak right now!” As a child, I was safe when my father said I was safe.

I am plagued by dreams of people hurting my family as I watch helpless. I have nightmares of my kids seconds away from a tragedy that any man of limited physical abilities could prevent, but that I cannot. My physical inabilities put every-damn-thing on my wife. I am old and ineffectual years before my time. I should be put in a home and forgotten about for the sake of my family. They should be able to move beyond my limiting scope and function. I am the reason for imbalance and the emotional issues of my children. I am holding my family underwater and drowning my own children as I claw up their tiny bodies in my feeble, selfish and unjustifiable attempt for air – I am supposed to be their foundation, not their burden. But here I am, the bricks chained to their helpless little ankles. I am not the safety net that a father is supposed to be, I am instead, a net of imprisonment that has been cast out over the waters of their youth; an entanglement of confusion and fear, of weight and obstacle, a lesson of life and death that I have not even had to go through myself yet.

How do I protect them from me? How do I make this ordeal appear to be okay, acceptable or fair? Is it fair? All of the rationalizing that I have ever done ( and I have done so extensively) argues in favor of randomness. If it is random, is it therefore just dumb luck? And do I want my kids to feel that their lives, true or not, are hinged so solidly upon uncontrollable circumstances? Do I tell them that, maybe it is fate or destiny? Suffering by fate seems slightly more frightening and maybe even more morbid then the Russian roulette style of suffer by dumb luck scenario.

I was recently baptized and both of my sons then, to my shock, followed suit. I am aware that perhaps more cliché then “like a moth to the flame” is “like a dying man to religion.” I am not ashamed of being a cliché, acknowledging my faith or confessing my love for God and I harbor no regrets other than timing. I wanted to approach God on my terms; as a self-created success story and to offer to the world and God himself, my selfless services for the greater good; a generous gift of my hard won fortunes to be appreciated and admired by those that were going to receive it. I wanted to choose to follow God simply because I chose to follow God and not because I was seeking favors, support, help or even salvation; that is for the weak and I am not supposed to be weak.

I have had to learn, as selfish and jerky as it sounds ( because of how selfish and jerky as I am) how to appreciate your prayers and your good thoughts on my behalf. I do not want your pity, I never have – I wanted your envy and still want it now. I wanted all of you to be jealous of my accomplishments, and not to be a recipient of your selfless generosity for my misfortunes. A generosity that I now so rely upon.

I gave myself over to God and begged forgiveness for my soul, not for my health. I wanted my children to feel comforted by my after life, not disillusioned by miracles; they are called miracles because they are miraculous and unexplainable, not because my dedicated doctors gave up all of their 20s going to school and educating themselves for me and the other unfortunates like me. It is not a miracle that I have made countless sacrifices, subject myself to extremely painful and never ending procedures, endured countless hours of frustration due to paralysis, head-aches, confusion, debilitating vertigo and utter exhaustion. It is not a miracle that my wife and I have had to endure one failure after another. Nothing that has happened is a miracle and I am not asking for a miracle either.

People die. Even the most devout of us will die. And sometimes, people die because they believe in God. We should never base our faith on the health of our own flesh, because as our flesh will surly rot so will our faith rot along with it. Praying for God to somehow prove himself to you spiritually by healing me physically will only build false hope, but a definite disappointment as well.

I am not your miracle. I am not your proof. Please do not confuse my children and set them up on a path that will surly lead to a crises of faith. Do not tell them that God will heal me, because I might not become healed and that has nothing to do with God.

When all is said and done, there is a severe chance that my boys will have suffered so unfairly, unjustly and so extraordinarily that any type of spirituality might be cause for feelings of anger, isolation or abandonment. They do not need their faiths crushed by the foolish talking of miracles. They need to know that I am not my failing body, that I am stronger than my physiology, that I am still here and that they were never abandoned. They need to know that energy is forever and that a part of me will always be with them. They need to know, as all children that are unfairly introduced to death do, that life itself is beautiful, worthwhile and forever. They need to know to not tie their spirituality to their temporal observations.

I need them to see me as more than just the crippled, emaciated dying man that will occupy their most recent and recallable memories. I need them to understand that my physical well-being was not tied to any sins or faults of theirs or mine.

I need them to understand and be comfortable in the fact that there was never going to be any miracles from God. And therefore know and be confident in that it was never God that failed me, but only my flesh.