Life is like a box of chocolates...you never know what your gonna get.

Mama tells son to expect the unexpected because, in the end everything is sweet. My life is less like a box of chocolates and more like an endless bowl of pasta.  It seems everything overlaps and happens at the same time.  Or I think I'm eating one noodle from the edge of my plate that really is a different noodle twisted up in the middle of the pile.  My emotions are everywhere.  My thoughts are on one thing only.  My hopes are up. My future silhoutted behind a scrim woven with choices.  

Last year death claimed three cousins, an aunt, a best friend and my grandmother. My dad's house burned down and we didn't cook for Thanksgiving for the second year in a row. This year I experienced real betrayal for the first time and for the first time felt real judgment about myself and how I've chosen to live my life.  I was jobless and dependant (no longer jobless, but still dependant) not for the first time, but felt ashamed of that fact for the first time.  Oh, and this will be year three of Thanksgiving on the fly. Oddly, in the midst of all this Love has found me. I'm not sure I was totally ready for it. I've been working on becoming a healthy person for a long time so that when love came I would be ready.  But in the tangle of my experiences I've discovered just as much discouragement as excitement about being in love. 

Today I am in love and hopeful, learning to appreciate all the strands being laced together, pulling and tugging on one another, hiding in plain sight.  Life is like a bowl of pasta, take a stab at it and savor what you get.

Few truer words have been spoken.

So, I'm the one that did the breaking up and yet this is how I feel.  

Perfect love casts out fear.  Love seeks not its own.  If this is true, then couldn't we work it out?  If we really love each other, then won't love transform us to be able to be together forever and have the life we both want? 

I can't change him.  I can't make him want the things he doesn't want.  I can't stop wanting the things I want because they are the things that make up my destiny.  

Expectations I can change. 

Perspective I can change

False hopes I can change.

The desire to be a mother I cannot change.  

But I also cannot change the fact that I love him.

I cannot change the fact that he knew what I wanted and what I was all about and pursued me anyway. 

I cannot change the fact that he won me and made me feel loved, prized, wanted, admired.

Am I still to rigid and inflexible?  Can I marry someone with the hope that he will cease to fear being a father again?

Can I marry someone with the hope that he will cease to fear travelling to far flung locales?

Can I bind myself to someone knowing that he may never change, that I may never have what I desire and that he is content to let me live that way?

I've been crying off and on all day asking these questions over and over again, thinking I made a mistake.

I made a mistake.

Did I make a mistake?

I just gave up my first love.  
He doesn't want kids.
I do.
He doesn't want to travel the world.
I do.
Travel...not a big deal.
Kids...big deal.

I've spent most of the morning being mad at things outside of my control.  It'll be raining tomorrow when I need my hair to be nice.  My man is acting up.  I still haven't recieved an important phone call.  

Being so upset about these things, I don't have the desire or motivation to do the things within my control.  This is madness...absolute insanity and I need help to stop it.