I've been having the same conversation with each of the four people I talk to on a regular basis today.
Them: This is my problem. It is a problem to me. Listen to me talk about my problem.
Me: Don't worry. Have faith. It'll be fine.
Of the four problems I have discussed, the one of immediate concern to me involves my mom and sister and niece -- and the ex-husband/ex-brother-in-law who is honestly the only person in the world I've ever wished would just get hit by a very large bus.
When one has spent the past four years trying to protect a child from anything and anyone who could hurt her; when one tries to provide a safe, familiar, comfortable environment, a routine a child can depend on -- the introduction of a lawsuit into the proceedings is awfully hard to swallow. It seems that the ex-husband has decided that two days a week visitation is not enough. Now he wants 6 weeks in the summer, a sleepover every weekend, a full week surrounding alternate birthdays, Christmases, and Thanksgivings, and three days surrounding every other major holiday, up to and including Martin Luther King Day and President's Day. To add insult to injury, he also wants my sister to pay his legal fees, for forcing him to this state of affairs.
Let me state at this point that the ex-husband does not have a safe, familiar, comfortable environment for a four-year-old. He has a two-bedroom apartment he shares with two other 30-year-old men, and the woman he cheated on my sister with. It would turn my niece's world upside-down to be subjected to this, at a point in her life when she could not bear to be separated from her mother for a sleepover at my mother's house (which she visits every day) when my sister took a one-night honeymoon with her new husband. The ex is simply an alpha-male motherfucker who cannot bear the fact that my sister has control over something (my niece's welfare) that he does not, if I might be allowed to editorialize. Which of course I can, as this is my diary.
Both mom and sister have called me for support in the past few days. I am usually a nigh-bottomless source for cockeyed optimism, so it falls to me to tell them, "Don't worry. Have faith. It'll be fine." Having to trot this out so often, in the midst of another protracted stretch of literal pennilessness, is wearing my smile a little thin. I write this as I listen to Sarah's "Surfacing" album -- something reserved for nights of low spirits when I want to wallow. The only flaw I can find in my reassurances is that when I tell them to myself, in regards to my own personal problems, I cannot hide the hollowness underlying the words.