Rotini and Chopsticks

So I was on Facebook, talking with a couple of most excellent friends. We were discussing the deep sadness inspired by Amanda Todd's suicide. I was deeply effected by reading her story and watching her Youtube video. To be honest, I cried like a baby. I cried like Rush Limbaugh the day the cops took away his prescription narcotics. I felt the pain so keenly that I wondered: how do therapists deal with this? I told my friends that I thought my own therapist must have steel in his psyche.

Then I made dinner: rotini with spaghetti sauce and meatballs for my partner and with chicken and breadcrumbs for me (I didn't want meatballs tonight.) We sat down to eat, and for some odd reason I decided I wanted to use chopsticks to eat rather than the standard fork. Rotini lends itself well to chopsticks and I am quite good at using them. It's kind of like eating with my fingers only I don't have to get my fingers dirty.

But I kept thinking about therapy and the steel in the psyche. My boyfriend and I got to talking about the Amanda Todd tragedy, and about therapy and the difficulties presented to children and their therapists. Then he said something that triggered an emotional response: he said that parents generally have children so they can torture them.

Strangely enough, perhaps by some miracle of perspective, I was able to point out his error with an example from my own life:

When my parents became pregnant it was an accident: a condom broke. He wasn't prepared for kids, still in college. She never wanted kids, and would never conceive again. Her own history of incest and her physical problems should have given her plenty of ammunition for the board she would have to convince in 1972 Alabama that she deserved an abortion. She thought she wanted one, and went with my father supporting her to the board to plead her case. On their way out after making a weak half-hearted case, my father said to my mother, "you don't really want an abortion, do you?" She answered him, "no." And that was that. Wedding bells followed, with a small reception and pictures of her looking tense in a white dress while he smiles his alcoholic smile by her side.

The point is: she didn't get pregnant to save a marriage, or even to acquire a marriage. She got married so she could support me, not the other way around. And do you know, that actually makes me feel loved and wanted? Maybe it's just a matter of perspective, maybe not. The point is, my parents chose life. And they didn't have me as a vehicle to work out their aggressions or past problems - they had me because they didn't want to kill me. Maybe that's good enough?

As I sat there at the table, picking up rotini neatly with my chopsticks, I decided that, at least for that moment, it was. And it occurred to me, in that small moment of grace, that that feeling of "good enough" is the steel in the psyche. We all have it: it's just a matter of somehow remembering that it's there.