You CAN Go Home Again

I mentioned a soldier in 48 Mondays that was deployed, and I won’t lie. When I heard she was back safe, I cried a few tears of joy at my desk. I’m not usually that weepy, but at the same time, I spent a long time praying for her safe return, and I was out of Lamictal, which generally makes me weepy and grateful. I was crying tears of joy over someone I don’t even particularly like, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that every time a soldier makes it home safe, I lose my snot. Actually, it’s an interesting dichotomy. I like her plenty. We’ve just been through too much to recreate friendship in a healthy way, because my past would be hung over my head til Jesus comes (look busy)…. And honestly, that’s ok. I can root for her from Silver Spring just as well as I can root for her anywhere else.

It was like hearing Hawkeye made it home safe from Kabul. We don’t know each other that well, but again, you get to walk to through the Heroes’ Walk, you deserve a standing ovation and tears and snot running down your friends’ faces, because in today’s world, it’s just a fucking miracle.

It is in that way that I feel sorry for intelligence and State, because they do just as much work to further our agenda overseas, but there are no parades for them. They are the Agents K and J of our generation, and many more before that. Off the grid because they have to be, just as when the plane hit the Pentagon, they tried everything they could to keep the focus on New York. It wasn’t that they were any less hurt, it’s just that the Pentagon works in secrecy, anyway. But that didn’t stop gawkers the first few weeks, before they got the partitions up and you could see the damage from the freeway, from literally turning off their cars on the left hand side of 395 and mourning. Getting into the city was a nightmare.

One of the members of our church at St. Mark’s was named Louise Bracher, and she did not live to see her daughter, Barbara Olson, lose her life in the attack on the Pentagon. Such a bright political pundit, even though I disagreed with her on damn near everything… but it changed her husband, Ted, in a major way. The same lawyer that argued Bush v. Gore was the same lawyer that argued FOR marriage equality, and I cannot imagine that his own loss of love did not play into it. I was not in the courtroom for the proceedings, but I wonder if he ever brought it up. It would have shed a whole new light on why he needed love to win. This is someone whom I also disagree with politically on nearly everything, but if I saw him in the city, I would have trouble not running up to him and giving him a huge hug and kiss on the cheek…. which would be awkward because we’ve never met, but I’d introduce myself and tell him what he meant to me before I asked him if I could hug him, and I might not be able to keep the tears from flowing, because I was standing outside the Supreme Court as the arguments were going on, and shook the plaintiff’s hands as they came down the steps.

Love Actually IS All Around.

As I have said before, I never thought I would see national gay marriage in my lifetime. Perhaps my children’s, should I’d ever had any. I suppose it is early yet, but not by much. And in other ways, I would not want to be pregnant. I’d hope that my partner would be down for it, because with my chemical imbalance issues, I wouldn’t want to pass them down. But then again, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, “every family is crazy in its own way.”

I agreed to be the “hostess” when Dana and I were married, because even though she reassured me that she’d probably be “fertile Myrtle” because of the ease with which her mother got pregnant, she was officially Not. Impressed. with the idea of being pregnant. We also talked about adoption, but I balked at it because I read long books on the subject and one of the things it brought up was that there were plenty of agencies that would take your money and close up in the middle of the night… money lost and no baby.

I would have wanted to adopt through the state, and one of the ideas Dana and I had was to adopt a pregnant teenager, so that we’d have stock in a baby, helping take care of it while our daughter finished school… and there are so few teenagers that get adopted, much less pregnant ones, that we were pretty sure we’d get “Insta-family” right away…. especially, and this is sad but true, if we were willing to adopt a minority.

Plus, from what I’ve heard, it’s much more fun to be a grandma.

Love Actually IS all around.

Especially when you realize that there is so much that can go wrong in the world, and you want so desperately to have things go right… and there are no shortage of 13-15 year old pregnant girls that need help in the worst way. I am to the point in my life where as long as my job was stable and I was debt-free, I could afford to adopt on my own… and perhaps that is the answer for me at some point, as long as I can afford a housekeeper… because it wouldn’t be just me. It would be my daughter and the mother of my grandchild and me… which sheds a whole new light on single-parenthood, because I wouldn’t be the only single parent in the house.

But these are just dreams, not reality, the future I can see that might not happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea in my head… whether it’s a good idea in practice is a whole other thing. But the futures that do not happen are just that, thanks to The Doctor.

The Doctor has explained more about letting go of guilt and shame to me than just about anyone or anything. Letting go of a future that didn’t happen is much easier than torturing myself over the past.

And on that note, it’s time to get back in line for a refill on coffee and get to the office. Today is Friday, which means that I will be entirely slammed all day, but it is not unwelcome. I like getting out of my head.

But the thing that remains is that a soldier came home from deployment, and will enjoy many more days with her family, and I can stop being afraid that she won’t. If that is not gratitude for the power of the universe, I don’t know what is.

Because Love Actually IS All Around.