OK, so I guess I'll view these updates as my 30K well...
Quote:
Originally Posted by PlzBeALevel
If you were to die tomorrow, how satisfied would you be with how you lived your life?
Not. That's easy; the question is how close I am to that being different.
atakpup is coming along well — considerably better, even, than the last time I talked about him. And frankly, I take a good chunk of credit for this. But there is so much left to do for him: to a large extent it's too late to have an effect on his basic personality, but I can help put him in a position to be successful (at whatever he tries to do) and maybe even to be happy. I haven't done that yet, but give me a few more years and maybe I will. Having done that (if I do), I'll feel that I accomplished something and left the world a better place than I found it; if I were to die today that test clearly would not be satisfied.
Apropos of that, the major change in my life is something I've mentioned before in other threads but hasn't appeared in this well: As of a month and a half ago, it seems that pup will be living with me full time, come the beginning of next school year. His mother seems to have given up her resistance to the idea that his expressed desire to be with me instead of her is just a passing fancy or a transient phase, so she has started talking to him about how he'll be with me next year. There won't be a formal custody battle (which I've always wanted to avoid), just a simple handover.
I believe this change is good for pup, of course, but it's also a reflection of how I think he's growing up. He has decided that being with me is better even though his understanding of the situation (whether correct or not yet to be determined) is that it means he will be spending the school year with me in Chicago and giving up the fun, exciting summers traveling and playing with me to spend them instead with his mother, who rarely travels with him or does much else that's fun or interesting. He also believes that he won't be spending Christmases with me and my very cool, very fun, very generous family (typically in New Hampshire) any more, to do it instead with his mother and her (boring, fairly Christian [which he's not]) family instead. But even though he sees it as meaning he's pretty much giving up everything fun in his life, he wants to do it anyway, because he has come to understand that the freedom he will have with me (I recognize that he is a teenager; his mother doesn't) and most importantly the encouragement and assistance I will give him in academics, are worth it in the long run. He has his mind set on being an engineer, and understands who difficult that will be if he goes to high school in a backwater town with a mother who two years ago stopped helping him with his homework because she couldn't handle it and who won't let him go to the library without accompaniment. I think this reflects a maturity level beyond his years, and I'm proud of him for it.
That impending change, in turn, leads to what's different in my life, for what's better and worse. By the time pup gets here I
must be settled into a stable life conducive to being a single (time to admit it's inevitable, at least for the next few years) father. That stable life also has to support the likely need for private school (it's too late to test into magnet schools for next year, and it's not clear he'd make it anyway as he doesn't test terribly well). Basically, it means I have to be working as a lawyer, which means... well, anyone who has read this well understands what it means in terms of overcoming barriers.
I thought this was all good. I thought what would happen now that I
need to do my law stuff for someone else is that I would just do it — I'm terrible at doing things for myself but pretty good at doing them for others. But that hasn't happened. Instead, I went into my post-atakpup funk (which has been a twice-yearly part of my life for as long as we've been doing this) and have gotten pretty much nothing done since he went home at New Year's. And now, getting nothing done matters even more than usual, so I get depressed about that, and when I'm depressed I get even less productive... and there we have my usual spiral of failure, manifesting itself at a time when things really have to be different. I've had some very bad days, and there are more to come. Somehow I have to beat this, but I really don't understand how.
Well, that was a ramble, but anyone who's gotten this far knows that's what I do.