Holy cow! It's Tad...

[Rita]

Gerda peeking in. I don't know why, I haven't been posting at all but this made me want to post!

I am all about the forgiveness and allowing God to do the work for you.

But it's just a baby SHOWER. It's not the baby! It's not the baby's BIRTH! It's not you playing a beautiful role as the baby's grandfather for all his/her life! It's not even the baby's first birthday party. It's a bunch of gifts and some appetizers and your W is using it to legitimize her adultery.

A shower is a modern construction of secularized ritual to get a bunch of gifts. The baby isn't even there, and even the modern version of it was always just women with women until the really modern version of it that made it co-ed.

What is natural and right is for you to be married to the grandma and to all be a family and have events together. That can't happen (for now), and that's not your choice. There is nothing natural or right about you having to attend an event with the man who stole your wife, and in no other time of history would this have been expected of you. Think of a Russian novel with this scene. Your character would perhaps go -- with a pistol!

I've been saying no to things that are too emotionally hard, even disappointing my 92 year old father and others. I need to be able to keep functioning and not crawl under a rock, so I might not be able to do everything a perfectly strong or saintly person can do, or that I will be able to do one day. We are wounded! It's like asking someone with a gunshot wound and PTSD to go for a fun afternoon at the rifle range with the guy from the other country's army who shot him.

I pray about things I can't do a lot and I ask God to give me what I need to do something if He wants me to do it. If I still can't do it, I tell God I am not ready and to please forgive me. I go to confession about it. I know you don't have those comforts in your life, but you can do the secular version.

My take is, go have a good cry. Talk to the trees. Tell them it hurts too much. Forgive yourself. Spend that afternoon of the shower handwriting a beautiful book of family stories and photos for the baby and go visit your son the next day with the book. Or do something else positive and beautiful during the shower. Tell your S how sorry you are for your weakness and how you will get stronger as the years go by and how much you love him and how you can't wait to be the best grandpa in the world. Which you will be. Because you have a big beautiful heart. (And big beautiful hearts can be hurt, that's their nature.)

(((((Tad)))))))