Brave Little Gerda Faces the Icy Game of Reason

[Rita]

Well, for the grand finale of this thread, I will post the letter I got from H this morning. I am supposed to come up with 3K for him and I have only made 500 on the rentals so far, and have already posted about all the craziness I went through. He wrote to me demanding his money via transfer because of traveling and also I got a text from the mom of D10's best friend saying that D10 has been talking about how much her dad criticizes me and how much it upsets her, so I decided, not for engaging with H but only to have in writing (for court) that I tried to explain what is going on, I wrote to him to explain all that is happening with expenses and the kids' emotional distress, etc. I also said that he should not respond as I would turn any future conversation to lawyers. And this is what I got this morning. Before I opened my e-mail, I gave myself a little speech that a terrible e-mail would be there but that my goal in writing to him was a court strategy and not anything I needed to worry about on a personal level. And this kind of worked. I haven't written back to the wonderful posts from Hope and Job about anger -- but I will say that I had huge amounts of rage bottled up inside since I was 14 years old, and that when H first started to change, a couple years before BD, it started to come out a little bit. And when I got cancer and saw the image of the tumor, I thought instantly, "That's rage." And when I became a Christian, the rage started to fade away. When it comes now, I try to give it to God. The weight of judgment is too heavy for me, too crushing. So I am not sure about how the stage of anger can play into it for me. I need a clear head to strategize to dig out of this mess and I don't want any more tumors but I see what you are saying and am thinking about it!

Here is the letter. Enjoy!

Gerdie (he uses the cute version of my name on most e-mails),

I have been listening to plaintive-tragic violins of this email (with all of its lists and motifs and themes) for two decades, and I wish not to listen to these fatalist violins any longer. That is, I won't listen to them any longer.

The house upstate (according to three different specs I asked brokers for) is worth (number that is double what I think it is worth) and the house downstate can fetch (number that is 1.5 times what I think it is worth but appraisals will tell) easily. The price of the Guesthouse business is to be determined.

Gerdie, consider the outlook, the worldview that your desire to cling to both properties and the business (versus monetize both) carries with it your readiness to deadlock and enchain the H family (my kids) to a desecrate (and arguably maladaptive and/or dysfunctional) reality of sub-poverty and ceaseless ghettoization— whilst anyone can clearly see that -- in view of the emergency existential and financial conditions that have been swarming around us for a solid decade now as we run like fugitives from banks, creditors, state, city and federal collection agencies -- the alternative approach to life (monetizing our hard-won shared resources in the direction of "an abundant life" of living and loving) is not just a convenient alternative but an absolute necessity.

In my opinion and according to the world-view I live by (and I am not telling you to agree or to live by it), the happiness, the peace, the lighthearted joy that attach to an "Abundant" life (in contrast to a life of "Poverty"— in both its spiritual and material manifestations) are a happiness, peace, a lighthearted joy that are not a priori "determined," they are not a priori an un-rewritable existential verdict: they are, rather, "a choice" plain and simple: they are a free clear-headed, right-headed CHOICE available to you and I and available to all humans everywhere and in any epoch of history.

And yes, likewise, the alternative, the dread, the gloom, all proclivities for ghettoization that attach to a life of "Poverty" (in contrast to an "Abundant" life — again, in both its spiritual and material manifestations) is not (in my opinion) an a priori un-rewritable existential verdict: spiritual and material "Poverty," rather, are, again, first and foremost an interior solemn "choice" plain and simple: a free clear-headed, right-headed choice available to us and available to all humans everywhere and in any epoch of history.

I won't listen to the tragic (fatalist) violins of the latter worldview issuing from you any longer — because I personally believe they are the tragic violins of an interior worldview known by philosophers interrelatedly as both determinism and fatalism, and which are not my interior worldview at all.

Rather, I will exercise (what I believe is a God-given capacity) for free-choice in ways that in a nano-second cuts the umbilical chord to spiritual and material Poverty, to the very ghettoizing gestalt to which (I believe) we CHOOSE to umbilical chord ourselves: in other words, I will exercise (what I believe is a God-given capacity) for free-choice to make my own alternative music about a peace, a joy, a happiness that attach to an abundant life in both its spiritual and material manifestations.

I am finished listening to dark music. I am free to make and to listen to another kind of music.