Brave Little Gerda Knows More Now

[Rita]

Hi Gerda.

I was thinking about you today and wanted to reach out and say hello. I hope things are well with you and that you had a good holiday season. Happy lunar new year today! Its the year of the tiger!

Hugs to you and your kiddos!!

-Sam

It always gives a spring to my step when you check in on me, Sam! Thank you!

Update in brief — I’ve been doing a lot of my creative work, a lot of writing and plenty of bookings in the other creative work that I do (but will remain vague about here). I don't have time for it but I am trying to do it before I have time so that I can return to what I meant to be before I lost myself. I’ve been pushing my rental biz farther too, and still a long way to go before I can quit all my day jobs but definitely making progress. I’m still not interested in dating and have no time as I am still totally on my own as provider for the kids and still embroiled in the world’s stupidest divorce. A guy friend of mine went to talk to my H to try to get him to resolve, and he came back saying that it would never ever happen because H wants to destroy me and thinks he will get “justice” at a trial. I still periodically ask H to follow the orders we are supposed to follow to resolve, but nothing happens. I'm still pro se and still doing better than any of my lawyers ever did. I had to file to change custody because of all the terrible things that continue, and I had to file an appeal of the judge’s refusal to grant me interim child support, so this month I am spending hours writing the brief! So much of my life on this divorce bulls** and it’s so incredibly stupid and pointless, as we already have a 50-50 split agreement and I’ve only asked for a custody change that puts what we are doing for years now in writing. The only thing holding this back is that H won't accept an appraisal, not any appraisal, though this was our agreement. But I don't think it's really that, I think that's just the way that he can prolong this and keep me tied to him. We are literally waiting on nothing. Sometimes it makes me despair that so much of my creativity and light is being sucked into this pointless endless divorce when I am so willing to lose a lot to end it, but mostly I just try to keep walking and accept that this is my reality. We do have a new judge, and she is from family court, so I have a tiny flare of hope that she will finally grant me interim child support. No, I still do not receive a dime in any kind of support or help with housing or medical or camp or anything at all. We still aren’t scheduled for a trial but I think if my H actually had to cough up some money each month for our children, no matter how small, he might stop dragging this out and just abide by our agreement to resolve the whole thing.

I remain the poster child for getting finances settled the second you can — finances have nothing to do with standing for your marriage, newbies! But not settling them will be a bear claw trap tight tight around your ankle for years, like Gerda, lone wolf with her pups.

Not dating. Don’t think I will ever believe a man could love me and don't have any interest in that right now, just enough time to mother my kids, work and do my art.

....

I’m glad SJohn got me to post as I did want to write a last post. Lent is coming, when I try to give up all screen media including this, but I don’t know if I will be back either way, at least not very often.

These past months I tried a few times to post updates but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was so freaked out about the post suggesting that someone could "win" or "lose" an argument by invoking Hitler, or that we shouldn't refer to Hitler lest it offend someone. My father is a Holocaust survivor and I have spent all my life contemplating evil and goodness through that lens — what it would take to follow Hitler or allow Hitler or be a neighbor who was too afraid of Hitler to help a neighbor or what part of myself is like what part of him, etc. Likewise Pol Pot, Genghis Kahn, Mugabe, Kim Jong Un and the very long list of obvious incarnations of evil, not to mention the even longer list of less obvious incarnations. Certainly I have thought about it a lot during these past nine years of my H committing so many evil acts in such a prolonged way.

I think it’s quite dangerous actually not to talk about evil and think about evil as often as we can. It’s the only way to know it in ourselves and in others. I spoke with my dad about our terror of silence recently with Maus being banned in one of our Southern states, and the teaching of other “uncomfortable” parts of history, including black history, being banned. Recently at my daughter’s school, a Shakespeare production was cancelled because people were too scared to allow discussion of the racism in the play.

I don’t see this as political but as foundational to our humanity. So I was freaked out about the response to the discussion and I was even more freaked out about the silence that followed it.

I’m going to post below an excerpt from a writing on conscience by a much smarter person than I if anyone reading this wants to know more.

My friends here, you know where I live, and if you are ever there, I would be so glad to see you. Sending you all love and courage in all your days of facing evil and welcoming goodness and other joys. Newbies, learn from my story!

Whether something (evil or good) is recognized or not depends too on the will, which can block the way to recognition or lead to it. It is dependent, that is to say, on an already formed moral character which can either continue to deform or be further purified. On this level, the level of judgment (conscientia in the narrower sense), it can be said that even the erroneous conscience binds.

This statement is completely intelligible from the rational tradition of scholasticism. No one may act against his convictions... But the fact that the conviction a person has come to certainly binds in the moment of acting does not signify a canonization of subjectivity. It is never wrong to follow the convictions one has arrived at—in fact, one must do so. But it can very well be wrong to have come to such askew convictions in the first place, by having stifled the protest of the anamnesis of being. The guilt lies then in a different place, much deeper—not in the present act, not in the present judgment of conscience, but in the neglect of my being which made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth.

For this reason, criminals of conviction like Hitler and Stalin are guilty. These crass examples should not serve to put us at ease but should rouse us to take seriously the earnestness of the plea: “Free me from my unknown guilt” (Ps 19:13).