For so long, right from the beginning, I worked with all my heart and mind towards one goal: to make Jenna whole again. I have as much as admitted it in the past here, but it looks like that just is not going to happen. So much of my self esteem has been wrapped up in Jenna’s ultimate fate, and my role in her current one, that I have become totally non-functional. trying to span the distance between full recovery and partial.
For a long time I tried to do the best I could with the whole faith thing, and believing against hope in some kind of Christian miracle. I mean, I *really* tried to believe it. The name of this website itself is testimony to that much. The funny part of all of this is that if you had asked any of my college friends about an eventual Christian conversion for Mr. Robert here, they probably would have put that at a -100000% probability. At least I would have. But maybe its like they say, the more you resist something, the more you will eventually succumb. Just ask all the moralizing preachers who are eventually caught — often literally — with their pants down on the question.
I don’t know if “succumb” is the right word. I distinctly remember being in a hallway with Jenna’s dad and some church and “believer” friends of theirs, and I so very desperately wanted Jenna to be OK, to be whole again, that I really wanted to be able to believe. I just didnt think it was possible, given where I had come from on the subject. I walked that hallway a FEW times before I could convince myself that such a thing was even possible. I eventually decided I would have to make myself believe it was possible, and for a long time I believed and prayed that Jenna would be able to return to her former life.
I do have to note that if it wasn’t for the possibility-of-whole-recovery thing to begin with, I may not have been able to make it at all. And where Jenna is right now is not all that bad, recovery wise. She is happy, so I should be too.
Nevertheless, in my darker moments, I blame myself for so much of this. I blame myself for ever entering Jenna’s life to begin with, etc. I wont make a list because I am trying to move beyond it all. If I persist with it, and with trying to be so entwined with Jenna’s recovery on a daily basis, I am going to end up in a rubber room, or a morgue. At least until I can get my own emotional soup cleared up, I just have to step back from the Jenna war room mentality I’ve kept up for the past four years.
I used to try to be as honest with Jenna as possible, including telling her the truth about my own mental status. Big mistake. I need to get some distance from all of this. For my own survival. I have been wallowing in the gap between where I want Jenna to be and in the reality of where Jenna is going to be, and it is just not working. Now its been a frickin YEAR in the hellabama house. When I dropped Jenna off with her parents in Indiana last summer, I was a weeping wreck. A year later, I am still a weeping wreck. I have had conversations about “keeping” Jenna, aka whether to completely cut her off, with her dad, wondering whether I have the ability any more to deal with it all. God knows I tried, but clearly I do not. I have no intention of cutting her off entirely, I just need to step back a little bit.
I will still stay in Jenna’s life, take her many calls, but I am going to try to detach spiritually and emotionally from the impossible goal stated in this website’s URL. Jenna is happy, content, and functioning as best she can in her current situation, and I need to be happy with that, just that, and not be a Sisyphusian mess.
The library is closing right now (actually now im in the parking lot doing a revision) so I will try to articulate more of what I’m talking about at another time.
