A once wise person I used to know said that if you want to be somebody, you be that person today. You’re not who you want to be in the future, today is the future, and you make the choice to be the person you want to be.
My prayer is that I want to become the woman that God wants me to be.
Isn’t that my goal while I’m here? To please God? Well, if that is my one goal while I’m on earth, I think to myself sometimes…
”What in the world am I doing?”
I think I’m having a problem moving on to change because I haven’t really processed everything that’s happened. So I think I’ll use this as an outlet to write it out, so I have nothing left to keep replaying in my head to see what I could have done differently. This will be devoid of any kind of form, but perhaps a faint timeline will be present.
I should turn the tube off before proceeding….and now for a soundtrack of the year for my writings.
Okay , after going to the bathroom and thinking about how long this will take, I think I’ll just do short snippets and take about a week to complete this. ( I have a lot of work to do around the house today, so let’s just start with January.)
Music: I’m taking a chance on Pandora and using a Jump Little Children Station. Joel was still in my life at this point, so it’s only appropriate.
Okay…
The day before school started I was notified by my mother that my Dad was not continuing his financial support into the spring semester.
I hit the roof, but I knew it was expected. The premise of my fathers’ continuing financial support was to make C’s and above. I made 1 D that semester (it’s possible that there were two, but grades have never been my strongsuit.)
In a logical perspective of cause and effect, my Dad had every right to financially withdraw. However, during that fall semester, my Dad called me perhaps 3 times, and all about finance questions, never about how good I was or how Joel and I were. I don’t remember him asking about class that much either. The relationship with my father and I had been on a steady decline since my freshman year when he didn’t come to visit me.
First day of school, I sent and email to my Dad asking about financial documentation, and a casually dropped question about why he didn’t tell me sooner. ( The kicker is that you have to apply for financial aid for the year by april BEFORE the fall of that semester. This was the spring, and no FAFSA had been filed.) I was doomed not to receive any financial aid.
My dad emailed me back explaining the logical reason why he didn’t continue support, but I didn’t care, all I could read from his words were “I don’t really care much about you as it is, and you’re just a financial obligation who wasn’t really panning out so I needed to cut off all ties.”
I felt like bad stock. The things that my Dad and I talked about were not that deep and weren’t really ever about the real me. I tried bringing things up, tried talking about Joel, but things always get refracted back to school and money. This had been a trend of communication since I started college.
I do understand that my father was putting me through school at that point, and that school and money were intertwined to him. But it seems like there has been irreparable damage done in almost every phone conversation that didn’t talk about my personal journey, or every parents weekend that nobody was there for the past 3 years.
So, these were the things going through my head. Joel was a great support system, there for me to cry to and talk to, however here is where the big whopper of mistakes was made by Joel Boss. He had said this a few times before when my dad had hurt me, but this time I took it way too seriously.
“Sarah, all you need is God and me. That’s all you need.”
We’ll talk in another chapter about just how much that one screwed me up.
Even though I felt that my faith wasn’t strong, and there were days I knew that God would pull through for me, to be honest, I thought that was the moment when I would just drop out of school because I wouldn’t get any funding.
From the leftover of selling my piano, I received enough financial aid to keep going through the semester. (Through loans of course, how else?)
God pulled through for me and I still had Joel, so I was content. Except one thing. My father hadn’t spoken to me on the phone this entire time.
I sent him a couple of emails a couple of weeks after this with no response. Here’s an excerpt from one of them:
“Having a relationship with my Father matters to me, and if you can’t see that it’s been going down the drain for the past three years, then I don’t know what to say.”
“If it wasn’t obvious to you, then I am stating now that I think that email warrants some kind of response. You are killing me with your silence Dad. Please call or write or something, or I’m going to have to stop contact altogether for my own sake. I love you but I can’t keep letting this eat at me everyday.”
No response.
He called me about a two weeks before the wedding and asked how I was, and said we hadn’t talked in a while. I wanted to run myself into a tar pit because maybe that might be less aggravating than this situation.
The next chapter has a lot to do with Joel and my Dad, so I’ll end this chapter here. Sorry if I’m ending on a sad note. There is a happy ending, I promise.
