Rambling Questions

[Rainerius]

I hope this wont turn into a long aimless ramble, but knowing myself, I am sure that it will. So apologies in advance

I’m 34, agnostic, childless, and alone.

When I was a teen, while I was definitely a bit of a dog, I always wanted to settle down and have a big family. I always thought I would end up with my high school sweetheart but it was not to be. It ended very badly when I was 22 and I don’t think I ever recovered. I haven’t been in a long term relationship ever since. In fact I only made one more attempt at a serious relationship after that. It was when I was 28-29 and that failed spectacularly too. In both cases, while I think the women were needlessly heartless and cruel, I admit that it was my own emotional instability that was the larger cause of the problems.

I’ve dealt with pretty much daily thoughts of suicide since I was 13-14. I was in therapy off and on for 15 years. I was in therapy so long, my therapist eventually got old and died of cancer, and at that point I felt I was ‘stable enough’ and moved on. I still get depressed and have a lot of self hatred and self loathing, but I think I’m well passed the point of ever actually committing suicide. I’m an adult, I can deal with my problems, but that doesn’t mean the problems magically disappear, and I know that they never will.

I grew up in a turbulent home. It was a ‘blended family’. My father married a woman with two kids from a previous marriage. My older brother and older sister had a lot of jealousy and trauma over their father abandoning them (obviously) and this was unavoidably taken out on me. My brother was and is twice my size. There were daily beatings growing up, and my sister would lie to my parents and tell them I started it etc. They were a team, and I was the odd one out. My parents were so worried about the trauma my siblings had suffered, that they didn’t realize what a heavy weight had been placed on me. I also got bullied a lot at school because I’m quite nerdy and somewhat shy and awkward. So it was bullying at school, and bullying at home. I eventually learned to just stay to myself and avoid everyone else in the world, and this has remained a big part of my personality into adulthood.

My parents got divorced when I was 7. I’ve never had a stable loving bond with anyone other than my father.

Why did my father pick such an unstable field to grow his family? Well, he himself came from a broken home. His mother was part of the 60s ‘liberation’ movement and left my grandfather for the town preacher when my father was 14. He didn’t see her again until he was 28 and I was being born. My grandfather didn’t truly survive that humiliation. He was left with three kids and no wife and did the best he could, but obviously my father was missing female attention and when he got older he picked the first woman that came along. I think he liked being needed. He liked being the savior/martyr figure.

(Continued…)

 

[Rutherford2]

Grab some time with your priest outside over a cuppa and let him counsel you.

 

[Rainerius]

I grew up in a liberal home in a liberal state and went to liberal schools. As I’ve gotten older I have realized more and more that all of these problems I have experienced and that our society is experiencing are a result of excessive liberalism. No generation before the 60s would have allowed any of this. My grandmothers ‘liberation’ came at the expense of generational damage to our family. My mothers ‘liberation’ came at the expense of generational damage to our family.

I went to Europe last year and although I’m agnostic, I guess you could say I had something of a religious experience when touring the Vatican and all the Cathedrals across Italy. I remember in Milan, seeing the names of all the Archbishops carved into the stone, going back to the first one in 38 AD (if I remember correctly). It struck me that these old values and old traditions had lasted two millennia, and yet our modern way of life can’t even last two generations. More and more I see the values espoused in our culture as absolutely sick and predatory, preying on the base instincts of both men and women, pandering to the worst aspects of our nature. Pandering to women’s sense of entitlement. Pandering to men’s lust. It’s the Garden of Eden all over again, where women disobey God himself to enjoy the fruits of this world, and where men disobey God himself just to please a beautiful woman.

I saw that long list of names going back 2000 years and my desire to have a family is still in me. I want to take my place in the great chain of being, I don’t want to be a dead end. I see friends on facebook raising their kids, celebrating birthdays and holidays with them, and I want that more than anything but don’t know how to achieve it.

I’ve been doing volunteer work with my other grandmother, the woman who adopted my mother (my mother came from an even more broken home than my father). My grandmother is Catholic. Very inspiring woman. She used to smuggle Bibles into China, and this was back in the day before China liberalized and they would put you to death if they caught you. My grandmother said, “I dared them to put a little old lady to death”.

She says I should go to Church and find a girl, but I have no idea how to ‘work the church’ like that, lol. Plus, I still don’t see myself as having ‘faith’, I still would consider myself agnostic, I just strongly agree with traditionalist conservative values when it comes to family. So in other words, I feel like I would be lying to a religious woman, but a non-religious woman would likely have a fundamental difference of values that I am not willing to compromise on.

I would love to hear other people’s opinions or advice. Any words of wisdom would be very much appreciated.