A Ticket To Ride

Bear with me for a moment, if you will. I’m working on a theory, here. In the list of universal truths, “Life will bring pain” has got to be way up there, right? It seems to be an inevitability. It’s going to happen… you just don’t know when.

Take me, for instance. I was pretty much born into pain, and it lasted for my entire childhood. By any measure, my early life was absolutely miserable. My mom was a teenager when she had me, and we were dirt poor – I got shoes and gloves from my elementary school’s lost and found when a teacher took pity on me. I was a sickly kid… nary an illness passed me by. My mom has Borderline Personality Disorder (look it up… it’s bad news) and was never much of a mother to me at all. I never even met my biological father until I was an adult. To top it off… I was repeatedly molested by one of my mom’s brothers. The first time it happened, I was six months old. Just about my whole family knew it was happening, and didn’t do much about it. I eventually put a stop to it myself when I was 13. I was basically left unprotected from the very big, very bad world. All of this just might explain why I suffered with depression and suicidal urges for so long. Ya’ think?

On the other hand, as an adult, I’ve been pretty damn lucky. Gainful employment and good friends. A long and stable marriage to a good man that produced three wonderful children. An affluent lifestyle that allowed me to stay home with them for many years. A mutual, and for the most part, amicable parting of the ways that led me to an exciting new phase of my life. Finding a new love when I wasn’t even looking. Maybe more importantly, finding myself. I’m now married to the love of my life, my daughters have grown into lovely young women, and I have a great job serving a wonderful community of people. I’m more satisfied with my life than ever.

Conversely, I know many people who had idyllic childhoods, loved & warm & protected. The big bad world didn’t catch up with them until later, you see. As adults, though, they struggle. With love and its attending relationships, or money – just barely getting by. Drugs or alcohol grab them by the tail, or the loss, too soon, of a loved one. Maybe just painfully bad luck. Sometimes these folks have a bad spell and move on to better times, sometimes not.

So, my theory is this: We all have to pay sometime. I paid big time, early and often. You may have paid a little or a lot. Maybe it caught up with you later, or maybe you’re paying through the nose right now, as you read this. If that’s the case, you have my full sympathies. It just seems to me that everyone must have his or her share of tragedy. It’s like the price of admission to this fantastic and awful adventure that we call living.

Okay, you may say, but what about we poor doomed souls who seem to have been paying all our lives… rotten childhoods, followed by more of the same? Well, even those of you in that situation have surely had brief moments of joy in your lives. Bright, shiny memories to hold on to in dark times. Though it can’t eradicate the bad, it does at least temper it with good. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be living it up in some Utopian after-life, paid in full for all of eternity!

In any event, I believe the price has been worth it. I’d pay it again, if it got me here. So just know it going in. You’ll have to pay a price, large or small, sooner or later. Buy your ticket with grace and courage & hang on tight. Life is a wonderful, if bumpy, ride.