Mood:  hungry

Hey there everyone!  Flyboy here! 

Ok. So I got the day off today for getting up at 0430 yesterday to work the City’s Marathon.  It is very nice to get some days off when we work on the weekend.  Sometimes I feel as if I work in a very thankless work environment.

For the past couple of months, I’ve practically been the only scheduler, and it had fallen upon my shoulders alone to take the task of keeping my office operational.  I will admit that I had gone in over my head, and I began to make mistakes.  I suppose that I had protected myself from repercussions with my integrity; I owned up to the mistakes I made and pointed out the things that were out of my control.  Finally, over the last several weeks, I made several suggestions to Leadership to hire some new schedulers and get new people trained up.  I am now the Scheduling Trainer, and am on the backburner to schedule.  In a way, I am glad to have the break, so I can refocus on managing my weight issues, but at the same time, I can hardly handle the idle time that happens on a daily basis.

Now, normally, when things start going like this, I would take some leave, get some R&R and come back to work somewhat refreshed.  But right now, of course, I am saving up my leave for a big, true vacation; our trip to Cali. I have some reservations, however, to the trip.  I suppose that I can’t help but be critical, I suppose that I can only handle so many of the troubles in Niki’s past.  I just get the thought that I need to vent all this out, because Niki is extremely stressed and struggles with a very deep depression and general distrust of everyone.

It bothers me to hear of all the manipulation and downright childishness that had occurred when Niki’s father passed away; his death occurred in a very vulnerable period in both Niki and Soldier’s lives.  This was a time when they needed a family to cling on to, but I feel that in all of the emotional distress that occurred in the aftermath of his passing, my wife and her brother were almost forgotten in the feud that waged on.  I can see that her dad was truly a gift to all of you, and the void that he left behind is a reminder of how much love he had for all of you.  The problem, however, is how divided the family became in his absence.  I can understand the frustration, the disappointment and the sadness that filled all of your hearts.  I can understand how you felt when Mississippi Mom moved on so quickly, but I can assure you that she too was grieving, and that is the path that she turned to; I feel that she had fallen into a deep denial that she is just beginning to recover from.  She has admitted to me that she regrets some of her decisions as she was blinded with pain.  On the other hand, I must say that the way that she (and my wife and her brother) was shunned away from all of you is a very unfortunate choice. Mississippi Mom was left with no one to lean on, and the choices she made were an attempt to find some comfort and peace in the absence of her family. I understand that you all felt betrayed, that you felt, “this is too soon”, but to turn it into a feud has created deep emotional scars in my wife; scars that I will end up spending the rest of my life trying to heal.

What saddens me the most is that the rift in the family continues even today.  While I can see that many of the negative feelings have faded, I sense that it still rages underneath the surface, a raging fire that burns all of your hearts.  This fire has consumed much of the family: it has divided where love should have conquered.  It breaks my heart.  What’s worse, I know that this rant of mine may not even begin to heal the wounds.  I know that this will also take the entirety of my life to repair, and I may also be isolating myself.  But I feel that I must take a stand: for the sake of my wife, for the sake of her brother, for the sake of everyone involved.  All this resentment without forgiveness is sin in its finest…

I don’t mean to be rude about all of this, I just want to make this family whole again.  I am really concerned about all of it; to have Niki partially dreading a trip home speaks much about her pain.  It says to me that things are dysfunctional, especially when she was raised in a Christian home.  The fact that a family has broken apart so badly tells me that Niki’s father was an especially great and loving man.  I can see this in Niki’s gentle determination to make things right in this world; in Soldier’s desire to protect the ones he loves; in Niki’s dad’s own writings and teachings about the bible and how we all should live as Christians.  They all speak to me, and tell me that this would not be the way he wanted things to be.  He lived a peaceful life, an example of who we should strive to be.  I think that he would tell us all that it is time to forgive each other, and remember how he lived, and love each other with the same passion that now burns in his children’s hearts.

I guess that I have ranted enough for one day… after all, I do have the day off! Lol…

Flyboy out.