Last night after the kids got picked up I headed out to see some friends at Eastside. I had put out an Instagram “help” sign and they came through. A couple of drinks later and I headed home to try and decompress and ended up getting sick to my stomach. It wasn’t like I was purging anything major but my body rejected the food I put in and it was a rough night to end the weekend on. I still set my alarm to get up and workout even though I wasn’t feeling great but I had to plan for the best.

I got up around 6 and did a short workout with the intention of coming home and getting the work in when I got home. The day was pretty humdrum with getting kids working on the project they were supposed to be working on while I was away on Friday, they mostly got to the point I wanted them to get to and it was a pretty solid way to start the last week before break. I do have a couple of meetings this week to round things out but it should be pretty painless.

Tomorrow my daughter has her first orchestra concert of the year. She started playing a few years ago when the orchestra director on my campus offered to teach her. She would come to the house and teach for 30 minutes and we’d chat about work and life and stuff. After the events of the summer, I’m taking a step back from work relationships and my kiddo is just doing the school orchestra thing for the time being. I wanted to set up lessons with my brother in Montana via the internet and hopefully that will still be something that we can work out in the future. I’m headed up to Minnesota for a day or so over Winter Break to see the siblings and my mom for the first time in many years. I was very reticent to join them for that reason alone, there is plenty of mom shit in the closet that I haven’t really unpacked yet but I know that this is most likely the last time I’ll make the trip up there for the holidays and decided to let my siblings figure out a way to get me there. I’ll talk to Geoff then to see if we can do video lessons, I know my daughter would love a chance to reconnect with my brother. My ex-in-laws will be at the concert tomorrow and I don’t know quite how that will go, I’m still the crazy ex-son-in-law as far as I know. My dad will probably be there and maybe my step-mother as well, I am firmly committed to this concert being about one thing only, my daughter.

We had a very interesting weekend with a conversation I wasn’t expecting. When I met my ex, she had recently started attending church again after a years-long foray into the jam band world and I was very much done with mainstream religion and in the process of extricating myself from the church musician world I had found my way back into when I came back from Minnesota as a burned-out Evangelical. When we split up 8 years ago, she started reconnecting with that world but it wasn’t until this summer that she decided to head back in for whatever reason. The whole time we were married, religion was something that didn’t factor into our lives and my daughter at one point declared that she believed in two things, Santa and the Easter Bunny because “it was fun.” She had overheard the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage and when I explained what that meant she asked why anyone would want to stop people from being with who they wanted to be with. We talked about the nature of faith and that as far as I was concerned, then and now, people believe in things because it is fun and if it stops being fun then it doesn’t really serve a purpose. She asked me this weekend what sin was. This is new territory for me because not only have I made a point to raise my children free from the idea that there is some big bogey man in the sky waiting to smite them for bad behavior, but new because now I’m in a position where I don’t want them to think that I’m talking badly about their mother or the church that she is taking them to.

I deferred to my dad who has come a long way since I was a kid and has a much more nuanced idea of faith and I figured he would have a better answer than my “its a matter of building a guilt and shame based system to keep people in line with a fear of hell.” He said that people have always needed stories and sometimes people need to make sense of the world they live in and just because something was true at the time the stories were written, it doesn’t always translate to the modern world. My daughter later asked me, my son was riding with my dad and step-mother, about Greek mythology and we started talking about world religions and which were the oldest and that kind of thing. We talked about the idea of suffering and that the highest calling in life is easing the suffering of others, ideas that she connected to Buddhism and to Christianity. She made the connections. I told her that going to church was a good opportunity to meet new people and if things they said sounded weird, she should talk to me or Grandad instead of asking questions at church. I only said this to her because I know what it is like to ask the hard, weird questions and get non-answers and a talking to after Sunday School. I don’t want her growing up with a new sense of shame and guilt, especially after she has finally stopped apologizing for everything, something she did for years.

I want my kids to feel comfortable with who they are with no reservations or manufactured guilt for being different or not seeing things the way that their mother’s new chosen community does, I only hope that she continues to see things that way too. It has taken me years to be fully comfortable with who I am and who I want to be, to take the life I see for myself, or at least the hope that it will be there.

When I got home this afternoon, I went for a long run. Just under 10 miles, and while it isn’t quite where I want to be on a Monday evening, I’m trying to take a more direct approach to getting back to distance. I can’t always run long on the weekends but I can stack some night runs that keep me from sitting in my house alone and build mileage that way. Getting set for Bandera in January and those miles won’t run themselves. I started the run with sunglasses and ended with my headlamp and I’ll probably be getting a lot of dark runs here this week and the rest of the dark season. Up for a workout in the morning and a marathon day. I’m trying to eat more consistently throughout the day and I’m happy to say its a good feeling to have the energy and drive to get out after work rather than being so low I just make a short jaunt of it. I’m not going to allow the disordered eating habits I build in high school come back to rule me now.