Sometimes I find my own interest in my suffering galling. Here I am, forty years old. Nice house, good life. Amazing kid, unbelievable and perfect husband who thinks I’ve got merits too. Enough money through good times and bad (which, motivated by no small portion of personal guilt makes me feel awful sometimes–or at least scratching my head at the wonder of the thing) and no horrible misfortunes. I’ve had self-created dramas, but who hasn’t? I’m not starving. I’m not (completely) mentally ill. My son is brainy and not dying of some easily treatable malady like cholera or garden-variety diarrhea in some waste-infested hell-hole like a refugee camp. He’s not a child soldier. He’s not a girl forced into the sex trade in Thailand or the former Soviet states. He’s not living in the Sudan. We’re not even in low-rent housing. My husband, who often dreams the worst possible outcome of any particular scenario has been visited by few of them (not to say none). That he can picture them with such vividness is his own personal cross to bear; he, like the rest of us, is blessed.

We know without question that we are a lucky bunch.* Our tragedies have been, in the relative scope of all the horrors that can be visited upon human beings, completely pedestrian. Small, small potatoes. And we don’t buy that we deserve our good fortune; we know it is some little part hard work, some large part dumb luck. My husband and I met under unlikely circumstances, though anyone can tell you that we are utterly and completely each others person; that there could be a past where we did not meet gives me the horrors. I don’t know where or what or who I would be without him. Dumb luck is how we met, but I’ll take it. But I believe it was coincidence, not destiny.

And do I deserve it any more than any other being on the planet? I would never be so crass nor so foolish. No-one can tell me that I deserve my good fortune more than any other schmuck, and there’s no reason why it might not disappear in a gnat’s breath. People face horrible things all the time. Good people get swallowed up by forces completely irrelevant to themselves and are unkindly (or, in certain situations, luckily) the beneficiaries of the fallout. I just have not been one of them.

Which is how I got to this point in the first place, bemoaning my life, boo hoo, so sad, *sniff*. I’m so accustomed to the stability my reasonably placid life has afforded me that when faced with the traumatic but pedestrian reality of cancer (CANCER. How much more pedestrian can it get?) I think I have the right to get all philosophically huffy about the thing. As if I have a mandate. Who do I think I am?

So I’m having my brief little excoriation of self. This is the entry where I tell all that are willing to read it (four, maybe five people) that I’m not under any illusions my life is rotten. My father is ill, but in the big scheme? Not too bad, really. I actually HAD a father which is a lucky turn; a mother too (multiples of both when you count step-so-and-so’s). A brother and good friends, most of whom also had relatively un-horrific lives. A roof and food (granted it was a little light in the refrigerator at the end of the month, but as far as that goes it’s a good thing to understand moderation and economy). A house full of books. Love.

Tomorrow I’ll return to my previously scheduled program of moping. But today I’m hating the network’s line-up of shows.

*or my husband and I do, unlike our son. When my husband asked me about how he liked sitting in an Aston Martin, I told him, “he’s completely unimpressed. He believes that he deserves it, just because.” That’s being Five for you. At least our five year old.

We’ll have to do something about that, I suspect.

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