Night Drive

I prayed out loud last night, in my car.
I was driving home from picking up cold medicine for Pepper.
It was 10 p.m. and I nestled deep into the nest of my Northface down coat.
I felt my hair growing longer around my face, and a small sense of success.
I've been trying to grow it out.  The only way I can let it grow is to ignore it.  I clamp it into a banana clip and don't wash it for days.
One day it will be long, and I probably won't care very much.
 I'll be accustomed to ignoring it.

The thing I wanted most a year ago was to loose my pregnancy weight.
"One day I will fit into all my old clothes.  I will be thin again, and feel more like myself."
Now I do.  I fit.  But I don't feel any more like Sarah.
I miss the fluency of my writing a year ago.  I miss the acute nature of post-birth pain.
I miss my baby boy Beckam who fit right under my chin.  I miss our 2 a.m. movie dates when the whole house was asleep.
I don't remember the extra 20 pounds.  They are not in my memory.

So why do I work so hard to keep them at bay?
The why never comes when I am begging for it.
I stumble over the why as I walk the path, unconcerned with it anymore.
If I don't ask why, then I am just left with is.
That's what I prayed about - what is now.

"God, I am sorry I am still this way.  I'm still scared.  I still struggle.  I don't want to, and my brain knows better.  I know I don't need to starve or loose weight.  I know that it doesn't work.  But this is deeper than knowing.  This is about what I believe....it's about what I am.  It's about how I'm supposed to be small and big at the same time.  And I'm mad, and I'm scared, and I can't be just one. I don't know how to do this.  I guess I still want something based on my good intentions rather than work.  Is the work just time, and life?  Or is it the absence of work?  Am I working against myself?..."

"Of course you are."

Then God and I had a good laugh...

I remember noticing this in philosophy class during college.
The only truth existed as a paradox.
Whatever is also necessarily isn't.
And then class was just funny.
Because the whole point of philosophy is to discover truth - I think.