The Universe is Laughing at Me

My mother was nearly thirty when I was born and my father was twelve years older than her. My friends tend to have parents similar in age to my parents which means my friends tend to be somewhat older than me.

My mother wrote in ancient German script because an elderly aunt taught her to write before she started school. In short, my parents were throwbacks to an earlier era and I grew up with a great of superstitious nonsense that left me deeply scarred.

I grew up freaking out about quite a lot of stuff, like if you dream something, it WILL happen, and felt trapped in a Greek Tragedy where the harder you try to escape it, the more certain is your doom of exactly whatever was predicted.

Around age seven, I dreamed I would marry a man with a particular first name and be widowed at a young age. I completely forgot about that until after I married a man with that name who then went into the military.

I had a child seven years ahead of schedule and was a young mom financially dependent on a man with a dangerous job who had EIGHT gender benders one year and was raised by troglodytes. If he had been raised by wolves, he would have had better social skills.

So this butthead absolutely never called me to tell me he would be late. Regularly trapped at home with an infant and no means to support myself while wondering for two hours or more if my husband was dead in a ditch somewhere, I began trying to find to find ways to stop freaking the fuck out and began assuring myself there was insurance etc. I would not simply be shit out of luck if he died.

This led to what a coworker with presumably similar life experiences summed up neatly as "spending the insurance money."

So I spent a lot of years mentally spending the insurance money and having nightmares my husband was going to DIE on me and at some point I began looking forward to the possibility he would die and there would be insurance money to pay off the mountain of debt.

I didn't want to be widowed and go "Thank God! Now I can pay our debts!" If I was going to be widowed, I wanted it to RIP my heart out.

So I began planning my divorce to avoid being widowed and I got a job at an insurance company where I worked in claims. And I remarked one day to my sons that I got my paycheck from an insurance company and I also spent the company's money all day everyday as my job and I had spent decades dreading the day that their father would be gone and I would be spending the insurance money.

My youngest said "The universe is laughing at you and it's not even being cruel."