Reality TV

Does anyone else feel like their family should be an episode of Intervention, Hoarders, Celebrity Rehab, or some other off the wall reality show?  I like to think my life is pretty boring.  Soccer mom, divorced with a semi-amicable relationship with my ex-husband, recent home buyer and in a relationship doesn't make for headlines, but I like it.  I'm comfortable and I enjoy my yard and my kids' activities.  I have friends over occasionally, but just for dinner or the occasional board game night.  Why is it that it feels like I'm watching a flood roll in from ten miles away?  My immediate family hovers on the brink of disaster.

Someone in my family has a secret.  It is a time bomb ticking away in my lap.  I know the secret, but then I know all the secrets.  I'm the bank.  I'm the normal one that everyone runs to.  I'm the rock, the sounding board, the liar to all.  I can't tell any of them the truth without getting swallowed by the flood.  This time it is different though.  It is the big one.  The 40 days and 40 nights flood that will wipe out everything.  There is no escape and it is far reaching.  It's the point in the episode where everyone will gasp in disbelief and then be on edge until next week's show.

I hate reality TV.  I have never understood the point of watching people struggle through horrible times in their lives.  Even Survivor was just really fake and pointless to me, because when you are forced into a survival mode you don't make friends or allies.  Real people trying to survive go for the throat the first time and it doesn't get drug out over weeks and weeks.  My reality is that most people can and will do the unthinkable to survive and when you live on survival mode for long enough, you make really poor choices.  It's like a person dying of thirst in the ocean.  You know you can't drink salt water, but you are so thirsty after a few days, many people will do it anyway.

I stopped operating on survival mode just in this last year.  I'm really doing well.  My kids are really doing well.  I'm seriously considering getting married again at some point to my boyfriend of almost three years and the prospect of that doesn't scare me into a destructive spiral of bad behavior.  I'm not testing people anymore.  I'm not as angry as I was.  I really have whole weeks where I'm just really happy for the first time in my life.  So why is it that I feel like I've climbed to higher ground only to see that the mountain is covered in snow that is slowly melting and rolling down towards me?

I've also decided to start working seriously on my writing.  I have a promising book idea that seems to be evolving well.  I feel like sometimes I have to hurry through my life just in case the bomb explodes.  I feel this intense urgency to become very financially stable, or at least enough so that I can run away if I have to.  I don't want to be here when the bomb goes boom.  I don't want to deal with the broken pieces that will be left.  I didn't choose any of this and I don't deserve this.  I don't want to feel any of the pain this is going to cause.  Can't somebody please write me off this show or vote me out?

I guess I will just have to ride out this storm like all the others.  Maybe they will surprise me and be able to overcome this disaster.  Maybe this is supposed to teach me that family endures and I should trust they will always be there for me, as screwed up and twisted as they are, but there.  Maybe this will destroy them and I won't have to bank their problems on my doorstep.  I just don't want to survive anymore.  I want to get ahead.  I want the light at the end of the tunnel and to come out in the fresh air.  I want to sing and dance like the Sound of Music!  I want to exhale not sigh.