breaking patterns

I am a bleeding heart.

I know this. I am aware. I have a save the world mentality. I hate to see people I know in any kind of difficulty. I want to help every thing and everybody. When I was a kid, I was known on occasion to give my tithing money to the guy on the corner, what I didn’t spend on candy mind you. I brought home every stray imaginable. I begged my mom in high school to let my best friend stay with us when her family was having problems, and she did, for six months. My home for as long as I can remember has been a place of refuge for friends and on occasion strangers. My first apartment, at one time housed Tim and then Valerie, friends from community college. Then there were the co workers from waitressing, who need a place to crash. Then I got into poetry and then the poets came, and any one who had a chap book or a CD and a good delivery could call through a network of poets started by Lamar Hill (so another story), could sleep on my couch for the duration of a cycle – the first poetry event of the week to the last one, as many as seven poets at a time have been in my home, probably in the area of thirty or so individual poets have graced my doorway. Most multiple times. I have taken old ladies home waiting for cabs at the grocery store. I have picked up moms with a kid in the rain and gone out of my way to take them where the bus would have. I have given my last dime to buy a guy a meal. I have worked for free at a for profit bookstore, because I didn’t want the poetry night to end.

I tell you all of this not because I want to impress or I need validation but because I need you to understand how hard what I have to do is.

My best friend is in trouble. It is of his own making. A series of blatantly stupid and just plain bad decisions have left him with out a place to stay.
Those of you who read or have read my entries previously know this is not new for us. We are just getting our home back from the last time it turned into a youth hostel. Spoken is comfortably in her apartment, Rock and Dwayne are currently in apartment, and John has moved back in with his mother. It has only been about three weeks since all has gone back to normal. People leave our home at some point during the evening, even if its after we go to bed.
Our house is quiet save for our own noises. And it has been wonderful. My husband and I are repairing the stress marks that time caused, one day at a time. God blessed us, there were no breaks in our armor, no cracks in our foundation, but heavy stress marks remain, like plastic bent just to the point of breaking. Our lives have gotten no less stressful, his mother issues (see his blog) our financial stresses, the house – which isn’t stressful yet, but its renovation – the stress will come. Cammy’s schooling, getting her into school, and then paying for that school.
Then my friend makes the request. Asks if he can stay for a while.

And I have to say no.

Against every pull in my heart to make it work, I can’t sacrifice my marriage to help any one else. And it would be. Neither of us want to admit it, but it would. I can not sacrifice my sanity to help anyone else. Not until we are better and more comfortable, and healed from the last time. And to be totally honest I don’t want to be anything less than my husbands safe harbor, he needs to know that our family is my number one priority, and that I have focused my energy on that long list of stresses previously mentioned. I can't help him resolve his bad decisions by making one myself.

That being said my dad found a paint sprayer so I can get some more work done upstairs, which totally rocks, my dad he totally rocks too, alot like my husband, my dad is.

But the rest of this sucks.
It sucks hot sweaty monkey balls.
Seriously.