TheBanyanTree: High school reunions, etc. (WARNING: Religious theme invoked towards the end)

[PJMoney]

If I had stayed at high school, in the normal way, till the end, I would
have done the *HSC in 1968.  But I didn't stay.  I dropped out the year
before.  When one is miserable at home staying on at school seems to offer
nothing but compounded misery.  At least being in employment offers the
probability of the possibility of an escape to something better.

So in 1988 (or maybe it was 1989 - who can remember these details?), when
the class was getting ready for their 20-year reunion, there was, I was
told, considerable debate about whether or not I should be invited.  But I
had at least one good friend among the old girls and she argued the case for
inviting me.  After all I had, eventually, done the exam, gone on to
university and graduated from there in the usual way.  And she knew the
mitigating circumstances.  She'd seen the bruises and felt sorry for the
girl I had been.

The invitation came and I went.  It was interesting.  Most interesting was
the fact that one of the girls in my former circle of friends, the one who
in those days had criticised my appearance relentlessly, was not there.
Apparently she'd gone prematurely grey and was embarrassed about it.  

Is it catty of me to mention that?  Probably.  But I'm beyond caring.  That
woman got what she wanted; to be at uni forever, or at least until she has
to retire.  She has some lecturer position in some arts faculty at some
sand-stone university.  Her specialty is in jargon-laden, self-refuting
post-modernist, radical-feminist claptrap.  She has never married nor had
children.  I don't hate her.  I do feel sorry for her whenever I think about
her.

Me, I'm a high-achieving failure at worldly success.  Here I sit with the
string of letters after my name and no paying job.  Actually, I do have a
job.  It's just that the people I work for don't pay me.  Or, rather, they
pay me very, very slowly.  I'm owed for work done over about the last 8 - 10
months.  

What a laugh!  In November 2006 the business owners gave me a raise and
since then they've paid me so infrequently that I'm basically working for
less than half the miserable wage I was earning beforehand.  I don't want to
press the issue because I don't want to bankrupt them.  They have two
children, after all.  But I am going to have to stop doing their work.
Doing their work means I don't have time to do other work that I want to do,
that needs doing and that might eventually be profitable for my own family.

There is one more job for me to do at that place.  Another friend, the first
one I made after we moved up here, has been prime mover of a group that has
commissioned my non-paying employers to run a survey for them.  So I will
work to achieve the outcome my friend and her group want and then I will
call it quits and wait for the payment total to catch up with the invoice
total.  Whether or not they go bankrupt during or after that will have
nothing to do with me.

I've completely given up on the idea that I will ever be a mover-and-shaker
as far as success in this world is concerned.  But, finally, I can see that
in the area about which I care the most - my children - I've been
successful.  My eldest son, whose understanding of what life is about has
for so long been disrupted and confused by the fact of my divorce from his
father, has at last, like his brothers, decided to trust himself to Christ
Jesus.

What finally did it for him was the news, last week, that a woman who had
become a man had become pregnant.  For all his adult life he has been a
'progressive' of the 'if you're not a socialist at 20 you have no heart'
kind.  This news struck him as something not just beyond his capacity to
celebrate but perverse.  He couldn't find any sort of 'normal' face to put
on it at all.  

Having found that idea perverse one thing that really bothered him was that
he was turning into a conservative, right-wing, Christian.  I said, "Stop
worrying.  Proper Christians are considered by the 'elite' to be very weird
indeed."  That's true I think, especially in this country.

He's 36 and he starts confirmation classes in a fortnight.  He booked in for
them himself.  There is no way I'd interfere in something as important as
that.  His life.  His choice.  My joy.

Janice  

*Higher School Certificate