I had a late night reading with Domino this week. She’s been with Dennis for 5 years. When they met, they’d both just gotten divorced and he’d just moved to Florida. She was thrilled to find a man who didn’t drink himself into a stupor every night and who had a good job. So good a job, in fact, that when he moved in, he suggested Domino quit her job and go back to school to get her degree. It was perfect. Domino couldn’t quite believe her luck. Then one day she came home to find a process server looking for Denny. Apparently he owed about $41,000 in back child support. She didn’t even know he had kids. The legal system had caught up with him and were garnishing his bank account and his wages. He did what any self respecting, responsible man would do. Wait, no he didn’t; instead, he quit his job.
Yep, he figured the court would have nothing else to garnish if he didn’t have an income. It’s a shame because he’d also hurt his back and was thinking about applying for disability, but he knew they could garnish that also. He assured Domino that he could do enough under the table jobs to keep them afloat while she got her degree. Being a savvy woman, she got a part time job to help out. It went downhill from there.
Instead of looking for work, Dennis began thinking of one money making scheme after another, none of which panned out and all of which cost Domino money and her excellent credit standing. She got a second part time job. She didn’t want to quit school since she was halfway to her degree. She’d worked hard to get where she was and wasn’t going to let anything stop her.
Denny wasn’t contributing at all, but heck he’d done so the first year so she felt she kind of owed him. Plus it was such good sex. But now, four years later, he hadn’t found a job much less looked for one. His days were spent chain smoking cigarettes on the couch watching the news, his evenings spent telling Domino how bad the economy was, along with his daily commentary on the news of the day. Meanwhile, Domino spent her days working and going to school; her nights working, catching up on household and yard chores, paying for Denny’s 3 pack a day cig habit and sleeping when she could finally manage to shut off her brain enough to fall into bed.
By the time she called me, she’d had enough but was just too tired to think straight. Four years of supporting a man who didn’t want to contribute was way too many. Not to mention in that time he’d done nothing to clear up his financial responsibility to his ex for child support. Domino lost a lot of respect for him when she learned that.
It’s a testament to his charisma that it’s gotten to this point. He used to use his charm to get jobs, now he does it to keep himself afloat. It’d be different if he was job hunting and helping free up Domino’s time by keeping the house clean, the yard picked up and doing the shopping, cooking and errands. She knows she won’t find someone with no past baggage, but she can’t take being so openly deceived for so long.
We all go through those times when past momentum catches up with us and we have to go through some heavy stuff to clear up our karma. It can come at you in the form of bills piling up, marriages dissolving, being fired from jobs, traffic tickets, paternity suits and child support with women you don’t even recall being with a decade ago. It can come in the form of longtime friends betraying a sacred trust and in the form of being ostracized from the only family you’ve ever known.
But no matter what, the quicker you learn the lesson, the quicker you’re on the other side of it. The quicker you get humble, surrender, drop a knee and ask forgiveness for whatever your part in whatever is happening, the quicker the harshness of your lesson will begin to dissipate. You’ll know when you’ve done it sincerely because the weight of the past will begin to fall off and you’ll have renewed hope for what is to come.
Maybe the situation itself won’t immediately change, but instead your perception of it changes. It changes in such a way that what previously seemed overly burdensome now seems doable. It stops feeling so hopeless. You begin to see lights at the end of the tunnel.
As you begin to begin to do what it takes to clear up your past obligations and indebtdness, you’ll see evidence of your karma clearing up, too. You’ll see doors open you didn’t notice before and you’ll be led to a better place. Keep one foot in front of the other doing only as much as you can do each day, but doing that fully and completely, and soon enough you’ll be living a different life and attracting a new experience that’s far more fulfilling than what you scraped and settled for before.
And as for Domino? She’s a smart woman. She joked about the fact they’d not had sex for almost a year yet that was the big draw that got her hooked on him in the first place. And now? In her own words, “The f**cking I’m getting is no longer worth the f**cking I’m getting.” I told you she was a smart woman.