Dear Jerry:

I think I understand your situation better: I think that you are indeed stuck, most accurate word.

Stuck and powerless to free yourself from this prison cell, so to speak, where you have been in  for years. As you made the logical decisions, to make enough money to support your family and the many other decisions for the benefit of your family, you turned in the keys to your freedom and you find yourself stuck, or imprisoned. You turned in your creativity, your dreams, the part of you that lived.

What remains is this deadness that continues to exist within the boundaries of dry logic.

What to do when every possible solution to this entrapment is met by refuting logic?

How about moving to a very small house in a very quite place, a little town, maybe outside a city limit, where living expenses are very low, taking a job as an elementary school teacher, a school where behavior is okay, on the part of the students, where you can be creative, even share a few poems with the students?

A happy father is much more logical for the well being of your children than more money. Sure you and your wife have to make enough money, but.. just enough.

And teaching elementary school (or higher, as long as students’ behavior is okay) does not require more schooling, or if it does, then it is something you can do gradually while teaching, take classes here and there while working, or during summer recess.

anita