Random Thoughts... To Paul with Love

• I love that God brought us together
• I love how much more I smile than ever in my life
• I love your blue eyes
• I love your baseball caps
• I love my life with you in it
• I love your warped sense of humor - practically all the time... 99%
• I love when something I say makes you laugh
• I love that you call my underwear my drawers
• I love that I'm laughing while writing this
• I laugh whenever I hear you say "settle down"
• I love watching sports with you
• I love how you love watching me watch sports
• I love watching PTI with you
• I love the way your thick skin balances out my thin skin
• I love that you are patient. VERY patient
• I love that you've got the approval of my kids
• I love my Claddagh necklace
• I love the things you say in the middle of the night that you have no recollection of
• I love that you said you'll paint my toenails for me. really? you will?
• I love that I can tell you anything. wow, that's really good
• I love that you cook for me... all of it... most especially now I'm thinking BURGERS
• and I love that there's just so much more... and so much more to come
  

Present Tense Life

For years I have been seeking - journeying - searching... to find the way, any way to be able to live my life with a feeling of freedom. To be in the present tense, I like to think of it. It's been decades, really, and it continually seems to elude me. I've done all kinds of "work": therapy, keeping a journal, writing letters to the (many) perpetrators in my life (never sent), creating collages, other art projects, reading all I could get my hands on, painstakingly learning to discover my instincts and then listen to them. So many things I have done, worked on, for a very long time.

As long as I can remember, I have uttered two phrases more than perhaps any other when it has come to my search for life in the present-tense: "I was born too sensitive for this world", and "I'm so afraid too much has happened - maybe I can't fully live the life that was to have been my birthright because too much has been stripped away.

Recently, the connection between cancer cells and what may be lurking within my own cells continually comes to mind. With cancer cells, healthy "normal" cells are invaded by the vicious cancer and literally taken over. The cancer, once discovered, may be treatable - there's radiation, chemotherapy, other less common therapies - and it could possibly be eradicated, and life can go on. Of course there is the sad truth of the cancers that are found too late to save a person.

Then I think of the cells in a person who has been traumatized repeatedly from birth. Yes, from birth. I think the cell structure is different. Trust is stripped away if there was ever any there initially, and an invasive fear invades each cell - whatever is needed to survive is replaced in that cellular structure, given the basic human need above all else is survival itself. The constant (I once called it near-constant, however I realize now it is truly constant) surveillance that must take place... looking always for the next "attack" however real or imagined, there seems to be one at every turn. Those who have been stripped of the right to a LIFE at its onset will spend their days knowing - not thinking, but knowing - that Safe Is Never REALLY Safe.

I titled this "Present-Tense Life" because I am striving, working will all my might, to come to a place where I can live in the present. Where I am not wondering (or worse, expecting) if someone is about to come up behind me and smash the back of my head just because. If someone who has given me every - EVERY - reason, to know and to believe they are there for me and not leaving me - will, in fact, leave. If I can enter a store, a meeting, a gathering of friends, and ever truly relax. If I will ever really know what relaxing is, for that matter.

Oh, I've had moments, many of them, where life has felt good. Laughter, love, the kindness of strangers, the way the air smells on a beautiful spring day... plenty of moments when I feel optimistic. In fact, I write because I've no intention of giving up.

It's the lingering fears - sometimes looming so large I can see nothing else, and at times distant whispers that, though faint, I always hear - it is those very things that have me questioning just how fully I can be in a relationship with others. Is it fair to them when I am riddled with fears that have been in my cells for nearly a half-century now? Should I be attempting to "right the ship" on my own - yet knowing the very second I put that sentence down, that I am only at the place I have reached today because there is now someone in my life who stands by me no matter what.

I am keenly aware that what I have been through is not going to disappear - and with all the downsides, it is that very life experience itself that has created the sensitive, caring, and loving person I am (who, sadly, also can't help but feel desperate so often).

Is a morning going to dawn in my lifetime when I can smile even before opening my eyes because I am honestly, truly, living in the present? I can only pray for that, and continue the "work" I am doing today.

CHERISH THE JOURNEY

The early morning is so quiet and calm... that must be what I loved so much about it when the kids were small, as I would wake before them, sit with a cup of coffee and somehow attempt to absorb that calm before the day began in earnest. Those mornings helped me in more ways than I probably realize.

Here I sit today, this calm, quiet, beautiful winter morning, drinking my coffee in the peace all around me, praying for that peace to permeate me more fully. I notice the pink coffee mug I am drinking from, a gift from my sister Maryellen, and the words on it that read cherish the journey... wow. My first thought was 'let the journey begin' when it struck me that I am on the journey, have always been. It doesn't wait for us, this journey, it is there for us to notice and decide how we are going to live it.

So how is my journey going, I begin thinking to myself. Well, as I look upon the unseen path beneath me, there are many indicators of the anxiety that is well, ever-present with every step. I don't like seeing that, and as I spend some time thinking about it, I am keenly aware of the journey, of life, going on whether I am anxious or not. I wonder just how do I stop being anxious, and if it is really easy to simply relax, then why haven't I? Fear is something I know about, it's familiar. I know how to worry, I'm expert at it.

It is painful to acknowledge how much of this journey that is already behind me is veiled in angst. With all that concern, the anticipation of what might happen at any time, it is not very easy to live in the moment. The moments are not seen for what they are because I must be ever vigilant... this all may change in an instant, and I know that from my own vast experience. Valid as those experiences are, they are robbing me of the opportunity to do what my pink coffee mug is urging me to do.

As I taste the coffee, I can also taste the fear I feel just thinking of all this...

Damn...

I have to let go. (well, I don't, but it's where my freedom lies)
I'm not in charge of anyone's actions but my own.
That journey is unknown.
I don't like the unknown.
I'm on it anyway, we all are. (wait, this is just about me)
LIFE, truly living fully, awaits me.
The above sentence scares the crap out of me.
I want that LIFE.
I want to let go. Really.
I'm afraid to.

I am more afraid of not letting go.

"Thanks... Bye, Mom!"

We were just on the phone a little while ago. It was something she has certainly said to me many times, but this time it just came over the phone line and went straight to my heart. "Thanks" and "Bye, Mom!" were the words my youngest, Kerri, had just uttered. I was immediately struck with a deep sense of gratitude.

I am a mother to grown-ups. :)

I've wanted this for so long, it is part of my cellular make-up by now. Losing my own mother when I was twelve is where it all began. All of the things I went through from that age and on and not having mom there... I wanted so much to be a mom, but not just to have babies. I wanted to be there for my children as they grew into adults.

Well, now my kids are 27, 25, and 21. I am filled with so much thankfulness that I am here and available to my kids. Sure, I have plenty of my own unique "mom-isms" and I'm sure they roll their eyes a lot when I am talking to them... that's all part of the package.

That's okay with me. I plan to stick around and enjoy this new time of life, when I am, in fact, a mother to grown-ups.

They bless my life more than they could ever know in words.

Wait - what about the WEIGHT?

So I've been feeling a little sluggish lately. Stressed too. Eating too much maybe, and not always the right things. Not listening to my body, which apparently tells me when it's full. I've never heard that, I'm pretty sure. I find myself wondering what it is that has me feeling this way, and I have plenty of answers right at my fingertips. But if I don't pay attention to the REALLY BIG ONE, nothing else will really do much to change things.

I MUST take care of myself. Beginning with my weight. Okay, I've never had a weight problem, if I don't count the times I have lost over ten pounds too, too, fast and without trying. That's not today's issue. I have extra weight (not a lot, but enough) that is leaving me feeling weighed down (pun intended). It's too easy to just grab food instead of getting involved in more positive things. Of course to turn away from food altogether would only leave me with more problems, not less.

Moderation, that's it. As in all things - we are usually okay if we do things in moderation. I plan to set some moderate goals for myself, as the love handles I've developed aren't going to go away overnight, but neither are they going to disappear if I just think about it. So some action. Today is a rare sunny, beautiful day in New England for the end of January. I need to harness the opportunity to take a walk this afternoon, and begin some positive thinking. The walking will help the feeling sluggish, and the stress, and the feelings of depression that can creep in. Probably help take away this headache I have, too.

All these are some steps to take care of myself, something that, as I approach fifty this year, is about time I focus on. Everyone in my life will benefit. Especially me!

Roller Coaster

I hate roller coasters, always have. In the past few weeks, I've found myself on an emotional roller coaster, not the first one I've been on, and admittedly not the worst one, either. Most likely because I have a support person in my life I haven't had there before and what a difference. His name is Paul. Just to clarify, he's not my first husband, who was named Paul, just happens his name is Paul too.

Most of the time this roller coaster has been on the high side and it feels good. Very good in fact. Paul doesn't like roller coasters either, but we seem to be on a ride that neither of us wants to get off. So we smile and stay on, continually being surprised by the dips and turns.

Today, when I found myself feeling rather low, it was just a simple phone call and a hug over the phone from Paul and my day began to turn around. Oh I know - I've worked for a long time - years, really, to come to this place and I can't give Paul all of the credit. But I am so, so thankful to have him here in my life.

Eyes wide open, I'm staying on this ride.

Little Girl

My mom was buried on January 20th in 1973. Thirty-seven years ago, but it still feels very present to me. I still see the plot in the ground that was not-so-carefully hidden beneath the fake grass that day. All the assurances that I would see her again some day, or that she wasn't really gone, she was still with me... Though I have her in my heart, that young girl is still wondering WHEN she is going to see her.

My father was just not present. He really hadn't been, even before we lost Mom, but he DEFINITELY did not know how to deal with a 12-year-old who was standing at a cemetery on a dreary January day staring into a hole in the ground where they were going to put her mom. So he didn't.

I find myself furiously cleaning, feeling very angry inside, and letting it out on household cleaning products. Radio on loud, yelling at everyone and everything (on the inside - not saying a word outwardly). It's cathartic I guess, but my mom still isn't here.

Today the radio suddenly blares out lyrics from Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire "hey little girl is your daddy home, did he go away and leave you all alone..." and "sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul..."

I have lived 37 out of 49 years without her. I know how to do it, I have been doing it. But I don't WANT to. Yet I have no say about that. We don't know when we will lose someone, something, that we hold dear.

So as I force the vacuum into the rug a little harder, scrape the tile in the bathroom until my hands crack, yell at "someone out there" who took my mom, I need to remember to tell those that I love that they are precious to me RIGHT NOW.

Send someone a note, or better yet - give them a call, and let them know they are important to you and your life is different because they are in it. I hope you'll be glad you did.