Hi

It's hard to believe it's been 5 months since I last verbal spewed here...

I think of posting...  think of writing...  think of unburdening...  then I don't.

It's been a hard year but a good year, too.

I've been distanced from people I just couldn't have in my world for my own protection, I've made new friends, I've changed jobs (not as easy as it was in my 20's - far more scary as you get older and more aware of your "responsibilities")...  I've seen old relationships renewed and spent a year and some by myself just learning how to be alone again. 

It's been a hard year because growing and maturing is never easy...  being lonely isn't easy...  feeling isolated is never easy...  but then, it's been a good year because I've grown, I've matured, I've realized some more of my failings, I've learned that there's a difference between being alone and being lonely, and I'm more comfortable with me than I've probably ever been.

I still see some of those folks I distanced myself from in social media and I laugh at just how batshit crazy one is, think how very much I miss others, and feel content inside for the others who I know it was a good thing to get away from.

What's all this to say?  It's to say that I still have a lot to write here; I've missed it, but for now I'm content to just check in and say hi.

Universe Found

So I wrote a whole blog entry, not too terribly long, and the whole damned thing bollocks'd up and didn't save.

Damn.

Let's try it again and hopefully I can recreate it to some extent...

A couple of things kind of took me off guard today...

I'm 48 years old as of 2 weeks ago.  48!!  Wow.

I haven't blogged since May.  MAY!!  Boo.

And that's about it.

Oh.

And today the bailiffs, upon taking a woman into custody after her trial today and searching her, found a snake in her pocket.  A snake.  In her pocket.  In court.

That's about it.  Nothing huge.  Just random things that made me go "huh!".

Where I am today kind of caught up with me and made me go "huh!", too.

I'm alone.  For a long time.  And kind of digging it.

From April to roughly October, I was depressed.  Borderline suicidally.  Tried to deny it at first, telling myself I'd get better like I always do.  I'd work through it.  After all, I know what to do.  But by the first of June I realized I wasn't pulling out of it.  Drinking hard.  Crying hard.  Cutting off from everyone.

"I'm alone.  I have no one who loves me.  No one will ever be in love with me.  I've never actually had anyone truly in love with me.  I'll never find real love..."

The day I realized I was at the point that I could understand people who committ suicide, I realized it was time.  I'd been at that point many years ago and not long after I'd felt like that, I'd crossed the line from borderline to full-fledged.  So when I realized I understood, I also realized I wasn't coping like I usually can.  I wasn't getting better.  I was slipping further down.

"I'm alone!  SO alone!  I have NO one who loves me!  NO one will ever be in love with me!  I've never had anyone TRULY in love with me!  I'll NEVER find REAL love...!!"

There's a reason my mother called me Sarah Burnhardt as a child.

So I got help.

And here I am again.

Alone.  For a long time.  And kind of digging it.

And much like when I was totally open with Sparky when we talked of seeing other people and me saying I was ok with it for the time being but would eventually not be (that was a HYOOGE thing for me who bottles everything up and rarely tells how I'm feeling about something that personal), I have been very comfortably honest with boys who ask me out - not something I would ordinarily be - and feel totally at ease saying "I'm spending time alone with me right now, I'm not ready to step out at the moment, but thank you for wanting to.", something I would not have been able to do in the past.

And good on me.  'Cause I am a good woman.

So I stand back now and say "huh!" on this dreary, icy, icky day, that my universe is looking pretty good for the first time in a very long time.

Peace.

Fear and loathing in Las Madre

I visited one of my oldest friends and her husband the weekend before Christmas...  it was such a good weekend; over far too quickly, naturally, and during the course of the weekend, we discussed some family issues of mine.

Pertaining to my mother.  Who I love.  But who I simply don't like sometimes.

And to all my loved ones near and far I say now, stop reading because this is supposed to be a place I can divest myself of every manner of thought and emotion, good or bad, and there may be content here that will not sit well.  If you keep reading and there is an issue with anything I say, then I only ask that it isn't buried and not talked about as has been the way all too often.

To everyone else, this will ramble and may never be cohesive.  The end.

So to begin...  my grandparents, as I've blogged about, were my world...  world... when I was young.  Summers spent with them are pretty much the sole source of the majority of my happy childhood memories.

My gramma died of kidney failure in 1992.  I was crushed.  I stayed by her bed for the last three days of her life, giving her ice chips, wiping her brow, cleaning her whenever she soiled...  I had a friend who said "Why did you do that?  Why didn't you let the nurses care for her?"

Um.  What?  Why would I let a total stranger do that...?  I did it because...  well...  because.  Because what else WOULD I do. 

It's what you do when you love another soul; I held her hand when she left this world, whispering words of love and devotion in her ear as I lay my head next to hers on her pillow...

And then I went into a clinical depression.

I was there when my best friend, Mama Lois, died of breast cancer at the age of 34 a few months later, too.  Held her hand and her brother's hand hands as the last breath left her, and hugged him while sobbed.  Broke my heart in a million pieces and pushed me deeper into the black hole.

But it's what you do.

And I digress... 

My granddad died twenty plus years after my gramma.  He remarried about a year after she died, a very nice lady he and my gramma had known, but he pined for my gramma and missed and mourned her until the day he died.  They'd been married for over four decades.

My dad was - and this will sound all melodramatic but, in reality, it's just the facts...  Jack - an absent father at best.

Consciously, it didn't bother me - he always sent THE greatest birthday gifts and he worked for the ATF and as a secret service agent under President Ford...  what wasn't to love and wallow around in as a teen with not one shred of "cool" going for her when she moved to live with her dad in 1980 - but unconsciously I know I've based a lifetime of "please-love-me" choices on that fact and they've all been poor ones.

So.  To see devoted love like my grandparents was a lesson.  Did it set the bar too high?  Perhaps.  But to have them shower that same love on me my whole life? 

Another lesson in how it's done. 

To have one man in my life who was ALWAYS my supporter and loved me wholly until the day he died? 

Again.  A lesson.

And both reasons I absolutely believe in the power of forgiveness and all it encompasses. 

It's beyond hard to forgive someone when they hurt you.  Somehow I was blessed enough in my early 20's to learn I didn't want to go through my life discarding friends or family, cutting them from my life forever, unless they were truly and irrevocably unredeemable. 

So far, my daughter's dad - despite plenty of people who have done plenty of TRULY awful things to me and mine, and even despite the fact that my own father was not someone I EVER recall seeing before the age of 15 when my mother shipped me off to live with him, is the only one I've never been able to truly forgive.  And frankly, if he fell down on his knees and begged our daughter's forgiveness for being such a money-grubbing, tight ass, emotionless, unthinking, uncaring asshole to her her whole life (and then backed it up), I'd probably forgive him, too.

Because to me it's about awareness.  Self-awareness of yourself, and your affect on the world around you...  and if you are aware you have behaved badly and you are genuinely remorseful...

Well then, we have something to build on.

If you are unaware, or aware and stubborn or insincere about your mea culpa, piss off.

About a year after my younger brother was killed in a wreck a month after graduation and a month before his 18th birthday, my dad and I met for lunch and talked.  He was remorseful.  And, more than that, apologetic that he hadn't tried harder as I was growing up, acknowleging that as the adult it was his "job".

LOTTA bridge repair happened there, I assure you.

Navy apologized while saying he was sorry for him and how he couldn't say he was a good person or tried.  Insincere.  Self-centered.  Self-involved.  Nice words, but piss off.

So.

Now the question is...  am I capable of letting go of a fluctuating dislike with my own mother and forgive her?

There are a lot of reasons I don't like her as a person sometimes.  Most notably that she's controlling and derisive of her children, all of us well into our adulthoods, when things don't go precisely how she thinks they should or she wants them to.  To the point that she will get pissed and then gives us the stiff-spine, silent treatment.  When we were children, we pandered and ingratiated ourselves to try to curry a return of favor.  As teens we rebelled.  As adults, we see it for what it is and for what it's done to us in terms of our need to please others to our own detriment - at least I and one of my siblings has...  the other I'm not sure about.  Anyway, combine all that in her with what we now think could be manic depression or bi-polarism? 

You've got one helluva scary childhood.  Of course WE didn't know it wasn't normal.  Scary was normal.  I even found out as an adult that my step-dad was shocked and uncomfortable with her treatment of me when they were married (I was between the ages of roughly 7 and 15), hinting it was inappropriate and even abusive.

Anyway, the story we talked about when I visited my Richmond friends pertains to Mother and goes something like this...  9 years ago my mother accused my grandfather of molesting her when she was young.  At the time of the accusation, he was 81, she was 59.

He was her step father.  She never liked him.  A fact that I didn't know until I was in my 20's with my first child.  But she wouldn't tell me why.  And it wasn't until over a decade later that I finally "figured it out".

And here's the caveat.

She is the sole person responsible for fostering the genuinely close, loving, devoted bonds I had with my grandparents.  Both of them.  Including during the 13 years after my grandmother's death and prior to her accusation of my granddad.

Now here's the thing.  I know about all the science and research, but when it happens to you, you still can't wrap your head around it...

Why wasn't I molested?

Why would she let me be with him/them?

Why wouldn't she have protected me by keeping me away?

And after each of those questions is the echo "...  if it's true?"

There's another layer to this story that adds to why she says she chose to finally "let the cat out of the bag"...

There was another Loved One in our world who made the same allegation after mother did.  But when it was made, mother flatly said to me, "Oooh, you know Loved One, if you cut your finger, they cut off their arm."

Sound like someone telling a true story?  Didn't to me.  Took me aback.

But there it was - and shortly after that, my mother used Loved One's accusation as a spring-board of sorts to write a letter to my grandfather, and letters to his wife and HER children, saying that while she had kept her own molestation private all those years, Loved One's accusation was intolerable and therefore she had to bring it all out in the open and my granddad's wife and her family best be aware so he didn't molest any children in THAT family.

Now here's the thing.

I want to believe my mother.  But I wanted to believe my grandfather, too.

So.

Over the last 9 years it has been the pink elephant in the room in my family.

Especially when she got angry at me for not "taking her side" as others in my family had.

And I respected that they did and I didn't blame them - I knew why they did and I could never question their stance.  But they - at least as far as I know - never got angry with me for not joining in.

And the thing that pissed me off most and still sits like a giant marble stone on my chest?

She did what she's done my whole fucking life.  She was pissed at me but wouldn't say a word.  Wouldn't talk to me about it.  Wouldn't discuss it.  Wouldn't say "I'm mad and I'm hurt." and let me then respond," I know you are and I'm so very sorry.

And why, you might ask, would I NOT "take my mother's side"?

That's not simple to answer...

It's because she fostered such a close relationship for my granddad and me.  It's because she never kept me from them.  It's because she sent me to them for weeks at a time in summers, unattended.  It's because after she found out he intended to cut her from his will, she started sending him Christmas cards.  It's because when Loved One made the same accusation, she discounted it.  It's because...  I didn't want to take either side.  Believe either person or disbelieve either person.

So what I'm left with is sometimes not liking my own mother.  For putting me in this position, although that I can forgive/forget - it's really just a blip...  more than that, for being angry with me that I didn't take a side after 40 years of my life with one reality.  For being angry with me that I wouldn't turn my back on him.

That, Friends, is unattractive in anyone - but when it's your own mother...

Anyway...  this has all been a process...  as I said in another blog entry fromt his week...  I've had a crushing weight on me and I was going to fine-tune my counseling...  I thought fine-tuning with the shrink was in order but, frankly, 3 blogs in as many days has helped me mentally more than I ever would have imagined it might...  and in my universe, voyages of self-discovery are primo.

Working my way back up...

Don't say "There's still time..."
Or "Maybe next time..."
Because there's also the concept of "It's too late."

Fuckin'fuck.  I'm doomed.

I believe it's out there.  I trust it's out there.  But I am convinced I am the only person in the world who it isn't true for.

I've opened the soft mooshy part with the last two - HYOOOOGE step on my part - to varying degrees...  one I was just beginning to let it show, the other, I was full on invested and even bought a deeply emotional V-day card which I haven't done in easily 20 years...

Torpedo'd.  The bothuvems.

I feel young.  Ish.  I know I'm 47, not 87. 

Head:

"There's still time to find it..."

"Maybe next time will be it..."

Heart:

"Fuckin'fuck.  I'm doomed.  It's too late."

Welcome to my universe.

Righting My Universe

So.  What do you do when your universe is so overwhelming you feel like you have been pinned by something so huge you can't even get an arm under you, much less breath?

Exactly what my mama told me when I was young; grab your bootstraps, Bessie, and keep walking.

Just like I always have.

Until now.  Now I'm having a hard time climbing back up for the first time in a decade and a half.

A handful of life changes over the last 6 months - death, job, relationship, etc...  none big unto themselves but combined, too much.

Seeing a shrink is something I did when I was clinically depressed and a raging fucktard of a bitch for all those years; his diagnosis when we finished?  "You're...", "Normal?", I said.

"No.  What passes for normal these days (and that was 15ish years ago so now "normal's" even less normal) scares the hell out of me.  I prefer the term 'healthy'."

Healthy.  I liked that.  And I've worn it as a badge since; very proud of overcoming who I was.  Until now.  Now I'm not feeling so healthy. 

And I'm thinking a fine tuning at the shrink might be just the thing.

So I called.  He answered.  His voice slapped me back 15 years and I instantly felt something "good" inside.  I smiled and we talked and he remembered me and details about me.  Damn.  I am really feeling some hope just welling up in me like some emotional Pavlovian response.  Is he taking new patients??

"I only work with nursing home patients now, I don't do any out-patient."  It's been 15 years, after all, and he wasn't a spring chicken when I was seeing him.

I burst into tears.  Yep.  Fine tuning, indeed.

So in no particular order, here are the things I'm struggling with in the last 6ish months that have come to a screaming crescendo recently...

My granddad, the only constant male in my whole life, died.  He and my grandmother were like parents to me and when she died in '92, it nearly killed me, driving me into depression that peaked with a suicidal pinnacle roughly 7 years later.  7 years is a long time to be depressed, especially when it steadily worsens that whole time.  Doc Kyle was amazing and I trust him, literally, with my life.  Now he's gone.

My love life in its entirety is a hot mess.  All marriages for the wrong reasons, though two amazing kids to show for it, and two serious relationships fallen to dust because I was committed and they weren't.  And they were damaged.  Which evidently I'm drawn to.  But now, all gone.

And then there's Sparky.  More than 6 months ago but right now in the midst of what I have going down I miss his guidance and support.  Never made it to serious with him but enjoyed a couple of years of a friendship that was more genuine and supportive than any I'd had with a male, so that when it moved to intimate it was as natural and warm and good feeling as anything I'd ever had and I trusted him like no one I ever had...  until it was incinerated.  Suckass part?  He incinerated it and the hurt he felt was so much that he couldn't let me apologize or try to make amends, yet I still miss him - that person he was before the lava flow.

Then my job life...  now also a hot mess because I have a great position with wonderful people and a boss who is extraordinarily flexible in anything I ask of him...  and I hate it.  Hate what I do, hate that I'm bored, hate that the office politics I deal with are such that I feel like I don't belong and never have - a first in my work universe.  Hate.  My boss knows I'm looking and he's been wonderful about it, references, etc., but I am freaking out because I'm not finding anything and I don't feel like it's right to ask him to wait in definitely.  And it'll soon be gone.

Let's see...  what else...  then there's my boot camp business...  I work a full time job and from last summer through the end of the year, I held 1 hour each A.M. and P.M. classes 3 days per week.  This didn't include time spent researching and then working up workouts for fun and maximum results.  It was killing me.  So in January, I scaled back to single evening class, 3 days a week.  It helped immensely but now I've reached burnout after two years of steady boot camp/p.t. learning/certifiying/instructing and I don't want to do it for a while.  I need time to catch my breath personally and professionally, and I need time to crank out some REAL marketing.  And I can't.  I don't have time.  I almost want it gone.

My family...  mother, brother, sister-in-law & nieces in Maryland, father in Lynchburg...  none doing much to stay a part of my life even when I try staying in theirs because they're wrapped in their own - yep, even leaving me to founder when my granddad died...  all effectively gone.

Then, my daughter is losing the relationship she's in which affords her a decent guy - prone to bouts of selfishness and raging assholeyness, but a decent guy overall - who she treats like a lackey and who has had it almost up to *here* with her narcissistic, self-centered, self-involved view and explosive temper being aimed at him and their boys (which personally I feel he should've thought about BEFORE knocking her up...  but there ya go.).  That I don't blame him, is the bad part.

My son.  My son is my bright spot.  He works hard, he thinks of those around him.  He's an all-around good kid and a burgeoning great man.  Shining star.

Then my ex, Navy.  Sending me texts saying I should shut my storm windows because it'll be cold, or asking if I want to see his new big delivery truck, or if I might one day some time want to have lunch, or the best one...  that he was sorry what he'd put me through and then spending the rest of the message saying he was sorry for us and sorry for him and how he didn't feel like he could say he was a good person.  Translation:  I read your blog and in black and white I realize I might've been a blazing asshole but feel sorry for me and tell me it's ok.  I heard Sparky's voice telling me not to respond, but I did, and I was polite - I had love for him still - and I told him it was ok, it was over and I was fine...  s'all good.

Then one Sunday I text him in church (he's A/V for the church so he's listening to the same sermon on broken relationships I am) to tell him as I'm listening and realizing things...  that he wasn't the only one to ruin us...  that I realized I was so busy playing the victim that I never acknowleged that I helped swamp the boat and I was sorry.  I felt like it was the right thing to do.

I know if Sparky were here, he'd just tell me "Yeauh, well, what did you expect to happen?  If you give us (men) a bone, we'll jump.  Don't give us the bone."

I realize I gave the bone, so when Navy texts saying how he'll always love me and how a church member singing the Whitney Houston/Dolly Parton song of the same name got him misty eyed and how he'd thought of me/us all that morning, and how when the music leader's husband straightened her mic he almost "broke down".  Ok, THAT was a little overboard but since I didn't feel that old heart tug or sick feeling when I read it, I thought it was nice.  That we'd reached detente.

SideBar:  Have I ever mentioned how FUCKING gullible I am.

Less than two weeks later, more Naval douchebaggery.

A picture of his baby-mama's hand (the baby-mama who kept his daughter from him for 21 years and then left all her OTHER children for him), wearing his dead mother's engagement ring (the dead mother I adored and baby-mama never knew), crossed with his in a soft focus FB "announcement" to the world of their impending nuptials.

You fucking fuck.  I blasted him via text and told him never reach out again.  Yes, I was furious that he didn't even have the balls - as usual - to give me a heads up.  Furious that after 5 years of 100% support, I wasn't enough, but this woman with no regard for her own children was his soul mate.  Furious that I tried to make him feel better about his shitty treatment.  Furious that he'd reached out and I'd fallen for it. 

But mostly, I was furious with myself and with where I was in my own life.  That was the true sticker.

Which brings us back to me not being able to climb out from under this crusher this time.

After Navy and my brief toe-dip with Sparky, I finally started dating again; a nice, stable, quiet guy.  This is good.  We see each other a few times a month, live in our own spaces, and that suits because after the marriage debacles and then 5 years with Navy, I NEVER wanted to get married again.  But then, time healed some wounds and I realized that even if I never marry again, I'd be ok to be in a relationship with someone who I can move towards common goals with (something I've never had as a prerequisite before in life - I know, I know...  but I was damaged and in need of "love", what can I say?  I do feel like that it's a consideration for me now is a positive sign I'm still evolving...); someone I can plan with and be with and share with and learn with.  Someone I love looking at sleeping, who fixes me breakfast, who I can stay in and cuddle with when the skies are gray, who will put an arm on the back of my chair when we're spectating, who'll let me put an arm through his while walking & will clamp down with his arm because he wants to keep my hand just where it is, someone I have no hesitation saying I'm sorry to and who I know has no hesitation saying it, genuinely, to me and who will have my back with the same level of committment that I bring to them...

And almost two years later, we part company because he can't and won't commit to anyone again he says.  His marriage and horrid divorce ruined him and he realized he didn't want "anyone telling [him] what to do.".  WTF?!  Yeauh, THAT wasn't me anyway so I truly got the shit knocked out of me when he said that.

He most assuredly did not have my back.

And that is the true nail in the coffin of my little black place right now.  It's been months of emotional pounding but I was taking it and bobbing along the ocean of life, recovering after each swell.

But this last swell...  the one that's swamped me?  It's that I'm 47 years old, I have family I love but have no close relationships with, the last of my familial and male stability died with my granddad, I have a string of romantic failures behind me, I'm in a job change in a time in life no one should be, I'm alone again (which is not the problematic part) after thinking I finally got it right (which IS the problematic part since clearly I've gotten it wrong YET again), and I'm feeling like I have no time left to turn any of these setbacks around.

And now, my psyche has reached the point that it has my heart terrified that at this age, not only am I not going to find a suitable job, but that I may not be able to handle my daughter's next huge crisis, that I may never get the closeness of family that I try to give, and that  if I open my soft 8th grade innards one more time and I either don't find anyone willing to give that back to the same level I am, or if I do it and they give enough to hook me and then torch me again...  that I just might die.

So.  I'm feeling around for my bootstraps right now and struggling to come to terms with the things I know I have to... 

I can't make things right with the people I want to make them right with if they don't want to allow me that and I have to accept it.  I can't make things right for my daughter because she has to do it, and I have to accept it.  I can't make my family any closer just because I repeatedly reach out or just because I wish we were, and I have to accept it.  I have another failed relationship behind me and I have to accept it.  I have a job change happening whether I want it or not and I have to accept it.  And I may very well never find that one soul who will bring the level of committment I want to give, who will give me what I give them to the same degree I give it, or who will show me their soft, inner, squishy part so that I feel like I can let down the shield one more time.  And I have to accept it.

So.

In my universe, though letting this all out here has helped a bit, a fine tune is clearly in order.  And I'm dialing now.

Let's Dance

I held my private investigator's license some years ago.  Unfortunately, it was the wrong time in my life to have it because I didn't have the contacts I needed, but it was something I wanted and I did it.

There's a reason I did, too.  I'm nosey.  And patient.  And methodical.  I don't mind sitting for hours, looking up information or watching someone forever, waiting for the slip up. 

Because everyone does.  Eventually.

When my network engineer/I.T. second husband, now ex, was sexting with a woman in another state - back in the mid-90's when home computers were not as plentiful as they are now and AOL was pretty much THE on line gathering place - I suspected and then confirmed the fact when I cracked his email password.  Not once, but twice.

When my third husband, now ex, was stealing my kids' Christmas money and using it to buy meth and then replacing it before I found out - I found out.  Seeing the money gone.  Keeping my silence.  Watching.  Waiting.

When you want to know something that someone doesn't want to tell you...  best way to find out?  Shut up.  Listen.  Let it go.  It will come out.

It always comes out.

It worked that way with my mother.  When my daughter was born, 27 years ago, my mother divulged that she didn't like my grandfather; her step-father since she was 6 or so - something I'd NEVER sensed in my whole life (I'm absolutely naive, but never thought I was obtuse so really don't think there was ever an indication a child would pick up on). Why, I asked.  She never would tell me.  Over the years I learned that at least part of it was because she was devastated when my grandmother divorced my cheating, Navy-sailor-with-a-girl-in-every-port biological grandfather.  She always wished and hoped they would get back together.  That her father would come back.  And thus ensued a life-long abandonment personality problem for her, and a life-long dislike of the man who took her father's place.

But that wasn't all of it.  What then?  Tell me, mom?  Why don't you like Baba?  Why do you hate him? 

She never would tell me; only saying years later that she didn't want to affect the way I felt about him.  Which, of course, just spawned more questions from me.

Then, I didn't know to wait.  But it wasn't long before I did.

And so I waited.

7 years ago it came out.  It took 20 years and some gentle, occasional prods, but it came out.

He'd sexually molested her, she said.

I was 40 years old.  She'd always encouraged, even fostered, a very close relationship between me and BOTH my grandparents.  She'd left me with them for periods of time during summer breaks.  They were like parents to me.  He was the ONLY man who had ever been a constant in my life, including my father and the step-father who was as like a father as any could be and who I called Daddy.

And she wanted me to turn my back and walk away from him.  82 years old, in poor health, and more than that, there for me with love, support and encouragement since as far back as I could remember. My brother and sister did.  Never looked back, either.  They had no other choice, I don't think - but even as I say that I can't comprehend it.  We choose the stands we make and to do it whether it's personally costly or not is the right thing to do.  I stood with my grandfather because I felt like it was right.

There were reasons they did, I'm sure, not the least of which I thought might be tied to the fact that I was sent to live with my father by my mother when I was 15.  I "made it out".  They didn't.  And they couldn't do anything other than back my mother up.  I understood. 

But it hurt terribly.  It drove a wedge into our entire family.  Because they walked away.  Because I wouldn't.  Couldn't. 

My sister-in-law understood to some extent.  She understood that with all the abandonment I'd had in my life, he was the one person who hadn't.  She understood that after a life-time of my granddad loving me, of my mother waiting until I was 40 to "tell the truth", of him being there my whole life, I couldn't walk away.

And finally, after 10 years of mental and physical misery and emotional devastation, the last 7 of which were a slow decline into the horror of Alzheimer's for a man with a masters in electrical engineering and a doctorate in education, he died last September.

And I was sooooo angry.

Angry that he was alone except for me and his wife's family.

Angry that I was alone except for my son and my granddad's wife's family.  Angry not that I had to handle the tanglible things alone...  but that I had to handle the emotional things alone. 

I told them he was gone after he was buried.  His wishes.  Though I'd have done it anyway.  False platitudes or any other emotions beyond sincere sympathy would have sent me completely over the edge.

My sister-in-law sent sympathy for me.  My sister did, too, through text.  My brother was silent.  But that's nothing new.

My mother, though.

My mother called and left a voicemail.  Terse.  Angry sounding.  Saying all the "right" things.  But in a way that made every syllable a lie.  And made me more resentful and angry.  And let me know that I was right not to have told her/them.

I've waited to blog it.  If I haven't learned anything I've learned to wait. 

I am, after all, the Queen of Compartmentalization.  Wall it away and look at it later when it doesn't evoke the same level of emotion.

So I waited.

Now I can say what I haven't except to a couple of very trusted people.

I've never known what to believe...  my mother who, in her younger years before my brother and sister, was an amazing mom...  I always felt protected and loved with her.  After marriages 2 and 3, not so much.  After her third, she lost it.  Depression so deep she couldn't get out of bed.  So I cared for my brother and sister like she should have.  And learned for the first time in my life to truly resent my mother.  The selfish side of her that I was left with in the wake of her third divorce.

Because of all of that, I always felt like a parent to my brother and sister, rather than their sibling.  Which was ok.  Until all of this. 

When they turned their backs on my granddad, it truly felt like they'd turned their backs on me.  I didn't blame them.  I understood why.  But Jesus, Mary and Joseph it fucking crushed me.

Within the year after my mother and siblings turned their backs on my granddad, he mentioned on one of my visits (he lived 3 hours away, irrelevant), that he intended to cut them out of his estate.  Shortly thereafter, on a visit to my mother (5 hours away, also irrelevant), she asked if he had cut her and them out of his will.  I told her I didn't know.  It made me angry that she asked me; put me in a shitty position, put me on the spot.  Then, some months later, my sister and I were talking and she commented asking essentially the same thing...  and I told her.  That he'd mentioned it.  But that I had no idea if he'd followed through.  It made me angry my mother put me in that position asking so I said I didn't know, but my sister was another matter; I trust her and love her so I told her.

A few months later, at my Christmas visit to my granddad, he mentioned he'd gotten a card from my mother.  The first contact in over 2 years.

A message addressing her accusations?  A letter damning him?

Nope.

A Christmas card.  Seriously.  A Christmas card.

::blinkblink::  What the FUCK?!

More followed over the years.  Every one made me angrier and more resentful towards my mother than I already had been.  Because yes, I felt like it was monetarily motivated. 

And then, years of physical, mental and emotional agony for him later, he finally died.

And then my mother's angry sounding message.  Which made me angry.  Jesus, the circle is vicious.

And in the 7 months since he died?

I've pushed it away.  My mother has returned to "normal".  Calling.  Wanting to spend time.  Wanting to be close.

At first I resisted.  I was sooo fucking raw.

Now, not so much.  In my universe, I've had enough time to begin to heal and to let it go.  Mostly.  Enough so I can return her calls and talk with genuine affection to her.  I had to.  If I didn't want to let it all eat me alive inside, I had to.  For my OWN sake and sense of well-being, I had to. 

Because besides learning to wait and watch in this life, I've learned that I have to forgive and move on.  Not forget, I don't forget.  It makes me smarter.  But I can forgive and move on so that I am not eaten with the negative emotion that comes with hurt.

And if 7 months has let me heal this much, then I know I'll heal as totally as is humanly possible in time.

Because you see, in my universe, I've learned to dance.  And wait.  And watch.  Just ask my friend Ericka.

Smoke and Irony, No Mirrors

It took me until I was 46 years old.  And amusingly enough, it really WAS what I'd used as my excuse all those years.

Mind over matter.

I quit smoking.  

August 3, 2011.

I started when I was 15.  SOLELY to fit in.  The cool girl, Louise, crazy beautiful dark read hair, teeny tiny waist, and a pear shaped bottom that all the boys loved to see encased in red tab Levis, smoked - as did other hoodlums I was running around with then - and if cool girl Louise was going to smoke and offer me a Marlboro Red, then by-God, I was gonna take it and smoke it just like the big dogs...  I'd fit right in then, right?

I still distinctly remember thinking "Oh dear God, this shit HURTS!" when the first drag I inhaled made its rough brick way down my throat...  and yet I still kept at it.  George Carlin was right, we should age backwards...  God, what great sense it would make that we should know more as kids and less as adults! 

Anyway...  I'd been participating in Boot Camp Challenge (I'm now proud to say that after months of grueling and overwhelming studying and final testing, I'm a certified personal trainer and certified BCC trainer and run morning and evening boot camps as well as my "day job") since April 2011 and one morning, running the quad, I thought, "Why the hell am I doing this to myself?"

You see, I'd been told a decade earlier while in the throes of a bout of pneumonia that I had the beginnings of emphysema but that since I smoked so little it'd be fine if I quit because while our lungs will never repair the damage done, they will stretch to accommodate.  What does that mean for someone like me?  It means the QUEEN of fooling herself will "quit" and then when she feels "stressed", or is out with friends for drinks, or it's Tuesday...  she will think, "I don't smoke much, it's ok."  

I swear I'm not that stupid, folks.

Anyway, there I was, running the quad, and not really having a horrible time of it but still feeling like I was struggling 4 months after I'd begun BCC and my endurance was higher than it's maybe ever been and I thought, "Why am I doing this to myself...  I could have so much MORE endurance."

And that was it.  I haven't touched another one since.  

I've wanted to a couple of times.  Even dreamed about it once a couple of months ago when my granddad died and I wanted to curl up and never get back up.  But I was done with it.

And that's where the smoke comes in rather than leaving.

Everything's a game.  I don't care HOW enlightened you are, how smart you are, how much you DON'T "play the game".  You still play the game.

She isn't calling and she's spending too much time with her friends out drinking?  I'll post a pic on FB of me with a group hugging a hottie.

He hasn't said he's sorry that he got too drunk and pissed in mom's potted plant?  I'll cut him off until he does.

I said something really shitty to her in a fight and she told me to get out, I won't call for days and let her make the first move since I'm pissed she called me on my shit.

I was really crappy to him at my mother's because my mother was being a bitch and I felt 12 years old again but he should say he's sorry because he got tired of MY shit and went home rather than stay over; I'm going to disappear and he can just come find me.

I've heard ALL of these before, and more, from men and women friends.  No one's immune.  No one DOESN'T play a game of some sort.

Maybe you've been walked on before so you pony up balls to the next guy even though he's been nothing but nice just to prove you can't be walked on again...  maybe your last 3 girlfriend's cheated on you so you cheat on your new one to "beat her to the punch".  You don't have to be conscious of the game to play it.

So.

This all hits me when I get a text from 30.  You remember her - "Aahh, fuck'im, what he doesn't know won't hurt him!" from the I-could-tell-him-a-lie-but-I-don't-want-to-be-that-person blog - saying the guy she's been seeing for a month has totally backed away and what should she do?

Now let me say that she's in a very different place now than she was.  She's still very looks-oriented...  Regular Joe with a paunch?  Hells to the no.  Tyson Beckford?  Even if he were a flaming user-asshole?  With fucking BELLS on.

But before it was the younger the better, the more committment-phobe the better - the goal was no attachments, take me out in $tyle and $pend to make things happen, wanna sleep over?  Time to get out!

Now, she's been single for about 8 years and her priorities have finally changed.  Now she's looking for that relationship.  That bond.  That trust.  That closeness.  That knowledge that someone will catch her when she falls and she'll do anything to catch them when they fall if she can.

Now THAT is a girl I can hang with.

So fine...  she's met a guy, Single Dad, with two boys her boys' age, they've been going out for about a month and she got butt-hurt about something he jokingly said about her being allowed to flirt with one guy at the holiday parade and she just had to bring him a picture so he'd know whether to be jealous.  She totally focuses on the idea that he doesn't like her like she likes him and why not and what did she do and how come and what can she do to make it better and why doesn't he like her like that...

ALL through text.  Now I'll confess I'm a serial texter...  but NOT for serious shit like this.  SOOO much gets lost and we ALL damned well know that!  But she texts him all of this.  Bombards him.

So what's Single Dad do?  Shuts down.  She's coming across desperate and clingy and he's just inked his divorce papers and only a year separated, is NOT ready for that yet.

So yesterday I get the text from 30 that, despite my counseling to give him some breathing room, she wonders if she should text him and tell him she misses him?

ARRRGH!!  What?!  I already saiiiiid...

::sigh::

"No.  Silence.  Put the phone down.  He needs to miss YOU."

"Oh fuck, they never do!"

"I mean it.  Never forget, you are amazing.  If they don't, then they're not the right one."

"But sometimes they need to know they're missed - right?  What if he just needs to hear it?  What if I need to show I'm the right one?"

Shit.  Seriously.  She's pretty and smart and funny, has a good job, nice car, her own home, she's thin, has beautiful clothes...  seriously, she has it ALL...  how in GOD's name can she be THAT insecure about herself.

::sigh::

"You already know that answer.  You've shown him how you feel, and told him."

"True.  Ok.  I won't.  Little Boy and I will be watching the Salem parade at the office Friday night if you're around."  

"Sounds good"

8 hours later she texts again... 

"So I deleted SD's number today so I wouldn't be tempted and he just texted me and said he misses me!!  :)"

"Not as dumb as I look."

Only I AM dumb as I look.  Two years ago I'd've been dangling from the same damned string.  But I had the dumb luck to lean on someone who walked me through unscathed.  Well.  Almost unscathed; Navy left a few scars.  :)  But they gave me superb advice and they repeatedly told me I was a good woman and had more value than I was giving myself credit for.

All I did was turn that towards 30.  

And I gave her the advice I was given, too...

"Ok.  Since he said he missed me...  and I told him I missed him...  can I ask him out???  Or see if I'll see him again??"

"Nope.  Silence.  You told him you miss him.  He needs to make the next move.  He backed away because he felt pressured.  Let him come back to you now."

Same advice I was given two years ago.  And it was spot on.  "Silence.  It will kill them.  They'll show up at your door, I swear."  They need the space but it will kill them and they'll show up at your door.  Maybe not literally, but they will. 

Yep.  spot on.  And I passed the game right along to her.

Now the thing is - though I see that kind of maneuver as a game, it's reality and non-game, too.  She was bombarding him and he was spooked and he needed the space.  Like a startled cat, he came back slowly, checking the room for barking dogs.

Today I get the text that starts me thinking of The Game again... 

"Single Dad asked to see me again.  :)  You rock!!!  xoxoxox"

Yep.  

"Unfortunately, I had a very good teacher.  Maybe I'll tell you about it some time."

She "wins", I helped a friend, she's maybe gotten a little self-confidence boost from it...

Match, set, game.

So how does 16 months of non-smoking combine with that to bring me to Smoke, Irony, No Mirrors...

Well...

All games aside; it's a mindset.  Like quitting ciggies.  Decide there won't be mirrors.  Speak what's in your heart and don't be afraid to. 

If you can't trust the person on the other end to understand then you need to take a look at one of you. 

Either yourself for being too afraid to speak.  Or them if your words would change their perception of you.

I've been too afraid to speak so many times in my life and only a few times have I not regretted it.  More often, I've lived with the knowlege that had I, things would have been better.

So I give.  Uncle.  I don't want to be afraid to speak any more.  I've lost too much in this life because I have been.

Because I've learned in my universe that submission, in many arenas, is a far better thing than pride and much more rewarding.  No smoke.  No mirrors.