Family – Page 2 – Brilliant Distraction

Just another hopeful cynic?

What happens when you are an optimist who sees the worst and the best in people? Do you get jaded? Do you get frustrated and resentful? Do you just figure their bad day is not connected to you? They are having a bad day and that’s okay because things are generally all good? Are you past your nonjudgmental phase, resigned to the fact that everyone must have sufficient baggage to sink a battleship?

I think at one time or another I have felt all of these things more or less simultaneously. Is this a study in contradictions or just an understanding of simple human nature? Are we not some balance of both tendencies, depending the day, hour, or minute? Are we convinced the next great thing/relationship/job is out there for the taking? Or are resigned to the fact there is no great thing or it will turn to shit or sabotage anyway and why bother? I think this is where we make up our mind and when we flip the coin and predict, it determines our overall general inclination. And I think that is what makes me somewhat optimistic. I know when I see the next great thing, I go out and grab it. Because its amazing. Because it’s there. A Scot once said to me “what’s meant for you won’t go by you” (I am paraphrasing this sentiment, this Scottish saying). I believe it’s there because I have seen it and it has been tangible and the sensation of its possession is palpable; I am cynical with the whole carpe diem thing, however: I am pretty convinced I may not see anything like it again. Nothing this good happens twice.

Yep, I am just another hopeful cynic….

Back after extended holiday…

Did everyone have a good holiday? Or at least a decent one? Was it hard with family?

I know I have not blogged in a week. I was all ready to post a few updates and new topics last weekend and I had the worst headache. Ugh. After missing two days of work, I started to feel better and started to think about a few things I would like to address here.

Out of respect to my last relationship, I promised no more talk of that. I learned something about that and writing about a current relationship. I have so much to share, that I am not too worried if the significant other wants me to keep our relationship private and white anonymous, wants me to keep it all together off the internet. That was my last lesson learned. I will bring that with me going forward. I will still talk about the lessons learned, the heart ache of every good and bad relationship. It just may not be the one I happen to be in at the time. It will be up to that person and with utmost respect, I will follow his lead to determine where the content goes.

I want to hear from other bloggers who write non fiction narrative and memoir like posts. Is it hard to write that content and keep people out of the limelight? I thought I was writing anonymously, but it can be a bit peculiar when you see yourself online, I am sure, even when no one else knows it’s you, except perhaps close family and friends. Please comment and share with me your experiences regarding real life events and expressing them here for all to see.

I look forward to hearing your comments and could definitely use the feed back!

Thanksgiving

I want to tell you something really fantastic about Thanksgiving. Something that makes us all inspired. Something about our gratitude and good fortune when we eat our turkey and other food in excess. Some of us watch football all day. I don’t, but hey, there it is, a great day off to eat a ton and watch football in the middle of the week. I absolutely know, at the least, I have the privilege of good fortune and good food and a roof over my head during m post divorce Hell (five years to be exact, six if you count when I had to leave my home). I know friends and family have helped immensely. And that’s an incredible start to my Thanksgiving story.

It is in those simple times in my life that I asked for help and received it with unconditional love that i am most humble and grateful. It is during those 364 other days of the year that I have depended on loved ones to hold me up during hard times. It is those days that I felt the most thankful.

I have to remember when we string each of the days, some tougher than others, we get something pretty awesome called LIFE. It’s not always fair. Its not always right or just. We fall in love. Out of love. We feel wronged. We feel awesome and vindicated. But this is the deal:

We are feeling. Which means we are alive and get to start over the next day. And that’s pretty cool. We can be thankful for that, right? For me this is an affirmation. I am going to repeat this affirmation for the next 48 hours and every hour after that, because really, we can NOT take this amazing life for granted. This is NOT a Debbie downer post. Not at all. I just want to stay humble and grateful for this life we are given every day. Sometimes that’s hard. Sometimes I feel entitled to more than just the notion of being alive. Maybe sometimes I feel I deserve something really awesome, above and beyond what I have worked for. Then I get right-sized and my ego gets bruised. A little. And I begin again. Humble. It keeps going like that.

Please let me know how your Thanksgiving week is…the anticipation of it, family angst, relationship angst, whatever it brings: Bring it on!

And now time for a commercial break….Family time!

I just left for a short trip to see family. I am so excited and need a break! Phew..what a great time for a break to refocus and re-energize!

I am going to try to blog, but if I end up spending the valuable time I have with family making memories, I bet everyone will understand the blank wall this week!

Have a fantastic week and see you very very soon!

With a very heavy heart…

To the loving mom of my first love,

This is so very hard to write, but as I was writing my letter of heart-felt loss to your son, I realized it is really you I need to reach. I am glad he was able to tell me about your health before now, so that I was able to reach out to you once more. I regret deeply that I haven’t reached out more often since then. And now, this is my only chance. And still, too late. I want to thank you for everything. Everything you have been since I met you more than a half a life time ago. Yes, do you remember? I was barely 20 years old. I did not have a driver’s license, so I think I came up there by bus. I remember so much. Some of the finer points are a bit fuzzy, but I remember the important things and many of the little details.

I want to thank you, but when I want to let you know I haven’t forgotten all the little things, it doesn’t seem so eloquent in a long drawn out paragraph. Perhaps a list will get the point across in some way. I know you were somewhat private about your health toward the end, so I am making this thank you note anonymous. Perhaps that doesn’t much matter now, but it is a mitzvah in your rememberence . I want to learn how it feels to grieve someone so wonderful who is not related to me by blood/legal family. I want to learn how it feels to lose that deeply. I wish it was written to someone else. I wish the lessons of grief and loss weren’t because you had to leave all of us way too soon.. I have always known I had to learn things the hard way. I can’t just read a big old book on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on death and the five stages of grief and just “get it”.

Someone like you had to come along and show me unconditional love with an open heart and open door to your home to show me it wouldn’t be easy. When I first met you, in my early 20’s, I was just beginning my life. I was learning about everything in books. I met your son at some crazy party and he brought me up north to meet you and your husband and other son. You made me great food and always had soda and fun snacks (these were fun facts for a young woman who did not have soda and chips at any time for the taking!). I ate with paper napkins. I saw a cross hung in your kitchen. Until then, I had never seen an actual cross in any home. You opened my eyes that people live different lives than the ones in my little Beltway Bubble. I am eternally grateful for those little things, the paper napkins, the cross on the wall, the marriage and intact family you offered. So, without going further, there’s just too many things for a run-on sentence or long-lost paragraph, so here’s your list:

Thank you for:

showing me different religions and paths simply by showing me your cross in the kitchen.
letting me eat with paper napkins
inviting me each and every time into your home
showing me a loving intact family (being from a child of divorce)
making me chicken pot pie that was more like a soup
always having food and soda and fun snacks
always making sure I was taken care of at your home
when I arrived all shaky after driving into the median on a highway and calling with a quarter from a payphone, you made sure I got to your place safely
showing me that no matter what, you can always love people who aren’t in your immediate family.
showing me that when people make other choices with their, there’s no need to judge.
having your first son so that I could know what that innocent first love is all about and of course, thank you for raising your sons so well so that I could even have this letter to write.
supporting us in our choices to consider other places to live and letting me take him across the country to start the next chapter of my life with him.
letting me be a part of your life tangentially (Facebook, holiday cards) even after my life with your son was over.
being unforgettable.
teaching me a lesson in grief of parent loss before I have to experience this with my own parents. It sounds so selfish, but I am telling you really how selfless you are and you didn’t even know it!

I am sure I am missing so much over the past 27 years that I have known you. I know paper napkins and crosses seem trivial to you, but they are not. They show me how people live amazing, but different lives than the one I lived up to that point. It taught me tolerance at a young age, when I did not have much experience in much at all for that matter. In a time of feeling immortal when I was young, I am all grown up now and very much in touch with our mortality. Thank you for showing me what counts.

You are so special. I am listening to Adele’s ’21’ as I wrote this. I am not sure if you ever listened to her, but it’s what I chose.

Thank you..

–

Stripped…

I am just going to go and say it, straight up: I was inspired by the last lines of the last episode of season six, part two of Sex and the City. Carrie talks about all of the relationships we have. But, then she says the most important relationship we have is the one we have with ourselves.

I think the relationship we have with ourselves is one of the hardest we could ever hope to grow and mature, because we can’t hide from ourselves. Sure, we can try. We can hide behind our Paige jeans, that grad school degree, very decent wages, hot pizza, alcohol and/or drugs, (good, bad and Prince-style) sex, and hell, I guess we can even hide behind our successes and failures. But, really, all that is really background noise.

I feel that the more I have, the more I can try to hide behind. I am successful, I finally fit into real skinny jeans for the first time in a really long time, and I have a decent share of intellect. I feel that all that is stripped when emotions take over. Intellectually, I know NO material things are very useful armor when that insane insecurity possesses every fiber of strength I thought I had. And, I also know the distance between my head and heart is unbearably long. It is really fucking frustrating. Seriously. So much progress, so much building up of what I had lost right after my divorce. 5.5 years of reattaining the things I lost. I was strong. I had things. I got back on my feet with an apartment in a decent place, a nice bed again, weight loss when I was ready to eat well, new hobbies and passions and a bit of self-confidence, I thought. It only takes a new and real relationship to check the quality of my relationship with myself.

So there’s still work to be done. I hate, no….I loathe, knowing everything I attained to create security means nothing when I realize those are just THINGS.

What a reality check when you realize how stripped you can be when self-love is tested. Because really we have to love ourselves always. Not just when someone else does or when we love “things” or people we surround ourselves with.

Just a question: How long did it take you to lose the insecurity that caught you off guard?

and P.S.: Yes, I was listening to Stripped by Depeche Mode while I was writing this post. How did you know? One of my favorite albums, Black Celebration came out in 1986; I was in the UK that summer.I think that summer and the music I took back across the pond changed me forever. Tonight, I listen to it, transported back to 1986 in London. The summer I met Andrew McCarthy (and have a picture to show for it). When I find it, I’ll post it!

PPS: Tangentially speaking, Andrew McCarthy had just made one of my favorite movies of that time, St. Elmo’s Fire a year before, in 1985.

No drama, no problem

As I got ready for bed, I was playing around Facebook. I posted an old picture of me as a blonde. Check out my About Me Page: I am clearly not blonde. I was feeling nostalgic for circa 2009. I guess as I got ready to actually sleep, I found that I couldn’t. More nostalgic than ever, I guess. And now just realizing that I may just be plagued with a writer’s mind. Why is it that my most intense thoughts come late at night? Why do I not trust my self to remember them in the morning at a more post-appropriate hour? I am SO NOT a night person. However, I am compelled to write now. I keep hearing “don’t write it later, censored by a good night’s sleep and a will to kindly protect those who crushed me”…So I trudge on.

Instead of counting sheep tonight, I found myself counting all the past relationships (female friends, male friends, boyfriends, husband, girl I mentored) that were so toxic for me that I had to leave them in the past. Leaving those relationships behind , as venomous to my spirit as they were, were some of my most difficult and turbulent moments in the last 5-6 years. The most interesting thing is that the memories are coming back into my thoughts at a time where I am developing a very nice healthy relationship. It’s as if I am setting out to sabotage myself with still-too-vivid memories of disappointment, betrayal, distrust, sadness, perpetual anxiety, and loss. Basically a Pandora’s box of misery. Why, oh why? Why are they coming to the surface now? I have a really awesome thing going here.

What.Am.I.Doing.To.Myself? I would almost think if I was some psychologist, that I just suffer from low self-esteem, that perhaps I don’t know how to deal with a great thing when it comes, perpetually destined to think: “do I deserve this?”. Maybe the damage is done. The horrid years of being bullied/harrassed/perpetually teased and no way back. How would I know smooth sailing if the sailboat’s boom hit me in the face? I wouldn’t. Or at least I haven’t. That needs to change. Now. What I can tell you, after quite a few years of self discovery, is that I know that I, do in fact, deserve good and amazing things. I know my diet and exercise achievements, my acquisition of French as a foreign language, and blogging are a great start. A healthy relationship is here. It is my job not to royally fuck it up.

So I am learning. Learning from a very good guy that there can be life with out drama, anxiety, sabotage, frequently broken hearts or abundant tears. Why in Hell did it take me so damn long? I seriously hope you are not planning on telling me that perhaps I wasn’t ready for it. Yet, I would probably end up agreeing with you in the end. My life could potentially and finally be so much better than it was 5-7 years ago. I am starting to feel great and if I don’t watch out, I am going to turn into my worst enemy and really mess up a fantastic thing.

Be your own advocate. Be your own support system and accept the wisdom of your friends around you. Sometimes, if you are really lucky, they know you pretty damn well. I guess I have been blessed this whole time, after all!

And, yes, you ARE worth it. You ALWAYS were. Don’t fuck it up!

Blue Jeans

These jeans are only six years old, but they look older than they are. I bought them in 2010 as I was leaving a particularly difficult chapter in my life. I was living in Florida and had a shopping bag full of clothes, but only tank tops and shorts. My mother came down to help me with some personal things (like finding a divorce attorney, obtaining temporary housing, etc). My mom and I knew I was headed toward a very difficult transition in my life. I had spent a few days at a friend’s place after being forced to leave my home where I lived for 9 months. She gave us a few nights in a gorgeous hotel in Sarasota. She took me to the mall to get a few things. Most of my things would be in a locked storage center till I saved money to get my own place in Denver (where I belonged). This pair of jeans was one of the few items of clothes I picked out. I brought them back to Denver with me. I did have a chance to grab more clothes, but these jeans made the move with me.

Six years later: I am not a sentimental person as far as material goods go. So why with all these rips and tattered seams am I holding on to these jeans? If I thought it was because I never worked through the events that went down in Florida before I left, that would be easy. But I did that, thoroughly. I wish it was as easy as that. I went through Hell toward the end in Florida..and even for the first several years after I left that house in September 2010. I am pretty much on the other side now. I am very good at purging “stuff” that doesn’t fit, torn, stained, even 25-year-old college t-shirts.

So what’s with the jeans??? Should I hold on to them since they are pretty cool and they fit me perfectly and just release the emotional baggage attached? Or do I pitch them in the trash?