Reflection

Recently I had the chance to spend time with two high-school (50 years ago) classmates. It was great to reminisce, question, uncover, reveal, different bits and pieces of our shared history.  With one friend, our association then was completely in passing---a hello-goodbye relationship (as I recall). The other was someone who was in my life, a sister cheerleader.  Hers was an absolute Father Knows Best family, unlike anything I knew (save for TV).  And I was lucky enough, also, to work for her father.  A real job, cleaning his office and once a week, in addition to a paycheck, I had access to a real father and that was a gift to me.

It struck me that they shared/remembered/had many more memories than I did. 

Had we not participated in the same sphere of events? OR had I not felt those experiences because I was working so hard to appear "normal." 

For me, life was far from normal.

Headed Toward Normal

from countryliving.com

It was 11:07 PM when I first walked into the kitchen. I finally stop watching TV (though Sunday night is filled with TV favorites) and got up to DO something.  It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done anything all day; it had been a productive day on many fronts — I’d made a chicken and broccoli salad that I took to a friend’s to lunch and help reorganize kitchen cabinets — a fun job for me and helpful to her.

I’d gone to help the once-husband unpack a carload of our daughter’s stuff that he’d just helped pack and drove to his house to unload and store; and I’d decided to see (via email) if it was possible to arrange a weekend reunion with some college friends in a city where none of us lived.

I had my lists of to-dos (getting ready to leave town for my nephew’s wedding) and among the many items was making a tomato tart.  I had tomatoes freshly picked from a friend’s neighbor and now there was a possibility my friend and her family might come for dinner and I didn’t have any idea of what I would make.  But the tomato tart would come in handy. I needed to get up and make it.

While I was slicing the onions and sautéing them (with olive oil and the lemon thyme I’d just cut from my little garden) I started thinking about a question someone asked someone else in my presence:  

“When were you the happiest?”

That was some question. It wasn’t a question I’d ever thought about answering.. And while I was trying to think of my answer to that question, surprisingly the answer just popped up —  “Now.”

That was surprising.   There were so many happy-s in my life:  Happy when I met my husband; happy when we got married; happy when I had my kids; happy at so many times but (and this was “but” big) all those times I was happy, I was also saddled with stress and/or worry.  Always.  My other twins: stress and worry.

All of those happy occasions in my past were times when I was in control, managing a lot, taking care of a lot — people and things.  I was orchestrating my life and theirs.  No one asked me or demanded I do it.  It was my mission.  It was what I thought was my lot in life and I was pretty good at it but it wasn’t great for my relationships and it wasn’t ever carefree.

Now most of my day, my every day, is spent only on taking care of me.. It’s a pretty easy job!  For the most part I feel happy and content.  I may have times when I wish I weren’t alone and times when I wish I had a partner to do things with — things like listening to music, dancing, or trying out a new recipe on.   And I’d like to be working some, but that hasn’t worked out yet but still — for the most part, life is good and I’m not worried!  I just signed a new lease (Has it been a year already?), my physical issues are behind me at the moment and I don’t have much stress.

I’ve never lived this way before. Living this way now is really a gift; and whatever it cost to get this gift, well, I guess right now I’m feeling the payoff.  It was 11:30 at night and I was doing exactly what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.  That is my life these days.  Amazingly.

It’s been two long years of real transition but right now — I think I’m starting to edge into the phase of what might become my new normal.

I’ll keep you posted.

What Will It Take To Make Me Happy?

My therapist asked me this question the other day:  

"What will it take to make you happy?"

It was a good question.  It's been two years since I made the decision to leave my marriage and left.  I've been back and forth to the house physically over those two years — but not to the marriage. Tough. Up and down. Still sad.  And uncertain about what my "new normal" looks like — but over all, across many aspects, I'm living happier and feeling so much better.  

Now I'm spending my time, energy and finances (for the most part) on myself — a new experience. Totally new. My truth is that most of my life I made myself somewhat indispensable (or at least valuable) by taking care of things for others.  By doing that I got the attention I needed; the attention that wasn't available at home.  Good behavior got me attention (since second grade).  But that automatic-robo focus on the external (It's-all-his-fault) and lack of focus on my internal (What's my part in this?) in part created the unhappiness I found myself living in.  

From young adulthood on, my driven, commanding (ever-worried) behavior got me great jobs, made me great friends, paid our way (partially) through life (along with my persistent frugality).  But it wasn't all beneficial. Not for me or my relationships.  I trusted next to nothing.  If I wasn't hyper-vigilant, something bad was going to happen.  And a married a guy who virtually never worried (way before I came along) and thought about it even less after we married because mastermind-me was always on the job.  It was a vicious cycle.

We're both free of that now.  It's a better, easier, happier life — but it came at a price. And now, moving forward means leaving behind the only male partner I've had for 36 years.  It doesn't come easy!  Hard to turn off the motor in my mind that still looks for the clothes I think he needs (in thrift stores, of course) or still wants to pass along info I think he could use, or still thinks about feeding him the leftovers I know he'd enjoy having.  But that coupled life is no longer my reality.  My reality is grieving the loss of the marriage and grieving the loss of couple-dom, and I need to sit with that.  Something I don't find easy to do.

My daughter is going through a break-up and she's decided to write about it, which is SO healthy.   And it reminded me how I've shirked writing about my own transition.  From where I sit, it seems too hard to categorize or define or even know what my life is day to day.  How to write about that?  

What's on the table for me right now is so uncertain, so nebulous, that I scarce wanna write about it — but writing about it is what helps.  At least for me.  And I'd guess for our daughter, too. [FYI, that was just a place of transition for me, choosing to write "our" instead of "my" daughter.]  Anyway, none of this territory is known to me.  

I make choices every day and only as they benefit me.  I don't really need to consider anyone else — or if I do, it's because I CHOOSE to.  It's such a relief — such a gift to just focus on what I want and not need to take anything else into consideration.  Amazingly freeing.

And yet I've had two health scares recently (urgent care/ER) and at least one will require surgery pretty immediately and being on your own makes you feel really vulnerable. All the progress you've made on feeling strong and being able to exist solo, fritters away when you're in the ER and someone is asking, "Emergency contact?"

It's hard to write about this stuff, this transition.  It's always shifting to me.  But writing about it (along with time spent in therapy) forces me to examine it and that helps me learn from it.  I've examined a lot in my life and in real depth — but not examined myself.  I haven't been in help-myself mode in, well, forever.  At least that's how it feels.  It's a frightening business — but it's a must.

One of these days, I'll get into a writing routine again; find some "new normal", but it's not right now.  

Bear with me— it may take time, but I'm gonna figure out how to truly make myself happy. 

This Is Us...Really

USA is showing a THIS IS US marathon and I find myself re-watching and feeling even more than I felt seeing this show the first time. It's got everything you've seen or wished for in a family — a Dad who's a dreamer but shows love; a reluctant mom who clearly does her best but is flawed.  There's sibling rivalry, not fitting in, weight, cancer, success, fame, dying, regret, family — relationships.

I know people don't understand my deep connection to watching TV.  Television is a source for me.  Of company, of information, of sentiment, and vicarious emotion.  When I'm feeling lonely, disconnected, sad, depressed, I find something to watch that will fix that for me.  

It seems frivolous I know.  But there are so many pluses for me watching TV:  It's right here and it's here all the time; I've already paid for it; and between satellite and Netflix and Showtime and HBO, I can usually find something that will give me what I'm seeking.  I don't have to risk that I'll seek something and it won't be gotten.

My friend Susan believes it's better to ask — even if you don't get what you're asking for — than not to ask at all. I don't feel that way.  Yet.  It's too disappointing and too hurtful and too — well — just "too".

But I understand that when you don't ask, you definitely have no chance of getting.

My struggle (well, one of them anyway) is to let go of the outcome.  That's what a therapist tells me.  Let Go of the Outcome.  Let go of resentment and regret.  Let go of expectations.  Let it all go.  I'm trying.

I understand the concept and it makes sense to me, but it's one of those easier said than done.  But I'm trying. And at times, I'm succeeding.  So far my best success — I think — has been with some of my friends and my daughter.  Still a ways to go with the son and the once-husband.

So This Is Us allows me to see a family — across time — struggling and loving and hurting and supporting in ways that virtually never existed in my family.  I get to watch how they do it and I get to momentarily feel the bonds of being with a family.  I hope we managed to live that give-and-take for our kids so that they'll have a better sense of what it means to be in a relationship, to have a family.

That voyeuristic view of family life (whether it's real or not) allows me to experience what I currently lack in my life.  

Right now, luckily, I'm really pretty happy.

I love my little home.  It's filled with everything I absolutely love, arranged just as I like, only used by me and for the first time in I do not know how long (if ever) I'm neat.  Everything is in its place.  I'm no longer sloppy but I'm also not racing and juggling to manage and provide for a family of four.  

It is just me.

What a change.  I'm continually surprised by what can change.  

I had an open house on New Year's Day.  Twenty-six people came, it was wonderful, my daughter was there and saw my new place for the first time, and for the first time EVER, I didn't kill myself to have company!

I didn't have to stress about cleaning up days before everyone came because pretty much everything was already clean.  I didn't go overboard on getting drinks or food and I almost cooked NOTHING.  I had a great time, I was relaxed and I didn't pay for it in a horrible way.  HOORAY!

I miss having a fireplace and of course the companionship of someone next to me, but all in all, I'm enjoying my life at the moment and I feel secure.

So while I may be watching This Is Us — finally, joyfully, amazingly — 
I'm much more intently watching —  This Is Me.

Moving On

It's been six months to the day since I last wrote.  Six straight months of sorting, reliving, moving, discarding, earmarking, revisiting, and preparing for the sale of the stuff and for the sale of the house we've had as our home for the past 23 years.

Physically, it's been daunting.  The amount of things that have gone from house to basement or attic or separate rentals or storage units has been exhausting.  At my age my knees are hurting, my feet are too, and at night, my hip bones ache.  It has all been done in the sweltering heat of an unusually hot southern summer.

Logistically, it has been the challenge of shifting things from here to there, truckloads, carloads, and still — there is always more.  I call it the fishes and the loaves.  You think you're done but you open another door, another closet, another hidden recess, and find there are still items to deal with, to decide, to divest.


Emotionally, it is what you might imagine. An endless confrontation of the memories of every moment you have lived.  I found an album where I had placed every engagement and wedding card we received.  There was a box with each and every gift card and greeting card from the time I was pregnant through their second birthday.  I had no idea that there were specific cards made that said —  "Congratulations!  You're Expecting Twins!"  I had about twelve each of the three designs that were made.  I had no memory of such cards.  

The cards represented all the well wishes, all the outpouring of love — from those we knew and those we didn't.  Gifts from people's mothers I'd never met.  Hand-knit teeny-tiny white baby booties from Jean-Louis' mom in Paris.  Matching hooded sweaters trimmed in blue and pink with pom-pom ties from Susan's co-worker's mom in Nebraska or North Dakota.  Ceramic plates with cherubic babies hand-painted by Aunt Doris on my father's side, with their names and weights and birthdates.  Loving expressions of joy at our great gift of healthy boy-girl twins.

Box after box after bin after bag of photos capturing the moments of our 36 years together — the vacations, the birthdays, the holidays, the milestones — all smiling and hugging and picturing happiness.  

What do you do with the thousands of images that you've stockpiled before things were digital?  The wedding photos, the engagement, bridal and baby showers?  What do you keep?  I, who always had walls and stairwells hung with framed photographs of family.  I don't want them staring me in the face.  Looking at me with eyes that question the close of that life lived.

Others are selling off the art, pottery, jewelry, household goods and knickknacks of my past.  I've kept quite a bit but moving into a house that's one-third the space forces you to be selective and I have been.  Let us hope that my former treasures find places in someone else's home and that they will bring pleasure to others as they once did to me.

I feel relief that it's almost at the end of a long passage.  The six-month road of dismantling what once was.  I feel a sense of lightness and ease at no longer being weighed down by so much.  And even better, I love my new home.

It is a tremendous gift to love where one lives  — to feel a sense of comfort and real happiness — to walk in the door and smile at the things you see.  I feel that here.  I settled in very quickly, probably because I've felt "homeless" for the past twenty months.  My nest is made and I am cocooning at the moment.  When I open my eyes in the morning I see a half wall filled floor-to-ceiling with sixteen pieces of art that I adore.  Lauren's framed wedding invitation with its silvery tree.  The blue castle from college-friend Peggy.  The framed Folon poster all signed on the back from my Random House buddies celebrating my first real apartment in Manhattan. The lovers kissing "In a Sentimental Mood" by Havlicek from Shirley Sender. The tiny painted grove of trees by Norman Kaplanoff bought in the basement of a Ukrainian church on the lower East side for 50¢ (unframed). 

Two more tree etchings, one from my daughter, bought in Florence (bottom) and one from my son that we picked out together one Christmas.  

Various representation of and from New York: the Flatiron Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge... 

                                           

and the lovely print of swimming goldfish that I bought on the street outside the Museum of Modern Art from a Chinese artist named Zhyoo (and I have never been able to track down).

The gorgeous watercolor of the Colorado mountains painted by Lynnie's sister Joannie Shapiro and...

   

"Shadow of the child I used to be" by m. ensign johnson.

I am a shadow of the person I used to be. Empty of virtually all my former identities...no longer a daughter, sister, not a wife, not a couple, not a co-worker, not a teacher, and not a mother in the way I was for 20+ years. Emptying me of the marriage, the house, the possessions and feeling hollow is hard but I'm beginning to feel the openness — in being able to start again and figure out just want I want to fill inside. What I want. 

What I want. Not what is expected. Not what I think I should be, need to be, have to be. Just what I want. 

I don't know what I want, but it's nice to begin imagining.

Wish me luck.

Doodling for Direction

For a long, long time, all my doodles were arrows coming and going, up and down, sideways, never getting anywhere.  Pointing, reaching, looking for direction.  I often felt boxed in by those arrows.  Trapped in no direction.  In elementary school, in high school, in college, in every job I've ever had — I was always worried about where I would end up.

Now I'm sixty-three and where have I ended up?

Back at the beginning.

After a working career of 40-plus years (I'm not including working at the dry cleaners from ages 8-15,  or pricing at the pet-supply warehouse, not counting serving in the cafeteria at Northeastern or working in the Registrar's Office at Finch); after a number of apartments, single and shared, a six-year relationship, a 29-year marriage, a townhouse that almost foreclosed, a big house, two lovely children boy-girl twins; now after all that I'm again seeking direction.

Direction is a funny thing because there's no one "right" direction in life.  For any place you want to go, there are oh-so-many ways of getting there.  Will you walk? bike? or drive? Do you go the fastest way or take the most scenic route like my friend Nancy who bobs and weaves this way and that, avoiding the main roads, even highways if she can.  Unlike me, she goes the "back roads" while I — well I just want to get there quick as I can.

Part of the difficulty now is just deciding direction.  My first choice of direction was to leave our town and live in New York — return to the hustle and bustle of of city streets teeming with people, alive with music and plays and magnificent art and always, always, always, the possibility of human connection.  I have had great moments of "positivity resonance" with men, women, and children here in the Big Apple.  People like me/unlike me, close in age/decades away, of similar persuasions/of radically different views.  These connections rarely seemed to happen in the town where we raised our family because we lived in cars to and from the same places.  And we didn't have many couple friends.

Most couples attach to other couples and do things together.  They go to concerts or movies, camp, play cards, take vacations together. I think these couples usually meet through their young children — but that didn't happen for us.  We moved to teach in a small school where most of our colleagues were far younger and single and transitory — each around for a few years and then on to the next career phase in another part of the country or the world.  Our friends are in Iowa and Santiago, Chile or elsewhere but not so many here.

Now it seems that the dream of New York may be a dead end and my direction points me back to North Carolina where I've spent the past 24 years. In a way, and surprisingly, that's beginning to excite me.  There are new things for me to focus on.  We're selling the house and emptying out 35 years of objects and memories.  Every Monday night I'm free-form dancing with about 25 other people for 90 minutes and NO talking!  I'm back to volunteering for the two non-profits  that I support.

Maybe the time has come to procrastinate — to start doodling and see where those arrows take me.
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For the past few months, I've been in a women's writing group that meets weekly at a neighborhood senior center.  I am by far the youngest of the seniors but they're a real bunch of characters, all with interesting thoughts to write.  We spend about 20-30 minutes writing and then we each read aloud and share our piece, followed by comments.  Before we begin, the table is strewn with pages of images torn from magazines (brought  by our writer-facilitator Rosalie) to help prompt one to write if needed.  

This is the image I saw that prompted me to write this post. 

Stuck ... at the Curb

http://8tracks.com/practicallygabby/stuck-in-bed

Sunday it was 6:19 pm, ten hours after waking and I had not yet gotten dressed.  I had not changed out of my pajamas.

Despite all my best intentions, it became one of those days when try as I might (or not),  I could not get myself out of bed.

Not to The Merchant’s House Museum. Not to Kikoo Sushi (with a Groupon that will soon expire).  Not to someplace where I could get free Wi-Fi. (And not to the comfort of the public library — closed on Sunday.)  I just didn’t get outside.   Not even outside the confines of the sofa bed, except for the bathroom and food.

The most I did — and it took a lot — was to throw a top over my pajamas and pad down the carpeted hallway in my socks to tape a postcard with a message on the apartment door of a woman I’d seen twice and spoken to once in the elevator.  That was my attempt at reaching out.  Making a connection. But it was all I could do that day.

I couldn’t escape the waves of melancholy.  So rather than fight a losing battle, I decided to sink into it.  (I prefer to optimistically think of it as "sinking into" as opposed to drowning.)  Then a lightbulb moment and I saw something about myself I'd never fully seen.  

If asked to describe me, anyone who knows me would describe me as strong, forceful, stubborn, controlling.  There is certainly truth in that characterization (of at least one aspect of my personality).  Unfortunately, that tendency is in the fabric of who I am.

It started in second grade when I began worrying that things would not turn out alright.  Except at school — my safe haven — no one gave me any information about what was going on or how to cope with what was going on.   No one at home told me anything growing up.  (Well, maybe my sister.)  I quickly found out if I didn't pay attention, I wouldn't know how to avoid the next upset, disaster, explosion that inevitably was around the corner.  I was obsessed with learning all I could as a means of surviving in an emotionally turbulent household.  I tried hard to be perfect thinking that would make people like me, value me.

Once I had my kids, that instinct to control, to make everything perfect, to be perfect, became much, much worse.  I was bound and determined to tell my kids EVERYTHING. I was going to ensure that they had every bit of information possible.  I'd help them interpret the world and give them the tools to navigate it.  I was going to prepare them the way no one had prepared me.

It wasn’t until mid-way through my life (when a husband and teenaged kids kept telling me repeatedly to stop!) that I recognized this obsessive behavior and struggled to curb it.  But I hadn't really understood it in a big picture way until now.

Though clearly it comes across that way, I’m not trying to control people, I’m trying to control circumstances. It’s ridiculous to imagine I could control events.  Yes, ridiculous, but that never stopped me.  Even lack of success didn't deter the behavior — it’s so age-old, so ingrained in the fabric of me.   

Image by Michelle Arseneault

What a disaster.  This compulsion to teach, to assist, to share-all, became a curse.  At times, my drive to give everything I could to those around me, led to the smothering, crushing, suffocating of them and eventually, all but exhausted me.  

I still struggle to curb it.  It's hard to weed out.

The day in bed?

I felt kicked to the curb.            
                                               Time to get back up.