I love coffee.  I love the color purple; the color, the movie, and I REALLY loved the book.  I love reading.  I love the sound of the ocean and the sand at the beach.  I think of all the flavors, I love mint chocolate chip best of all.  LOVE is a word I use pretty regularly and I throw it around like confetti…I love my black walnut floors, I love my house, I love my Eames lounge chair even though I seldom sit in it…I love a lot, and I feel it deeply.  I did not however know how much love I had inside of me until a hot July in Hope Mills, North Carolina, when I first held the daughter of my daughter.  Sure, I love coffee and the color purple and chocolate chip mint ice cream and books, and I guess more importantly, I sure do love my daughter, but this, THIS was different.  11 years ago I felt a wave of something that was bigger and deeper and stronger than anything I had ever felt in my life, and it scared me.  My hands shook and my heart skipped and I felt timid, which might sound strange, but it is true.  That I could love something that much was terrifying.  I liked to think myself ‘tougher’ than that…I’d been through bad things, sad things, rough things, difficult things, and I always felt kind of proud of how I would dust myself off and move on, no matter what, but this kind of emotion frightened me, that I could care so much about something; somebody else’s someone.  Sure, I loved my daughter, I mean of course I love her, but to be honest, I was 18 when she was born, living a life in less than perfect conditions, and even after I got away from the awful and moved back into my parents’ house, I of course worked full-time which included every weekend, and was going to college at night, on my days off…my mom and dad and my sister were far more active ‘parents’ than I was to my child, it was simply how it was, and despite how much I did in fact love her, I was too busy trying to love myself that maybe I did not give her as deep the love she deserved…but then, fast forward > there was this baby…I had sold my house the year before she was born, fixed up my boyfriend’s attic into my own little apartment, had my own small business, no debt, no obligations to anybody but myself, and could pretty much do whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted…so I went to North Carolina, in July, for a month, to help my daughter and son-in-law and to bond with that baby.

We knew she was going to be a she and we knew she was due around the 23rd of July but shortly after midnight of the 17th,  I was outside at a local summer bar on the water,  listening to my friend Dave play his guitar and sing, when I received a text message that simply read “9.5 lbs”  While I am sure they must have emailed me pictures that next day of their baby, I don’t remember.  My mother was already down there and surely she  must have emailed me pictures, but all I remember of those first hours was the text message.  When I arrived in North Carolina two days later, a few hours after my daughter was released from hospital, after that dreadful 9 hour drive, my daughter looked tired and overwhelmed…The house was filled with people, my son-in-law’s family all lived near them in North Carolina, but nobody had sterilized any of the bottles, or put any of the gifts away that had been brought over or delivered, and while everybody was cooing over the baby I realized at that moment that MY baby needed me…so I did what I do best, I started to organize and make order out of chaos, a place for everything and everything in its place; started putting gifts away, tossing trash, got a pot of water on the stove to start sterilizing bottles and mixing formula and making things happen, and while I was exhausted from that awful drive, I did not sit down until it was all done…then the house emptied of all those people, I showered, and I told the new parents to get a good sleep and I kept the cradle in the living room with me, and that first feeding of that first grand baby was the best hour…I held her and whispered to her and fed her and walked around with her cradled in my arms and felt so happy; that I had the freedom and the means to take a month off of work to help my daughter, to bond with this baby who I would perhaps might only  see two or three times a year…I thought about how when she was older, it would be great if I read to her over the phone, so she would know my voice, and know how much I loved books.  I thought about when I would next be able to get to North Carolina to see her, I thought about how I hoped my daughter was going to be okay, SO many thoughts in that time it took that little mouth to take 3 ounces of formula…

I could go on and on about that first month of her life, bonding with that baby…I don’t think I thought about work even one time that month.  I was devoted to my daughter and her daughter and it felt so good, I felt beyond joyful over what I was doing, and I did go back in October, and stayed another month when my daughter first went back to work…tomorrow, or should I say shortly after midnight later, that baby is 11.  That baby lives next door to me, less than 100 steps.  That baby is already over five feet tall and when she stands beside me I can kiss the top of her head without having to bend…

I never had to read to her over the phone, I got to read to her in my lap…shortly after her sister was born two years later they decided to move, North Carolina felt too far away my daughter said.  We built two houses on two lots and here we are, neighbors…this baby who will be 11 tomorrow, comes and goes here at my house as if it were just an extension of her own.  I love that I can see her any time of any day.  If she is engrossed in a book she’ll text me a picture of the cover.  She told me the other day that she was reading It’s Not The End Of The World, “again, because it’s just that good.”  When she sleeps over here in my loft with her sister, they still love a bedtime story.  To be read to is one of those childhood joys that never goes away, and I love that she doesn’t think that she is too old yet, for bedtime stories.  She often says that she’s “just like you Nana” over books.   She is one of my favorite things about being alive.  She was the origin of love for me.  She brought out a depth of emotion I did not know I was capable of feeling.  She calls me Nana and I call her Sweet-Ti, she loves the sound of the ocean and the sand at the beach, and of all the flavors, she loves mint chocolate chip best of all…

If I say ____, he will _____ me.  If I ask him _____, he might do _____.  I was married, albeit briefly, to a man who had a drinking and a drug problem but more than that, had a violence problem.  When he was nice he was very, very nice, and when he was mean he was horrid. So I spent the months I shared an address with him always on edge.  Trying to do the “right” thing all the time, so dance and navigate around his moods, his thoughts, the extreme thoughts of supremacy provided by the neurotransmitter chemical interference of cocaine and booze…it was ugly far more often than it was pretty.  So to say I was on “alert” all the time when I was around him, is quite accurate.  So I can only imagine what it feels like to be a hard-working and successful black man, driving an expensive car, in a predominantly white town, or even to be an out of work, -down on his luck-,  black man, driving a clunker in any town…alert, fearful, what ifs…I have a degree in criminal justice and minored in pre-law, and I worked one day a week for over a year in the prosecutor’s office as a volunteer with the criminal case management office and at the jail. A criminal is a criminal, I don’t care what color of skin they’ve got, and I saw and interviewed criminals of every shade, and they were all mad that they got caught doing whatever it was they were doing…BUT a person just out running errands, or on his or her way to work, or the liquor store, wherever, is not presumed a criminal…should not be presumed to be anything but a person on his or her way to work, or the liquor store, or wherever.  It has got to be awful to be on that kind of alert all the time, just because you are black.  I can’t even wrap my head around that, knowing how hard it was to live with a brutal man for the months I was a wife, I can’t bear the thought of living with that kind of anxiety, every day of my life, because of the color of my skin…

Lots of black people are criminals.  Lots of white people are criminals.  Lots of black people have illegal guns.  Lots of white people have illegal guns.  Lots of black people drink and drive, or like to buy drugs now and then.  Lots of white people do too…We are all the same, people, humans, on this planet.  Lots of black people own homes, and have jobs, and check their mutual funds in the Sunday paper, just like lots of white people.  BUT I suspect that lots of black people go into immediate anxiety with a fear factor of 10 when they see the red and blue lights blinking behind their vehicle, far more often and far more acutely than white people do, and that’s a problem.  It’s a problem for ALL people.

About a week ago I had to go water plants for a customer who lives up on the ocean with a narrow driveway easement and little to no room for me to turn around my ridiculously long double cab-extended bed pick-up truck, so I parked on the street, with my hazard lights blinking so I could walk up to the house and do my watering and then leave, without difficulty of having to back down a 700 foot long driveway onto the street…and when I walked back to my truck there was a cop sitting behind my truck.  Mind you, there are no signs that say “no parking” but I think it’s just understood, however I had my hazard lights blinking, which I thought implied that I was not parked but stopped at the moment, so I walked over to the car, and said, “are you here for me?”  The cop was a big-fat-necked, north Jersey accented, non-local of our quiet and laid back and casual beach community, but he was in fact hired by our beach community and was the one with the uniform and the badge and the police car, so despite how I loathed his appearance and tone of voice, I had to remember he was the cop and I was the one with the truck in a place it really was not supposed to be…BUT not once during our few minutes of interaction did I fear for my life, or fear that he was going to arrest me, or fear that this minor traffic violation would escalate into anything other than a parking ticket that would annoy me but otherwise not have any affect on my life whatsoever.  In fact it never even crossed my mind that having a cop behind my truck would lead to my being roughed up or maybe shot.  Those thoughts did not even enter my realm of possibility at that moment…THAT is the difference and that is the problem that black people have to think about every day.   I’m not looking for a debate, I am not looking for an argument, I am just telling it as I see it…it is not fair, and it has to stop, and I think people of all colors should feel angry that it happens.  I know from my brief marriage experience, living in fear is no way to live.  I got out of my difficult situation, there is no way to get out of your skin…

“You have my heart in your teeth.”  I finished a book a couple of weeks ago with this sentence in it…the story was pages of letters, emails actually, exchanged between lovers in the chapters of this novel, with both characters making brave choices to move forward into a new relationship together and away from their spouses and families, and relative ease and comforts and normalcy of their lives.  Away from the familiar and towards the unknown…it was one of those sentences that made me stop and think about the words…  What does that mean?  I had read before about some of the descriptions of hell, that there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, neither of which appeals to me at all, but this sentence, it made me think of a lioness, how she so tenderly carries her babies in her jaw but minutes later can rip an antelope to shreds…same teeth, different desire…

When you first fall in love, or lust, or even simply make a connection where the chemistry feels right, particularly after a recent break up, there is a tenderness about you, so inexplicably gentle, that you wonder where all your anger and sadness or disappointment disappeared to?  You think about what you are about to do, or try, and ponder how you could be so brave to, yet again, put your heart in somebody’s teeth.  It’s a monumental decision, and yet with stars in our eyes and fiercely throbbing hearts, and often sweaty palms and pulsing private spaces, we hand it over…butterflies in our bellies, smiles that makes our toes tingle and our eyelids twitch, losing our words and losing our minds in a brain fog of wonderment…Here you go, we toss it, take my heart in your teeth…

People fall in love all the time everywhere. We see it in the pages of  US magazine, on Extra and Access Hollywood on television, we read it on google news, and couples-news often has its own “trending” space on social media,  and it looks so easy doesn’t it?  Even people we have seen go through public and seemingly humiliating break ups manage to wipe their tears and dust themselves off and try again.  People leave their wives and husbands or partners or the parent of their child and move on, trying to find a better fit perhaps?  What it means mostly is that they have decided to stop trying to make something fit that never will, with the hopes and dreams and excitement that this ‘new one’ will fit perfectly.  This could be wrong, but it’s my opinion…

I’ve come to accept that only in Cinderella was there a perfect fit.  Only a fairy tale can lead to happily ever after and a fit like no other.  I’ve grown old enough and lived enough now to know and accept and understand that life is messy, and often, not at all what you want to happen, happens.  I’ve grown to realize that no matter how comfortable it feels in the beginning, even when it’s as if you are walking on a cloud, after a while, sometimes a longer while than other times, you’ll get a blister.  I guess then comes the question; do you use a little Neosporin and a  Band-Aid or do you head right to Nordstrom and get new shoes?  When we feel so wanted and so wanting, we think it will never fade, but when we feel superfluous and bitter, we wonder, “how did THAT happen?”  “when did THAT happen?”  It’s one of the few things in life that I think is equal for both men and for women.  Men have their hearts ripped to bits just as often, and just as painfully, as women do.  We women might just express our sorrow with a bit more drama and fuss, and perhaps are less private about such matters, but men suffer crippling sadness as much and as often, of this I am sure.  We all do it all, to all.   They give a girl an inch and she demands a mile, they change-up all of their dreams to accommodate and appease her, and still end up lost and alone and feel used up.  We women can feel like we went from having our hearts in their teeth, to feeling that we’ve been torn to pieces and left in a heap of bones and gristle…I think for both sexes it becomes confusion and questions about how what (or who) you once wanted so badly, and made all these choices and changes for, is no longer what you enjoy and you are left utterly dissatisfied with the changes.  You wonder, ‘well, how did I get here from there?’ & is this going to ever feel better?  is it ever going to feel again like it did in the beginning?  Hope and desire are BIG feelings aren’t they?  You put all your eggs in one basket when you mix want and lust with hope and dreams.   It can be a beautiful recipe, or an epic Pinterest worthy fail.

There is weeping and gnashing of teeth in the hell that is the sorrow of a break up or an unhappy ending.  There are certainly feelings of failure, whether you were the instigator or the one tossed, I mean failure is failure is failure.  There seem to almost always be feelings of rueful despair, and so much self-doubt…what did I do?  did I do the right thing?  We can wring our hands night after night and wake up every day with stress and an upset stomach or we can just accept.  Accept things as they are, not contemplate whether things are good or bad, they just are what they are.  I suspect most of us have been in this exact predicament, & those of us who have not, well, lucky you!  BUT…much like a rainbow after a storm, as cliché as that might sound, there really is light at the end of dark tunnels,  there really can be happiness after grief, and new wishes after woe…it’s remarkable really, how resilient the human heart is.  How sad and aching we can be during a loss, a death of dreams or unfulfilled promises, is still a death, I mean loss is loss is loss, and yet how healed and excited we seem to feel, or think we are, when we stumble upon new emotions and new dreams, I mean love is love is love…you just have to be brave enough to put your heart in somebody’s teeth…

“I am the daughter of a great romance.”  This is a line I have often used to describe how I see my parents’ marriage, but the words aren’t mine, it’s a song lyric by Dar Williams, and it’s the truth.  It’s really how I see myself as their adult child and deeply appreciate the love I see my parents have, and have always had, for each other.  My dad recently said to me that they didn’t have stars in their eyes, they knew it was part business, part romance, the plan that is, their plan in the spring of 1966, to make a life together.  Tomorrow, 6/11 is the 50th anniversary of the day they were married…In a little church, in a little beach town, on a little island, with very few people in attendance, and a little diamond on my mother’s finger, and a little bit of money saved for their future…it was all very small but they created something so big…

The way that my Dad sometimes looks at my Mom is both devastating and divine; Divine in that I get to bask in the glory of a real life love story, and devastating in that I acknowledge, every single time he says, “she’s the best wife I ever had” that no man has ever treated me the way my father treats my mother, and it’s likely no one ever will.  It sometimes makes my heart hurt.  My chance to share my life, someone to grow up  and grow old with, with a partner for a lifetime, has passed me by.  When I dwell on that I feel crushed, but when I think about how lucky I am that I got to have THAT for parents, well, I feel blessed beyond measure.  Despite my own failures at love, marriage, relationships, family, partnering, coupling, merging, combining, I got to be a part of something wonderful, and that they are still in love and still creating a life together, is really something special.  They were friends for several years but only dated for several weeks before their wedding.  That they knew in their early twenties what mattered to them, and how to make it happen, still boggles my mind, as an unmarried woman at 48 who has yet to figure out either…

They started out with nothing, but together turned it into everything.  They each had a car and they each had a job and my dad had $100 saved.  They drove to Williamsburg for their honeymoon and told me the other day that the motel cost $6 a night.  My mom, ever the organized, found her ledger from the first year they were married and texted me the other night that their entire honeymoon cost less than $133.  Geez, I thought, I’ve spent more than that at the liquor store when I’ve stocked up for a dinner party…and from THAT they have come to THIS…comfortable in their retirement, their smart choices with living well but never beyond their means, never having debt, never wasting money on interest or fees, budgeting monthly so they always could pay cash for their cars and always had money for unexpected expenses…they did, and do all those things Suze Orman would be impressed by and which financial planners applaud and encourage, and so many of us, myself included, fail to master.  Every time my mom tried to help me organize a household budget and sort out my finances, or untangle a mess I got myself into with bills, she always sadly said, ‘it takes two,‘ two people to be partners in life and love,  and I know she must be right, as I’ve always been a one…

Two people could not be better suited for one another than my parents, who like the same music and have the same ideals and beliefs and philosophies on most everything.  While my mom prefers a Reese’s peanut butter cup and my dad prefers a Mounds bar, their likes and dislikes and habits and ways of doing things are otherwise very similar.  Two non-foodies, non-imbibers, dinner party decliners…the list of things they don’t do is really long, but you know what they do do?  They work together for hours in their yard and take walks at night around their property and look at what they have and what they have created, and then they rock together in a teak glider and look at planes as the moon comes up.  Some might see it as a boring life or too simple, with not enough “action” but I see it as comfort and joy.   Two people who are comfortable together and with their choices and joyful in the results of their planning and hard work and commitment.  It is near impossible to compare any relationship to another, but my parents’ relationship in particular is so unique, to compare it to anybody’s is out of the question.  I barely understand how it works so well but I am part of their family and their plan and have seen it with my own eyes for my whole life, two people really in love and really perfect for each other.  Truly a match made in heaven if ever there was one.

My mother met my father when she was 15, on the island where she grew up (and her family had been since 1863) and where my dad’s parents had a summer-house.  My dad started working as a carpenter on that barrier island after the great storm of 1962, and got engaged that year to a different local girl, and this by the way is one of the most oft told  stories my mother shared during my childhood when I would ask about how they met…but he broke up with this girl and broke off their engagement when she took the $100 he gave her ‘to start their life together,’ and bought a guitar.  My mother, practical as ever, who still has the stainless cookware she got when she got married, always liked to tell us that story, and always added vocal emphasis to the “and she used that money to buy a guitar!”  I think she liked to remind my sister and me that she was a better match and catch for my dad, pretty AND practical!  He got drafted into the Army when my mom was a senior in high school and later in the winter of 1966 after his military service was over, and he had traveled all over Europe and thankfully for them both, did not end up in Vietnam, he came back to the little island he loved and rented an apartment on the block next to where my mother still lived with her parents.  He was on 11th Street and my mother was on 12th Street and they went on their first “real” date in April of 1966 and got married 8 weeks later.  AND ARE STILL MARRIED, and STILL LOVE EACH OTHER, and I get to have them as my parents!

I can honestly count on one hand the number of times I have heard my father raise his voice.  My father is the epitome of cool, calm, and collected.  I tend to hold things in until they are so bottled up and suppressed that I burst like a shaken can of soda, this, I do believe, I get from my mother.  I like balance but am also very emotional and I sure get my two halves from both of my parents.  I have known many people  who had, and still have, very bad “feelings” or ideas about marriage because the example they grew up around was dreadful.  Their perspective of what it means to be married, or part of a couple, and truly committed was terrible because of their parents.   I’ve known women who had fathers who were drunks, or perpetually unemployed or underemployed, who were not providers and on whom nobody could depend, or crass belligerent oafs, and who simply have had a lifetime of bad ideas on men.  I’ve known men who had mothers who were lazy, needy, and couldn’t cook or didn’t like to clean or were very un-motherly and un-affectionate.   I’ve known a number of people who shared stories of falling to sleep at night, quietly crying, hearing their parents fighting in the kitchen…I never heard any of  these people talk longingly or lovingly about finding a mate, a spouse, a partner with whom they could share a home, a future, and a life…It seems to me when you have parents who care deeply about each other, and have great respect for one another, treat each other with kindness and compassion, you can’t help but to long for love, for better or for worse, or happily ever after, and til death do us part…it’s all I knew…

My parents’ marriage, and frankly the life they have created together, is enviable.  Something I always believed in, saw as good and worthy, and yet always beyond my reach.  For some reason, confusing and positively baffling to my parents, I have been unable in my life to ever find that kind of true balance in a relationship…an extra crunchy Jif to one’s Welch’s concord grape for example…my parents really seem to be perfect for each other in every way…and if they are not? if it has all been a trick? well they have created an illusion, a most believable ruse, that they are.  If my father does not truly and deeply love and appreciate my mother, and if she does not truly and deeply love and appreciate him, well it’s the biggest bamboozle of my life!!! Sometimes it’s embarrassing, to be their grown daughter, still in such a state of flux, still single, and never successfully creating, not even coming close to, what they were able to do together…like the great line from Nora Ephron, “I’ll have what she’s having”  is how I have often thought of my mother’s life with my father.   We are very different, me and my parents, different in far more ways than we are alike, but, where we are similar is I guess where it matters, I guess really it’s all that matters…we put aside our differences all the time because of love, and I see now that they must have always done this with each other.  Love always wins.  They are good people, my mom and dad, and that strong moral compass that guides me is surely one of the best gifts they ever bestowed to me.   They deserve this happiness, this peace in life…  They expected nothing and yet created everything…

Everybody, or so I like to think, has a clear sense of what is important and what is a worthy and valuable use of their time.  This sense is totally subjective.  What you think is worthwhile might seem to me incredibly wasteful of those 1440 minutes of your day.  If you knew some of the ways I “waste” minutes in mine over a week, you might laugh at the preposterousness of it, but you see, waste is also a term which could be subjective.  When I think about time, I sometimes think about those Dunkin Donuts commercials from the 80’s “time to make the donuts” and it is a bit how I feel, like Fred The Baker, he’s got to get it done…when I feel or think a task is an important use of my time.

I know a number of people who follow sports teams and over the months of a season spend hours on a sofa watching games, or those who can afford tickets, travel for hours over a season to go to stadiums, to sit for hours to watch the event, and then time to travel back home.  I know a number of people who follow certain shows on television and over a year spend weeks watching episodes.  I know a number of people who, like me, read for hours a week, and if they did not have other obligations, like me, would read for hours more!  I know a few people who do crafts and art, and I know a few people who play video games, and a number of them who go to the gym or run or bike.  Every single person is spending their time that is “free” doing what they want to do.

There are a few things I do that some think are mildly insane, and I have over the years, had people tell me that they think I might very well fall on the autism or Asperger’s spectrum, with my “need” for order and my mild compulsion to have certain things be certain ways, but I argue that this is neither a mental problem nor an affliction, it is simply that I like things the way I like them.  It’s true that I become incensed when the remote control is left out on the coffee table and not in the wicker basket under the coffee table.  It’s true that when my sofa cushions are not even I can’t think straight…it’s honestly one of the many reasons I so adore the sofa I bought from Crate and Barrel when I was building this house, because the modern straight back couch design means that there is not ever a chance that the back cushions would not be perfect, because there are no back cushions!  It’s the little things…

I like that my linen cupboard and my towel closet are in perfect order.  I like that my bath sheets are folded and stacked together the exact same way, that my bath towels are folded and stacked together the exact same way, that my hand towels are folded and stacked together, by size, the exact same way, and same frankly with my wash cloths, larger ones obviously being on the bottom and smaller ones obviously being on the top and all items recirculated, top to bottom, as used and washed.  Years ago, before my dad retired and was still working as a carpenter, he had repaired a leak for a customer and had me repair the sheetrock damage and paint the bedroom.  While I was at the house doing this job, I noticed that the bathroom had an antique etagere rather than a linen cupboard and while I was peeing one afternoon, thought to myself, “I can’t believe their cleaning woman finds these towels acceptable”…they were lavender, gray, and a pale aqua, and in a complete jumble, folded in a mish-mash, and neither sorted by size nor color.  It offended me!  Have I mentioned this was not my house, and not one of my regular customers?  Upon completion of the paint job, I did in fact totally empty the etagere, dust all the shelves, sort all the towels, and refold them in a style to my liking and in a display that was both orderly and pleasing to the eye, never to actually see them again.  Afterwards I thought it was funny, that I could feel so ‘wronged’ by a badly displayed etagere, but that is simply how it was for me…I could not leave the house knowing it was like THAT.  Much like I can’t leave the house with dishes in the sink or my bed unmade.  I mean, sure, I COULD leave the house but I would find it (whatever the “it” was that offended my brain) on my mind all day.  I will refold a fitted sheet, two or three times if necessary, until it is exactly the way I want it folded, so that when the flat sheet is atop it, and the pillow cases on that, all four edges are the same and so they stack, as a complete and matched set, in my linen cupboard just so.  There is nothing deranged about this, is is simply how this is.

I like that my new canned goods, when I return from food shopping, are put into the laundry room pantry cupboard and what is in the laundry room pantry cupboard gets brought into the kitchen pantry…because you see, rotating stock is no different at home than in a store, in my ever so humble opinion.  My dvds are in a lidded bench in my living room and are alphabetized.  My cds in my Sony jukebox player are organized by band and style and I have a five-page index list in a purple folder in the stereo cabinet so I can go to the exact number cd if I so choose.  My tax returns are in a tote in my attic by year, of course, 1981 being at the bottom, naturally, and 2015 is on the top now, obviously.  These are things that make me happy.  I sometimes wonder if these are things about me that I should try to change…like my weight, my fitness level, the number of ounces of alcohol I consume in a week, but then I think, “why?!”  These are not things, at least in my view, that make me qualified for a fitted white jacket and soft quilted walls and strong doses of antipsychotics.

In a perfect world, I would have a much larger house with much more closet space and more shelving but my house is small and to me, small houses need to be kept tidy and orderly so as never to feel cluttered or messy.  I sometimes work tirelessly all day and then come home and work tirelessly til I am simply too tired to do another thing, so that when I finally sit down, I am sitting down in a space that is perfectly pleasing to me and I can relax fully.  The funny thing, to me at least, is that some days the only time I am sitting is in my truck, on my way to the next house or place of work, and the truck is a mess.  The truck is a total pollen covered dashboard, papers on the floor, center cup holders filled with things that are not cups, pit of despair, and yet I am in that space for many minutes over every day.  It’s bizarre to me, how it is awful, and I SEE that it IS IN FACT AWFUL, but I don’t really care all that much.  My boyfriend finds it hilarious, and sometimes scary I think, that I will positively obsess over a throw pillow, or a lap blanket, or how a vase is turned and how I have arranged the flowers, and yet my truck, where I spend quite a bit of time over the hours of a week and a month and a year, gets cleaned out and cleaned perhaps once a quarter!  Like income taxes, every quarter, I really don’t WANT to pay them, but I have to…that’s how the inside of my truck is!  So I guess like everything else, when it’s time to make the donuts, it’s simply doing what makes each of us happy…I’ve “wasted” minutes this bright Saturday morning, writing this blog, and I wasted minutes last night reading my book, and now I am going to waste some hours in the yard, pulling weeds and mulching…and yes, later today when my boyfriend truly tries to be a partner, he will do a load of whites, as that is all that is left in the hamper, and he will leave them out of the dryer in a heap on my bed tonight for me to fold, because he knows, no matter how meticulously he folds them, I will in fact re-fold EVERY SINGLE THING, probably while he watches golf highlights from the day, and we will both be doing what makes us happy and neither of us will feel like it is wasted time 😉

I did not want to be a mother, pretty much up until the second I heard my sister’s voice say, “it’s a girl.” I did not want my daughter to be a mother, pretty much up until I got the late night text message from North Carolina one July that simply read, “9.5 lbs” and yet I am the daughter of a woman whose only “wish” or goal really in life was to have a husband and children.  None of what my life is now was part of my “plan,” and yet when I think about my past and my dreams, and how much goodness is in my life today, it’s sort of funny that THIS was not at all what I wished for, but how glad I am it’s what I got…On days when I quietly reflect on what has worked out well for me, and how dearly I love my daughter and her daughters, and how profoundly their love has changed me for the better, I can “see” it…how a woman might dream of being a mother and having a family…this much love, given and received, well really it’s almost impossible to comprehend sometimes, that we can possibly have THAT much love inside of us.  To be honest, some days I feel so loved by those granddaughters of mine that I do shake my head in disbelief, that I can’t possibly deserve this much joy, this pure and perfect goodness, and in such unbelievably unconditional unyielding abundance…that I did not want to be a mother, and by choices & circumstances became one, forcing me to grow right where I was planted, when I all I dreamed of was flying away, far-far away…and that I did not want my own daughter to be a young mother, but by her choices & determination to fly away, far-far away,  she did become one, interestingly turned out to be some of the very best things about my life.  Like Sheryl Crow says, It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got   It’s funny, life.

…SO, here we are, a week before Mother’s Day and I am thinking about mothers, and babies, and daughters, and choices, all because I tried to find cards the other day at Walgreen’s for my mom and my daughter, and as usual, nothing seemed at all like anything I would say to either of them…You can get unmarried and you can get unemployed and you can get uncoupled, and you can get un-housed, but you can’t get un-mothered, ever.  After you become one, you are a mother before you’re anything else.  It’s a title that once you accept, you can’t change your mind.  You can quite easily rid yourself of disappointing boyfriends, lazy husbands, quit unfulfilling jobs with rude misogynist bosses, you can trade in cars, you can sell your house with the ugly carpet or move to another condo with better lighting…all these big choices in life; who to love, where to live, what kind of job to have, are actually all things that you can change pretty quickly if you so choose…but when you become a mother, well, whether it’s really what you wanted or not, becomes irrelevant, TAG! You’re IT!!!

The tasks you have to perform, the sacrifices you have to make, the obligations you must uphold when you become a mother do not ever end.  You feel a responsibility to this person for the rest of the days that you breathe on this earth. AND I’m here to tell you, there’s something else…even after this person is a mother herself, your feelings of responsibility don’t change, your want for her happiness does not change. You discover, through your journey as a mother, that the joy and the peace and the contentment of your child is far more important than your own and it never changes, that unbelievably unconditional unyielding want for what is best for somebody else.  A friend wrote to me once that her favorite quote about motherhood is something about how you now live with your heart outside of your body, once you have a child.  It seems spot-on.

So, that is how this ends I guess, this dreary week before Mother’s Day, in the gratitude I have for my own mother…A woman who has always wanted nothing for me but joy, and peace, and contentment, who always put my wants and needs before her own, and her unbelievably unconditional unyielding love for me.  The gratitude I have for the relationship my daughter and I have cultivated, and my hope that she feels the unbelievably unconditional unyielding love that I have for her, and her children…they don’t make cards that say this, but I feel like they’re the only words worth saying…

So for many months I have followed some internet groups and forums for people who like to crochet.  I love that people share pictures of their work, finished items, works in progress, ask help for gauges or needles or yarns, or seek advice, but yesterday morning I noticed that the majority of the posts I had recently seen started out with self-defeating comments like, “I know it’s not great but” or “it’s not the best” and nonsense negative talk of this type…SO being the kind of person I am, I made a general post on one of the sites called Crochet Addict.  I wrote that everything everyone makes is amazing.  That we are women who enjoy an “old-fashioned” hobby and I love how people seek feedback, but could they please not so often include negative comments, such as I described above, that couldn’t we agree that it is amazing that any of us make things at all, and appreciate it, without women putting themselves down…

So I noticed during my lunch break at work yesterday that 390 people had “liked” my post but that 41 people had made comments.  So I looked at what the comments were.  GOOD GRIEF People!!!???  Needless to say, my uplifting and positive comment was met with many grossly distorted interpretations and then comments about how ‘bullies who have confidence are always wanting to tell other people how to feel’ and how ‘maybe some of us who have suffered 43 years of abuse don’t have the confidence in our work that you do’ and ‘why would you tell people how to think or ask for help’ and another one who wrote, “you know men crochet too don’t you” …Over-Thinking much ladies??!!  Oh my goodness…I was just trying to share some positive vibes, to encourage some of these women to take pride in their work and their tasks!

So I deleted my comment and I deleted myself from the group and “un-joined” the forum…ALL I was trying to do was to remind these people that anytime we sit down to create something, is IS worthy of praise, however elementary or stupendous our skill level might be…AND instead, and I guess I should have expected it, people chose to read into my words, WAY more, or different meaning, than I intended…I felt sort of sad and then sort of annoyed…BUT then the light bulb came on in my head, as it often does minutes or hours or days after an event, and I realized that negative people are always going to find the negative, in anything, no matter what…they lack the ability to read my simple words, and fail to interpret the intent because they are seeking to find the bad in all and everything…and then I felt kind of sad for them and a little sad for myself, as I did love seeing the different stitches and patterns that people shared.

I really wasn’t aiming to tell women how to “be” and was just reminding them all that there is no need to put yourself down, ever!  So I am back to YouTube only for my crocheting tutorials and Pinterest for my ideas and I learned a lesson…no need to try to share my positive view, I’ll do like my boyfriend advises and just keep my upbeat-ness to myself  😉

I recently read about a Hindu goddess called Akhilandra who is thought powerful because she is broken.  I like this, mostly because it is in complete opposition to “our” modern American cultural beliefs and philosophies that seem to constantly remind us, women especially, that broken equates with defeat, failure or weakness.  Her name in Sanskrit literally means never not broken, yet she is revered and honored because, her super-power if you will, is being able to constantly put herself back together again.  This touched me when I read it because one of the ways I most regularly describe myself and my life and my time on this planet is that I am a work in progress, and I’ve often felt like I have failed, because the progressing and the working seems to be ongoing, like I never get “done,” yet here is a goddess who is honored highly for just this…rebuilding and re-imagining, constantly.

It is not unusual for me to often feel  like peace will simply evade me forever, the continuous loop of fixing, failing, fixing, failing…but reading about Akhilandra made me think that it’s not the end of the world really, ( and honestly, we all know it NEVER is ) because, for every failure, when I felt so doomed or discouraged, however briefly or lengthy the sadness held, it was just a new starting point for something next.  Sometimes the next was better and sometimes it wasn’t, but nothing was ever the same.  This goddess reconfigures reality as needed, any time…At the start, at the end, some random middle, wherever and whatever… She takes all the broken bits and aches and tears, and reworks them fully knowing she will likely do it again sometime in the future…Yet, in all the images I found on the internet of her, she’s not sobbing in a heap of woe, wearing the same yoga pants she’s had on for days and eating Pringles right out of the pantry and Ben and Jerry’s right out of the freezer.  NO!  She is depicted wearing colorful exquisite sarees and riding, get this, a crocodile!  Talk about girl-power!!

I follow no religion and don’t have too many firm beliefs but I do believe this; things can always be worse, and we can always try to do better.  I like that in Hinduism there is a goddess for pretty much any need you might have.  There is Parvati, the gentle goddess of love, there is Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, there is Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, and it seems that if something ails you or hurts you or troubles you, yes, they’ve got a goddess for that.  My friends who are Christian will tell me that this is what God does for them, any need they might have, they put their trust in their faith and let God handle it.  They will also tell me that their God will love me, whole or broken.  That idea comforts me too.

I thought too about how many times I have comforted my broken daughter, or a broken friend, and how many times my mother and my friends, did the same for me.  I’ve felt power in the healing of love, both coming to me and moving through me.  If Akhilandra has a theme song, it would not surprise me one bit to find it’s Beth Orton’s version of Ooh Child, or maybe Closer To Fine by the Indigo Girls.  As flawed and broken as I have felt in life, when I have needed energy to comfort someone I care for, somehow all my broken bits meld together and suddenly I am the healer, the fixer, and not the one in need of healing or fixing.  Maybe Akhilandra’s energy is all encompassing in its brokenness and wholeness both, it’s love above all else after all.

I know some women who feel broken right now.  Some feel broken by the men they thought really loved them and on whom they thought they could depend.  Some feel broken by the constant charlatan-like chant and chatter in between their own ears, self-defeating and self harming always.  Some feel broken by the jobs they thought they really wanted or careers they thought were worth pursuing.  Some feel broken by their own bodies with angry cells clustering together and revolting against them, trying to beat them down.  Some feel broken by their desires for food, alcohol, shoes, vacations, all trying to fill their feelings of emptiness, yet none ever succeeding in quashing the hunger pains.  I hope any of those women who might read this will reference some pages of the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita and feel some of this goddess power.  I like that whatever I believe, or you believe, is what ultimately gets us through the night.  I like thinking that there are entire religions and principles that give us peace with our thoughts, strength and power, and forgiveness for our failings, and I guess most importantly, the confidence we need to believe we can always try again.  I like thinking that every time I stumble I can dust myself off and regroup.  I like thinking that there is a cool chick wearing bright cloths, scarves, and a sari and steering a crocodile, ready to swoop me up anytime I fall.

A lot happens in a day, in a season, in a year, in a lifetime…we have lots of time & space & moments of living between our first breath and our last.  Some of us will have far more days than we expected and some of us will have far fewer, but every day really counts…some days are clearly (no pun whatsoever intended) better than others, and even the hours of the days with events we would rather forget, well, they count too.  Those days, the hard ones, the struggling and the juggling, I’m told are what build character, and fair or not, some people have WAY more of those than seems just.  However, regardless of the number, or the frequency with which some suffer, if we focus on the moments of joy and the days or hours that are splendid, we are all better for it.  At least I believe this to be true, and if it’s not, I still prefer thinking about the nice & happy.  The first sunrise I ever saw, from that first sliver of flaming tangerine glow just peeking a hair above the horizon, until it sits big, round, and magically bright, just above the edge of the earth, happened only a few years ago on a chilly end of summer morning beside a boy I’d been dating a couple of weeks.  We had a first date in July that simply never ended, and I sat that morning, shivering on my beach chair in the stillness of predawn, wondering why people would want to be outside, in the dark, in the chill of September, but then it happened…that little shimmer forming on the water, and I kept my eyes open in wonder and watched, and then laughed at how silly it was, to grow up down the shore, and be “so old”  before I witnessed a sunrise.  It was one of the best mornings and moments of my whole life.  That boy, who I sat and watched surf fishing that morning, well, we are still on that first date that never ended, and today, his birthday, is the 18,264th sunrise of his life…despite the fact it is pouring rain today, is gray and gloomy, and his golf game got canceled, and it’s rather likely none of us will see the sun today at all…

I have spent some time during this relationship thinking about the space between…the space between a day and a night, a week and a month, summer solstice and winter, year upon year…I often wonder, too much some would say, about the “if-onlys” and the “should-haves” and think how so much of both our lives would possibly, well honestly very likely,  have been much better if only we had met when we were teenagers…My heart literally skipped a beat, like I mean I really felt like I was not breathing, that night that July, those many sunrises ago, the first time we met.  Hundreds of thoughts raced through my mind in those first moments, most notably the shocking realization that we had been teenagers at the same small high school at the same time, and had many mutual friends, and yet, never had I ever met him, not even once.  Even in those first minutes and then hours, and days of our first never-ending-date, I wondered how nobody thought to introduce us, how did he not notice or know me, and how did I not notice or know him??!!  I was a cheerleader and he was a drummer, we could have been quite the couple!  It was almost funny, and then sort of sad…the wondering, as we got to know each other, and learned each others stories, how much fun we would have had, how very different both of our lives would have been, could have been, had we only met then, instead of now…but we are not young, we do not have full lives ahead of us, we don’t get to have dreams of ‘how it’s gonna be,’ we don’t get to have visions of a wide open future of possibilities…we have only the time we have left, to try to now live the life we imagined…

I call him the drummer boy, but he is not a boy at all, and actually as of late, not even a drummer…Today he is 50, and plays percussion, and while I have known him for only 1,368  days, I sometimes feel like I have known him all my life, and honestly there are some other days, of which I am not nearly so fond, when I wonder if I know him at all…it’s not a complaint, really just an observation, and it reminds me of a Jane Austen passage; “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”  This is of course from Sense and Sensibility, and anybody who knows me, knows that when I first meet somebody, I lack both.  

Some couples meet and click and ease, flawlessly, or so it seems, into a relationship.  We, the drummer boy and I, were not that kind of couple.  We met at a time that was confusing and uncertain for both of us…looking back, it’s always so easy to look back and see SO MUCH MORE CLEARLY, we probably should have, after our first few dates, agreed that “now is not the right time to try to start a relationship” for either of us…but we didn’t do that.  We dove in, straight down the rabbit hole, head over feet, despite many indicators and facts that, had we both had our sense and sensibility about us, should have made us stop or at least pause, but what happened, happened, and all we can do is move forward.  Not one of us can change our pasts, we just press on.  I still feel my toes tingle when he smiles at me, and his laugh is still like magic to my ears.  These things matter.  We aren’t young, and maybe we met too late for us to have had the kind of love, experiences, and lifestyle we would have wanted, and wish we could have shared together, but sometimes I feel like I’m still a teenager when I am beside him, or watch him making music.  Like F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”  In every sunset comes the promise of a sunrise.  In every mistake comes the learning.  In every rumination comes the understanding.  In every space between comes the living.

My mother is one of the least superficial people I know.  While she could well afford to buy elegantly glass bottled fragrances from Bloomingdale’s she prefers the spray mist from Bath and Body Works.  She could surely swing it in her budget to do her clothes shopping at Chico’s or J. Jill, but she prefers to buy her cotton t-shirts and capri pants at K-Mart.  She could trade in or trade up luxury cars every few years if she wanted to, but instead treasures her 16-year-old VW Beetle and her ten-year-old Jeep.  This kind of practicality from a woman who, while she and my Dad were building their last house, bought every single handmade vintage iron hinge, door knob, and decorative lock box (some with the original skeleton keys) from a man she found on the internet who did architectural salvage and restorations, and spent more money per door than some people spend for hardware for an entire house!!!  She cares far more about the character and civility of a person than how they appear, or what qualities they project.  My mom is far more impressed by your moral compass than the GPS in your Mercedes, if you get what I mean.  She has known for all of her life that what we see on the outside and perceive to be true, is not necessarily relevant or reflective of what is on the inside.  As a young person, this seemed meaningless to me, but now that I am grown and she is growing old, I understand how incredibly important it is to recognize the difference.

My mom is one of those women who, as Ben Harper says, has ‘diamonds on the inside.’  When I was a young teenager and began to notice things like the size of women’s engagement rings, or the way some of my friend’s mother’s expressed themselves with their clothes or handbags, or the way some women chose to show what they valued or how they chose to demonstrate it,  I made a comment one day to my mother, as she was sitting at the desk in her bedroom, about how tiny her ring was…she looked down at her hand, and without missing a beat said,  “there is more love behind this little ring than most women will ever know.”  Boom.  That’s my mom.

“She’s the best wife I ever had,” is how my dad describes her, as he grins adoringly at her and continues to see with his loving eyes the woman he fell in love with fifty years ago.  Love like theirs, and a lifetime of working together as true partners with a common goal and shared values is something I will never know.  Today is her birthday and she is one of those women who needs nothing and wants nothing.  What makes her the happiest is to know that her loved ones are happy.  So my gift today for her is to let her know that I am very happy with much of my life, and the parts that need improvement, well, I am really working hard to improve them.  It’s the only gift I can give her that won’t cost me a penny.

I have rolled my eyes at things she has said, and she has sighed with annoyance at things I have said, for decades.  We seldom agree on much, but the funny thing is, the older I get, the less I seem to roll my eyes and the less she seems to sigh.  Things she did or said or found to be important and valuable, that used to make me feel frustrated with her, are now things that I find, at this stage of my own “mid-life,” enviable.  As a young person I made great efforts to convince myself I was nothing like her, but I see more clearly now that to have been more like her would have been smart.  I’m growing older and she is growing old, and while we still disagree mightily on many matters, the things that really matter, I finally have begun to understand.