When an artist conjures up an idea or image and creates a masterpiece, or what she believes could be a masterpiece, she might make many small changes to her work, before she feels satisfied that it is right and complete.  It’s doubtful she begins with negative thoughts that this will fail, that this will be ugly, that this will be nothing very special… When a chef creates a dish she imagines will be appreciated as a masterpiece, she might increase the spices, change the texture, adjust the temperature, or add more ingredients  before she feels it is right and complete.  It’s doubtful she begins with thoughts of things that won’t blend well together…what a waste of time that would be.  I believe that when we’ve created the life we imagined, or are having the lifestyle we thought we wanted, and find ourselves actually “living the dream,” we must do whatever we have to do to keep it operating smoothly and change or add and revise as needed, so that it feels right, and we think of it as our masterpiece.   What purpose is there at all to simply exist and not relish what we are ‘having?’  Is just breathing in and breathing out, living?

Over many years of trial and error I found myself having to accept the reality that the life I had -“dreamed of-”  was neither the life I was actually living nor, upon deep thought and reflection, really what I wanted anyway…so I would end a chapter and turn a page and create the next phase, in a perpetual effort to live a life I could think of as a masterpiece.  I have done this over and over, over the years of my life, and do believe it is the only way to ultimately GET where you want to be, both figuratively and literally; to assess and to modify, to adapt or to overcome, or to end a chapter and start a new page.

“Live as though life was created for you.”  – Maya Angelou

The WHERE, as in place is set, not in stone, but in 2×4’s, 5/8 plywood, 3/4 gypsum, and the coolest silver metal roof in my town, right next door to the three girls who make my heart pitter-patter; my daughter and her daughters.  I built my house exactly when I did and exactly where I did so that I could be an active participant in helping my adult child raise her young children.  Sometimes,  if I’m in one of those moods, I feel anxious  that babysitting is on the schedule far more times a month than perhaps it is for most neighbors or Na-nas, but that was the plan…I would be an integral part of their lives…and I do believe that it really does “take a village” and we created our own village…

GET where I want to be, as in the dreamy philosophical idealized sense, the way I imagine I want my life to be, or think I want the days of my life to flow, is not set at all; it’s totally fluid…in and out, heavy and light, rough and calm, it is nothing I can modify, because it ISN’T anything…the masterpiece that is my life is being created every day I am alive, it is constantly changing…I think hundreds of thoughts a day.  I imagine hundreds of scenarios a day.  I have hundreds of narratives in my head a day.  There are hundreds of  ‘lives’  I could create, all of them appealing and seemingly right, and any one of those ideas could be the masterpiece.   Any change to any part of the equation can turn the whole “thing” into something else…Meaning I could fall down any rabbit hole and the outcome would be manageable…

A couple of days ago with my granddaughters the youngest one asked, “Nana do you have a boss?”  and I told her no, I was my own boss, it’s called self-employed, to which she responded, “you are SO LUCKY, that means you can do anything you want to do.”  She said it with such reverence for this concept and I thought later that day, she is so right.  I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT TO DO…to be clear, I HAVE to pay my property taxes every quarter so the township does not put a lien on my house, BUT I don’t have to live where I do, I live here because I want to.  I HAVE to work so that I can make money to pay my property taxes BUT I work the job I do because it’s something different every day and the views are priceless, and I do what I do because I want to.  Her way of seeing the world helped me tweak the way I had lately  been seeing mine.

She reinforced my belief that we all are the creators of our lives and have a responsibility to ourselves to do whatever we think we must to “get right.”  We must continually assess our masterpieces and adjust accordingly, to be well, to feel well, to “be” right.  We can work very hard to create our DREAM only to discover, thankfully sometimes quickly or sorrowfully sometimes much too late,  that the people with whom we are sharing our dream don’t find any value in it all, it is not a masterpiece to them whatsoever…and they do things that sabotage, knowingly or not, our creation…do we just give up?  do we just accept that somebody stomped on our dream?  People can mislead, deceive, delude, lie, stab us in the back, cheat, steal, make us feel like fools, and suck the wonderful out of our lives…if we let them…do we let their choices and actions destruct our masterpieces?  do we call it failure and feel like we lost?  or do we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, & turn the page and start a new chapter?  It’s all a choice.  A choice to feel defeated or a choice to feel challenged.  Let somebody trudge all over your project or pick up whatever pieces you still have in tact and get busy recreating…it’s up to you… As we grow older we can think somebody rained on our parade, that somebody derailed our plans, BUT the fact of the matter is that quite simply their dream/idea/masterpiece/creation is their own, it just did not or could not synch with ours…their vision did not grok with our vision.

I know people who are stuck… I know people who are stuck in houses they can’t afford or are no longer worth half what they paid.  I know people who are stuck in relationships; with marriages that have slipped to the ‘so-so’ or  ‘ it’s tolerable’ range from the ‘great & crazy about each other’ zone they once lived in, but with small children or financial obligations and literally can’t afford to break up.  I know people who have empty nests and now feel lost without a specific familial role to play, and I know people who can’t wait for the freedom associated with finding their nest empty.  I know people who have had to spend their nest egg to live, and I know people who every week of the year think about amassing more of an egg.  All of us should be doing whatever we can, to reshape our lives as we can, so that we constantly try to live our masterpiece, whatever it may be and however we envision it.

My granddaughter’s expression of amazement that I could do anything I want reminded me how much I truly believe that we all are creators. Some people really do ANYTHING they want, and some do most of what they want and a little of what they have to, and some do most of what they have to and only a smidgen of what they want to…but so many fail to consider that it’s always an option to DO SOMETHING ELSE, CREATE SOMETHING ELSE…Erase what you wrote, Apologize for what you said, Change your mind, Change your attitude, Leave, Stay, Start over, Pick up where you left off, Kiss and make up, Shake hands and break up, Tear it down, Build it up…WHATEVER…we can spend time feeling good about our choices when they turn out to be right, and  beating ourselves up and suffering the consequences when they turn out to be bad, but there is nothing bad at all about creating a life you imagine, and recreating it when your imagination thinks  it’s time.

The winter my daughter turned one, I was living in a tiny island apartment with  my husband who had recently been discharged out of the Coast Guard.  He was working sporadically with friends and spending every cent of money he could get his hands on, on cocaine, weed, and beer.  I was working as many hours a week as I could at a gallery and hiding every bit of money I made in secret spots around the apartment.  I used the pay phone at 7-11 when I needed to make a call, I often bought groceries, like cereal, cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, milk, and bread (you can live pretty well on tomato soup and Cocoa Pebbles by the way) at CVS because it was the nearest place to walk with the stroller.  It was not an easy life but it was my life.

My boss’s daughter had recently gotten married, moved off the island, no longer needed a bike and so she gave me her orange ten-speed which I then used to get 27 blocks away to work.  I would leave for work after my grandparents or my in-laws, or whoever was babysitting for me that day, had driven to my apartment to retrieve my adorable Buddha bellied bald baby girl.  On rainy days, whoever was babysitting would drive me to work and then leave with my child and come back to get me at the end of the day. Most winters the gallery closed after December 31st not to reopen til spring, but because I needed to work my boss stayed open off-season that year so I could work Friday through Monday, and people who loved my baby were willing and able to babysit, so I at least got four days of work a week.  My rent was never paid on time on the 1st of  the month and my oil tank for heat became empty too many times to count over that winter, but I managed somehow to get through every day, day after day,  and each day had to hope that ‘this day’ would be better for me than the day before.  To write that this was  not an easy way to live would be an understatement.

My apartment came with access to a washer in the landlord’s garage and was located just 23 blocks from the laundromat where the nearest dryer was, so I would often do two or three loads of wash on Thursday night so that Friday morning I could evenly distribute the wash into two Hefty trash bags so I could stop at the dryers before work, so that after work I could fold my dry clothes and take them back to the apartment.  If you have never had to ride a used orange 10-speed boy’s bicycle 23 blocks to the laundromat with a Hefty bag of damp clothes on each wrist, count yourself very lucky.  It is a balancing act worthy of any Cirque Du Soleil show.  One morning during the February of that winter one of the bags got lopsided as I pedaled, and as the red ties started to twist around my wrist, the  bag began to spin and within seconds my balance of both heavy trash bags was thrown off and before I could stop the bike one of the bags got twisted up in the spoke of the front wheel and I went flying off the bike, and the one bag tore open and there I sat, on a cold morning, on a rather empty island, in the middle of Central Avenue, with a torn bag of wet wash beside me, and I cried.  I cried so hard sitting there in the street and wondering what on earth was I going to DO…is this what my LIFE WAS GOING TO BE??…hardship after hardship after hardship…there was no light at the end of my tunnel, there wasn’t even a tunnel.  I was in a hole.  The pit of despair.  I had made terrible choices and that morning accepted completely that my life was awful and it was awful because of the choices I made.

I did not want to move back home with my parents again, (I had moved back to their house when my baby was four months old, but moved out again by that September, I don’t know, even now, what made me hate living with them so much, that the alternative was better in my mind, and remains a mystery even these almost 30 years later) which was odd, since they had a big beautiful house with heat, air conditioning, and food, and my bedroom at their house was bigger than my living room, kitchen, and bedroom combined in the tiny island apartment, and they loved me, and were kind to me and treated me nicely…who would not want to live there?!  What kind of idiot would choose the alternative?!  um, yes, it was me…I have often wondered why I made the choices I did, what could possibly have made me think that being on my ‘own,’ was better than living with my parents and my sister?  Why would I have chosen a tiny apartment with a mean man who neither provided for me nor really cared about my well-being, over my parents who loved me and my child unconditionally and had an empty room waiting for me…it still blows my mind to think about it.

There were moments that winter when I thought I might die;  both figuratively from sadness and hopelessness, and literally by the hands of a  husband who was often high,  and terrifyingly strong, and terrifyingly mean, when he was drunk and on drugs.  I don’t remember if he was ever nice to me that winter…did we ever laugh together or take a walk and hold hands, or smile at each other across the dinner table, or-or-or???  …I have no memory of butterflies in my belly or a kiss or a hug that made me feel loved or cared for, or any nice thing that he did that made my spine tingle…I do not know what I disliked so much about living with my parents that I CHOSE living with him…I did finally leave, later that June 1st, when I called my friend and asked her to ‘please just come,’  and she did…Who I was then and who I am now is exactly the same girl, woman, person…I still love to read, crochet, work, clean…the hours of my days then were rather similar to the hours of my days now, so little, honestly is different.  I don’t know what made me think of all this today.  I don’t know why I opened up a wound so long ago closed and healed.

I guess when I feel confused, conflicted, or uncertain, or at a difficult point in my present life, I ponder, in the big scheme of things, what is “wrong” now and the realization sinks in that the answer is honestly, “not much,” when compared to my life then.  I find that when I compare my life to somebody who is living a seemingly better one; fun toys,  fat wallets, taking vacations…I suffer, BUT  that suffering is when I am comparing apples I guess to oranges…nobody has my life, nobody has my past, nobody has my blessings or my sorrows…they are mine to embrace or shed…comparing anything about myself or my present circumstances to anything or anyone is just being a glutton for punishment…it’s purposefully thinking about things that make me feel bad, so it is my duty to my well-being to STOP.  To think only about what is good about my life today, now, at present, when I compare it to my life then…that sad, hard winter…

One of my dear girlfriends would say simply to stop thinking about anything or anyone or any situation that does not make me feel good, that does not make me feel positive about my life today.   She also would tell me that it is sometimes very hard to do, but it is part of how she lives, to stop her thoughts when they stray to the ones that hurt her.  It is part of her daily practice, to control her thoughts.  So, WHEN I think about the life I have and live NOW and compare it only to the life I had and lived THEN, all those years ago during that cold lonely and scary winter, there is no suffering…there is no sadness there is no fear, there is only joy…Happiness and gratitude, beauty, smiles, laughter, a fullness, a quality of life that anyone, if one wanted to compare, would find to be perfectly fine…there is pure and true and honest happiness when I compare my life then and my life now.  No envy of some woman’s fine jewelry, no envy of some couple’s fancy vacation, no envy of some friend’s expensive wedding, or exotic car, or designer shoes…just acceptance that I made many choices in my life, some very good and some very bad, but  that all of those choices got me here, now, today, and I hope, well I believe really, that I’ve learned a little bit more, about what really matters,  all of the many days in-between…

I breathe a sigh of relief today, this hot July Thursday morning,  the first child of my child is now 9.  She is no longer eight and I feel a weight lifted off of me, and I have one more to go, the second child of my child will be nine before too long, and then the curse of my thoughts and my worries will be lifted…You see, when my mom was a teenager her little brother drowned in the bay off  the island where they lived.  He was 8.  –Getting beyond 8–  in my mind, once I became a mother, became a goal that must be achieved,  so deep it was in my thoughts, and even more so since I’ve become a Nana.  It’s a thought in my head that I can’t shake and never could.  My mother’s and my aunt’s loss as teenagers, and my Nana’s as a woman, became part of my history, herstory, without ever experiencing it myself.

When I was 17 I found out I was pregnant.  I neither wanted to be or wished to be and made great efforts to get rid of it, only to learn that it had been inside of me longer than I had thought or counted, and inside of me was where it was going to live.   It moved and grew, and I grew, and it forced me to give up drinking Tab and eating SuzyQ’s as my lunch choice, but not much changed for me other than my size.   When I was 18 and about to give birth, I still had no deep maternal feelings for it, no warmth, no attachment to it really at all.  Then after a few minutes of pressure, sweating, and dizziness I heard my sister say “it’s a girl” and all I wanted in the whole world was her.  I suddenly and inexplicably wanted to keep her next to me and safe, and love her more than I ever had wanted anything in my life.

And that is when it hit me the first time…that it takes only minutes to fall in love with your child.  I understand clearly that for many women, most women probably, that this happens during pregnancy, but that is not my story, that was not my herstory… I did not fall in love until she was here and had taken her first breath of air on this planet and then I was so deeply in love with her I didn’t know what could have possibly happened to me.  But that kind of love comes with a very high price…it could be snatched away by circumstance or by nature…through no fault of your own, it could be taken from you…and once I became a mother, I understood so deeply what my Nana had lived with for all of my life.  Loss.  Devastating, unimaginable, indescribable loss.

I have never heard my mom or my aunt refer to him as anything other than “little Billy” he is forever an 8 year-old boy, truly a boy who won’t grow up.  I talked to my Nana about heaven a lot when I was a teenager, she who was so full of faith, and I who had none, talked about heaven and God and things that we really knew nothing about, and I would ask her what she thought, if there was heaven would he be still just an 8-year-old soul?   She really wanted to find out, and then after my Pop died, her husband, we talked more about heaven, she was so curious, never fearful.   She had no fear really at all about dying and believed as deeply as the day is long that she would be with them again, that being said, I seldom asked her details about how she felt, how she learned, who told her, that day in 1960, that near a bulkhead in Beach Haven Terrace her son went missing and then later his body was found.  I never really asked my mom or aunt for many details either…it became a story of a family who suffered a tragic loss.

But it also became a fear deep inside me, once I became a mother.  I learned rather rapidly that the love you feel for this child that you didn’t really want in the first place, and now want more than you want any single other thing, is so all-consuming it becomes part of your cells, your being, your soul…and that is when I first really thought deeply about my Nana’s loss of a child, my first weekend home from the hospital, cold dreary January, the realization that ALREADY I love this child THIS much, and she is only hours on this planet, being completely unable to wrap my head around how my Nana felt when little Billy died. During my pregnancy my Nana had embroidered the edges and corners of many cotton diapers for me to use as burp cloths and every time I washed one or touched the decorative threads I felt her sorrow…I wondered how many of little Billy’s things she touched after he died…how she managed to take her next breath, how she managed to wake up that next day, how she ever could go on…she used to have this odd habit of once in a while taking in this deep loud and sharp breath and I used to think it was a reminder, from that day long ago in 1960, her body reminding her that she in fact was alive and that she must breathe…

So I had this little infant girl who grew into this toddler who grew into this preschooler who grew into this really fabulous kid, and I became consumed with fear, a purpose,  that I had to get her to age 8, that once I got her to age 8 the universe would take care of her for all of the rest of her days on this earth…I convinced myself that this family history of loss became a burden I had to overcome, not an obstacle so much as a challenge.  I never re-read my writing after it’s written, so I won’t go find my journal from January of 1995, but if I wanted to I could find it in the box under my bed, where all of the journals are (I’ve been keeping my journals since I was 14) I am sure that that day’s entry was filled with many emotions and relief, that she was –no longer eight–  and I had gotten beyond the curse of loss that had been in my mind all those years.

So today the child I call ‘Sweet-Ti’  is no longer eight and I again feel an ability to take a deeper breath, to worry a tiny bit less, to enjoy a moment of relief.  I have one to go…the little blonde tan one I most often call by a nickname ‘Bug,’ due to her love of ladybugs and all those multi-legged and flying creatures, and another year plus of over-thinking, over-worrying, over-protection until it will be her time for me to let the universe take over and wrap her in glorious protective goodness for the rest of her days on earth.  When each of these children was born I went to North Carolina to help with all things related to new infant care.  I kept these babies in the living room with me and slept on the sofa for their first few weeks of life so that their parents did not have to get up for late hour feedings and diaper changes, but I also did it for myself…to connect with them, to make them part of me, and I whispered to each of them that I would do my very best to care for them and protect them until such time as the universe took over…When they are grown women and perhaps mothers themselves they’ll understand too…but it’ll no longer be history, it’ll be herstory, our story, the way we women in this family feel about the humans we make, and the joy to see them turn from eight to nine…one to go, and then I am free to let the universe take charge…

Living life, the day in and the day out monotonous bits…the gloriously good bits, however infrequent they may be…and even the devastatingly dark bits, with hopes that they are few and far between…they are all part of life, and we have to take all of those bits and weave them, like the threads of the fabric of our lives, as best we can into something that comforts us and we call it living…The first lines of  ‘Tapestry’ by Carole King…

“My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold”

I know some people who have time and time again suffered; death, sadness, worry, losses that build and accumulate to a mountain of woe that seems insurmountable, yet they keep on going forward.  I know some people for whom life has been cushy, pampered, generous, easy as pie, yet they are miserable, frown filled, and unpleasant, day after day.  I know some people who had really terrible horrible very bad childhoods, yet raised really remarkable terrific wonderful children.  I know some people who had picture perfect fairy tale childhoods and sadly produced self-centered self-absorbed know-it-all assholes, and that’s never a pretty picture.  The older I grow the more I realize that it is our choice how to see the world and the life we are living as either full or empty, great or God awful…life as a tapestry that hugs us and brings us comfort like a flannel cloth to a swaddled infant, or like a heavy itchy blanket we can’t wait to throw off that suffocates us in the heat…

For most of us life is constantly changing, morphing into something else, something “other” over time, over and over…sometimes it is slow and sluggish and sometimes it moves  fast like Speedy Gonzales.  Some of us notice something changed or different, the moment something changes or is different, and some people hardly notice anything around them at all.  I can’t say, or write, or guess which one is better or correct, I suppose there is no such thing, but I know what is right for me, or at the very least, feels right for me…to try every day to see life as a wonderous woven magic tapestry, some of it glitters and shimmers and is filled with the finest of threads, and some of it is worn and ragged, some of it has moth holes and pulls,  but it is mine.

My tapestry…to bundle around myself when I feel chilled and to curl up with if I feel lonely, and to spread open as a welcoming mat when I crave friendship or companionship, or laughter and a full house and lots of dishes… It is the tapestry I used to comfort the crying infant  that came from my body, and to comfort the crying infants that later came from hers…it is the tapestry that has wiped my tears and the tapestry that has polished my awards…it is mine to pull tight and hold against me like a cocoon and claim as my own, “No room at the Inn” …or it is mine to open wide and wrap around another and share its embrace of tranquility, “please do come in, Welcome” …we can share our life with others and allow ourselves to be open to all the positives, or negatives that come with that exposure, the vulnerability that comes with opening up your tapestry, where there was just one, then there was two…or we can choose to be solitary and isolated, safe and protected from any of the forces or thoughts from others, but at what cost?  …but it seems to me such a colorful mix of textures and threads ought not be hidden, alone in a linen cupboard, but shared as needed and proudly displayed, and fully used lovingly over time, until it has served its purpose and we take our last breath and no longer need its warmth…

We all make choices every day, every hour, perhaps every minute…what to do, what not to do, who to love, who to dislike, what to eat, what not to eat, where to go, if we should go, who should go…every second of every day is a chance to change direction or to stay on the course we’re on.  I am in need, in want really, of a new direction and deeply desire the strength, or perhaps simply the will,  to make better choices in nearly every area of my life.   A friend recently celebrated his 3rd wedding anniversary, with a woman he had been friends with 30 years ago, and he wrote that he  “finally figured out that we should be together in every sense of the word. Today marks our 3rd year of marriage. I have never made a better move in my life.  [she] is my perfect complement and my cherished companion. Thank God we finally figured it out.”  and when I read that, I cried…both in happiness for my friend who I have known for 20 years and for myself, wondering if my time will EVER come that I finally make choices, repeatedly, that say, or scream, that I’ve finally figured  ‘it’  out…

I find that a constant sensation, or I guess emotion, I feel is frustration…it’s not unhappiness or dissatisfaction or lack of joy in my life; my life is full of lovely and beautiful things and people. I have a full life of love…I love so many different people and I feel loved by many, so there is a fullness, an abundance of good in my world, but, there is also an almost equal supply of frustration.  It diminishes my quality of life.  Frustration sucks the delight out of a life otherwise well lived.  I know that every choice I make, every time I make one, is an opportunity to turn things around in my life towards a direction I want to go or not.  The key to success I guess is to begin, and then not stop, making choices that lead me to a point where I wish to be.  “Pick a path, any path…”  I can’t go backwards and change anything that I have already done.  I can’t un-do mistakes, I can’t un-do bad decisions, I can’t un-do any of the choices I have already made.  I can only move forward, ahead, ‘press on,’ as my Momma says…and make new choices that reflect my goals or desires.

Every bad choice we make can be a learned lesson.  If we don’t learn from our mistakes, well shame on us!  Every bad choice we make can be an opportunity, if nothing else, to force ourselves next time to say or think, “hey, I picked A, now I see B would have been better for me, from now on I simply can know that B won’t work for my goals, so A might not always be the best choice in the future, but I know B is wrong for me regardless.”

I was thinking last night about where I want to be, not in the sense of “place” like home, but in the sense of settled and secure and certain, the quality of life I want to have in this next chapter of adulthood, and how to get myself there…there, this unknown mystical place where I think I should be… I got to thinking about how much I LOVE to cook but how much I abhor grocery shopping.  However, when I have a menu planned for a dinner party, or a week’s worth of meals on my mind and I make a detailed list of what I need, after verifying what I’ve already got in the pantry or the freezer, and I write my list in an orderly fashion that follows the path of the supermarket aisles, and I only buy what is on my list and I don’t get distracted by the promotions or balloons or featured items, but STICK TO MY LIST, I get everything I needed and wanted and stay within my budget and I come home feeling good…and I thought, well, I can look at life like I look at my grocery list before a dinner party…I know what I want to make, and I know the ingredients that I need to accompany what I’ve already got…make a list and stick to it...Ina, and Martha, and Nigella would be proud of me, Voila! success!!

I’ve written of how I tend to see things as black or white, working or broken, good or bad, messy or tidy…it’s simply how I seem to see things, not a choice, really, I just don’t seem to recognize a lot of gray areas or “sort-ofs.”  Last night I watched my grandchildren run home through the trees of the area of woods that separates their house from mine; one in flip-flops and one barefooted, one round and soft still with all her ‘baby fat,’  with greenish eyes that see everything in such a unique way, with a head of long  blonde curls, and the other tall and lean and lithe, with these fierce chestnut eyes, and every brunette hair on her head determined and confident…I wished them a great last day of school, kindergarten and 3rd grade respectively, and remembered and realized that whether we are ready or not, life just keeps changing…There is nothing we can do but to live, as well as we can…time isn’t stopping or slowing down so we can catch up…

When I look at these daughters of my daughter, my delight in their existence is sometimes combined with a presentiment of loss…they will soon not want to smooch and cuddle and hug me wildly, they will soon not share every detail about their day with me, they will soon find I am just a driver and a cook and a maid for them…but perhaps, because I am not their mother, they will maintain a relationship with me different from that with my daughter.  My mother and I butted heads, a lot and often, but I never seemed to ever tire of time spent with my Mimom or my Nana…I could shoot daggers out of my eyes towards my mother when she annoyed me, but I think I always looked with love at my grandmothers.

I worry sometimes, that because I don’t have a “traditional” relationship with my granddaughters, that our connection won’t maintain the special-ness that it now has…by this I guess I mean that because I do help to raise them, and they are here with me much more than most children are with a grandparent, that the magic bits will be lost in time…Grandparents are usually, I guess usually, the ones where time spent with them is play, joy, laughter, treats…not having to be disciplined or do homework or clean their rooms, but because I am helping my daughter to raise her girls, I am forced to be a “mom” a lot, and I hope that does not diminish the magic of my NaNa-ness.

I have written before that I was married, a mother, and divorced all by the time I was 20, so I spent much of my adult life feeling like I missed the boat…I went to college while working full-time and raising my daughter when friends were traveling, partying, going on dates, DOING FUN STUFF when I was not…my Aunt, who was then and is now again my neighbor, has told me often that many nights if she wasn’t sleeping she’d look out her east windows and see my dining room light on at late hours knowing I was up doing homework long after I had tucked my child into bed, and some of those nights, working on my Smith Corona at the table I would think to myself, “this will all be worth it, someday”  But, that someday never did really come around…despite graduating college with straight A’s, only 12 of us in the entire class of 1800 did so, and despite my volunteering at the jail and the probation department every Tuesday, my only day off, for well over a year, and writing countless letters and sending in too many resume’s to count, I never did get the job I always wanted with the Prosecutor’s Office or any of the departments to which I applied…and with every letter I sent out I would wonder, “how could they not want me?!”  I didn’t know another girl who worked as hard as I did or cared as much as I did about anything…but it never came to be and I had to accept that I somehow missed the boat, the  S.S. R*’s Career…

So here I now am, 22 years later back to the same street where I lived while I raised my child and went to college and dreamed big dreams, in a different house, but sharing the same woods and field with my Aunt, in the same 5 acre radius…where my grandchildren now can run to my Aunt’s back yard through the same field as their mother did…what was once the woods in my Aunt’s back acres, is now my house and my daughter’s house…I have come full circle so to speak…Now I look out my east window some late nights, to see that my daughter is doing homework long after she has tucked her girls into bed…

Very little of  my day-to-day life is anything at all like I had hoped it would be…most of my “dreams” for the life I wanted to live have been dashed by reality…I never did find a love and got the chance to have a husband and more children, I never did find the great job in the criminal justice system as I had intended, I never did get to see much of the world let alone my own country, I never did get much of what I wanted, or thought I wanted, I missed the boat of love, career, family, & travel…none of those journeys none of those life experiences none of those dreams came to be…but last night, having those two little girls wander over to my house, to chat, use my computer for a bit, and say goodnight, unexpected and uninvited, but always welcomed with open arms and a smile, made me think that I might not have ever gotten much, if anything, of what I wanted, but maybe I got what I needed and that’s not a bad ride at all…Time is like a FLASH!  These two little girls, whose first gulps of air on this planet inexplicably changed my life for the better, are having their last days of kindergarten and 3rd grade today, I cradled them in my arms during their first 48 hours of life and now they are having their own full lives, dreaming already of boats they don’t want to miss…Life is a love, a job, a group of people, a journey and it just keeps on flowing & moving whether we are ready for the inevitable changes or not.  Time cares not for our ability to handle what is happening.  I’ve read a quote before that goes something like, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be”  and I think that is how best to start seeing  my  life, at this stage of my life, probably now more than half lived, perhaps I did not miss the boat, maybe I was supposed to take some other journey…not good not bad, not black not white, somewhere in between…

I never expected to date a man with kids.  It was never part of my life plan, and yet here I now am, a middle-aged woman, in love with a man with a  child who is only 5 months older than the eldest of my daughter’s two girls!  We joke that I became a parent way too early and he became one way too late, but the serendipitous silver lining is that these three little girls play together and love each other as if they’ve always been in each others lives…they bicker as sisters do, but they hug and laugh and share like best friends do, and when I got engaged on Christmas morning, they enjoyed very much the laughter that ensued when they discussed the change in their relationship status, that this 9-year-old in their life would become their “aunt and Mommy’s sister!”

There are times when his daughter is here that I have to bite my tongue, or simply and more easily I might add, go into another room, because I don’t want to overstep a line…he and his ex are very dissimilar to me in many ways in how they parent; their rules, their level of strictness, what they expect or don’t, and so I try not to insert too much of my parenting style into their parenting, but it’s hard…she’s in my house…There are other times when his daughter is here that I watch how he looks at her, how he teaches her things, how she looks to him and at him, how he helps her and guides her, and to watch him love his child warms my heart.  He is very affectionate and nurturing  to my granddaughters too…I’ve watched him teach them how to keep time behind a drum kit, how to bait a fishing hook, how to stand up on a boogie board, and most recently he taught the littlest one how to tie her shoes…and yet I sometimes feel something like a sadness, a profound sense of loss…the realization that if only he and I had met when we were young…I think how awesome it would have been to make a family with him, how wonderful it would have felt to be the woman who made him a father…

This man I love has no father, his father died when he was only 17, which would be tragic enough in itself but for the fact that he also lost his mother when he was only 15…when I think about how many times a week I need my parents, or talk to my dad, or ask him a question, or think of how he would have done something, or seek him out for advice or to confirm whether or not I am doing something right…I think about this man I love, who does not have that luxury.  He had to grow into his role as “man” with no role to model.  He has two brothers-in-law who are old enough to be his father, and has talked to me about how much they both have meant to him over the years, and helped him and guided him when he was so young and suddenly without parents, but I imagine it is not at all the same…not even close…I often want to ask him about his dad, but I know it makes him sad; what he liked about his father and what he didn’t, what he learned from him, and what he wished he had…I often wonder what his dad would think of this man I love, the man he grew up to be…would he be proud, would he have been a good grandpa to this other little girl now in my life, would he like me, would he think I was a good woman to his son?

I tried to buy a father’s day card for this man I love.  I went to four different stores during this month, I read dozens of cards and not one “said” anything at all like I would want to say to him…the ones that had great designs were ridiculously expensive and the ones that were cheap were ugly and written for a buffoon…Nothing expressed at all how I sometimes think about what it would have been like, to have loved him when we were young, to find out I was pregnant and to be excited, to plan a future and to create a human being out of nothing because two people fell in love, to wonder what he or she would look like, would its eyes be more my green than his blue, knowing both of us had eyes that change color with the seasons…what it would have been like to watch him comfort a crying infant, what it would have been like to watch him watch how the eyes dart around behind the lids while the baby deeply sleeps…all those thoughts I thought by myself when I was pregnant, and how beautiful it would have been to think those thoughts with somebody who loved me and I loved and who was anxiously awaiting this human whose very first breath would take us from Couple to Family…falling in love late in life has its perks, but this, above all else, is the drawback…we missed sharing a lot of beautiful dreams…I refer to him often as “the boy” not to be condescending, but because we are sometimes so in love that we do really feel like teenagers…but he is man who is a father and who does his very best to be a good one, and there is nothing boyish about that…

Today is Father’s Day, but in my world, every day is.  I am one of those blessed women who has one of those Dads…The kind who knows how to do anything, is smart, thoughtful, generous, does everything without ever complaining, and often without having to be asked.  When my mom got a full time job when I was in 4th grade or so, he would do the vacuuming, laundry, make dinner, and anything else that would HELP the family in addition to all the other things he did around the yard or the house, plus he still worked full time too…I remember some friends at various times commenting that their dads never helped with anything, and even then at a young age, I knew that my father was special, different, better….he is all the things I suppose a man should be, wrapped up into a tall skinny handsome package who loves my mother…The kind of man to whom every man is compared.  My Mom will tell me and my sister that Daddy is not as perfect as we think, but those words fall on deaf ears…

If you grow up with a lazy, deadbeat, uninspired, unemployed, unkind, alcoholic or drunk or jerk of a father, then a man who actually has any sort of job, actually helps a bit around the house or yard, and does not kick your dog, turns out to be “good enough.”  But when you grow up with a father like I have, nothing seems to ever be good enough, and that’s hard…it’s hard to hear at one time or another from every man you ever cared about, “I’m not like your Dad” when all you really wanted was to find someone with qualities very much like your dad…There are things about my father that would annoy me if someone exactly like him was my husband, to be clear, VERY MUCH annoy me & drive me crazy mad, but I have never looked for a man to be just like my dad, I just had always wanted to find someone much like him…I have found that when a man does something that is in a way or manner or style as my Dad would have, or says something similar to something my Dad might say, I am joyful and almost giddy…but to be clear, when a man does something, or really in most cases, DOES NOT do something,  I feel emotion rather like anger…and a voice in my head says, Daddy wouldn’t have done that…

I think sometimes what I will do when he is gone…he has taught me SO much…will I remember everything I learned?  When we built this house, my dream house, this space where I feel I most belong, where I feel like I truly am at home, he came here almost every single night after we both worked all day, to work with me…he came here every single weekend to work with me…he taught me HOW to DO SOMETHING almost every single day it seemed…and suddenly after 365 days, literally, from the morning we broke ground to the afternoon I got my C.O., I realized that although I hired sub-contractors for many of the tasks that go into building a house, WE built a house!!!  My house!!!  …but it’s not just that, it’s everything…he has taught me how to do so many things and yet I still ask him to do things for me, or help me do things, and I wonder, when he is not on this earth, will I know how?  Will I remember what he has taught me?  It makes my heart ache when I think about it.  I can no more conceive of a world without my father in it, than I can imagine living without my limbs…

I know some women who had and have really terrible fathers, I am sure they would read these words and think, “oh poor you, your perfect father, boo-hoo, oh poor you can never find a perfect boyfriend like your mother got, oh woe is you…” and think about the times their Dad was drunk, or mean, or yelled, or got fired, or the family had no money, or he got arrested, or cheated, or-or-or…NOPE, none of that in my world…My dad has never been unkind, he has never been out of work, we never wanted for anything, I can count on one hand the number of times I have ever heard him raise his voice, he never missed work EVER, we always had enough money (or it seemed so,) he never got in ‘trouble’ with anyone in any way, and he ALWAYS has loved and been true to my mother.

The way that my father talks about how he loves my mother, and the way he looks at her when she does not know he is looking, is the stuff that great sonnets and poems and love songs are written about…my father truly loves my mother…and I suppose, if I were to break down all of the components of my life, what it means to be a daughter, what my father means to me, and the knowledge of having had the good luck to be born to people who dearly care for one another, and who had the same dreams as a young in love couple for the same simple and good life, perhaps that above all, is why my father is such a good Dad, because he truly is and was in love with the woman who is our mom…

I am 46 years and seven months and nine days on this earth, and I have felt loved for every single one of them.  I have disappointed my parents several times in my life, and as much as I love my mom, those feelings of upsetting her, are not nearly as hard to bear as when I feel I have upset and disappointed my father…I have a constant “need” I guess, to want him to be pleased with me…I guess most women with a dad like mine, do, and I admit that is difficult, all the time, to feel that perpetual urge to “measure up,” and with every poor choice and bad decision I make, feel that I am again disappointing him, but the fact of the matter is that I know both my parents love me without condition, and so on this Father’s Day I want to say thank you to my Dad, for loving my mother, for loving me and my sister, and our children, and the daughters of my daughter, and for accepting all of us, even when we disappoint him, and loving us and being good to us, 365 days a year…year after year…

I have never heard my father, not even once, raise his voice to, or speak in a mean manner to, my mother.  He has with an exasperated tone and something akin to a sigh said, “Dear…” If he has ever yelled at her or said an unkind thing to her it was never ever in my presence or within the walls of a space I lived and frankly, I do not think, even all these years I have been out on my own, that it has ever happened.  I moved out of my parents house when I was 17 years old into a life that was unkind and filled with yelling and mean manners.  Many nights when I either cried myself to sleep or stayed awake all night long so as not to be caught off guard by a hand or a knife, I would wonder how I could have ever ended up where I was, with parents like I had…

Today is my parents anniversary.  My parents have been dearly and deeply in love for 48 years…and 8 weeks I suppose, since they were friends for years but only “dated” for eight weeks before their wedding.  I have wished, for all of my life, since puberty I would imagine, to be loved like my father loves my mother.  To have a man care for me and everything about me, my person, me, my financial stability, me, my feelings and beliefs, me, my place on this earth by his side…It’s always perplexed me, being the daughter of such a great romance, why I did not find that kind of love and that kind of man to make a life with…a man who took pride in his relationship with me, the home he built for us, the children we made together, the work he did to provide us with such a wonderful life…my parents love gifted me with the guide-book and owner’s manual, but I failed to follow the maps or read the instructions…

Years ago a customer of my Dad’s started dating only a month or so after the loss of his wife.  My Dad looked at me one day and said, “I can’t believe it.  If I lost your mother my very soul would hurt” and I knew he meant it.  My mother has on occasion said, “I don’t know what I would do without your father” and I know she means it.  I don’t know what I will do without either of them, and can’t really think about it…their love for each other is a constant in my life, when all of my failings & screw ups & bad choices & terrible decisions lead me to a state of boo-hoo-hoo-ing, their unconditional love for me and their deep love for each other gives me strength, makes me feel like I will be able to fix things, anything…

My mother did not have dreams for a fabulous occupation or great wealth, she dreamed of having a loving husband and children and a family…my Dad never really talked about his “dreams” only that he wanted to be a carpenter and one semester at Villanova confirmed it for him, they lived on a small barrier island at a time when people knew each other up and down all 18 miles of it, at a time when options for men and women were few as far as a “career,” at a time when it was “normal” to get married and start a family at 23 & 26, so that is what they did.  They borrowed money from my Dad’s boss to put a down-payment on a house off the island and they started their “grown up” life.  If when I was little they had hard times, I didn’t know about it, and if when I was a teenager they had hard times, they did not let it be known…perhaps they did not always love each other, perhaps they did say mean things to each other behind closed doors, but their voices did not carry.

I have spent my entire adult life knowing deep down what kind of love I deserve yet being unable to attain that level of security and certainty…they showed me what I should want in a relationship, and yet for some reason I kept making choices that seemed to indicate it’s not what I wanted.  I had their guidance but made decisions, over and over, that seemed to say I paid no attention to the example they set.  They provided me with a guide to life, a guide to love, a “This is How You Do It” that I foolishly perpetually failed to follow, and so, now near middle age myself, I still flounder around in dark rooms looking for the light switch, had I paid more attention to how my parents made their life work, the light bulb would have always been right above my head…

We all know that expression that goes -when life gives you lemons, make lemonade-  and I often admittedly add vodka to mine, but regardless of how you prepare your lemons I really do think it’s best to find a way to like them.  There are a number of things in my own life and in the lives of people I care for that are not going particularly well.  Some situations for some of us are just a bit sucky, and some situations for some of us are really total bummers…but life just keeps on moving forward whether one is on board with what’s going on or not!  The laundry still needs to be put away, the floors still need to be vacuumed, the bills still need to be paid, the weeds still need to be pulled, hours still have to be worked to pay for things, and hours still have to be rested in order to revive…so no matter HOW we find ourselves at this very moment, or WHERE we find ourselves at this very moment, or WHY we think we are dealing with what we are at this very moment, it does not really matter, AT ALL…things are going to get brighter or better if we believe it so…and things will stay the same or get worse if we believe it so.

I have dreams and I have high hopes and I have great expectations, frankly it is how I live…I get into ruts sometimes, we all do I suppose, where I focus on the negative or the bad or the uncertain and create needless worry in my thoughts of the worst possible situations that could become my life. BUT I do this FAR LESS FREQUENTLY than the “better” way to think, which is focused on the positive and the good and the potential for all the wonderfulness I wish for and work for and aim for, to come to fruition.  I know people who deeply believe that our thoughts manifest our life…worry too much and worry is all you’re going to do…think things will never improve, and never improve is what’s going to happen…this idea makes perfect sense to me, and is why I do look for the bright side as often as I can even when I sometimes find I am starting to zone in onto the bleak, I really try to apply the brakes and turn around!!!

I know so many people dealing with so many things, some good things and some bad things, and I know so many women like myself who keep running-running-running, juggling, doing, making things work…because they feel they just can’t stop and are not making the effort to reboot and reload and recover and who feel like they are simply going to crash and burn…so today even though I do have to work on a Sunday, and so today even though I am tired and sore from hours of yard work yesterday working at home, I am looking at the bright side…customer will be so happy that her decks are done when she arrives back at the beach on Thursday, customer will be so happy that the rest of her gardens are planted when she arrives back at the beach on Wednesday, I will be so happy to earn another day of pay, and when I get home I am going to have a tall glass of lemonade…if any of you are feeling overwhelmed or upset and can’t seem to find the bright side today, it’s really okay and it doesn’t hurt to add the vodka…