There are many lives I can imagine, other than the one I am living, but how do I know that what I imagine would ultimately be any better than what is right here right now?  I have scenarios that shoot through my mind day in and day out and I dream of things and imagine things and ponder all of the “what ifs” and while they keep my mind and thoughts from being just about anything but boring, I do wonder…is my wondering keeping me from the wonderment of now???

I honestly did not want to be married, a mother, and divorced all before my 21st birthday…yet I made terrible choices that put me in difficult and rather unbearable situations, that made those things my reality and yet, all these years later, I have these amazing little neighbors who are the daughters of my daughter, and my life is SO MUCH BETTER every single day because they are in my life…so I can imagine a lot of things… I think about if I had met a boyfriend two summers ago who was taking me to tropical vacations and spoiling me with fancy dates and expensive presents, but maybe he would not have been a very good kisser.  I think about if I had never joined Facebook, I never would have ‘met’ what became a deceiving jerk who made me very sad over several months, but I also would not have later met this handsome drummer I love madly now,  whose glorious smile, passionate kisses  and superb loving melt me into a puddle of romance almost every single day…I think about if I hadn’t gone out that school night in the spring of 1985 & not gotten myself pregnant at a friend’s party house, I would have probably gone directly to college after high school, maybe I would be a real writer with a really good job and have a lot of disposable income and an actual career, but I would not have this beautiful woman in my life who lives next door and  calls me ‘Mom.’

…maybe my life would not be any better than it is, perhaps things could be much worse, in fact I know things can always be worse…I think about if I had moved to a different section of Maryland in 1998, where I might have met more  like-minded people or people who made me feel like I belonged…would I have stayed there instead of coming back to south Jersey a year later?  I think about if I had studied nursing when I decided to start college when my daughter was a year old, instead of having dreams of becoming a lawyer which I never brought to fruition, where would I be now?  what would be different?  would it be any better?

I know some of my friends who are VERY good at living in the now, and who are very comfortable with just being at ease with what is, will read this and wonder why on earth I waste even a lick of energy on these “What Ifs” but it is something that I just can’t seem to stop…I do indeed waste a lot of brain cells wondering…I have had and continue to have, so much love in my life, and I know people who have had and continue to have so little…and I have had days where my wallet was much fatter and I have had days when my wallet was even thinner, same with my body now that I think of it!!  So I am perpetually aware of the ins and outs and ups and downs, that life moves and flows…it is not solid nor stationary, it is ever-changing…I think now, this very second, when I finish typing and I finish my coffee and leave for work…what could happen…there are many lives I can imagine, and knowing how I am I don’t think I will stop, so I guess I will just do the best with the one I have now…again. today.

Did you ever have a favorite sweater, so soft and so warm and so cozy that it felt like a hug every time you wore it and you really loved it, but then one day you notice a thread…and you pull it, and then you pull it some more instead of cut it, and it unravels…the whole thing comes apart?

If you are a man and you come home from work one day and announce unexpectedly to the woman in your life that you are not in love anymore and you have not been in love for a while and you don’t love the life you are living with her, that is kind of like pulling at the thread of what once was your favorite sweater.  If you are a woman and you come home from grocery shopping one Sunday and announce unexpectedly to the man in your life that this situation is just not working anymore for you and you are tired of arguing over things that are not your fault or your doing and you don’t think you can do this anymore, that is kind of like pulling at the thread of what was once your favorite sweater.  You see, once you pull, the unraveling simply happens, even if you stop pulling, the damage is already done and it can never be the same sweater, and it will continue to unravel until there is little evidence of what it once was…

If you are a woman who is frustrated with the man you love, perhaps it is better to come home from food shopping and for dinner prepare a meal that he likes very very much and open a bottle of wine and say something like, “I really am happy that our relationship is so loving, but I am very concerned about _____, or I really love the life we have but when you do _____ I really am bothered by it and I want to discuss this.”  If you are a man who is frustrated with your life, perhaps it is better to come home from work one evening with flowers and once your kids are tucked into bed sit down with the woman you share your space with and say something like, “I really feel so fortunate for this life we’ve had over these years but I am so angry about _____ and I don’t know how to handle it, or I can’t believe we have these amazing kids and live in this wonderful town but I am just so sad about ____ and I wish you were more understanding of my feelings.”  …you see, once you pull at the thread it’s kind of already over…I’ve learned, or am learning that the key is not to pull at all, but to identify the bad thread and figure out where the stitch is weak and fix it…if your desire is to keep this sweater that you love…

There is a famous quote about when you get to the end of your rope, you tie a knot and hang on…but I guess that only holds true if your desire is the “hanging on,”  if your desire is not for “the end.”  I think when things begin to feel like they are unraveling, we have clues…we know how we feel and what we think, and we get vibes from those around us when things are amiss…if we choose to not recognize when our partners are uneasy or seem unhappy then we must accept the consequence of having poor situational awareness.  If we choose to act out with cruel words or harsh statements then we must accept the consequence of misplaced blame…If you have a sweater that you don’t want to unravel you have to check the stitches now and then, maybe not with every tumble in the wash but if you really love it, you have to take care of it to keep it in tact…you see, sweaters generally don’t simply unravel… we notice a loose thread and we choose to fix it or knot it or reinforce the stitch, or I suppose if we decide we didn’t really love the sweater as much as we thought, we just let the unraveling begin…

Tapestry, the Carole King album of greatness, was released 43 years ago this spring…I bought it on cassette when I got my first car in December of 1984, and the songs have traveled with me as I’ve grown from a 17-year-old girl, thinking she was ‘all that’ with her Aqua-Net hair, and her Pontiac Sunbird, and her Calvin Klein jeans, and her high-heeled shoes, to the 46-year-old woman I am today with the occasional grays, sometimes tired eyes, and frequent bouts of “this is all there is?”

…and sometimes when I listen to great lyrics like this album, I am astonished to think, ‘YES! This is all there is!’  It takes just one listen through, either from start, I Feel The Earth Move,  to finish, You Make Me Feel Like (A Natural Woman), or shuffled, or mixed in with other singing ladies in an assorted playlist, to feel grounded and okay.  Every song has at least one line that speaks to me, so clearly, and effortlessly I am rebooted, restored, revived.  The album makes me think of new love, good love, lost love, friendship, longing, endings and beginnings, home and hearth…it makes me feel connected to everything and everyone and everywhere…which might sound silly, but it’s true.  When I listen to these songs and sing them, badly, but with my whole heart, I feel like it’s something of a soundtrack for a life fully lived, and the words to the songs are so pure that it could be a soundtrack for any one of us…

…I still have SO MUCH I wish I could do, and want to do, and am annoyed that I can’t do, but when I feel grounded in the words of these songs, I recognize how much I have done, have achieved, have survived…it’s strange how somebody else can write words that can mean so much to so many, but she did.  Her words make me feel good, make me feel beautiful, make me feel like I am a good friend and have great friendships, that I have loved well and to the best of my ability, that I have been the best woman I can be, despite all the uncertainty that comes with living a life…I don’t know, do men connect with the songs on this album too??  Rolling Stone has listed this album as #36 in its top 500 greatest albums of all time…and it is one of the best selling albums ever on the planet, so one would assume that men find her poetry to be powerful too…if you do not own the album you can’t very well listen to it today, but if you do own the album, you should listen to it today and think about how remarkable it is that words written 43 or more years ago are still so compelling…that’s a good song, or poem, or story, isn’t it??  Words that stand the test of time…to write one sentence that lasts forever would be amazing, can you just imagine writing a whole album?  Timeless goodness right there, in your cd cabinet, an old milk crate of cassettes, vinyl albums in your attic…

Since the new year I’ve developed something of an expensive habit…well, I guess it’s not a habit so much as a choice, but it is something that I find I want to do more and more, the more often I do it, and I suppose this is the case with most habits…So on the day after Christmas, my boyfriend, ♥ well the man to whom I had been engaged for 29 hours ♥, and I went out to lunch to celebrate our new ‘relationship status.’  He was in the mood for sushi and I was in the mood for anything that made him happy and after we were seated I said to him, “just order for us both.”  I love to try new things or to try things that have been prepared in a way I’ve not had before.  I am not what they call a ‘cheap date’ and I really will try anything.  When I go out to eat I generally try to order something that I would never make at home, primarily because I really do love to cook and I really do love my kitchen, and to me it seems silly to order food outside of the home that you could actually just make in your home…so I was excited to let him order for us both because then I’ve no choice but to try everything and anything.

I first had sushi in the early 90’s in New York City.  I worked with a woman who became a dear friend to me & who had a sister-in-law who was Japanese and lived in the city and who, to keep fluent in her native tongue, worked three nights a week at a Japanese restaurant.  My first adventure to this restaurant with my friend blew my mind…her sister-in-law ordered for the table, which was not only a long table, but a crowded table with an assortment of their mutual friends and family, and the food quickly started to be delivered and it just kept coming for an hour…plate after plate and bowl after bowl and I tried everything.  I also asked what nothing was until I had tried it, because as much as I like to try new things, I know that my brain might immediately make an assumption and I find that no matter how hard I try, once my brain thinks one thing, the rest of my senses follow…so to me, the NOT knowing what it is, is a better way to experience it fully.  I learned that day that I don’t like octopus, the texture just does not work with my mouth and my tongue.  I learned that day that I don’t like fish eggs of any size or color, again the texture and the ‘pop’ and the way they feel against my teeth and tongue I just can’t handle.  I also learned that I like wasabi paste but do not like fresh ginger. I also learned that I love fish and rice, and not so much the rolls that seemed so popular with everybody else at the table…so I like to have that kind of full sensory eating experience, a table full of beautifully presented and impeccably prepared food to try and try again.

So on the day after Christmas we sipped champagne and laughed and smiled and ate and ate and ate…we talked about how we might decide to set a date, how we might elope instead, where we might have a party, what we could or couldn’t afford, and all the while we ate…it was honestly one of the best meals I have ever had in my life.  Perhaps a combination of feeling dearly loved, blissfully happy, unexpectedly excited, and really hungry…and it was simply a GREAT afternoon, however, something happened that day that I did not expect…something got stimulated in my brain that made me begin to CRAVE sushi, like to the point that every time I had nothing planned for dinner or no food really in the house to make a complete meal, I would say, “let’s go for sushi,” which is a fine thing to say if you have a significant disposable income, which we do not, and it is a fine thing to say if perhaps you live in a large town or city where there are a significant number of restaurants in which to eat, which we do not…to make a too long story shorter, we have now spent many hundreds of dollars since the new year that could have been spent on say a wedding, or a wedding dress, or plane tickets to Vegas, or maybe even the electric bill, on sushi.  You know that adage about give a man a fish or teach a man to fish…you know it…so now I am on a mission…I want to learn how to make it myself.  I want to learn how to properly prepare sushi grade fish, I certainly know how to make sticky rice and shape it into a small football…I want to be able to do this myself…I am sure somebody gives lessons, or I might just search youtube where I have found out how to do just about everything else…take a girl for sushi and she eats dinner, teach a girl how to make it and she and her boyfriend eat happily ever after ♥

…and so things are happening to me, inside and outside of me, of which I feel like I have little control, and I wondered this morning if there is a rite of passage book for women of my age, like there were rites of passage books for girls of our age, back then when things were happening to us and inside us and outside of us, and we felt so confused and out of control???

March was a wonky month for me, for many reasons, specifically things started to go wonky with my insides that had not ever been wonky before.  Wonky, you might imagine, is NOT one of the words I learned from my excessive searching on Web-MD during the last several weeks.  I have found that when you are feeling uncertain about things and have symptoms that are unusual or new to you, if you are a person with disposable income and/or health insurance, you probably go to a doctor, a person who knows you and to whom you go when things are wonky…if you are like me, a person with neither disposable income nor health insurance who does not have a “regular” doctor of any sort, other than the dentist, you likely go to the internet and begin typing in questions and words and finding that, according to Google, you are VERY MUCH not the only one with these questions and these words, IN THAT ORDER…because guess what??!!  the questions you typed in, or the words you typed in that exact order, are the second and third match that shows up in Google!  Yay!!  Some other woman, likely of your age, has also typed in this search at some ridiculous hour of the night when she inexplicably wants to punch the lights out of the man sleeping beside her, who has done nothing wrong, and who can’t seem to stop the sweat from dripping down her neck, and who now wants to unreasonably burst into tears because when she gets up to pee, again, she discovers that one of the light-bulbs is out on her porch light…so you feel a little less wonky, and a little bit comforted that some other woman of your age has typed in these same words and has these same questions and probably much like yourself has no extra money, no health insurance, and no regular doctor to whom she can discuss these “unmentionable” wonky things…

So back when I was in 4th or 5th grade or so, LONG before there was the internet and long before girls felt comfortable to talk to their mothers about ANYthing, and mostly just had each other to talk with about wonky things happening of which we had no control…we had Judy Blume, in the privacy of our rooms…she talked to us about EVERYthing and made us feel like we were going to be just fine…all the confusion we had, all the wonky-ness going on in our bodies and in our brains turned out to be PERFECTLY normal and Judy Blume made what was scary and unsettling, fine, sometimes funny, and totally easy to understand…so I want to know…what’s the book I should read now??!!  Is there a rite of passage book a woman ought to be reading when she is confused about the ungodly large number of wonky symptoms she has inside, outside, and upside down??!!  If said book does not presently exist, I think that THAT is my clue…no more blogging about blah-blah-blah romance, love, blah-blah-blah relationships, couples…perhaps there is a book that wants to be written and I have got to write it??!!  In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath writes,  “Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.”  …and now I think, no, not a novel, maybe what I want to write that might fix a lot of people would be a book about all this mid-life wonky business…maybe?  What would Judy Blume think?

It seems clear to me that Miss Elizabeth, the hyphenated poetess wonder, before being hyphenated was  fashionable, wrote exactly what she meant when she was counting the ways, “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach,” I mean, she’s quite succinct and concise yes?  She did not seem to be at all uncertain, she rather simply defines her feelings.  There are some people who truly, madly, and deeply believe in the concept of & the word –love–  and some who believe it does not “exist” or is not “real”  because it cannot be clearly defined, and most of us I think  fall somewhere in between.  Any of us who are mothers know that there is an extreme unconditional emotion we have and we feel towards our children and feelings that we, more often than not, can’t possibly put into words.  However, any of us who have been in ‘relationship love’ more than once know that those types of romantic feelings and emotions do indeed have conditions, and come and go over time, place, or circumstance.  We never stop loving a child yet we can stop loving, surprisingly easily I have found, a romantic partner…and I wonder why or how that is?

When we are newly in love it sure feels intense and like it could never ever end, yet it frequently does, more often than not actually. The intensity with which we love a child, from the moment it is removed from our body or handed over to us, feels intense and like it could never ever end, and it doesn’t, ever.  Why?  Is it deeper?  Somehow more valid?  What makes us able to love deeply and unconditionally and for absolutely EVER, our children, but not other people?

In my past I’ve been told the words -I love you- and then realized not as deeply as the love for an 8-ball, or not as deeply as the rush of sneaking around behind my back with a girl who worked at a Dunkin Donuts counter…well you get it…I’ve been told the words by a few men who turned out to be wrong for me for all the right reasons.  I’ve had two break ups in my life that made me feel devastatingly crushed and wondering how my heart would ever heal, and yet it did and always does; rather remarkably one day you wake up, and suddenly you’re “over it,”  like a cold or the flu.  I’ve also had a couple of break ups that made me feel like the weight of a tractor-trailer had been lifted off my chest or that made me feel relieved and revived as if I were in a perpetual Calgon ‘take me away’ kind of bath…ones that perhaps were not so deep at all…

I’ve never, in these 28 years, found myself comparing romantic love to the love I feel for my child, it’s totally NOT the same.  The love that I have for my daughter and now her daughters is impossible for me to describe or define, but that does not make me think it is not real, it does however make me think it is BIGGER than words and BRIGHTER than the sun and DEEPER than the Mariana Trench.  I have said the words, ‘this is not working for me’ to several men and ended a relationship, yet no matter the ups, downs, difficulties, or hardships of raising a child to adulthood, I never said nor thought ‘this is not working for me’ regarding my daughter because as a mother you just keep going, keep sorting things out, it just goes on and on because you do not ever give up on your child…it may not be “working” at the moment, but you know and believe it will all sort itself out.  Maybe that could be the secret to romantic love, loving deeply and purely enough that you decide not to give up, and believing that no matter what, it will all sort itself out.

There are consequences to everything we do & say.  It is very easy to act and react in a narcissistic way, it is often much more difficult to act and react in a selfless way, or at least in a way that puts the ego aside, even just temporarily.  And I don’t mean we should put ourselves last; our needs and wants and feelings are just as valid as the next person’s, but I do mean that we should, I think, first do no harm, then do whatever is next…maybe what is next IS narcissistic, but if we first determined that is the best way to act, so be it, and maybe what is next IS a bit self-serving, but if we have given some thought to the issue at hand, and decided it is the way to act, well, there it is.  I feel like I have seen this winter, and to be sure it’s been a bleak/gray/cold/awful season, a lot of unkindness.  MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.  It’s true.  Mean people are purposefully unkind.  I want people to be nicer to each other.  I want people to think about what they are saying and what they are doing and try, if at all possible, to be kind.  Is it ridiculously immature and naive to want the world, or at least my world, to be a nicer, kinder, happier place to live???

I often read stories in magazines about husbands and wives who cheat and lie, I see stories on television about boyfriends and parents who abuse and fight…we all are subject to this modern world of over stimulation from the media, and we keep buying the magazines and we keep paying our cable bills, so we want to STOP knowing bad shit, but we keep looking for it…is it to compare?  “Oh, look, things could be so much worse,” we might think as we turn the pages or the channels…I saw a video on the internet the other day, a young woman, obviously a junkie, nodding off while sitting on the aisle seat of a city bus, and her little girl across the aisle in a hot pink coat saying, “mom, they can’t get by,” and her little hand on the mother’s forehead, pushing her up…the video made me feel nauseated frankly; one that somebody video taped this rather than called the police so someone could rescue this little girl, and two, that somebody who is a mother would care so much more about herself than her child.  Seeing the video made me feel disgusted in many ways and now days later it is an image that I can’t un-see, like a scene in a horror movie when sadly you did not cover your eyes fast enough, it’s just there in my brain popping up at random times and making me feel unsettled.  Any of those behaviors that scream, “I care more about myself than I care about you” make me wonder why…why get married if you think monogamy is not for you?  why have a child if you think it’s going to be too expensive or too much work to raise it?  why work a job that you hate that makes you come home and beat your wife or kick your dog?  why become a wife or father if what you really want is to live on the floor of a dirty row house and take drugs?  Are we TRYING to do the “right” thing and failing, or are some of us too focused on trying to play a part that we think we are “supposed” to play when the role is totally wrong for us?  …and then when we find ourselves stuck in that role, we are mean, we act out, we behave in a way that hurts those who love us, because we were not true to our true selves to begin with?  It’s rather complicated isn’t it?

Cheating, lying, fighting, abusing, drug addiction, all of it is a choice, and all of those choices generally hurt somebody who loves or cares for the person who has made the choice.  We learn from Buddha that “Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”  If you screw up on Monday you have Tuesday to do better, if Friday night you lied, you can apologize on Saturday.  Nobody is going to be PERFECT, nobody is going to DO THE RIGHT THING EVERY TIME, it would be impossible, unless you were Buddha…we all make mistakes and we all sometimes are unkind, sometimes even mean or cruel…some acts purposefully hurt others and some acts cause hurts to others even if it was not our intent…I want people to get along, I want people to be loving to each other, I want people to be kind & friendly…yeah, I know, hippy-dippy incense burning, flowers in your hair, hand-holding silliness is what some of you think…but I think I LIKE thinking about how what I do, or what I say, will make somebody feel, and acting or speaking in a way that shows that I may not always be loving, and I may not always be nice, but I will first do no harm…

Remember when we were little, before our school grades went to A’s and 4.0 GPA’s and instead we had the occasional “I” for Needs Improvement?  I hated an -‘I’- as a kid, because it meant that I tried to do something and did not do it as well as those who got the “E” for Excellent.  Something in me is changing, not just my hormones and not just my sleep patterns, I mean something deeply within my being  is happening,  partly through my effort and partly just like this miraculous metamorphosis that I’ve no control over…I feel silly writing that it could be these books I am reading, but honestly I kind of think it IS due, at least in part, TO these three books I am reading.

Buddhist Book Camp,  F**K It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way,  and The Freedom of Being: At Ease With What Is    two of which I purchased, and one was a gift, and all three are being read simultaneously and all three have tweaked my thought process enough to start this indescribable change I am feeling.  Several aspects of my life have always gone swimmingly and several aspects of my life have frequently been not so good, and all-in-all there have been times where I admit that segments of my life have Needed Improvement, but I am coming to “learn” that they are just PARTS of my world, NOT MY WORLD…I guess I am achieving a level of understanding of the difference.  When I feel sad or frustrated I am  “getting it” that I am sad or frustrated about a particular event or personal issue, not LIFE…when I feel anger I am now starting to understand that I am having a sensation of angry feelings about an incident or a person but am not an angry person…it’s a lot of hippy-dippy words and thoughts on these pages  but they are making perfect sense to me.

With each paragraph I seem to better recognize that portions of my life and my world are excellent, and so few actually need improvement!!  How some stranger’s perspective on paper can help me see so clearly what was fuzzy for so long is a mystery…also, why I needed to read some other way of seeing the world and could not seem to GET THERE on my own perplexes me, but I guess it does not matter how or why only that I am seeing things differently…What an amazing discovery, to get to be THIS old and finally see the light!!  It’s not so bad, it’s actually pretty terrific even when bits and pieces are kind of sucky!!…like a clementine, one dry segment does not make a bad piece of fruit!  It’s still so juicy and delicious, it’s just that there was a sliver of bad…not a whole orb of awful.

There are people I know and people I love, myself included,  going through rough patches every day; work, family, financial, relationships, whatever…there might be an “I” on a report card for an area that indeed needs improvement that is otherwise filled with “E’s” for Excellent.  Each night I feel like I want to look at the day and make note of where I got an E and where I got an I and then I can try to make the next day better…Since I don’t know if I believe in “heaven” I don’t know if there is a chance I’ll ever get a final grade of life.  I think for now I just want to keep on reading these books and finding better ways to SEE the world and how I live in it, we all  just have to keep on improving where we can and  being grateful for the ‘excellents,’  and keep on living…alright, alright, alright…

I wrote in an email last week to my Mom that I have made some decisions, recognizing that I am at a new stage of my life, about how I will act and what I will feel, and that I’ve accepted that I am now 46 years old; I might have 40 more years to live, or four, or just four days…after all my family’s creed is  “tomorrow you could be run over by a pie wagon.”

I want to live my life in a way that more deeply fulfills me, and I want to make choices which reflect that, and mostly I don’t want to be ‘afraid’ that people will judge me about it, when those choices are different from theirs …When I was younger for example, although truth be told, as recently as this year, if my Mom or Dad called me on a morning and I was still in my pajamas and had not yet left for work, I would tell a little white lie that I was already on my way to work…why?  Because I didn’t want my parents to think I was a slacker.  That is just a silly example of a very serious flaw that has resided in me for all of my adult life and one that I believe I am done with owning…Fear of disappointing my parents, that I was not working hard enough or did not have enough of a drive to earn a good living or that my work ethic was not as strong as my Dad’s or, or, or…you see my Dad LOVES, L O V E S to work…hard.  He does not have hobbies, he does not watch sports, he does not like to hang out at a bar, he does not go to the beach…”play time” that is appealing to him is using his Kubota to move heavy objects from one place to another, or digging holes or planting trees or building new pantry doors for my mother, or, or, or…so for much of my life I have been striving to achieve this level of productiveness and I realized this winter, it is not who I am and it is not who I want to be.

I got the beginnings of a cold on Super Bowl Sunday and proceeded to work fewer than 50 hours this entire month of February…I had what I think was the flu during the first week of the month and a deep chest cold during the second, and by last week I finally felt a bit more alive, but still not good, and I did a lot of crocheting and a lot of thinking these last 24 days.  I thought until my thinker was sore, as Dr. Seuss might say, and I decided that I want to be comfortable with working hard enough to pay my bills and survive in this modern world,  but to also be comfortable with spending my Saturdays this summer on the beach in a chair watching my boyfriend teach three beautiful little girls  how to surf, or spending a Friday night looking at the stars above our houses  with my son-in-law and drinking shots of FireBall until we can’t keep our eyes open, or not leaving for work until after 10 on a Wednesday because this boy I love and I want to go out to breakfast…just because…

I feel like I have accepted that being afraid of appearing to be a slacker to my parents diminishes my quality of life.  I don’t mean to sound so dramatic, it’s not.  My parents are both VERY unlike their parents…in TOO many ways to count, and neither of them ever felt the need to apologize for it.  My mom and dad are both so dissimilar to both of their mothers and fathers that you could count what they had in common on one hand.  If I find one month that I’ve got an extra $150 I would get a massage and fill my wine rack…my mom, when she was my age, would’ve bought a savings bond for my daughter or just added the credit to her household budget.  My mom is VERY responsible and I do envy her skill at money management.  My Dad married her almost 48 years ago and has known nothing of their financial situation since.  She is extraordinary, and I have come to accept that I am not her.  My Dad is now retired, and is STILL the hardest working man I will EVER know, now he just works at home or for us, his family, and not for the rich customers on the beach.  He is extraordinary, and I have come to accept that I am not him.

I spent most of my adult life fearful of not measuring up to their expectations, and have come to realize this month of bitterly cold gray days that it does not matter, they did not put them on me, I put them on me.  A friend mailed a book to me a couple of years ago called “When Fear Falls Away” and I read it, and I really really liked it, but I don’t know if I got out of it what my friend did, because frankly I didn’t change much, and I still felt all the same angst I always did…now, these bleak February days sort of pushed me over my edge…I can’t say that I “get it” fully but I get it better now, my fear of being a not good enough daughter, worker, mother, friend, housekeeper, etc., all of it is self induced pressure and I think this month I’ve finally popped from it.  I don’t claim to be enlightened or changed or that I have no fears anymore, but I do, these last couple of days feel a little more comfortable with who I am and who I’ve been, and it is after 9 and I have not left for work yet and I am not afraid to own it.  I think it’s a step in the right direction…

We are not new to this thing called love.  We are adults with histories and pasts, and who lived full lives long before we knew the other existed…We both once said “I do” to somebody else, we both have said “I love you” to other people, we both have shared living spaces with other people, we both have gone on vacations with other people, each of us both made a daughter with somebody else, we both have shared laughter and tears with some  other person at some  other time, …so there is nothing “new” really at all that I can do for this man I love that  hasn’t already happened, that’s not already been done by some other person at some other time…

I’ve had people SAY they were going to be good to me and good for me, and I’ve had people SAY or WRITE all the right words to make me believe it, and so I suppose too there are no words I could say or write to this man that have not been said or written before by somebody else at some other time…there is nothing new I can offer…we neither are, nor can we be, each other’s first anything…yet each time I catch his eye, in each moment of unspoken kindness, in each grin or smile, it feels somehow as if everything is new…it feels like my heart is whole, and I feel like he filled in all my curved lines and sharp angles with vibrant, brilliant, unimaginable colors, before I even realized  black and white wasn’t good enough…

Each day I’ve known this boy I’m going to marry I more wholeheartedly believe that all the days, months, and years that we lived before we met were practice…practice for a chance to do a relationship right and to be a good partner, to not make the same errors, mistakes, or poor choices we made before.  I feel angry with myself that when things are peachy, sunny, and going smoothly I am filled to overflowing with kindness for all and love for many, but the minute things turn blue, cloudy, or my life path begins to get rocky and our plans get thwarted, I default to a nasty moroseness that benefits no one, least of all us. That’s not being wholehearted, that’s being caught up in the minutiae, disjointed and focused on so little that is wrong, rather than so much that is right.  I don’t want to be a girl whose default is negative, better to be one whose default is positive.  I strive every day to be happy and to not get sucked into the vortex of this modern world we live in…want-want-want-more-more-more-me-me-me-I-I-I…I have love and a roof over my head, and  family &  friends near and far…I am living as whole  a life as can be.

When I have said unkind things or thought unkind thoughts I try to reboot by remembering our 1st date, our first kiss, those first days and weeks of that first summer…“All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”  I’ve realized that THAT is what I can do for him…I can try to make every season seem new, make every ‘I love you’ sound new to his ears…make every laugh & every smile feel fresh and unexpected, every ‘good morning’ and every ‘good night,’ every time I meet his gaze or reach for his hand, and love him enough that it feels new, over and over, maybe even til death do us part…