I was not emotionally ready, financially ready, or mature enough to be a mother, but I took the task seriously and did my very best.  I imagine every woman has the very same worries and concerns, regardless of her age or wealth,  and indeed feels vulnerable those first few days of motherhood, but somehow we figure it out as we go along and we learn every day, sometimes every hour, what works and what doesn’t.  It’s quite possible that where we are in life when we accept this job is irrelevant, perhaps no matter how much life experience we have, or how little, we all feel that sense of wonder and think, “I sure hope I do this right!” 

I am sometimes mediocre and I am sometimes marvelous, I am a Mother.  I am often ordinary and occasionally outrageous, I am a mOther.  I am traditional at times and trendsetting at times, I am a moTher.  I am heavy hearted when I hurt and I am heaving hysterically with laughter when I am happy, I am a motHer.  I am excited by joy and I am edgy from worry, I am a mothEr.  I recall first steps and first words and remember first  spankings and first scoldings, I am a motheR.

When my daughter was just six years-old I took a literature class in college that was HEAVY with reading.  In an effort to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone that semester, I decided that rather than read a story-book to my child every night before bed as I had done since she was an infant, instead I would read my school homework aloud to her.  She’d get a bedtime story and I’d get my homework assignment done, and it seemed a perfect solution to the time management issue of being a young single mother with a job and a desire to get an “A.”  I remember VERY clearly that she adored two works in particular, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. She would joyfully crawl into my bed and hand me my books for me to read to her, I often wondered if she understood much, if anything she was hearing, but her enthusiasm for the stories, as they unfolded, told me that she indeed was “getting” something out of the words.  She asked questions, bigger questions than one would think would come from a small child, and I answered them as if I was responding to a professor.  When I wrote my papers on these readings I read her them too…I can’t help but think, all these years later, that some of what molded her into the woman and parent she is today, is partly related to her early introduction to feminism, motherhood, and gender identity from her mother’s choice to read  -totally inappropriate for first grade-  books to her.

I can say and write with confidence that when your girl child grows up and has children and you see her as a mother, noun, and mother, verb, it is a pretty good indicator of how well you yourself did, it is perhaps a mother mirror.  You hope all along as you raise this child that you are doing okay and are well aware that there is not really a right or a wrong way but some ways are certainly better than others…it’s mostly by instinct I guess.  A dear friend while in labor was told by the doula, “find your inner monkey” and it might have been the very best advice about being a mother that I ever heard.

I am well aware that there are many truly fabulous women who turned out to be fantastic mothers, having had terribly un-fantastic horrific ones themselves, but I am not writing about those women today, today, this Mother’s Day weekend, I am writing about me and my daughter, both of us daughters and both of us mothers, making our way in the world and navigating the oceans of confusion when it comes to “what TO do” in all things related to mothering.  I am done, in a way, she is new, in a way, but I am still required to ‘mother’ as I am frequently responsible for these little humans.  I have found myself in awe at times when I see how she and her husband are raising their children, and how she tends to them, teaches them, and touches them.  I watch her kiss boo-boos, mend broken feelings, find her secret inner Doctor Spock when they are sick, and her secret inner Martha Stewart when they are making a project.  I feel deeply loved when I watch her love her kids:  I hear an inner voice tenderly say, “you did just fine.”  I guess how we spell it does not matter at all, only how we do it.

I have been happy with much less than I have at this moment and have been sad with much more.  At times in my history I have had much more money & many more friends, but had much less free time and much less love.

I have made choices and decisions in my life that have brought me to where I am today.  Everything I have chosen to do or elected not to do has planted me right here.  Good or bad, the free will I’ve exhibited and the judgments I’ve made to act or not, got me to this point.   There is nothing great about expectations.  I am old enough to know, and have lived long enough to have learned, that if one sews seeds of expectation, one harvests disappointment.

My Nana always told me, “kindness is its own reward” and I have tried for all of my life to be a kind person, a loving person, a friendly person, an optimistic person, a hard-working person, a generous person…dare I write, a deserving person…and therein lies the enigma of my existence.

I think that somehow I convinced myself over time and trial and error that there was some sort of prize on the horizon if I just kept at it, that despite the teachings of my Nana there was something else coming my way, that I was entitled to always expect something more.  I have watched over the days of my life as people got  things that I wanted, or thought I wanted, but did not have, often people who on the surface seemed not particularly kind, and instead of having feelings of congratulations or happiness for them, rather I felt those totally un-fabulous sensations of envy and self-pity…the “why not me?”  syndrome.  Somehow I came to believe I deserved…I don’t want to be a bitter and angry Miss Havisham, living alone in her beautiful house, or feeling resentful that I didn’t get what I wanted.  Miss Havisham will not live here.  It is not who I feel I am, yet sometimes my behavior or my words suggest otherwise.

Show gratitude for all that I have and all that is good and expect nothing, is how I want to live this life on this earth at this time, but it is not always easy, distractions are frequent, but ultimately it is how I wish to be.  A better version of myself.  I know people who have lost all of their possessions to a storm surge, I know people who have lost their house to the bank, I know people who have lost their jobs, I know people who have lost a child, I know people who have lost their parents…I have everything I could possibly want and let the very few things I do not have weigh on my spirit oh so heavily…why?  Pearl Jam has a line I love in one of  their songs, “the haves have not a clue” and I realize that in comparison to most of the rest of the world, I am in fact a ‘have,’ and when I find myself growing morose and taciturn and moody with envy I know that I am behaving like nothing short of a spoiled brat.  Nobody likes a spoiled brat, whether the brat is five or 45!!  My Nana also used to always say “pretty is as pretty does” and there is nothing appealing about a discontent sour-puss.

I started back to kick-boxing class a few weeks ago.  It is a great mood enhancer.  Running, punching, kicking, jumping…well, one can’t really dwell on any of the voices in her heard when one is trying to remind her lungs to take in air!!!  Getting back into my strong girl mode gets me toned and makes my outside better, but it is my inside that needs far more attention.  I don’t need to enhance my mood I need to stabilize it.  I have said for years I am a work in progress, but I don’t seem to ever fully change the way I think long enough to break the habit…I go through spurts of intense joy but then the old ways of thinking find their way back to my mind and I grow woeful again.  It’s like I’m constantly riding Rolling Thunder when all I really want is It’s a Small World…I don’t want the rush of the highs and lows, I just want to float.

“There is no disaster greater than not being content; There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.” ― Lao Tzu 

It’s hard sometimes for me to understand that the truth is I must simply be glad and grateful for whatever IS, whatever it may be.  I need to kiss my boy and hug my girls and believe, and know, I need nothing more, and feel joy and thanks that the universe has granted me another day on this side of the dirt…another sunrise to watch come up over the cedar trees and another sunset to watch go down behind the evergreens…

I have given an art print as a gift to many women upon the birth of a child, it reads, “There are lives I can imagine without children, but none of them have the same laughter & noise”   I realized Friday night that perhaps I need a refresher course in child rearing and care…I don’t know if it’s because I only had one child of my own, that sometimes tending to three seems to overwhelm and exhaust me, or if maybe I am simply too old or set in my ways to be anything other than a babysitter, although Halle Berry is a year older than I and pregnant, so I’m young enough still to be a mother, but I don’t know if I am still any good at “mothering” as they are not at all the same thing…

I love the daughters of my daughter and son-in-law, and often, when I watch them walk the few hundred feet home, as they leave my house for their own, I feel my heart swell as I see the sun glimmer off their hair and I feel this intense sensation of adoration, and realize that they are really the light of my life and that my world in many ways revolves around them.  Every other weekend my world grows more full when the daughter of my boyfriend is here too.  Why then, I asked myself  late Friday night, do I get so irritated over the clothes left on the floor, the Monster High shoes strewn about the coffee table, or the sticky fingerprints from lip gloss and eye liner dress-up time near every light switch and every door jamb??

After they were kissed goodnight and tucked into bed in the loft, I went downstairs to read and I fell into a deep sleep…I awoke two hours later and heard laughing and little feet running around and I stomped upstairs and expressed my annoyance and told them to get back to bed and that, “I don’t want to hear another word,” but when I got back to my room I felt a deep sadness and regret for what I had said, I thought, wow, what would I feel inside if I never heard them again…you see, it’s been a sad many days here…my son-in-law and daughter lost their dear friend last week, a death so unexpected and so unfortunate in so many ways, and Friday morning’s funeral memorial was so sad…I hugged and cried with a woman who I had never before met, who I am quite sure wanted more than anything in the  world to hear her son’s voice, even just one more time…so I felt awful for what I had said to the girls, because I suddenly found myself thinking about what my father always says, “tomorrow you could be run over by a pie wagon” and I felt an ache for how awful it would be if I died and those were the last words I said to these children, or if something happened to one of them, and those were the last words they heard come from my lips…and I started to cry.

I don’t want to be so consumed with my neat and orderly house that I miss the life that should be lived IN the house.  I don’t want to care so much that they go to bed when they are supposed to, it is the weekend after all…I don’t want to care so much that I have to spend an hour or two reorganizing and picking up after they leave, I don’t want to care so much that they change their clothes four times in a day, or scuff the toes of their shoes while they ride their bikes…I want to be better at mothering, although I am not their mother…and I apologized to them Saturday morning for raising my voice, that I want their time here to be joyful and fun and I want them to feel nothing but loved when they are in this house…I realized this weekend that I cannot imagine a world without them in it, and if I had to live a life without them, I would so dearly miss the laughter and noise…

I’ve ‘reinvented‘ myself many times in my adult life; played roles, some I liked and some I loathed, changed the way I thought, changed the way I looked, changed the way I cared for myself, or in some circumstances, didn’t.  I have over the years of my life re-imagined myself countless times…always able to change a scenario in my head in order to get a feel for what might be my future, if only…if only I did what I thought about doing…It is time for some changes, it is time for some reinvention, it is time to make the idea of what can be, be.

In my past there were so many variables…so many things at once that needed changing, that I felt like I could dream it, always, but never TOTALLY succeed, but things have changed…When I was young there was the worry over whether I was doing a fine or poor job raising my child, worry over getting good grades in college, worry over working enough hours to cover my expenses, then years later the worry over if I sold my house where would I go, the worry over my daughter living an 8 hour drive away and what if she needed me…always so much on my mind that the ME was always pushed to the bottom of the list. I found I was continuously and consciously putting the needs of others ahead of my own, and I suppose, any mother will tell me, that’s simply how it is supposed to be.

Things were different then, all is different now…things have changed.  My child is grown, my work is fulfilling, my house is built, the grand-babies live right next door…I am at a point in my timeline where I can focus on me, 100% if I so choose.  This is exciting and daunting simultaneously…because, there is no longer an excuse for NOT putting myself;  my wants, my needs & my wishes, to the top of my list.  I have run out of excuses as to why I do not force myself to make changes that need to be made, or to put my well-being & contentment first and foremost on my ‘life-list,’ I do not have to care for anybody but myself, if I so choose.  I do not have to do anything for anyone that I do not want to do.  I know people my age with toddlers and children in grade school, I am done with having to care for someone, and am free to choose to care, and they are completely different…I am obligated to no one, but myself.  It is time to love me as much as I have loved others… It is time to transform, again…necessity is the mother of invention. This is liberating and this is terrifying.

How does it happen…how do we go from strangers to friends?  It’s a curious thing, curiouser and curiouser…how we meet new people and how a relationship grows, or doesn’t.  I am fond of saying and writing that I am a work in progress, and do believe that all of us are,  in some way or another.  There are always elements of who we are and how we act and what we think and do that we can improve.  I think sometimes about how we come in and out of each others lives and what we bring to relationships and what we take.  There are lessons we learn with every goodbye, every bad break-up, every ending, and I think if we are wise, or at the very least aware, we start every new friendship, every new love, every new interaction with some level of understanding about ourselves that we did not have, or perhaps were not conscious of, before.

I suppose that in some circumstances the time it takes to know, or believe that somebody “fits” us or will suit us, is quite short and at other times, well, we could spend months with a person and come to find that we really did not know them at all, they are completely something “else”…with some others, in a matter of days we can wonder where they had been all our lives, how was it we never crossed paths, how is it that it feels like we’ve known them forever…I’m sure that for many social scientists there are algorithms and formulas that can answer these sorts of questions, but for those of us who just try to “be” there is not much in the way of rules or recipes, we simply must follow our instincts, that gut feeling, always.  I’ve learned that when I don’t, it is a grievous error.

Last June, one night while perusing cyber-space and enjoying some ice-cold vodka, I took notice of the little sidebar on Facebook called “people you may know.”  It is something I had never looked at before and the first picture on the top of this list was of a man and a little girl and it indicated we had 41 mutual friends.  ‘Who on earth is this person?,’  I asked myself, that I had no idea who he was and yet we shared quite a number of mutual acquaintances…so as I am prone to do, I wrote him a note, and remarked simply that I thought it funny that we went to high school together at the same time and knew all these same people and that I had no idea who he was.  A cyber friendship developed and after three misses, well, to be clear, three times he asked me to come see him play the drums and meet, and three times I chickened out, we finally met eye to eye in the early morning hours after his show on July 4th.  He smiled at me when he walked in my door and I got butterflies in my belly like I had not had since I was a 14-year-old girl.  Our first kiss later that night was far more exciting than the fireworks I had seen hours before.  We talked until the sun came up and I went to work wondering how I had never before known this person who suddenly I wanted to know more than anybody in the whole world…

It’s inexplicable, really, how the chemistry happens, how the sparks fly, how we went from strangers to friends in a matter of hours and how before the week was up,  I felt I had truly and finally found my match.  I am, and have always been, something of a hopeless romantic, but that does not diminish the reality of how it happens, or in most cases, doesn’t.  My daughter went to Myrtle Beach for spring break in her senior year of high school and arrived home to tell me she had met the boy she was going to marry…I thought it could not possibly be true, that she could not have made such a connection in only a week, but seven weeks later I watched them get married in my sister’s gazebo, and here they are, soon to celebrate their 9th anniversary, still in love and having created a beautiful family together.  My mother and father were acquainted for years, he a summer boy here at the shore and she a year-rounder, but their first official date was on Easter Sunday, walking the boardwalk in Atlantic City and they were married 8 weeks later, and here they are, still dearly in love with each other…so I KNOW it happens, or can happen, and fast.  They just knew.

A few days after I met this man last summer, we were in Atlantic City watching a great “hot girls” dance show, and they performed a number to a song whose lyrics were “where have you been all my life” and I laughed that night, so full of joy and wonder and excitement, that it was a very valid question…where had he been all my life?  You just don’t know, do you?  When a stranger becomes something more, something else…it’s magical really, how once we were strangers, and now we have this.  We have smiled at each other every day since we met and we have found that perhaps we were at the same pit parties in the woods, at the same beach parties here at the shore, in and out invisibly of each others lives for so many years since we were  teenagers, and we talk and wonder what our lives might have been like, had we met sooner…but I do believe that we meet people we are supposed to meet when we are supposed to meet them, so I no longer waste much energy wishing we had met when we were young, I just am glad we met at all…

“You have your Mother’s eyes.”  I have been told this so many times over the times of my life when I have met or been introduced to people, which is ironic, since we seldom if ever saw anything the same way.  However, since today is my Mother’s birthday, I think it is high time I admit that several things on which we often, if not always disagreed, are in fact, exactly right.

My sister and I spent our early childhood in a rather modern 70’s style home, with white carpeting and white furniture…it is my belief that I “keep house” in the way that I do because of my Mother, and for that, I thank her.  My home is my castle, despite it’s rather small, by today’s standards, size, and I owe her thanks for that feeling of pride that I have of this space.  I reluctantly made my bed every day from the time I was about four-years-old, because she told me it is nice to come back home after a day to a tidy room, and there needs to be a place for everything, and everything in its place.   She was right, and I ALWAYS now make my bed, and ALWAYS make sure that things are where they “belong” and for that I thank her.  I reluctantly filled the dishwasher as a child because she told me a kitchen looks dirty even when it’s clean if dishes are ever left in the sink.  She was right, I never leave the house or go to bed with used dishes in the sink, and for that I thank her.  Although I fought her every step of the way as a child, it is because of her care and manner of keeping a home that I am the kind of woman I am today, and for that I thank her.

My Mother and I butted heads over the years about SO much, but the older I get, the more I find, I am quite a bit like her in many ways.  All she ever wanted out of life was a happy marriage and a healthy family and a beautiful home.  No matter what I “wish” for or “dream of” it seems that those “simple” desires are ultimately what now also make me the most content.  My sister and nephew and brother-in-law live next door to my parents, and my daughter, granddaughters, and son-in-law live next door to me.  I currently have a deeply  loving relationship and a healthy family and a beautiful home, and these things make me so happy, & the older I get the more I find, I don’t need much else, and for that I thank her.

When my daughter was little my mother so often would say, after I had punished the child in some way, “oh come here…” and would dote and love and smooch & cuddle and spoil my daughter and that would make me SO MAD, you know, the love of Gram totally counteracting my immediately forgotten discipline…but fast forward these years, and you KNOW I am very happy to spoil these wee-ones next door and pretty much give them all the love and smooching and spoiling that I so choose 😉  I suppose, I learned that from my Mother too…I learned how to love others, and for that, perhaps more than anything, I thank her.

I remember enough about 9th grade and college algebra to know that equal means equal.  The sign = indicates that both sides are the same…and whatever kinds of formulas we have to use to get THERE, we use.  Our goal when doing math is that both sides of the = sign are the same.  I read a headline in the  news today that perplexes me in so many ways, that the Supreme Court was reluctant “to rule broadly on the fundamental right to marriage for gays and lesbians” and frankly, I just don’t GET IT.

We live in a culture that provides all sorts of benefits to people, incentives if you will, to be married.  The filing status of “married filing jointly” on tax returns is simply one of many.  There are all sorts of financial benefits to being married in this world in which we live  that are not afforded to us who are single or who live with someone we love.  In a country so often filled with unease and unkindness, I just do not understand how anyone can think that gay couples should not be entitled to the same benefits of marriage as straight couples.

I know and have known gay couples in much healthier, much more loving, much longer, much more compassionate, much kinder, and much more joyful & committed relationships than I have been in over my life…and that I have the right to marry whoever I choose and they can’t legally marry the person they choose positively blows my mind.   Weddings make me cry, mostly because I just feel so full inside of happiness for two people who met and fell in love and decided that they wanted to share their life with one another.  Why my friends who are gay can’t have THAT just confuses me.

I love my parents, so much, but they are very conservative in all of their views, compared to me at least, and I tried to talk to my Mom and Dad about this issue several years ago, and my father said something about that  if the courts allow for men to marry men and women to marry women, then who is to say that somebody won’t argue someday that they want to marry a goat.  I ended the conversation at that moment because I realized that I would never have the skill or the vocabulary or the knowledge of the subject to ever state my position in a strong enough way to them that could sway them.  They simply would  never see or understand my point of view.

Yes I am aware that in the last 13 years several states have adopted rules that allow for civil unions, like marriage, but not the same, and while I think it is terrific, I think it is ridiculous that if you are gay you might have to travel out of your own state in order to marry the person you love and have chosen to share your life.  I am often very naive, I know this, but I just can’t understand, in the world in which we live, filled with so much hate and so much that is unkind and so much that is unsettled, that anyone would want to deny people who love each other, the right to marry.  Why would you want to make loving any more complicated than it already is?

It is already something of a miracle really, when you think about it, that we meet people and get to know them and fall in love…that anybody would think it right to dictate who we love and who we can marry, confuses me on so many levels.  There is so much about relationships that is hard, any gay couple and any straight couple will agree…there is a constant balance struggle…who earns the money, who empties the dishwasher, who pays the property taxes, who does the laundry…just living life is hard enough, why make it so difficult for a couple who just happens to be gay, to make the choice to marry?

If Equal means Equal, then stop giving perks to married straight couples.  Stop giving them the best tax rate or breaks, stop giving them better prices on car insurance, or health insurance, STOP giving marrieds more financial breaks and incentives than singles, and then we can simply all be equal!  Men and women, white and black, gay and straight, people are people…let us all be the same.  Why should a married man and woman together for 20 years get financial benefits that are not given to a gay couple who have been together for 20 years but who have to file as “single” every April 15th?  Just because they (the straight and the married) are the majority, doesn’t make it fair, or right, or equal.  I don’t know enough about the laws or the issues to have much more of an opinion than I already do, but I do know this…we love who we love.  We are who we are.  Equal means equal.  Always.

My eldest granddaughter came over the other night and was wearing my favorite coat, from 1974, a Wrangler jean jacket on which my mother had embroidered a little girl viking on the back.  That my mother saved it all these years thrilled me, even though I am hardly a sentimental kind of woman, and this grandchild of mine noted that in fact her mother, my daughter, had also worn it, as her name was written in magic marker on the tag.  I often tease my mother for her sentimental ways…I ask her why she bothers to save old things, but seeing my granddaughter wearing my jean jacket gave me goosebumps.  Last summer my Mother sent me a photo of this same child wearing the red dress she had made for my daughter to wear for the first day of kindergarten, and now I have another picture, of her wearing my favorite ever coat…as much as I have given my mother grief over her ways, I can’t thank her enough for her love of family history.

I have a little white dress in my laundry room that has a black and gray kitten embroidered on it…I wore it, my sister wore it, my daughter wore it, and both her  daughters wore it.  Now it just is folded in the laundry room cupboard but it exists, and through no effort really of my own…my mother saved it all those years and now I simply can’t bear to part with it.  I have the first quilt my mother ever made me, before arthritis set in and made her fingers ache and her hands hurt.   I don’t use it anymore but I have it in the blanket chest at the foot of my bed…which actually is my first ever toy box…now repainted and reupholstered and  used to hold bedding I seldom use…I “pick” on my mother for being so sentimental, yet here I am, in possession of my first toy box and the kitten smocked dress…My mother’s poor fingers are so sore with arthritis now that she only does minimal mending and no longer sews or quilts.  Last week she texted me a picture of the girls at her house getting their first lessons at the sewing machine…perhaps the fabric of our lives will just continue to unfold…

I was raised to believe in “making plenty of deposits” in my karmic bank, an expression my Dad has used all of my life.  I’ve read that you get what you give, and that what you send out is returned to you three-fold.  I suppose in many ways this belief is partly why I do my nightly “was I an asshole to anybody today” apology to the universe.  ‘Being good is its own reward‘ was something my Nana used to say and it seems that all of this is related to that whole ‘do unto others‘ Bible stuff…but whether it is karma I fear or not making it to heaven if there is such a place, it seems to keep me on the path to being, well, good.

When I love a friend, I try to be a good one, and I suppose because I want it returned, but also because it does feel good to care about people.   I’ve had very few “falling outs” with girlfriends, and of course lots of break ups in relationships or dating that just didn’t grow into something more.  Relationships end sometimes and we just keep living and maybe our friends list gets smaller or maybe we try to make new friends, but over time friends come and go, lovers come and go, we fall in love, it ends, we fall in love again…it just keeps on going as long as we keep breathing.

I think it would be egocentric and self-serving to write that I try to be good to people because I want them to be good to me, but in reality, I think it is partly true.  When I care deeply for a girlfriend or a man with whom I am sharing my life, I guess I expect those people to also care deeply for me.  Boyfriends over the years have let me down far more often than girlfriends.  I’ve been “in love” only six times in my life,  but I still have the same two girlfriends I have loved for a very long time; one I met on the 1st day of first grade, and the other I met on the first day of spring gym class when I was a freshman in high school.  They have been the ones who have shared my laughter and my tears through all my ups and downs, heart-breaks and joys.

I’ve been accused over my life, although I hardly see it as a flaw, of being too Black & White, and to be fair, I have never been particularly fond of all the shades of gray that fall in between.  I generally either like something or I don’t, love someone a lot or dislike them immensely, want something desperately or don’t care about it at all…yes black and white is perhaps quite accurate, but friendships have lots of gray areas over time.  We go through periods where we talk every day and see each other often or we drift apart for months or even years, we get busy with living and choices and obligations and the amount of effort we put into our friendships becomes minimal.

We choose our friends and we can’t choose our family.  My parent’s love for me is unconditional, my child’s love for me is too, and her children’s as well, and whether I’ve screwed up or done right, my family seems to love me no matter what.  My girlfriends have put up with a lot more of my “crap” than I have had to put up with theirs, and still, they miss me when they don’t see me and they ask me to make more of an effort to be their friend, to spend some time with them, and so, as it is spring, and spring is a time for renewal, I started last night, by having dinner with my first friend and I plan to have dinner later this week with my second friend.  They’ve both asked me over the last couple years, regularly, to please try to make more time for them, and even though I so often have failed to do so, they still seem to love me and their love has proved over time to be unconditional.  I chose them years ago to be my friends and I am going to do better, to be a better one.

When the first daughter of my daughter was born, I described the feeling as that “I had no idea I had so much love inside of me” and I have come to believe over these years, as a second granddaughter has come into my life, and now the daughter of the man I love, that my capacity for loving is much greater than I knew.  My heart just manages to keep growing, and I guess be it in family, in friendship, or in love, I feel happy that I am a point in life where it is returned to me, repeatedly, from all of them…

There are all sorts of pills and elixirs in this modern world that we can buy to cure what ails us, but I have found that for me, a woman who is seldom sick, but who suffers occasionally from some mental or physical ills, that the best medicine is a strong dose of Jane Austen.  I read her work when I was young, and loved the language, but frankly often found the stories hard to follow because OF the language…fast forward to my adult life and the PBS version of Pride and Prejudice and the Emma Thompson version of Sense and Sensibility are my panaceas of choice.  The words are generally still the same and the language in particular still excites me, but because I am watching the story unfold, rather than re-reading paragraphs that confused me, I find I GET more out of them than when I read them.  I could watch both of these films once a week for the rest of my life and not ever grow tired of them.

S&S gets me thinking deep thoughts, mostly because I see myself a complex and confused mix of Elinor and Marianne; I think about being, or trying to be,  sensible and clever and practical, and knowing that I ought not be so bold to so openly and frequently share my thoughts and emotions and wishes… and yet often I am so painfully aware of how those more “practical” demeanors often conflict, deeply, with my hopeless romanticism and carefree expressions of affection, desire, elation or melancholy.

P&P gets me thinking about what it means to me to be independent; how lucky I am to live in this modern world where women can own property, earn money, and make choices and decisions without having to answer to anyone.  Self sufficiency is a gift we contemporary women have received through time and changing social norms, and to be sure, there are many many times I depend on my father, but I take great joy in how often I depend on no one but myself.

I needed some regrouping of my thoughts last week, and I was, well, there is no other term for it, blue, and so one cold afternoon when I should have been doing many things on my to-do list, opted instead to get out my yarn basket and I sat on my bed and crocheted and watched these films.  I replayed some of my favorite scenes, I paused the films at times to rethink the words I had just heard, I watched with anticipation for what would come next, despite knowing exactly what was coming next…I spent many nights over a week thinking about my life, my choices, my regrets and remorse, as well as my contentments and joys.  I thought a lot about my failures and my successes, the times when I have been so “up” and the times I’ve been so “down.”  Both films have gloriously happy endings but so many hardships and upsets are suffered on the paths along the way.  Jane Austen’s works reminded me that living life was not easy then and is not easy now, but that we press on, we move forward, we strive to do better next time with each time we miss, and hopefully we learn a lesson with every stumble, and that is good medicine to me.