I recently read the interview with Linda Evangelista, about the pain and trauma she is experiencing after a body sculpt procedure, that has been wildly successful for millions of customers, but was not at all successful for her. The story has left me feeling heavy-hearted for a person I don’t even know. She was without a doubt one of my favorites from that era of super models with big hair and long legs, before the rise of what I think they called “heroin chic” which to my eye was never attractive, for the models or the clothes, and certainly did not seem “chic.” I loved that era of the late 80’s and early 90’s and while yes, it was impossible for any average female to identify with, it was beautiful to the eye, and to think that a woman so stupendously successful for being pretty, has chosen to hide away for years after a bad cosmetic procedure has made me so sad. I beat myself up with negative self talk too often; I used to have a flawless forehead with not even a tiny wrinkle and used to have a flat hard belly too, neither of which is the truth now, and the person I see in the mirror has not looked like what I “see” in my mind for decades. At yoga the other day, one of the ladies said, “we all just have to find a way to like what we are now” and I know she is right, but time is a body snatcher and for some, like this former super model, maybe it’s harder to accept than for us regular people. For her, the results of the negative self talk now has her full of pain and regret.

To be honest, if I could afford to have a doctor shoot poison into my forehead to make it wrinkle free, I probably would, it is one of the main reasons I wear head wraps and hats so much, and here is another thing…I can’t afford to DO some of the things that rich people do when they feel Time the body snatcher getting too close! I have no problem at all with plastic surgery or cosmetic procedures, I mean, that lady who has made her face look like a cat is rather disturbing, and the doctor who agreed to her requests should probably not be allowed to practice plastic surgery any more, but I feel like if you have the funds to make things happen that you wish for, WELL GOOD ON YOU! because, most of us can’t afford to fix or change what we would like to fix or change!

Her face on so many of the magazine covers over so many years, and from the beginning of George Michael’s famous video for the song FREEDOM was to me, perfection…her perfect teeth, perfect brows, perfect cheek bones and that perfect forehead with just a wisp of that super funky hair…oh how I love and so miss weird and funky hair from that era! At the time, as a young single mother of a pre-schooler, her face and her body and the clothes it looked built for, well, it was everything I wished for but could not be or could not have. All these years later, while I definitely have more than an inch to pinch and nothing about my face or my body looks like I wish I could make it look, I am in general rather content in my life, extra jiggles and wiggles and wrinkles and all…I felt sad for all her sadness and I suppose it made me recognize that I am glad for my overall happiness. I don’t really like how I look, compared to my younger self, but I am not stuck hiding away or in agony…her story was sad.

I guess what made me the most sad for her is that somebody so spectacularly beautiful could not find peace with the regular pace of aging. It’s life, it’s living, it happens…All the money and all of the success can’t keep Time away…it is a body snatcher. It got me thinking about how much we women often equate our worth and wellness with what we see in the mirror. I do know several women who are in as good, or even better physical shape now, in their fifties and sixties as they were in their twenties, but I know far more women like myself, who have not seen in the mirror what we see in our mind’s eyes, for decades!!!

I suppose if I had spent my life as a super model, being paid for being pretty and being thin, and then found myself feeling both not pretty nor thin, it would be rather traumatizing to my psyche, certainly more than what I believe I “suffer,” which really is just feeling down about myself sometimes, and sometimes filled with mean-talk between my ears, despite all the amazing things my body does every day and how super capable and strong it is! I suppose her mean talk to herself forced her to try something new to “fix” what she thought was in need of fixing. This former super model, is in agony both physically and mentally, and suffering terribly at present, or so it seems from this article, from deep emotional trauma for having tried to get a cosmetic procedure that was supposed to improve that which Time the body snatcher had taken away, and it made me sad for one of the most beautiful people in the world. Body image, body distortion by your own mind, is not uncommon for women, be they “mad fit” or plump! AND here we have a woman our age who infamously would “not get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day” feeling as bad about herself as so many of us “regular” women do, or actually, by both the tone of the article in People magazine and her essay on Instagram, I suspect she feels infinitely worse about herself than I do, or any of us do really!

“All we have to do now, is take these lies and make them true somehow” is how the chorus of that song goes…We women notoriously tell ourselves lies all the time don’t we?? That if we don’t LOOK a certain way we can’t ACT a certain way, or WEAR special things, or don’t DESERVE TO HAVE CERTAIN THINGS or don’t deserve to be TREATED a certain way…Lies, Lies, Lies. Here I am pondering, contemplating, looks?? worth??? value???? the whole world around us is a mess and I can’t stop thinking about this former super-model, of my age, who went to get a cosmetic procedure that was “supposed” to give her the toning results she was looking for, as she aged, to feel better about herself, and sadly for her she is one of the very few for whom the procedure does not work, at all. It has me thinking about contentment and how if we let it, Time the body snatcher will snatch our positive thoughts as well as our youthful bodies…

How we LOOK is not WHO we are. We are WORTH whatever we think we DESERVE or WANT. Our VALUE as a person has nothing to do with what size jeans we wear…I for one have many things about my own body I would like to improve upon, and I will continue to try to keep Time the Body Snatcher from getting too close, but remember friends that we are not what we look like we are what we do, and Time the body snatcher can’t take our goodness away…Talk pretty to yourself today friends, and for today love the body you are in right now, just as you are. Like the tv commercials used to say, “love the skin you’re in” and more importantly, “You’re worth it!”

I worked at an upscale gallery for nearly 23 years and while we sold all contemporary handcrafted pottery and glass and wood and metal, what many people came for was the jewelry…all hand made and everything beautiful. No matter how much care an artist put into packing their items to ship them to the shore, inevitably a necklace would arrive to the shop in knots…sometimes one big knot ball of sterling silver mess and sometimes one intricately twisted knot ball of gold and every time my boss would look at me with pleading eyes to get the knot out. “Not another knot??!!” She would exclaim, as she hated trying to get them out, but I would just calmly get a push pin or a safety pin and take it to my stool behind the counter and begin. I would take the tip of the pin and just start in anywhere to see what I was in for. If you have never tried to get a knot out of a necklace then count yourself lucky. Knots in boat lines, knots in hair, knots in toddler’s sneaker laces, I have been a person who does not mind untangling knots for all of my adult life, and here is something you may not know about knots, the kind of knots that tangle up your life, the knots in your stomach when you are anxious or unnerved, are just as easy to untie, if you don’t rush, you take the time to find the way that they twist and turn and where the end piece is…marriage knots, teenage angst knots, romantic knots, infidelity knots, addiction knots, break-up knots, sick in the body knots, sick in the head knots, they are all the same…it’s just a mess that needs to be unraveled and untangled, and you have to know it will take time. More importantly, you have to simply begin…

It is so easy, too easy perhaps, to be consumed with worry or grief or anger and just let it eat at you and sit within you. Knots form rather quickly when you aren’t paying attention. If you find a knot in your neck or your necklace, and you try to ignore it, it won’t magically come undone. AND worse, if you just set it aside, it’s still there when you go back to it, no matter how long you tried to forget it was there…The kind of knots that tangle up your life are not much different than the kind that you get when you are out on a motorcycle or a boat and forgot to braid your hair…if you ignore them when they are small they will get so big that they are nearly impossible to fix and you will just want to grab the sharpest scissors and cut it out! Sure, you can just snip it right out of your head, that gets rid of a knot pretty fast, but you will be happier, in the end, if you take the slow and steady approach…you see life knots are the kind of knots that we don’t just want to cut out and toss like a mangled glob of hair, they have to be addressed with care, with attention, with intention.

I don’t know about you, but I am now of the age where if I move oddly when I sneeze I could get a knot in my shoulder blades or when I lift something heavy and I am not paying enough attention to my task at hand the knot that forms in my neck feels like it actually might kill me. You can’t ignore a knot. No, when you have a knot you have to notice it and decide what you are going to do about it. A literal knot might need a heating pad after work, it might need a really hot shower, it might need some Tiger Balm, and do please remember to wash your hands so very well after applying!! …but a life knot, the figurative kind of knot, neither shower nor salve can help, no, a life knot needs deliberate action, but more than anything, one must find the source…deeply look into the knot, where does it begin?? can you see the end loop or twist?? can you tell where it started to form?? …like in a handmade delicate chain necklace, back in 1985, at that gallery I called my other home for more than twenty years, you have to find out where the end piece is, and you have to find your way through the tangles, it’s the only success you are looking for…you have to find the end and you have to work at all the unraveling until you get to the last twist, the last turn, and delicately, like with the tip of a push pin, gently pull the last twist around and lift it out of the mess that it once was…

If you happen to show up at my parent’s house and you have not been there for some time, it’s possible my dad will take you out to his garage and have you listen to Take It To The Limit, loud. You may also get something from The Last Waltz, most likely Who Do You Love, but not necessarily. If he’s in a female sound frame of mind you will definitely get I’d Rather Go Blind and it’ll be far more likely that you’ll get the Davina and the Vagabonds version, rather than Etta James. The stereo set up in my dad’s garage is better than some bars and stages! He likes music and he likes it loud. No old folks shouting to “turn it down” in my dad’s garage. My dad is 80 this week, but you would not know it if you met him, saw him, or talked to him…AND if you worked with him then, or work with him now, you definitely will believe him when he tells you that in his mind he is still a 14 year old boy, and I believe this much is true.

He is either the most content and the happiest person you will ever meet, or he is the most extraordinary actor and faker of our time. I have written it before and said it too many times; I have heard him raise his voice maybe three times, at the most, in my entire life, and I have never, not even once, heard him raise his voice to our mother. It takes a very strong man to not lose his cool in totally uncool circumstances or situations, but it’s no joke, my sister will tell you this much is true, we have never really heard him yell. The other thing about our dad is that he still loves our mother. “She’s the best wife I ever had” he says with a grin more times than we could ever count, and he treats her better than any man I have ever known has treated a woman.

I have absolutely no fear of growing old, or death, or dying because of him…tomorrow you could be run over by a pie wagon and you have to be ready to go every day and make plenty of deposits in your karmic bank are three of the ‘Dad-isms’ that I heard for all of my life and, and while I suppose yes, I sure would be sad to die young, or not see my granddaughters grow into women, or be run over by a pie wagon, I am completely comfortable with the fact that in fact, tomorrow could be the day, or today, or well, any day could be my time. My dad instilled in me a lust for life, and you might think we are boring in that we don’t do much of what other people find exciting or adventuresome, but we are never EVER bored…my desire to always be doing or creating or fixing or modify or cleaning is because of my dad I suppose…never really idle and never doing nothing. He always taught me to embrace work, and I do, and more importantly, to always choose to do the right thing, to tell it like it is…it seems “simple” now, such an easy way to be a human, but the world gets more wonky every day it seems, but my dad is a constant…he is the same person he has always been and to say that I am grateful, to write that my sister and my mom and my daughter and my nephew and the daughters of my daughter are grateful, is an extraordinary understatement. He is the best of men. We are so lucky that he is “ours.” The number of my friends and acquaintances who no longer have both of their parents, or are down to one, is growing every month, so to still have a dad and a mom, and that they still love each other and are in generally extremely good health, is no small thing to me.

He has done every single thing he has wanted to do in his life, and when he retired, shortly after Hurricane Sandy, he said, joked, but was quite serious, that if he never had to leave his driveway again, that would be okay. He still works all day long, every day, but now does it for himself and my mother, and their yard and their home, and with the same attention to detail and pride in the work as when he was building one-off beach homes for the rich, or the famous, or both. He started his career after the storm of 1962 and ended it after the storm of 2012 and Long Beach Island was better for having had him swing a hammer on that strip of barrier sand. He says he was “just a carpenter” but my house, his house, my sister’s house, my daughter’s house, and every other house he built, or helped build, or repaired, remodeled, or reconfigured, and every piece of furniture he ever imagined and then brought from thought to use, or metal sculpture he dreamed of and then welded, will tell you that he was, and still is, a master craftsman, and so very much more than “just” a carpenter.

If you knew me and also knew my family…you might wonder, how on earth can they be so close? You see, I am a very “blue” minded person and my family is all “red” minded all day, if you get my drift, but here’s the thing; red and blue make purple, which is the very best color, and we focus on what we have in common, and let me tell you, sometimes we’ve not got much, at all, to work with…but we try. We try not to dwell on what divides us. Years ago when I started my R*’s common grounds blog, it really was truly about just that…finding common ground, with everyone, and we do, we have, we live it every day in my family, and the secret to our life is this; you don’t have to agree with someone to love them. I have never felt unloved ever, in all of my life, from this family, and even though we can probably count on one hand the number of things we agree upon, we love each other, and there’s no limit on that…

You look at pictures from weddings, honeymoons, new boats, new homes, or new cars, and all you see are beaming smiles and excitement looking back out at you…sometimes you even feel it; the energy, the zip, the rev, it’s all so “up” feeling…and then later, sometimes sooner than you had imagined could be possible, you find out that behind closed doors, in the day-to-days, and over months and months, not in front of a camera, there were few smiles, there were way too many tears, too frequently raised voices or slammed doors, and you come to realize that it was more likely that the negativity sucked the zip and the rev right out of every room these people were in together. Perhaps you come to realize that there was far more anxiety and upset in their real-life than excitement or joy of any sort whatsoever, all from what you assumed from the photographs that you saw. Happiness and contentment implied but not experienced…pictures show us, us on the outside, us the observers, a moment in time, but when we find out what so many moments really were like, for the people in the photographs, there is a jolt, a pang of sadness, a “wish I had known” sort of narrative for us, us on the outside, us the observers. At least that is how it feels for me, when I watch the unraveling of what appeared, on the surface, to be a happy marriage of a couple I once knew…

I believe it is universally acknowledged that half, or more, of all marriages end in divorce; but even KNOWING this, I for one get so excited when people get married. I want to cheer them on, “Yay for you, you are going to take a shot!” knowing, full well, that it might fail, but enthusiastically clap we do!!! Whether it’s months later in the pages of Vanity Fair or on the Today show some future morning, when I hear about famous people splitting up, I do feel a little bit sad…sad that they tried and could not do it; even with all the money and all the good looks ( and all the things we like to think “buys” happiness, but we all full well know they don’t) they still could not keep it together. Famous people in magazines or regular people in the neighborhood, my feelings are the same when a marriage fails, that’s a shame, I wished they could have made it, is pretty much what I think every time, no matter who the couple is.

Sure, when it’s real life people we know, we might get clues over the years that things were not quite as rosy as they often appeared; text messages with mixed messages, overhearing mutterings under breaths at dinner parties or events, and us, us on the outside, us the observers, trying to shrug it off as just bickering, which some couples certainly do…fluctuating estrogen levels married to empty beer cans can lead to bickering, trying to blend multiple children from multiple households can lead to bickering, not having enough money or having too much can lead to bickering…I mean, people try to come together as individuals and make a couple that becomes a unit, and from what I know, see, and hear, there seems to be an exquisite feat of skill sets needed to make that couple unit they’ve joined together, a strong one. Coupling seems simply just so terribly fragile, that it takes some serious efforts to make one that remains stable, or so it seems to us, us on the outside, us the observers.

I read an article earlier in the fall that said, “whether the pandemic caused new problems or amplified old ones, divorce cases have family lawyers and judges busier than ever.” I don’t know if the pandemic had ANYTHING to do with new problems, or old ones, for the people in my neighborhood, but I know that watching what once appeared to be the happiest of couples dissolve into tears and anger and dividing up dressers and tables and frying pans is as sad to watch as any sad movie. My heart hurts when people are hurting, that is simply how I am. I am constantly on a mission to create peace and harmony in my home, and I want the same for the people and the homes around me. It is my opinion that in every circumstance, no matter how you look at it, or whose side you’re on, the husband could always have been a bit of a better husband and the wife could always have been a bit of a better wife. Sure, sometimes one party is a total jerk and is the prime suspect in the dissolving of the marriage, but I think it takes two to make or break a relationship, no matter how new or old it is, which I guess coming from me is quite silly really…me, a woman who is not married, what business have I to comment on any marriage?? But, we all do it…us, us on the outside, us the observers…

What I do know for sure is that I have never once heard my father say an unkind word to my mother, and have never heard him raise his voice to her, not once. I grew up believing that this, more than anything else, has to do with making a marriage work, and us, us on the outside, us the observers, when we see a marriage where there are unkind words and where there are raised voices, well, it just seems like it might be doomed, doesn’t it?? When you know there are better ways to be part of a couple…half of a whole…

We see it on Google news, we see it in People magazine, we see it right in our communities…couples who appear/appeared to have it all, living the good life, traveling to exotic vacation locations, enjoying dinner and having cocktails in upscale eateries, we SEE IT, but we are not living it, and when the reality of what we were seeing becomes known, and the couple parts, we feel a little bit baffled, like “Oh but they seemed so happy!” and whether it’s JLo or your neighbor on the corner, the shock is kind of the same for us, us on the outside, us the observers…bewildering thoughts of “what must have gone wrong” when all we have seen is the photos and the GOOD STUFF…it seems that the pictures painted a thousand words, but few of them were true…

Her smile still makes my heart flutter…36 years, and about three hours ago, a kind nurse handed me an enormous, pink, minutes old baby girl and said, ‘I’ll leave you two for a bit‘…and left the room…I was so tired. I still to this day don’t know that I have ever been as tired as I was that cold January morning after the birth of my baby. I was so tired that I was terrified I was going to fall asleep and drop her. She was in the crook of my left arm and I was scared to death that if I fell asleep she would just tumble right down to the floor, and so I did not sleep and I did not rest, I just looked at her, and she smiled. She slept, and I don’t remember that she opened her eyes at all, but she smiled, and it felt like hours that I was alone with her, but it could have been only minutes…her finger nails were perfectly rounded long nails, and I joked for weeks that it was like she had stopped for a manicure on her way out to earth. I did not yet know her and she did not yet know me, but she smiled.

Nine weeks after I became an official adult, I became a mother. That the universe saw me fit for this monumental task, raising a human, is still something that blows my mind…Nothing about my life at that time was good, at all, but she was…She was a perfect baby. She would mew like a kitten if she was hungry, and if my memory serves me rightly she was many days old before I ever even heard her cry. Looking back now with clearer vision, and 36 years of personal growth, I was not all that much more than a child myself…the me, who used to be, was reborn when she was born. I think a person becomes somebody else, like it or not, when she becomes a mother.

The rebirth at birth is not immediate, but what is immediate is that, for me at least, everything that mattered BEFORE mattered less AFTER. Once I heard my sister tearily whisper, “it’s a girl,” everything that I thought was exceptionally important BEFORE was less important AFTER. It seems to me that a woman has her rebirth after the birth because, whether she is ready or not, motherhood is her job, the most important of all the jobs she will ever have, for the next many years. PERIOD. You may think many things about going back to your “old” self, those first weeks, but those thoughts, well, they are mostly wrong because the “yourself” is now that person’s person, and the “self” is no more…the obligation you have chosen is essentially saying to the universe, “I shall put this other human before me, and myself is now second and my old self is now gone.” PERIOD. I would suspect that most women do, get reborn after birth, and they quietly, without complaint, move themselves to the back of the line while they move this tiny human to the front.

What nobody really tells you then, during those first few weeks, is that it never ends. The “it” being mothering, motherhood, this new you. You think it will, that the “job” one day will be over, you will have completed your mission so to speak, your obligation, but it won’t be done, ever. When I was a young mother I didn’t realize this as profoundly as I do now, now that I am older & wiser, hardened, and yet softened, by time…

My mother still puts me and my sister, my daughter and my nephew, and now the daughters of my daughter, in front of herself…and my mother, without ever complaining about it, has moved herself to the back of the line, time and time again for all of the years of my life…Now that my own baby is today nearer to 40 than 30, I see more clearly how my mom and I are rather alike in so many ways, ways that one does not always notice when one is still young…but now I am older, and she is old, and I better understand how we are much more similar than we are different.

I worked hard, over many years, to create the kind of relationship with my daughter that I wanted. I am pretty sure that I annoy her, a lot, this now 36 year-old daughter of mine, because that is the nature of most mother/daughter dynamics, but decades after her arrival to earth I think we would both agree that the mother/daughter gig we’ve developed and cultivated is a lot better than many. I have made profoundly purposeful efforts over these years to do and say things that would make us have the type of connection I wanted, and I’d like to think it was a success. We often laugh together while we drink wine and chat, just like I do with my girlfriends. We have cried together when we are having a rough go of life, just like I do with my girlfriends. We take power walks and vent about those who annoy us, just like I do with my girlfriends. She is my friend but she is first my daughter, and in many ways, whether I succeeded or failed at mothering, or being her mother, it is to me, like the icing on the cake, that these last 12 years I’ve lived next door.

She is my neighbor, friend, and child, and the mother of my granddaughters, which, when I add it all up, is probably the most extraordinary thing of them all…she brought those girls into my life, and kind of made me born again, again, into yet another version, and I like to think a remarkably better version, of me…My rebirth at her birth, made me better woman that I’d otherwise have been. This I know is true. My rebirth at her birth made me awfully less self-centered than I think I’d otherwise have been. This I know is true. My rebirth at her birth made me much more grateful for my own mom than I think I’d otherwise have been. This I know is true. Today is a celebration of the birth of my daughter, whose smile lights up a room and still makes my heart flutter, but in many ways I am celebrating too, the woman I became, because she came to earth.

The song starts out, “I’m only pretty sure I can’t take anymore” and this blog will begin similarly…or like in Hangover II, I want to stomp around in the street wildly asking “WHAT the F**k is going on??!!” but what is going on, at least to my mind, is that this year is starting off totally crap for too many and I for one am going to do a bit of a reboot today, thus pretending that tonight is New Year’s Eve and smudging the heck out of my house and myself and doing a 2022 restart!!!

These last two weeks have been brutal for too many people I actually know, and for too many people I know of, or have heard and read about…there have been falls, bone breaks, break-ups, heart failures, heart breaks, financial losses, job losses, friend losses, and vacation cancellations, marriage cancellations, and coughs, colds, and covid-covid-covid. It is a rare morning that there is not bad news in a text message on my phone, on the television, a program on NPR, or some miserable story or statistic on google, and I feel like THIS IS NOT HOW 2022 is GONNA BE!!!! Is it????

Now, to be clear, from March of 2020 through today, some people have had their lives totally ruined or upended, or well, ended, as in they are no longer of this earth…I am one of the people who has, thus far, gotten off with barely a scratch…VERY LITTLE that is bad has happened to me at all, but because I am such a deeply “feeling” person, I am constantly feeling all the feels of ache and angst that others are suffering, and I for one am exhausted. Oh to be a doctor or nurse right now…I can’t imagine. AND I do have a friend who is a doctor, she is exhausted. AND teachers!! Good grief how exhausted they are!! What a “first world problem” I know, for me, to say that the bad news is exhausting and I don’t mean to minimize the suffering of others, but I am thankful that for whatever reason, my life has not nearly been as hard as the lives of too many…there are literally women my age with minor children who have lost their jobs, their rentals, their cars, and are couch surfing trying to keep their families together, and there are men who have committed suicide over the financial messes they got in since they lost their jobs or businesses because of a global pandemic that some took very seriously and some still think is no big deal…but it is only “no big deal” I suppose if you have not yourself suffered or feel the suffering of others though a deeply compassionate heart.

Then there are others, of course there always are, who have THRIVED…people who worked for a friend for cash, but “cashed in” on the months of unemployment bonuses intended to help people not become homeless or hungry, or the “skilled” business people who know how to work the system, oh yes let me get a PPP loan, and apply to have it forgiven, and because I know how to do the tax trickery, let me also buy a sports car, or buy a vacation home, or hide lots of money away for my retirement even though that was not AT ALL what the government intended with this loan that I miraculously now don’t have to pay back…Yes, some people who could do for others out of deeply empathetic emotions, instead do for themselves, only and always, and some people who know what they are doing is wrong but, because they will likely not get caught, do it anyway…there is always one…or more…

It’s been nearly two years of wiping down shopping carts, unless you are my daughter who literally has been sanitizing her hands and wiping down shopping carts for her entire adult life. It’s been nearly two years of backing away from people who cough and sneeze and while I suppose we always did this in line at a store, or waiting for a table in a restaurant, it’s different now…I suppose this is how it’s gonna be for a long time in many ways.

There are couples who used to make their relationships work just fine because they had a rhythm of their home life, tasks and obligations and habits that helped them to live together in harmony…AND THEN OUT OF THE BLUE, or so it seemed to many, the man who wore the Bespoke suits and accumulated thousands of air miles is wearing the same sweat pants for four days in a row and accumulating high scores on Free Cell…and the woman who organized her household and chores and children with the efficiency of a Swiss train schedule is now positively overwhelmed as a teacher/nurse/babysitter/chef/maid/laundress…AND now their relationships are suffering because their roles have gone wonky and they don’t know how it’s gonna be…

My advice, or at least what I’m going to do, is RE-DO 2022. I am literally going to “pretend” that tonight is the start of a new year…I am going to make some wishes and write them on pieces of paper and light them on fire in my prayer bowl, I am going to light some sage and smudge my own self with an eagle feather and I am going to start at my front door and walk and “pray” smudge the perimeter of this house, I am going to make my deals with the universe at bed time, I am going to make wishes and pray for those suffering, and I am going to do my best to answer the question, How’s It Gonna Be??, with the only acceptable answer I can think of…BETTER.

If you are a Jersey girl like me you might think I am fondly referencing Thunder Road, but no…I am feeling an ache for a time, not so long ago, when every morning I heard the screen door slam as two joyful, laughing little girls bounded into my house, in their pajamas, before their mother had even made their breakfast or had her coffee, to look for their Elf, Everbloom Woodsong. If you have small children or grandchildren you might have read a book called Elf on the Shelf. In the story, on Thanksgiving night the Elf arrives from the North Pole and the Elf goes back every night to advise Santa about the behavior of the children. Let me tell you, it is an extraordinarily effective tool for behavior modification. For a month, as the Elf returns to the North Pole on the night of Christmas Eve, to help Santa with all that work, and does not come back to your home until next Thanksgiving, the children are positively stiff with worry or fear if they misbehave in the presence of the Elf, at least my wee-ones were!

Two little girls, who live next door to me, who are the daughters of my daughter, and the lights of my life, got a book and an Elf on a cold Friday in 2010, named her Everbloom Woodsong, and for seven holiday seasons they blew through my door first thing every morning for a month to look for Everbloom…she only once forgot to “go back” to the North Pole and it was because of bad weather! Ha-ha! We found Everbloom hiding in a Fiesta ware pitcher once, over top the stove, we found her in the wine rack once pretending to be a bottle, we found her reading books, we found her hanging from the loft balcony railing, we found her on the sofa, under the table, sometimes in the bathroom! That Elf worked really hard to trick those girls but they always found her, and they then could go home and get on with their day!

The eighth holiday season, only one little girl came one morning after Thanksgiving, and then a few days later, and then a week went by…and I felt an ache, a pull, a pain really, feeling that this bit of childhood magic was one that had had its last days…so on a cold November day, before the 9th holiday season arrived, two little girls who live next door to me got a letter, a beautifully penned letter on white glittery paper, adorned with snowflakes and sparkles, from the North Pole, to Barnegat, NJ on planet Earth, that was from Everbloom…telling them that so many babies had been born since they met, and that she was really needed at the North Pole, and how they were older now and would surely understand, and that maybe, someday, when they were grown and if they were mothers themselves with their own wee ones, they might meet again one day…I saved that letter, framed it, and it is now a decoration and part of my holiday joy. I look at it every time I go up my stairs. It makes me smile and frown at the same time. I miss many things about my granddaughters little voices, their wee joy and wonder, their laughter, that they used to treat this house like an extension of their own, the way they came here and went back and forth so many times over the days of their lives, but more than anything, on a gray winter morning near Christmas, I miss the sound of the screen door slam…

Fact of my life: I had more fun and more laughter, and more ear-to-ear smiling in the last six months of 2012, which were the first six months of knowing a man I fondly started calling “the drummer boy,” than I had had in the 26 years of adulting, prior to meeting him. No matter what happened later, or during or since that first six months of knowing him, this is a fact that I could not deny when faced with a heavy decision that I couldn’t take lightly during the last few months…to give up and turn away or to press on and try again…When your life skids out of control, like it hits a patch of black ice and you horrifyingly spin-out, and you are not shy to share that your life had become totally and painfully unmanageable, it’s not always easy to get realigned and back on your path with grace or dignity of any sort…there are people who know your life was wonky for months and people who know how hard you cried and how sad, scared, and sullen you were for many weeks…so I can’t just wave my wand like Hermione, or do that nose wiggle like Samantha, or fling my high ponytail like Jeannie and make it all go away.

WHAT I can do is live fully today with how things are today. I can move forward with my head held high and know in my heart I have done the right things, taken the right course of action as a good and compassionate human, and know that for me, for this moment in my life, I am perfectly imperfect and okay with that. If my choices and decisions turn out to be wrong, then that is another lesson for me to learn in the future, and if my choices and decisions are right, then I am glad for them and glad that I followed my gut and did not let the opinions of others, or difficult circumstances during a difficult period of several weeks, sway me too far from my empathetic and compassionate and loving soul.

When you have gone through a difficulty or tragedy or sadness, or an event that is all of those things, it is rather easy to dwell on the bad parts and linger there, but it is not a good place to be, a cesspool of resentment and rage really, who wants to stay in THAT??!! Not me. When your brain is in a kerfuffle and you are struggling with choices to make and actions to take, thinking about all of the good times and how they outweigh the bad times is an effective tool for decision making, at least for me. When you are sad you can easily allow yourself to hold onto and linger with the sadness but then the good times memories get quashed and squished and are harder to access…best to file away the sad and refocus on the glad, in my experience anyway!

There are so many GOOD MEMORIES in my mind that are so much better, and so full of love and laughter from so many GOOD TIMES that they easily outnumber the bad feelings that are still quietly lingering in the background of my brain from a recent bad chapter in this, in general and overall, pretty great story… It is the right thing, for me, to move on with an open heart and an open mind, and to be honest, set and follow some new boundaries and some new “rules” for myself and how I interact with others, and how I care for myself, but to be clear it’s the right thing for me to move on with a positive mindset to create more good times and make more good memories, putting the bad feelings to bed in a way, really inducing a coma for them if I’m being totally honest…just be gone!! with a wave of a wand, a wrinkle of a nose, and a fling of ponytail…POOF!!

We, this drummer boy and I, are certainly are not the first couple, and won’t be the last, to go through a very bad event or series of unfortunate events and decide to try to repair what is damaged and strengthen what is still good, like that great lyric from PINK, we’re not broken just bent…we are certainly not the only couple who are two pretty good people who went through a pretty bad time…we are certainly not the first couple to have to have some difficult conversations to find our common ground again in order to move on…and we are certainly not the first couple to have to have a heart to heart HE-Said-SHE-Said about things that caused raised voices and were argued about.

I’ve lived long enough to know, whether people share their personal lives and personal business out in the open, or if they keep things totally locked and private and to themselves, “in house” so to speak, that more goes on behind most closed doors than anybody wants to admit…I just keep my door open I guess. All the good times you might see other couples having posted on social media, your neighbors or your friends going out and having fun, or famous people you read about in google news, are not always what they seem…sometimes good times are illusions that tell a tale and not a truth.

I suppose I want to be comfortable with the ugly parts of adulting and the sad parts of growing as a person, or the difficulties that often arise if you stay alive long enough…I am ending this year with a wide open heart for all of the good that comes to your soul with welcoming in a new year. I am totally comfortable with envisioning myself years from now, laughing, but rather horrified, at what a crap of a year 2021 was, and being bright eyed with how delighted I am, my future self that is, that 2022 and on was so much better, and so filled with good times, and filled with more memories made of more fun and laughter…the good times are there for the living and the taking and the doing. I shuffled my brain, reorganized my files so to speak, to make some room for more merry memory making!

Forgiving and Forgetting are the words on my mind this morning. THE “F” word does not trouble me nearly as much as these other two…I have no problem muttering under my breath for somebody to go F*off, F* yourself, go F*ing die, but “I forgive you” or “let’s just move on and forget about this” well, those are doozies for me!! I F*ing loathe them!!! But they are necessary in the art of letting go and growing and they are the F words of my own “Super Soul Sunday” today.

I finished a memoir last week, written by a young monk who basically said, well, the way I summed it up for my own understanding was, what good is dwelling on somebody who hurt you, or lied to you or did you wrong, when instead you can just forgive and move on?? We hurt our own selves every day and we lie to ourselves every day and we do some things wrong almost every day, yet forgive our own selves and just try to move on and do better, so why do we make it hard to give that same kindness or empathy to somebody else??? This was a very small book that packed a big punch! On the author’s web page he is described thusly: “Timber was born Jewish, ordained Buddhist, uses a Hindu mantra, and his morning meditation is a Catholic prayer. His altar at home features a statue of Jesus, one of the Buddha, another of Saint Francis of Assisi, and they get along just fine. On paper, Timber Hawkeye is a bestselling author, a podcast producer, a publisher, and an international public speaker, but in person, he is just another friendly face in town.” He signed my book when I bought it and wrote: To RStar, discover the freedom and the beauty of letting go…and I took this to heart.

I was away for a few days last week after Thanksgiving; friends invited me to spend some time at their vacation home in the Virgin Islands. I was grateful for a chance to not HAVE TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN BE. I read and wrote every day and did a lot of contemplating about a lot of things. I realized that I prefer the happiness of my personality when I remain positive and hopeful and optimistic and cheerful even in the face of difficulties or sadness. I realized after finishing this book, that I do really work hard to practice the two F words of forgiving and forgetting, but sometimes the opinions of others or the words between my own ears make me steer away from that freedom, of forgiveness, and I do not want to be a woman who dwells on bad stuff, or sad stuff, or old news of old wrongs or pains. This kind of behavior does not serve me.

When somebody hurts you, and they apologize with sincerity, and you accept the apology there are two pretty important steps that come after; forgiving and forgetting. You can disagree with me all you want, but I feel pretty sure that these are necessary for moving on, whether you ever speak to said person again, or not, these steps are part of the healing process of a hurt, and if you don’t take the time to do one, or both, there are thoughts and emotions that linger and they can EAT YOU ALIVE for the rest of your life. Staying angry at a person who has wronged you is, as I misquote the Buddha, like holding onto a hot coal and thinking the other person’s hand will burn.

Accepting a humbled and heartfelt apology is a challenge in and of itself, but in order to not dwell on any event that caused suffering you have to let it go…literally, the only way to not suffer is to not hold onto the hurt and once you say, I accept your apology, you can’t then go backwards over and over and discuss the event again, it just stirs up the sludge that has settled…forgiving and forgetting is healing.

I suffered some difficulties over the summer that left me bereft, and I needed to start this new year with a clear head. I needed to move on from the thoughts of what had happened and I needed to change the narrative…things could have been exceedingly worse than they were, and so for me, forgiving and forgetting is how I let go. I am just turned 54. I might have one week left on this earth or I might have forty more years, who knows??!! WHY would I spend one more minute lingering with any thoughts of what went wrong over a period of 13 weeks or so of one summer, when I have lived many summers that were much happier, and I potentially have many summers ahead of even more happiness??!! Thoughts that do not serve me of events and behavior that can be forgiven and a summer that can be forgotten seems like something that I can control and choosing to control these thoughts, forgive and forget and let go, feels good. I am a happy person and I am a cheerful person and the only person I can control is me. The things that somebody else did wrong are things I can’t control, but how I deal with them is. The things that people said or the opinions that people have, are things I can’t control, but how I listen or comprehend and then act accordingly, or not, are.

Forgiving and Forgetting, well that doesn’t mean that I was not angry, or sad, or hurt, or mad…forgiving and forgetting FREE ME. That might be the best F Word of all…FREE. I am free to choose happiness. I am free to choose to look on the bright side. I am free to say, I forgive you and I accept your apology. I am free to look back on nearly a decade and ask myself, “Was it a relationship of 50% joy and 50% crap?? Was it a relationship of 90% some kind of wonderful and 10% dreadfully woeful??” Is this the barometer for everybody?? No, but is it the barometer for me?? Yes. We all have choices every day to make…do we merge or yield, keep smoking, stop drinking, take up jogging, stay at this job, move from this house, cheat on our wife, lie to our husband, quit, love…choices that either free us, to make room for more happiness, or freeze us, stagnation and in a constant state of dwelling on bad news. I am choosing the F words that make me feel mighty fine…forgiving, forgetting, freeing me to keep choosing joy and creating it wherever and whenever I can…the glass is nearly full all of the time for me, and I don’t intend to let a total crap of a chapter in a whole book of life turn me into a glass half empty kind of person…I let go.

There is not any sort of warranty of the heart, of love. I know of a woman who after three bad failed marriages, finally found her dear one and moved into his stunning beach house, and was so excited for her last chapters of life to be finally filled with laughter and travel and cooking together with this man who swept her off her feet only to, less than two years later, find out that her fatigue was not just mid-life tiredness, but ovarian cancer and within a year she was not of this earth. I know of a young woman who married her dear one and had their baby nine months later and before that baby was one year old that husband died, right next to her, in his sleep, leaving the baby fatherless and her dreams broken. I know of a woman who married her dear one who she had loved from high school and they worked so hard to pay for their wedding, then build their dream house, and before they had lived in it a year, she decided she didn’t love the house or him really at all. I know of a woman who had been picking out engagement rings with her dear one the day before she got a phone call informing her that she was dating someone else’s boyfriend and did she know he had another whole life on the side, and was expecting a baby?? Despite their hopes and intentions, there was no guarantee that anything any of these women planned for was going to go as planned. We all get these spam phone calls day after day, that our car’s extended warranty is about to expire and we will suffer the expense of unknown and unexpected repair costs…but what about the warranty on love, on people, on relationships, on our hearts…is there any way to help defray the cost, or the suffering, from those repairs???

I poured my heart out last summer when I was going through an upsetting situation and experience with the man I loved. I was confused and sad and completely blindsided by some things that happened with him, and to us, and I kept thinking to myself, “I didn’t sign up for this” but, I did, in a way, didn’t I?? WE have no warranty in relationships. We jump or slowly fall into them, but it’s with these wide open hearts and big dreams and giddy tickles in our spines…We dive into a pool that has no sign warning us if it’s deep enough to jump, or should we just slowly step in, one toe at a time…We simply have no way to know what might happen, what will happen, what could happen, what might work, what could go wrong…NOTHING IS CERTAIN and there is nothing we can do about it.

We get into our vehicles every day, planning to go to work or the grocery store, and that day could be THE day, and there is nothing we can do about it…we can plan our days & our futures, but all we can honestly do is live for today, each day, right here and right now. NOTHING WE TRY TO DO, no scheduled maintenance, no best intentions, no hard work, no precise planning, can stop what is going to happen that is beyond our control. Period.

I had planned on a way to solve my problem this summer and nothing, at all, went the way I planned. So I had to roll with it, rather than fighting what was out of my control. Guess what?? That’s all any of us can do every day…there is ultimately nothing that we control, despite our best intentions. I asked people for help last summer, people I thought I could trust and on whom I should have been able to depend, and they looked the other way, so I just plowed ahead with what needed to be done. This scenario of last summer can be replayed over and over in my head, but to what point?? Things went wrong and I did my best to handle them, and no matter how much I might wish otherwise, what is done is done. My last summer is not much different than those women’s ovaries, husband, house, or boyfriend…meaning, they all had plans, and those plans didn’t work out, period. We only can respond the best way we know how, to what happens in, and to, our lives, because otherwise, we beat ourselves up to death with wishing for what could have been different or should have been different, but it’s pointless… because what happened did, and is now over…all that can be controlled is how we respond to these repairs that have no warranty…

We might do proper scheduled maintenance on our trucks but end up smashed into a telephone pole…because things happen, no matter the efforts we take. It sounds so elementary to compare a truck to life, but…you might tend with so much care to your marriage, or to your house, but an unexpected cancer diagnosis or a faulty circuit breaker box can take away your spouse and your house, no matter how faithfully your performed the maintenance. BAD THINGS CAN HAPPEN to our trucks, our houses, and our relationships, despite our efforts to care for them. That’s it. There is no warranty that any of our plans will go as planned. There is nothing that we can do about anything except to try to live within the understanding that we want to be good people, and happy, and functioning members of a civil society, but that’s it…all we can do is the work to be the best versions of ourselves that we wish to be. My dad has always said it best, tomorrow you could be run over by a pie wagon. Period.

Giving thanks where thanks is due can be every day of the year, not just on a Thursday in November with turkey and pies. Despite all of your efforts to work hard, pay your bills on time, get yearly physicals, not participate in habits that damage your health, this year could still be your year to go from this earth…you don’t know and nobody else knows either…there is no extended warranty for us. None of us gets a phone call telling us that we can have another five years for this low today only price…you could answer your phone or look down at a text in your car today and those would be your last five seconds on this earth…things happen…you don’t know and can’t plan for it. All we can do is try to do what feels right to our spirit and hope for the best. Literally, nothing else can be done. This week of Thanksgiving, do that dear readers. GIVE THANKS. If anything in your plan, has gone as planned, give thanks. If you have a dear one and things are nice & lovely, give thanks. If you have a safe home and food on your table and in the cupboard, give thanks. If you have good health in your body and good relationships in your circle, give thanks. There is no extended warranty, find thanks for whatever is…now…