MARCH MADNESS

White blossomsIt’s almost the end of March and the moon hangs full in the eastern sky as I drive home tonight. There is some humidity and it has been warm today compared to earlier in the week, so the moon is murky behind the damp film of moisture, and pieces and streaks of gray clouds are backlit here and there. I enter my house through my garage, walk across the kitchen and out the door to the little patio, the better to continue staring at the beautiful light. There are stars, too, but they are harder to see not only because of the moon but also the fact that my little subdivision is getting built up and there is more light pollution to compete with the dark.

This coming Sunday is Easter, a time of resurrection not only of Jesus Christ but of the Earth herself here in the Northern Hemisphere as we supposedly shift into spring and longer days and the advent of the first flowers and leaves and the grass greening up. Easter is early this year but I am hoping we have a bit of rain or snow to slow what is promising to be another year of drought.

My children have moved into adulthood but I still go out and buy an impossible amount of sweets and jelly beans and plastic eggs to fill with chocolate so I can make them Easter baskets. My daughter can feed it to her boyfriend’s family and his younger siblings the way she used to feed the candy to her roommates when I brought a basket to her house while she was still in college. My son is a little different. He is 4 ½ years younger than his sister. He will be 22 in May.

He came to my house before he went to work today because I had to get him to sign a legal paper. I fed him lunch and gave him his Easter basket. “I know you are a man, now,” I say to him with a smile, “but it is still my pleasure to give a basket of candy to my disappeared little boy.” I say things like that in hopes that he will hear how much I miss that little boy at the same time I am proud of the young man before me. I am pulling his leg, in effect, though there is truth in the emotion I express.

He surprises me and responds, “Not quite, Mom. Not quite all grown up. I’ll eat it.” A moment of sentiment seems to hang between us.

“If you don’t want all that candy, you can bring that to work and let everyone inhale it for you,” I say.

The sentiment disappears in a second as my son looks at me with disbelief. “Do you know what kind of shit I’d get if I brought this to work?” he asks, holding up the gaudy basket filled with treats. He works a welding job, and most of his workmates are men close to his father’s age. I smile in return. Yes, I can just imagine him bringing that to work and telling these hardcore men his mommy gave him an Easter basket. I had no idea what I was signing up for when I decided to have children. I love them so fiercely it is sometimes like a knife in my chest over the simplest things, even the silly ones. He takes his basket and gets in his car to go to work.

Last night at this time I was sitting with a Hospice patient in the quiet of her darkened room as she approached the end of her life. Sometimes I catch myself thinking perhaps it is time to stop serving in a death-oriented capacity, i.e. as a volunteer for end of life service. Then something happens to make me realize just how sacred life is, and how precious every moment really is, like making baskets of candy. On some level I am more alive because I can be with people on the edge of death…at least in some situations. I have friends who can’t imagine doing what I do. As if it takes some extraordinary capacity or skill they think they could never find in themselves. I simply wanted to give my time somewhere I felt it had meaning. Millions of people do what I do. To me it is not so special. It is what I learn that makes it so special.

In the days after I volunteer as an 11th Hour companion I often pay so much more attention to the simple things that feed my being. The shadings in the color of the moon tonight, for instance. The temperature of the night air and how it feels as it flows in and out of my nostrils and lungs as I talk to my friend earlier this evening. The click of my little dog’s toenails as he stands and dances in joy when I come in, squeaking his excited greeting through closed lips and waving front paws. My focus is sharpened. I am more connected to life.

It is easy to become complacent. I have my own comfortable small house to call home. I have more than enough food to eat. I can afford not only to put gas in the car, but to own the car to begin with. I have work to do most days that means something to me and that I like. I have some very nice friends. People about whom I care so deeply, like my children, also care about me, like my friends. The irony is that it can all be over in an instant. I try to keep that in mind as I let the chocolate melt in my mouth from the piece of candy I have stolen from my daughter’s Easter basket. Tomorrow I’ll bring it over to her house.

TIMES CHANGE

AlaskaI heard the unfamiliar screech of a forklift dumping off supplies for the new house being built catty-corner to my lot this morning. As I watched it back up across the barren dirt to the street behind it, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. The relative privacy I’ve enjoyed due to the housing recession is coming to an end. The open lots in my subdivision are beginning to fill. It won’t be long until there is a new house blocking the view from my back patio of open space and sky.

The tiny lots, so appealing to me five years ago as I moved into town from the country and the work it took to tend just over three acres, feel suffocating. The luxury of three open lots out my back door almost made up for the fact that my neighbors’ houses to the right and the left of me are each ten feet off the walls of my own house. I hear street noises and conversations and the clunks and thumps of construction that were silent not that long ago.

My little dog flings himself out the dog-door in the kitchen as he winds up a growl started across the house at the front window, legs flailing, claws scrabbling across the wooden floor, and bursts into a loud, short blast or two of barking at something, person or animal, daring to cross behind our property. He, too, thinks of the empty lots as his territory.

I love my house. If anyone could succeed at manifesting a perfect sanctuary in which to heal from a thirty year marriage and a lifetime of allowing other peoples’ (mother, husband, society) opinions to dictate who I was and how I should be in the world, I have certainly done so. Like the ancient maxim that a church would provide refuge from the law to a fugitive, so my house has protected me from a grudge-holding, secret-keeping, inflexible, angry manipulator who would have rather seen me left with nothing than stepping into my own life without him.

IMG_0199Don’t get me wrong. I am well aware that relationships, however destructive, are two-way streets. My husband could not have been the bully he was without, on some level, my compliance. He could not have stripped me of self-esteem without my giving it to him to begin with. He could not have physically threatened me, or stepped between me and my relationships with my children, if I had had the courage at the time to stand my ground. I didn’t. I look back on that time now and I wonder how I ever did find a way out. I tell people it must have been Divine intervention. And on many levels, it was.

I know in reality it was a series of steps, over a number of years, to finally live true to my heart. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror anymore and put up with the hypocrisy of what I saw. I didn’t want my daughter to look at me on whatever level and see a possible role model for being a woman in who I was in that marriage. I didn’t want my son to see a woman who would allow herself to be treated as I allowed myself to be treated. I was angry, vindictive and frustrated myself. I felt cornered, and like a wild animal with no room left to retreat, I attacked those closest to me, especially my children. I was like an emotional banshee.

I’m not that person anymore. I’ve worked very, very hard on myself and my perceptions of the world as it was, and is. The fact that I even have this house, this time, this space in which to recuperate is at least partially the result of a gift from the other nemesis in my life, my mother. My dear, sweet mother with whom I battled all my life gave me in death what she never could in life. I could buy this house, build this sanctuary, find this peace because she left me the funds to do so. When I first bought the house I used to keep a picture of my mother on my kitchen counter. I wanted her to see what she had given me.

I suspect it was always her intention, all across my life, to provide me with whatever I might need to survive. The fact that her ideas rarely if ever matched mine, made for a difficult relationship. But I am eternally grateful for my house. I am even grateful for her, and the courage she gave me in the end, to stand up for myself.

I feel the houses closing in around me as the economy recovers. I have to listen to music blaring on a car radio when a neighbor washes his car in his driveway nearby. My dog goes bananas barking at the kid who walks his dog across the last few weeks and months of the empty lot behind my back fence. Snow is falling gently from the purple sky, momentarily driving the forklift back to its garage. The quiet roar of my furnace and the ticking of clocks float through my house. Could it be I have outgrown this sanctuary? Could it be time to change, once again?

RIGHT TO LEFT

IMG_0107The flakes are getting bigger as the hours go by and the snow still streams almost horizontally across my living room window from right to left, or north to south. Every once in a while the current gets caught by the overhang of my porch roof and the white bits swarm up against the glass like curious creatures in an aquarium at feeding time. The man who tends the landscape in my subdivision came by in his pickup truck and plowed the tiny cul-de-sac on which I live only about an hour ago, but as I look outside now it is almost impossible to tell where he drove. We are desperate for water in Colorado, so even on the news shows no one is complaining on this last Sunday in February.

I am not happy about being housebound on such a cold and blustery day. It’s not like I had anything pressing I would have done had it been a less challenging weather event. It is more the fact that I feel resentful of my limited choices of how to entertain myself. Laundry and house cleaning are necessary evils I do to pass the time. I flick the switch to light the gas fireplace for the benefit of my short-haired little dog. He’ll lie there for hours cooking like a deli hotdog rolling behind the glass on metal bars. I slog through the snow to the house across the street to ask my neighbor to help me start my snowblower.

The snow is deep but not very wet and heavy. I plow my driveway even though a few more inches of snow are expected. Shoveling the steps and the walk to my house is hard work. All of these are the simplest of tasks I finally realize. Going to the gym for the last few months means my back isn’t complaining too badly a couple of hours later. The fact that I even have a house, with a gas fireplace I can wastefully turn on for the dog, a warm shelter with a stocked refrigerator in the middle of a storm, is a miracle so many millions of my fellow human beings can’t even imagine. Snow stings my face and blurs my glasses, and I am grateful.IMG_0107

My birthday is in May. I will be 60 this year. I want to do something to celebrate, but I don’t think that includes a party. At least not yet. Instead I have begun to put a few things on something like a “bucket list.” They aren’t things I want to do before I die, but perhaps they are things I am finding I really would just like to do.

“Will you be coming with my daughter and me to Oregon this year to help at the Healing Circle weekend for Veterans and their families?” my friend asks. We went two years ago at the invitation of one of the Native American tribal wisdom keepers my friend had become friends with. The yearly event came about because a man had had a vision of healing for everyone afflicted by war, not just Native Americans. This would be the ninth one.

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t have to think about it long. “It’s just what I need to kick my healing practice back into gear.” I was thinking about the office I opened with another friend not even a month ago. Confidence is something gained by doing. Nothing like a four day weekend of working with one person after another to get some “doing” under your belt. We work with many kinds of healing modalities like Reiki, and sound healing, and essential oils.

There is a ten-day painting workshop in May in Taos, New Mexico I would like to go to. It costs a fortune and it’s always full, but it’s not an unmanageable drive from where I live in Colorado. I’ve been to a shorter workshop there, but this long one feels special. I called today and got myself on the wait list. “How many people are on the list,” I asked.

IMG_0097“One,” said the woman who answered the phone. “It’s close to the time they have to have the workshop paid in full. Sometimes they can’t gather the money.” Good. There is only one person ahead of me. People always drop out. Shit happens. I think it would be a great present to myself. I have to trust it’ll work out.

The workshop is about awakening creativity. It is a process to help you access hidden emotional recesses and ferret out the stuff that keeps you from living your own life as deeply as you want. Last summer my friend came to visit and made me dig out old paintings I had from other workshops. “Frame them and hang them up,” she said. So I did pick a few out and hang them in my house.

I’ve hidden so deeply from myself in the years since my divorce (and since I last took a painting workshop) I hardly even know who that woman was who visioned all the things in those paintings. I feel her coming back to life. Life this year is about getting out of my house and allowing myself to “go public.” I know a great astrologer in the UK who has done some readings for me. “For you, Chris,” he said, “life truly does begin at 60.”

SUNRISE

I want to live in a house again where I can look to the eastern horizon and see the rising sun splash its “Bronco Colors” across the underbellies of the earliest clouds splayed against the retreating night-time sky. It starts as a hint of fiery reddish-orange that seems to gather a life of its own and consume the fiercely smoke-gray sky. In the course of just a few minutes that edge of light spreads upwards, bleeding the color along with it and transforming everything it touches. Sometimes I stand on my little patio, coffee in hand, and watch the transition from night to day, or I stand in the warmth of my kitchen and watch through the glass in the patio door. There is only one corner where I can catch a view of what’s left of the open fields, unencumbered by the angles of rooftops of the new houses in my subdivision.

Not that many years ago I would go out to the barn in the early morning to feed my daughter’s horses, her fat little dog dancing along next to me in joyful accompaniment. My daughter’s older horse, Shorty, would inevitably be standing out in the arena, facing the colors of the rising sun as if he relished every dawn as much as I. Only reluctantly, it seemed, did he turn and come back into his stall to munch the can of oats I poured out for him. Walking back to the house, watching my breath steam in the chilly air, I would sometimes be treated to the spectacle of the moon setting over the just lighted tops of the highest mountains to the west as the sun broke the eastern horizon.

It is memories like these that come to haunt me when I think of my marital house for sale. I haven’t lived there for more than four years, but it is a place where a true urbanite like me first learned to appreciate stillness and space and the cycles of day and night, the moon and the stars and the sun. On summer nights with the windows open as I lay in bed, I could hear cows lowing in neighboring fields and the snort of the horses in the barn. Coyotes routinely sang and howled, too, yipping and moving closer and farther away through the inky darkness. For a couple of years the cackle and crowing of a nearby flock of chickens and their rooster heralded the morning light.

I suppose it was all the loss and change and distance in my life that turned my spirit to what nature there was available to me around that house. My husband traveled three or four days a week, three or four weeks a month for work. He is a stone that relishes skipping across the surface of a pond; I am a stone that likes to be thrown and sinks right down, watching the ripples spread across the surface far above. As my marriage deteriorated I tried to fill that space with other things. Then my brother sickened and died and I was desperate for peace.

I love the home I live in now. It is perfect, full of quiet space that was big enough for my children to share a bit of for a while, and not too big to inhabit now by myself. I can still see a bit of the horizon to watch the sun, but when my friend texts me to look to the east to see the rising moon I can’t see it until it has mostly lost its orange color and rises above the rooftops of the houses not far from me. For four years the crash in the housing market has kept the lots behind my house, to the east, empty of new building. I have been spoiled by the extra space. Now houses are springing up overnight, and a couple of lots away to the north a foundation is going in. My time in this house, in the relative space, is limited.

I am being turned inward again, this time to the quieter spirit waiting there. I have learned to shush my mind, and sometimes when I am lucky, to detach from the rush of thoughts that gather and flow like a rising tide against the quiet. A spiritual teacher I know helps me think of it this way; God is stillness. We must learn to touch that place of stillness because it is from there that we can deal with whatever is around us to cope with. The stillness is the place from which all answers come. How can I heal my broken heart? The answer is in the stillness. How can I live a life that feels full of meaning as I transition from what was to what will be? Stillness. How do I survive the storms and vicissitudes of just being who I am?

On recent mornings as I stand and drink my coffee and watch the sunrise I hear the geese honking on the lake a couple of miles away. This morning in the watery light, maybe a thousand ducks flew over, fluttering their wings madly and making that peeping sound they do as they flap and swing and change positions, dashing wherever it is they were headed. My dog, Mojo, stood beside me and looked up and watched the ducks, too. I could feel my heart rush along with them.

I am finally ready to let go of the past, to make peace with it and let it dissolve. I may be sitting in the figurative “empty nest” these days, but unlike the veiled warning my mother used to purvey in her admonition, “You better be careful or you will end up alone..,” I am not alone. Stillness is deeply, richly full. I think I finally get what my grandfather saw as he sat, well into his nineties, on the porch of his house and stared off into the hills of southeastern Ohio as day turned to evening. Now, in my mind, I can sit with him.

NOT QUITE ORDINARY

My heart is full this morning as I look out at the frost covered rooftops of neighbors’ houses. The colors of yet another spectacular sunrise spread across the horizon and begin to reach up into the sky. Snow is coming to the high country tonight and into the weekend, but so far only some cold air has bled over the peaks and down to the altitude at which I live.

“Dear God,” I think, “Please watch over my friend Joanne and her family members today as they face the overwhelming difficulties before them and the reality that in the not-so-distant future a circle of ten siblings might become fewer. Please watch over my friend Denise and her heartbreak as she makes the decision to end the suffering of her beloved dog, Murphy, and the cancer cutting short her companion’s life.”

My sweet New Jersey friend, Lisa, posted pictures in Facebook of the devastation Hurricane Sandy has wrought upon the places she knows and loves. “See that roller coaster sticking up out of the ocean water?” she asks, “That’s only a few miles from where my family lives…”

It’s not that I don’t ordinarily carry around a feeling of compassion for the people I know and love, and through them for people everywhere and even the planet herself. It just becomes so much more real and personal when big things hit my friends and family, or me personally. I feel guilty sometimes because I can feel grateful for the blessings in my life at the same time I feel pain for the ones who are suffering.

Amazingly I find gratitude pulls me out of the pit of my own suffering if I but take the time to notice the small things. The color of the sky as I walk out of my house, or the way my dog clutches her paws to her chest like a human child as she sleeps on her blanket can bring a profound shift in who and where I am mentally. The suffering can melt away.

But I’ve come to realize that for me, gratitude requires a certain mental discipline. It requires a space of mental quiet that sometimes takes work to achieve. I can’t slip on my morning meditations, even if I only spend five minutes sitting in a chair watching my breath. I have to read two or three pages of my morning readings. Sometimes I write a few pages in my journal. The ritual itself can bring a quiet mind. When I am most distressed I have to work the hardest. That adage, “bring the body and the mind will follow,” has proven true more than once for me.

In the past few years I have made an even deeper and more helpful discovery. Praying for others is most beneficial of all to me. This is pretty remarkable to me since I didn’t have much of a relationship with a “Higher Power” for many years. A prayer practice deepened my own relationship with God.

I first learned this as a volunteer for Hospice. I became a volunteer at the suggestion of a friend who suffered with me after the death of my brother, and then the decay and ending of my marriage. I realized the best thing I could do for my Hospice patients was just to be with them in a place of acceptance. I would pray for them and thank them mentally for the opportunity to be of service. I don’t mean “prayer” as I think of it in religious terms. I just sit, and think, and sometimes I ask for specific things, like the requests at the beginning of this writing, but not always.

I reach inside and try to find that place of inner quiet. Then I think of the people I love, or the people I work with, or the billions of people everywhere I will never know or love but who might have things they need help with. I ask for help and comfort and peace; like that moment when you are falling asleep and you are wrapped in a warm blanket, in a soft bed, and your body and mind are quiet.

You can surrender everything then, to sleep, to God. There is no work to be done, or cures to be begged for, but there is that place of connection. Heart to heart, for a second or a minute or a lifetime. “Hello, fellow human being. I see you. I walk with you. You are not alone. You are loved. We are one.”

Thank you, Higher Power, for the opportunity to be part of something so much greater than I am, my little self, my fears and struggles. Thank you so much for the opportunity, (maybe, I certainly hope so, even if I don’t see exactly how it works), to help someone else.

ORANGE LIGHT

It’s way too warm for the “w-o-o-o-o-ing” frequency I hear in the wind in this mid-October light. Despite the wind it’s supposed to stay warm for another day and not get cold until Wednesday. The sun is dropping down toward the mountains and the tiny orange and yellow leaves still cling tenaciously in clumps along the almost bare branches of the Locust trees outside my living room window. Earlier a lone bee came through my open kitchen door and buzzed me as I sat at my computer before going back out into the afternoon sun. Even the mountains seem to be waiting for something to change. There is a new coating of white on the highest peaks.

In my old house it would be the time for putting mouse traps in the basement along the northwest corner of the foundation, and in some years on the floor in the kitchen closet pantry, too. Over the course of a couple of weeks I would trap six or eight mice, no more, no less, and that would be the end of the invasion. In the spring there would be a few more mice. My daughter’s Beagle-Blue Heeler mix and I would be sitting in the living room and watch a little brown body scoot across the floor. Thus I would know it was time for traps. The dog, Beeler, would bring me half dead baby bunnies all spring and summer, but the mice she obviously considered beneath her and purely my job to cope with. She hardly ever even turned her head.

Beeler has been gone a few years now and I haven’t lived in that house for longer than that. My ex-husband never did anything about the mice. He’s either poisoned the whole house or the mice have found a warm winter refuge. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking about the seasonal things I used to do to transition that house into another part of the year and wonder whether they get done. It doesn’t matter this year, I suppose, because the house is finally going to be sold.

We sat in the realtor’s office yesterday and went over the listing and the pricing and what would stay and what would go in the house. The realtor offers a free consultation with a person who does “exit strategies,” i.e. staging, with the listing. She also won’t put the house on the MLS until it’s in condition to take bunches of pictures for people who shop for houses first by internet. I think my once-husband seriously thought I would let him live there until he was ready to move out, no matter how many years that took.

The saddest part, really, is the level of venom with which the man who was my husband deals with me. In my opinion, five years is a very long time to hold such a living, palpable grudge. As they say, the only one hurt by that kind of feeling is him. Ninety nine percent of the time, because I have very little direct dealing with him at all, I don’t even know how angry he is, especially now about selling the house. With the house gone there will be nothing remaining of our connection as man and wife. We’ll always be bound by the two beautiful human beings who came to grace our lives in the form of children, but finally, at last, that property will be someone else’s legacy.

I think sometimes this bothers me so much now because when the divorce was still in process I was simply overwhelmed by emotion, physical illness and financial problems to the point that selling the house seemed the least of my worries. My son was still in high school. It took all I had to put one foot in front of the other. Now my life is miraculously calm by comparison. I like my days. I don’t have to live with anyone spewing toxic emotional energy all over the place. These current last-of-the-legal-business encounters weigh heavily on me.

I am grateful for the still warm fall days and the yellow light of the slanting sun touching the many-colored leaves as the afternoons draw to a close. “You don’t have to do anything now except sit back and wait for the check,” my friend said to me the other day. In a way she’s right. I don’t have to clean up the property or stage the interior or find somewhere to move or sell the skateboard ramp in the barn. I am a “stranger at law” as the saying goes. I just get to force the sale, as was already decreed and agreed upon four years ago. Honestly, it’s about time.

A PLUS B DOES NOT EQUAL C

My husband never ceased to amaze me for all the time I was married to him. I would think I had something all figured out, and it would turn out that no, I really didn’t. Not by the longest shot I could imagine. Toward the end of our marriage we got into couples counseling with a highly recommended shrink. I looked forward to it because I felt that finally, we would get some real help communicating.

I thought, since he agreed to come to counseling at all, that my husband would work on the marriage because he really did care about me and wanted our relationship to work. The only other option I could think of was that if he didn’t care about me, he would work on the marriage because he knew how much a divorce would cost. That option might buy us some time, I thought, even if the marriage was on shaky ground. Maybe we had a chance of figuring this out. My husband was a very successful salesman, after all. He was highly motivated by money.

Just about the time I realized that counseling was not going to repair the rifts between us, my brother was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma. I couldn’t deal with my brother’s illness and my marriage at the same time. We dropped out of counseling while I flew back and forth from Colorado to New York City to be with my brother. My husband bitched not about the time I was gone, or the fact that he had to deal with taking care of our kids, then 11 and 15, but about the money. Especially when I dared to change my flight dates at the last minute due to some change in my brother’s treatment, and spent an extra hundred dollars here and there revising the flight schedules.

Once I booked a three-day weekend in New York when it was obvious the treatment wasn’t going to buy him much more time. “Chris, why are you going for such a short visit?” my friend asked. “What are you going to think of yourself when a few months from now you no longer have a brother and you look back on this time and kick yourself that you didn’t stay longer?”  She had a point. I changed my flight and gave myself a few more days. I paid the fee to do so. My husband held that over my head shortly after my brother died.

“I know you were playing games with money to piss me off while your brother was sick,” he told me. “I had to pay those penalties to change your flights not just once, but a few times.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing what he was saying. “How can you even say that?” I screamed. “Other than my children my brother was the human being I felt closest to on the planet!” I would have stood in line with the junkies to sell my blood plasma if I needed to, to get the money to go see my brother. I would have sold or hocked anything I personally owned to be able to get on a plane. My husband knew that very well. I had told my husband once during counseling that if I was going to play games with him about money, he would know it without a second thought.

At the time I was thinking of a joint savings account we had with a very large balance. I could have emptied that account and hidden the money and there would have been little he could have done to prevent it. That’s what I was talking about in terms of a “game.” It never occurred to me to worry about a few hundred dollars in fees to change flights.

I learned a very hard lesson from that exchange. My husband thought it was okay to kick me when I was down. There were other things he did during that time that showed me just how much he wasn’t my friend, or someone I could count on. And the counseling? I realized there was an option that hadn’t even been on my radar at the time. My husband never did believe that I would leave if things didn’t change, even though I had been telling him that as clearly as I knew how. Therefore he didn’t have to work on the relationship, period, other than to show up. He could behave any way he wanted, he thought, and often did. In his mind I had no credibility.

It took me years to recover from losing my brother. My mother’s death followed not that long after my brother died. I didn’t experience much support coming from my husband in either case. It’s not that he couldn’t offer support. Early in our marriage my father had passed away and he had been totally different. But now it was obvious something fundamental had changed.

I realized as I sat with my brother in those last weeks of his life that if it had been me suffering from that terminal disease and not him, I never would have had the level of support around me that he did. My brother and his spouse were divorced at the time of his illness. She took him in and cared for him at the end when she had no obligation whatsoever to do so. “Wouldn’t you do the same for me if I was dying and you knew I had no one?” she asked. It made me think. On so many levels I had “no one” and I was still married.

I did eventually file for divorce. It’s been by far the hardest thing I ever did because it involved so many relationships at the same time; grieving for those I had loved and lost to death,  to change as my children left the nest, and to dissolution of so many precious dreams, which is mostly all that was left of the marriage. The hardest kernel of all within that realization was how I had deserted myself.

I’ve had four years to find out just who I might be. I like this person I am so much better than that ghost-like woman who moved through her life without much presence. Where had I gone? What had become of me? I guess that doesn’t matter so much anymore. What matters most is I can look in the mirror today, and today there is someone looking back. I promise never to lose her again.

TIME TRAVELING

The man I married grew up in a world very different from mine. I learned a lot by being part of his family, though certainly not the kinds of things I might have thought I wanted to learn. We lived in the same town, after all. I made so many assumptions about what his life was like that had no connection to reality at all because of that one similarity, being part of the same town.

He certainly wasn’t my only boyfriend. I knew him in high school. We shared a homeroom, but that didn’t mean I really knew him. We did go out a few times senior year, but nothing that was too deep or serious. We didn’t have much in-person contact at all for the six years between high school and the time that found us back together in our home town again, though I did think of him as a good friend. He was fun. He was wild and crazy, I thought, and my father liked him. I had gone to college and worked, and he had done a little college, and a whole lot of other wanderings and work in the meantime. We started dating pretty seriously when we were thrown together again, in the beginning because of convenience I think.

From what I could surmise being exposed to my husband’s parents and his aunt and his cousins, his childhood must have sucked. His father was a violent alcoholic. I only know that because of the stories I was told. His father was in bad shape and pretty weak by the time I knew him. He still drank, though, and went to detox at least a couple of times that I remember before and right after my husband and I married. It was the beginning of my understanding of the disease of alcoholism. I heard hints and rumors and stories of his father having lost jobs because of his drinking.

The most significant of these was being let go from his very last job. I heard many times the innuendo and warning that came from hints here and there, but nothing direct. The “family,” meaning the aunt’s business and all the cousins who worked for it, had a policy of not hiring “family,” meaning my husband’s family, because of something that had happened with his father. Apparently his father had been given a job (out of pity for being fired so much and thus virtually unemployable) with the “business” and had yet again disgraced himself and been fired, which resulted in the “never again” policy. I never did find out what that was. The aunt and my mother-in-law were sisters, after all. I became part of the “never again” family.

It took me a while to catch on to the fact that the half of the family that had money and a very successful business looked down their noses at my husband’s family. The two sisters shared much of their lives together, and holidays, and of course all their life history, but there was still that huge unspoken difference. One sister had made a poor choice of husband and provider, and the other sister had hit the gold mine. Unfortunately the good provider had passed away fairly early in the picture, but his business did very well for the family.

It was little things that taught me what “my place” was supposed to be, or perhaps was assumed to be, since I chose to marry this man. He was an only child. He was a “special” child because his mother was so old when he was born it was a miracle he arrived at all. (She was 42). He was learning disabled (severe dyslexia) at a time when that simply meant you were “stupid” because you didn’t do well in school. His father thought beating him was the way to teach him to spell. He was given hand-me-down clothing from his older cousins at Christmas and expected to be grateful. His mother was admired (supposedly) for her ability to find “bargains” at sales in expensive stores. But I saw through the sham. I never did accept my “place.”

One of the first things I just didn’t “get” was about the Christmas trees. After his mother ended up in a nursing home and his father in a social services assisted living facility, we moved into his parents’ little house. It was in a suburb of New York City, very close to the city line. Three of my husband’s four cousins lived in New York City itself. The fourth lived in Pennsylvania near the family business. The fourth cousin would send freshly cut Christmas trees every December to my husband’s parents’ house to be dropped off and await pickup by the cousins. The trees were dropped off by a company tractor-trailer truck as it made a routine delivery to one or another nearby vendor.

The first year I lived in the house, I went out to look at the trees in my yard. There were three, one for each cousin. Excuse me, but where was a tree for us? Use my yard and you can’t put another tree on the truck for us? The cousins came and took their trees. Not one said thank you. No one even came to the door when they picked up their tree to say hello.

This was obviously expected behavior, that the trees would wait there, behind the hedge, to be retrieved. Maybe my mother-in-law hadn’t wanted a live tree. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to ask about dropping the trees off, or if I wanted one. I was just informed that this is what was going to happen. Oh my. I dared to speak up. I asked where the tree was for me. I said if they wanted to drop the trees off, that was fine, but a tree better be there for me.

I could tell that didn’t go over well, but the next year there were four trees. I committed another sin. I picked which tree I wanted first out of the four. I didn’t wait for the tree that was left over after they picked their trees. It was body language and tone of voice and facial expression that told me I wasn’t behaving as expected. Hey, nobody handed me a manual about how to behave. In my family I survived by having enough spirit to defy most attempts to classify me as something I had no intention of being.

See, they couldn’t really refuse to send another tree. They really were asking a favor to drop the trees off, because there was nowhere else to leave them. The aunt had sold her big house and moved into a nice apartment with no yard in the same community. The cousins might look bad; they might look like what they were, chintzy, if they didn’t add a tree.

For all the problems my husband and I may have had with each other, I think I did him a huge favor sticking up for him in this small way again and again with his family. I didn’t think he was “stupid.” I didn’t think he was “less than” because he wasn’t wealthy. I didn’t think he was never going to amount to anything in life because he hadn’t graduated from an Ivy League school. Maybe I should have thought those things. I might have saved myself a lot of grief along the way. I simply expected the best of him. People live up to what you expect of them, I’ve heard said.

My ex-husband and I have parted ways, but for many years he did do exceptionally well against those demeaning measurements. In the end the things that brought our relationship down had nothing to do with those judgments. I will tell you to this day that he is exceptionally creative. The kind of creative that comes from being very, very smart and perceptive. I think having me to believe in him, perhaps to drive him, helped him make choices for success he might not have made otherwise. The fact that it all fell apart in the end is pretty sad. But that doesn’t mean the miracle man isn’t still in there. Now he just has to believe in himself.

HISSING SNOW

One of the great things about living in Colorado is all my eastern friends think the winter closes in and the snow starts falling in September and doesn’t stop until the spring, the way it does in upstate New York where I went to college, or later in the year in January or February, the way it does near the city of New York where I grew up. It’s a great secret that it only snows like that here in the mountains, which makes this such a great state for skiing.

Here on the plains up against the foothills, at only a mile high or so, the sun still has enough intensity to make it seem warm when it’s only twenty or thirty degrees. It’s so dry and arid that even when the snow does come down it rarely lasts very long before it’s evaporated away. It takes a big storm and lots of cold to hang around a week or so, especially in the places where the sun is unobstructed.

So when the woman reached over and opened the blinds this morning in the meeting room, I was thrilled as a little kid to see the millions and millions of thumbnail sized, fat, fluffy, gently-falling, perfect-white snowflakes filling the air and landing on the tree branches and the bushes and the still-green October grass.

Walking out to my car across the parking lot the flakes were so thick my hair was quickly coated along with the sleeves of my jacket and even my glasses and eyelashes. The only sound in the windless air was the hissing “s-s-s-s-s” snow makes as it lands on the grass and the asphalt and the cars.

There is something so soothing about that, so comforting and calming. The only sound coming close to it for me is that very similar “hiss-s-s-s” a wood-fire makes in a fireplace as the last of the embers turn to ash. A primal kind of eons-old, in-the-genes  sound that still makes me think of going out on winter evenings with my father to walk the dog in the chilly dark after dinner, and then coming home and sitting in front of the roaring fireplace to watch a little TV.

Today was my daughter’s birthday so I drove over to her house to bring her a birthday card and to say hello for a minute. Her little dog, Tig, came running out of the house in the orange patterned sweater I had given him. He threw himself up my leg to my knee about a hundred times before flopping onto his back to be scratched. We’ve only seen each other once since my daughter moved out and I was touched that he was so happy to see me.

Tig is about the same size as my dog, Chippy, but I wasn’t sure the sweater was going to fit. I guessed he’d been out in all that beautiful snow this morning that didn’t even exist anymore a couple of hours later when I came to visit. I’ve learned to find bargain priced pet supplies like chew toys and sweaters the way some people shop garage sales for antiques. Tig’s long coat filled out the sweater where my little dog’s stockier body would have filled it out instead. It fit just fine.

It was a quiet and peaceful day that didn’t get much more exciting than the thrill of the snow. I didn’t once worry about house sales or ex husbands or how to entertain myself with no plans or friends to see. I painted some more of my family room until my not-quite-healed shoulder started to complain and then watched “Dark Shadows,” that inane Johnny Depp film where he plays a vampire. I spent some time on the phone with a friend after that.

Chippy went trotting by on his way to curl up on his blanket and put himself to bed about a half hour ago, so I know it is time for me to do the same. At another time in my life I might have called a day like this boring, tedious, or empty. Instead I have found it a day in which I have had ample time for gratitude. Gratitude for my warm house, plenty of food to eat, friends to talk to, magnificent little snowbursts, and memories of my father. In short, the most simple and basic things. Would that I could be so content every day.

FEAR CAME KNOCKING

Yesterday I had a tough day, full of lessons about living mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually everywhere but in the present. I woke up with a splitting headache, an upset stomach, and a feeling that I could hardly catch my breath. Ahh, something about this was wa-a-ay too familiar. Still, I wanted to think maybe I really was sick. I took some ibuprofen. It didn’t put a dent in the headache. I ate a small, easy to digest breakfast. My stomach was no more settled. I drank several glasses of water, just in case the headache was from being dehydrated. I live in a semi-arid climate, and pretty high altitude. How I hoped what was wrong could be solved by water.

Eventually I had to admit it. I was full of anxiety. Crippling anxiety of a kind I haven’t experienced more than four or five times since those years in my thirties when my life was pretty much run by it. It was a beautiful morning, the air was clear and cool, the trees are letting go of their leaves and the colors of the landscape are warm and comforting as the earth prepares for winter. I made myself go to my Sunday morning meeting to spend an hour in a good place with lots of other people, some of whom are good friends. A friend of mine asked me how I was as I went to sit near him.

“I feel terrible,” I said. “I’m having a lousy day. That’s how Chris is today,” I replied.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Something’s happened and you are just going round and round in your head and you can’t let go of it.”

“Worse than that,” I said. “It hasn’t even happened yet. I’m stuck in the what-ifs…”

Today is the day the lawyer mails the letter to my ex-husband that will require him to put the house on the market. The letter is not something new I’m initiating, it’s just a legal process to finish what’s already in the four-year old divorce decree. It’s taken me four years to get to the point where I am willing to stand up to a very volatile personality and request what is mine already. To take what is mine already is a better way of putting it. I thought it wouldn’t bother me so much to actually do this. As I’ve said before, the legal process is pretty simple. It’s pretty cut and dried. In my head, however, it’s anything but.

“What if my children are mad at me? What if they judge me for taking their father’s home away from him when he is in a not-so-fortunate financial cycle in his life?”

What if they are? That’s not my problem. He’s had the same opportunities in life that I have, maybe more.

“What if my ex-husband is truly angry at me and does his best to poison an already difficult process of change between myself and my adult children?”

What they all think of me is none of my business. I have to do what I have to do to take care of myself. Taking care of myself, in the end, also takes care of them.

“What if I never see the man again, never talk to him again, never know where or how he is again?”

Does that matter? I don’t know any of these things, anyway, and the man lives two miles away. What I need to let go of is the picture in my head of my family. A non-existent, old, limiting, stifling to be exact, way that I left years ago. The house is simply a symbol of what was. The divorce decree said it was to be let go. I guess on some level I had a hard time letting that happen. Not so anymore. Time to say goodbye so I can move on and truly create a new life. Yes, I’ve already done that on lots of levels, but now it’s time for the real moving on. Time to drop the past, which is gone anyway.

The rest of my day yesterday wasn’t much better. After my meeting I tried to go up to another town where Colorado State University plants thousands of flowering plants in a public park. I wanted to take pictures to accompany my blogs before the cold comes and the flowers are gone for the winter. I got about three-quarters of the way there and I had to come home. The anxiety symptoms got really bad. The headache was blinding. I thought I’d get sick in my car.

I came home and went to bed. I took an anti-anxiety med a friend had given me a long time ago but I had saved. Who knew if it would work? I slept a couple of hours, and eventually did go back and take some nice pictures. Later I watched some mindless TV with my little dog and went back to sleep.

Today is a whole other day. The light is again beautiful and the trees are full of gorgeous color. My daughter is coming over after work and I plan to tell her I’ve sent this letter to her father, just so she can hear my side. Just so she knows. I had hoped I would call her father and tell him before the letter shows up, too. The thought of that is what started the anxiety yesterday. Thank God for email. He’ll get one later, just in case the letter is going to show up tomorrow. I really do know how to take care of myself; sometimes I just need to get out of my own head.