I am settling beautifully into the routine (yes, I said routine as in I almost actually have one) of Eric and Delena’s college schedules.  Eric took a heavy load of classes and between that and his hours working at the Veteran’s Administration for his work study program, I don’t see much of him.  The boys are settling into this year of middle school.  Both are finding their strides as an 8th grader and a 6th grader. 

This means that three days a week, I have hours of time to myself, which has really worked to facilitate a lot of insight and contemplation.  The other two days, Delena is here, but she is very quiet and unobtrusive.  Mostly, I have days of serenity and self-guided time.  I have been working on getting my house the way I want it.  I’m rested up from the great door painting experience.  This week, I rearranged the living room slightly which shifted the feng shui in a very nice way.  My work room is really the ugliest room in the house because no one hardly ever goes in there and it has been ignored since we moved in.  It’s just the room where the dogs sleep, the laundry happens and Mom spends her whole day.  Because of that last part, I decided that I deserve better.  I bought a gallon of beige paint yesterday and plan to pretty it up a bit.   The biggest challenge is that it has a high vaulted ceiling that honestly, I’m not confident I can reach even with a ladder.  I bought an extender for the paint roller and I’ll give it my best shot.  My hope is to have enough to paint the ceiling as well, so I dn’t have to worry about it being perfect.  I also have some beautiful Harvest wallies a friend bought for me a few years ago that I intend to use for accents.  It’s going to be a chore, but it will be worth it.  That’s the project for next week. 

This kind, not the snap kind

I also really, really want to make some more votive candles.  I got the materials months ago and every single time I plan to do it, something comes up.  This week, I am determined.  I love candle making and want to get into the zen of it again.  I also finalized getting the stuff I need to start crafting for the year.  I am sticking with things I won’t hate doing.  I will be making some harvest brooms, wreaths and baskets.  At two separate thrift shops, I found bags of old fashioned clothes pins. 

I will find something wonderful to make with them.  I also have several different sizes of styrofoam balls, which will grow up to be spiders on bouncy strings.  I’d also like to try my hand at some potholders and maybe placemats.  I don’t think I’ll hate it as much this year.  I am actually kind of excited to get started on it.  Our craft fair is on October 9th, then we’ll have a Christmas one the following month.

Delena and I went wild this week and covered a total of 6 different thrift stores, one of them twice.  It was great fun, but I did not find as many goodies as I normally do.  I found enough and that is what is important.  Mostly, I look for small, interesting harvest-related figurines and such for the diorama type shadow baskets I put together.  It’s much easier to find Christmas items than Harvest items.  Another bonus to doing this is that it uses up a lot of the materials I have stored in our shed.

My new project is born from the introspection I have enjoyed since I’ve had alone time.  Of course, any time I have an epiphany, it gets its own website.  This one is at www.queensrule.net.  It will be filling up over the next few weeks.  I have had such a rush of my own empowerment that the energy had to be released somewhere.

That has definitely made for a happy harvest.

My new peace and – dare I say it? – personal redemption – comes from a new attitude which I welcome with open arms and great enthusiasm.  It is best illustrated by this scene from Lethal Weapon:

It’s incredible how easy it is and how much it fixes in life.

I’ve been all about the “Ownership of Shit” lately, as in “this is my shit/deal,” “that’s your shit/deal.”  I will be writing more about it on the Queens page later on.  It has cleared up a lot of muddy water for me and I really do appreciate it.  As caregivers, too often we feel like we have to fix everything.  It can be so liberating to just let go and say, “You know what?  That’s their shit.  It’s not MY shit.  Let them take care of their shit.” 

I have come to the realization that if I don’t fix everything, if I don’t go through heroic measures to make everything work out, if I let some chips fall and put the responsibility onto others when it’s their issue, the world will keep spinning and everything will be OK.  This knowledge has been tremendously welcome.  I still love and care. I just don’t have to fix it all to demonstrate that.

Hope you are all doing well.

(New adventure coming in 3 weeks!)

I’m almost at the end of my second week of school being in session.  The boys are doing fine, which is a relief for as long as it lasts.  Nathan really loves his teacher and being in middle school.  He’s a kid who doesn’t do well being a kid and really needs to be older and have more control over his life to be comfortable in his own skin.  Dylan is just the opposite.  He’s so relaxed and kicked back that he’s happy no matter where he is.   Nathan is intense.  Neither boy felt particularly well this morning.  Dylan had a headache and Nathan’s throat was scratchy.  I pushed them out the door anyway and hoped for the best. 

Delena enjoys college very much.  She scheduled her class load so that she has a very, very long day ever Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but is off on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Eric has classes 5 days a week and works at his work/study program at the VA on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well.  He has kept up the pace pretty well this week. 

I am just enjoying the quiet.  Having the house to myself now and then gives me some off duty time to relax and regroup from the stresses of the past several years.  I want to sleep all of the time, which is the only downside.  After sleeping fitfully for so long, I now go deeply into sleep and stay there until I’m yoinked out of it by some demand or another, usually a ringing phone.  I feel my spirit and my body slowly healing from a lot of stress and I am very grateful for that opportunity. 

This weekend was interesting.  The grandkids came up to visit and it was a few days before Aiden’s 6th birthday, so we did the presents and cake thing.  My first (who is also my second) husband was in California to climb Mt Whitney and he came to this area to see Josh, David and the grandkids.  Since Josh lives here, David brought him up to visit for the day.  He and I did not speak unless it was absolutely necessary for the 10 years following our divorce.  The main reason was because of the tremendous jealousy and insecurity of his next wife.  After he divorced her, he got in contact with me and we managed to gingerly form a friendship of sorts.  He came up briefly at Christmas. 

This time, he and Eric acted like they were old friends and ended up spending most of their time together, with and without Josh and David.  It was like a bizarre colliding of the worlds.  At one point when they were deep in conversation, I went outside and made the obvious comment, “Surely the two of you are talking about what a fantastic wife I am.”  Eric didn’t miss a beat and said, “Well, that goes without saying, so we were just talking about cars.”  Paul looked more like a deer caught in headlights (haha).  Despite being an odd day, it was a good day and I am grateful that Eric is the kind of person who can jump right into a situation like that without making it a big issue.

Paul brought me a computer disk with video files on it.  My ex-sister-in-law, Berta, and her husband Bill had visited us around 1987-1988 or so and took home movies, which she had recently converted to DVD.  These were among them, so she passed them on to Paul, who copied them for me and for the big boys.  I watched them yesterday and it was enormously uncomfortable.

Seeing me at that time, weighing around 125 or so and with the weight of the world on my shoulders was awful.  Hearing the voices and seeing the house, the kids, Paul and such caused it to slam into me how much pain I was in all the time.  There was so much personal and spiritual pain.  Paul’s brother, Lee, and his wife were also there and seeing him alive and well tore my heart out.  Lee was one of the finest men I have ever known and I loved him dearly.  He died in I believe 1999 from agent-orange related cancer. 

The hardest part was seeing my beautiful, precious little boys, who were around 5, 7 and 9 at the time.  In nearly every frame, they were fighting each other.  So much pain.  So much anger.  So much fear.  They were competing for attention they so badly needed while Paul and I pretty much walked around each other and tried not to touch or think or feel.  Both of us were unplugged.  At one point, Paul was encouraging the boys to fight, calling David a baby for not getting into the fray when he was already taking the brunt of it.  I honestly wanted to throw up just watching it. 

The whole experience took my breath away and left me feeling like a goose had walked over my grave for the rest of the day.  Every now and then, I’d feel myself tearing up and would have to stop and take a breath so that I didn’t get washed away in emotion. 

I’m not sure why I was supposed to see those things right now.  Obviously, it served some purpose.  I tried to show them to Eric once he got home and talk to him about the experience, but he quickly hurried himself away and I let it go.  Evidently, it was something that I was supposed to process on my own.  Truthfully, I still don’t know what to do with it and when I even think of it, my stomach pitches and my heart hurts and my eyes fill with tears.  I’m not packing it away just yet, even though I really want to.  I’ll let it sit around and see what comes to me. 

Right now, the corollary I am drawing comes with that Iyanla Vanzant clip that I posted in the video section of this site.  I was actually looking for a different clip, but came around this one instead.  In it, she talks about going to Lens Crafters who was having a two for one on eye exams.  She took her grandson in and ended up getting checked herself only to find that her own eyesight was in pretty bad shape.  She asked the optician why she wouldn’t have known that her sight had deteriorated so badly and was told, “Your eyes will adjust to compensate for the deficit.”  That means that your brain will also get used to seeing things badly and think that is normal.  The implications are fairly breath-taking.  We get so used to seeing things as they are and as they degenerate around us over time that we stop realizing what is “normal” and what is really whacked.

I mean seriously, think about it:  “Your eyes will adjust to compensate for the deficiency.”  You will begin to think that “not good enough” is absolutely fine and normal and right.

Shit.

During the time I was living the life that I just re-watched on that video file, I thought sure, we struggle like any other family, but we’re OK.  Things are hard, but life is hard.  Is it?  Really?  Or do our spirits simply adjust to compensate for the deficiencies in our lives that stop seeing the crazy, the wrong, the immoral, the impractical?

When I look back on my Then Life now, I know I should have scooped my my little boys in my arms and told Paul that I love him, but I gotta jam.  I would then have gone back to Kentucky to my equally (or more) dysfunctional home family and tried to make it on my own.  Because my eyes were adjusted for the deficiency, I couldn’t see what to do or how to fix anything or even that anything was wrong.  It was simply my life.

You have No Idea How Much I Wish I Could Have Seen Clearly And Taken Action.

How different all of our lives would have been.

I bless where life took me, the good and the bad, and I am grateful that those little boys fared even as well as they did.  Truly, it could have been much worse and I want nothing more than to just hold those little guys and bury my face in their little necks and tummies and tell them how very important they are, how much they mean to me, how much I love them with all my soul.  Oh to have those years back to relive differently.

This doesn’t mean that I am no longer living in the now and I’m focusing on the past.  It simply means that in the midst of living in the now, The Universe chose to remind me that there are lessons in the past that can affect our “now.” 

I love my mother tremendously.  I love my father tremendously.  Some of my memories of them are precious and warm and cause me to swell with pride.  There was, however, another side and that was a side that involved mental illness on both of their parts.  I can only look back with a child’s input since I left home at the age of 16 and rarely returned.  I would guess that there was a good bit of clinical depression, some paranoid schitzophrenia (mostly on Dad’s part) and God only knows what plethora of other psychoses mixed in there.  Mom was a HUGE exaggerater to the point that it was hard to know when she would relate a story what really happened and what she thought happened.  Dad was the same and they built on one another’s stories.  They were good people, don’t get me wrong.  They were just rarely not always in the real world.  Granted, we all know that “there is no reality; only perception,” but suffice it to say, if my mom and dad were in a room for 20 people, the other 18 would have been stunned to hear what Mom and Dad thought happened after all 20 of them experienced something together.

The end result is that we kids grew up basically drinking the Kool-aid of delusion.  We learned to shift our perception and understanding of what happened at any given time based entirely on what Mom and Dad were saying had actually happened.  We learned to willfully adjust our eyes to compensate for the deficiency. 

 It

Was

Madness.

Mostly, we learned to never, ever trust our own impressions or perceptions.  We got to the point that we would wait to be told what was real and what wasn’t so we knew what we should remember.  Then the next time they told the story, it would change again and we kids would adapt our eyes again to a new reality.

By the time I got married and left home, I was perfectly willing to hand over 99% of my thinking to someone else to fill in the blanks and tell me what to feel or think.  I was completely incapable of formulating an opinion, saying shit if I had a mouth full of it or sparking up any kind of original thought.

That lasted for a very, very long time.

I do feel like a completely different person now and as I write about how I was back then or in those home movies or even 15 years ago, it feels like I am talking about a completely different person than myself.  It *feels* very objectified and removed, but intellectually, I know it happened to me and that it helped to form who I am now on some level and the base level of response to which I will sometimes return.

I had the rare privilege (and I do not use the word loosely) to sit down and talk to my mother’s two sisters and brother-in-law (the patriarch of our family) in June and have the courage to tell them how terrified I am of being like Mom and Dad and not being able to tell what’s real and what’s not.  Being crazy on any level is one of my greatest fears after growing up the way I did.  They were so wonderful about it and as much as they loved my mother and father, it took an act of great will for me to even voice those fears to them.  My uncle was sweet enough to point out that my mother had a tumor removed from her brain later in life (From Mom, I heard the tumor starting out to be the size of a jack ball and within a few months, she had it up to the size of a lemon) and that we could never know how long or to what degree that affected her perceptions.  Dad painted cars for a living for most of his adult life and had a bad case of claustrophobia, so he refused to wear a mask, so he had a lot of lead based paint residue built up in him which can also cause delusions. 

All of that made me feel better since it provided an alternative explanation for how they were in the world. 

Then I watch those movies and see how immersed I was in the crazy and how I can so clearly see now (at a point where I can do nothing to fix it) that there were big, big problems that were never really addressed.  These were problems that changed who we were forever and created enormous challenges for my kids, both then and when they got older.

There may be other reasons why this lesson, however painful, was brought to me, but it has been my experience that when we  are suddenly confronted with issues from our past, it’s because we are supposed to revisit some lesson we should have learned back then and need to know now.

For the moment, I am going with the idea that my eyes are way out of whack and I need to learn to see more clearly.  Until something better comes to light, I’m going with that.

The title is based on a poem by her daughter, Gemmia, which is here.  This website attributes the poem to Iyanla herself, but that is inaccurate.

I had an experience last Wednesday that quite frankly, I am only now starting to fully process.   It was very, very simple, but it had a profound effect on me.  Despite all of my writing about it here, I know that I had never really understood what I had become until this happened.

I was in my back room working when the boys came home from school.  I’d had a good day and slept well the night before, which is always a blessing.  Nathan came in to say hello and I greeted him with a hug and asked him how his day had gone.  He looked at me, genuinely puzzled, and said, “Did something happen today?”  I asked him what he meant.  He said, “I figured something really great happened today because you’re smiling and happy.”

Oh dear.

This is not good at all.

I told him I was just happy to see him and that everthing was just really good.  I’m still kind of haunted by his words.  I have been really, really miserable and I guess it shows.

Around the same time, I had two bits of Divine Message come to me.  One was rather lengthy and I kept having to read it and walk away and think about it and then come back to it and read a bit more and come back to it again. 

With those three power house hits in the span of less than 24 hours, I knew God was talking to me directly and I had to stand up and take noticed.  It’s hard to stand after you’ve been crawling on your belly for months, but I did manage.  More divine info kept appearing and I knew I was existing in a sacred space.  I will take you through them as I encountered them and that will tell you a little bit about how I got to where I am now and what my mindset is currently. 

Truly, many of you have been through this cycle with me before, but I just want to say that it’s nice to be back on the topside again.

First came Nathan’s “out of the mouths of babes” observation.

Next came a very simple Facebook update from one of my favorite authors and doctors, Dr. Christiane Northrup.  She posted (paraphrased), “The only real power you have is in now.”  Isn’t that just the truth?  I’ve heard it many times before, but it really resonated with me this time.  We are powerless to change the past except by means of shifting perspective.  We are fairly helpless in regard to the future.  We can create our own reality.  We can plan.  We can divine and get a basic idea.  We are, however, pretty much at the mercy of fate and things unseen as to what tomorrow holds.  Any power we think we have over the future is an illusion.  The only true power is in our “now.”

We have the power to create the best “now” we can, despite outside influences and despite what other people need, want or think.  Now is all we have that is real.

I used to tell my students that the most powerful words ever are the two that are, “Until now…” because that implies the power of self-awareness and change.  It defines the critical, explosive moment of awareness meeting intent.  Within those two words, all things are possible.

I can’t change the people around me.  I can’t fix how they are or what they think.  That’s on them.  I can’t go back and have them experience different realities than the ones that shape them into the people they are in this moment.  I can’t re-create their perspective.  All I can do is be mindful of my own reaction and where their behavior takes me – or doesn’t – as I allow.  I have to be self-possessed enough and self-aware enough to be responsible for how I behave and how I feel and how I allow myself to be in response to what happens around me.  I also have to be pro-active enough to change the things in my life that do not serve me, but to do so in an honorable way. 

I also have to be willing and able to draw the line and let people know when they have hit a boundary, then take action to defend that boundary. 

That brings me to bullies.  (More on the Divine Messages in a bit)

I was bullied my whole childhood and so I am very sensitive to bullying.  In the past couple of months, I have had several instances where I was in situations that involved a bully who pushed and pushed and pushed their agenda, their wants, their interests above anyone elses, refusing to back down, refusing to listen to reason, refusing to see any other way but the one they had in their minds.  In each situation, I responded badly, mostly because of the weakened mindset I’ve had for several months now.  To say that I have not been my self is quite an understatement.

One of the bullying experiences was at the GH Fan Club Weekend where a well known guy (well known for his massive tantrums and being abusive to people as well as being a fantastic photographer) was honestly pretty terrible to me in public and I took it like an idiot.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got back to that moment and rewritten the script.  I was stunned.  I was busy.  I was unprepared completely.  I let him do it and I shouldn’t have.  That actually did color a lot of my weekend.

I should have trusted myself and stood up for myself.  I WAS doing a good job.  Hell, I was doing a GREAT job and I know from a long standing history with this man that he has major psychological issues.  What happened there was his deal, not mine, and I should not have allowed myself to be victimized.  I should not have allowed myself to be intimidated.  I should not have given him the power to humiliate me in front of people.  Trust me, I won’t again in the future.

In my compromised state, I allowed myself to be run over and to let that resentment build up to the point that it became intolerable.  I got into the state of just doing my best to give everyone else what they wanted so they would just shut up.  It didn’t matter how much it infringed on my plans or my wants or needs.  Just as long as they would shut up.  That’s how bullies get their way is by just pushing and pushing and pushing until people give in and give them what they want, but I started cutting things off at the pass by giving in right away so as to avoid the conflict and pushing.

In that situation I described, I believed that if I did not give in to the man’s intimidation, he would make things difficult for my boss or for me or for the dear man this bully represents.  So I gave in and did as I was told to do.  I left.  I let myself be “fired” by him when I in no way worked for him.

For months now, I have felt surrounded by conflict and the selfish demands of others every single where I turned.  There was no soft place to fall.  There was no safe retreat.  There was no port in the storm. 

After internalizing the messages I’ve gotten recently, I have finally been able to separate “their issue” from “my issues” and not let the two both become mine.  Theirs stays theirs and I don’t let myself wrap up in it.  I can sympathize.  I can lend advice.  I can hug.  I can walk away.  I don’t have to incestuously marry up into it.  This goes for my kids, my husband, my friends, my enemies, whoever.  No more internalizing other people’s shit.

I’m currently in the king daddy of all bullying situations and I am so grateful that the insights I received that shook me out of that weak, victim place happened before this most recent test.

Now, in this situation, I am trying to be my best self and to take things as objectively and kindly as I can without being run over by the steam roller.  Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

I saw something in myself and I didn’t like it, so I am working hard to change it.  It’s not that I ever really passed the bullying test before, even though it has been presented to me repeatedly through my life.  If I passed the test and it went away, I passed with a D- and it kept coming back until I made honor roll.  We’ll see how that works out because it’s very much in progress as we speak.

I’m sort of in summer school.

The second bit of wisdom I got was the lengthy one I got before, which is here.  It is a piece written by an elderly retired Methodist minister about God and it echos many of my own sentiments.  In fact, it put me back in touch with my own spirituality, which had been diminished by my recent depression.

That was further cemented by this wonderful piece by a gal named Sylvie about the process and intricacies of manifestation.  It is one of the most well written explanations and directives I have ever seen in over 20 years of study specifically about creating your own reality and manifesting situations and things into your own life.  It reminded me of strengths I had put aside and got me back in touch with a side of my life that had been seriously faltering.  The Attitudes of Gratitude site was a pre-emptive start to that process (see links to the right), but I had not fully internalized the lesson until I read Sylvie’s article.

As a result of these revelations, I picked up two familiar books from my shelf.  One was the aforementioned, “One Day My Soul Just Opened Up” and I began to read the book for the 4th or 5th time in my life.  It starts with this:

“This book is dedicated to Ego, that part of us that continues to worry, lives in doubt, is afraid, judges other people, is afraid to trust, needs proof, believes only when it is convenient, fails to follow up, refuses to practice what it preaches, needs to be rescued, wants to be a victim, beats up on “self,” needs to be right all the time, and continues to hold onto what does not work.  You are now put on notice that YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!”

Oh how I have been guilty of letting Ego drive the car, to the detriment of me and those people I love so much.

I really fell off the bridge into the drink and got carried away by the Ego undertow, bigger than anything.

I am working hard to repair that now and have been doing so for several days now.  I am intent on enjoying the happiness that is in every moment.  I refuse to entertain fear or worry about the future.  I refuse to entertain guilt or concern about the past.  I am in the Now.

Eric has very much felt the difference and he and I have discussed at length how his obsession on the future and what he does and does not have and is and is not entitled to affects our life and always has.  He has been very open to the conversation and has started to work on the idea himself.  It has tremendously turned our home life around in a positive way and we started to see results immediately on all levels.

Our lives began to change profoundly like chess pieces playing a game on their own.  It was fascinating to watch odd things start to shift and change without our direct involvement and to be able to understand clearly and profoundly why that was happening.  When you’re out of sync and you step back into the natural rhythm that is your life, suddenly, everything starts to click and hum and flow exactly as it should.  Life begins to feel more effortless because you are working with the natural flow and not against it.

Granted, this is all just a matter of a few days, but each day has been blessed and joyful rather than dark and dismal.  I can actually sleep at night, which I greatly appreciate.

I feel strong and empowered, but at the same time, a sense of surrender.  I have truly “let go and let God” and I’m open to the experiences and adventures that await me.

…and yes, the lessons.

The second book I picked up is one called “The Sacred Portable Now” by Daniel Singer and Marcella Bakur Weiner.  Although it is a little more glib and new-agey than what I typically enjoy, it does have some good premises and so I am reading mostly its intent rather than its exact words and absorbing the energy of the book.

As I look back in retrospect, I can see where my life has been setting itself up to take me to this point.  Going back to my experiences last October when I went to Kentucky and had that experience of being surrounded by unconditional love for the first time that I can remember in my whole life.  There was one betrayal of trust, one gal who had been a friend in high school with whom I’d reconnected, ignored some red (big) flags and sure enough, the newly rekindled friendship ended in a big, dramatic mess.  Because I was enveloped in all of this love and acceptance, I was able to understand right away that these were her issues.  She was reacting to programming put in place by her own life experiences and even though the things she did were fairly unforgivable and I had no interest in having her remain in my life, it in no way ruined my trip or really was anything more than a blip on the radar.  I was sad it happened, but it was her deal and all about her own misperceptions and choices.  She did not want to listen to the clarification of her misperceptions and that, again, was her deal, not mine.  I bless her. I love her for who she is.  I wish her well and I hope she ends up with the kinds of relationships she wants.

Had I been paying attention at the time, I could have seen that the atmosphere of love and acceptance, even from the self, is what gives us the clarity and self-awareness to understand where we end and someone else begins.  Without those two critical elements, we begin the self-doubt process (sooo different than self-awareness).  “Did I do enough?”  “Am I wrong?”  “What if it really is my fault?”  “How can I make them feel better?”  “How can I fix this?”  and so on and so on until you are immersed in their problems and ignoring your own.

I really don’t think that when we’re operating in our best mindset, it’s that hard to see the giant, four-lane-highway of a line between “self-trust” and “arrogance.”

We have to trust ourselves more.

Like the stupid title to the stupid car I looked for last week.  The car needed to be registered and I could not find the title that had been sitting on my desk for 2 weeks straight.  I spent 6 hours pulling my back room apart, going through desk drawers, pulling out the desk, looking behind it, beside it, going through bins that had not been opened in weeks, looking through mounds of envelopes, bills and paperwork over and over and over, certain I’d overlooked it because it was just here.  Most of that time was spent RElooking in places I’d already looked.  Maybe I had not looked hard enough or thoroughly enough.   Ultimately, Delena found it days later with the flip of a visor in the Jeep Liberty.  The title fluttered down where it had been slipped between the visor and the top of the car.  Neither Eric nor I remember putting it there.  The point is that had I trusted myself more, I could have spent maybe 90 minutes tearing the back room apart to look for the title and just said, “Well, it’s not here, obviously” and moved on to something more productive rather than blasting out the entire day in an exhaustive repeat of prior actions with no result to show for it other than being tired and frustrated.

The adventures I went out to find were an excuse not to fix the “now” I live in.  If I have an adventure planned, I look forward to that instead of fixing the “now” where I am.  If I’m having an adventure, I can live in that “now” instead of the one I exist in every day that is so messed up.  Mind you, I still plan to have adventures; I will just enjoy them more because they will become the “now” for that moment in time rather than the escape I’m running to.

It’s Harvest time and I do trust the process completely.  I now trust myself completely and refuse to let self-doubt, self-recrimination, resentfulness and anger cloud my “now.”  “Now” is just one letter off from “No,” as in “No, I can’t let that happen to myself.”

My time of being self-ish (hyphen intentional) has grown up and blossomed into something pretty big.  I’m about me now, in terms of taking care of myself and in terms of being responsible for how I am in the world and how I let the issues of others affect me.  I certainly will no longer let them define me, especially to myself.

One day, and I’m not sure which day in the past week it was, my soul just opened up.  It came out of hiding and reached for the warm sunlight.  It refused to be denied any more.  It refused to cower and simper any more.  It refused to be bullied and intimidated any longer.  It insisted on being strong and vibrant and alive despite my best efforts to subdue it with negative talk and thoughts.

One day my soul just opened up and embraced an enormous capacity of love and forgiveness.  After blanketing others with all of that love and forgiveness, one day, my soul turned that magnificent power onto me and I wept from the beauty of it.

One day, my soul just opened up and the day was warm and welcoming. 

One day, my soul just opened up and I was consumed with gratitude for the life I am living and for the blessings that God has bestowed upon me.  I laughed with the sheer delight of feeling life course through me, rich and aware.

One day, my soul just opened up and I felt overwhelmed by the love I am offered from so many.

One day, my soul just opened up and in surrendering ego and control, I was given empowerment and tremendous strength.

One day, my soul just opened up and a peace like no other began to flow through it and from it.

One day, my soul just opened up and I felt the magnificence of God, strong and powerful, and She said, “Hey, I remember you.  Will you walk with me, old friend?” and I said, “Yes, please, do you have cookies?” and She said, “You bet and ice cold Dr. Pepper” and I said, “Oh yeah” and off we went.

Most of you know me and know how much I overthink things and try to give them meaning and figure out the root of what’s going on when I see a trend going on, but lately, I have started giving very heavy consideration to Occam’s Razor which is a principle set forth by people far wiser than I am that states that the simplest answer is usually the correct answer.  That means that for the time being, I have pretty much given up the analyzing that is so prominent in we Virgos and I’m just going with, “Pfft.  Whatever.”

It’s hard not to get used to things going wrong as the norm.  If 10 things go wrong and 1 thing goes right, it should detract from the joy of the 1 thing going right.  With us, it seems like before we can get the 3-4 things managed that are going wrong, 2-3 more things present.  I hate spending my life in triage.

Today was typical.  I slept downstairs because I was hot-flashing like mad and it was cooler.  I asked Eric what time he was getting up and he said 6:00.  I asked him to wake me so I could get the kids going.  The high school bus woke me up as it pulled up at 6:30.  I hurried upstairs to get kiddies moving (fortunately, they had showers the night before) and told Eric his alarm was going off.  He mumbled something and I went back downstairs.  He came down around 15 minutes later and let me know he was going to register the Buick today and needed the title he’d given me to set up the insurance.  The title sat on my desk forever, stared at it every day thinking I should likely put it somewhere safer.  I should have.   It was gone.  I looked for it until 2pm before I gave up.  I’ve been through every place it could likely be, including the trash, a minimum of 3 times (just in case it “came back”).   I’ve gone through literally hundreds of papers, 5 desk drawers, pulled out furniture, gotten on the floor with a flashlight, etc, etc.  Eric called the DMV and found the paperwork online he needs to get the previous owner to sign. 

When Eric bought the car, he paid the guy $200 to reimburse him for the money he claimed to have just spent smogging and registering the vehicle.  Of course, the DMV has no record of this.  Now Eric has to go back to the previous owner not only to get him to sign the paperwork, but also to see if he has any kind of receipt for the money he supposedly paid the DMV.

On the tail of that, we found out the mortgage company has lost our mortgage payments since February.  They have record of the $15 service charges we paid to make a payment by phone (unless you mail in your payment, there is a service charge), but no record of the payment itself or where they put it.  We faxed bank statements to them showing the payments.  They sent us a letter back thanking us for our cooperation, but saying no changes had been made to our account.  More phone calls must ensue.  Eric needed the documentation for our loan modification that the mortgage company sent to use, which I was sure I gave him when he spoke to them before, but he is sure I didn’t.  That means I got to go through the back room a couple more times (make that around 5 today) to look for that paperwork.  Have I mentioned that Virgos are typically very organized?  No luck.  Like the wedding ring and the car title, it’s just gone.

There’s not much left to do know but call them up and throw ourselves on their mercy and see what happens.  Occam’s Razor says, “The crap is just gone.”  As much as I love the world of the magical and the mystical, I’ve been such a mental mess lately that I probably just lost it all.  I shouldn’t have gotten pissed off at Eric and taken off my ring.  Then I would have it now.  I’ll assume responsibility for all of it.  Meanwhile, I’m wearing HP’s ring, where ever it came from; the magically appearing ring that showed up in my desk drawer.

I got some new Estroven, the kind with the multi-vitamin, and some StressTabs. Neither seems to be doing much except giving me a bad aftertaste. 

I am trying to smile more, but it kind of makes my face hurt.  I figure it I wear it around enough, I’ll start to feel it again.  I put a very nice circle area together out back around the fire pit.  It’s purty.  My doors are still purty. I’ve been changing and changing things, trying to shift the energy.  It’s still here, so I have to figure it’s meant to be for now.

In honor of the fact that the kids and I are going to watch Zombieland and fold clothes, I am going to review the Zombieland rules and work hard to apply them to my life.  If they can manage zombies, they can surely manage my life.  We know there are 32 rules, although they are not all referenced in the movie.  Here are the ones that are:

#1 – Cardio
I would if I wasn’t so tired and fed up.  Cardio just… is not an option right now.  Going to have to skip #1.  Not an auspicious beginning.
#2 – The Double Tap
Do not presume a problem is solved because you came up with one solution.  Come up with two and hit hard and fast.  I am going to have to develop a back up plan in tandem with a primary plan from now on because primary rarely works.  Got it.
#3 – Beware of Bathrooms
Sorry, I do have to use them from time to time. I will lock the door and won’t use public restrooms unless absolutely necessary.
#4 – Seat Belts
Always
#5 – ???
#6 – The Skillet*
I’m on it.  The best food comes from a skillet.
#7 – Travel Light
I always do
#8 – Get A Kickass Partner*
Working on it.
#9 – ???
#10 – ???
#11 – ???
#12 – Bounty Paper Towels*
Accept no substitute and honestly, select-a-size is even better.
#13 – ???
#14 – ???
#15 – Bowling Ball*
Can’t even lift one.
#16 – ???
#17 – Don’t Be A Hero
No danger of that
#18 – Limber Up
OK, that I can do.
#19 – ???
#20 – ???
#21 – Avoid Strip Clubs*
No danger of that one either
#22 – When In Doubt, Know Your Way Out
Always have an exit strategy.  You bet.
#23 – ???
#24 – ???
#25 – ???
#26 – ???
#27 – ???
#28 – ???
#29 – The Buddy System*
I have my crew on which I can always depend.  Covered.
#30 – ???
#31 – Check The Back Seat
Always, because that’s where the monsters live.
#32 – Enjoy The Little Things
Or laugh at them if they are really tiny
#33 – Swiss Army Knife* 
Have the right tool for the job because often, the simplest answer is the right one.  Right Occam?

A - Available?  Married? Sure, whatever 

B – Books? Got lots, don’t get to read nearly enough.

C – Cake or pie? Pie. Strawberry or pumplin pie.

D – Drink of choice? Dr Pepper

E – Essential item? computer

F – Favorite color? anything not orange

G – Game to play or watch? None  I play, I don’t watch.

H – Hometown? Pleasant Ridge, Kentucky 

I – Indulgence? Adventures.

J – Job? 3 – web page designer, telephone psychic, webmaster

K – Kids and names? Joe, David, Josh, Delena, Dylan and Nathan

L – Life is incomplete without? Joy

M – Music group or singer?  Too many to list

N – Number of siblings? 2 brothers.

O – Oranges or apples? Apples.

P – Phobias/fears? Drowning and falling 

Q – Favorite quote? “Believe people when they show you who they are the first time.”  Maya Angelou

R – Reason to smile? Getting money.

S – Season? All but Winter.

T – Tattoos? 2 butterflies.

U – Unknown fact about me? Everybody knows everything or at least a bunch of people combined know everything.

V – Vegetable you love? Good green beans.

W – Worst habit? Writing people off very easily.

X – X-rays you’ve had? Oh hell, I don’t remember… I’m old.

Y – Your favorite food? A really, really good steak – so far, the best I have ever had was from Lonestar in Beaver Dam, Ky.

Z – Zodiac? Virgo sun, Cancer Moon and Scorpio rising.

Emmylou wrote those words to express her grief over the death of her singing partner and mentor, Graham Parsons.  The song is rife with pain and heartache, as most good country songs should be.  Still, it speaks to a real point of pain for many of us; knowing that whatever happens, we’ll be forced to live through it no matter how much damage it does to us.

I agree with the immediate response of most rational people who would counter that life shouldn’t be something you have to endure and survive, but about the wonderful things that hold it all together.  Sometimes, though, it’s really hard to keep walking when you’re just so damned tired.  Whether there is an afterlife or not – a concept I am still processing – the allure of death and having everything just stopping and some kind of ongoing rest from strife sounds so very seductive. 

Intermittent trials and tribulation are completely understandable and just a fact of life.   This shit just seems to never, ever end.  They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  I keep doing different things and getting the same result.  I hate that for me, a good day is a day when I don’t get messed with in some major way at least once.  “Ah, there you are, my old traveling companion, Mr Fuckingwith.  I wondered where you’d gotten off to.  I didn’t see you at all yesterday and was beginning to think you’d taken a vacation from all of your fuckingwith duties.  Yet here you are, ready for action, you tenacious little sucker, you.” 

The idea of poverty and other people’s dramas being the defining points of my life for the rest of my life is almost breath-taking in its intensity.  As nearly as I can tell based on intuition and the family history with the females to whom I best relate,  I expect I am around halfway done and you can’t really count the last 20 years or so since I don’t expect quality of life to be particularly supreme.  By then, I intend to be firmly parked in my recliner with my Whoppers, Cheetos and cooler of Dr. Pepper, man-handling the remote and periodically accepting delicious meals from my manservant, Branson.

That still easily leaves 30 or so years in the wind and unless things pick up here, ol’ Branson is going to be working for something other than money. 

Can this really be all there is?  Not that my life completely sucks, but it sucks enough, and has for decades, that the idea of moving forward without major change is just almost too much to bear.  Days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years and regardless of how much tweaking and shifting and fixing I do, I seem to end up right back in the same spot. 

Now, I am in the same spot of watching Eric all excited about starting yet another business; his third and he is 33 years old and that is if you don’t count the 4 years of mining .  He’s thrilled and motivated for the first time in ages, which is wonderful, but the whole idea just makes me want to cry because I feel like I don’t have any more enthusiasm left to give. 

You know, that’s really the crux of the whole thing.  I don’t have anything left to give.  It’s not just enthusiasm.  I don’t have patience.  I don’t have kindness or compassion or empathy.  I don’t have a healthy interest in hardly anything.   I feel like I am a big bag of meat and bones that gets up in the morning because well, that’s what we do and cleans house because well, that’s what we’re supposed to do and works 2-3 tiny little jobs because well, that’s what we have to do and goes to bed at night because well, the day’s done and if we don’t do that, we can’t start the same cycle over again tomorrow.

Even the things I used to enjoy in life are like a chewed up piece of gum, dying a stale and tasteless life under the seat of a theater while everyone else watches the movie.  I am that Zoloft egg:

I am Rosie the Robot on The Jetsons after her boyfriend robot, Mack, is deactivated.  She rolls around the house bent over at the waist and making a mournful sound.

I am Eeyore:

I am not so sure the Evil Queen from Snow White started out the way we see her.  I think she started out like a normal, fully functioning human being with good intentions and a happy heart and over time, lots and lots of people wanted more from her than what she could give. 

"Another business? Are you serious?"

I think one too many times she said one thing to someone and had to go back and explain herself 14 times before she said it in a way that they approved of at last.  I think she watched one too many truly wretched people get ahead in life and decided that the only way to be successful is to start crushing a few bones herself.  From there, it’s just a short step to having some smart alecky kid’s heart cut out by a woodsman who STILL manages to screw it up.  Then what happens?  The very animals of the forest and some vertically challenged diamond miners all rally together to make sure SHE gets the prince and SHE gets the castle and SHE gets to live happily ever after.

I've had this exact look on my face more times than I care to count lately.

...and this one...

Me driving down the mountain, hoping for an adventure

Truly bad or just left out of one too many social circles?

Just trying to ONCE have the pretty voice, to wear the crown, to not have to live in the shadows

For the first time in my life, I really do get why some people just shuffle off the coil of sanity into a world of their own.  I get why there is a disease that makes us forget things when we get old.  I get why we have a huge industry dedicated to medications to keep people from feeling like life just sucks.  I get why some people just take that big step off of a tall bridge or hang themselves in the oven.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to do it; but I sure understand why it’s done. 

You just get to the point where you can’t give anyone anything any more and something weird and numb happens inside.  You know their disappointment is coming, but you’re helpless to do anything to make them feel better, so you just numb up.  You get so tired of having to care about how you sound to anyone else or what they need or feel that something just closes up so you don’t feel any more. 

I’m not there yet completely, but I definitely slide in for a visit pretty often.  It has gone from being a “summer home” to being a room in my house.  I’m not completely sure if it’s a positive or a negative development or if it just “is.”  A positive is that I am no longer as much of an enabler as I was and I know my kids have benefited from that and likely Eric to some degree.  It likely doesn’t feel like it to them, but overall, I think they will be better off.  The rest?  I’m just not sure.

I tell myself that as things unfold and progress, I’ll crack open the door to the cave a little bit and feel the sunshine on my face and become something more human.  It’s hard not to feel as though I am holding my happiness ransom until something good happens.  I try every day to count my blessings and stay in good connection with the miracles in my life.  I don’t want to get numb to those as well.  It’s just sometimes hard not to be a “glass half empty” person when the glass is completely empty and has dust and moths and crap blowing around in it. 

More than anything, I believe in cycles and I have to trust that this is going to cycle out as well.  I wouldn’t even bother to post such whiney stuff except that maybe some of you are feeling something similar.  It might help to know that you aren’t the only one. 

I was serious in the recent post when I observed “What a Difference a Day Makes.”  Things can turn around on a dime, especially at Harvest Time.  I am too tired to hope for that, but I’m not too tired to be still and quietly watch and see what happens.  I think that best describes where I am now.

Like the song says, “The hardest part is knowing I’ll survive.”  The alternative, overall, is just too grim.

Just talked to Eric, who has no idea how a phantom ring would materialize in my desk drawer.  He is often at his mining claims and such and just spent the weekend with a high powered metal detector, so I thought maybe he’d turned one up from the river.  Nope.  It was in one of the little white organizer baskets with pencils and spare pennies and such.  So strange. 

As my dearly loved Lizard King sang:  “This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.”

I am so grateful for that day.

My life doesn’t suck, not nearly as much as it could. I am completely aware of that.  Still, as Dr. Phil says, having a man in the hospital bed beside you with two broken legs and two broken arms doesn’t make your one broken leg and one broken arm hurt any less. 

I am struggling to hold onto my recent empowerment while, convexly, struggling to hold onto my resolution to release people to their own empowerment and be discriminating about where my energy goes.

It is always easier to maintain goals during happy times rather than challenging ones.

As I have mentioned before, in the Spring, my son and daughter-in-law separated.  It was ugly.  He came up to visit and when he returned, she had moved another guy – the father of her first child (who is – into the house.   They coached him not to make a scene, to just leave quietly.  Later, predictably, she wanted him back and he went back and tried to make things work.  She wanted to continue seeing the other guy while he was there and it degenerated from that point.  Since then, life has been knee-deep in drama and as those of you who know me are aware, I despise drama. 

Josh had nowhere to go, so he ended up coming up here and staying in my beloved shuttle.   I ended up having it for my own use for about a month from April into May.  It was lovely.  Now, all of the altar items, candles, figurines and such are packed away and it is a frat house.  There is literally nowhere else to put him except on my couch in the family room and this makes the most sense.  I know I can have the shuttle again later.  Now the issue is getting Josh settled into his own place, somehow, some way.

My daughter-in-law has surprised me with her way of handling things.  She was upset that Josh left rather than staying with her while she her sorted out her feelings for him and for her ex, so she has worked overtime to make him miserable.  The depth of her anger and vengeance is truly stunning and doesn’t seem to have any limits.  There is a lot of screaming, threatening, ranting and raging.  When he left, she drained his paycheck from the account twice and continues to demand even more money from him.   She uses the kids as weapons, refusing to let him see the girls unless he pays child support for them.  He is not the biological father of either of them, but has raised them since they were 3 and 4.  (They are now 9 and 10)  Neither of their biological fathers pay child support for them and, as I mentioned, one of them lives with her and has also brought his own other three children along with him now.  That’s six kids and two adults in a two bedroom duplex.

She will only let Josh talk to the children on speaker phone and yells out comments like “Your father doesn’t love you enough to _____” (fill in the blank with anything he hasn’t agreed to that she or they wanted him to).  About a month ago, she drove her car off of a cliff, totalling it but unhurt herself.  She then demanded his car, which he did not give her, but never you mind.  His car died on him not long afterward, so Eric and I have been taking him to and from work when a local lady who also works at Walmart is not on the same shift. 

Josh phoned me at 2pm yesterday in the middle of my deliciously decadent and peaceful day (a nap!  I even took a nap.)  and told me that he was in an “interesting situation.”  Both he and his ex are managers at the Walmartin town.  She told him that she was having “pus” come from one of her breasts and that he had to take the kids for the night while she went to the Emergency Room.  Taking the kids for the night translates out into me taking them for all of the next day, which is today, while he works.  Eric will then take the kids back down to Walmart to be driven home again when he picks up Josh at 4pm.

The kids showed up dirtier than I have ever seen children be.  My grandson did not have a shirt, so I dug through some older clothes of Nathan’s and found a couple, as well as a pair of shorts for him to wear.  I had a pair of girls’ shorts that would fit the oldest granddaughter.  Josh started cycling them through baths.  The youngest granddaughter (8) has poison oak in various places all over her.  No medication was sent, so Josh bought some Caladryl before he brought them home.  Eric is deathly allergic to poison oak and was admitted to the hospital for a while when he last encountered it, so his interaction is limited.  I found a long sleeved, light weight shirt for her to wear. 

The kids have been very quiet and subdued for the most part.  I brushed the girls’ hair and put it back in ponytails this morning.  It took a while, but with some careful brushing and a lot of spray on conditioner, we got through it.  They were very patient with me.  It was nice to spend one on one time with each of them after not seeing them for so long.  My grandson, the youngest (almost 6),  is hungry all the time, so I keep passing him cold cereal, yogurt tubes and, of course, cookies because I’m a Mammaw.

They all crashed on the couch around 9pm last night except for the oldest granddaughter (10) , who was still awake when I came down at 1:30am to let the dog pee.  Not sure when she went to sleep, but she was snoozing when I came downstairs at 7am to get my boys on the bus.  The grandkids don’t start school until Tuesday.

I did not write this just to bash on my daughter-in-law.  We all have our challenges to work through, but her choices are sure making a lot of people miserable right now.  None of us should be defined by our worst moments.  Josh is shell-shocked and hardly knows which way to move.  She blows up his phone with texts and phone calls berating him constantly.  It seems as though she is not resting unless she is working to make him miserable.  As the old cliche says, “It’s the kids who pay the price.”  In this case, it’s also Josh’s parents(us).  She has made it clear she never liked us anyway, so I am sure that is of no concern to her. 

Meanwhile, Josh is here and miserable because he rarely gets to see his kids and some other guy is living with them pretending to be their dad while their mom talks mad shit about him to them constantly.  He is working on the paperwork to file for divorce.  He reconnected with an old girlfriend from high school via email and that makes him happy.  He seems to have gotten over the idea he had that he and his wife will reconcile.  Meanwhile, mostly he and Eric drink and smoke copious amounts and try to get Josh’s car working.  Needless to say, I’m not exactly in Nirvana right now and I work to steal my happy moments right out of the very air.

I am glad to see the grandkids, but it bothers me that they are kept from us unless she needs to use us for her own needs.  Some people are just like that and what I find disheartening is that it seems like any more, more and more people are “just like that.”  I also like to be better prepared so I can have enough food on hand and, as it turns out, a wardrobe of clothes for them to wear.  It’s only for a day and tomorrow, I will go back to having a quiet, peaceful life again.  Today, they love me and I love them and I have three children to tend to.  They are being so good, bless their hearts, and I am happy things are going as well as they are.  It was a little hairy this morning when my kids were here too and all five needed attending at once. 

Eric and I are dealing with some pretty heavy issues between the two of us, which has kept life strained for a while now.  Finances are still tenuous and a very unexpected $700 expense early this month pretty much leveled us.  A major job he was contracted into that would have financed us for a couple of months just evaporated.  It was for a Montissouri school, their enrollment was not what they expected, so they backed out of the project.  No one told him that his VA benefits for school were only paid out at 3/4 time over the summer semester, so that was less than we expected.  School supplies for Dylan and Nathan,when were, of course, required by the end of the week, came to just at $100.  Delena still has not heard back from her EOP&S application to know if her books are covered for her Fall semester of college.  She has to get books by this next week, so I am just trusting we won’t have to pay out the $300+ required (used) for the books she needs.  Eric’s are automatically coverd by the VA. 

Eric is currently going into his second hour of sitting at the VA hospital pharmacy waiting for a refill on his stomach pills.  The stress is kicking his ass hard. 

My stupid dog just came back from her most recent escape attempt with a stick lodged across the soft palate of her mouth jammed between the two sides of her teeth.  If her mouth was a V shape, this was the bar that made it into an A.  She’s a very big, strong dog and it took Delena and I over an hour to wrestle her down so I could pull it out with a pair of wire cutters.  My goal was to snap it or at least weaken the middle (this was a stick about the size of my pinky finger, so it was stout) so we could get it out.  She was fighting like mad.  Once I finally got hold of it and felt it give even slightly when I tugged, it was on and I was going to get that thing out or else.  It popped out and she wasn’t nearly grateful enough.  They never are.

My wedding ring is missing.  It disappeared from inside the little glass chicken on my dresser.  My engagement ring is there.  My mother’s wedding ring is there.  My ring guard is there.  My wedding ring is gone.  We have torn the bedroom apart, moving furniture, going through drawers where it might have fallen, investigating every crack and crevice.  Before I left for LA, I had to look through a couple of bins for a CD Debbie Morris wanted to borrow and while doing so, I transitioned some jewelry I wasn’t wearing into those bins, which normally sit next to my dresser with a curtain thrown over them, serving as a make shift table.  I thought there was a chance it could have been picked up by mistake or fallen in.  No luck, but I did notice that a jewelry box is missing that had also been in the bins.  It had my father’s wedding ring, my Aunt Vernie’s wedding ring and my wedding ring from when I was married to Paul in it.  That’s a total of four wedding bands missing, oddly.  I’d really like to have them all back, honestly.  I keep checking where they ought to be as if to see if they are “back” yet.  Very frustrating.  I could think it was some invasive robbery if the diamonds hadn’t been left behind.  Fortunately, Eric remembers seeing me put my wedding ring in the chicken at the same time as my other rings, so I’m not totally losing my mind.

My house that was so beautiful and pristine clean 24 hours ago is a shambles. It’s going to take a bit to get put back together.  I want to have it nice by tomorrow so I can have a quiet day before the weekend hits.  Life cycles.  That’s for sure.  If my harvest is here, I’m not seeing it just yet.  Everything feels like a tight-rope and the ‘fight or flight’ lives in my gut almost all the time any more.

Yesterday, however… yesterday was a work of beauty.  Days like yesterday give me hope for more in the future.  As long as there are days like yesterday, there must still be goodness in the world.  All of my hope is based on the light from that one candle in the darkness, that one bright little day in a sea of mess.  Failure is just not an option and I refuse to be pulled down into the din of hopelessness that I see people living in all around me.  I took a dive there for a day the first week of the month and I don’t ever want to go back again.

Insecurity, resentment and it’s little friend, fear, aren’t invited along for this trip.

I looked forward to the boys returning to school and knew that they really, really needed it.  There are no two different personalities on earth than my two youngest sons nad because we only have a three bedroom house, they are forced to share a (very large) room.  In the past month or so, likely due to some kind of insane testosterone flood, their differences have really taken hold and it felt like they were fighting and arguing and bickering like two old women all the time.  Overall, I don’t tolerate infighting.  Work it out and get along.  This was way past my ability to manage without killing them, so I started hiding which is, of course, not good.  Gotta be out there and be a plugged in, fully functioning parent or you’ve already lost the battle without them firing a single shot in your direction.

That isn’t to say I’m not sticking by my guns and snatching my necessary “me” time and privacy right out of their grubby little paws.  I am, however, doing my best to be present for the most part.  So here they are, just running their mouths and amping up the tension, despite my best hard stares and me doing the thing where I point to my eyes, then at them, then repeat. 

That tension led us right into Monday, when they piled onto the bus with minimal apprehension (Dylan) and moderate apprehension (Nathan) and disappeared into the World of The Man for many hours.  The emerged just before 4pm filled with joy and optimism and giddy excitement for the year to come.  We are still riding the wave of honeymoon phase and it is delightful.  They come home happy about their day at school, feeling empowered and capable, too tired to argue and drop off to sleep around 9pm.  Eric has been busy with his own things.  Delena is here with me, but she is quiet and also busy with her own things.   My days are my own and there’s no fighting, no tension, nothing to prove or fix or resolve.

It’s lovely.

I got the house all cleaned up on Sunday, so went into the week with only minor upkeep to do.  Last night, we all did yard work and got things cleaned up.  There is a nice breeze going through the house and it’s around 72 degrees outside.  Eric is putting in some time working at the VA office.  I could seriously get used to this kind of recouperative time.

My experiment into empowering people to do their own crap and not enabling any more has been an amazing success.  They just do whatever I ask them pretty much.  No complaints yet.  When I say “I got the house all cleaned up on Sunday,” it does not necessarily mean I did it.  I just got it done.  I left a list of things to be done and went to the grocery store for 90 minutes or so and when I came back, the house was clean for the most part. 

This past weekend, I was moved to paint all of the doors in my house.  It was a weird compulsion.  I used paint I already had in the shed.  Didn’t have to purchase anything new except $3 on a couple of packages of foam paint brushes.  My reasoning was that I was so tired of seeing stupid fingerprints on EVERY door and door jam in the house, no matter how much I got after them with cleanser and a Mr Clean Magic Eraser.  All of the doors and jams were off white like the walls.  I started with the front door, painting it brick red on the outside and deep chocolate brown on the inside.  The door jam was painted to match the door.  My demon head door knocker now stands out very nicely against the red background.  Then I did the closet next to Delena’s room.  Delena painted her own door a brighter red than the front door.  I touched up the cupboards that were painted the same chocoloate brown several years ago when I removed the doors to them.  Upstairs, I painted my bedroom door and the doors leading onto the balcony a deep, khaki green.  Same for the bathroom door.  I let the boys do their own doors.  Nathan liked the look of the gray primer, which dries a soft blue.  He then used some Wallies that were birds and bird houses:

(not his room here, just the same birds)

After the birds and bird houses were up, he took a round sponge and made bright red polka dots all over the door and a blue smiley face. 

Dylan still hasn’t done his side of the door, which is the one that faces into the hallway, but I did notice that he had stenciled a Nintendo DS and a pokeball and such onto the primer, so I guess he has plans.

The end result is that I am much more so without fingerprints, which I appreciate.  The house is much darker inside, which is not a problem, and looks much cleaner and more elegant.  It was 3 days of work, but well worth it.  I meditated on the reasoning behind painting my doors and realized that I wanted them to stand out more rather than blend into the walls.  Basically, I’m afraid of missing a signficant connection, a door I should walk through at a particular time.  This makes them more visible.

Eric went mining with friends this past weekend from Friday through Monday and let me tell you, I slept like the dead.  It has been so long since I got a good night’s sleep and I really drank it in.  I’m not sure what it is about his energy – probably just the tremendous sense of dissatisfaction, frustration and resentment that he carries around with him – that keeps me from sleeping well.  Bless his heart, he really feels that The Universe owes him more than what he’s getting and it gnaws at him like crazy all the time any more.  He’s just never happy in his own skin.

I’ve stopped all weight loss efforts since the 60 day challenge.  I lost 11 pounds in those two months and feel proud of that.  Now, I pretty much eat whatever I want whenever I want.  I really needed a break from that focus.  I regained a bit of the weight at first, but it fell back off again of its own accord.  I will know when it’s time to get busy on it again. 

For now, I plan to spend my days writing my book, making candles and counting my blessings.  Being a Crone is awesome.

Here they are:  http://www.katrinarasbold.com/santamonica.htm