I apologize for the delay in updating.  It’s the usual reason:  I have been mulling and processing and wanted to wait until I had things someone organized in my head before trying to commit them to text.  Of course, as usual again, that never really happened so I am going to write out what I can and hope that maybe that very process will be what gives me clarity on some things that have been rolling around in my head.

The job is going well.  For a while, the calls were drying up, but I have had an influx of new people calling, which is lovely.  I have been working as a telephone psychic for three months  now and I feel as though I am finally starting to get my balance in the job.  Over two decades of in person Tarot readings does nothing to get you prepared for cold reading after cold reading after cold reading where you seriously have to pull the information right out of the air through your connection to God.  ”Dear Lord, tell me what these people need to know…”  At this point, I have done 638 readings in those 3 months.  

A lot of the time is spent waiting for callers.  My manager tells me that I have a 26% “fill rate,” which is the amount of my on shift time I actually spend talking to people.  He says that’s about average.  Of course, the people who have been with the company for years have an established clientele and are busier than newbies like myself.  I have met some amazing people who I love to hear from already in the short time since I started.

You have to pick up the phone by the second ring, so remaining in the immediate vicinity is required the whole time a reader is on shift.  I do like it now and for a awhile, I wasn’t sure if I would or not.  The income has gone a long way toward helping out our financial situation, but still, it’s not enough.  I make more money doing this than I would working full time in town once the expense of gasoline, food and payroll deductions are considered.  I am an independent contractor, so all I have to do is take care of my income tax and that’s it.  

I also still bring in some money from the web site development business.  I’m not really designing new sites, but I do have a few that I maintain for other folks.  

Eric has gotten enrolled in his college classes at Berkeley and should start in the next couple of weeks.  For now, he’s taking 3 online classes, but 2 actual classroom classes will join them in January.  He is majoring in Geology and minoring in Business and will have his BA completed in 2012 (which is likely what the Maya’s were so stunned about that they stopped making their calendar).  The VA has been a tremendous force in getting him set up and ready to go.  He will actually get paid to go to school, plus they put him into a work study program that has him doing office work and studying for 25 hours a week and being paid $8 an hour to do it, plus they pay his tuition and books and mileage.  

For those of you who remember, in March, he “planted” the goal of finding his passion in life and being able to sustain his family with that.  Since a major in Geology feeds into his passion for gold mining, he’s a happy camper right now.  He also has a brilliant mind and is very academically motivated and oriented, so he will do great in school.  I am so very proud of him for taking this brave step.

I have no idea how we managed to sustain ourselves as far as we have since his business folded in the spring, but it looks like things will be taking much better shape after the first of the year.  Meanwhile, of course, I have not purchased one single thing for Christmas yet and will try and piece something together at the last minute.  

As much as I love Christmas, at this moment, between kids and grandbabies and such, it’s just too big to think about so I am putting my head in the nearest snow drift and pretending it doesn’t exist.  I am going to let Santa handle it.  God knows I’ve been pulling his fat ass for long enough.

Tra la, and all.

Or since it’s Christmas, “Fa la la la la la la la la.”  

Thanksgiving was lovely.  David came up from Sacramento and Paul, Eric’s mining partner, ate with us as well.  The day was utterly uneventful, which can sometimes be less “boring” and more on the “good” side.

The kids are out an entire week for Thanksgiving (WTF?) and 3 weeks for Christmas.  I am awash in needs and wants and frustrations.  For some reason, they all three seem to be rubbing one another the wrong way.  Tomorrow, before everyone gets up, I will burn some sage and bless the house and try to get the energies calm again.

Part of that is my fault, I am the first to admit.  I know I have been contributing some frustrating energy and I am working hard to reel that back in again and ground it rather than project it.  The stuff I’ve been processing is very internal and very personal to the point that I have to decide what to write about and what to keep to myself.  I’ve had some strong realizations about myself and my relationships and I’m still trying to figure out what it all means and where to put it.  About the dumbest thing you can do is to take some kind of impulsive action to try and effect a change before you even understand what kind of change is warranted.  Too many people figure out that they want things to change, but they don’t know what exactly they want to have be different, so they start taking a hatchet to different parts of their life until they have killed everything around them and still don’t have (or even know) what they wanted.

The old sculpture joke about how to carve a statue of an elephant says that you get a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.  If you don’t know what an elephant looks like or even that you want to carve an elephant, you just end up with a mess.

Whereas Eric planted his passion, I planted my own financial means (check – for the most part), financial security (in the works – in theory) and healthy weight loss.  While I did lose just at 40 pounds this year, I still have another 80 or so to go to get to where I really want to be.  I consider it to be an amazing start and I am very proud of my success.  My initial goals were very lofty, not taking into account the need to lose weight, maintain, then lose weight again.  Such an important part of the process is to learn maintenance after a phase of loss rather than pushing constantly for the loss.  

As every weight loss guide ever written or conceived will tell you, there are some hard core reasons why obese people are obese and they are nearly all emotional.   Sure there is the math of eating more than you are  burning, but the eating and lack of motion are caused by underlying emotional issues.

A year ago, I would have (and did, in this journal) expounded at length about how very happy and blessed I am and overall, that is true.  Yet here I was, maintaining a very unhealthy obesity that – let’s face it – you do have to work at to achieve.  What was the pain I was eating to numb?  What was the emptiness inside me that demanded to be filled?  What was draining away so much of my energy that I could not bear to exercise?

Those were questions that haunted me for years, but I fought them back with a barage of running comments in my brain.  How could I be unhappy with a husband who loves me to distraction?  How could I be unhappy when I live in such a heavenly place?  How could I be unhappy when I have so many blessings?

Other than financially, Eric and I have been abundantly blessed.  We have beautiful, robust, healthy, fun, respectful children.  We have a lovely, quaint (small!) home.  We have a relationship built on deep, abiding friendship.  We have a thriving spiritual life together.  Our only problem has always seemed to be money.  I have always seen our life as being perfect in every other way.

Eric commented recently that I have been different since I came back from my trip to Kentucky to be with my family and high school friends.  I am.  Being surrounded by all of that unconditional love was not only addictive, but clarifying.  No, I don’t believe that a week of my life in a realistic sample of how things would be if I lived there all of the time.  Still, I know I am loved for who I am.

There is an inate understanding of one another when you are with people from your own area.  For instance, a friend recently commented off handedly about making “turkey and dressing” for Thanksgiving and I actually had tears come into my eyes.  For years now, I have been corrected to say “stuffing” instead of “dressing,” even though my “stuffing” never sees the inside of a bird.  I have been trained out of calling the evening meal “supper” and the noon meal “dinner.”  (We don’t fool around with anything called “lunch.”)  The sense of belonging, like when Gonzo goes to the Gonzo planet and finds all of the other Gonzos, is so very important and it’s something I lost through 23 years of military living and 9 years of post-military living in California.  

When I was down with my back a couple of weeks ago, there was very little I could do BUT think about things.  The contrast of how I felt in Kentucky versus how I feel on a day to day basis was very much in my mind and I wanted to try and get to the heart of it to work through the grief I was feeling since picking up stakes and moving to Kentucky isn’t really an option.

After a great deal of mulling, what it came down to was the issue of change and ironically, it started in Kentucky.  When I was growing up, my parents did not think highly of the fact that I had some pretty lofty goals and ambitions. I wanted to be a midwife.  I wanted to travel to see some other places.  I didn’t necessary want to live in those other places (as I ended up doing), but I wanted to see them.  I wanted to go to college.  I wanted to write medical journals.  (Told you my goals were lofty).  I was always a kind of free spirit, interested in weird things like ghosts and other worlds.  Dad hated that I liked rock and roll.  Mom hated that I didn’t like to sew or cook or do domestic things.  My head was always in the clouds.  They wanted so desperately for me to be different and more like them.  Had I not been born at home, they likely would have believed their baby was switched for me at birth.

Finally, when I got married, they pretty much saw me as Paul’s problem and waved me goodbye and wished me well.  They loved me, but they didn’t have a clue what to do with me after I was around 13-14, so the thing we never talked about was what a relief it was for them when I left home and they could grieve me properly.

I was 16 when I got married and we promptly moved to Guam.  I had no clue how to behave in the world as an adult, despite my aspirations.  I had a series of babies and turned out myself to be nothing that Paul wanted.  For the better part of 20 years he worked in shifts of trying hard to change me into someone else or get away from me.  Finally, he just found someone else and was gone.  

Some time later, I married Eric and, truth be told, he’s spent the past 13 years wanting me to be different than I am.  He wants me to be more sportsy and active, more in tune with things going on in the world, much, much more physically fit, more of a hard core disciplinarian with the kids, more focused, more tuned into the physical world, more of a Type A personality, more outdoors focused than indoors focused…

These aren’t just goals he has for me, but lackings in me that he actively laments from time to time.  I have gone in cycles of trying to fit into that mold of what he wants to trying to get him to let go of his own goals for me and it has turned into an uncomfortable situation for both of us.  After almost 50 years of people telling me how I ought to be and actively trying to change me into that, I’m just tired. I want to be who I am and be loved FOR that rather than IN SPITE of that.   

To his view, all of the changes he wants to manifest in me are for my own best interests and for the best interests of the family, so I should get busy on them, chop chop.  So I cry and promise to do better and try harder and fail again and he gets frustrated with me and I gets frustrated with me and of course, I eat to anesthetize that pain.

What’s interesting is that while I was in Kentucky for that week, despite eating (well) at restaurants for a lot of the time, I lost 3 pounds.  I was happy.  I was relaxed and I didn’t really think about eating.  I usually ate one decent sized meal a day and nibbled on fruit and such the rest of the time.  

He and I have discussed these things endlessly.  They are no surprise or mystery to him.  He sees things one way and I see them another.  He has specific goals for me and for our family and holds tightly to them.  I have reached a point in life (cursed menopause!) where I am tired of struggling to meet the goals other people have for me.  It is, currently, at an empasse.

The weight loss is the one place where I am determined to persevere, for me and not for anyone else.  The 40 pounds I’ve lost represents a long journey for me and I refuse to let myself down by not completing the trip.  By this time next year, I expect to be at my goal weight and well into maintenance.  Admittedly, a part of me is irritated that he will take partial credit for that and believe that him badgering me into it created positive change when actually (got to use these words again), it was done in spite of him and not because of him.

Eric is not a bad guy and I do not in any way mean to paint him as such.  I love him tremendously and he is an amazing friend, father and stepfather.  I don’t ever want to not have him in my life and I know that his intentions are all good.  I do, however, need to find a way to successfully pull away from his strong expectations of me and find out who I am for once and what expectations I have of myself.  I have spent way too long nurturing others as my primary mission in life and not tuning into myself. I have spent way too long relentlessly pursuing the goals other people have for me to the point that I no longer even have goals for myself.  I just try to do what I’m told and end up repeatedly failing.  

To my mind, that’s no kind of life.

I’m 48 and I do not intend to live the last half of my life as I did the first half of my life.  It’s not a matter of not caring what my family needs or wants for or from me, but more a matter of finding out what I need and want for and from myself.

I do chalk this whole experience up to an effect of menopause.  We just reach a point where enough is enough.  Whether that turns out to be a blessing or a curse is yet to be seen.  

For now, I am – as one Native American group says – “taking back my power eggs” and putting them into my own basket.  I’ve got my slab of marble and I by God know what an elephant looks like.  I am going to start chipping and see what all falls away.  One thing I do know is that this is going to be one very amazing, svelte, muscular, empowered, gorgeous elephant when I’m done.