A down yo

To you, it looks like I shrug it off. Maybe I do. Today, it really feels like I internalize it. I’m hurting, little, confused, scared.

I try to be a good person; I really do. I think I am a good person, but I’m not sure right now who I could find to tell me that I am. That’s the incredible power of poor self-esteem: no matter how well I succeed in being happy and confident most of the time, no matter how well-respected or well-liked I am, when something or someone activates one of my triggers, I no longer believe that anyone sees me as a good person.

Right now, I’m struggling to convince myself that I am lovable. That I am a good person. That people see me as a good person.

I understand that you might be disappointed in me right now. I’m disappointed in myself, too. The thing is, I’m not sure how to fix it. I’m not sure why it exists. I’m really sad and belittled by the fact that people need me to fix it- that they need me to fix ME. Aren’t I good enough just the way I am? Clearly, at the moment, I am not. And that sucks.

Damn.

A letter to a certain child

Dear Child,

You had it tough growing up. You really did. It is a testament to some real strength deep within you that you survived your childhood, and without resorting to drugs or other self-destructive behaviours. You did not escape childhood unscathed, though, did you?

I hear you. I wonder how many instances there were where you were belittled or criticized or judged and found inadequate? It still happens. It happens so frequently, that it is no longer possible to tell when it does not happen. The whole sum of the transactions are coloured in such a way that if there are positive transactions, you are not even aware of them.

When each transaction, even the innocent ones, contain a barb, perhaps not meant to injure, but nevertheless piercing and painful, it becomes very difficult to stay whole and sane, doesn’t it? You have done so well. I am so sorry that this has happened to you, and still happens to you. You are a lovely person and do not deserve ill-treatment.

Abuse is a funny thing, isn’t it? It may not look like abuse from the outside. It may not feel like abuse in the moment. But the accumulation of years of put-downs and jeering comments is truly devastating. I’m sorry you still have to be dealing with this. This is not fair, and is undeserved.

You are very special. “What has she done now?” is a question that does not reflect the reality of who you are. It reflects a perception of inadequacy which exists solidly because of the deficits of the questioner. Other people can see and do see and do love the good that is within you, without treating you as though you are the total sum of your habits, quirks, idiosyncrasies. Some people even love those things about you; in fact, many people love you because of those habits, quirks and idiosyncrasies. I am one of those people.

In fact, it is those characteristics which make you interesting and successful and YOU. Please believe that it is those character traits which come under the most attack that I love best in you. Sometimes these traits are challenging, even for you, but please do not allow yourself to be diminished because some other person says you are not good enough. No one else has the right to judge you or to bludgeon you into different behaviour.

If you are behaving badly, in some way, which does happen from time-to-time, please know that guidance and correction can be offered in a loving and supportive manner. When you are chastised for some behaviour, please believe that that chastisement, while hurtful, does not offer up a reflection of your worth as a person. Truly, you are a good person. Your entire goal in life seems to be to help people and to build them up. I so wish that you could be such a cheerleader for yourself, and that when you are such a cheerleader, that you could hear and believe in the messages you give yourself.

Let’s try. Put on your best calming, reassuring, loving voice. You are an amazing “whisperer”. Do it for yourself now.

• You are an exceptionally kind person. You would never intentionally hurt someone. When you do hurt someone unintentionally, you try so hard to make it right, as soon as you are able. 
  
• You are so honest. It is quite amazing to watch sometimes.
  
• You listen amazingly well. You hear so much more than is being said. 
  
• You care so much about people. You like people, and people like to be with you because of the way you make them feel.
  
• You always look for the good in any situation. You can find a positive attribute in the most dire of circumstances. Good for you!
  
• Do you see how well you communicate with animals? You know how to love and speak lovingly to them, and they hear that and respond. You do this with your family sometimes, too, and it always works well when you do.
  
• You are so willing to learn.
  
• You work so hard at being considerate.
  
• You are so playful.
  
• You are amazingly strong, and amazingly resilient.
  
• You wrote this for yourself and from yourself recently: “ Love is an amazing force; joy can be found almost anywhere, anytime, in playing and listening to each other; laughter is infectious and tickling games create solidarity; when in doubt, a hug is never a bad idea.” There is so much wisdom in this. You are wise beyond what you give yourself credit for.
  
• You are often a truly amazing parent and spouse. You are always willing to work on becoming better, which is perhaps the more impressive attribute. Please give yourself credit for being willing to change and to grow.
  

Postus Interruptus

I start so many more posts than I finish, or even attend to, and I want to be okay with that. My blog shouldn’t add a layer of obligation to my life- it’s supposed to be a helpful, joyful thing.

That said, let’s see if I can sneak some snippets of stuff into here:

•I missed my nephew’s birthday- he turned 9, and I haven’t acknowledged it in any way. I haven’t ever sent last year’s gift to him, either. I am so disorganized!

•I love my “husband”- he is a real gift in my life.

•I miss my husband- I wish I could recall more of his quirks to mind more readily. Yesterday, as Rob was leaning over the bathroom sink in shorts, no top and socks and slippers, I caught sight of his mid-section first. The body shape, posture, texture and pattern of hair, all said Willis to me- it was very disorienting to see Rob’s face on Willis- the mind is a funny creature that way. The socks and slippers were clearly characteristic of Rob, but the problem my poor, tired mind cannot solve is whatever would Willis have been wearing on his feet if it had been him? I absolutely cannot remember or picture it. And, much as I love Rob, I sometimes ache for one more hug with Willis- I love(d) him, too, and I never did get a final hug with him (lying my head on his lifeless chest in the trauma room doesn’t count).

•When I hug Rob, I get a powerful and profound feeling of “rightness” and “calmness”. We are clearly meant to be together, or at least, we clearly belong to each other. I love that a hug with Rob can often put my world to rights- how cool is that? (And Annie, just like with you and your Rob, it goes waaay beyond hugging. Note the title of this post? Bet you can figure out what interrupted this particular piece a couple of nights back... ;))

•The other day, I left Sam in the boy’s wear department, happily picking out some summer gear for himself, while Sydney and I were in the girl’s wear, a couple of aisles over. Turns out, Sam wasn’t actually paying attention to the fact that I had moved on, found himself alone, and got worried. He saw a cashier in the jewelry department, and thought about asking her for help, but was feeling a little too shy to go up to her. He took himself behind a rack of clothes, talked to himself reassuringly, then went up to her to ask for help. I was paged to pick up my “package” in the jewelry department, which I did with alacrity, and was able to greet my not-quite-grownup boy with a big hug. I’m so proud of him for overcoming his shyness and doing the right thing, and not panicking. I still believe that “free-range” (with shades of “attachment”) parenting is absolutely the best style for me, and my kids do okay with it, too, which is an added bonus.

•Sydney is a drama queen, and she is little, and the only girl in the family- this causes her issues sometimes:

•I think Girl wrote this: “The thing about recurring issues is that the better you get at spotting them, the better they get about subterfuge.  The same issues crop up constantly in our lives, in different guises, and sometimes it takes awhile to realize you’re dealing with the same old thing for the nth time.” I absolutely love this, which explains so exactly where I am in my life, and why I am talking with my therapist again. Tardiness, procrastination, avoidance, insecurity, self-doubt are constant issues, from childhood, and as I stand on the crest of my meno-pausal wave, I’d like to tame these issues a little. I’d like them to be familiar companions, rather than looming, scary monsters on the path beside me, as I walk/scamper/plod/skip down the road that is my life.

•Pretty soon, I’m gonna write my inner child a letter, as a part of the process of de-mystifying the terrors residing in my psyche. I know I can take really good care of folks, whether they be 5 or 41, two-legged or four-legged, and by writing that letter, explaining and demystifying some of the terrifying experiences of childhood, and reassuring her/myself that I can and will always be present with a calm, warm voice and a hand to hold in the dark, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to turn the monsters in my background into pussycats at the garden gate.

•I’ll probably write a loving letter to Willis, too. His death was sudden and traumatic, if not entirely unexpected, and although I have worked through many issues and talked to him a great deal since his death, we all know how extraordinarily powerful the written word is as a way to move through emotion and come to a place of love, light and understanding.

•I’d better go get my car- they’ve changed this parking lot into a 30-minute limit, and I don’t need another ticket, do I?

Random Rantings

I want to be in charge of my life, dammit- time to stop being late all the time!

My therapist called- I’m going back there next week- maybe we can get the tardiness/insecurity better controlled this time round.

They destroyed a dam, and drowned the dad beaver in Surrey- beavers are endangered here, and this reappearance of beavers so close to an urban setting should have been a good thing, no? There was a “danger” of “flooding”- wtf? There were wild creatures returning to co-mingle with us after we as a species had abused them as a species most heinously for centuries. Death by drowning? Goddamn people anyway!

I haven’t said recently that I hate that Willis is dead. I do hate that. But. I know he’s gone, never coming back. This is my life and his death, not the other way around. I WILL NOT give up on learning out to extract the juices from my life because of adversity, no matter how intense. I will not give that message to my children. I will not.
What I will do is remember Willis, be gentle with myself, channel as many of his finest qualities as I can... I will whine as little as I possibly can, especially about things I can change, and about things I can’t change (Serenity Prayer, anyone?). I am so proud of my widda friends who have seized the brass ring and embraced life again, and so impatient with those who continue to see their immense loss as giving them the right to whine indefinitely. Yes, this sucks: none of us deserved this, it is a profound loss and it is completely disorienting to lose one’s spouse and partner, BUT, our job as inhabitants of this beautiful planet is to GROW, cherish, be thankful, do less harm, honour the planet’s other inhabitants with our thoughts, words, feelings and actions. (I may be ranting, here, and I’m gonna blame PMS and the damn beaver story.)

I met a young widow today at the clinic- 3-4 weeks out. Her cat is sick, she has no $ and her world is shattered. Do all you widdas remember how disorienting that time was? I barely do remember, but I know that the first few weeks were astonishingly raw, and the disbelief was huge. This girl surprised me by saying that she was grateful to hear that there was light at the end of the tunnel, and that things would get better. I guess that makes me “vintage” and able to mentor someone newer than me on the widow-road. It’s an odd feeling, and I hope that I truly can help her a little, if only by example and compassion, and that my tendency to impatience, as noted above, will not scar her more. Less than a month? Ouch. A very painful time, and I like to think I have all the patience in the world for her, and that I will not put her on a timeline (which I hated to have done to me).

Okay, enough ranting. Time for family and supper and joy again.

The goings on, and an out-of-my-comfort-zone challenge

Rob's not been feeling well - 2 days now of being really sorta pitiful. Maybe it was the mussels, which nobody else ate, on account of their being nasty little things. Our Sunday clean up was even more necessary because "Rob the invalid" had not been doing his usual stirling job of keeping things clean and organized. We’d absolutely fall apart without that man. 

The kids (all 4 of them, plus an overnight houseguest of Sam's) were all corralled into attending to their chore chart duties - I might as well have been asking them to eat dung for the amount of protesting I got. In the end, the house got to look alright, even in the kitchen. Since the kitchen is Rob's purview, the kids complained mightily about the “extra” chore, but I managed to explain that a kitchen piled high with 2 days worth of detritus, dishes and debris was going to make supper a non-event. They all pitched in, and the kitchen looked half way decent when we left to go out for supper (as if I was actually gonna cook; I cleaned - isn’t that enough?). I left Rob wrapped in a kid’s blanket in a sorry bundle on the love seat- I think he was grateful for the reduction in volume at home. Poor guy- at least he

 seemed okay on his birthday the day before.

We did 3 birthday parties this weekend- I guess we’re into that season again. Sometimes I wish Sam wasn’t such an easy-going, likable kid; maybe we’d have to deal with fewer birthday party invitations then.

Sam’s overnight guest (because what Rob really wanted on his birthday was another child- not!) was Evan, who’s a likable kid. He and Sam do pretty well together. They met at after-school care a couple of years ago; we see less of Evan since he moved to another school. Evan's mum called me last minute to arrange a play date, which is a good way to arrange things with me, ‘cause if they’re arranged too far

 in advance, I’ll likely forget, or double book or something; in an aside, she let me know that she and her husband, Evan's dad, are separating. She says it’s mutual and amicable and that they have just fizzled out. Over the rest of the summer, they are going to take turns living in a suite, alternating with living in the house with the kids. I'm shocked and saddened about the whole turn of events- they seemed like a particularly “together” couple- enjoying each other’s company, doing interesting things together. I am having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that two people who are still “good friends” would choose to split up- I just don’t get it. I'm sure there’s more to the story, and it’s not my place to judge, and if I ever have a relationship (other than with Pentax) that lasts more than 3.5 years, maybe I’ll understand, too. but still...

Sunday's birthday party was for Jacob. His mum Carol is a beautiful person, inside and out. She’s one of my favourite people. Jacob's dad is also gorgeous, so Jacob and his younger sister are gorgeous kids, too. Tragedy struck this family when Jacob was 10 months old. His dad was a semi-pro soccer player, and while leaping up to head the ball, was headed in the head by an opponent. Brain injury ensued, and at points during his subsequent hospitalization, he wasn’t expected to survive. He has survived, and in some ways has made a miraculous recovery, but he is definitely brain-injured. Carol had been finding her husband’s increasingly erratic and abusive behaviour more and more difficult to deal with, and she could see how damaging the abuse was for the kids. Eventually, this past winter, she made the heart-breaking decision to have her husband moved back to his mother’s house, which has been viewed as a betrayal of sorts by most of his family. Apparently, life is less stressful at home, but Carol still struggles with the guilt, logistics and ongoing trauma of the original injury, and how it has brought such a brutal disruption to all their lives. I have the barest glimmer of how painful her life has been, and I wish I could do more for her. She was first in line with support when Willis died, and I feel a kinship with her, in a way, and I love her and her kids, and her husband, too, although I don’t know him well. Carol did okay at the birthday party- gracious and gentle, as always. She, like a widow, is coming from a place not so much of “you’re so strong and brave”, but of sheer necessity. She absolutely has no choice but to keep her ship afloat, because her kids are on that ship. Necessity doesn’t preclude desperation, and I see that in her, too. I am going to have to challenge myself to make an absolute commitment to have her kids out here soon, so she can get some down time of some sort.

Maybe this’ll be my opportunity to push myself out of my comfort zone: I really do avoid making and keeping commitments. I absolutely “fly by the seat of my pants” in social situations, household habits, parenting, at work. It’s easier, more familiar, more comfortable this way. Rob is astonishingly regular. I doubt that natural disaster (and certainly not a disaster of a wife) could put him off his regular routine. This is both inspirational and annoying. Alright, there it is, out there in public: my goal for the next week(?) (maybe a day; I’m scared already about this idea) is to make commitments and stick to them, and to make and stick to a routine. Specifically, how about if I get up on time for the rest of the week, get out of the house on time, get Sam to school on time and make a date with Carol to have her kids over here- all this week. That seems doable to me. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s something a little more light-hearted to finish up with:


My kids are so totally adorable!










Some Pampas Grass, up close:





Can you identify this plant?





My sweetie, being hunky, adorable and capable- I do love this man!



This post has rambled all over the place, hasn't it? It rambled kind of unexpectedly into a post I'm gonna use for Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm- Comfort Zone. Writing can be such a funny thing.

It'd be great to be blogging for fun

I subscribe to 30 feeds on bloglines, and I love my daily reads there. I’d like to participate more. I have many ideas, often inspired by other writers. I have images, and I sometimes have the words to describe them. What I don’t seem to have is the patience to record and transcribe my ideas through a keyboard. I am an aural, verbal, intuitive type, and I am impatient with the sloth of my ability to articulate myself.

I also have a great deal of trouble focusing on a single task at a time (which makes me an erratic driver, at best). I am currently sort of watching The Andromeda Strain, while writing, listening for my daughter’s nightmares, providing a cushion for the cat (why don’t they make cat-top computers; who has a lap anymore?). I have a dozen thoughts vibrating through my head, all wanting to be heard.

I battle my latent insecurities on many fronts (tardiness, separation anxiety, relationship sabotage, overly permissive parenting, over-dependence on goodwill), and have come to realize that I will always have a core of insecurity. I spend too much unproductive time on the computer.

Dangnabbit, this wasn’t meant as a piece of self-flagellation. I had intended to state my intention to write littler bits, snippits of journaling and diarizing, and post them more frequently. I don’t need to attend to the overwhelmingly big pieces of writing in my head; I (and my handful of readers too, perhaps) may be very well served by a frequent (daily?) expression of a few sentences of nothing much. Who knows? Maybe the therapy inherent in writing might actually move me along on my psychic, psychologic journey. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

And in the balance...

Syd’s daycare has a late pick-up policy, which includes fines, and after 5 lates in 6 months, immediate expulsion from daycare. We are at 4 lates, and are actively seeking another daycare. This has been a pretty big downer for the last two days since we got our “probationary’ notice- lots of tears and angst on my part, and lots of feeling shamed and blamed- score one for the dark side.

Rob and I have been together for a year. This is our “anniversary” weekend. We had each arranged 3 days off, and I had vague ideas of a low-key celebration of this life-altering event. Rob, it turns out, had no such vagueness. He arranged for our babysitter to come over, his boys to be at their mother’s and for us to go to the world-class Sooke Harbour House resort, overnight, without children. The man is a wonder and a blessing, and we agree that we have reaped a well-deserved reward from life in finding each other- score one for the bright side.

After our exquisite supper at the resort, we were deciding whether to use the oceanside hot tub, the fireplace or that big, inviting bed first when my cell phone rang. There was Sam, in tears, barely discernible through a fading cell signal. The kids were both still up, missing mum, filled with over-tired, late-night anguish about mum being away (is it because I’m a widowed parent that I imagine they fear that I won’t return?). I did what I could to be reassuring over the phone, and suggested that they could sleep in my bed while I was gone for the night. Let’s hope that that suggestion doesn’t backfire... The phone call was disconcerting, which would seem to be another point for the dark side.

As I write this, though, I am relaxed from the hot tub, at peace from the sound of the surf outside, full from a delicious meal, warmed by a crackling fire and snuggled with a man who loves me (in spite of my forays into the dark side), and who wants to spend the rest of his days celebrating life with me. The balance looks pretty healthy from here.