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.

Time

I have tried in recent weeks to operate from a position that time and time-keeping are an arbitrary human/western concoction, and that I am actually in tune with universal rhythms and that it is okay to be that way. Unfortunately, my attitude is not making me on time, nor is it currently helping me to be okay with being late. Problem is, I’m up against a pretty big societal more, and I need to meet some minimum requirements for timeliness, or deal with the consequences of tardiness. I guess that’s my goal: to be on time, when I need to be, or be okay with being late, and accept the consequences of a society that says it is not okay to be late. 

There are two circumstances where I have particular trouble with being okay with being late. These are Sam’s school drop-off and Sydney’s daycare pick-up. The rest, I am either okay with the consequences of being late, or I will deal with those situations later.

I hope that exploring the history, emotionality and psychology around my tardiness, in story form, may get me to some peace and possibly changed action behaviour, as well as changed thinking/feeling behaviour. Ready?

There is a girl-child in a meadow, exploring. She is perfectly content. Time is immaterial, because she is busy with the world around her. Birds and butterflies dance in the sunshine, flowers buzz and wave, the trees are telling stories. The colours are vibrant and welcoming. The meadow is warm and safe. All the animals passing by are friends, and many of them choose to stay and rest in her lap, or at her feet. This is a happy place and a happy time.

There are no interruptions or demands here. Hunger seldom intrudes, and tiredness is resolved by napping peacefully. Boredom is a long way off. Loneliness is an occasional visitor, and may signal a time to leave the meadow for a bit.

The world outside this meadow is not at all pretty. It is, in fact, downright ugly. There is anger and violence and noise and chaos. There is no time for exploring or questions or safety. Everything is rushed and threatening or indifferent. There is no room for caring; there is too much judgement and not enough compassion. Why would she ever want to leave the meadow and be in the noisy, dirty, gray place?

Clearly, she would not choose to leave the meadow very often. The sad reality is that children are not allowed to make all their own choices all the time; sometimes, choices are made for them. Sometimes, when the choices are made with compassion and grace and gentleness and presented without rancour and stridency, other people’s choices are not so bad, and leaving the meadow is ok. Especially if the meadow remains to visit another time.

Problem is, often, choices are made for children, for girl-child in particular, and these choices are not made gently and are not presented with compassion. Sometimes, girl-child is wrenched from the meadow, not by force, but with violence none-the-less. Sometimes, the consequences of refusing to leave the meadow, in a timely manner, under duress, are shattering.

It takes a lot of uninterrupted meadow time to make up from being wrenched from the meadow without permission, at someone else’s beck and call, without recognition that the meadow exists and is important.

The meadow is a special place, and girl-child has the right to be there. She needs to be there to refresh, grow, re-energize. Without the meadow, girl-child may die. Perhaps girl-child does die a little inside every time she leaves the meadow, without knowing whether she can come back, without knowing whether the meadow will even exist when she does come back.

The meadow is special; girl-child is special. Meadow time is special and necessary, and girl-child’s time there should be honoured. Not everyone is invited to have a meadow, and those that do should be honoured, not ridiculed, for having a meadow.

Girl-child should not be made to leave the meadow with the threat of violence, nor without permission or acknowledgement that she has been in the meadow and may need time to say good-bye to the meadow.

“I need you to finish up what you’re doing (even if it appears to be nothing), because I need us to leave/go somewhere/change activities in 5 minutes. I will not stand over you during that 5 minutes to insist that you stop your activity in my way. I will not hurt you if you do stop, nor will I hurt you if you don’t stop. I will try very hard to come to your level if you have not finished your activity in 5 minutes, and I will lower, not raise my voice, to help you change activities. If you need more than 5 minutes, I will try to be patient, and remember that I do not have all the answers and that my agenda is not the only one of importance in our relationship.”

Girl-child has the right to be. Girl-child is. I choose to honour girl-child for having a meadow. I will do my utmost to remember to leave the meadow gently, and to ask girl-child and her cohorts (offspring?) to leave the meadow gently. I will spend time in the meadow wisely. I will acknowledge to myself when I am in the meadow and I will feel the joy and the peace of the meadow. I will avoid living in a perpetual state of fighting to stay in the meadow without appreciating what it offers. When I do not remember to appreciate the meadow, and get lost in nothingness which is not refreshing, I will be gentle with myself. When I let myself BE, truly BE in the meadow, I will feel calm and refreshed afterwards. I will enjoy my time in the meadow. I will choose to spend time in the meadow. I will protect my time in the meadow, and I will remind myself not to squander time in the meadow. I will let writing and exercise stand for time in the meadow. I will come back to the meadow soon.

(YOU GO GIRL!)

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.