A Little Sunshine on a Damp and Cold Day

On a day that is overcast and gray in a country suffering from a recession that fills all news sources with blurbs that are as dark as the skies outside, the Today show aired a wonderful little vignette that lifted my spirit and my lips while making a few tears paint my cheeks. Forty years ago, this baby's family was killed in an apartment fire. Since she was an early teen, she has wondered about this man who was kind enough to give her his breath of life, as her stepmother reminded her. So she went on a search and finally found him.

My daughter, who is 25 and still so naive in many ways, has had a very privileged life. She grew up in the military so was not taught prejudice. She travelled the globe living in far off, exotic places and was raised both here and abroad so she does not comprehend racial hatred. So therefore, as this news piece was airing and I was as still as a cat in a room full of rockers, she was quite unaware of the significance of the story. She could only see life being given to a child. What is not depicted clearly above is that the child is black.

At a time when racial tension in the country was at it's peak, this white, Irish Catholic firefighter from Boston, an area that was rife with tension and hatred between blacks and whites, held this small negro infant in his huge, gentle, yet capable hands and kissed her with the breath she so desperately needed in order to survive. That is the miracle, that is the heart of the story, that is why we have hope. I would like to think that any firefighter would have had the honor and compassion to do what he did, but having been alive during that time period in history as well as having highly educated extended family members that hate black people just because they are black, I can imagine there are some that would rather have let her die then place their own mouth upon her. But not Firefighter Carroll who did what he knew was best. And thank heavens above he did.

I don't know if it took forty years to find him, or that long to get the nerve to find him, but find him she did. And the reunion was special and heartfelt...and by the looks of it, her children have found new members to add their extended and extending family. Blessed may they all be.

Remembering the past

Have you ever noticed how you can be doing the most mundane chore and this colorful memory comes flying out of nowhere implanting itself in your mind's eye where it remains, lifelike, vibrant and constant for a long time? Sometimes it leads to other memories, just as silly but just as emotionally searing. Sometimes those little nuances of time past, the little traits that one takes advantage of are the things that are missed the most when a person is no longer in your life. Licking q-tips before cleaning an ear, biting a lip in concentration, absentminded touches of a pinky as reassurance of someone's presence. And you wonder if thoughts of you fall into memories of those who have gone away to live distant and separate lives. Does that someone ever get a glimpse of something you did that was insignificant but so special? Does it glue itself into their memory bank making them catch their breath? Does it matter?

My father always said there were three stages in life; the first stage is when you are worried about what everyone thinks about you. The second is when you don't care if they think about you or not. And the third is when you realize no one was actually thinking about YOU to begin with. Thinking about you and remembering you....are they so different?

Just wanted to see his precious face on my blog. This is my grandson, Mikey. He is a ball of fire! He turned one on the 7th and the doctor said he was more like a three year old. It's Kyle all over again, size-wise. 32 inches long, 32 pounds. I will say my arms are getting toned!

Relationships: Part 2

The relationships between parents and their children are beyond words, traversing the emotional roads that sometimes have guardrails, but most times just rest on the precipice of a deep dark abyss in which our hopes, dreams and good intentions cloud the views of what has happened and what will come to pass. When children are small, we are so proud. Look what we have produced. We are godlike in our skills of creating human perfection. Then we begin to mold them, forming their beings with creative hands and open minds so they will become what we visualize, nay fantasize, to be the best example of human kind that ever walked the earth, eradicating those flaws we find in ourselves and perfecting the qualities we recognize to be redeeming. And God sits back and laughs! What entertainment we narcissistic characters are!

I have two children, brought forth in the world in the usual manner. Though married, I believe I did the majority of work raising them and probably did the most damage as well. My eldest, a girl child (and believe me, growing up with girls, THAT was the last thing I wanted) was the most beautiful, most incredible little creature with all of her fingers and toes and these enormous cornflower blue eyes surrounded by camel's lashes. What a tiny bit of perfection I had.

As she grew I taught her to be tolerant, animal friendly, artistic, open-minded, loving, understanding and good. I tried to teach her forgiveness but I did not teach her guilt as I thought I had learned that to the nth degree and didn't really like the instruction myself, so I skipped it. Little did I know, at the time, that one must feel guilt in order to experience forgiveness. So, unfortunately, that was pretty much a moot lesson altogether. I taught her not to lie by washing her mouth out with soap if she didn't tell the truth. I showed her that throwing sand in the face of another child is not a nice experience by throwing the sand in her own face. I asked her not to point at people who looked or acted differently than ourselves, and I instilled in her the values that I still hold dear, I think...to accept people for who they are and not to judge them by the standards of others. So strong was my lesson that she morphed into that which I preached should be accepted. She has multicolored hair (today... she was completely bald last spring), she has just had a new tattoo done on her wrist, she wears metal in places I'm sure I don't want to know about, she befriends people who will never grace the cover of Forbes or amount to much (socially) unless they win the really BIG lottery and she loves heavy metal, metallic, head-banging, violent-languaged music...oh, and she has the mouth of a sailor (like her mother).

And as my heart hurts, I question all the mistakes I made in motherhood; and as I feel the guilt of failure as a parent, God sits up there and laughs at me. Sometimes I can hear Him snorting as He doubles over in hysterics. "Yes," he snickers. "You have produced that same person that you so pompously taught your daughter to 'tolerate'. Are you two-faced in your beliefs? Are you a bigot?" Those lessons of accepting all people for who they are and not by what they may look like or where their background may have originated are now standing firmly in my living room showing me her new "ink". And I beg God, please show me the humor; this will be much easier to take if I can laugh about it too. But He answers, NOT YET.

My son is now 17 and on the verge of leaving the nest, maybe. I didn't push him as hard as his sister under the advise of others. In hindsight I wish I hadn't listened but "boys are so different from girls, they learn on different levels and at different times". And besides, Kyle was just so darned different than anyone I'd come across, any of the other children and he, well, Kyle reminded me of me. He was my daydreamer and rather than reprimand him about it, I fostered that "creativity" in him. Dreaming was wonderful, some great creative minds are dreamers, IE Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, um, Steven Spielberg...! And Kyle loved to help me in the kitchen so I gladly allowed him that opportunity. He was not athletic and once we moved to an area of the world where the weather wasn't conducive to outside play, we stopped trying to make him participate in physical games. And now I have an overweight giant on my hands, whose heart breaks at a wrong word, who still daydreams instead of doing his homework, and who has made the success of failure an art form. My young man who is kind, good, gentle, tolerant, sweet, and different from all the other boys because he is gay. And God laughs harder and I shake my head and wait for the punchline.

Today my children who are not really children (17 and 22) are angry with me. As a single mother I lose patience sometimes as I feel overwhelmed by it all. I rue my decisions and shake my fist at God, I yell at the injustice of being the only parent carrying the sole responsibility of these "wrong choices" taken in their youth, I dream of running away as their father did and I ask myself why I couldn't have done it first...then I stop and I realize God is no longer laughing as my words have hurt him as deeply as they have hurt me. Then I remember the report card where the D was pulled up to a B, and I see the excitement in the new art of ink that shines in the brilliant eyes, and I take a deep breath, cry a few tears and remind myself that I have produced two wonderful children. No, they may not be the adults I had envisioned as I held them in my arms. Their experiences in life didn't preclude the shaping of home-coming queens, or geniuses with full-ride scholarships to Yale for there was no participation in the high school booster club and no debate team. There were no piano recitals and no football games.

What they had, though, was love, tolerance, respect, and a plethora of colorful and worldly experiences that will eventually shape them into the incredible adults that they ARE becoming...that is, if I don't kill them first. Then I hear God laughing again, and I finally get the joke!

Relationships: Part 1

It has been one hell of a week, emotionally; a real roller coaster ride. This just exacerbates the typical drama that seems to adhere to me like metal to magnets. And I am so tired of the drama. Dealing with it on a daily basis is the most exhausting job I have. I used to think of myself as a helpful friend, listening to others as they sort out their problems, giving them a sounding board, dishing out advise (whether wanted or not), and just trying to be there for others when their own lives seemed to overwhelm them. I realized that I was nothing but a beast of burden, and probably not at all helpful to anyone in the long run. On top of that, I was damaging myself, surrounding myself with the problems of others and therefore making myself incapable of solving my own. Maybe I felt that if I took on this baggage I wouldn't need to be responsible for my own, but whatever I was attempting all I had accomplished was to become a drowning victim of the drama I had created. My psychologist asked "Why is it you feel you are always surrounded by drama? Answer that question and you will be able to take the steps to eliminate the problem." That is what I have been trying to ask and answer for quite awhile, but it was truly brought home this week.

I will say that I took a much needed reprieve after quitting my job. I didn't answer the phone and I did little else except to clean the house and do laundry, shovel snow and cook, and surf the Internet for neat dumb junk, read and send email, and vegetate. Yes, this became my time to be lazy and self-absorbed, to allow others to deal with their own issues and to allow me the time to, well, heal. It was wonderfully therapeutic and I was able to shut my mind off to all the little bites that life, in general, seemed to have taken from me for the past several months, nay years.

I think the hardest part of being a single parent is the single bit, especially when you've never been a "single" unit in your whole entire life. All of the sudden you alone have the sole responsibility of everything. There is no one to share in the decision-making, the financial burdens, or emotional tribulations that come along in this day-to-day life. When one is used to having another body there, be he supportive or otherwise, the onus of taking it on alone can be devastatingly overwhelming. The lives you moulded as a couple have now come to depend upon you and only you. And maybe those decisions that were made as a couple would not have been made by you, as a single, but still, you have the sole responsibility for the outcome of these "coupled" decisions. And sometimes you can feel that no matter what you do, no matter what you try to accomplish, no matter how good the intentions, somehow it all turns to shit and you are left facing the failure of a marriage, the failure to produce productive and responsible offspring, and the failure to maintain friendships that you have held so close to your heart for so many years. And over time these "personal" failures seem to glom together to become such a form of insurmountable guilt and grief, the core of that ever dreaded psychological, dysfunctional drama that you have allowed yourself to become.

I trudged through two bi-polar emotional experiences this week. After having a full seven plus days of mental recuperation and the week of beginning the process of creating a menu for "the inn", I received an invitation from Dick (who was overseas at the time) to a Valentine Party at his house on Saturday. Now, you have to understand that around Thanksgiving, the neighbors were at Dick's house at the time one of them asked WHEN (not if) we were going to get engaged. Dick laughed then blew us all away by saying we'd announce our engagement at a Valentine's Day Party. Before we could all get excited, he stipulated that he just wasn't sure what year it would be. In the meantime, he asked about my preference of rings and also spoke with our children about future plans of spending our lives together. But that was weeks ago. In actuality, I thought we would use this night to announce, not the engagement, but the final closure of the property in Staunton, VA. Unfortunately, the purchase of the inn died it's last death on Tuesday afternoon. Now, if I have learned anything in this life, it is not to expect the expected. On Monday night while I was making dinner, Dick and Kyle ran and errand and when they came back Dick told me that Kyle said we could get married, but he didn't say when. (I get teased like this all the time, but this really felt different.) And so I was quite thrilled, very humbled, and incredibly overwhelmed when Dick asked for my hand two days later, on Valentine's day...no ring, no bent knee, but a lovely valentine card with the words "will you marry me, please" carefully inscribed inside. Which brings me back to the Valentine Party invitation.

My very best friend of so many years has slammed the door on our relationship, placing the blame of the demise solely at my front stoop. I do know that I am at some fault. I have not called as often as I should. I use the Internet as my main form of communication. And I have segregated myself from others but not intentionally. Before I quit my job, I found I had no time anymore. Every minute of every second of every day was filled with something or someone and I had no time for me. And I was so tired and exhausted and spirit-broken that the path I saw ahead of me was nothing but more of the same, a dark hole that I had managed to dig myself into with no chance of escape. So, I quit my job, spent days resting and reevaluating, and felt deep in my soul that something good was going to come to pass. And this is no excuse, but when my invitation came to the Valentine's party, I sent it out to friends and family across the board with a little aside that Dick might be asking me to marry him at the party. I should have called Elaine and told her. I shouldn't have sent her an en masse email. I should have phoned, period. She wrote me back in the afternoon and her reply was very presice. Lose her email address like I've lost her phone number. I felt as though I'd been kicked in the gut. Having her cut that last thread that I had with my past life at a time when I was just getting the chance to reweave old threads with new, well, I was not prepared for the loss. But there it was. The End written in big letters across this chapter of my life.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this mental evaluation...drama. So, maybe one can't prevent it, per Se, but one can make it less "dramatic". Maybe her ending our friendship was a way that she could purge her own drama. Maybe her blaming me was a cover for her own withdrawal and a way to alleviate her own guilty feelings about our "break up". Or maybe it was none of these things, but something else completely different that I, in my ignorance, refuse to acknowledge. But whatever it was, and as much as it hurts my heart, I will abide by her wishes. I will close that chapter of my life and weave tomorrow with all new threads. I will continue to pray for her health as well as hope for a renewal of a new and better friendship, but I will not hold my breath, I will not rant and rave, and I will not beg for forgiveness for something I did not do intentionally. I will instead sadly yet proudly and with a positive spirit walk down this new road I have chosen, taking my own baggage but leaving the drama of others on the curb where it was given to me. I will not pick it up anymore. I may have the strength, but have not the will. It is enough for me to care for the baggage of my immediate family when their own arms get to tired for the load, and they will help me carry mine.

My words to Elaine will always be that I love you. I will miss you my friend, my sister, my guardian angel. I do not think I will truly be the same ever again, but I will survive this as I have survived so much before. And in the end, the better person I will become will be due to the magic that we spun with our laughter and our tears. For that I will always be grateful.

Update 6/21/07: This is now all water over the damn. After many months of stewing in our own juices, Elaine and I are back on track as friends will be once they stop being hard-headed because we sure as hell aren't hard-hearted. Dick sent me to Utah to see her because he got sick and tired of me complaining all the time. Thank you my darling Richard! It was a mini-vacation too long in coming that was way too short. But Elaine and Frank are coming to see us in our new digs so all is good!