I don’t know how she did it. How she survived losing the love of her life. Not once but twice. First to the bottle, then to cancer. Maybe three times even- to blindness then booze then illness. The sequence does not matter really but that it all happened.

Before the elephant in the room came to live with us, life was happier. We laughed a lot and had family adventures; we ate meals together at the same table and played board games; we did chores and went to the drive in and got ice cream cones. We got tucked in tight and kissed good night. The house was filled with love. My parents made that for us. Their love made our family.

We all experienced the same situation- my Mom, sister and I- but in entirely different ways. My Mom has asked me when I am going to be past all this. I believe her intentions come from a place of worry and concern because she’s my Mom and she hates to see me unhappy or in pain and maybe she wishes she could take it all away and make it better. Maybe she feels guilt too because she was the grown up and I was the kid. My Mom and I are close and I love her fiercely but there are certain things she and I have never been able to talk out even when we’ve tried. We are a lot alike even if she might deny it. I see myself now as a version of her when she was my age minus certain life circumstances. This complicates our communication. I don’t talk a lot about my Mom here because, well, she is alive and she reads my blog. Frankly, it’s easier to talk about someone who is not living. No rebuttal, you know?

So how does a person survive watching the man she loves stop choosing life? That’s the thing that I can’t figure out. After bouncing from one grief coping mechanism to the next, how do you come to peace? I suppose I wonder this because I can’t fathom it. Either allowing myself to love someone that deeply or watching the man I love leave. Maybe in our own way we all tried to save him. At age 38 or age 16 or age 13, we all tried to love him enough to fix him. And almost 18 years later we still have pieces of it to sort out. Isn’t that a big part of why we’re all in therapy?

How do you watch your partner take up space in the home you created but no longer participate in life? How do you talk to a drunk, depressed, passive aggressive? How do you take care of your kids, the mortgage, the bills, your full time job with him passed out in the chair and still manage to make dinner? I’m a grown up now and I think about how hard that must have been for my Mom. All those pressures. All that heartache. All those choices to make with no help.

She did the best she could.

I’ve spent my whole life afraid that I might find the kind of love my parents had and that it would turn out the way their love story did. A man lying in a bed breathing his last breaths way across town as two teenagers cry in their childhood home knowing that the woman driving frantically to get to him would not make it in time to say good-bye.

Maybe that wasn’t the end. But it’s what has stayed with me. And I’m trying to make my peace with it.

“Because you thought that you could outrun sorrow/Take your own advice/Thunder and lightening gets you rain/Run an airtight mission, a Cousteau expedition/To find a diamond at the bottom of the drain/A diamond at the bottom of the drain …” -Magpie to the Morning, Neko Case

While everyone seems to be signing up for the write-every-single-day NaBloPoMo, I have decided to do the opposite. And I never was much of a rebel.

I’ve found myself far too angsty, angry, pent up, depressed, irritable and sad as of late and when I come here, I can’t seem to give voice to it. I feel a pressure to post for everyone BUT me. I feel like I can’t talk about the things that are weighing on me in a public forum. Why yes, I do have boundaries and sometimes I actually do keep my mouth shut.

See? Even that sounded bitchy. I can’t seem to escape it.

I blame an emotional growth spurt. At least, I hope to hell that’s what’s going on with me and not that I’ve turned into an asshole. I’m going to get my head on straight and I’m not going to write until I have something of consequence to say. Not until the feeling like I am drowning subsides. Not until I stop wanting to punch the world in the face.

So I was going to dress up as an owl but time got the best of me and I wasn’t able to make my costume. Then at work some of us decided WEDNESDAY (two days notice, mind you) that we should all come to work as female singers from the 1980’s.

Guess who I picked?

Your only hint: Think short hair.

Emulating

The Real Thing

I probably didn’t need to practice her dance moves. But of course I did.

Pictures forthcoming.

Here you go! We’ve got a Debbie Gibson, a Madonna, a Cyndi Lauper* and an Olivia Newton-John.

*Cyndia Lauper totally called in sick. That beyotch.

I’ve been inspired by my BlogHer roomies (and good pals!) to share my happy. And to make it into bullets thanks to another friend. Here goes nothing everything:

• Booking a New Year’s Eve getaway to the Oregon coast with very good friends.
• Needing new clothes in a smaller size.
• Quinoa.
• Telling people what I want and need without apologizing for it. (Sweet liberation!)
• Boots. (We’ve covered this repeatedly.)
• These rocking bands.
• My purple hallway.
• My nephew in his bat costume.
• The leaves changing.
• Rain thundering against my windows.
• Scarves.
• Tickets to go see Raphael Saadiq, Charli 2na & Gift of Gab, The Swell Season, and Blind Pilot.
• Hosting Thanksgiving at my apartment.

What about you?

But I can’t decide which is the bigger issue.

1) The fact that I keep taking self-portraits in public restrooms.

Or

2) The fact that I went from owning zero belts to owning six.

Exhibit A

Red Belt

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

White Belt

Okay so Exhibit B was taken in my own apartment bathroom. What is with me and the hand-on-hip pose? Also, I seem to want to wear heels or boots* all the time. WHO AM I?!

Hmm, I think I like her.

*I ordered new boots to replace the first ones that did not fit but they are on back order. Do I have bad boot karma or something?

If you’d like to read about my weekend adventure with Kaply, go visit her here.

It’s Sunday night and I’m settling in after a long day. I’ve just put on my pajamas and am making some butternut squash soup. Already I’d changed light bulbs, cleaned, did a walk through, scheduled appointments for repairs, did a lease signing with a new tenant, and vacuumed. I’ve attempted to thwart an electrical problem in one apartment to no avail.

So, of course, it would follow that the moment my bra comes off my phone would ring. It’s one of my tenants sounding rather desperate because he’s locked out of his apartment. As in, his doorknob will not turn.

I hang up the phone, turn down the soup, throw on presentable clothing and make my way with screwdriver in hand wondering how in the hell I am going to be able to fix this one. I act on gut instinct, not training. I use logic and sometimes, trusty MacGyver-like skills involving paper clips, gum and duct tape. I learned the duct tape thing from my Dad, actually. He’d duct tape anything that was broken.

He and his friend are standing there forlornly when I reach his floor. Upon inspection it seems the turning mechanism on the old knob is definitely stuck. I unscrew the panel thinking maybe we can lift the thing off and thus remedy the problem until a locksmith can come out the next day. But the panel was stuck on with the old lock that didn’t even have a key. Some of the apartment doors have original door knobs that contain the original lock in the same panel but with a new deadbolt lock installed right above. What happens is that over time the interior turning mechanism gets jammed meaning you can unlock the deadbolt but you can’t get the handle to turn and open the door.

Can you tell I don’t really know that much about locksmithing?

We decided we were desperate enough to get a hammer and wail at it hoping to knock it free. I let the tenant have first dibs to get his frustration out. On his second hit the door opened without even busting the knob off. Hallelujah! Now we’re in the apartment but uh oops, the knob still won’t turn even from the inside. I tried not to panic and joked, “Well if we’re stuck in here, I hope you have food cuz I haven’t had any dinner.” We managed to remove the panel from the inside and he grabbed some trusty duct tape to seal down the offending mechanism. He instructed us to always tape vertically, not horizontally. Know why? Because of Watergate.

That’s what he said. No foolin’.

In my last session with my therapist she said, “Those are just feelings; it is not an emergency.”

Excuse me?

So now not only are feelings not facts (thanks, Kaply) but they are also not an emergency. Hrmph. This is. . . weird. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around these new concepts. Do you mean other people are existing in the world and not letting their emotions rule their lives? Who are these people? I’ll tell you who they are: They are robots. Plain and simple.

Okay so obviously I’m joking. I have to joke or else I will lose my everlovingmind. This week is slamming me with opportunities for personal growth. The kind where I make hard decisions to stand up for myself, to look deep into what it is I believe I deserve and then. . . use my own voice to speak up about it. Does telling people what you want come easily to you? Because for all my opinions and pockets of confidence, when it comes to love I have the hardest time telling someone what I want and need. I could say something derogatory about how it’s no wonder I am single but that’s not very nice. And I need to be nice to myself. Why is it so difficult?

I am having trouble with the deserving part of all this. There is this story I have told myself for years and years. It’s about a girl who gives and gives and gives and people like her so she keeps giving because clearly that’s the measure of her worth. She gives outwardly but not inwardly. She only knows herself as a giver and to stay in her comfort zone, she continually seeks out receivers. She gives so much that one day she comes up empty because no one taught her how to replenish that which she  gave away.

I do not like this story.

So I am writing a new one.

I know that it is incredibly freeing to speak up about what you are feeling. To give voice to what you hold deep inside you. I think many people live their entire lives pushing emotions down or away and then wonder why they are unhappy or unfulfilled. I will not be one of those people.

“We don’t say everything that we could/So that we can say later/Oh, you misunderstood/I hold my cards up/Close to my chest/I say what I have to/And I hold back the rest/Cause someone you don’t know/Is someone you don’t know/Get a firm grip, girl/Before you let go/For every hand extended/Another lies in wait/Keep your eye on that one/Anticipate/If there’s anything I’ve learned/All these years on my own/It’s how to find my own way there/And how to find my own way back home…” -Anticipate, Ani DiFranco

“Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt- marvelous error!- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.”

- Antonio Machado

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver

I got this email yesterday from someone I used to care about but have long since only harbored ill will towards. The email made me furious and so I did what any hot head naturally does, I shot off some one liner response. But then the ex-Catholic in me needed to confess so I called up someone more level-headed than me.

Two guesses who that was.

Kaply listens to my bullshit with patience and utter amusement. I’m telling her what went down and she says, “Baby girl, you have every right to be mad. You have to get mad at the right people and stop holding it all in. It just eats you up inside.” (Paraphrasing.) I tried not to cry and said, “I don’t feel like I am worth it.”

And then I really started crying.

Fuck.

I have a really difficult time expressing my anger towards men. My dad was extremely passive aggressive and basically a doormat. You could yell in his face with all the rage in your soul and get only a snide remark made under his breath or total silence. Each equally infuriating. My anger never got to be heard and now as a grown up when I get mad at a guy, I feel irrational and talk myself out of saying anything because I assume they won’t want to hear it because I DO NOT MATTER ENOUGH TO BE HEARD.

I have no idea how to be appropriately angry but I tried. I sent another email expressing how I really felt, letting all the anger and sadness pour out and felt like it was the meanest email I’ve ever sent anyone. I called Kaply again to talk about what I wrote and since she is basically the Queen of Mean and one of my closest friends, I value her opinion. She didn’t think it was that mean. I still think I was mean FOR ME but there are meaner people who could send meaner emails. But you know what? I had every right to be angry and he deserved to hear about it. I don’t care if he “gets” it or even if he feels bad. I needed to say what I’d been carrying around inside of me for years. Because I matter. My feelings matter. And I don’t have to swallow my feelings for the sake of someone who stomped all over mine.

It felt pretty liberating.

So to the person who felt my wrath who is probably still reading my blog even though I specifically asked him not to anymore- that new me you so cunningly referred to in your email? Yeah, you just met her.

Lately, I’ve been looking outside myself for validation a bit too often than feels comfortable.

While it is natural to want people to like you or think you’re cool or awesome or made of win, you have to believe in yourself first and foremost. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. Maybe you know it but don’t put it into practice. I suffer from the same affliction, my friend.

I’ve also been thinking about dating. (See my first sentence.) I do not think I am ready to date. The idea ignites panic inside me. But I put up an ad on a dating site then proceeded to not pay to actually use the site rendering it basically useless. I keep getting emails alerting me to so-and-so who has emailed me or favorited me or whatnot but I can’t bring myself to pay the fee to find a date. Fear or logic? You be the judge.

I’ve noticed myself withholding my natural niceness towards certain people because internally I don’t feel like they “deserve” it. Though they have no idea they’ve done something to wrong me. Wrong being entirely relative to my own neurosis and subject to change with the wind. I’ve found myself actively ignoring people but it totally backfires because they don’t even NOTICE that I am ignoring them. Like I turn my phone on silent and no one calls. Ha. Brilliant. Way to show ‘em! How’s that passive aggressive tendency working for you, Sizz?

I talk a lot here about trying to be different. And I AM slowly shifting my way of being but it’s soooo slow. I am impatient. I want it yesterday. I read a line in a post that Abby shared out yesterday that totally struck me. It said: “What if we all chose to stop waiting for things to happen, and woke up to the fact that something is always happening, right now?” (Becca Faith Yoga)

Holy crap. YES! That’s it! I am not IN my life. I’ve been so wrapped up in trying to manipulate the time space continuum that I’ve completely lost sight of the here and the now.

Deep breath.

I am six months away from turning 37. I do not own a home. I am no one’s wife or partner. I have no children. I am just now learning to truly love myself. Depending on how you look at this list, I am a failure or I am a success. Who is to say? Only me.

I have been future tripping and it has been, well, tripping me up.  Sometimes it feels like time is racing forward. Every day I feel this pressure to go here, get this, do that right this instant, reply to so and so, finish that project, figure out the meaning of life, land the love of my life and somewhere under all the pressure actually enjoy life. How? How in the hell can we honestly enjoy the rushing and the pressures and the go, go, go? No wonder so many of us are cranky. The truth is- I thought I would have a lot of the accomplishments on my adult to do list checked off by this age. I am trying to make my peace with that and still feel good about this life. This life right now. In this moment. This is good. I am okay. What is my hurry?

“Oh how I wish I were a trinity/So if I lost a part of me/I’d still have two of the same to live/But nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal/As specks of dust were universal…” - Love’s Recovery, Indigo Girls