Tag Archives: appreciation

Early Morning Wishes

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Getting hit with an acute cancer diagnosis in the middle of the summer when I would much rather be selling amazing jewelry, meeting people, going out to dinner, and spending time with friends, has knocked me on my butt. My days right now, usually, involve sitting like a deity in my cozy bed, leaning against various sizes and configurations of pillows, with my trusty hot water bottle by my side.

This morning, I got up and grabbed Oscar and walked the loop around our property. I am feeling the need to mark time: to mark days that are passing so fast. How is it the 30th of August? This has been going on now for almost two months; two months ago, I sat at Blundt’s Pond in Lamoine with friends and felt…funny.

Nothing feels funny right now. This is one of the challenges of the moment: brave faces and all. I love when people come to see me and it it truly is sustaining me right now; this love force that I feel from friends and family. It is so amazing; I imagine it as this big pink fluffy cloud-spiderweb with little sparkles in it everywhere. It is carrying me through this most terrifying experience. I talked to my mom last night, asking if she is going to counseling to deal with this as no one knows what is going to happen and it has only been a few years since my dad’s death. I don’t think she quite got the message, but I will try again. It feels so odd to just not know what the next week, two weeks, a month, will bring. As my friend Meg said yesterday, this cancer feels angry and it moves fast. It is scary to feel there is a being in your body, totally out of your control, messing with your everything.

I have been wanting to write more here, on a more regular basis, but have been struggling with energy and focus. I am on a lot of pain medication, too, and the brain fog of opiates is real! We were staying with Erica and Aaron this week in Boston, and he got so upset when he saw the Fentanyl patches in my box of pharmaceuticals. I had to tell him not to be scared, that it is medicine when it is used properly. Fentanyl freaks people out. My pain specialist, Patrick the Angel, just upped my dose yesterday so I will have to really work on focusing from now on.

That’s something I can ask my care team to help with: how to keep focused on Life while treating for cancer. It is much harder than I had thought, this journey. Having cancer is unlike any other sickness I have ever had. It sucks!!! You heard it here first. But, people are super nice, more nice than usual, so that is a perk.

I miss creating things as that has fallen by the wayside lately. I have to get back into that groove, too, in whatever way is manageable. One of the chemo options given to me gives people almost-permanent neuropathy, and I said no because I am an artist and I must be able to create things; it is part of who I am. My friend Ferry wrote to me and said that even as Matisse lay dying and was not able to pick up a paintbrush, he had a team of mentees cutting paper, painting, and arranging pieces right to the end, and that would be me! I have to print that text out and put it somewhere.

There is so much ephemera, so much detritus of our little lives, lingering in corners, piles on tables, the back edges of bookshelves. What makes up a life?

Wishes –

  • my edema in my legs begins to go down and it becomes more comfortable to walk
  • my appetite stays pretty strong so i can have the calories i need to stay well
  • i am my kindest, best, most authentic self with everyone i meet

Gratitudes –

  • Cody – despite some hiccups along the way, he has become the most amazing caregiver and I would be lost without him
  • Friends and family who bring food so we don’t have to think about cooking, even though I miss cooking
  • The pink spiderweb-cloud of love that surrounds me everywhere!

Night Pains

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It is 4:20am and I am writing because I have been woken up with pain, again; this has happened the last three nights. I am tired, and I am sad, and I miss days without pain like this. And the thing is, I am used to chronic pain. I have had it since I was 18 and was first diagnosed with the autoimmune disease that makes illnesses like Lyme and anaplasmosis and shingles so much worse for me: agammaglobulinemia. The constant, chronic pain that I have learned to live with is in my hips and my hands. But this, this is different. I don’t know exactly how to describe it save it is a burning feeling emanating from the bones of my ribcage, lower back, and abdomen, as if there is something slow burning there, like charcoal. It wakes me up and begs for relief. I took one tylenol and two iibuprofen per instructions, and now I wait, as I took 2 gabapentin before I went to sleep.

The doctor’s assistant told me on Friday the pain could be the pain of the bacterial “die off” which I find gross and rude (on the part of the bacteria). My tummy is distended and I have had a stomach ache now everyday for three weeks. I can’t put any pressure on my stomach at all without feeling a lot of overwhelming pain. I feel terrible about this as it means it is hard to hold my husband’s body at night, and hard for him to hold mine, without causing discomfort. Pain is alienating on top of being sad and frustrating.

This is a short entry, written in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I do not know what to do. I surrender to this, but it does me no good as the surrender is simply because I am lost to this pain and lost to a real solution to it. During the day, I can manage it with medication, but at night, I try to sleep. For the first three weeks, it was like my body turned off at night and so did the pain, but no more. I hope we are reaching the end of this, if not, I am worried that we will have to do something different; more medication, different medication, more impactful drugs than what I want to do.

I said this the other day and still think it today; I am so thankful for modern medicine as if we were in the olden days without antibiotics and pain medication. I would be lost. But then I read that the first case of anaplasmosis was diagnosed in 1993 and wasn’t even fully identified til 2003, so it didn’t even exist in the olden days, thank god. I just googled Lyme disease and it has only been around since 1975 so, big whoop, these diseases are of the modern age! I am sure though there are lots of diseases that are hundreds of years old and are miserable without medication.

I am hoping the meds kick in so I can go back to sleep. This is a sad moment, but hopefully it is just a moment that will pass and I will remember it but not dwell on it.

Up Out of a Deep Well

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Waiting.

Time.

Circumstance.

Change.

The decade of the 40s has been interesting because I have experienced many moments of clear reflection. I like to think of them as plateaus of understanding; it’s as if my mind’s eye is climbing mesa after mesa, seeing clearly out to a horizon that, beforehand, I could not see.

Maine has always been a place where I am an artist, first. In Texas, I was always a teacher, first, and had been for years. I am beginning to appreciate the practicality of that choice of vocation, as i am really struggling here with earning a lot less than what I earned in Texas. But, I digress. As an artist, first, I am embarking on an adventure of making more work, finishing a writing project, and hoping to take over a friend’s longstanding artistic business. It is a time of big leaps, and I am waiting for my confidence to catch up.

The deep well, I think, is a series of experiences that have emboldened an already highly-developed struggle with self-confidence. People tell me this struggle isn’t obvious to others, but to people who know me really well, it is clear. The deep well of circumstances like: teaching under-resourced students for almost twenty years, moving a lot from place to place, being afraid of commitment and how that impacts decision-making, focusing more on achievement over joy and balance and contentment, the death of my dad, the death of one of my best friends, teaching during the pandemic, discovering two half-brothers at the age of 45, and landing again in a place that I love but is very challenging to make a good living, have all resulted in this moment of clarity. Ah ha! Here I am, after all these years.

I find it hard to internalize that we are where we are because of everything that came before. But, to me, standing on tonight’s metaphysical mesa and staring at a new horizon, this explanation is the only one that makes sense. What now must be is a decision as to what to do next. I feel in some ways that I am taking huge risks in waiting and seeing if the jewelry store dream becomes reality; most of these risks are financial and right now, financial risks seem bad. On the other hand, with our country in the throes of the changes it is experiencing, maybe this is the time to grab the dreams by the hands and jump. I don’t know? I know what I want, which is to own or co-own the jewelry store, be able to save money and pay for health insurance without total panic every month, take a month or two off in the winter and go somewhere nice and sunny, to be able to buy the land around us and run a campground for people in the summer, to pay off our house within 15 years; all of these are the dreams.

But the waiting, the realizing, the digging oneself out of a series of experiences to find meaning within them; it is hard and it is drudgery sometimes, and sometimes it is joyful, like tonight.

I am still sick with anaplasmosis and Lyme disease. I think that something about these illnesses forces me to think about a lot of things while I am sick; they are thoughtful illnesses, to be sure. This experience reminds me of when I got sick my senior year of high school and could do little else but be sick and hope I would get better sometime. I spent a lot of time sitting on the back porch, thinking about the meaning of life. I think I have some sort of understanding of the meaning of life, for now anyway, but I am thinking about a lot of other things. I think about the preciousness of life and time, how fast it all goes, what I want the next ten years to look like and be like, and what I can do to make the world a better place, a little at a time. It is an active time, this thinking time.

Last year, one year ago yesterday, the world lost an amazing person in Kate Shuster. She was a mentor and a friend and a shero and an inspiration, and she is very missed. She left behind lots of memories, photos, and writings, but her death impacted me so much and especially reminded me of the precious nature of our time on Earth. She made a mark, a series of them, in fact, and she left Earth very quickly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she died last year, I went and sat on the edge of the ocean and thought about her, and Mary Ann, and Ken, and John, and Meredith; all the friends who I had lost before I wanted them to go. Sometimes I see them or hear them or feel them around the edges of this reality and I wonder what they think or want us to see or understand. I guess we will never know that, and just have to keep on doing the best we can.

Perimenopause, Truthtelling, Medical Trauma & Intimate Partner Violence

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Recently, I learned that my father lied for my entire life (longer, actually) about being a father of twins who were born in 1967. One of them is coming to visit my brother and I in August, and I literally could not be happier about a thing happening; all I want to do is hug him and look at his face and take a photo with his tall self (during our first chat, I asked them both how tall they are as my brother and I are very tall, too).

Since discovering the existence of my brothers, I have been meditating on lying and why we do it. Why did my dad do it? Why have I done it (not very much, but I have been guilty of hiding myself and parts of my selves). All of the artwork I have done since December has been of eyes; iteration after iteration of eyes. I make them even when I don’t intend to make them. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Paths. Eyes surrounded by paths. The path of the past to the present. Yesterday I was in my amazing quilt class and we had a guest speaker, Zak Foster, and he said the most interesting snippet “There is no history, not really. There is only the present, and many, many presents.”

I loved that and it made me think. Right now I am going through perimenopause which is this insane journey of weird physical symptoms, overwhelming rage, quick tempered emotions that spin out of nowhere, pain, decisions that are hard for me to make, a sense of perspective, a sense of looking backward to look forward, and a sense that there isn’t as much time in front of me as there is behind. It’s a bit of a mindfuck.

Today I was getting an ultrasound to check that the Mirena IUD I had placed last week to provide me with progesterone is in the right place in my uterus. I had it placed last Wednesday and it has been very painful and exhausting: surprisingly so. It has reminded me that I am older now, and it reminded me of my past presents. When I was getting the IUD inserted, my cervix kept “running away” (the words of my midwife as I have no idea what this means but it sounds weird and sad) from her. She finally had to dose me with some extra Lidocaine and hold on to it with forceps. As I lay there waiting for the inevitable, this wonderful nurse Caroline was holding my hand and telling me that I was a wild horse running free on a beach, like the horses of Chincoteague from those old books. I felt my body tensing up over and over. They kept telling me to relax. I kept apologizing. I remembered something.

When I was about 20, I had this seemingly wonderful boyfriend named Ryan, who was so cute with long hair and who liked to go camping. He was from Midland and we went out to west Texas and camped alot on forestry land and cooked rice for dinner in the dark. We went on an ill-fated road trip out west one summer and discovered we didn’t travel well together, but in retrospect, my part of that was that I was/is/always will be desperately afraid of intimacy as I don’t trust it. The model I was shown was irregular and broken and weirdly sad and incomplete. Now I know that at its center was a big lie, which must have contributed, but isn’t the entire explanation. Either way, I discovered that I was pregnant with Ryan’s baby later that year and we both decided we didn’t want to have a baby then (I haven’t investigated how I feel about this just yet but think it is mostly ok with me). Ryan came in with me when I was having the procedure – the doctor must have been very open-minded? – and he told me later that I tensed up and looked like I was in the most pain of anyone he had ever seen. I remembered this vividly in that moment last week when I was getting the IUD. I couldn’t stop tensing up, I was very quiet, and I kept squeezing Caroline’s hand. At one point I asked if I was hurting her, and she said no, to keep squeezing, so I did.

Today I went and got the ultrasound to check its placement and everything looks good according to the tech. She was very nice and her name is Jane and she has been doing ultrasound for 35 years which I find amazing. While she was ultrasounding, she kept asking me if I was ok and I kept telling her that I was, but I was tensing up and was trying to get myself to relax. She took about 30 photos of my uterus from on top of my belly and inside my body, showed me the IUD (it looked good!) and off I went. I apologized to her and told her I had a lot of medical trauma associated with my childbirthing body parts, and she said she was sorry, and I told her it was ok as it wasn’t her fault.

After Ryan and I had the abortion, everything was hard and I think we started fighting about everything everywhere for months and the fights got worse and worse and worse until his neighbors didn’t want us to live at the co-op anymore. He moved into a little house with a friend and we kept trying but it was done, somehow. The fights got worse, and then 9/11 happened and I remember noticing there weren’t any planes in the sky when we sat on his porch. I was supposed to go give a presentation at UT about something and he was threatened and we fought and he pushed me into a wall. Later that day he broke up with me.

Girl, so confusing.

Last year, last May, a friend of mine was killed by her partner. He killed her, set fire to the family house she was living in, and then killed himself. He did make sure her horses were safe, which is some blessing in all of this. When she was killed, no one described the incident as domestic violence, only murder-suicide. She worked with my husband, and his boss never spoke about it again. It was as if they weren’t allowed to speak about it, but I don’t think that was what is was. I think he didn’t know how to talk about it, deal with it, wrap his heart around it, and so passively coerced his coworkers to do the same. It was horrible: it festered. Just before her death, Cody’s other coworker lost his father, and his wife thinks that because of the lack of space for discussion, that her husband felt that losing his friend and coworker was more painful, was worse, made more of an impact, than the death of his own father.

This week I went to Willowind, a therapeutic horse farm that teaches people how to ride horses peacefully and provides horse-based therapy to people who need it. A friend who teaches there had saved some horsehair for me, some special ashy blonde hair from a huge dappled draught horse named Abel. His fur looks like stone and he is a giant. I am planning on taking the horsehair and combining it with a design of a horse, making my friend’s mother and sister a necklace each. I want to do something with the loss of this person that is beautiful and special just as she was.

It has been a hard time of loss and of change. Growing older is not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. I have a hormone patch on my tummy that I switch left to right twice a week and it is helping me sleep better. I hope the IUD helps other things. My skin on my face looks better, my boobs are droopier and I want to make a corset for them and be a little radical. When I walk around my garden I am amazed everyday at my plants’ abilities to grow a little bit more. I wonder what it would be like if our only stimuli were light and water?

Circling back to eyes and lies, I have made (almost done with the third anyway) three quilts about it. They are all the same size, baby sized, and have various iterations of eyes and repeated patterns that are a little spiky. One is spooky, one is sweet, one looks like a flag somehow. I wish I could ask my dad why. I wish I could call my brothers ask them over now, but I have to live up to my name. I plan to make a quilt about us, but it is a bit of a dive into a deep well, and I am not sure exactly where to start. Zak told me to talk to my fabric, and that seems like a good idea. He also said to write, so here I am.

One of the things my therapist shared with me is that she thinks I don’t exactly know how to have a real partner, as the example given my brother and I was so fraught. I agree, but it makes me sad as, for the most part, Cody is so great and I wish I was better at being a partner. I am trying very much to integrate with him, to think about him, to not be afraid to share stories with him. It is amazing to me that we have been together for 10 years and there are still stories we haven’t shared with each other. I am lucky to have him and he me but there are lots of things that I have yet to learn to be a whole person and the best version of myself. I have always been so good with kids, but adults scare me quite a bit. The brothers, though, don’t scare me at all. Why is that?

How can so many worlds exist within our minds and our hearts at the same time? How can there be so many both/ands? It is a great mystery this life of ours. Nature gives me some rhythm which is comforting, but I want to be more honest about how I feel and what I am thinking about. I am too scared I think to voice these things out loud, but I think I can write them down. Maybe I can get to a place where they come out in a more formal way, but for now, making stuff and writing stuff will have to do.

I had baby chickens in my studio for a month or two and it got all dusty, so I am off to go and dust it and get it ready to start making things again. I have about 8 power rings and an amazing pendant that are asking to be finished. When will I move on from eyes? Who knows? They are beautiful and it is interesting how many types of eyes there are and how many colors. Right now the world and my place in it feel very mysterious and spinny, but I saw this poster in the hospital today that said “Bloom Where You Are Planted” and I thought I could start there.

I miss my friends who have left the planet before me; I wish I could talk with them. Their loss shows me how precious it all is, how fast it goes by, and how important it is to notice the weird little plants and how they grow in the sunshine and the rain. It is all interconnected, everything. All of my feelings of fear and inadequacy that came from early days somehow connect to the lie my dad told that he kept so well hidden. How different things can be when we are just honest, even if it hurts in the moment. Right?

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  1. Camping in Lamoine State Park and being close enough to home to come work on projects
  2. Planting huge amounts of squash plants and expanding the garden
  3. The stars!!!
  4. Time and thinking about things differently in terms of the past and of self
  5. The birds that fly around our house and land all the time and eat all the birdseed

Life is harder than I had expected as a younger person. People are complex and all these things happen to us, and they are almost all unpredictable. It is all about how we respond: that is what matters. It is also really hard sometimes to be my best self. My mom’s neighbor, Mrs. Meryweather, is almost 91 and has taught me so much about all of this. She has taught me to garden and been an open book and a listening ear. She makes me laugh and I honestly want to be alot like her when I am that old, and even before. Her husband was equally wonderful; they are quite a pair to shine this experience of life upon, having done so much good for everyone around them, in small ways. That’s all I have to say tonight. The garden is gorgeous and I am happy to be busy with that and everything else. ❤

What Are You Really Thinking About Right Now?

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I keep thinking about the bigger picture.

At night, I walk on my driveway and look up at thousands of stars, and every night I try to find the Big Dipper. When I do, I then look for Orion, the Little Dipper, and some planets. I find it soothing, and so I talk to them, making wishes for their help on this tiny floating blue dot. I know that they are so much bigger than me, and that there might be tiny floating blue dots orbiting them, and probably nobody there (if there is someone) even knows that I exist. Somehow though, every night I see them as this web of lights, connected across space, protecting me on Earth.

Life in the United States right now is very strange. I am convinced that the government is trying to make everyone afraid and divided. I think that the powers that be are using social media to do this, and there are now so many channels that can capture your attention.

I currently use Instagram and Facebook; I just deleted X because I found it mildly horrifying. I think I am about to delete Facebook, though, as I think my brain isn’t big enough for two social media accounts. It is filled with other things like plants, stars, sewing projects, and making jewelry.

Today is April 21st and it was sunny and cool today. The sun shone on the ocean and it twinkled and sparkled. Through a window, it almost looked like if you jumped in, it would be refreshing. Of course, it would actually kill you. Oh, Ocean – you’re a beast. So powerful; in reality, the most powerful thing on Earth. What a mirage of safety that ocean; birthplace of us all, so wildly different in different places. Where I grew up, in Houston, the water is always around 70-80 degrees. Here it is in the 40s right now and would make you hypothermic in minutes. And yet, this water, this cold water, is warming faster than any other body of water on Earth. All the while the climate is growing cooler, losing 1 degree of warmth over the last 11 years.

A bigger picture – a small and short life. I am about to turn 45. I just started hormone replacement therapy and now wear a tiny patch about the size of a dime on my stomach. I put one on twice a week and am hoping it makes me feel better and gives me relief from night sweats and hot flashes, brain fog, and a crazy hip pain that comes and goes. I am sure there are other things, too, but those are the ones I am most aware of. In a few years, my body will have changed again, as I transition into the second half of my short life.

I wonder why people in government would choose to do bad things, knowing how short their lives are, too, and how if they did good, more people would remember them after they’ve died. But then again, some people think they will never die; they are so afraid of its unknown.

I go back to work next week which is exciting; I am looking forward to seeing people and remembering how to do all the little things that make the gallery work. Every day I look outside waiting for leaves; still waiting. It’s ok. They are coming. There is a fox here who is eating my chickens as if she has access to take-out whenever she wants. There is also a porcupine who climbs the white pine trees at night, scratching with its big nails like a giant spiky cat. I wonder what other wild animal will come soon, the third in the series.

Writing has helped me understand that it is time to detach from the world of the internet and attach to the world of real life; plants, animals, sky, trees, making things to reflect those things back at themselves. I have many seedlings ready to put in the ground. I have already planted roses and made new flower beds for this year. The sound of the road at the end of the driveway is loud sometimes, but the land is pretty. We cleared out a streambed yesterday and planted dwarf willow trees at the stream edge. The apple trees are about to bloom, I think. I can’t wait to go swimming.

I have been listening to Radio Paradise a lot lately. It is really great; maybe you will like it too. I am off to go eat a girl dinner and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Tomorrow is a new day? I think? I mean, it is. How will it feel tomorrow?

Free Weight

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For awhile, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself; who was that, staring back at me with little wrinkles everywhere, eyelids that are changing, a worried brow, gray hair? For a while, I knew that it was, indeed me, but a me that somehow had changed. Now, they have come together and I see the same old face in my current new face.

This blog has existed for about ten years, and so much has happened in those interim ten years. For a long time, I was good at writing regularly, at night, by myself, in my house. But then ten years ago I got together with the man I am now married to, and my evening behaviors changed. To me, writing is a solitary act. I really don’t like to do it when anyone is home, even with the door closed. I somehow feel that it is important not to be interrupted when channeling whatever this is.

Here I am today, writing stream of consciousness style, so please bear with me. Today is my friend Mary Ann’s birthday and she would have been 46. She died two years ago. She visits a lot, but we can’t talk anymore, and that is what I miss the most. I also miss talking to my dad, as we did during his last few years of life. We had had a lifetime of fights (since I was a teenager, so half a lifetime I guess), that we gave up sometime after I got married and we moved Maw Maw into our house after she had a stroke. Taking care of her made me realize that our lives are very finite and we can leave the planet oh so quickly. I vowed to never talk to my dad about anything important ever again, and we began talking all the time.

Today I am thinking about his first, secret-to-us family in England. What is weird about this iteration of thinking, after now knowing for about 2 months, is that I feel the most compassion for him that I have ever felt. I never could feel this compassion for him in life because he never told us about this thing, this majorly big issue in his life that explains so much. When I asked my aunts about him in 2017 and they told me they wouldn’t tell me, I thought all kinds of things.

I thought he had gotten someone pregnant and his parents were really mad. (Partially true)

I thought maybe he had gotten drunk and wrecked a car and his parents were really mad. (No)

I thought he had fought in Vietnam and had PTSD. (Not true; now we aren’t sure if he was ever over there, but he said he was, so……)

Basically all of the things I thought it could be were way more colorful and interesting than a breakup of a marriage in its infancy, and leaving the infants that came along with the young marriage behind, never to see them again. It’s just so damn sad.

Lately, sometimes, I get so sad. It’s like something is literally hanging around my neck with a weight. What’s in the weight? I don’t even know. Is it just me? Am I a melancholy baby after all? It would seem so. I used to be more fun though, I think. Why is this weight so heavy and how do I lift it? I don’t want to feel this sad and anxious all the time; emotions so overwhelming and a general feeling of no one liking me. And coupled with that, a crazy desire to keep everyone happy so that I don’t say things when I am angry or sad or irritated or when I need to. Those two things must be intertwined; some ouroboros that is.

Earlier I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in Texas and we were talking about how reflective the 40s is. This decade is wild and whack. I don’t understand how the shift is perhaps a bit more money in the bank, or perhaps an investment (house) or something, and then people start to die? Right now, I think this trade off, this change, this phase, level-up, or whatever you want to call it, is bullshit.

I also accept that everyone dies and literally they have to die at some point. It just seems that it is weirdly becoming a regular part of life, and I am having to adjust to it and “deal” with it, and try to understand it and be at peace with it. One of the things I learned when Maw Maw lived with us is that death doesn’t scare me. I think I knew this, as I when I got very sick in high school and didn’t die, I think I chose to no longer be frightened of it and be open to it all the time. When Maw Maw was dying, a day that I haven’t written about yet, it was very weird and mysterious. Watching someone leave the planet “is NOT like in the movies” (I said this over and over at that time).

Why can I not seem to get out of thinking about Maw Maw, my Dad, Mary Ann, and my friend Kate (who died this past summer). I am shaken by Kate’s death; I always thought she’d end up working for the federal government and be interviewed on 60 Minutes or something. Mary Ann I just miss. My Dad I just miss. Those two were my phone people; I spoke to them almost every day. I haven’t had my phone people in over 2 years, and I miss them. Maw Maw I miss, but she makes me smile and laugh. She was old and she was ready to roll out. I just miss her, again, because it would be fun if she was here and we could watch a movie. They just seem to live in my mind right now; I am not sure what to do about that.

When I think of my Dad right now I just wish I could tell him that it’s ok, we know, and we just wish he would have told us because everything is fine. It happened so long ago, before he had even met my mom, and I know that no matter what happened, it was not an easy decision and I am sure he didn’t want to make it. My Aunt Margaret told me about his white wedding, and how beautiful it was, everyone in white dresses and my Aunt Helen was the flower girl. She told me she has photos somewhere and I so hope she can find them. I have a hard time imagining my dad as a 26 year old person. How was he ever that young?

I wish I could tell him that it’s ok because it is. It explains so much, almost everything. It explains why we came to the US, and why his family didn’t know that. It explains, perhaps, why we fought so much. Did he feel guilty every time he looked at me? Did he feel guilty all the time, ashamed, anxious, afraid, and did he transform those feelings into rage and anger? (Seems so). It seems so sad, what a waste of time and energy. My mom said that she would have welcomed the boys into the family, but who knows if they would have wanted that, or their mom. I know that with Cody’s situation with his baby mama, she was (metaphorically) driving the bus and made it extremely hard for him to see or have partial custody of his son. It took many thousands of dollars and hours of time to secure those rights. But, he did it, he chose to fight for them. Why didn’t my dad fight for his boys?

I can only imagine how sad he must have been, and that is how I have compassion for him. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t working when they were living in Scotland and found out they were pregnant. I wonder where they moved after that. Did they own their house or rent it? Was it near my grandparents or her parents or neither? How much was he working then, and doing what? I know that he was a cigarette salesman at one point down in Devon/Cornwall, but was that before when he first got back from Australia, or between Outward Bound and Noble Denton?

It is such a drag that I probably won’t know the answers to many of these questions. The tragedy of this story, or at least one of the big ones, is that the boys’ mum died the same year that he did. She died still with his last name, after all that time.

I feel better after writing a bit. Please bear with me as this all comes pouring out. I am so scared to let it, but it feels like a weight lifted when I do.

Grief, again. Grabbing hold of my heart and squeezing it in a vice. Some people describe grief as being shaken by a wild animal, but mine is a cold squeeze and I feel like I can’t scream out even though I want to. If I scream, someone might get mad at me for being too dramatic or sensitive or overly-emotional. If I scream, people might know and worry or be mad at me for making noises in quiet places. I said this to my therapist two weeks ago and just remembered it:

“If I look at it, then I may be sad forever.” Where does that come from? When I say it outloud or read it, I know that it is some part of my brain trying to trick me. I can’t be sad forever, and how would letting this out make me sadder? Perhaps it’s the weight? It doesn’t want to let go?

Magnifying Glass

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There is an old, leather-wrapped Jefferson Magnifier that years ago I stole from my parents and use it to read words and letters largely from time to time. As the moments pass and we get closer to the inauguration of the 47th President, I keep thinking about magnification, this time of ideas, rather than random passages in old books.

I wonder if the new strategy is to employ loyalists who won’t say much against, well, anything, and to wear down the resolve of those of us who still believe in parts of the government as good, functional, useful, purposeful, and necessary for our mutual survival as a country. I am consistently reminded, also, of the Batman movie in which Christian Bale is Batman and Heath Ledger is The Joker, and Alfred reminds Bruce Wayne that “some men just want to watch the world burn”. It could be that, too, I suppose.

I wonder how does someone advocating for the slashing-and-burning of the FBI impact me? Does it? What if the Department of Education is dismantled to pre-1979 laws. Would they go after those laws, too? What about IDEA? What about school lunch programs?

I wonder.

When I pull back on this philosophical magnifying glass, I see that this is both a detail and a long-term strategy that started way back when I was little and Reagan was president. So many big ideas had been codified into law during the 1940s-1980, and his administration wasn’t able to do much about it. But what about this one? 40 years later and a whole lot more vocal and indignant.

I hope that the federal government is not changed to a point where we can’t recognize it. I don’t know what that would mean for most people, especially young people and poor people and unhoused people and immigrant people. This last week’s news was emotionally draining for me, but I am trying to read the news about once per day. I do want to know about as much as the media will report. I hope they continue being brave and sharing details. Without them, I am not sure what might happen. I do remember that there were no press briefings during his last administration. Will that happen again?

This all so strange to experience, this shift in the United States. The shift is so dramatic as to be alienating and exciting but not in a happy way. The other side I think probably feels the same way except they are excited in a good way. This is so tiring; I hate that I am feeling so tired by all of it and I feel like my writing is not as clear as normal. But that is ok. Like one of my best friends said today, “it is all so fleeting”.

Something New

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It is the end of August – the light is sharpening in its angle and the sun is moving ever lower on the tree line each day. I did something wild and left my public school teaching job about 2 weeks ago, and here I sit, in my favorite armchair, which I share with my favorite dog, wondering.

We moved to Maine one year and two months ago. Moving cross country in your forties is no small feat and it has been harder than I thought it would be. Peoples’ lives have changed and everyone has aged. Houses are so expensive, if you can even get one. Wages, if you’re lucky, just barely keep up with the costs. There is this other aspect of middle-aged life that I am curious about, too. It is the sadness; I wonder where it comes from, and does everyone share it?

With middle age comes a lot of experiences, and I think quite a bit of loss. There are a few people that I know who have made it to their mid forties without significant losses of loved ones, but, on the whole, it seems that the decade comes with an acceptance that people you love are going to die, and sometimes, a lot of them are going to die, closely together. Some of them will be old, and so their deaths will be understandable, but some will be young, and will die so quickly that it is like whiplash when they go.

My friend Kate passed away last month, a week shy of her 50th birthday. She died after being sick for 11 months. I will write more about Kate later; she deserves a deep-dive into my many times and experiences with her and learnings from her, but suffice it to say for today, her death scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know that that could happen: that you could be diagnosed and pass away in 11 months. It cemented a decision I had already made to jump into the unknown.

Here I am. Seems a little nuts. I own a house and in a week won’t have any health insurance. Somehow, it will work out. My husband is such a sweet person but he, too, is struggling with his own middle-aged sadness. I am not sure where his comes from, because he has trouble identifying his emotions. I think he was taught at a young age that emotions were a weak enemy to be vanquished and sent away; he did that, to his current peril. He says his brain feels like mud. I worry about him and want him to have dreams again.

This place is so seasonal, and here we are, in a transition again. A great friend and I were talking today about how fall feels early, but it’s possible that it just feels that way because we spent most of our lives living in a place with no seasons (Texas). I found a red maple leaf on the driveway two days ago, and today I saw an entire red maple tree on the drive home.

Today I drove into Northeast Harbor to go to work and was struck with a feeling that I don’t feel about it the same way that I did before. I am not certain that I have lost some magic feeling, or just that my feelings on the whole are a bit muddled right now. I am worried that I might struggle to be happy anywhere, and what that means to me. I am curious about how I find peace in accepting myself. How do I keep my inherent loneliness at bay? Or, alternatively, how do I welcome it in and befriend the feeling? My husband and I were speaking about that yesterday; about being people who have always felt lonely, and yet, are together.

Does it come from my 0-3 formative experiences? Is it genes? Is it the crazy stressful harsh and intense family of origin I come from? Probably. But what do I do with this?

I am working on a book that is based on many of the writings I posted here about 10 years ago. Over the next month or so, I will be removing those posts as this blog goes in a new direction; this version of me, not the older version. So many lives in this one life, if we are lucky. One of my mentors, one of my professors from grad school, told me to write everything down. I had said that to someone else, so I have decided to take my own advice, and his, and be here now, writing and musing. I think that I am finding some kernels of truth within the annals of my mind, but it is a deep labyrinth in there and will take some time.

Thanks for the love,

The Grasping Hands of Primates are an Adaptation to Life in the Trees

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There was the first spring, when the roses bloomed in February – or perhaps it was even January – I have forgotten. In the front of the garden lay the double pink and the yellow roses, standing stalwart against the North wind. A late February ice storm beat them back to the ground; I almost thought they were lost, but no, roses are strong.

The second spring came similarly; why were all the storms so strong now, as if sending us a message from on high, something we were supposed to notice? There was the hail storm that felt as if someone was pouring golf-ball size hail from the roof amidst a green sky like one of a tornado. The tornado came later, and we all learned that the scariest parts of tornados is that they are invisibly powerful as they tear off your roof.

My roof remained unscathed; my friend sent me a photo of the tornado traveling just above our house on its way out of town where it wrecked a fine line of homes and barns in a path of destruction.

The changes happen slowly; perhaps we should have known this. I should have known this, as an armchair scientist and teacher of critical thinking, discernment. How could it be fast like in so many stories? It was slow.

I often wonder about princesses in carriages; gazing out the windows at the landscape. What did they think about? Were they in conflict with their material possessions in contrast with the lives of their people? My doctor said to me two weeks ago: we all had gotten way too used to all the Amazon, click-a-button and have it shit, it was time for a change.

A change is here; I feel it settling around me and I am trying to choose how to respond. I keep planting trees. I have planted six so far. My husband said last night, “I will be working in the garden on the day they blow the world apart”.

Could it be? Every day I go into a classroom and turn on lights, log into the internet, kids come in and go and get breakfast and later, lunch. We walk up a green hillside dotted with dandelions and if we have time, go into the woods to walk the trails. Children are friends, get mad at each other, stare into their phone screens, cry, laugh, and make fun of me. I love it. The children everywhere are the best part of the gig. I think every day about children in Israel, Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, Russia, the Congo, the Sudan, etc. and I wonder do they get to walk into a classroom?

I remember teaching in Philly 12 years ago and how surprised I was at the world within the world I was then a part of. The other day there was an article about that same neighborhood in the New York Times and it made me so sad. Why? I think because I know now that it is worse than it was when I was there, and that fact is so shocking to me. I remember walking to the Dominican restaurant down the block to get lunch or to the little shops under the El to get candy or cookies for kids. There were no homeless people sick from drugs then; there were simply drug markets selling the drugs that would then populate all the blocks, all the corners. I remember taking a photo of a vacant lot with a hurricane fence, overgrown with weeds and wondering why there were no trees there.

For me, peace is coming in tiny moments and I have to actively pursue them. Dusting furniture, looking at the ocean, cooking dinner, planting a tree, refilling a bird feeder; all are tiny moments that are expanding into a greater peace. I look at the pine boughs in late afternoon sun and the way clouds look early in the morning and remember that we are all so tiny in this cosmos, and it will continue long after we are gone, whether through simple mortality or grave human error.

During the eclipse, I watched with awe the power of the Sun, and thought, without that one thing, all is lost! How amazing. We used to think that we were so powerful, before. Now we understand that nothing is certain, clear, or real. Perhaps it is time to jump into the unknown? Perhaps it is time to recognize that our hands are empty, but when we reach out to grasp another, the grasp and the hand are real.

Good night.