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I Bought Myself A Hug

(written May 2023)

 I have had a crazy few weeks, every aspect of life has been on overload, and I am just tired! I care how others are doing. It is part of my nature and that isn’t a bad thing. Everyone assumes I’m good, but no one asks me. Maybe others think that strong people are just always strong. How can they be anything else? I have fought my entire life for other people to see I am human. I make it a priority to treat others that way so they won’t feel this way.  I am the oldest and have always been the one that keeps everything together for everyone else…. BUT….I am allowed to be sad. I am allowed to have days I don’t want to get out of bed. I am allowed to be human and fall apart!  More importantly I am allowed to be scared too. So yesterday I ordered a hug necklace. I miss those a lot! Everyone needs one of those wrap their arms around you make you feel safe hugs every now and again when life gets crazy.  I desperately needed to remember that feeling.

 A memory from my journal August 8th, 2022last year…

Thank you for coming to visit me again. I needed that more than I knew I did. I could feel your comfort and know where he learned how to give amazing hugs. Antonio taught me that I can find peace with a person, and you taught me not to be afraid of my gift.

Both are gifts I will cherish forever, and both are things I was missing in this moment of feeling helpless.

My mom had surgery to remove her cancer today. She didn’t want anyone to know so I worried here alone, not telling anyone. My brothers were back in Iowa taking care of her but I was here knowing there was nothing I could do but wait. I tried going to work but my mind wasn’t on numbers. They found more than planned. That was not the news I wanted to hear. She is not a fighter and now we need her to be one. I don’t think she wants to face the hard road ahead of her, really ahead of all of us as we help her fight this together.

Two weeks earlier I spent a very long, emotional day in the waiting room of Mercy Gilbert hospital worrying about my daughter in-law. Yesterday, she asked me if I wanted to come over and spend time with her and Trevor. I know that she is feeling the loss of a child I will never understand. I know that we almost lost her in the process and that her chances of having another child greatly decreased from this. It’s only been a couple weeks; she is healing on the outside but has things to work through on the inside. Her emergency surgery to save her life added another layer of perspective to the saying, make every moment count! I am so grateful she is still here with us!

I feel the “fragileness of life” has been reminding me to not take life for granted right now. Life is way too short and you never know what it is going to throw at you next. Hold on to the good things, make sure the people in your life know they matter to you. Cliches, I know, but so true!

I need even just one part of life to go smoothly right now.  I just keep going. I am afraid to stop because then I just slide back down the hill I feel like I am trying to climb. And sliding backwards means I have to fight my way through things over again and it was hard enough the first time.

Yes, a strong person learns how to get through things by themselves, but that doesn’t mean they want to. Asking them how they are doing and letting them know you want the real answer, not the generic answer, and giving them lots of hugs means more than they will ever admit.

When life doesn’t give me what I need, faith that life will get better and hope that things will work out is how I choose to look at life. But in the meantime, I bought myself a hug to remind me.  

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Are you sure you need a table that big?

I remember the day I brought home a giant cardboard box filled with pieces of a new kitchen table. I barely got it in the car at the store by myself. I asked my then husband to carry it inside. We already had a decent, very solid, last a lifetime table. It was square and held eight people. We were a family of six so you would think that should be plenty big enough. This new table would easily fit fourteen! The look of shock on the kids’ faces when I explained we would need to tear down the wall between our kitchen and dining room for this new, unnecessary in their eyes, project!  

After I turned 18, I moved across country to go to school and that is where we stayed when we started our family.  I had moved a thousand miles away from my family and all the traditions I grew up with.  My dad had 9 brothers and once they got married and started having kids there were a lot of people when we got together. They didn’t have much but what they had a lot of was love! I missed that.  I remember the table overflowing with food on holidays and Saturday night card games and how excited I was when I was finally big enough to sit at the table and play Euchre with the grown-ups. I remember the stories and jokes told around that table when it was time to leave but nobody wanted to leave. Most of all I remember there was always laughter. That room that looked like chaos was so full of love. Everyone was welcome around Grandma’s table.

My kids grew up on this side of the country, but I wanted those same kinds of memories for my children. I could tell them about it, but I wanted them to really understand that same feeling of being a part of it. That meant, step one, I needed a table big enough to hold that future dream.

SO began the process to take down the wall and creating a space to hold such a big table. The kids had fun swinging the sledgehammer in the house and not getting in trouble. They didn’t want to give it up and take turns.  We look back and laugh at asking if anyone turned off the electrical circuit just moments before Logan found out that nope that step definitely got missed as he touched the two live wires together. I remember climbing up into the hot attic  full of itchy insulation to reroute said electrical line safely into a different wall to move the light switch and add a new outlet. I decided that was not a space I wanted to climb into again and had a deeper understanding of why electricians get paid so much. Taking down the wall and patching the walls we left in place took the whole weekend. It was a long weekend. The do it yourself shows always make it look so much easier. We decided we would save the floor project for a different day.

A month or so after bringing home my prized new possession, I finally got to build my beautiful black table. It was so long with the leaves in it that we ate on only one end of the table. That left room for puzzles to sit out or board games on the other end. Our tv was hardly on as we spent hours playing board games as a family and that was what I had wanted! We also started a new annual tradition; one day each Thanksgiving, the table would be covered in graham crackers and piled high with more candy than we could possibly use. We would spend hours gluing the grahams and candy together building houses, trains, tree houses, bobsled runs, and even zoos out of those graham crackers and laughing at ourselves when they would come crashing down.  More importantly, we were building the same kinds of memories I cherished from my childhood.

Then life changed, as life usually does, and kids grew up and moved out followed by several divorces. The number of people around the table shrunk. My sister came for a visit and we talked her and her family into moving across the country. I was happy, I finally had my sister around again that shared those same memories. Our number grew. They joined us for holidays and it made the table feel full again. Brittany moved back from Utah with her new little family to join us around the table last year. Like my grandmother, my table was also a place everyone was welcome.

Sometimes you work so long and so hard for so many years that you forget to pause and see what you have created. My nieces came for a visit last summer, so all my kids and my sister’s family all came over to spend the day. It was in one of those small moments that I realized after 13 years of adding spouses and grandkids, divorces and weddings, I finally felt my moment of my entire family around my table together. I saw that future I had dreamt of so long ago. I looked around to realize that all that chaos of the day was the same love I felt around my grandma’s table many many years ago and it was so worth the wait! It was a room full of chaos and love and at the end of the day everyone sat around the table laughing and enjoying each other’s company, not wanting to leave.

There will be more moments and more memories made. Amanda is about to get married and we are happily adding more around our table again. There will always be room for more and if there isn’t, then I will have to go on a new quest to find an even bigger table.

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Learning to find peace in quiet moments

For me my life is split into two parts. Who I was before my divorce and who I became after. My life before was always going a hundred miles an hour and full of multitasking. How could it not be with four kids who were just as active as I was.

Divorce tore apart all the things I thought I knew about my life. It made me question myself. I knew I had to pick up the pieces but after 25 years who I started as no longer existed. I had become a mother and a wife. I had become   part of a family. There was no me and I had to find me again. When you feel like you are starting at the bottom, finding anything that feels beautiful is hard. I went from feeling like I could accomplish anything to having nothing and knowing I had to find a way to start over. How was I going to figure out who I was?

When I say I had nothing, I mean I had nothing. I felt like I was splurging when I bought myself another journal. This one was different than the journals I have been keeping since I was eight years old. This small orange, plain looking, blank book would help me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined. I called it my gratitude book. I used it to find the good when I felt like there wasn’t much good in my life. I made a rule for myself. I must write in it everyday and no two days could I be thankful for the same thing. The first week or so was easy because you can go through all of the generic things, like your kids and home and the food in the house. But after that it gets harder. I had to actually look for the good so I would have something to write down. I focused on finding the good. Sometimes when I would have a really rough day, and I couldn’t find the words, I would take my camera and go for a walk. It was easier to see beauty through my camera than with my eyes sometimes. I grew to love my adventures and would go looking for beauty even without having a rough day.

 I met people that helped me along the way. They would offer ideas of places I should explore or the best vantage point for a picture. One person in particular change my whole perspective. He didn’t take me to magical places or amazing views. He told me to just stand on the pier and wait. “Just be quiet and keep watching” “what I am looking for?” I didn’t understand. I saw the everyday people walking by with their faces intently focused on their phones, and the kids playing in the sand. I had no idea what he could think was here that I would need to take a picture of. And then, along came a seagull. The beach is full of seagulls. The come in all sizes and shades of grey and brown but this one was different, this seagull only had one leg.  I watched him hopping along the shore and only rarely interacting with the other seagulls. He did things in his own way but was thriving just like the other seagulls. No one was watching or even noticed him. I only saw him because I slowed down and waited. In that moment I saw a beauty that I had never seen before.

 I went home and wrote how grateful I was for that one legged seagull and that we can all do things in our own way. That it was ok for me to do things my own way. If he could thrive, so could I.

I am horrible at slowing down and yet I had to sit quietly looking for my beautiful or I never would have experienced that glimpse into his world. There was a beach full of busy people all going about their life who didn’t see him. And yet when I needed it most, I had a person come into my life just long enough to help me learn how to stop, slow my hundred mile an hour life down and really look for beautiful things.  I have taken pictures of beautiful sunsets and traveled all over to take pictures but who would have guessed that my favorite would be of a not so common, very plain looking, one legged brown seagull.

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I may be the writer, but you will always be the words….

These words are painted in bold letters on my bathroom wall. Do you have any idea all the hundreds of pages of nonsense I write in my journal? Or the word written in blue dry erase marker all over my bathroom mirrors and shower door. Some people are all about numbers. I fill my life with quotes and words.

Not everything I write is for people to read. I want to be understood but I know I write pages and pages. If my life depended on me explaining things in the fewest words possible, I would fail every time. I was told once that my mind is a labyrinth, a place someone could get lost without a map. My journal is filled with random bits and pieces but even that is incomplete. The fractured thoughts that play on repeat in my head are enough for anyone to get lost in.

Everything needs to come out of me. Some days it flows out like a gusher you can’t stop. Words and tears all mixing together. It’s like pandora’s box. I can’t open it just a little. It’s all or nothing. Other days I feel it building but not close enough to the surface to make enough sense to write down. I love logic and there is no logic to feelings so that is what I write about most. I have learned I have no say, I can only acknowledge my feelings exist. I write to find my own reason when logic tells me there is none.

My favorite place to write is on the beach. It seems to make the hard things a little easier. The roar of the waves crashing, the birds circling, in the middle of that chaos I can find calm. I must watch for it or I will miss it. It comes in those small moments. It comes in whispers. It’s that one thing that goes right that you weren’t expecting. I look for those moments, make them be louder than the chaos.

The ocean is such a large thing when I stand on the edge of it. I love the feel of the waves barely kissing my toes but it makes me feel so small. It gives me perspective and makes it easier to accept the truths I don’t want to admit to myself.

Being vulnerable is not my favorite place to be. I don’t think anyone wants the world to know their secrets. We live in a world that judges. My life is so far from perfect but its my life and even though it’s been hard, I don’t think I would change any of it. I live with the philosophy that all of the things we have been through, make us the person that we are today. I couldn’t have become this person if it wasn’t for the people I cross on my journey. They inspire the words and the feelings. I grow just by knowing them.

It’s taken a while and thousands of journal entries, but I like the person I am today.

My words are the story of my tears and my crazy adventures, my journey to find that feeling alive moment we all want to feel. I may be the writer, but the adventure and the people i meet along the way are the foundation that becomes my words. I don’t need to be famous or have the entire world to know about my adventures. I just need to have the courage to write them down.

 

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Things no one taught me about life

Just keep going. Choose living. Sometimes life makes you want to give up and throw the towel in. I have seen the consequences of hiding more times than I want to admit and it is always sliding backwards and things for them just got worse. Frankly I am more afraid of the worse than I am of just dealing with the hard stuff. I watched my mom shut down this week. She became like a little kid. It didn’t matter that any of us were trying to help her and do things for her. She was just done. I watched my mom sit in a chair and cry because she had to admit that remembering things has become really hard for her. I rode in the car with her as I watched her drive slowly and think she should not be driving any more. I don’t come home very much so the changes are more drastic to me than to my brother who lives with her. Before I left she talked about my next trip, we need to start marking things we want when she is gone. I am now the adult as I watch my mother change. This has been a week of emotions for me. How does one deal with yet more changes after so many in the last few years? I am coming back in a few months and I am afraid because I know that the changes aren’t over. Dave had a conversation with her to reassure her that we weren’t putting her in home. These are not the conversation I thought I would be needing to have this trip. Such a hard thing to watch when I am living so far away and yet I know I could not live here nor do I think she would ask me to. I am the oldest and taking care of things has always fallen to me. I remember having to be the strong one when my dad died and I am the one who has taken on the estate and the lawsuit.

Life is full of so many changes and yet I feel so unprepared as each of them begin. I feel aloneness in going through these trials. These things were never something we covered when conversations about life occurred. I don’t even know how to process that my mother needs my brother so that she can live on her own now. I was talking to Linda about it but as she and mom don’t talk, this is one I again, get to deal with. My mother is one of those people that judge others actions and say she would do them differently until the time comes when she actually has to make those choice that impact her herself. She genuinely was afraid. I am a writer and I have no words for how this made me feel.

I just keep going. My list of things I need to do to complete her lawsuit grew exponentially in the past two days and that made me feel guilty that I haven’t worked on my own lawyer stuff since the day that Ryan and I talked after the hearing. Life has been so busy and yet I feel like my list is growing instead of getting shorter. I cant stop and I wont stop! I just need to be able to breathe every once in a while. My  writing has become my sanity. My writing is where I sort out these emotions that the hard stuff brings with it. I know I can get through this and that I am just going to be stronger for it, and that I am going to learn something from it but in the middle of it I am just trying to keep my head above water. I keep avoiding this. I want things to be different but life never works the way I want it to.

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Marching to Apathy

For the longest time I thought I had to justify the things I loved to my children OR not love those things at all.  My children grew up in a house that they were free to explore things they wanted to but I wasn’t. There had to be a responsible parent and we didn’t take turns at that job. The music in the car was what dad liked. Our food choices for dinner were based on what everyone else liked. If Keith told me he didn’t like something, rarely would I make it again even if it was something I grew up loving. My children told me to start making decisions for myself. It still took me a bit to figure that out. Those choices are not what my children would always choose for me, but isn’t that what the, “for myself” means?

Last Thursday I spent in a movie theater listening to Drum Corps. Five hours of me sitting still and I loved it. I watched the drill and hard sets and soft sets. Who watches those kinds of things, really?  I watched color guard, and the use of props. It is a world that I love! I think about what it would take to make that flag for how long they used it or how they stand out on the field. When I look for shadows it makes me think of the friends that I made through high school marching band and watching shadows with them at high school competitions. The friendships have lasted well beyond the years my kids were in high school. I sat in the theater with a friend from cub scouts, another activity that was a big part of my life at one time.  Driving to find a theater that still had seats, was its own adventure. Being scared and doing things anyway has been one of the greatest things that I have gained since my divorce.

From marching band to this week’s concert, Apathy, but they could not be further apart musically. I am learning its ok to have my own interests. A rap concert at 46 years old? It is not music that my children made me listen to, nor would they. In high school I wore out my Run DMC cassette tape. I don’t listen to all rap but this guy is amazing in the words that he uses intertwined with old-school music. Of course I am scared to go by myself. I have no idea what to expect, but we will all be there because we have the love of that music in common. That is the part of the new experience I am trying to focus on.

I don’t fit what most people my age act like, but do I have to? Age is how you feel more than it is a number. I have had people say to me that I should act my age but am I not allowed to choose what that means? Where is there a rule that says I can’t get a tattoo or go to a concert or date whom I enjoy spending time with, (especially if they enjoy spending time with me also)? Does music have an age limit? I can like marching and more classical music but I can also love rap music. I am finding what I love again. I am so grateful I have been able to do so many activities with my kids and now new ones by myself.  Not fitting into the idea people think you should be isn’t the hard part. The hard part is doing things you love anyway.

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