Alecto's Ophelia

2010 - Coming Home

The last 90 minutes of 2009 frizzled out while I was sleeping. When my contacts are fogged enough I'm stabbing myself with a needle every third stitch it's time to go to bed. I left the girls in front of the television, gathered up my animals, peeled the contacts off my eyeballs (and I do hope I'm going to find them in solution) and went to bed. I wish I'd brushed my teeth. Sometime in the night a small tribe of Pygmies set up camp and decided to have a rain dance on my tongue. It was dry, dry, dry in there. This morning I staggered to the bathroom,spit them unceremoniously into the sink and proceeded to beat the hell out of my mouth until I looked into the mirror and noticed I was just South of rabid. That's usually a good indicator.

The alarm on the iPod went off at 7:30 like it does every weekday morning. I was dreaming it was something else until I woke up enough to turn it off and then climb back into bed warning the dog that it was technically still the middle of the night. Somewhere. I haven't bothered to turn that alarm off because it makes a good 15 minute warning before Little Girl needs to head out to the bus stop (which is the end of the driveway) and on weekends it doesn't go off at all although Simon will generally put his great slobbery face right up against mine (or the back of my head if I'm lucky) and breathe heavily while moaning pathetically about the fact that he's not going to be able to keep his legs crossed forever. Simon has no trouble getting my attention in the morning. He is 79 inches long snout to tail tip, 31 inches at the whithers and his head is massive. Someday I'll figure out how to weigh it. Maybe I can slide the flat digital kitchen scale under his head while he's sleeping. Remind me to try that. The drop from the top of my mattress to the floor is 36 inches and while that's five inches above his whithers we must consider the length between whithers and snout. Unless I'm sleeping in the middle of the bed there's really no escape and if I don't want St. Bernard slobber ON my sheets I need to respond fairly quickly even if it means telling him to lay the hell back down and go to sleep. If his need is not immanent he will. He's a good boy. 

Little Girl let him out this morning. I was out cold. I have no recollection of the door opening and closing again after my baby boy lumbered across the threshold, made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and galloped down the hall coming to his usual skidding stop at the top of the stairs. When he's got his bearings he tip toes down the six carpeted stairs and stands patiently at the front door followed shortly by the manic Rat Terrier. The only time the Rat Terrier is not manic is when he's overslept and slinks up the stairs from the lower level hoping I won't notice but knowing perfectly well he's been caught sleeping on the couch again. Sometimes he hides until I'm back upstairs. He's sly and has great bladder control.

I nuked a cup of yesterday's coffee and here I sit thinking about what to write while my fingers typed out three paragraphs (which I just read) while I wasn't looking. I was thinking about resolutions.

I have no resolutions. I don't do resolutions. The only time I made a resolution was in the first few minutes of the last year of the twentieth century and that was more of an invocation to the fertility gods (it worked too, I delivered Little Girl on December 11, 2000).

I have nothing to invoke this year except maybe patience, perseverance and the strength to let be the things I have no right to control. I know perfectly well what those are too I just have a really hard time not panicking and grasping a float that has no intention of being grasped. The float does like to be grasped at though. I think it makes him feel wanted and needed. I think that's poison for me.However, invoking a negative does not create a positive. So here they are, my resolutions in spite of not doing resolutions (because God forbid I don't keep them):

1. Bake more bread. We lost that in 2009.
2. Order the seeds and actually start the seedlings.
3. Repair the fence and till the garden hopefully one week after the last hard freeze (sometime in March most years).
4. Compost. Everything that ought to be composted. Lost that in 2009 too.
5. Put the seedlings in just after Mother's Day and protect the tomato plants with plastic bottle hot houses. Pay attention to the weather and don't boil them.
6. This year pull UP all the volunteers from last year. That was fun but unproductive.
7. Cultivate early and often.
8. Order more broiler chicks. Maybe even eggs if I can work out an incubator and commit to turning them every day.
9. Get back on the elliptical in the morning at least until the heavier garden work is in full swing. Bikram is not enough.
10. Walk away from 2009 and don't look back. I can't imagine turning into a pillar of salt particularly pleasant.

That's it. I'm stopping at ten because I'm an over achiever and usually bite off more than I can chew without choking. Those ten are probably a big mouthful but maybe there should be an 11th:

    11. Give myself permission to fall down and get up again. You know, permission to be a bona fide member of he human race. The expectation of perfection is a horrible conceit.

Happy New Year, peoples. I wish you joy, love, passion, strength and surrender.

Peace out - Alecto

 
Borrowed without permission from an artist who's name I can no longer locate.

Oh yeah - Bikram Yoga - bring it on, baby!

Yeah, I know, this site's on hiatus and all that but I really do have something relevant to share.

Did something called Bikram Yoga today. 90 minutes in a 105 degree room with relative humidity at or about 40%.

Yikes.

I'm 44 and while not out of shape by any means, not so much your super flexible yoga goddess either.

There were moments when I thought I'd pass out. There were moments when I thought all that stuff I've got would just come pouring out of me in this incredible torrent. There were moments when I just could not believe what it felt like to just lay there and breathe. There were moments when I surprised myself and stepped back up into it again.

And then there was the moment when I tried to get my pants back on.

Pause.

We're in the changing room and it's full of half or totally naked women who have just sweat out sixteen tons of water and what have you. I think I have toweled off and I try to pull on a pair of jeans that are too big for me. I've lost about 10 pounds in the last two weeks.

I cannot get them on. There I stand in my itty bitty thong with my 44 year old ass in what I so dearly wished was a breeze and I'm fucking stuck! Halfway up the thighs.

I look desperately at my WORK friend and make whimpering sounds. She is sympathetic but working out her own modesty (I have 14 years on her for God's sake). The woman next to me says, yeah, I never get how people try to put jeans on after this, it's like when we were little kids after swimming trying to pull our pants back up.

I wondered how I was going to get home.

Lets just say they did finally and I did and next week I'll bring something else to change into.

Bikram Yoga, highly recommend it. Seriously. Not just for laughs anymore.

Happy New Year and good morning and all that

This is a quickie, I'll be back later but I have something that probably must be said.

This will only be meaningful to anyone who has been to the other site. The other site is a journal, often moment by moment, of exactly where I am in this journey. Last night at 1:49 AM EST somebody followed the link from there to here (that I've since deleted). What concerns me is that this may not be a perfect stranger. This could be one of my current readers, it could be my mother or it could have been my husband.

If it was a perfect stranger and you're back here reading again, I remind you that the other blog was very raw and bounces all over the place like a crazy out of control roller coaster. That is my private place where I can have those moments and not get them on anyone who isn't prepared to read them. All I ask is that you treat that with the utmost respect.

If it was one of my readers, welcome to the deep dark world and I hope it wasn't too upsetting.

If it was my mother that's perfectly fine because I'm sure you understand, you told me to set up another blog for this purpose anyway. It's not your fault I used a dormant blog.

If it was my husband, I don't know that you ever need to see those things. It is not that they are bad or negative, it's that it would certainly be a very overwhelming thing to read for you at the moment because one of the promises that I made was that you would have none of that from me when you come home, that I would take it elsewhere. And I did. If you found it, I am so very, very sorry and ask that you let that part go. It is mine, not for you to shoulder or even question.

That is all for now. I've had my full cup of coffee, smoked two smokes (this shit gotta stop soon because my asthma is flaring up again) and will now go fun out the early morning anxiety on the elliptical with both knee braces and a good bit of water.

I'll be back and Happy New Year. It was happy for me.

A Love Story - part 4

I'm going to start this with a statement about this blog which is about to turn 2 years old in a couple of days. This space started out as a way for me to journal the things in my life. You know, day to day events that were noteworthy to me. This rapidly turned into a life blog (which it probably was in the first place) and the entries became raw, painful, sometimes joyous but mostly incredibly emotionally honest. And then some rather extreme events occurred (OK, a lot of extreme events occurred but toward the end of 2007 they got REALLY hairy) and the focused turned away from the rawness of how I experience my life to a more prosaic detailing of what I was doing. There is a big difference between discussing the 'being' and documenting the 'doing'.

Well, we just came full circle and we're back to what most people call TMI and I'm not even going to apologize for that, this is my blog and it's for me. So here I am.

And yes, love's got everything to do with it.

I have another blog, some of you know where it is and you are welcome to go there otherwise I'm not going to advertise it because it is a journal, sometimes moment by moment of what I'm experiencing right this second and I've got to write it down somewhere just to keep myself focused and aware.

So the love story today is about emotional exhaustion. I am completely exhausted. I don't eat much, I don't sleep much and I drive my body to the brink in order to feed on those endorphins whenever possible. I swill coffee at an alarming rate and smoke like a chimney (hey, don't judge it, nicotine is a very powerful drug and I have no intention of keeping it) and at night I drink wine in front of my computer writing in my journal and praying for contact. And I do get contact and lately it's been very nice and I am grateful for whatever he can give me. A simple 'I love you' or 'I love you too' is enough to reduce me to tears and they aren't the bad kind.

I also want to talk about the tube and the cheese because of a comment MC left and my response to that comment. Unfortunately somebody took this metaphor and wrote a book called Who Moved My Cheese and the metaphor became trite and useless (and if you found it useful, I apologize but the version of the exercise (and it's an exercise, not a book) is a very powerful experience.

Rats are smarter than people:

The Rat
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is a piece of cheese. The rat knows where the cheese is and every day he goes and gets it until one day the cheese isn't there. The rats sniffs around to see if he's missing something and then heads right back out of the tube. He goes into tube 4 and then 3 and then 2 and then 1 and there is the cheese. He eats it and he's happy. Each day the cheese moves and each day the rat goes and finds it wasting no time wondering why is fucking cheese keeps moving.

The Man (apologies to men, this could equally be a woman but that's not how the story was told to me)
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is the mans significant other, committed partner, what have you. Each day on the way to tube five, the man has a look down tubes 1 through 4 just to have a look at the view and see if there's anything better down there. This causes conflict in the relationship and trust becomes a problem.

The Woman (could be a man too but in my case, it's me)
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is a man. Each day on the way to tube five the woman rushes right to the tube and throws her arms around the man, or pisses him off, or asks too much or refuses to be responsible or just doesn't keep up with who and what he is or needs. One day the man walks out of the tube. The woman says, no! you can't do this, this is not what we do in a committed relationship! We stay and we work it out. But no, he says, I must go and he goes saying that he will return in a few short days. The woman waits, the days pass and he does not return. There is very little communication. What she knows comes from a third party. Initially the woman fights it tooth and nail. She cries all day, cannot leave the house, picks up smoking again but what she does do, which is unprecedented for her, is call a friend. After that she calls another friend and then another letting them all into her vulnerability and telling her story from as responsible a place as possible (no victim, it's his fault shit). And then she turns outward and focuses on the man. First up. He is not in tube 5. Letting go of that is so hard she bangs her head (metaphorically) against her own delusions until she realizes he's another tube. He hasn't said he doesn't love her, he hasn't said he won't come home, he's only said he can't come home just yet.

The rat goes tube to tube until he finds the cheese. The woman stews in it feeling abandoned and lost until she realizes he's just in another tube. Now, she can go get him, she can go find him, she can join him in the cube or they can go to a new tube together. What cannot, or should not do, is go back to tube five. That didn't work so well.

And that is the story of the rat, the cheese, the tubes and the people.

And I'm so damn tired I have lost the ability to resist. Can we have a Hallelujah chorus please.

A Love Story - Part 3

Love's got everything to do with it.

I recently made a statement (borrowed shamelessly from Grey's Anatomy) that I lived every day these days at an 8. And that was the truth. What I am discovering is that there are 8s and then there are 8s. The second does not negate the first, it's just of an entire other flavor.

To clarify, my original 8 centered around overwhelm, fear and a probable need to have my freaking meds adjusted as well as some unresolved issues and my stubborn refusal to let anything go until I'd reconciled it to something I could understand and live with. What that really boiled down to was my base line belief that I would be hurt no matter what. I recall telling my husband that the 8 didn't necessarily have a lot to do with him directly, it just was what it was. That's hard to hear if you think you're supposed to do something about it and the truth is nobody can do that nor should they be expected to.

Another flavor of pain at an 8 is the physical kind. Turns out I'm really good at dealing with that. I can sink right into myself and either be with it or ride the waves. I am not a screamer when it comes to physical pain. Unfortunately I tend to seriously under report and that's nearly gotten me dead once or twice.

The third flavor of pain is is the pain of grief. As it turns out, for me at least, this is not a suicidal fear or pain at all. It's purely functional, as in how do I get up, work out (because I think those endorphins are the one thing that kicks me off with a fighting chance), shower, shave (because that's normalcy, right?), dress, apply make up, put in my contacts if I think I can keep the tears to a minimum and my glasses if I believe I cannot.

There are moments when I believe I simply cannot bear it one second longer and will do something rash. Not rash as in hurt myself, that need seems to be gone right out the window (maybe it's self preservation or a final surrender, I'm betting it's surrender and THAT is a very reassuring thought). But rash in terms of causing undo pain or harm to others. Of believing I cannot be functional when in fact I know that is not true. Not for me, it isn't my way.

An event is just that. An event. We make of it what we will. We can choose to be mired or we can choose to let it wash over us leaving us engulphed in the truth of it all. This is not a drowning by any means. It's an acceptance. The more I fight it the worse it gets and the harder it is to move through it.

I think of child birth. I've had three children with large gaps in between (five and nine years). With each labor I learned to let go and wash through the waves sometimes chewing the sheets and sometimes just panting. Sometimes there were tears but never any outright crying and certainly no screaming. At the point of transition when the body called mine becomes something else entirely and I have no control there is only one thing to do - push through it. That's a scary thing because the ring of fire we all hear about is exactly that and the only way through is through.

I think of love that way these days. And by love I don't mean the romantic flowers and puppy dog love. I mean the enduring commitment that has us move mountains. I think that in the letting go of the me creates the space for something infinitely greater and quite honestly, precious beyond belief.

So here is an event. I have it. I am in it and the only way to be is just 'is'.

Try that sometime. I am.

A Love Story - Part 2

And yes, loves got everything to do with it.

Commitment is Binary.

kind of like being pregnant, you either are committed or you are not.There are no conditions attached to commitment. And while we're on the subject there is no such thing as 110% committed. That's just not feasible; 100% is the whole thing and anything else is imaginary hyperbole generally designed to disguise a lack of commitment. Rah rah and all that.

Love is not enough you say? Then maybe we need to have a look at what love means. And I'm not talking the romantic kind either although most relationships certainly start out that way. I'm talking about the kind of love that will do the hard things, move the mountains and live through what might appear to be unendurable pain. Love that sees the bottomness in all of us and is the very foundation for the word commitment.

And I'll tell you something scary too; it doesn't necessarily take two to tango. One voice can be enough. Not the easiest approach but possible in a world where we bandy about the word impossible or inconceivable all too freely and we wind up in a consumer top loaded society that chews through people as fast as it chews up what credit can buy.

I walked away from two marriages before I finally got hit upside the head with what commitment really means and well, what love is and what it is not. We live in a me oriented world where if I'm not happy then I have to do something about it or you have to do something about it and it's just not OK. We walk away from our families tearing our children and communities (not to mention properties and anything else with inherent value) asunder. We lose our support structures when we turn our backs and walk away because it's just too hard or I'm not getting what I want or I don't want to give up who me is.

My mother, in her infinite love for me, asked if I really wanted this because she didn't want to see me give up who I am for the sake of a relationship that may not be giving me what I believe I must have. I'm pretty sure by the time I was done speaking she had a good idea where I was headed and it wasn't out of the marriage by any means.

I used to wonder how the hell people stayed married. In some cases maybe it's pure compatibility and there's just magic or no expectation of magic. In some cases maybe it's because there's no viable alternative. And as one dear friend said to me of her marriage of at least 35 years, 'it's inertia, my dear, it gets you through the tough spots.'

Which brings us back to the culture of me. Where in God's name do any of us get off buying that happily ever after tale? Buggers to the authors of the Victorian fairy tales - they just don't cut the mustard no matter how sweat and desirable they may seem.

And life just keeps right on lifing. If it was easy and painless it would be boring as sin and we'd all put our heads in the proverbial oven out of sheer despair.

 

 

And these pretty rings we love to put on our fingers have come to represent something far less than the original hand fasting they eventually replaced (in the Victorian era I might add).

 

I am not giving up who I am. I am making some major modifications because who I am being just isn't working for this relationship and I'm here to tell you that the relationship comes first.

Because I say so and that's a pretty strong statement coming from me.

Oh yeah, and one other thing, we don't always know how we're going to get from point A to point Z but that doesn't mean we can't or won't.

 

 

I Have A Dream (1963)

I can't even speak.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that

America

has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation,

America

has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind

America

of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in

America

until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in

Mississippi

cannot vote and a Negro in

New York

believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends - so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of

Georgia

the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

And if

America

is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of

New Hampshire

. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of

New York

. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of

California

.

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of

Mississippi

- from every mountainside.

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Surrender?

OK. I bought and paid for 12 cubic yards of organic (what, exactly, do you suppose that means?) top soil in March, had it delivered and spread it out over, oh, um, what turned out to be approximately 1000 square feet and then I proceeded to plant things in it at will.

Sigh.

So what I have now are as follows:

• Potato plants nearly consumed by potato bugs. Broke down and sprinkled Seven all over the bastards. I am clearly going to hell but maybe I will have potatoes anyway.
• Radishes that didn't produce as much as they ought to because I failed to be as mercenary as I ought to in the thinning process leaving approximately 25% of the yield I ought to have had.
• Radishes left to bolt because I thought it was a good idea (and maybe it still is) that attempted to eat the entire bed.
• Carrots that may or may not produce six Bugs Bunny edibles.
• Peas that came up two inches, produced flowers and died.
• Onions that never onioned
• Chives that appear to be doing all right
• Spring garlic that looks different then I expected but hey, I'm pleasantly surprised.
• Tomatoes that failed to thrive. Oh how this kills me in ways I cannot even begin to describe. I hear Garrison Keillor's monologue where he goes on and on about having to go on tomato relief and I am just beside myself with grief. I broke down and miracle growed the pathetic excuse for nightshade on Sunday. Hey, I want to eat, OK? I'll work out the organic stuff a bit at a time.
• Beans that nearly took over the garden. Thank you God, now please, can we have some flowers?
• Corn that may or may not produce something given the prodigious and quite honestly frightening sugar pumpkin plant that ate New York. Or is going to at this rate. I should have killed her when I had the chance or maybe just surrender and eat what the earth wants to give me. Sugar pumpkins. Fine. I'll eat them all.

There's more but that's the mid summer highlight. Only it's not mid summer yet. There's still time.

Really; what have you been doing with yourself?

I won't tell you who asked that question because it's not particularly relevant. Here it is; I spend my mornings in women's group and my afternoons at work. In between I do other things. I keep myself upright and try to learn about this flying business all over again. Some days are better then others.

Three mornings a week I answer the following questions on a scale of 0 - 10; 0 being no feeling and 10 being the max. I don't tend to do zeros or tens but there are occasions...

Today I feel (answer 0 - 10)

• Good/Happy
• Anxious/Tense
• Miserable
• Angry
• Depressed
• Hopeful
• Empty/Alone
• Unreal/Disconnected
• Physically Bad

I have the urge to (0 - 10):

• Kill myself
• Binge or Purge
• Drink or take drugs
• Injure myself
• Overdose
• Other

What is important to me today is....

• (fill in the blank)

Yes really. This is NOT a meme but go ahead and give yourself a moment. Yes, really. And then move on, it isn't everything.

Most of the time my Good/Happy and Hopeful numbers are way up there because most of the time I just am. I don't know I'm unhappy until I'm so deep in the hole I can't even tell you there ever was light. I have never had the urge to injure myself in the morning. That is always a late evening or after midnight kind of thing. Oh wait, so not true. There was that one time that landed me in the hospital. That was morning. So usually I'm perfectly fine and these days that's extra true because of this interesting little blue pill called Depakote (go ahead, look it up, it's 500 mg of Depakote ER) that I take at 9 PM every evening followed at 10 with 100 mg of Trazodone to counteract what NoMans and I call the boing effect that will occur at 11:30 and keep me up all night otherwise. Instead the boing effect is delayed until sometime between 5 and 6:30 at which point I either lay there and twitch until it's time to get up or spring out of bed (YES, I spring out of bed, this is previously unheard of), throw on some clothes and rush rush rush to the Elliptical and go go go until it's shower time and then I'm pretty happy... and functional and everything.

I hit my wall in the afternoon and do my damn best to stay busy right up until bed time. If NoMans is home I'm in pretty good shape. If he is not then I am in for a rough ride. I do not know why that is but I'm learning to accept that I do have feelings and the only thing really to do with those things is to feel them. And so I am.

The Purpose of Confession

I'm so tired I'm silly now. My family is coming for Christmas and I am a creature of habit so this is the best thing for me now. I have moments that are repeated and same and true and I find enormous solace in this.

I have stopped going to the hospital. I could say that there is too much to do here (all true) or that he cannot hear me anymore anyway (I'm gonna bet that's true given his morphine dose and even if it's not true he is in the best drug haze ever and I bet he's thinking it anyway). The truth is that it is time to back out of the family space and leave them be. Mig and the girls allowed all sorts of people into the space because they wouldn't have denied Jeffrey any sort of comfort but there is a price. Mig and the girls let me in a lot farther than I ever expected to be let in. Now it's time for me to do for them and get out of the space.

My Girl told me that Mig finally went home and slept in her own bed last night. Jeffrey is too far gone to know she's there and I think she's experiencing something close to what they call ICU psychosis. How can you empty yourself out like that and not? Now I have become a watch dog and need to figure out who to email or call and tell them the time to visit is past and they need to let the family be.

For the moment Jeffrey is in the world but not really. There is a body that breathes on it's own (isn't the human body just amazing?) but a mind that has gone deep under to avoid the pain. The pain would be, well, stunning, I think, without the morphine. Now is a bit of limbo. I think of purgatory when I hear limbo. Catholicism uses limbo and purgatory like synonyms but I think limbo is just where you hang out and purgatory is where you pay for small sins. Something must have been lost in translation there. In any event, this is limbo, not purgatory. No small sins to be paid for and released, just a bit of time suspended between the grief and the Grieving.

Or maybe this is the time for small sins paid for and released. I am flooded constantly with memories. Eighty percent of the memories are achingly good and beautiful. Twenty percent, or maybe less now, are about me and the failures in friendship. Maybe this is normal, for me it is I think. It would have been a lot worse without this time to love and give back.

When we love someone and we agree to be vulnerable and intimate in a relationship there is going to be pain. To sin means literally to miss the mark. It's an archery term. Maybe it was used as a metaphor to explain not being all that we meant to be but it turned into something heinous. To sin is to be evil. Well, you know what? I'm not buying it. To sin is to miss the mark. You can be evil on your own terms. Or not.

I think about the times that I missed the mark. The times when I acted in a way that caused this man pain. There were many. Some of these times were deliberate. No, I am not going to be your lover. Yes, I love you and cherish you but I will not be with you like that. That is enormously hurtful and yet done for honest reasons. So we can forgive that, right? I don't think so, not really. It's not that I should have done differently, it isn't about me and what I should or should not have done. It's about what he experienced. Pain. Screaming, absolute pain. It is a moment in time and a bit of flesh torn that needs to be recognized.

Then there are other times and things. I took his department. He was fired and I inherited his job and purpose. This isn't the sin. The sin was in being unable to look him in the eye through out the process. That was betrayal and it sucked. He forgave me. I did not. Probably I'm going to have to find a way now if I want to be whole. It won't involve denial.

I bought him a card and wrote in it. It was something that would have meant everything to him. I did not mail it or bring it while he could still understand. Small sin, but a missed opportunity because I'm a withdrawn ass and don't do a lot of stuff until it's too late. It sits on my night table and I look at it every night. I read what it says and let myself feel those words. This is not punishment, it's acknowledgment.

When he needed me a few years back and I was an utter and complete mess myself I did not come out of my hole and speak honestly to him. I left him standing in the dark wondering what the hell he'd done wrong this time. It took six months to fix that and it was him who did the fixing.

I am sure there are many other moments, we all have them, this is what it means to be alive and in relationship with the human race. These are the moments that weigh heavy on my scales. I will have them now and pay the price and then I will let go.

But mostly I have the other moments. I have the moments of true friendship. Moments when both of us stood up and walked through fire for the other. Moments of pure joy in the adventure of the shared life we had for, well, just about eleven years now. These are the moments that made us who we are and they're coming next. I just had to get that other bit out of the way first. I think if you don't do that you can't really be clean enough to have what's right and true.