Just Another Manic Friday November 30, 2012

Hello all!

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Y’all, I live in a state of emotional bungee jumping.  If you’ve been reading me longer than five minutes you know this, and today is one of those days.  Today is a day where my body feels like nothing so much as leashed power.  Like if you could stick the right electrodes on me I could power a small city.   Today is one of those days where I want to do things like go climb mountains with Sherpas.  Do meditative yoga at sunrise with a bunch of monks in a temple somewhere.  Kiss my soul mate at midnight on New Year’s Eve at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.  Make love on a bearskin rug in front of a blazing fire in a snowbound cabin in Alaska.

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It all started when I was awakened at about 3:30 this morning by the noise from the living room where one of the cats was attempting to violate a package of cookies the kids left in there.  I got up and took it away from her and put it in the fridge.  Then of course I couldn’t get back to sleep.  I just lay there and tossed and turned and flipped and flopped.  I killed a little time doing some exercises.  (Yes, you can exercise while lying in bed.)  I did some leg lifts and butt squeezes and crunch-ish things, some arm presses against the wall over my head.  Stuff like that.

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By the time I got bored with that, it was about to get light outside.  I decided it had been a while since I’d watched a sunrise, so I rolled over and pulled the curtain back from the window and started watching the darkness lighten.  There was only one star in my view and it was a great big bright one.  I decided I’d watch it continuously until it got so light I couldn’t see it anymore and see how long it took.  This was about 6:30.

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So I lay there and held the curtain back and just watched.  The light crept upward and the star I watched got smaller and dimmer.  A couple of times I took my eyes off it and thought it had gone, but then I’d find it again.  Finally, it just disappeared.  It was 7:18 a.m.  The sun still wasn’t actually up.  And I started thinking about how that star is still there, and when I go to bed again, if I look out the window, there it will be.  Some things are always there whether you see them (and acknowledge them) or not.

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So when I wrote all the above, I was flopped across my bed with Clairol #43 on my hair, scribbling furiously across the back of a transcript of something I printed out and brought home from work.  Now I am AT work, and today is what I might call Fashion Experiment Day.  I was in the mood to do something different, so I’m wearing a rather blindingly bright neon yellow A-line thing (it’s either an oversized shirt or a short dress) over white pants, with robin’s egg blue ballet flats.   Dabbling in color makes me happy.

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Yesterday was my twin daughters’ 19th birthday.  I wanted to do a long, mushy post about how amazing and wonderful and fabulous they are, but I got busy at work and didn’t get around to it.  But let me just say that they are two of the brightest spots in my universe, and I don’t know what I would do without them.  They represent all I ever wanted from the time I was in middle school:  to be a mom.  I understand now that there’s a lot more in the world to be experienced than just having babies, and if I could do it over again, I would probably go do some of that other stuff first, but make no mistake:  I would not trade those two amazing young women for all the baguettes in France or all the monks in Tibet.   Happy Birthday, my girls!

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Until next time,

D.

Related articles

• Why I Went to Europe Alone (persephonemagazine.com)
• New Year in Paris (travelsupermarket.com)

I Talk A Good Game, But This Is Basically A Self Pep-Talk! September 2, 2012

Paris Sunset from the Louvre window (Photo credit: Dimitry B)

Hello all.

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So I have a milestone coming up.  In three days, I will turn back into a mermaid, over a new leaf, OK, OK!  In three days, I will turn 40.  Forty!  This is a number that is so surreal I cannot imagine it.  Wasn’t I just dealing with stupid junior high crushes, like, five minutes ago?  Wasn’t it just yesterday I was trying to decide whether to strike out on my own and try the college my parents wanted me to try, or take the safe route and go where my best friend wanted us to go together?  Didn’t I just a day ago say “I love you, Seniors.” and with hands shaking, return the microphone to the stand after fulfilling a dream of singing a solo at graduation?  I could swear it!  Or maybe it was just yesterday when I was 21 and drowning in newborn babies when my twin daughters appeared on the scene?  Or when I was 30 and doing the baby thing all over again with my Little Man, The Boy.  Or those years in between, watching husbands self-destruct, searching for myself, suffering loss and surviving devastation again and again and freaking again!?

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Nope.  It was years ago.  Back in the Day.  Old times.  Ancient History.  It’s cool, I can deal, really!  I can live with these realities and look back on the events I’ve just listed and see that, yeah, they were pretty good times overall.  There’ve definitely been some awful times.  I touched on those, but what I’d really like to examine is, “Where the heck am I going from here?!”  What’s in my future?  What lies ahead in the twisty, turn-y, dark and light-y  road through my next few decades?  Why did I just edit that sentence from ‘hell’ to ‘heck’ so I might not offend or shock anyone who knows me?  What’s going to happen to my kids in their journeys?  And please tell me I’m not going to fulfill that horrible line from that poem in Dead Poets’ Society:  “…and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.”

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I think society tries to tell us life is meant to be some grandiose adventure, some breathtaking experience that smacks of deep meaning and awe and wonder, and that if we don’t find our experience matching up, that we’re not doing it right, that our life is somehow subpar, substandard, just sub.  Sub means below, you know.  Society tries to subversively and sneakily tell us that there is a bar to be cleared if we are to be able to say we have lived.  Like we must have made certain amounts of money or been to certain places or felt certain throbbing levels of love and lust.  And it’s true, there are crazy infinite amounts of experience out there to be had.  The world is so much bigger, more varied and vast and amazing than this little corner where I have grown to this point.  Society wants me to think my limited experience is somehow inferior.

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But you know what?  Society can just go screw itself.  I’m about to be 40.  I’ve lived. I’ve never owned a million dollar house or driven a Mercedes, but I’ve raised kids and seen them laugh and cry, seen them bleed, seen them struggle for breath, and even seen them die.  I’ve never been to Paris, but  I have loved parents and grandparents and friends, and I’ve laughed and cried with them.  I have never felt the certainty that I was looking into the eyes of my Soul Mate, but I have paid the bills (sometimes even on time) and most often eaten food paid for by the state.  I am still in the town where I graduated High School.  But I. Have. Lived.

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I am filled with hope that this is true, but I don’t have to be reassured that the next decade or four or five that I continue to breathe will be somehow more interesting or more awe-inspiring or more joy filled than the last four.  Just to illuminate with an example:   I got mad at my kids yesterday.  They let me down.  They didn’t do what I asked them to do, even with specific instructions and guidelines.  They just chose not to do it.  I was angry at them and more angry at myself for letting them get away with it.  I suddenly started experiencing a deep desire to just leave them to their own devices and go make myself a whole new life somewhere.  Let them do what they wanted to do, since they were going to do it anyway, and just go.  The girls are almost nineteen, right?  People do it.  But today we were in the car, on the way to my mom’s for after-church dinner.  And they were singing.  My babies.  All of them, singing together, some goofy song I can’t even remember now, but I was singing with them and laughing, and then I started to cry as I thought how just yesterday I wanted to leave them on their own and go be my own person without them.  I forgot for a moment that they are the personification of all I ever wanted in life!  I wanted to be a mom.  That was it.  All else was secondary……  And I knew then that they ARE the glorious, interesting, awe-inspiring, joy filled living that I have done!

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So would I be lying if I said I don’t care what the next 40 years holds?  Yep.  I hope my future is full of experience and adventure.  Travel.  Seeing more, doing more, being more.  True love, even.  But if it’s just day to day living, paying the bills, watching my kids walk their paths, being single but not alone, I know I have already been blessed beyond imagining.  I have loved.  And yes, I have most definitely lived.

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So bring on what you got, September 5, 2012!  Bring on the official turning 40!  It’s been good this far, and it will continue to be good, no matter what.  I am beautiful.  I am alive and breathing and fabulous, and so is my life.  As in my last post, it can only go up from here!

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Until next time,

D.