Quiet & Alone...

Just a month ago I lived in a house with sounds...The husband and two grown boys, their myriad of friends running up/down/in/out. Playing music, watching Rifftrax and Anime...Laughter coming from the basement all the time. 

Now I live alone with my cat. No amount of music played can mimic the noise I lived in. 

In most empty nesting times of life, the kids go off and the husband and wife stay in the house and adapt, together, to the lesser noise. Leave it to me to do it all discombobulated and be the one that left the nest alone.

I'm not sure I will EVER get used to the lack of noise....

One week into my new life...

I've been in my new apartment for 1 week today. It's been an odd, disconcerting feeling to be all alone for the first time in my life...except for my cat, of course.

I've managed to unpack almost everything...I have 6 boxes left with stuff in them. The way I imagined things arranged didn't quite come to fruition. I misjudged room size and baseboard heaters in my original layout in my head, however it came together fairly well in spite of that.

I picked up a second nightstand yesterday, because I needed more drawer space, but I didn't really have room for a dresser. It has 3 drawers and will fit the overflow from the other nightstand perfectly. Then I will move the leaning bookshelf into the kitchen next to the stove, I think, for small appliances.

I love the space and openness of the apartment. The only things I don't like are the lack of counter space in the kitchen, the tight fit of the bathroom (watch your knees people) and the fact that it only has a tub, no shower. I'm still searching for the appropriate "fitting" for the tiny antique spigot so I can at least have a hand held shower head for washing my hair!!!

Emotionally I'm fairly stable, most of the time. I still have crying jags (last night I was sobbing so hard I couldn't drive), but most of the time I'm doing ok. One day at a time...one hour at a time...sometimes one moment at a time...

Because this week was an emotional rollercoaster from hell, I've pretty much eaten junk all week. I am determined not to do that this coming week. I will get my cooking/eating/walking back on track and bring the physical into a better place, which will help the emotional.

I want to thank everyone for their ongoing prayer and support. It means the world to me...

Today is the day...

After 22 years together, today is the day I move out. I knew this was coming, we had planned to seaparate on March 1st, 2013, but his need to move on to "greener pastures" pushed the separation to a break neck speed. From confession to separation in 3 short weeks...

I wrote this in my journal: I am about to step out from under this huge shadow and into the light...The shadow of ALL OF THE ENDLESS WOMEN you flirted with constantly and of knowing you never really loved me exclusively. I knew, early on, that you didn't love me at the same depth as how I loved you. I feel like I carried our whole relationship by the sheer strength of my will and the depth of my love alone. The constant parade of women through your heart/mind was, indeed, brutal and ate at my heart/mind/soul. I will miss YOU, but I will not miss the constant knowing that I was not "enough".

You were always "seeking". It was simply a matter of time. This year, time ran out.

I wish you all happiness and love. I hope and pray you've found the "true love of your life" and that you are finally fulfilled...

The Long and Winding Road...

Is almost at an end. On December 9th, I move out of my husbands home into an apartment of my own. My marriage is over. We are on to different lives. I have cried until my eyes have almost burned out of my face...I am not sleeping and I'm exhausted. My heart is ripped and battered and torn. I still love my husband with all my heart, and this was one of the most difficult things, emotionally, I've ever done. We are comitted to remain friends...we've known each other so long that once the pain fades that should be fairly easy. We've spent the past 2 weeks talking it all through and are well on our way to a different kind of relationship.

I'm a tad terrified. I've never really lived alone, you see. I went from my Father's house to my first husbands house, to my 2nd husbands house (with kids), to my 3rd husbands house (with more kids), with very little break in between. Now I step out of the...shadow? control? life of...husbands and into a life of my own.

I want to thank all of the dear friends and family who helped me raise the money for the aparment, the deposits, the truck to move and food for the first week. I could not have done this without you. You are amazingly generous to me.

I have a 1 bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor of an older building. It's a secure building with a lock on the outside and a lock on the inside. It has a small patio where I can put my 2 patio chairs and sit in the sun...and I get to take my Ms. Kitty, so I will have a companion.

I have the internet set up to come online on 12/6 and Avista electric is now in my name. My 2 boys and their 2 friends will help me move on the 9th, husband and I will pick up the truck on the way home from my work.

And then I begin again...

I look at the page...the page looks at me. I'm in an emotional place...but words seem insignificant to the place where I am. In a world where everything is lived loud on the web...I cannot bring myself to speak. It is agony.

The sacred vs. the profane

Or reality vs holiness. This is one of the subjects my mind goes back to time after time. How do we bring the Holy into the mundaneness of our reality?

Contact Lenses...A Late Start

This year we have double vision insurance, which is fabulous because 3 people in my family wear glasses and we've really struggled with keeping everyone who needs glasses in glasses (between breakage & loss in rivers/lakes/corn fields), so we were thrilled when we all went off to the optometrist to have our eyes checked...

My husband has really bad eyes, right on the edge of legal blindness. His glasses have always been our first priority, because he literally cannot see without them.

Our youngest son, Sean, has been our next priority, because his are the next worse eyes in the house, and because his seemed to be broken/lost the most often. He just turned 18 so, hopefully, that will start happening less and less.

And then there is Michael, who has always, always wanted contacts, and we just never could swing the contact appointment fee. Well with double vision insurance, he gets his contacts this year!!!!

And then there is me...I haven't seen an optometrist since 2004 and have been only wearing reading glasses. But my distance vision has gotten a tad blurry, so I knew it was time. Because I tend to leave my glasses all over the place and lose them, I wanted to try contacts too. I went for monovision: Close vision in the left eye/Distance vision in the right eye.

The first night after wearing them for about 4 or 5 hours, I tried to take them out to go to bed. OMG, who knew removing thin, membranous lenses from ones eyes would be so freaking difficult??? Not I, and I almost pulled my retina out while removing it. Evidently I need help in contact removal technique, so I called my daughter-in-law who taught me the slide it over onto the white of the eye and THEN pinch it out technique, whew. I'd have ended up damaged the way I was going!!!!!

I'm sure my experience with monovision has been duplicated all over the world. No one told me how difficult it would be for me to "see" the lip on the contact that helps you put it in your eye right-side out!!! So the first day I wore them to work, they were wrong side out, and the 2nd day began with the same issue (but I didn't realize it then). There was just a slight irritation at the lower left corner of the contact, and the vision was just not right.

After 2 hours on the second day, I couldn't bear it anymore and went to the restroom to clean the lens. I dropped it, found it, cleaned it and put it in.

VIOLA!!! Vision and no discomfort!!! That's when I learned I had had them in wrong-side out from day 2 (the first day I wore them I started at the optical shop and she verified the lens was facing the right direction). It is AMAZING how quickly ones eyes adjust when the contact is simply facing the right direction!!!!

So today we go for follow up and I have to ask them to make the close vision better. I work on computers sometimes 12 hours a day, and I have moved everything as close to me as I can at work. It's "almost" visually workable. It simply needs to be tweeked. Wish me luck!!!

Caffienated Soda Pain

I did this semi-unscientific experiment and wanted to share it with you. I did the experiment quite accidentally, but that doesn't change what I figured out...

I have a lot of leg pain (which I realized the year I went to work at the YMCA: 2005). I had decided it was my lot in life and I'd have to live with it. From knee to ankle, almost all the time (except when sitting) my legs ache.

Then came Lent, 2012. I gave up all soda. (I've done this before but was never observant enogh to put this together in my head). After 2 weeks of no soda, I remember thinking, hmmm, my legs don't ache, and I went on with my day.

For the rest of Lent, though, no leg achage!!! I thought to myself, I wonder...

So a couple weeks after Lent, I went back to drinking soda (not Coca Cola, but Barque's Root Beer)...1 a day with my lunch and a couple of weeks later I stood up from sitting at work for my 2 hour stint on the phones and my legs ached again. I was dumbfounded. Could I really have found a link for this constant, I have to take Motrin/Exedrin all the darn time, pain? Maybe...

So, I've had my last soda today. I don't know if it's just the caffienated sodas that do this to me (probably not all the people of the world, right?), or if it's all soda in general. I may try a non-caffienated root beer for kicks down the road (because, really, who can live their whole life without a root beer float???) and see if it causes the same thing.

I also don't know if it's just Coca Cola products, which are my sodas of choice, or all caffienated sodas. But I like the idea of not having leg pain when I stand up, so I think it's worth it to me to not have soda.

Pink lemonade, anyone?

On having a home...

I've used this picture once before, in a blog named "Superfluous". It's a shot I took just after I refinished the table, but the other day I was looking through my blog and another thought struck me...This is a dream shot.

Let me explain: I know people who have basically lived in 2 houses their entire life. They grew up in their parents house, and their parents never moved. Then they went to college and either lived at home or in a dorm. Then they married and lived with their spouse and raised their children in the house they share with their spouse. One life...two homes.

My life was NOT  that way. My parents divorced when I was 6 months old. My father and my first step-father were military. We moved a LOT. I went to 10 schools from first grade to High School, for instance. In 3 states and 2 countries. 

My ex-husband was also military. The moving continued. 

Even after I married a civilian, we moved a lot. We were in the same city, but we moved from one rental to another. Eventually we moved back to my home town. Since moving home in 2004 we have lived in 2 motel like places, 3 different apartments and 2 houses. 

So, I was looking at this shot from the stairs through our dining room and into our kitchen and my thought was "home". It looks like home. Someones home. My home...for now. It has that warm, "lived in" look of a home. And that made me profoundly sad, because I know, once again, that this is temporary. Next year or the year after we will move again. And suddenly, I understood peoples desire to "buy a home"...somewhere you don't have to move away from every year or two or three. Somewhere you make "yours". Where you paint and decorate and you know that next year or the year after stuff will still be where you put it...in your home.

I've always said I didn't inherit that "got to own my own home" genetic thing that makes up the American dream...but looking at this photo, I finally got it. Not that I'll ever own my own home, mind you, but I got a glimpse of the dream and I understand it now. Amazing...

For my Mama...

(my mother loved jade green flowers)

All of my life, I have claimed to be a realist. I clung to this label as a way to stand against the unreality of life, the fantasies people tell themselves, the drugs/drinking/sex people fall into to not have to deal with the realities of life (I typed that sentence and sat here looking at it thinking: REALLY????).

You and I, Mama, had this conversation a few times in my life as you tried to explain to me your way of dealing with reality. And I didn't listen in my moral superiority, in the safety of being "a realist".

I come to you now, too late, of course, to tell you I'm sorry. The realist has always kept a toe (or maybe a whole foot or leg) in unreality, utterly incapable of seeing it, of shattering the safety of thinking "I'm a realist".

I am...most of the time...but in one area of my life I have lived an utter fantasy. A dream that could never be reality based on a perception that was never a reality. And I never even saw it until the other day...

It almost shattered me. Then it humbled me. And now it brings me here, to you, to say I'm sorry, Mama. I was so blind. Thankfully I know you loved me anyway. You and Gram and Daddy had to have seen it, but you all loved me too much to slap me in the face with it. I love you all and I thank you for your grace...

Judgmentalism

At what point do we get to look at another being and say, "You are a despicable person," or "You are trash or a tramp" or any other combination of disparaging words that say that that person is more "sinful" than we are?
I recently had an evening of someone revealing to me things that had happened to them and I found myself judging the people that they were talking about. They didn't understand my judgement and at one point focused my vision on an incident now 22 years in my past, and called it almost the same "kind" of behavior as the people they were sharing with me.
I have a troubled and difficult past. No one who knows me would say I try to hide who I am. But I had romanticised this "piece" of my history to a point where it was almost unrecognizable as reality because the truth of the matter is that if I had to look at my behavior 22 years ago very closely, I'd break.
Last night I spent the night looking at my behavior. Judging myself and judging myself again for being judgemental of the people originally shared with me. If I had had any money, or ANY where to go, last night I would have run away from home. But I have neither money, nor place, so I had to stay.
Not to mention, as I am wont to say, you cannot run from yourself.
So here I am...looking at myself, my behavior, my choices, and wondering is my whole life since that time 22 years ago a lie? Because I didn't face my own behavior HONESTLY 22 years ago, does that make everything that has happened in my life since then a lie? An unreality? Invalid?
I want to believe that I am no longer that person from 22 years ago. That given the same circumstances now, I would make better choices. That loneliness and brokenness would not drive me to make the decisions I did...but I cannot know. I can never, ever know.
I am intelligent enough to know that I cannot go back, I cannot change a single thing I did in my past, and I also know that to beat myself up about this aberration in my being is not at all productive, but having once looked, I cannot yet look away. Like a train wreck or a car crash, I have to look and examine and see all the parts and things and pressures that caused me to step into the life I have now...
I said to my children at one point (my 4 older children that is) that I don't know who I was at that point in my life, and I believe that is true to a certain extent. And I've also said that it wasn't me who made that decision, but, the choices preceding this one, from age 15 to age 37 make that a lie in some way. Because my choice for acting out in my life clearly went the direction that this choice took me.
The differences, however, are breathtaking in their scope. And the consequences have been both so good and so bad for everyone around me that I hesitate to even speak of it. How do I talk about that time that destroyed my "family" and the decisions that led up to it without hurting people yet again? So I don't talk about it as a general rule, which leaves me fighting my way through brokenness and sorrow and unforgiveness so deep it threatens to drown me if I look too close. So I try not to look. And for the most part, I succeed.
Until nights like last night. Where the ground beneath me opens up and threatens to swallow me whole if I let it. And I run around seeking a confessional, but feeling nothing confessed would ever be enough. And knowing that is a slap in the face of all that is divine, my own unforgiveness...