At 22

close to heart

2012-02-13T11:16:00.000-06:00

I want to take today's opportunity to talk about chance.

Yes, folks, that's right, you heard it right here on the Rambling Mexiwegian Network. Today we're going to be talking about the debate on chance. Can it be controlled or is it out of our control?

Let's think about it while I talk about some other things. Yeah. Just put it on the back burner, there, k?

Wait.

Waaaiiit...

Waaaaiiiitt... an-nd..

Done.

Okay.

I tricked you.

Because I'm stalling. The previous 76 words (not including this paragraph and considering I counted the contractions as a single word, in addition to the "k" at the end of the third "paragraph") have nothing to do with what I'm really wanting to blog out today. Those 76 took longer to write than it did to read them because they're not even related to what I'm wanting to focus on. Usually, that is the case with writing, hey? It takes longer to do than to read.

Well. Duh. But this time I mean exceptionally so because I am stalling.

I am stalling because I know exactly what I want to write about today, but I don't know if I can muster up the finger muscle to commit the words to the air, into time and space, into the universe.

I am stalling because I am aware that I have used writing in the past in negative ways, and I'm not just talking about rambly, incoherent, or emotional blog entries, but in letters to people. I'm talking about the contemplating of how I, in the past, could use my smarts to put people in their place--or--at least state MY position because x, y, or z person had to know what that was. Sometimes with reason, sometimes less so, many time jumping the gun, and at least almost always having to get that "one little dig" in, no matter the commencing tone.

I wonder if other writers have done this. I wonder if other writers have tarnished relationships with people because of this mode of expression. I would bet not. I would bet that no one has the effed up capacity I do to actually go through with using words as a weapon of class destruction.

Let me amend that. Had. Had that capacity. As in, once upon a time. As in "il etait un fois..."

Okay, okay, let's not bullshit ourselves entirely, here. I still have that capacity, but I'm too tired for it. I am ashamed of it. And it totally negates where my heart and mind truly are at. Today my words and emails have taken on an entirely difference personality overhaul, but they're not quite there yet.

I would like to stand up, like an addict or a cancer survivor might do, and say I have been 6 months sober/clean/in remission, but I can't. I can't. My writing has gotten me in trouble as recently as.... well, as recently as a year ago. (That's if I consider I stand by what I've said in communications since then.) (And I do, minus one name.) And, as any addict/survivor could say, the thought never really leaves you, it's just how you decide to deal with it.

To be honest, I've gotten less-than-praiseworthy feedback in even shorter time than that, but there does come a point in one's life where she knows for herself that she doesn't have to apologize for shit.

Which is quite the difference from before.

I guess I have just been using this little thing of gray matter between my ears called the brain a little differently, a little more, a lot more, and I know that all the shit I was trying to communicate before needed a better and steady outlet, not an emotionally-hopped-up one. Really, though I am still reeling with disgust, regret, contempt, and fatigue at this particular summary area of my actions, and all of the energy it took to be that... vindictive and overly apologetic at the same time.

After a while, a person like that either goes down in flames, exploding in a hot, bi-polar mess of anger and regret or they be cool, like me, and just drop it, stick the hands in the pocket and move on.

I kid.

The price I have paid to learn this lesson is far too dear.

I need to write more

2012-02-09T14:06:00.003-06:00

I need to write more. I need to be prolific. If I simply just wait for ideas to strike me, then I am consequently losing all that un-inspired time doing nothing. So I will write a little bit every day, methinks.

I have a friend who is a music teacher who also teaches English. Before the semester change, she was working on this project with her classes about writing a novel per week. It was less about quality of content than it is about encouraging the flow and volume of words stuck in the constipated imaginations of her students to flow incrementally easier from their brains.

I really liked it. So I thought I would give it a try. Just write and write until my creative juices are flowing and maybe some day be good enough to even enter the bowels of the literary world.

Man, I'm on a real potty-mouth tangent here.

I used to think whipping up a blog entry was my version of a real writer doing real commentary, but I've known, realized, and now really, really RE-realized it takes more than that to whip up anything worth reading.

Besides delivery, timing, style, mechanics, grammar, and all THAT hullabaloo, there is research. And no, I'm not talking about the obvious fields in which a writer had better have his facts backed up with reliable sources.

I'm talking about the kinds of details that, even when you think you know it all, even when you think you are more of an expert on any particular subject than most other people, you don't know. Little details that make you realize you still have to do that research. Case in point, my Mexicans Kick Ass thing I did.

I started this out of being inspired by this article (which actually had started with this article,) wanting to write in that style, with that kind of flare, but also that much "factuality" to it. Now, putting the stamp of truth on something that is clearly only perception, you have to be willing to take a stand that perception is truth, that it's your truth, and you have to go about setting that up.

You also have to take risks that expose you. Let me change that. I would have to take risks that exposed me. You can do whatever you want. I don't want to be naked in front a bunch of people! Once upon a time I had worked so hard to be a cool, impenetrable fortress of good guy laughey laugh!

Only I was never a guy and I was sooooo phucking miserable then!

Anyway, tangent aside, I knew with some weight of surety that I was the only one around me who knew and talked and thought and lived and breathed such a Mexican upbringing as I had, with a dad who read everything he could get his hands on about Aztecs culture; and fused this into every aspect of my childhood with all of this education (still showing us how to take pride in our own country.)

It was because I hadn't realized in the beginning just how very focused an upbringing it was that, when I did, it became instantaneously imperative to write about it. But when I sat down and started at it, I found I had to do lots and lots more research just to get things like numbers, figure out percentages (Amy Math!!), and double check that I did, indeed, have my facts straight.

Asking versus nagging

2012-01-30T15:53:00.001-06:00

Okay, let me just start this with one, big ole disclaimer: every relationship has its own quirks, its own methods of getting along, relating, and its own versions of repair attempts that can patch up an argument or divide it in a given topic. Each relationship has its own distinct character, made up of two individual people working to hard to meld entirely individual worlds into one world. Each one is unique.

Also, I detest, loathe, hate the word "nag."

I just read an article on the Slate Magazine website that was some female author's attempt to explain the concept of nagging by asserting her belief that in order for nagging to stop, one must understand the politics of it. (You can see it here.)

Ha! As IF... it were that simple.

It sounded a lot more like an attempt to sound intelligent within a wordy ramble of pop psychology than it did just a point of view, and I had an immensely difficult time trying to make myself read through it. Not just because it was sexist--sexist from a woman's point of view!--and rambling in its own way, but because even the structure made it hard to follow.

It was like watching someone take a giant leap back towards my junior high days, watching in horror as someone slid awkwardly into my old, baggy jeans and multi-colored t-shirts covered in bandaids and condoms. Or something.

Seriously, not a good look for a gangly Mexiwegian from Wyoming.

What was some woman doing rummaging through my old garbage? No, I meant my old writings.

I was pretty disappointed that such an inferior piece of crap was allowed on the Slate website AND that it did more harm than good to publish an already confused and horrible subject.

I remember spending my babysitting money on this stuff.

For the epic centuries that have made up my life and the life of other women, the word "nag" has been one of the most negative aspects of any relationship. For me, it is part of my vocabulary of Things To Be Aware Of in an overall stash of emotional intelligence that I carry around with me like Santa and his pack. Except a little dingier and a little crazier, kinda like that crazy aunt that brings you stuff you can't use right away. Or at all.

(I don't know how many of us have an aunt like that. I don't.)

It is a word that signals red. I've known, if by no other form than my dad's comments referencing my mom's behaviors while I was growing up, that it is meant to be supremely negative.

But I have other sources of knowing this, as well. It was part of the reason when, at the tender, dumbass age of 18, living with the father of my oldest daughter exploded in my face within the first year. Not only was I ticking time bomb of emotions and hormones, but based on the sordid and unrealistic belief that I would never nag, it came as a nasty and undeniable shock when he uttered those contemptible words, "quit being such a nag." Well! I never! Spitter, spatter...

Regardless of where it came from (foolish expectations? being unrealistic? not knowing myself well enough or not being a whole person?) it is a trigger word. Nag. It just conjures up evil pictures of hovering, bickering women, pointing their fingers over and over in the dark whilst their eyebrows arch high up in a steep frown and their nostrils flare. *Shudder!*

I don't want to be accused of this:

Or this.

Well, wouldja take-a-look-a-tha'.

And especially not this!

Why? Because even for a woman of the slightest intelligence, it is a written-off, flat-out insult. Even if I'm the only girl in the world that gets hotly ruffled by the mere mention of the word, my intention, like many women I know, is never to be that person to the man I love! Aw!

BUHHH-t...

I have done it. And it's excruciatingly embarrassing because I know better. Sometimes it's like, oh I don't know... like there are hormones that override reasonable behavior or something. But I didn't want to be wrapped up in being that way, I wanted to figure it out.

So I read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in the late 90s; Boundaries In Marriage in the last few years, and discussed personalities at length with my psychologist mother-in-law, on top of having my own "interesting" communication through the ages. The best book I have ever read so far is 7 Principles To Making Your Marriage Last, by John Gottman.

This guy actually developed a Love Lab and observed couples and wrote down all of his findings. It's actually got some really interesting stuff about committed relationships that you can really sink your teeth into without putting an alien label on your spouse. He's the guy that can allegedly predict divorce within 3 minutes of a couple's argument, but whatevs. He's a man with the credits and has done some serious empirical research in this field.

He also covers nagging.

It's true.

After all of the psychological and spiritual and knowledgeable advances we as a human race have made, the work he's done has comprised a major step in the right direction, from a scientific point.

It all makes sense in the Law of Divine Love, too.

Or, the law that governs us all whether we choose to accept it or not.

Go figure.

It boils down to being aware of yourself and how you come across, how important that is to you, and the fact that it should be important to you. The entire area of nagging, specifically, has to do with being emotionally intelligent. Ya have to pay attention when you're talking to your partner and you really have to decide if what you're about to bring up is an absolute priority or a let-go-able offense.

And you have to be willing to remember what brought you together in the first place and work to keep that "what's important to him/what's important to her" dynamic going. After all, real love is an action word. The swooning stage wears off, life/parenting gets in the way, and it's a hard hit to the relationship. A person has to shut that off from time to time, but the most important thing is to keep the conversation about it (and other such an evolutions) between any two people on-going.

Felíz Cumpleaños, Dad!

2012-01-14T12:32:00.000-06:00

My dearest father, from whom I have been given the heart that beats its music for you,

I was out having my morning coffee/smoke and was thinking about you this morning, and I realized with some regret that I have not used what some people call my gift of writing to compose words for you that are so important and long past due in needing to be said.

In the past, I have used my writing ability to vent, air frustrations, blast, surprise, hurt, and wound people, including you. But for all of my life and all of the little cards and things I've made for father's days or birthdays, I realized I have never tried to compose something that would be of value to me in passing on to you.

Now that I have grown older and I can no longer see the value of using my ability to air gripes, as well as cringing fiercely at my past for having done so, I'd rather tell you what you mean to me, what your presence in my life has done for me, how your passion and culture and influence on me has built my very identity, and how very much I appreciate it. It is the very essence of me--you.

No doubt you have wondered, in the days thus far in your own life, how someone you took in your arms and raised as your only daughter could surprise you in such monumental ways. Both in negative ways and positive ways. I feel like I have been responsible for a great deal more of the negative than the positive, but this time and for future times, I hope this to be a positive thing, because I am tired of being negative. As to the ways that have been negative, all I can say for myself is that I feel much sorrow over being a dumbass.

Fortunately for me, you were right about the stages I would come to in my life: the teens being that awkward and angsty life stage where there is a general contempt for all things ungratifying; the twenties being when you start to realize your parents aren't completely unreasonable but your are still fighting all of your ideals; and now in my newbie 30s being a shift in the tide of change where I can already sense that what I learned in my 20s, I can either throw away or apply it to my life.

I have been looking forward to my 30s and 40s because I heard that's where a person really, truly lives what they've learned. And for me, ever since Kyle was sick, when I was in my twenties, I felt like I had lived twice but suffered the frustration of not being taken seriously and being disrespected no matter what I did or how hard I tried to carry myself with grace and dignity.

But you have always treated me with respect and dignity. And you have taught me things I will never forget and which I pass onto my children. Even though I am unworthy of such love, it is because of your love that I am able to understand just a sliver of the kind of love God must have for each one of us. I am able to love my children in the same way. You have taught me how deeply children are to be loved because it emminated from you and underlined everything; so now it is the foundation that underlines my girls' lives.

I know that the boys have taken more opportunities than I have to tell you I love you and solidify the bond between each of you, and I know we have taken moments to do the same, but I don't think that, for the entirety of my adult life, I have taken the time to tell you just like this, in this way, in these words, in MY way what you are to me and what you mean to me.

You are my father, my reason for being alive. Without you, I would not be here. Without your presence in my life, I would not be who I am. I would not be made up of every good thing you have taught me and that I have learned.

It's true that any prick can have a baby, but it takes a real man to be a daddy. You are that daddy. So many people I know whose fathers were absent in their lives. They have to struggle with love, acceptance, even relationship compatibility. They have to struggle with self identity, self worth. If I ever struggled with those things, it was because of decisions I made or from living so damned far away, which created its own insecure monster at the time; not because of you. People with more family around have been more insecure than me because I realized being a Cazares means being a survivor. I was always able to draw strength from my deepest laid roots and remember that as crappy as it was to not have family around, I was able to quit feeling sorry for myself, lift my chin from the mess, and see that you were always there.

I also know that, maybe, as you read this, things I have said in the past will come back to contradict themselves and that, as recently as last year, have slapped you with my words and been wrong. There have been so many times I have wanted to say I'm sorry for, but the times when I have disrespected you are what bring me the most shame. There are specific moments in my life and in yours that I've wanted to speak for. For having been a brat, a red-headed step-child-like temperament, an insecure waffle trying to cover up my insecurities. For blaming my insecurities on you. For forgetting where I came from. For not talking to you more often over the years. For allowing myself to be influenced by everyone and everything all the time when that is NOT what you taught me to do.

I am a survivor.

Because of you.

You are a pillar of strength and resolve; it has taught me how to be strong and have resolve.

When I think of you, I am a stronger person. I forget my weaknesses and insecurities and remember where I came from.

When I think of you, I remember where I came from.

Our family and our blood line has been blessed with these strengths and I cannot forget them; but for you and me, on the eve of the anniversary of the day you were born, I celebrate another survivor being born and recall with profound richness all that you have taught me to be.

I will never forget this.

You are my role model, my hero, my teacher, and the very reason for my existence. You wisdom, your knowledge, your humility is awe-inspiring and I am humbled and excited that I am the one who gets to call you "Dad." I miss you. I wish we were closer. I think we have a reservoir of love between us that remains not fully tapped because of the distance, but I have confidence that it will not dry up. I love, you, Daddy, and I wish you a very happy birthday.

All my love,
Amy Maria

Norwexican!

2012-01-11T14:56:00.000-06:00

Since we were blessed with--like, literally whooped on with this ginormous miracle--a new truck just before Christmas (and I mean, a whole lot of foot and phone work to put this together, with the bankruptcy still in the air and the guys at the dealership), we have felt not only explosively excited about having a reliable mode of transportation WHICH, by the way, is four-wheel drive and jacked up with a Hemi, we have also felt a huge urge and desire to pay it forward.

So, having also been fortunate to socialize and interact with like the coolest neighbor in the universe (serious ass-kicking 62-year-old), we thought it a good idea, since she doesn't drive, to offer to take her wherever she needs to go when she needs to get there.

And much to our delight, she has taken up us on our offer, so this afternoon I agreed to take her to get some errands done. I'm sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a glossy home decor mag. I hear two ladies talking and every few words I also hear, "Sweden.." I glance up. Make eye contact. Smile. Look back down at my mag. Continue flipping.

I don't like waiting rooms. They remind me of all this stuff. But I'm a cool person, so I just read; and again,

"Sweden...." followed by nervous, waiting-room banter laughing and then, "must be the Swedish blood."

I can't help my nosy people self. I glance up again. Make eye contact again. Smile again. Look back down at my mag. Again. I'm bubbling. My heart is pounding. "I'm Norwegian!" I almost exclaim because, you know, Scandinavian is Scandinavian.

And this time, instead of sucking in that hot breath of air that reels just after one heart thump of stage fright to explain that I'm Mexican (also) because I don't look a beat like some hot Latina goddess, I feel a brand new sensation creep across my frontal and occipital lobes. I probably look Norwegian!

But I don't. Exclaim anything, that is. I'm trying to stay tuned in and tuned out simultaneously. It's not all that uncommon to run into every kind of nationality these days. Chances are, if they're not directly emigrated and aren't speaking with an accent, they're probably mutts, too.

I'm way too enthralled anyway. To me, it seems like I could have an "in" if I take advantage of the eye contact, engage in an understanding laughter, as though I have used my non-existing Swedish heritage (actually I have SOME) to define some common behavior that simply "must" be culturally exclusive to the Swedes.

It works! The nice, pretty ladies are laughing, looking my way, and they non-verbally invite me into this world of instant empathy with even brighter smiles and relieved laughing. I smile back. It really worked!

I still have it, oh yeah.

I actually stop reading (or looking at duh purty pitchers, okay?!) and slide my hand on top of the magazine, right over the page, and engage right back.

Laughing with them, as if I completely understood, I raised a finger, as though I were saying "aye" to a motion and in by best sympathetic chuckle said,

"Norwegian here!"

It was total dork move, but did you realize it was the first time in my life that I actually associated myself with my Norwegian roots in a public conversation (or conversation-type exchange) with strangers?

I was very proud of me.

The First Day of my New Life, the first time.

2012-01-09T11:08:00.002-06:00

(...previous.) (Written ten years ago:) It was my first year at a Catholic university and I was young, alone and overloaded with class credits. I battled all-day morning sickness, worried about off-campus housing, living expenses, non-existing employment and got buried under school work.

After the initial shock of learning I was pregnant wore off and the heartache it caused my family subsided, I gave birth to a little baby girl at the end of that year, whom I cradled in my arms and named Aurora. I accepted motherhood and pressed on, signing up for and attending classes for two and a half years. I worked part time at a local fast food joint and tried in vain to make ends meet and pass classes while trying to fit in time for practicing my bassoon and being a mom.

Moving into the first apartment I ever lived in involved caravanning with my mom and her car and me with my loaded, rusted blue 1977 Ford at half past five in the morning and seven months pregnant.

It was not a vehicle I cared to have, but I didn’t have much say in the matter and was sternly told that it was not beneath my station in life to drive it. I had to take what I could get because I didn’t have the money to complain and my dad had scrambled to doctor it up for me just the previous day.

Before there was even light in the sky, we were already on the side of the long highway, frantically discussing how bad I was speeding because the speedometer had been reading 10 to 20 miles per hour lower than what I was really going.

I tried to adjust to one comfortable speed so that the vinyl recliner and flimsy TV stand wouldn’t fall or fly out of the box, but I was unable to get a feeling for speed in the dark; and the tarp which was barely covering the furniture whipped sharply in the wind, so we had reason to regroup.

It was scary as hell. Mom was as equally terrified watching the contents in the back of my truck wobble, so she took the lead and I was able to calibrate my speed somewhat by following her Grand Marquis.

We were able to complete the 400-some-mile trip and start unloading by two-thirty in the afternoon. Setting up the apartment itself was not without scuffle. The couch that went with a hideous, 70’s era set of furniture we bought and scrounged up that day had to be shoved through the door, nearly busting the door frame, this worried mother and I working together with my six-month belly in between us; and the pizza guy was two hours late with what became our free supper.

We cleaned up beer bottles left by the previous tenants (who were evicted because of such related activities), mopped the floors and tackled the bathroom. Meanwhile, and not to our surprise, the oven was immaculate.

At close to two in the morning, we finally crashed on the only bed in the apartment only to lay there wide awake with late-night fears of the uncertain – my mom worried about her pregnant daughter and questionable means of transportation while I worried how I would fare completely and totally on my own without a job to speak of and no money in any other account.

So we sat up in the dark, grabbed a deck of cards and played a few rounds of 15 In a Pile until we were too exhausted to think about it anymore. An hour or so after dozing off and much to our horror, the phone rang. Though it had been plugged into both the electrical and line socket, the service wasn’t set up to work until well after the next day.

We debated momentarily whether to answer the phone or leave it, but the incessant, unending ringing made us pick up to silence on the line. The perfectly harrowing end to a perfectly harrowing day.

The Reason For The 22 In My Blog Name

2012-01-08T15:17:00.012-06:00

That was the age that I came back from much of time period I described in the posts labeled "cancer" and "auntie m". It was the age I had, for probably the first time in my adult life, the time and the resources to start unclogging the master grand hairball of toilet bowl-exploding confusion that was my life up to that point.

It was not lost on me that it sounded kind of like 'catch-22', although a majority of the mess had far less to do with a 'you're-damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't' cliche than it had to do with feeling freaking incredulous realization that I had just been through hell and was still reeling from it; and then was trying to take the encouragement I was given to write, tell my story, and ran with it, like any dork would, to the awkwardly forced humor side of it.

Anyway, it was just the age that I was when we all moved back to the town where my the girl's daddy had gotten his first job teaching and been diagnosed with the third episode of tumors. We had left, lived through hell, and come back.

It was pretty amazing that he was able to go back to work so quickly with having experienced all his side of these episodes, but as he went back to work, one little step at a time, I sat down to my computer and started to write. I started to write my story.

It has evolved into a hundred other things since then. Rants, introspection, memories not even related to the heavy parts. But after reading my auntie's post about her first child (my auntie, not the auntie m,) it inspired me to go back to my own. Especially since she is such a good writer and so interesting. I love her take on things.

So I went back into my old drafts, dug up a first chapter, and did some editing on the cutting floor.

***

My first of year life out on my own started at a Catholic university. Being a music major, I was instantly overloaded with class credits.

It was new. It was scary. I was out of my league on just about every issue imaginable, but especially the music level. Everyone around me had already had tons of experience in their instrument. I felt like a little hick kid out of Cow Town, wondering if I'd ever be good enough.

I didn't go there on scholarships, save for the one I got from the Knights of Columbus that didn't even pay for all the books I needed and the Burger King one that never, to this day, got paid out to me or the school. I was set up completely on loans that my mother had to help me get.

I hated practicing and saw practice rooms filled up all the time with people slouched over pianos and music stands. I knew I was going to have to work a lot harder to get better, rather than being a natural, and I hated that, too. If it didn't come easy to me, I didn't want it. I felt I should have been AWESOME without any effort.

And after seeing these people, I realized I was only so-so at my craft. Pulling an aria out of my ass, like I did in high school, wasn't going to work for me here.

What was worse was learning that flute and piano players came a dime a dozen. They have always come a dime a dozen. That's why certain instrument families are highly competitive. That's why I gladly switched to bassoon. Anything to get me out of there.

Plus, I was surrounded by kids who were on scholarships. I didn't even have the expressed desire of the college to have me there. I was there out of my own free will and accord. There couldn't have been a scarier way to be motivated. Relying on myself? Psh. No way. And I wasn't even realizing this feeling beyond the dread factor of it. All these kids around me who were being paid to be busy bees over their instruments.

I would have my work cut out for me.

Besides feeling cross and resentful about this new reality, I also knew that a lot of money was riding on me getting through this. So I dove in, trying to look like I knew what I was doing, trying to look like the others. Only I wasn't and I was deathly afraid it showed.

I did swallow the desire to complain. Mostly. I choked down the newness and unfamiliarity of a campus that was largely made of concrete. (No lie, even the walls in the main arts building were gray, lifeless, prison-type concrete.) I tried with a tremendous case of the "I don't want to!s" to be in the practice room as much as I could.

Because that's just what a Cazares does. They jump in feet first without thinking about it, being tough and proactive, and think about the sting of it later. Or the consequences.

But I was also sick during this time. I was bizarrely, uncharacteristically nauseated day in and day out.

And I couldn't explain it.

I went to class feeling gross and sick. I sat in theology as the nun went on and on about her syllabus. I tried to follow my Spanish literature professor during night class.

That's if I made it to class.

I was late to morning music theory that year more than I was on time, because even if I could make it breakfast without heaving, I was often rushing to the washroom after breakfast. I actually even quit wearing makeup because it would all wash off as I cried, bent over the toilet, wondering what in the sam hell was wrong with me.

Did you hear that? Me! The Makeup Queen! The girl would not even so much as leave her house without it. Not wearing makeup. That's how bad it was.

I was never a sickly child. I think the worst thing I suffered in childhood besides a broken arm and a few sprained ankles was the chicken pox.

I was beginning to think there was seriously something wrong with me. I could not, no matter how I tried, surpress the overwhelming feeling that something was terribly wrong.

I had actually started getting sick in Paris, France, where a whole group of us traveled, as a state diocese (about 200 individuals) all over the fabulous city on a tour of World Youth Day in 1997.

I thought it was culture shock. Food poisoning. Something. Anything. Maybe the french food was not sitting well in my stomach, although I couldn't remember eating anything that wasn't delicious, and I even remember trying to soothe myself by buying apples that, too, didn't set right with me. Smells were setting me off. Clove cigarettes and smashed-down wilted grass from the collected scents of just about every nationality of people in the world filled my nose like a pungent spear.

I called my boyfriend back home, crying. Everything was so strange. Maybe it was because I was missing out on some of the more cultural parts of the city due to being on a church trip. Maybe I was just one of those wusses who couldn't travel to foreign countries after all. Maybe it was just the churning in my stomach that just wouldn't go away, no matter how I tried to make myself comfortable. Maybe I was just pregnant and I was going to be in a shitload of trouble in very short order.

The lacking bit of interest he showed in my distress didn't help.

Neither did landing on home ground, which I thought it would bring some source of relief, nor the 13-hour bus ride for the last stretch home that had my nausea crashing my insides like a tidal wave. I rode with my bag on my lap, clutching it with a death grip, forehead miserably glued to the seat in front of me. I hate throwing up.

Hate. It.

I was fighting the raging fire in my esophagus so hard that I found myself relenting to having a trash can in my seat so that I would at least be at liberty to. If I could get anything to come out.

Everyone on the bus was aware of my situation.

Finally, at about seven in the morning, the bus reached our church. I saw my parents waiting outside for my brother and me. I was in such distress about my nausea I bolted past them to go throw up in the church bathroom.

Good times.

It was like everything pointed to me being pregnant or something.

Denial is funny, funny, strange thing.

The hell adventure didn't stop there. I was college-bound promptly the next day. I had the whole day I got home to rest, then it was up and re-pack for oh, I don't know, roughly the last hour and day of my childhood I would ever see again.

It was another 400 miles or so of traveling. I didn't even puke until we were at a gas station at the bottom of the hill where the campus was. Yep, I waited a good chunk of time before it came blasting out of me onto the floor in the back seat of my mom's car.

Mom and I said our good-byes outside on the sidewalk, shortly after getting my stuff set up in my room. She looked at me strangely and, without much ado, turned around left. Scared as a little baby in a dark room full of monsters, I screamed at her not to go. I did so without moving my lips.

No play on words intended.

* * *

So, after a round of this horrifying thing that was making my body do all these things and feeling the suspicious eyeballs of my parents, all the stress of the new surroundings, and noticing that it just wasn't going away, wasn't a bug or the flu, I finally relented to calling my mom, who asked me point blank if I was pregnant.

Whoa, wait a minute. I laughed it off nervously. No. Way.

She was so calm about it.

In fact she was so calm, it was eerie.

After I got off the phone, I handed my roommate, who had a job in the city, the last of my care package money and asked to get me a pregnancy test.

Just barely 18 and new on campus, I learned I was pregnant.

Oh, snap!

***

Resolutions. Yes, I actually have them. For the first time!!

2012-01-08T01:23:00.003-06:00

I actually, really, for reals, have resolutions that I fully intend to stick by. Who woulda thunk it!?

What I am most excited about is that I feel they are realistic and that I can follow through with them; which has always been my excuse for never setting a single other one in my whole life. Like, ever.

Seriously. I don't even stay on track with Lent. That's considerably more important than the so-called social bandwagon of New Year's Resolutions.

It's a new year. What can I say. A new year in the new life that is my life now. I'm not exactly the same person I was before. At least I hope I'm not. I hope I took the good stuff, banished the crap from my soul, and took on more good stuff, shoving it deep in my cellular makeup.

Anyway.

I really thought about what was close to my heart. What did I really need/want to improve on? What was imperative that I get right this year, that I've not worked on so much in previous years? (Besides not making resolutions at the top of the year?)

One answer. My girls. More specifically, my family.

1. Play more video games with Celia

2. Be ready to have my hair and makeup played with lots more by Aurora, as well as be her guinea pig for manicures and nails

3. Spend less time on the computer in the evenings

4. Spend more time in private with God; some people call this meditating. Whatever. For me, it's the awesome dude who created us all.

I cannot stress how, at the age of 32, this has become more than just a duty. One has to understand that my entire adult life has known no other way but being a mom. It started out as a personal sacrifice laced with rightful duty--an emotional conviction deep within my core--and blossomed into a choice.

What? A choice? How can that be, right? Obviously it's not like I could (or would ever!) give them up and then, like, re-adopt them or something. It was the difference in the attitude I had toward parenting: surviving parenthood at eighteen versus engaging parenthood full-on.

And then, call it age, necessity, maturity, whatever you want, I really started to feel these waves of needing my family near me that stirred deep within me about a few years ago, when the pain of leaving my mom standing at the train station in Seattle left me surprisingly, gut-wrenchingly wracked.

Who knew I'd ever grow up out of my surprisingly cocky, surprisingly naive, suprisingly angsty 20s to really re-grow an attachment to my parents, my brothers, even now my cousins and aunties! It was like re-attaching an arm that I had ripped off myself.

Needless to say, for all that I whined about in the last 15 years, and even more specifically on this blog, I needed my family the most.

And I LOVE being in my 30s now. I kind of remembered that I was waiting to be here a long time. Yeah, sure, I've complained about feeling my life is half over and wondering what I've done with my life. But frick! I'm changing my mind. Yup. Just like that. Because I have realized the importance of focusing on the positive. I have realized this by being consumed with the negative for far too long. And I don't even know how. I'm going to say: it just happened.

(Gaaa!! I'm really digging this Collective Soul album tonight! Staring Down from their second self-titled album.)

I'm not only just tired of working so hard at trying to get the people who just don't get it to GET it, but I am tired of the effort of it all keeping its grip on me. Tired of people who don't have the time of day for me and even more tired of giving the time of day to people who don't have it for me. Truly fed up with people who don't like me. And I have crap to teach my girls, crap that I learned from all of this.

Like following your heart, for one.

And for two, following your gut.

With having basically ditched town and torched a lot of friendships, I'm pretty much at the top of the heap of detestable things, really, and so my biggest fear of being hated came true and my second biggest fear followed suit: having to take responsibility for my share of things going wrong long before that.

It can't get much more in my face than that! I'm up! I'm up! I smell the coffee, dammit!

It Really Is Time

2012-01-05T23:50:00.002-06:00

To grow up. To move forward. To not just 'get' over old fears but charge right the hell over them. To quit giving that little piece of ****-mentality any room in my brain. To go back to school. And to quit making a big deal out of it.

I realized with an absurd, aggravated, and earth-rattling heaviness yesterday that in trying to be a good, decent citizen my whole life long and be a good listener (a challenge back in the day as I have procured such nick-names as Blabber Mouth and Chatty Patty,) I let TOO many outside opinions seep into the inside my brain and became the wishy-washy, insecure, tormented and turmoil-ridden little creep that I was. Just read some of my older entries, you'll see.

Okay, creep is a little too far. It just is a point of reference for how disgusted I am with this realization; and equally how frustrated.

I mean, retarded. It was absolutely retarded. Simply and finally just grabbing the realization like I was choke-holding it, it was an epiphany of the weary sort. Who woulda thunk. I thought epiphanies were supposed to be dowsed in light and make you feel like skipping all the way to school or something.

You have no idea how this whole idea has got me in a bit of a tizzy. For no other reason than that is not how my parents raised me. Like I said in a bit part of a few entries ago: where the HELL did that monster come from?

There were two parts to this:

1) The letting it soak in, the processing of information that had been lingering in the abodes of limbo for a time, the accepting it, the growing furiousness of wondering what in the hell "just" happened, the knowing full and damn well that it didn't actually just fly out of nowhere, and the overlapping madness of wanting to scream, yet again, it was ten or so excruciating years at my expense.

2) What. The. Ginormous. ____ Where in sam hell did she come from?

I'm not that person.

That is not how my parents raised me.

That is not even what I believe in being.

Did I ever mention that I think doormat people are the sorriest of people?

I don't really think anyone who knew me or knows me now would consider me a doormat, but there were doormat moments for sure.

It just doesn't make sense. When did I got from being a woman who knew what she wanted to being a scaredy-pants, little afraid-of-her-damned-shadow poser who tried to tap too hard into her old self?

Well I'll tell you what it was. I'll tell you how I got there. It was me listening to people and butting my head on brick walls. It was trying to value the opinion of others while slowly tuning out the dreams of my own heart. It was what morphed out of trying too hard to be a doormat and resenting the hell out of it. It was me forcing myself to be something I was not, and it was me making an effort and no one noticing. (So cheap!)

It was the anger and the insecurity of a person who tried so hard to be good, to do the right thing, was really dealing with some heavy crap on and on and on and on and on... along the way, and too backlogged with "whatthehellisgoingon!?" to pay attention until I was throwing syrup bottles at the wall across the kitchen.

Or, it was feeling placated when I did try to pay attention to what was going on in and around me. Several people, one at a time over time it felt, were simply trying to placate me or maybe placate a rage they felt on their own. Maybe me making enough gripes and slashing comments (many of which I wish I could take back) unearthed their own discontentment with feeling essentially trapped there. Who knows. I was just too inside the inside.

It was feeling cross about what was "right" for everyone else and nobody else at the same time versus what was right for Amy; and yet so rarely did what was right for me. Instead of being accountable for myself, I was accounting myself to everyone else, answering to them like a child.

It was discovering, albeit rudely, that finding a good ear was incrementally difficult to come by; and not only couldn't I get the help I needed nor rely on friends to simply say, "wow, that must've SUCKED", I didn't even get to have a 'my side' of the story without being linched for thinking the wrong way.

I had just had enough of it.

Or I thought I had, anyway. 'Cause apparently, even after being sick of editing myself to death, I was still doing it. I was still, still saying what I thought people wanted to hear based on what truths they were able to bring to my attention. Did you catch that? I was listening to other people's opinions, digesting them, understanding their side, and trying to alter my perception to meld to some schmoozy hybrid of them both!

And then I did it one last time. With the so-called 'last' person in my satchel of people I angered to the hilt with my attempt to clean up the hot mess that I was, wanting to get control of myself AND feel validated, a final stroke of contempt plus this massive downstroke of irritating depressive moment yesterday, and it all came swirling together. That's what made me mad. Holy crap.

Have I ever let people influence me!

And then it occurred to me. Regardless of the lack of details, pertinent or otherwise, for anyone sitting on the outside of my skull, or even fragments of the story pieced together by outsiders--by anyone not directly influenced--there is only what's right for me, and what is right for my kids. There is conjecture and perception, and then there is truth. And, as much as I hate to say it, just because someone doesn't like my point of view, it doesn't mean I'm wrong and it doesn't mean I deserved nearly a tenth of what I got. It means, I made a choice.

And isn't it effing ironic that I had a whole entire life of being indecisive and letting everyone make decisions for me (or at least influence the hell out of mine) that when I finally started making my own, I would get very little respect for them.

And here's the thing. I can still hear the voices of the multitude of well-meaning people in my past saying their well-damaging things.

I had grown monumentally resentful of it, too, relative to the time spent there.

1 year = isolated hardship frustration times pi r-squared minus some joyous moments X 10 = clusterphuck to the nth.

But...

...doesn't it just SAY something about me? Yah, what a kook I am, perphaps. Because I'm the only one to have moved in and moved out, with a hefty sum of time having been served on the inside, and being so absolutely "vocal" about it. (Who really knows who reads these things. It never serves me when I'm writing something cool, only the negative. Just ask whatever anonymous person it was who printed out one of my, shall we say, meaner entries some years ago and sent it to my bosses.)

But it should also speak to how hard I was trying to make it all work--living there, working, emoting, partying, sulking, crying, laughing, celebrating, mourning.... Taking my lemons and making lemonade, if you will. Doesn't anything speak for itself?

The worst part about this whole kind of dawning-on-me thing is that it really wasn't new or surprising. And it came laced with feeling dumbass-ey and feeling freaking justified all along. Weird.

The realization that I was drowning in that deforming mentality, rather than staying true to myself. It just sucks.

I mean, family can have their own way of screwing you up, true, but isolated northerners...

And to digress a bit more, yes, I know it wasn't just people back there, that it was just my own experience, that I am grouping the people I loved there/people I did not love/people who weren't even from there and therefore possibly stepping on their toes, and that yes, it wasn't all bad and yes, there were good times there, and yes, it's true that I should not be coloring the minds of whichever 2.3 people that read this with a negative opinion of a community that happily functions at a stunted level, and that yes, I know my contempt screams through every word. After all, there is much to be said (and will be said in an entry soon-ish to come) about the life I had with my kids there, and that was plenty positive.

But I am truly confident that I am not wholly out of line when I say that there is definitely a certain "mentality" because I did live there and did give it more than just a disgruntled chance. I've seen people who've lived there and left use air-quotes around the word 'mentality'.

I did my damned best to entrench myself there, live and bloom where I had been planted, and deal with all that I had been dealing with at that time in my life; and contrary to what I have been told in regards to post just like this one, I am not slapping people in the face. I'm slapping a mentality which does afford me some room to gripe. Not to mention that some of the dearest of my friends there admitted, or at least relented to, there being major disadvantages to living there.

I guess it just didn't didn't work for me. For whatever reason. My very two different, Gemini sides were very present through pretty much my whole ordeal there: from start to stop.

A rambling year in review: 2011 in some parts

2012-01-02T23:01:00.004-06:00

-So yeah, I don't know. That's just what my thoughts are on it. I think the biggest thing, in rereading my religious entries, is that I am still not satisfied with my answers. Perhaps that may be because I don't know what question I am answering, and to figure that out directly would mean answering directly. It would mean taking a defined stand on something I specifically and intrinsically do not feel I can do, for I see the errors in representation on all sides.

-I had to put some barriers between me and an old friend recently. It really sucked, and I am rather sure she was on her way to doing the same before I even resolved to, but the real pisser of it all is that I was trying really hard to be the kind of friend she wanted and needed and still failed miserably (for a multitude of reasons both sides contributed to) while trying with great difficulty to overlook the fact that we both were probably always friends with each other out some sort of sense of condescending obligation. I mean, that's not to say our friendship was or is a farce. No. Never. But just ended up being more on the ritual side of a prolonged, long-distance relationship, and then when I tested the friendship by making a decision she could not stand by nor overcome, the ugly reality of it basically divided us. I really don't harbor a whole lot of ill will because she had to stand by her convictions and I had to stand by mine. But what compelled the need to put more than a little space between us, and it's more complicated than I give credit here, is that at the end of the day, she could not be there for me.

-I started playing bassoon again and realizing a huge portion of an old dream: to perform for a living. I did not make a living off of playing come true, but I DID get to just focus on playing, practicing, performing, and making some good friends for life while doing it. I realized that I have a ginormous fear of accomplishment and/or failure, and that to get past it, I had to suck up a buttload of old preconceptions and misguided notions. About myself. About others. About success and failure in general. And I did it French.

-Learning French was a much needed benefit and blessing. As a result, my vocabulary and ability to communicate has improved somewhat. I have found the ability to articulate more clearly and be more concise in my communications. Being that French is a more direct language and puts the kibosh on vague and otherwise useless constructs of language, I have figured out how to more accurately state no more or no less of a given main idea, which has helped in my writing, but has also aided in my personal psychology, making introspection and even moving forward more easily accessible. On top of that, I can now listen and appreciate French music and television much more as well as watch movies in French without subtitles. I can walk into my girls' school and utilize my newly acquired French-speaking skills. Overall, it has made my life a much richer experience.

-I never, ever, ever, EVER, ever. Ev-er. Want to live without my daughters ever again. And while that may be just exactly what happens as they go to live with their dad next year, I will scream it from the rooftops of Blogger here and through tensely clenched teeth: I. Do. Not. Want. This. At. All. It is not because of their father. In fact, if there was anybody else to take care of them when it's not me, I would rather it be him. But it is because living without them last year was absolutely hell. My entire adult life has been constructed with being a mother. I do not know who I am without them, nor do I really want to know. Whatever sweet moments of living like I was a freely independent woman and cohabiting with a crazy wonderful man that I just adore to have existed last year were intensely subdued with the pain of being without them and the terrible, terrible state of limbo I was in without them. My life is complete when they are with me. It doesn't matter that I will just have to deal with their absence when they leave home to go to university or whatever mission in life, what my mom said about that absence being like a practice run for me is the shittiest thing I've ever heard.

-I realized how negative I had become. Again. Who knows why or when, and it almost certainly has to do with the tremendous ups and downs of the last year, from divorce to epic disagreements with mon conjoint to living without my daughters, but in rejoining my children's lives to mine, my oldest has been keen to call me out on it point blank.

So, after a negativity/positivity quiz kind of acted like the final smack upside the head, I just kind of, sort of snapped out of it. I quit dwelling or brooding. I realized how easy I could do it. I realized that I couldn't handle boring without brooding, that I had brooded all last year, that I had gone back to brooding after successfully changing my outlook TO be glass-half-full back in the day. I realized that if my daughters could live through the kind of year they had and still be happy, well-adjusted children, well then, so the eff could I. I realized I don't like brooding. So I changed it back again.

It doesn't mean I'm cheery or with sunny disposition all the time. But it does mean that I have, yes, reassessed my life, realized that even with all the stresses of starting over, of tight budgeting, of cleaning up after everyone, of maxing out the overdraft, sewing holes in clothes (rather than getting new ones), scrambling to make rent---in addition to this being the THIRD time in my life that I've started out from scratch and been poor. as. fuck.---my life is still pretty good.

Maybe the third time's a charm. Maybe it's because I have this really cool French boyfriend that my daughters are trying to establish a relationship with. Maybe it's because people are so friendly in this town, or that I'm doing what I love for a part time job. Maybe it's because I have cool friends and a sweet neighbor lady and family that still loves me. Maybe I'm wiser now. Maybe it's because putting all the crap behind me is working and I'm not hiding behind anyone or anything anymore (even WITH the drama and scandal of what I did.) I don't know. But I just know that things are getting better. I know I am seeing signs of hope, joy, love, and exciting times passing my way and just as sure to come.

-Bottom line of the last year: not apologizing for myself ever again. This is not the same as being sorry for people I've hurt or mistakes I've made. But it is about correcting those mistakes, making right the wrongs, and moving forward. I have not always moved forward so decisively. In fact, I pretty much never have. I have blabbed to just about everyone I've had a problem with in email form while continuing to spin out on either 1) blame/wanting someone else to take the responsibility of any given gripe (early on) or 2) force their side of accountability. I will probably never quit trying to be a mirror towards people, but I will not be focusing on what I can show someone else--I will only be worrying about choosing the paths and turns I am taking to be happy and to bring happiness to myself.

In the words of a very dear friend in regards to all the naysayers and judgmental critics: f*** 'em.

Apologetics? I wish.

2011-12-29T17:28:00.004-06:00

Here we go again. Another religious entry, dammit.

Maybe I am reading things wrong or too quickly, maybe I am missing some information, maybe just plain not doing enough research, maybe understanding things poorly, maybe misunderstanding the cross-generational cut, but in the cross-section of eloquent-to-non-eloquent responses I have seen in regards to just about any version of dogmatic interpretation (and believe me, I've seen quite a bit since my last post on this topic, not to mention over the whole course of my life), the information people have seems to be drastically short of substance somehow. A quark or two off from understanding the number one ethical basis of life: how the greatest law of life is love; and how genuine, earnest application of that basic, underlying, cemented root of ALL things is non-refundable, non-interchangeable, and absolute.

To me, neither side totally has it. But then again, I probably don't have it, either. I just had to say something. I just spent some more time scanning Catholic forums and was stunned at the sheer volume of inaccuracy. Such is the way of forums, and I am no studied theologian, but I was stunned. Stunned that there is no loving guide to put the retarder brakes on the snowball of misinformation going on, stunned at the gross number of people going round and round, already misrepresenting a whole slew of information, and dismayed that it will end up justifying some crazy-ass, wanked out position, or get in the hands of some already-jaded atheist.

Now, before I go turning you off with the implication that I am about to present the grand Pooba motherload of horsecrap, based on my perception, and call it "truth," just simmer down and take a breath. I'm not going to do that. Actually, I did do that, in the first paragraph, but if you haven't picked up on it before now, my entries concerning this subject are more defensive, as though I were attempting to speak to the heftiest of opposition.

It is, for lack of a better way to put it, a debate that I am having in my own head, having been sparked by this debate several years ago. Since that debate, I've been on a mission of sorts to better equip myself for answering the questions this debate called to light, since I have what I feel is a huge, deep-seeded desire to not only root for the underdog and for justice, but to hopefully provide a thorough presentation of something that is difficult enough to be summed up in a lifetime, much less a 2-hour debate. If I could stammer and fumble my way through a good conversation with Chris Hitchens, I'd consider myself pretty lucky.

I know it seems kind of silly, especially when it's just this one debate. But I've seen massive piles more of these kinds of things since this interview. I've read and reviewed articles on this subject, researched and double-checked actual dogmas, talked with priests and laypeople, discovered people who are trying to do what I'm doing but with limited understanding of the dogma (which then slips the slippery slope into rhetoric) and been a lifelong Catholic.

In addition to carefully swallowing every bit that an atheist, agnostic, or otherwise oppositional has had to say that I've come across, I've also been full of my own doubts. I cannot honestly sit here and say I've been a staunch Catholic from day one to year 32. One of the recurring themes seeming to surface as I go on a scavenger hunt for people with elevated intelligence on this subject is that wherever there is honest-to-goodness, hardball points to be made in opposition to the church, and to religion in general, this guy is there.

My dad, a rather devout Mexican Catholic, taught me that it was more important to search for the truth than to stay Catholic. He told my brothers and I that as long as we were on a quest for truth, that was more important than keeping a label. And from my mom, I learned the importance of being loyal to your beliefs.

That is what allows me to detach from the Catholic label and approach the topic as a person of freewill, compassion, and understanding for hard truths in the hearts of the most deeply-rooted opposition. Because maybe that's what Jesus would do. Jesus seemed to always speak for the underdog, the down trodden, the heavy-laden. I know for sure he didn't come to this world to free of us eternal death with the word "catholic" printed on his swaddling clothes.

But there is such a huge part of me that is deeply rooted in this discussion of faith and debate of ideals, this clashing of the masses, because humanity is capable of great love and love is the single most important, weighted, and valuable thing in this life. It is the element in which we do everything---e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g---it is the place from where all that is good transpires and doing good is rooted.

And so, that is the underlying principle, argument, and artillery I have to speak my ideas. Love. Unconditional love. Unwaivering love. The kind of love so strong and so pure that you would sacrifice personal comfort for. Epic love. The kind Dante had for his Beatrice. Or Romeo for his Juliet. Only those are just a snippet of what divine love is, and they still messed it up because they were humans. (Are you getting it now? Do you get how strong pure, thorough, and encapsulating divine love is? Okay, stay with me, don't worry about it for now.) God has that love for us, but on an unfathomable level. It is so ridiculously high above us and warm and comforting that to see that level of love, the brightness, the acceptance, the warmth, and the joy that is Him that we could not handle such a sight in its fullest form. You know, without dying and all, that is.

It is, also, coincidentally, the single most inspiring notions ever to beget the human race.

It is, also, totally and completely skewed by human vision with human trials and errors and feelings.

Our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions work to shade our eyes from that love in various degrees and intensities, much like sunglasses. It's not that the sun got dimmer, it's that we put something over our eyes.

Understanding this makes it easier to understand the pain of another human being. It also makes you want to judge less. It makes you want to do the things it will take to get you closer to that purer light. It also makes you realize that a creator of such divine love is a creator that could never forget his children, who could never be a god of wrath and of vengeance, or of capriciousness. The church needs to remember this and make it its focus; and the opposition, regardless of how high or low, needs to consider this.

Being able to come to some compromise in such a debate as this would be the application of that love in every sense. Loyalty, humility, passion. What are we doing when we spout out secular or religious truths in a way that is unpolished, incongruent, abridged, or deficient? Sparred out of pain or confusion?

We are simply just finding places for our pain to take root, that's what. Pain that comes from not having our questions answered truthfully and feeling left out at sea. And hard questions about the church, too: female priests, homosexuality, abortion. And that is hard to watch.

I mean, I've done it, too. We all do. We find moments of righteous frustration and we focus on them as being right. And as long as no one is offering to provide provable, solvable, tangible answers that change our mind, we keep on going. That is part of our human experience. We are not exempt from it.

But what if it wasn't so cut and dry as any one side puts it? What if it was?

Here's the thing: I think it is cut and dry. But not by us. By the divine creator, by our Savior, and the Spirit who guides us all. We have a duty to hold our brothers and sisters responsible, yes, but not to judge them. If the One who loves us loves us so much, then we should love our neighbors as ourselves. Period. Sinner or not. It is cut and dry in a way that in the face of His love, we will know our mistakes automatically, but it will be a private moment because our relationship with God is as individual as each one of us. As long as we choose Him, no matter our mistakes and atoning for them, we will be comforted in His arms.

There are no easy solutions, and that is probably why I will never be able to win a debate of this kind. But I have read as much on the lives of the saints as I have wonky forums, and I still get rather passionate about the plethora of ideas that circulate out there.

Moving On. An Older Topic.

2011-12-28T12:20:00.005-06:00

(Originally written in September of this year. Edited to post today.)

As I get ready to embark on the next stage of my life and there being a 4,000-kilometer expedition in front of me before getting there, I am inspired to expound on other stages in my life where I have already begun to piece out a story. It's therapeutic. Fun. And insofar that I am far less emotionally invested than I used to be, retrospection can be spun more positively. Old-fashioned conventions of writing, of time lines, of perfectly positioned punctuation WILL be tossed out the window.

On a side note, I have also thought about selling a large majority of my life story as fiction. I'm already sick of the one-question-begets-another cluster of assbackwardsness that is my life. And I mean, what's the point of putting a title on that story, extracting and sucking more (and hypothetical) sympathy when I have already had the experience of it being ignored, minimized, and slammed with antipathy? At least I won't have to rely on my imagination in order to come up with a good book. But I relent. I'm sure I couldn't even find a publisher. Not that I want to seriously go looking for one anyway, but I still have this retarded, deep-seeded wish in the far back dust traps of my mind that someone would pick it up.

But then I would probably just have one excuse or another for not wanting to work so hard on actually putting something together in the first place. Guess that's why I stick to my blog. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever order I deem to be in the mood for.

So then, where were we? Oh yes, I hadn't even started. And I was supposed to continue my post from yesterday, which I'm not doing after all. But like a good blogger person, I'll probably make a link from the continuation of yesterday's post to yesterday's post when I get around to it.

For today, though...

Rent.

And no, not the totally awesome musical with Adam Pascal and Idina Menzel (who played Elphaba, the witch, in "Wicked",) but the foreshadowing I referred to here (12th paragraph down, just before the asteriks and again 2nd to last paragraph.)

At the top of the switch-over, when I moved into the city after my living with friends flopped, I offered the aunt a small amount for rent. It wasn't much but at least it was something. I had done the same with my friends. By then my in-patient husband was getting his long-term disability paychecks and even though they didn't stretch far with an infant and a two-year old, at least we had something. My girls had what they needed and I was taking up space in their house, eating their food, and getting rides from them to the hospital. It seemed... fair.

But then...

End of January comes, beginning of February, something like that (yeah, not too long after the Christmas I was displaced--another entry coming soon to computer near you,) and the aunt pulls me aside and says, "well, hey, look, it's not quite enough. What you're giving me isn't covering enough." Vague like that. No details. In her squeaky, passive-aggressive smile, she doesn't explain. I don't ask. I just come to understand how maybe the near-four-hundred dollars for bigger-city living isn't a realistic number. And I trust her. I feel like she's family and I'm cheating her. And what do I know about the cost of living there? Nothing.

So I oblige. I don't think to check the newspaper to compare prices. I don't think to go on the Internet. And this is before the days of Kijiji. I don't think to do much of anything because my husband is sick with cancer in the hospital. I don't think about much else, at all, really, because it's already so much to be in this weird universe where I've lost control of my life, I'm trying to keep it together for my daughters, and security is a long-lost, foreign, far-away dream concept; and I am only 21 years old. My head is too full, I am perpetually in a state of alarm, and I just keep waiting for someone to have pity on me and be able to afford my leeching, or maybe even just know what to do.

But no. Next month, same thing. I don't even remember where the month went in terms of time, and here this woman is pulling me aside with a paper in her hand with figures on it. Somehow the rent goes up another chunk. Now I'm getting a little curious. We're talking over five hundred dollars now. In 2001.

I start to stew over it. My in-laws do nothing about it. What could they, do, right? They warned me not to move in with her in the first place. Husband comes out of the hospital for a short stint to get a change of scenery and in between chemo doses. He stays with us at the aunt's, and guess what? Yep, that's right, she ups the rent again.

By this point, it is costing me $680 to rent a small corner of her house. An enormous house that she and her husband got for cheap because they bought out someone's foreclosure. It doesn't cover my baby's foods, diapers, or formula. It doesn't cover any extras. This is just to live in a hole in the basement of her house.

One day, she comes home with arms loaded with loot from Michael's Craft Store. Another day, it's new HUGE television (before the days of HD.) Yet another day, it was a complete bedroom set for her youngest daughter.

I am now starting to see where all my husband's disability checks were going.

I am livid by the time I point it out to anyone who would listen.

Which is pretty much no one.

During my husband's stay with us and before going back into the hospital, he was with just enough presence of mind to agree with me about the maddening nature of all of it. I wanted to confront her about why she was charging me so much for rent. I wanted to know what she was figuring into the price of rent. And since she couldn't, for the love of God, give our young family a break, I wanted speak up and out loud.

But I was so filled with anger that I could hardly make sense of what was going on, much less what I wanted to do about it. It was a daily thing. No one seemed to clue into any part of the pain I was going through and to make matters worse, here was this aunt contributing to the injustices we were already suffering. I didn't even care about paying rent to earn my stay there nor paying a certain number as compared to the housing market around me, it's just that one or the other of the two choices would have at least yielded something more akin to freedom and the money that was being sucked from my pocket was sick money.

And freedom I did not get much of. I got lectured for one thing or another pretty much every other day. I never knew when I was going to be pulled aside for something, cornered about, or "suggested to." If it wasn't my bedtime--my bedtime for crying out loud! After bearing 2 children? Was she serious?--it was about cleaning the house, or about the way I cleaned it, it was about the way I disciplined (or did not discipline enough) my children or the way I did or did not talk about my emotions with her or "seemed" to be not understanding my situation. Oh, I understood it perfectly well, thank you.

Not to mention, again, no car, no job, no immigration status, no money of my own, no way to make a few bucks here or there. Trapped.

It was maddening all on its own to have been reduced from being my own person with a family and the husband's promising career to some kind of know-nothing, grunt-level, entry-level, belittled kid thing whose loosely-tied "family" status somehow enabled the aunt (or maybe entitled her?) to treat me like crap AND try to fake like she wasn't. But then paying big city rent for a shithole bedroom in her basement and cleaning her house and watching her daughters live comfortably spread out while I crammed myself and my two babies in the shithole bedroom was less than exciting. After months of trying to take it all in--the cancer, the aunt, the inlaws, the young motherhood, and immigration limbo--and nothing coming out, and this short off the heels of a year-old marriage, college with a baby, single motherhood, and no family around anywhere, I didn't know what end was up. It was like jamming a gig of information in 750 megabyte computer and the RAM is fried.

So I practically jumped at the idea of my mom buying me a plane ticket to hang with her for a month in Nevada. Of course it meant leaving my husband to deal with his lung surgery by himself (with his mom) and my mom would have to work and carry on her life while I was visiting, but I would be OUT of that place.

And I had received my mother in law's blessing. Respite came slowly in those days, and emotionally unintelligent people were slow to respond, but my mother in law's understanding of the situation (in addition to her own severe contempt of her brother and sister-in-law) helped relieve the guilt I had about going. By that point, it was May, the prognosis for my husband was looking better, and all the procedures his oncologist had promised were actually starting to be followed through on. I had had all I could stand of the situation. Had I stayed one second more, I might have had a psychotic break.

With what little sanity I thought I had left, I packed up everything I could carry, including two little girls, and made my way through the scary maze of customs to see my mom waiting at the port.

I have turned into one of THEM moms!!

2011-12-27T22:36:00.002-06:00

My kids got phones this Christmas.

I have been in serious, inner moral dilemma about this. I am probably about the last parent on earth to advocate kids having cell phones. I don't like the idea of them having them. I detest the idea of them in schools. I've seen the crap and output of what our voyeurism age can produce. I didn't have a cell phone until I was in my mid-twenties. (And guess, what? I survived!) I don't do bandwagons. I reject the reasoning all other parents have used. And worst of all, my own little cheapie one doesn't work.

Of all the things their father and I are able to agree on, we are in utter solidarity over this one.

But since the unfolding of the past 3 and a half months has produced mass confusion, missed volleyball or basketball games, miscommunication about schedules, and just an overall amplified level of stress, it dawned at me that maybe, just maybe, it's way more about the comfort level of the parents than I had, *sigh, originally thought.

I mean, what the? Societal norms have only dictated the "tiniest" (!) part of my life. You know, the part that's convenient when it's convenient? I make the tough parental decisions along with the co-counsel, their father, and we stick to our guns. And even though he and I are divorced, we lay down the law. We don't budge. My very significant other is as equally supportive and backs me up in our home. And I said, kids don't need cell phones.

But. Relent we did. And it wasn't an overnight change of mind. It had been coming over time and I had been discussing the issue with my ex. It just boiled down to them growing up, their social circles expanding, me seeing less of them, and them being so much smarter and more emotionally intelligent than everyone else. I mean, they ARE the single most intuitive and perceptive preteens I've ever known. I was at a perpetual stop-loss for why not. That and I had to do something to remedy the sinking of a feeling I got every time they were out of school and knowing they were going ahead with plans that were their own, quite probably not fully cleared with me ahead of time.

And I don't really think it will be so bad. There are going to be rules set into play. There are going to be consequences set for breaking the rules. But even with all of this understanding to come into play, I still can't believe my kids have cell phones. Just re-reading this makes me cringe.

"Nah, you're not! Have you seen you, lady?"

2011-12-26T23:08:00.008-06:00

This was the main idea behind me, a little white kid with freckles and starkly dark brown eyes, going around staking claim in my Mexican heritage as a VERY non-Mexican-looking runt. For pretty much the whole of my life, I grew up being half-Mexican.

Not half Norwegian, not as mutt-worthy as I really am, just... half Mexican. Anywhere I went, any time I had the chance, I was looking for a way to butt in with my cool Mexican-ness. In the band room before school, meeting new friends, heck just meeting new people. Going to coffee, starting in a group, and then later as a so-called grown up, it'd be a conversation piece. Sometimes related to the topic being discussed, sometimes not. Most times not. Eventually it grew to be, "Hi. I'm Amy. I'm Mexican. And your name is?"

I don't look at it. AT ALL. I have fair skin that never tanned (until I was an adult) and about as much natural rhythm as any puritanical protestant fundamentalist. But there was no consideration of this. Not because of extreme Mexism in our house, no. After all, my dad was just a simple, proud man, deeply defined by the rich culture and history from where he came. But because he instilled that same pride into his whitey kids. We. Are. Mexican. And... I did have just enough rhythm at unexpected, effortless moments to trick myself into thinking I could be Latina. (Those moments didn't really stick, though. Just ask my 7th grade band teacher who didn't let me into the jazz band.)

No rhythm plus conductor equals no jazz for me!

And isn't it really something that a man who grew up in Mexico, emigrated to the states with his single mother in the 60s, and mated with a Norwegian woman with starkly blue eyes teach his pale-faced, dark-brown-eyed kids to hold onto their culture?

So hold on we did, in varying degrees, to our Mexican heritage. Full-bore and headlong into an unsuspecting world where no one really dared to point out that we didn't really look the part.

Then one day, my dear college friend just kind of stopped me dead in my tracks by daring to ask with a puzzled frown, "But you're Norwegian, too. What about that part of ya?" Clearly she was appealing to my sense of culture and NOT my pale, shows-up-better-in-black-light visage. It made me think. For all of about two seconds. Then I'm pretty sure I changed the subject.

Then I had an Angst-For-Dad phase (you know, out of some crazy, ill-notioned thought that he should have reacted differently to me getting pregnant at 18) and did kind of focus on my Norwegian side. For about a day. Yeah, I looked up some stuff. Read that there is no real unified language as of yet, so instead of picking on dialect to try learning, I proverbially threw my hands up in the air and said, "Oh well, can't learn 'em all today. So why try." I know. Good, eh?

The best part? I am so full of contradictions I could make your head spin. It's fun living in my world! What with the cold Viking blood and the hot Aztec blood fighting itself in the same blood stream. It's a wonder I didn't end up bi-polar or ADHD. Guess I'll just have to settle for being Gemini.

They tried to make go to rehab, but I said, "No, no, no"

2011-12-19T00:04:00.000-06:00

I've gotten back into the bassoon scene just about a year now, maybe a little more. Did I ever say how much I missed it? I LOVE it! I have missed the challenge of playing, of establishing chops (more on that and bad practicing habits later!), playing in an ensemble, and the grand rarity of the bassoon.

Oh, what's that? A bassoon? Never mind, just watch this from the 2:10 mark. What you hear, that "poh-poh-poh-poh" sound, is the bassoon.

Okay, hmm, I can see that really isn't helping you. Well. Okay. This then:

Yes, that's me on the right. The cool guy on the left is Frank Morelli. Or at least what Google photo captions said he was. I still have to do research on him, but I'm sure he's a pretty fabulous bassoon player. He had is own bassoon bio and everything. ON his OWN domain. Pretty spiffy. Oh never mind. (There is absolutely no connection point between Mr. Morelli and me, only that I happened to pick up the same instrument he did, and he has probably been playing since before I was filling my diapers.)

Thanks to my experience in Quebec and my ability to find a bassoon to play here, the ginormous gap in my bassoon-playing experience (talking university days and the last year and a half) is closing. One little fact I realized, after much self-deprecation and ridiculously low confidence levels, is that WHOA HOA I can really play. I'm not just saying I could. I have produced, ese. Veni, vidi, vici. Yo.

THAT comes from years of lowering my standards and musical expectations, another story for another day, but yet another realization that it was, indeed, truly happening as I suspected and not... as I was incredulously starting to feel---fundamentally bat shit crazy.

See, not only is that me playing after a 12-year hiatus, yadda yadda, but that is me scoring an invitation to play with the youth orchestra at a conservatoire of outstanding musicians. Stellar musicians. All because I was able to acquire a bassoon, start working up (albeit piss-poorly) my chops and an audition, plus score some play time with the local city band.

I mean, seriously! It's not like I'm even this outstanding musician or bassoonist! But because I have stuck with it, because it's important to me, and because I just got sick and tired of this roladex of random people in my brain (over and along the course of I don't how many years now) repeating their negative thoughts in my brain, it has worked out. This is as life-altering for me as it is a relief to be doing what I have always wanted to do. That is, be a musician because I damn well want to (and no other reason) and just getting absolutely full-to-the-gullet tired of putting everything in a negative light. I had just let so many opinions affect me and was just so used to being negative that even when I wasn't being negative, it still oozed in between the words and my reactions. Ugh! I really saw the manifestation of that last year when I noticed that "look" on my professor's face, like I've seen elsewhere in my life: the look of, 'lady, you really are being unrealistic with yourself and your ability.' The kind of look that hits home. With just a hint of exasperation teamed up with a good dose of empathy, it almost makes you want to feel sorry for yourself, seeing what she (or he) sees---a super insecure person.

Which made me wonder where did that beast come from?

At any rate, music has healed me. And now, I am recognized in one form or another as a bassoon player. The most important part? Getting to know the people who have guided me to this point, in music and in life. Getting to know other bassoon players. Getting to maximize the sharing of what is a talent. The teachers I have studied with (Sara, Paskale), the blogs I have found (the principle bassoonist in the Columbus Ohio Symphony writes a great one!), being asked by someone younger for my advice, applying all that I have learned makes me so excited to dive back into a world I was compelled to forget. Just makes me remember that I do have experience, that I am experienced, and that oh yeah, I got this.

Be sure to check out:

http://bassoonblog.blogspot.com/

And this Dave Brubeck classic transcribed for bassoon:

8 Reasons Why Mexicans Are 10 Times More Badass Than You Thought.

2011-11-11T16:53:00.001-06:00

By Amy Cazares

1. They Don’t Speak English

For real. Anyone who has studied the English language knows there are a billion ways to say “the cheese is old and moldy”, and only one certified prick English teacher to tell you how many ways you can say the same thing and still produce different meanings. You try changing that shit into Spanish and it just doesn’t translate. It just doesn’t. That’s because Spanish is a romance language and there is nothing romantic about old and moldy cheese.

Not romantic.

There’s no way to produce the same kind of faceless, vague, and cynical English humor in a language that is more direct with the flowing verbs and rhythmic nouns of Spanish. Doesn’t give a classless, crass person a whole lot of space for ambiguity or suggestive bully-ing because you have to take responsibility for what you’re saying when you say it in Spanish. French, too. In fact, probably all other languages that are not English.

2. They Know How To Laugh At Their Own Expense.

In fact, they take pride in being able to laugh at their own follies because they know how to not take life so seriously. Mucho years before the economic crash, they were already passing around hand-me-down clothes, eating rice and beans, having family get-togethers and potlucks, and generally covering each other’s backs.

Random strangers covering each other's backs in the mid-90s.

My cousin, Carmela, helping get my uncle's car out of the ditch.

Friends, family, friends AND family. They are so damned happy that they take their life-celebrating selves to the cemeteries and share that love and support with their deceased loved ones on the Day of the Dead. They know it’s important to remember everyone, lest their loved ones suffer the “second death,” or be forgotten. Comfort and joy is much easier to come by because they are always together, working together, supporting each other. Life is centered around the kitchen, as a matter of fact. Working together produces a warmer environment. A warm environment produces the feeling of safety. Safety therefore produces a lighter, uplifted feeling of overall reduced life burden because they are sharing and relating; and that produces laughter, because they are predisposed to an accepting environment no matter how much they fuck up. And they’re not speaking English. Awkward, nuance-riddled English.

3. They Are The Awesomest Kind of Family To Have

They are warm, accepting, non-judgmental, forgiving people. Period. End of story. Case in point...

"One of these things is doing its own thing, one of these just isn't the same..."

One of these things grew up in the States.

Nobody said a thing about the inappropriateness of my screwing around.

4. They Are Not Pretensious

It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you’re going, or where you’ve been. There is absolutely no status. Not because it’s a way of deflecting American attitudes about their country off of them, but because they just do. not. care. They don’t give the least fuck about preconceived ideas because they have no preconceived ideas.

"What was that? Sorry I was too busy being badass and sexy to

give the least fuck about what you think of me."

They are too busy taking care of their families, making kickass food, having parties, enjoying mariachi music, celebrating their culture, and speaking romantic languages to care. They are too busy being accepting and loving or at least being concerned with their own responsibilities to worry about things they cannot control.

Unless you are messing with family.

Mexicans are very warm, welcoming people, whether from Guadalajara, Oaxaca, toward the northern states or southern peninsula; so it’s not that they don’t have room to be pricks or can’t be pricks, it’s just that it’s a far harder concept for them to grasp than, to say, your average fifteen-year-old-emo-minded, this-side-of-the-border 32-year old. Status cannot exist where it does not exist.

5. They Make Kick-Ass Food and They Do Food RIGHT

I’m NOT just talking about huevos rancheros and bean burritos. Chalupas, pozole, chile con carne, tamales, steaming hot corn cobs wrapped in hot sauce and lime at the vender stands (or elotes), and friggin' guacamole! Also most interesting are their candy. Tamarindo, cajeta. My brothers and I loved the novelties of tamarindo (think spicy Fruit Roll-Up being squeezed out of a Mop Top Hairshop Playdough head) and cajeta (cararmel/honey/peanut-buttery-type concoction) which came lined in wax paper inside a long, wooden oval-shaped coffin-looking containers.

Abso-fucking-lutely delish

(Clockwise from top left: tamarindo, elote, bean burrito, cajeta, guacamole, cajeta agian, tamales, pozole, and chile con carne.)

Traditional breakfasts kick some major cuisine butt with their stack of beans and a pile of rice alongside some eggs, shredded pork in mole sauce, and some steaming-hot, rolled up corn tortillas. Imagine if every kid in the States and Canada ate that before their big MAT6 test—we’d be ace-ing the crap out of standardized testing!

Point is, the importance of breakfast is not lost on Mexicans. They do it right. The big-ass meal of the day is breakfast followed by mid-sized lunches and dinners, and finally a small bedtime snack. For example: sweet bread with warm milk. That sure is ass-backwards! Dwindling calorie intake just before hibernating, rather than huge nightly feats? Preposterous!

6. Never At A Loss For Words.

A giant nebula of sayings, parental wisdom, life-is-hard anecdotes, superstitions, and really, super good advice—which does for the soul what warm milk and sweet-bread at bedtime does for the tummy—have come from using absurd or comical imagery to make a point, in lieu of the more direct Nouns and Verbs.

“Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos” (“Breed crows and they will take out your eyes”) is a far more interesting way to say that actions will have consequences.

Not only is this a more colorful and easily-relatable way of expressing a classic truth, opinion, or mindset, but it really hits the memory record button in your brain. That shit is used by psychologists, counselors, and therapists to broaden the overall, perceived problems of a patient when basic, fundamental explanations don’t do enough to empower them. It makes a self-evident truth reachable.

Simple math

7. They Have Aztec Ancestry

Before the Spanish came and conquered them by siding with the enemy, bringing over unwitting weapons of biological destruction (small pox), and shackin’ up with Aztec women, the Aztec empire was one to quite arguably rival that of the Byzantines.

Not only was their influence and power far reaching through most of what is current-day Mexico but they built aqueduct, civil, and agricultural systems that ensured a productive cycle of commerce and trade, opting for negotiation-style rule over military-enforced control. Their pyramids at their capital Tenochtitlan were ginormous and beautiful.

And, as the blend of European Spanish and Aztec cultures combined to give way to the race of people Mexicans are so proud to be, they took the pejorative “mestizo” (coined by the Spanish to indicate who was not of noble rank --- part native and part European) and instead harnessed it as a proud, national identity.

"In YO’ face! Trying to demoralize us, Spain--eat shit and die!"

Showin' some Mestizo pride.

An identity so sweet and so evident in pride of their Aztec ancestry that it can be seen splattered across the canvas of Mexican culture even today—“El Día de los Muertos” (Day of the Dead) is derived from Aztec superstitions and the eagle on the cactus eating a snake in the middle of the Mexican flag comes straight from Aztec mythology.

8. They Owned A Goooooood Chunk of the U.S. Back In the Day.

Before American politicians manifest-destiny-ed their way across to the Pacific Ocean, Mexican territory lay considerably further north than the Rio Grande. By ‘good chunk’ I mean Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, up past Colorado, and into a southern strip of Wyoming. That is approximately over 1 million square miles of land*.

To put it in comparison, the current-day United States stands at 3.79 million square miles in total. That means Mexicans owned one-THIRD of what is now the United States of America, on top of what is now Mexico. So maybe we need to rethink our definitions of legal and illegal aliens. Maybe if they wouldn’t have been so fresh off fighting for their independence from Spain and fighting off the French, they could have withstood the massacre coming from the States. Maybe the section of states which used to belong to Mexico would have stayed Mexico. Maybe a lot of things. Maybe they are just trying to go home!

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa

2011-09-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

Okay, let's back up a bit. Let's back way up. There's no way I'm going to get into the mystery of the Holy Trinity or any other mystery, or even get into the deeper strains of faith in the church or even in general until I get something off my chest.

Bigotry is the new catch-phrase for the insecure and self-conscious.

Think about it. There is an tumultuous, agitated, pouring outcry in society to be accepted, from kids in the schoolyard all the way to more controversial LGBT community, this not being a defined range, but all controversial within the context of what we see, experience, deal with, tolerate, opine about, etc. that even the honest Christians get the "B" word stapled to their heads when trying to stand up for what they believe. We--society, all of us--in our rants to be accepted, are slapping as many labels on ourselves as we are other people so that we feel recognized and acknowledged, to the degree that we are pointing fingers and looking everywhere but ourselves to put blame and not take responsibility for our hurts, our confusion, our anger. Or grouping good, honest Catholic Christians with the effed up, crazy, fundamentalist whacks. Or, at the very least, the Catholic Church getting the brunt of this societal divorce and becoming a whipping post for anyone who would disagree with her positions. But we don't need to be labeled! We just need to live our lives as we see fit and do the best we can in the light of the Great Creator. As long as we're trying, Our Lord will see this and he is going to have a good, enlightening discussion with each of us at the end of the road. He is the only judge we need to worry about. He knew the insides of our soul before we even thought of labels.

Furthermore, there is a difference between compassion/understanding/love/patience and 'tolerance', also the new throw-around catch word of the day. Dictionary.com defines tolerance as

1. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry.

2. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one's own.

3. interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own; a liberal, undogmatic viewpoint.

4. the act or capacity of enduring; endurance: My tolerance of noise is limited.

For the ones crying out loudest for justice, this definition only applies to them, but not of theirs toward the Church. That is also injustice. Or just plain not fair, is it now. Society wants freedom to practice whatever religion, mantra, zen-like thing they want---we want freedom to say whatever the hell we want, and we have that freedom, but we don't give others that freedom, and we certainly don't want to hear it if it disagrees with the feelings and opinions we've taken a lifetime to build. And sometimes we're just mean! Even people in the LGBT community! Not only does this hypocritical thing negate whatever peace-bringing thing we practice (or don't practice) or preach, but there is no respect for another's beliefs. So gay or straight, male or female, rich or poor, tolerance, as lukewarm and apathetic as it is, isn't even being applied by the ones who preach it. Then the word "bigot" gets thrown in there and well, if you're not one, it just gets old.

In some cases, some are just as intolerant of the Church's right to free speech as they accuse of the Church of being. And/or throw the entire intended meanings out the window, losing the context completely. (Like here and here.) When negative cycles like this get repeated, we are revisiting times that do, indeed, seem like the Dark Ages, because we're forgetting the whole return aspect of what you dole out. Like grade 6 logic appealing to the rest of the grade school-ers. The only difference being that instead of fighting a "no, I didn't, HE did" war, the kids have rejected the teacher altogether and so many of the ranks below them are in dispute. But there is still junior high and high school to go. It has become trendy and enlightened to buy every rearranged truth that is said under the umbrella of tolerance. It has become far less than unpopular to say that a homosexual lifestyle is a sin. But tolerance is the easy flip-word, negation to conviction. And it is just as humiliating to read and hear some of the things Christians say, from awkward wording all the way to right out bullshit. Let me be the first to say, even defending my church, that there are some pretty effed up people out there that claim to be Christian.

I can endure listening to thoughts, feelings, and opinions that differ---even greatly---from my own, and love so many walks of life as though they were my own (just ask my Mexican father, my Quebecois boyfriend, my Norwegian mother, my colleagues, my friends), but your freedom ends where mine begins and one of the choices I have in exercising my boundaries (besides abandoning literature and self-education--um, that's a no-go) is to stand up TO the craziness, stand up for what I believe, in a way that is whole-hearted and passionate, not to the point of bashing it down your throat, but not backing down because this aspect IS dying and church is struggling to make people understand her role in the grand role of Love Itself. I am damn near positive I'm not the only one who feels as I do. It is difficult for us to express these things in words and semantics that people will understand and accept, but then again we are only human. I hope there is leeway in that.

If we consider that true faith is a relationship with God, and if we consider that any relationship which you act on love and with regard to perfecting the way you love, it moves the relationship to greater and greater depths. Any good couples counselor will tell you that behavior not concerned with the health of the relationship will only eat at the relationship, and that we must become responsible for our hurts and attitudes which contribute to the health or the demise of the relationship. And that's what we have: a relationship with God. Whether we choose to engage or not, whether we grow up in one kind of home or another, whether we agree with it or not. Both sides must work on it, for the better of the whole relationship, whether the other side deserves it or not. And that is where Divine Law is already working. Agape love. The divine love that precludes any hurt or darkness. That is what God has for us, no matter what we do. (It's just that if we keep doing things that refuse Him, we are closing our hearts to his love, a cycle in which, if not stopped, can lead to eternal death.)

The Catholic Church is obliged to uphold these laws in the way that a spouse or lover is obliged to do things for his or her partner--out of love, devotion, loyalty, commitment, and deeply spirited desire. It's not about being God's little grunts and do so out of miserable duty. It's about choosing to love Him back! And doing the things we would do for our spouse/partner out of love. The historical, problematic part of the church is that she is made up of humans and her spouse is the Savior and humans always want God to bend to their will. It doesn't work like that. Whether or not you live by karma, The Golden Rule, cause-and-effect, or any such reciprocal principle, it is about loving accountability to a loving God, who is compassionate, merciful, and forgiving, but not subject to us, our creations, our rules. Right. Now. We are his creation, subject to Him. We are the ones who change, flex, move, bend, not Him. It is us that need to grow into his love, not his into ours. We are the ones who have to split our guts working on the deepest parts of our love because where we work, we grow; where we grow, we have pain; where we have pain, we can more easily identify with someone else; and when we can do that, we are on our way to loving the way God intended us to love one another.This also means trying to help all of our indignant, angry brothers and sisters understand that 1) we love them SO much, we want them to take part in our community of brothers and sisters, no matter their orientation; and 2) rules suck, but because of the Galileo incident, we know the church CAN grow and can fix old thoughts. Who is to say, on this earth, the church can't change and that there is no hope? Your own hope to live your life the way you want to is the very hope we have that if it's meant to be, it WILL happen.

But let it be known that it is not right on either side to get extreme of go full-throttle against the other without understanding and compassion.

Also, remember this addage? "When you point, three fingers are pointing back at you." We are all sinners. Duh. There are more than a few of us living in sin in a plethora of counts across the board. What about the man living with a divorced woman? The woman having an affair with a co-worker? The gazillion couples having sex before marriage? The point? Don't judge. No matter what your creed, your side, your argument. Stand up for what you believe but don't be an ass. What all of us sinners forget as we cry out against perceived injustice is that we all do crap that offends God. All. The. Time. But he still looks at us with love in his heart because he IS love there is a whole order of business of Him waiting for us to love Him back. He wants us to grow. The very definition of love includes growth. But he is not a lazy or trendy god. He is the god of all the ages, the sole creator (via evolution, yes) and not prone to OUR rules. The ones most outraged by the church's doctrines and papal declarations are neglecting to own--because it is very painful to not always live as we would choose--that life in God IS painful because growth IS painful/awkward/uncomfortable; and... that human interpretation of divine-anything is going to be prone to flaw by the very nature of being human. I am NOT saying you can grow out of homosexuality--that is just wrong. What I'm saying is that we can and should try to live in harmony of our choices and God's desires for us side-by-side until we've exhausted our every effort to live a full and holy life. There needs to be the same understanding for each side to any argument or issue, which is never easy and quite often impossible as there are many angles of a heated topic as there are individuals--and we ALL have our own, unique levels of love and of angst.

And so, when truly bigoted people say bigot-ey things in the name of Christianity, it makes me want to puke. But so does taking messages and addresses out of context. It is our job to hold our brothers responsible, but it is important to do so in a way that is in the way that Jesus would. And how was that? Certainly not being a push-over, uber-tolerant, long-haired, tunic-wearing dude that was like "heyyy, I said this was the Golden Rule and these things were the most important commandents, but.... uh.... I'm gonna change 'em." No. He brought the spirit of the law back into the consciences of the crowds and put it in our eyes like a mirror, broaching controversy with a loving message, and not laying down waiting for people to roll over him. Eventually the message he was spreading--the good news--ticked off people so much it got him killed. Do we dare say that he brought it on himself or 'that's what he got for being a revoluationary'. No. They could not accept the new message. And even in all the ignorance to be born of all the ages since, none of the ages before his days on earth can claim to have the kind of growing intelligence and illumination that we have now. His way of thinking revolutionized philosophy.

As more people grow to be more up-in-arms about how the Church fits in or does not fit in to their lives, there will only be more persecution slung out of our mouths. I know, I was critical of church and religion in general in my twenties. I still can't understand some of the same things my straight and homosexual friends can't understand. But I am young, and we are young, and we are all subject to ultimate God-law (the law of love, Divine Law) whether we want to or not, which is not a law of tolerance but of love, forgiveness, compassion, and mercy. And the church is NOT what it was in the archaic past. (And before you go popping off about molestation, just shut your mouth and remember that all of us regular, normal Catholics were disgusted and mortified and wanted to hang and remove those priests ourselves, and that they do NOT represent the real heart of our blessed church.) Part of that law of love is our individual free will on this earth, but ultimately we have to answer to a loving god for why our hearts are so hardened. Both sides of the equation. Forgiveness is the hardest thing to do or to come by but by far the most precious commodity.

(If you could read this, maybe you can try this one: The Gospel of Tolerance.)

The Holy Trinity

2011-08-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

Speaking from a strictly personal experience, I know this mystery is what sets us apart from other faiths, even other Christian faiths. Also, there are beautiful elements and qualities in other the world religions that set them apart from the world, too, but this, along with transubstantiation, is what really marks us catholics apart from all others.

It's the mystery of three persons in one.

Before anyone starts going crazy on me, I'm not really one to be talking about this in length as I am just a mere layperson in the context of worldly scholars, studied theologians, and various experts. And, if anyone has read any number of my posts, they would know that I am not a saint. I am not even backed up on my scriptures, and I struggle with my own things just like everyone else.

Also, I suck at explaining.

But in trying this out, in stepping into territory that I am wondering/starting to believe was part of my call here on earth due to the abilities I have been given (yes, acquired--but then, from whom do they come?), I branch out here. I try to explore the beliefs I have come to know here, the way one explores the traits of a most trusted friend, to offer my meager contribution to the plethora of opinions, beliefs, and even precepts that are out there (and perhaps explain why ours are there---the universal Church of Christ aka the Catholic Church.)

I don't do this to convince, either, because I have already wasted too much time trying to awkwardly share my thoughts before and ended up leaning too heavily to the convince-the-proverbial (theoretical) audience side. And for my part, it causing pandemic confusion at times and simply funny looks at others. Past efforts have been wasted, depending on the reason from where I wrote something or on another's ability to understand, and I, for one, am done with it.

I don't do this to convince, either, because I have never been one to push my thoughts and feelings down someone's throat. What's more, is that I have been surrounded in the past or immersed into situations where I am the one getting ideas shoved down her throat. I don't want to do that to others. I want to stand up for what I believe, I want to demonstrate the strength and the force with which I believe because I came to be lukewarm in my testimony, but without infringing on the freewill others.

In addition, if I believe in what I am sharing, and the proverbial audience is to be changed (or at least contemplative), then it will not be because I am so good at my job. It will not be because I am brilliantly persuasive or because I have all the answers, because I'm not and I don't. If something is to be changed and I am talking from the heart, the words will speak for themselves, no matter my style of delivery or vocabulary or use of language. It will be because something else is reaching through my words in their honesty, and I will be responsible for the integrity of my words, but not their effect. The effect, which is what I tried so hard to control in the all the ways I used to write, is not something I can control, I have finally learned. It is the result of the soul recognizing a truth in another soul, which gives an interior brightness and clarity or simple understanding. And so it is, that if effect does come upon my words or after, it is He to whom I should give glory, whose spirit inspired even the smallest bit of understanding from any single member of a so-called reader crowd, and not myself, because anything good that comes only comes because it was made possible by a greater and more loving creator. In ever having told my story, my faith has been and will always be an integral part of it. The difference, I stress, is intention.

So, before I dive into the mystery of the Holy Trinity, I stop here, if only to collect my thoughts more and to make a humanly-flawed attempt at an introduction, after which, "discussion" of the mystery will resume. It is time. It is time to give glory to the One who has given us all.

Old thoughts, a letter never sent, good reading

2011-08-17T16:10:00.006-05:00

Why would I want to go see what you bashed me with? On a site that I'm not interested in seeing? You tend to keep thinking I NEED help, when in reality, I've carved out a pretty hard ass road ALONE and acquired some pretty damned solid morals within my faith in spite of myself, keeping an open mind to all forms of wisdom: great works of art, of music, quotes worth immortalizing, literature.

I don't claim to have more wisdom than anyone or any 90-day program, but I find a very solid sense of the same things you are learning with this program in the skill set I already have and it just grates me that you keep telling me you think you know what I need. I think you just need to stick to knowing what you need because you're not very good at knowing what I need. Most of these programs are carved out of the same principles found in every good-moral book: the Torah, the Koran, the Bible, even great philosophers and literature giants. I'm not trying to impress anyone, You. I'm done dancing to the tune of everyone else's fiddle, and...

...just what am I supposed to do about everybody's hate? I will eventually have to go back sooner or later, and when that transpires, everyone's just gonna have to get over it sooner or later because the people MOST immediately affected by my oh-so-demonic move are already moving on. Also, I'm just not worth the hassle. They are not the ones I screwed over! I'm not divorcing them, I'm not tearing up their relationships, I'm not ruining their lives. The people who still hate me have a responsibility, like it or not, to tell me directly, to approach me, to confront me about, or shut the hell up. I don't want to be mean, but I am physically exhausted and emotionally drained from all the ways other people have felt so entitled to be that angry that even in their ANGER they try to control what they cannot because they lack compassion and understanding in spades. Even in seeing just how and what I brought on myself, here, even now, all these thousands of miles away, this truth cannot be veiled.

I understand that their anger stems from being hurt, confused, misunderstanding, hell even cultural differences and I can't blame them. I can't begin to tell you the torment I've felt over this, the hot tears I've cried, the soul-wracking sobs that come from being 1 person who suffers the opinions of many, but what does you telling me about everyone hating me do for anyone? Does it make you feel better? Do you think you are telling me something I am not wholly and completely 100% aware of? Is it supposed to make me feel worse? Teach me a lesson? Bestow something else, anything else, any other morsel of fruitful bearing, wherein it would just be better to move on? What good does it produce? How does it help you or me or anyone move on, feel better about the things that have transpired or heal deep wounds?

Hurt? Hell yeah, I understand that one. Pissed, yeah, for sure. But telling me not to come back? I still have reasons to come back and if you don't want to be one of them, I can and will respect that, but taking suggestions that don't really come out for my well-being is exactly the suffocating thing that I defied by leaving. All the friends that were close to me/us were friends first and foremost because they had important traits/qualities we found in each other worth saving, worth investing, worth smiling and laughing about, telling jokes, celebrating with. I'll take anything they have to say. But no one is going to tell me how to be me.

As for the lingering gossipy few, there are plenty of lakes around for them to take a long walk off a short pier. Everyone in that area of the world has something to say and I, for one, am not going to walk around like Hester Prinn with the scarlet letter branded to my forehead on account that I'm some abhorrent troll. In fact, I'm not even going to walk around as the least or the most of anything. I will not give a shit. Any. More. The very same noses that have been needlessly, bit-grabbingly poking up into my business up 'till now are all the very same noses that were okay to love me as long as I was doing exactly.... what.... they wanted. And you know what? None of them were around when I needed to talk and none of them stood by me along the way. I didn't make the move I did to protect and gainfully keep any semblage of popularity. The question is: why do YOU care if people hate me?

And as a last-ditch effort, I defend myself. If what I did, by leaving, was so horrible, then what about the good things I left there? Why isn't anyone thinking, well, you know, she was a good woman in X, Y, Z regard or remember the good things, or---for crying out loud---my children! Even though there was probably some silent, collective cheer when my girls went back to live with their father, I can tell you he didn't raise those girls all by himself and they didn't get to be sweet, spunky people that all my friends and all the nose-pickers claim to have say over without their mother! In fact, far from it. And. I was a good waitress. I used to teach there. I made friends from every gammut and circle I crossed. I was reliable. I threw my all into anything musical. I was a fairly productive member of society there. Everyone USED to like me. I knew I would have a lot of explaining to do, that my motion was severe, that it would sever many ties, but only did I expect to answer to those closest to me. I already committed far more than my share of energy in treating everyone with acute equality and niceness (even if they didn't deserve it) in attempting to get along with anyone at all costs. I'm done with it.

If not the past, if the good things I did in the past are somehow now negated, then so be it. I won't point out that I sent my girls to live thousands of miles away with their father pending a whole year. I won't mention that it was me respecting their choice. I won't point out that I could have made any number of battles for keeping them with me, could have made one vague excuse after another and won. I won't point out that I have come to rearrange my whole life around his job so that the girls will have parents that aren't split by plane tickets and geography. I won't point what a superiorly royal bitch I could have really been and wasn't.

The fact is and still remains that no one knew what was going on behind closed doors and worse, no one cared when I tried to even approach the subject. Just toss, toss, toss it under the rug. Don't talk about it, it's not that bad, it's not what you think it is, you're not thinking about it right. Ad nauseum.

People didn't see and people didn't care, so people didn't have a right to judge. The timing of it was messed, the action severe, but I point out: you didn't really give all that much a whoop anyway. But as I sat here once, with all the steaming hot indignation I felt, I couldn't help but see the ironic injustice of it all. All those who yelled at me from their social thrones on high, from their bacteria-cultured cells, through Facebook, behind my back (thanks for telling me)---the ones so hellbent to pin me to the wall---weren't there for the least or the most of the previous 12 years. None of them, not one, dropped by to help out when I was a single mom, alone and scared. Didn't come in to say hello when I had a dearly beloved husband sick and dying in the hospital. No one uttered a word of sympathy or pity in the whole existence of an altered life with an incapacitated husband, nor appreciation. Barely a word or gesture or measure of greeting, understanding, compassion at any single moment or angle of grief in my worst moments and muted support at the best. I wish I were exaggerating.

So then who.... tell me..... was there? Who could have possibly taken my hand and been able to give me the kind of real help and support and/or shove in the right direction I needed? Who was going to be willing to to be loving to me before my adjusted way of living went so far off track that I really felt like there was no one? How could anyone not of dedicated stamina help me figure it all out without exacerbating the world I made for myself? Who was there to think of anymore when I had no one? And who was going to help me so long as I was not willing to help myself?

No matter how many "shouldas" and "wouldas" and "couldas" that are infinitesimally born of the one and same problem, the fact is that I couldn't believe how changed things had become and I just finally had enough. I was fed up with being the kind of woman I swore I'd never become.

Prince William And Kate Middleton

2011-07-30T22:15:00.004-05:00

At the start of July, after picking up the girls at June’s end, visiting Vieux Montreal the same day and seeing the jazz festival being set up, characters on stilts, paintings on sidewalks, water fountains, charming town squares, sex shops (oh yes, quite the education for my girls who merely only saw the words over a business door and blushed—no, we did not go in! What kind of mother do you think I am?), novelty boutiques, and Chinatown, we left Marc in Saguenay for work and went to Levis to see the prince and his bride for their first of appearances in their Canada tour.

We waited a total of about 9 hours to see them, at least 5 of those unnecessary as we came WAY early in the morning to make sure we got a good spot and noticed that we could have come a lot later. Still, it was good to be safe, and finally after about eight or nine hours, they came into the barred-off circle of people, a crowd of probably four- to five-thousand people, and shook hands with as many people as their security team would let them, Prince William taking the far side, Kate Middleton coming around our side, who the girls wanted to see more.

I let two other little girls with flowers, whose mother I had been talking to for the afternoon, go in front of me to share the front-row space with my girls and all four of their faces were all over the newspapers the following day, and the television news. Marc had seen us all on the live coverage at work and had been super excited and jumping up and down.

Waiting outside the fort doors at Levis, QC. It was quiet for quite a while.

The girls were beside themselves when Kate finally made it around to them, and from what I could see, Ms. Middleton was very gracious. I really have to say it was nice to see someone exhibit a down-to-earthness that seems so easily lost on celebrities, at least from all the testimonies I’ve ever read about famous people who lose it or who are such jerks in person, and especially because up until that day, I really couldn’t see the relevance of the British royal family. However, I could definitely sense that she was just being a person who “happened” upon celebrity status, rather than being an altered ego of herself, like stars or celebrities or are driven by the sensationalism of their own career. And I am happy to admit that I can see that what Kate Middleton brings back to the royal family is something very akin to hope for future generations. With a rather classy, classic style, she is a new, refreshing kind of role model for young girls; and she seems to be as in awe of her status and reception as her fans are. What’s more is that it’s exciting, especially as a mother, to have such a wholesome thing to look up to. Yes, I can say I’m happy to be a convert, if only because it made me realize how cynical my attitudes have become.

So, Why The Do-Over Do-Over

2011-07-30T22:09:00.004-05:00

I had originally attempted to answer this question in another post, but ended up getting off subject in the worst way. Mainly, the emotional way. Nevertheless, I realized almost right away that my post entry had way less to do with the answer to that question than the emotions and defenses I was feeling at the time.

But rather than focus on just how embarrassing it was (somewhat still is), or how I felt a certain integrity not to re-edit it because there’s a certain element of standing by a work, even if it is flawed; or how learning about saying what you mean and meaning what you say mixes in with the old habits of overcorrecting and likely met with a variety of personal reactions (of which I had plenty), I’d rather just say it here like I intended to originally.

Besides, if I corrected the old one, it wouldn’t show up as a new post here, but rather stay buried in the year-ago collection of blog posts and get lost; and I feel confident that it’s not going to really matter to the least of my critics, nor do I care if it does—I just want to be able to look back and be satisfied to reread that I addressed it.

So, question. Why, I was asked, did I even have a do-over wedding-type shindig only to leave my husband 8 months later. How could I even think about doing that when so many people were present to witness the celebratory wedding we never had. It has been one of the top most lingering questions to keep surfacing this last year. It wasn’t just the one question itself, but also all what the answer represented, and a rather decisive maneuver to address it on my blog when I finally could answer it fully and honestly.

Answer. Number One. (And keep in mind, this was NOT an easy answer, nor an easy decision to come to in the very first place.) It was the quickest way to put a whole big patch over the whole thing. All the problems we were having. All the problems we were pushing under the rug. All the problems I tried bringing to the table and we never fixed. All the problems we tried scooping under the rug and never got counseling for. All the problems that bled into new ones, bigger ones, problems that we didn’t bring into our own lives (cancer and medical) breaching into ones that we did (too long a list now). Problems that metastasized into big, leprous, itchy tumors. Problems that caused us to consider divorce, not once, not twice, but at least three serious occasions in the past and in front of friends. Flatlined moments only dug out of long enough to fool myself back into the shredded union.

Number Two. I never thought, in probably a million years, that my life would flip over upside down on its head just months after. I was just not looking at the situation in my marriage honestly and was desperate to hide it, change it, make it work somehow, feel renewed, and give each other amnesty. I was hellbent on making it work ‘till the day I died, even resolving to be a Stepford wife if need be. I would take the final swallow in choking down what was left of me and operate at a shell level until the girls graduated and only reserve the real stuff for them (because it was the only way to compensate what K refused to give me--passion.) In many ways, I was like the wife of the alcoholic back in the day—the one who convinces herself that it will still work, that the terrible things going on inside her marriage only exist for a “tiny” reason, and compartmentalizes the situation so she can put it “over there” for an unspecified amount of time, until the next time. Only we were both part of the problem and I was compartmentalizing for two people—me and him. And I wouldn’t discover how bad it was or how hard I was working to choke it all down until I met someone who was able to drag me out from under all the layers of crap and point to the light.

Number Three. All of the layers of junk we had gone through, both inside and outside our marriage, whether it happened to us beyond our control or we brought it on ourselves in some way, was something I wanted to put behind us. I just wanted to really start over. I thought it was a great idea. I was inspired. I thought it would be a great way to throw away all the left-over ickies of life first afflicted with cancer and joint problems and then later infidelity. Or, like I said, a day of amnesty in our marriage and bumpy lives together. I wanted something normal and I really felt that it would be a good way to say a big ole “f*** you” to old attitudes, to people who couldn’t support us, nosy people, people who added to the demise of our relationship (including ourselves), and just celebrate something we never, ever had: a real wedding. I really believed that if we could give ourselves this treat, that we would feel more at liberty to be who we wanted to be with each other.

But….

It would take more than living in a small town and blaming everyone else to get past that. It would require a good, hard, honest look at myself. And it would take an even harder realization: that we already were what we were going to be, and that we contributed to our own demise. We had turned 180 degrees away from the day we got married.

Nothing can really happen without counseling and lots of support, which we received so little of, and when each of us had changed so much as a direct result of ignoring the issues. It was a small, isolated northern town with nowhere to go, nothing to do, very little aspirations, and people who care more about themselves than others or drinking themselves into oblivion. And where we had no family, no blood family anyway—the ones who love you regardless—people only can only go so far for you or, as in some cases, when there is something in it for them—like a snooping Tomcat or a glimpse at my boobs or ass, which I did nothing to bring on. Nothing. It was difficult to find help without judgment and we did not surround ourselves with people who could help us professionally or emotionally. Resources without traveling a good distance for them meant there was at least some risk of losing privacy, And we both had our own, separate hard times with reaching out to others. By the end, we didn’t know who to trust, and we only had ourselves to blame.

This I must say, though. Not every single person we met or knew there was like this, nor did they fit into this description, nor is it totally accurate or fair. But I am not talking about those people, and there were quite enough of the kind that did fit this description to make it difficult to live in a community where we, as a couple, depended on a support system that consisted of friends who could be as fickle as the wind and/or in no way obligated to us. Family absolutely mattered but ours continued to be far away and in the background, and we were only family to friends until their real family came home for the holidays. By the end, I just gave up trying to talk to people.

It should have been a sign in and of itself that I was not putting out the kind of quality person I wanted to be surrounded with by being defeatist about the things I could have done to save our marriage, but I had become so very tired of taking on more than half of the quality control for our union and excessive guilt three times over that I finally quit owning all the guilt of the whole marriage and started living like a person that knows it takes two to make it work. I just wanted to strip down the appearances we made even to each other and live a real life. I wanted K to make the call to the counselor, the psychologist who came in once a month from the teacher’s union. I wanted him to be the one to put in a last ditch effort to save us. To help me help us. To take some responsibility in an emotional matter. I wanted him to take the reins for a while, but not just in tasks, but in love and in passion.

But it takes two people to want this. Love is an action word. Be it that I’ve made mistakes—Lord knows I’m no angel—I know what devotion is; and I know that even in spite of myself, I backed up my fluffy words with actions. Anyone who can say that simply providing the basic necessities should suffice, well I would say I tried—oh god how I tried—to make it be enough, but it just doesn’t. Not for this girl, not for most passionate women. Not for me. It was not an easy decision to make.

And finally, when I could no longer deny it and no longer wanted to, I left. Bam. Just like that. Because it was my choice and because I’m a grown-ass woman (as my father might say.) Because I honestly didn’t think people would give two shits. Because people with family there just don’t realize how lucky they are. Because I was tired of haggling all of this AND my place in society without so much of a bottom line, a safety net, a support system, or a family. Because I was tired of allowing everyone else to make decisions for me. Because, as stupid as it sounds now, I thought it would be good that K wasn’t left alone. (In terms of the night I actually left, which itself hadn’t gone like I’d planned.) But most of all, because I was tired of grieving over my other half letting me go like a trap door on a stage long before I decided to leave and not caring about it, even when I brought it to the table as a concern.

Be it erred thinking or truths in reality based on perception, all of this was what was under the layers of the onion that our marriage became. I still grieve this because I believed in our love. I believed in our ability to make it work, to keep getting to know each other, and to get over obstacles. In all of my crazy quirks, mannerisms, nuances, plain dumb idiocy, forgetfulness, dizziness, airheaded and Gemini-ish blabbermouthy youth, never was I unrealistic about getting married or putting the work into it necessary to survive. Not even when any single link in the chain of the medical age robbed our lives of a real beginning, where the chain of THOSE events were never-ending. Nor did I forget the moments of magic we had once upon a time and in the beginning. But maybe I shouldn’t have had to do it so alone. Maybe I shouldn’t have had to do it so. damned. alone.

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em?

2011-06-26T10:34:00.002-05:00

I think I finally cracked (yes, you may ask, again) because instead of trying to locate the source of the buzzing mosquito, black fly, horse fly, or worse at the cabin we've been staying at--and believe me, there are several of each--I found myself trying to hum the same pitch of the buzzing and then hum the interval of a third over that pitch. There is only one reason I can think of for doing that, and it beats the alternative of continuing on a hopeless insect killing spree: submission.

However, there is no way around the construction on the house. At least three or four days out of five, I have woken up to the house literally being jarred by M.A.'s uncle, Y. pounding a hammer, nailing with the swift and loud air gun, sawing; and there's no humming a pitch to that. It has been positively stressful. More than I'd like to admit. But with the whole last year being what it has been, I've been desperately trying to shut my brain off to things that would normally spark my temper. Some days, I feel like I've ingested drugs or some other toxic or otherwise substance because I almost choose to not be my regular self.

And what has this last year been? This "last" place, last home to live in before moving west, for the beautiful, jaw-dropping scenery that it is, has been the third place we've been "stationed" at in a year, and at least the hundredth (or so it feels) place in time and space to have rested our heads without being able to call home. In a word: hell. Yes, "home" has never truly been ours, no matter where it's been, since we got here a year ago, because we have been bouncing around other people's homes, for better or for worse, for reasons beyond our control; and the loss of our independence has been staggering.

I lived with people back when my ex was sick and hated it so much that I swore to myself I'd never do it again.

It's times like these where all of my education about the good, kind, all-loving, all-powerful, all-merciful god we have goes out the window and I feel myself believing like a Puritan or something, and that this is just him showing his wrath in this kind of, "oh, you haven't had enough yet, here you go."

Yet I am trying to hold onto yet another thread--the thread of getting back west and getting back on our feet. M has a career waiting for him, me the opportunity to get back into the workforce and get some more schooling. It seems sickeningly unfair that we have to leave the beauty and culture here to grab at the opportunities anywhere else, yet many positive things await us out west.

Most importantly of all, the two young people I treasure the most in this world will never have to be apart from me like this ever again.

The Things We Do

2011-06-09T22:36:00.004-05:00

So I talk about a lot of emotional stuff on here because that's what I do. I blab on and on ad nauseum about, because it's interesting to me. It's interesting how the mind works and how sometimes it works against your emotions or for them. For me, it's the other way around: how my emotions work against my brain or not.

But for the sake of my occasional attempt at humor, and at least to share what I found amusing, I was thinking about what we women do to maintain our shape. In the artificial way, while we are either on our way up or down the scale. How we suffer through suffocating undergarments that come up to our boobs, how we struggle to peel out of them to go to the bathroom at, say, a wedding reception. What it takes to fasten everything together. Support bras, support hose, girdles, Spanks, garters, wires, even high heels to some degree. Everything it takes to look thinner, taller, shorter, more curvy, more sexy, less bumpy, less frumpy than we are (and should accept but can't because it's hard) and all only to have to peel out of it all at the end of the night.

And then I got to thinking about this on a dating level. Even though I, as a mom, should be anti-pre-marital sex (I certainly don't have room to preach, Miss Prego at age eighteen sans hubby,) it's a reality that becomes cumbersome once you realize that the canoodling in the bedroom will regress to peeling off and out of the time-honored tradition of gut-sucking contraptions of our feminine masochism. And then that poses a real challenge. Do you politely giggle and get out of more canoodling-graduates-to-sex? Or do you put your date to the test and make him watch you make a banana of yourself? And there's always the good, old plausible "Let me change into something more comfortable" whisper in his ear to buy time in the bathroom so you can make a banana of yourself in private.

I mean to say we haven't moved very far from the corset, have we? And do you know how we used to get into those? By getting laced up from the back. Someone else would have to lace you up inside steel boning and metal eyelets, put their foot into your back, and pull! Hard! The only protection between skin and digging corset was a thin tank top (chemise) and then they would tie that sausage casing up. Yeah, someone was thinking of the furthest way to torture a woman and still get her to smile--because you know those women still smiled. They would smile while they suffocated. And you thought you couldn't breathe in a pair of Spanx! Honestly, who thought up this stuff?

And so I thought further.

It had to have been a man, only for the simple reason that men are problem solvers. They tend to think towards an answer in a path of least resistance or in simple terms.

Fictional Male Character 1: "How do we get to see the most boobs for the least amount of work or pain to us?"

Fictional Male Character 2: "I know! Let's squeeze the crap out of the middle and tie it really tight so that the ends come out like turkey stuffing!"

But no! This sexist approach does not work. According to my lackluster research, it was supposedly Catherine de' Medici, wife of King Henry II of France, who had apparently banned "thick waistlines" at royal court in the mid-1500's. A woman! I gasp verily!

While there is actually no concrete history on who owns part of the corset's invention, and while this simple track of laughing to myself while peeling out of my own pair of Spanks not too long ago has gotten me into a complicated dive into the history of the corset, it bears pulling the thought to the surface merely for a laugh. Just think about it next time you walk into the underwear boutique...

Step, step, step

2011-06-06T21:11:00.002-05:00

It's easier to squeeze a whole pig into a sausage casing than it is to get people to change, you know? I need to tap into some more sarcasm in order to deliver the material, of which I have by the stashes and butt loads, but stepping into comedy probably just isn't my thing. In fact, I'll say it's not my thing. That way, it exempts me from expectations.

But take this into account. (Along with everyone's self-entitled right to free speech.) I am a complicated, complex woman. But alas, I also admit to being controversial. I didn't mean to be, but it ended up that way because I was really a bitch in disguise.

See, I tried to hide my feisty temper because I was afraid of what people thought, too afraid to face the consequences, and in the early days, just was WAY too angry to balance a good dose of ranting with a dose of good humor--it always just ended up in some mean fashion. Or at least it seemed that way after the fact. Like, when I was getting called into the office at work for an entry that contained absolutely zero incriminating evidence toward individuals or businesses mentioned (printed, mailed, and not labeled by a jealous (I guess?) co-worker.)

But I when finally could say I got over my case of the whiny, backed-up jitters and reactionary emotional epilepsy, I breathed the fresh air and realized that because I could take responsibility for my actions, I could also air opinions. AND... that I'm willing to air my take on things whenever I so choose because that's just what adulthood and a grand lack of willful maturity affords me. Yay!

So when I hear stories that my former, self-righteous boss, who took it upon herself to lecture me for a decision I made some ten months ago or so to leave the life I was living, the same woman who was trying to "improve" me in merely my job and I resented that because of her snobbish, two-faced attitude, made a face in reaction to a decision my best friend made, I feel obliged to snark back from my blog, if only to do the dork thing and retort what I would have said, could have said, and will now not refrain from saying from afar. Yes, while she was right in only one tiniest regard in the diatribe I received from her all those months ago, she is still the same little fish in a little pond, who looks bigger because the pond is so small and still has learned nothing about love, compassion, or the way forgiveness works. That is the biggest grievance at all. And it basically boils down to the old addage: if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all. And keep your eyeballs to yourself.

A Good Run

2011-04-12T11:43:00.010-05:00

In the bustle and flurry of post-concert frenzy (mingled with passerby students finding classes at the prep college there,) I choked back brewing emotion. Mostly unexpected, I heard my voice cracking to find the words I just didn't know in French in order that I might express my profound gratitude and pleasure of being welcomed into and being part of such a superior group to the conductor. After months and months of struggling to communicatemy thoughts and feelings in another language and make a fair amount of successful exchanges/interactions with multiple scores of situations (and being usually very talkative in my own language but experiencing the frustration of being limited,) I found myself surprisingly short of vocabulary in any language. Truly a sign, even if it betrayed my outer confidence, that I was indeed choked up about the full-on realization I would not be playing with this group--or probably any like it--for a long, long while.

When, in my frustration and stop-loss emotion, the conductor acknowledged as much by stating in very clear English, "You can say it in English if you want." I looked at him just gob-smacked. I said, and I quote (I fell from grace and defaulted to my backwoods kid ways,) "You can speak English?" I mean, of course he could. He's an educated man and English is just as much a requirement to live in Quebec as French is over the rest of Canada, but I felt taken back, a little irritated, and overall astonished. Here I had been putting all my effort into assimilating, taking risks, making an ever-lovin' fool of myself, donning the mindset of a French person to secure the respect I felt for a land that is slowly losing its culture and language, only to insult a very talented, very accomplished musician and conductor who was probably speaking English before I was born.

Whatever manner and composition I had or was trying to regain was smashed into pieces in that one little moment with one rather unknowing comment. There was no recovering. No wonder I couldn't explain the cock-eyed twitch in his neck and posture. So, I did what I do best. I "quirked" it up, exhaled a laugh, and told him what a great experience it had been. (Uh-huh. Sure.) Then I finished with the flourish of fumbling my way out and made my way through a group of people. So much for a refined exit.

Then, I ran into my fellow bassoonist and a few friends. We talked lightly of being done for the season, while inside I felt the finality of forever, and while these kids had been adults in my eyes, before us stood the difference of them having their entire lives in front of them and me getting a 15-year-old start to mine (musically speaking.) In the tiniest fraction of a second, their eyes revealed a sobering moment, realizing that I may or may not ever see them again. It depends on whether or not we cross paths for the single lessons remaining I have at the conservatory with Paskale. Not wanting to be the Debbie Downer and leave that as their last picture of me, I smiled with new excitement as I shook their hands and said, in broken French that I knew would be bad and didn't care to correct, "N'oubliez pas moi!" Then I walked out of the Cegep for what will probably be the last time.

Adventurous Day From.... Well, Not Hell, Exactly

2011-04-11T14:57:00.004-05:00

Ok. I've been chugging along the concert pace the past few days, performing not one, not two, but four (so far) concerts--one per day--and taking part in the rehearsals beforehand, making the time spent on site and on the road stretch out into full, every-man days.

It's been FABULOUS! This is the kind of life I imagined for myself when I was just a young thing. Playing professionally on a stage. Granted, it's not long-term and it doesn't pay, nor is it solo work, but I will not complain--how can I? The caliber of music has been a fantastic experience--and at my age now and in the unfolding of my life, I very much prefer playing in an ensemble to solo work. (Especially because bassoon isn't the most enthralling solo instrument--even I have a hard time sitting through a bassoon recital.) And as for pay, well, the quality of music and professionalism is self-paying.

But today unleashed a whole new monster of testing my confidence in all of my abilities, from music to language to chartering foreign territory to engaging socially!

Over the weekend, my very significant other accompanied me to the various concert locations--Metabetchouan (an hour and a half away) and Jonquiere (about an hour), and we made full days of it. However, it caught up with us and he needed to rest before work at 4 p.m. today and I needed to be at the hall, also in Jonquiere, but by 9 a.m this morning.

In addition, an appointment he made for our dog was scheduled for 8. For him to accompany me again, at that hour, after having gotten in late last night, we would have had to either a) get up ridiculously early and drop the dog off before the 9 a.m. concert call, leaving my poor boyfriend to twiddle his thumbs all day in an auditorium full of kids, no nap, go straight into 8 hours with homeless people and come home at 1 a.m. With no defined plans of when to pick up the pooch OR...

...b) still getting up early, doing the same thing to get to the hall, but leave him the car to pick up the pooch, go back home (a round trip of approximately 2 hours), get time to rest, return to pick me up, bring me back home (another 2-hour round trip), and take the car to work (another and third round-about of 1.5 hours.) One of the issues being a single car and two people with stuff to do. Another one being gas mileage. The other one convenience.

It's not really complicated. It's just that in supporting each other and loving each other to the hilt, we want to be there for all the things the other one is doing. Especially in a case such as my music. But without too much conversation about it, we decided that I would go alone, I would drop the pooch off, and I would get myself to the concert.

It would prove to be a fun, harrowing, tiring, and even!... a little emotional challenge to get there and back.

So.

I left the house in good time with a crudely hand-drawn map and made my way. The problem from the start was that I was not very familiar with the route from a driver's stance. Between here and in Chicoutimi, I got it. I know a couple of roads for getting there, I'm good in the city, and I've learned basic landmarks--the conservatory, Marc's work, his dad's place, the cathedral and the university. But to Jonquiere I've only driven solo there once, and that's where I had to be.

As for where I was going once I got there, it was easy as pie. Take the exit off the highway and go straight. Until the prep college and find parking. But to get there, well, I was nervous, and I had to find the veterinary hospital, where I've never been, and get back on the highway. If you've ever had to watch for landmarks and if you've ever missed them in a place you don't well, you know the feeling you get about a hundred times (give or take a few) thinking you've passed it.

I was thinking about the landmarks outlined on Marc's map (I love his handwriting!) when, just as I was to get out of town, I came to a line of stopped cars about quarter of a mile long. What was stopping us? I focused on the front of the line. Blinking lights drew my attention. *Bleep! I had budgeted stopping time for everything else, but not this. A train! A bluh-hee ole train! Yeah, sure I've driven over tracks in around La Baie, yeah sure I learned how to avoid them in my hometown fifteen years ago, but now? Now?! I hadn't even made it out of town and this would eat into every precious minute of road time and increase the pressure of finding the vet without missing it.

I looked at the clock on my CD player that still hadn't kicked in (a sensor/battery thing.) I waited. I despaired. I drew in a breath and exasperatedly exhaled. I looked at Emma, who was panting and careening to see out the window. Up ahead, cars were pulling out of line and making U-turns back. Yes, there was another way to the highway. I calculated the space between me and the cars around me and followed suit, going all the way back around, into town, and getting back on the other access to the highway. After an eternity (of about 5 extra minutes), I was finally heading out of town. Finally. I glanced at the map. I looked and looked for the exit that would take me to the vet. I looked and looked for the sign that said "Refuge Des Animaux," the only landmark I knew to watch for before taking the vet exit. Why, oh why didn't I pay attention to these drab buildings and dispersed houses before?

I was in danger of getting rammed because Quebecois drivers are 1)c-R-aZ-Y and 2) probably all working people, familiar with the road, but I was desperate to see the dog pound sign, so I just tried to use my old fast-scanning skills acquired when I waitressed, and I found it. Then I was careening for "the" exit and after that, the vet. When I saw an intersection approaching in the distance, I really freaked, I thought I missed it. After all that success before 9 in the morning, my heart dropped anew. Trees were blocking the approach for near a mile, I didn't even know if the intersection would take me back to the highway (since I'd just come from there), and I would have lost major time getting back to the highway the way I'd come, never mind miss the pooch's appointment. Thus, I theoretically saw myself missing the concert (oh, the horror!!) and doing who-knows-what with the pooch.

Out of a force of sheer stubbornness, I kept driving. I knew that if the veterinary hospital magically appeared, it would be on the left. Et voila! There it was. I was still too pinched for time to relax, but I was still relieved. I zoomed into the parking lot like a professional stunt driver, parked, and shuffled a cute but very hairy and dirty Emma in through the front doors. "Le pression" did not stop there. For me or for Emma.

Inside, a man with two very large, very beautiful dogs stood at the reception counter. First thought: oh shit, this is going to take longer than I thought. Second thought, oh, poor Emma. She was cowering by the door and positioned funny. She was peeing on the rug. Great. I picked her up and held her close to me to feel my body and felt her shaking. I knew I should have kept a hold of her once we were inside. Poor thing.

Finally, it was my turn. I had already negotiated small interactions in French, and I always prided myself on being professional with service clientele in English, so I sucked in my breath and surged forward. Maybe it was the panic I was masking, my head in a million other places than there, but the words came out far more fluidly than ever before.

"Oui. Bonjour. Mon chum a fait un rendevous pour son chien, Emma."

Just like that. Wow! I saw two 'me's. The one who just has shit to get done and lurches headlong into doing what needs to be done, and the other me who hides behind the other one sometimes and always joking around. The Goofy Me was looking at Serious Me in that split second, slapping the Serious Me hard on the back and laughing heartily. (Have you forgotten? I'm Gemini.) (Yes, that's my excuse.)

For the following 2 minutes--oh yeah, I was counting--discourse en Francais was had, the nice girl behind the counter at first unable to find the appointment at all. Great, another obstac- Oh, wait, not quite yet. What's my phone number? Oh. For a Marc-Andre? Yes. There it was. She found it. Whew. What? Est-ce que veux... quoi? (Do I want... what?) "When someone brings their dog in, they cut their fur" she explains in French. Ohhhh!! Yes! Yes, please, and more 'merci beaucoup' from me before she took Emma.

Out to the parking lot I stride, in the parking lot I break into a run. I didn't have time to revel in my success--there was still about twenty minutes of road to get to the hall in about ten minutes' worth of time and I quit believing I had any time at all.

Gently gunning my V6, dual exhaust on bald tires, I took a risk. I could either check out the intersection that was right there or go back and retrace my steps like I had planned, adding who knows how much more time to time I didn't have. I chose the intersection. Good gamble. Jonquiere ahead on the signs, with arrows, no less. Just like that, I was back on the highway and started to see familiar buildings.

It wasn't over yet.

It wasn't over until I was standing in the green room with the other musicians. I looked at my clock again. Sometimes it comes on after a while. Nope, not this time. I had a general idea of the time, but I needed exact minutes. We were down to the particulars now.

I sped where I could, taking a ginormous risk on top of already driving without a current license (the story involves waiting for my permanent resident card and the antics of a nationalistic province) and *squeak* no insurance (I need my license), but I was also too scaredy-pants to push too far. I waited for the indicators, read the green highways signs, and finally, finally...

...found the exit. "THE" exit. I zoomed all the way down the strip, parked fast, walk fast, and did so in lumbering strides with my purse and block cement bassoon case in hand. I got to the door, around the corner, into the green room, and down the stairs. I made it.

* * *

After three days of concerts, I can only say this: man, I've grown. But when I came out, again in a rush to get the car back to Marc, the skies opened and I was drenched before I crossed the street. With scrap tires, I was hydroplaning all the way home. Only to find I had missed him. He'd gotten a ride from his uncle.

People Who Dialogue In Between The Lines

2011-04-07T23:15:00.006-05:00

Yeah, you know who I'm talking about. Those people that can't say a straight line and mean exactly what they say. The ones who claim to say things at "face value" but communicate cryptically or put their terms in broad, analogical, sometimes poetic terms to hide that they can't actually articulate (admit) what they're really feeling. The ones who also undercut spoken dialogue with an entire undercurrent of loaded phrases or words, leaving some half-intelligent person to wonder if there was a subterranean attack launched or if their words meant nothing.

I am one of them.

Yeah, that's me. I have said or have written things that I know will hurt people in vague ways so that I don't have to take responsibility for the outcome of their effects.

Face value.

Why am I admitting this? Well I got on here to write something else, a quote actually, nothing original, found a friend's pragmatic entry on a site, and found it absurd that I could feel contempt for his efforts when I was nowhere, and I mean nowhere, in a place to be looking down on him. It made me remember that "coming clean" about truths that are actually easier than they seem is not that big a deal. Well, in terms of relative sanity anyway. (This would be an entirely different ball game if I had been, say, and ex-con.) It's always harder to be the one working so hard to keep certain truths at bay than it is to be the one judging them, and so if coming here and in doing all that I did by coming here last summer was for anything, it was for ripping through the barriers and screens of my own secret truths and freaking exercising new muscles of genuineness and authenticity.

And also, I'm just getting tired of it. Tired of the cycle of trying to be better than somebody else (the proverbial anybody else.) It's just old. Old news, old like a 1920 newspaper, and twice as mind-numbingly irrelevant. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hearing my voice on it. I'm tired of hearing the same words come out of the same vocal pipes, and I hate how I sound. I hate how I seem to be so damned insecure that I have to find some vastly-wide sweeping words to zero in on a point that doesn't even work. I'm tired of putting on a facade that I think will somehow make me better. I mean, really. Double-U. Tee. Eff.

With this increasingly inescapable theme of pointing fingers and blame ("for every finger pointing at you, there are three pointing back"; "take the plank of wood out of your own eye before helping someone else with the sliver in their eye"), it has become an irreplaceable, incredible, life-changing tool that, although once a childhood anecdote (or so the repetitiveness of those sayings would seem), is now re-encrusting itself into a sheer, undeniable and fundamental truth in the core of me. I've blamed just about everything and everyone I could get my proverbial hands on, and quite frankly, it doesn't work. I've known for some time that I've had a problem communicating as well as I could have, even in spite of trying to be the "fantastic-est communicator ever," and it boils down to lack of ability to truly articulate my thoughts and feelings. It has always been easier to give a picture of what I'm thinking instead of trying to sit down, think about it, and put them into nouns and verbs that express my feelings and don't actually implicate someone because I'm trying so desperately hard for the situation to NOT be my fault. I actually relied on this tactic too much, and that's the problem. I mean, it's part of my personality, but when it comes to balancing the two sides (there it is again!), the sweeping fru-fru of descriptive language far out-weighed the boring (or agonizing) truth.

And it doesn't even matter how genuine I am, I know I still f*** up and will most likely be f***ing up for a while. I'm trying not to think about that. I'm just trying to think of how to be more articulate, and that requires being honest with myself and being accountable.

That being said, I've been on the other end of loaded words. I think it's seeing this that has, in part, made me realize that I'd much rather struggle to define and articulate my thoughts than hand over one more loaded, double-edged slice of poetry. (The other part is seeing how much pain I've caused by doing that.) I've been the half-intelligent person, too--the one I referred to at the beginning of this entry. I'm fairly intelligent, I'd like to believe, but I don't always catch the intended double meaning, but because I've been afraid to miss it (for fear of looking like a simpleton), I learned how to take almost everything with double meaning in certain situations, with certain dynamics. Screwed up, ain't it? Well, don't laugh too heartily just yet. It was a default program I set up to avoid looking like an idiot.

My poor, poor pride, eh?

My world might have been a little happier a place if I'd chosen not to give those loaded words double meaning. It certainly would have helped alleviate the nasty little habit I got into of giving words double meaning that didn't exist. I chose to write this nasty little confession because I had originally intended to explore this very same trait in another friend, but just could not. For one, me being snarky just doesn't help anything or anyone. For two, let he (or she!) who is sinless cast the first stone. I haven't gotten nearly the start on being genuine as I had hoped when I came here, when I chose to make my life something else, because I just felt so bad about all the pain, uproar, and damnation it caused that I couldn't see past the guilt. But there is a whole other world past my narrow, 2-dimensional point of view, and I'd rather be the person who gets railed at in my blog than to continue even one teeny, tiny little step back in the old direction. Because for every and any bit I could throw out, it is a bit that makes me a self-righteous hypocrite, and, well, we really don't want too many more of those kinds of entries now, do we?

My new toy!

2011-04-04T22:33:00.008-05:00

I would like to interrupt this drama broadcast to deliver a special bulletin.

I got a car! Woo hoo!

Yeah, I've already posted the few pics I have all over Facebook and Photobucket for my friends and family to see, but it bears repeated action here (OH yeah, I'm gonna post them here, too!) because I am just that damned excited.

Last Friday, my boyfriend and I narrowed down the list of Kijiji car ads in the area to two choices and phoned to see the cars. After looking at them both (the make of the other one escapes my memory) and doing so with our mechanic friend, we settled on a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix for $1500. I know, right? Totally good price!

I know what you're thinking. I got shafted. For that price, that year, heck even just because I was paying for looks. Well the answer is yes and no.

The guy who sold us the car hadn't moved the car in 9 months, and upon initial inspection, it was... OK. Our mechanic friend just wasn't as sold on this pretty one as he was the other car--which had a really good motor, good transmission response, good suspension, and working lights, but was a pearlescent mint green and in need of a new windshield and brake pads (which the owner had purchased but hadn't replaced and was throwing in for the asking price.) The Grand Prix got a similar-but-less "test score" from our mechanic friend with us, but it also had a good motor, good transmission, suspension, working lights, good brakes, even the oil was pretty clear and all the fluids good; it had just been sitting the whole winter. And with that comes risk.

And I would find out (today, specifically) that the garage found about $2500 worth of work to be done. Ouch-like. Some bearings have to be replaced, the mufflers are cracked, and the tires are as scrapped as Kojak. But the guy had also cut the ABS line because he didn't like ABS. Wtf? Granted, I hate ABS, too. I'm old school that way. But really! And the emergency brake--he cut that, too. Really, how dumb do you have to be? It's one thing not to like it (I catch the brake lever with my foot every time I get in the car--maybe he did, too), but it's completely another to disable a major safety feature. Yikes!

But... it could be a lot worse. $2500 is not a lot to put into this machine when you consider that A) the major parts are good--the engine and the tranny, the brakes and the suspension, all which would have been singularly, hellishly priced and B) to have "walked" away with that car for that asking price and have none of the problems be life-threatening (save for the duel mufflers that are cracked--which means not letting the engine idle lest the fumes choke the children.) No problem! We're going to be taking care of the issues on the list long before my girls get to ride in back.

And anyway, it was my first choice. I hadn't expected it to be in as good of working condition as it was, but when I got see it and finally test drive it, the steering was good, the brakes, acceleration, turn signals, and gleefully most of all, POWER! (V6 engine with dual exhaust--oh yeah,) reeled me in big time. I know I should have been more concerned that the ABS light came on, and the check-oil light, and made sure that all the joints and bearings were greased (lubricated), but when I opened her up on the highway, I could hardly care. All things could be fixed. But this... this was an engine, a machine, to be reckoned with. And she roared like a lioness at dawn. The best part was being able to open her up on the highway--gently--and thump some tunes out of pretty damned good sound system, for being factory and all...

In the meantime, all the girly things that matter about a car are there--working buttons and functions, CD player, well-maintained upholstery, heater, equalizer, pretty colors (black and silver), sporty look (without the sporty insurance!), and nifty little drink holders that flip out from the console both for front and back seat passengers.

Most of all, VERY most of all, it is a reconciliation with my independence. It has been twelve years since I owned a vehicle. I mean really, really owned it, in my name and everything. And the last one barely counts because it was a ratty old 1977 Ford F150 that my dad had taken from my brother and fixed up for me the day before I went to move into my very first apartment 6 months pregnant--I didn't earn it, I didn't pay for it, and in the end it spent more time on the side of the road than it did on it. This... is mine. No lease, no having to return it, and it's pretty effing sweet, even with the cracked rear light cover and spots of rust on the door.

Head wounds

2011-04-02T20:26:00.005-05:00

"I can see that you bottle things up," she said. "You need to talk about things. You can't be a stuffer, like I am." I was facing the aunt on her couch, acutely aware of the mint green walls of her living room. It had been what, a day, a week since my girls and I plus our bags were dropped off here?

Hmm.

I wanted to make this work.

But I just couldn't shake my reservations about this woman. I looked at her and my eyes pleaded for someone to fall on, someone who could understand the hellish nightmare of uncertainty, injustice, confusion, and pending loss of a know-nothing, newbie immigrant.

Granted, I was only an American coming into Canada, but still. I had nothing. I had only been there a year with no status, no job, no provincial driver's license and it had been a year of major upheaval and transition--my husband's 2 other cancer episodes, moving five times with a toddler, a new baby, his just-barely-there new career, and all the post natal emotions which hadn't even subsided by this third diagnosis. There hadn't even been the time, much less the money, to start or pay for application of residency. So. To recap. I had no job, wouldn't have been allowed to work (immigration rules), and had no car with which to even escape. I relied totally and completely on everyone else.

And here I was. In the house of a stranger, wondering how I got there, how I got to that place in my life, no more assured of where I was than my own children. (I had been an independent woman before, hadn't I? I guess writing bad checks and scrambling to make ends me for me and my baby barely counted as independence, but it was hard to remember. It seemed like a lifetime ago.)

I looked at her. I was going to try this anyway. This getting-to-know-her thing. She was family albeit not the kind of family I knew. Maybe there was some value to us sitting there on that couch that winter day, her trying to get me to talk; and what did I know? Except for not to judge at first glance? But I was oblivious. Things? Stuff what things? I didn't even know what she was talking about, much less what I was thinking or processing.

I sputtered a response that somehow had nothing to do with my then-current state, something scattered and half thought out about the way I grew up. I think that's what she wanted to hear. I was able to pry into something more than just my current state. I waited for her response. This would be anecdotal or wise.

I don't remember what she said.

Whatever specifics that were exchanged, all I remember is being left with a feeling like she didn't understand what I was going through. I should have used that opportunity to tell her, to scream it maybe, "My life is a freaking nightmare and here's why!" I guess I just thought that she would be like every other basic compassionate, observe that I was young with two very young daughters, and put it together herself that being newly married and facing what our whole family was facing was terrible!

But maybe that is quite a lot of information to assume someone could know or put together. She at least knew that her nephew and I were newly married with a second child because she came to visit us back when the baby was born. That had only been 5 months prior. Hmm. The fact that she missed it just exhausted me more, and I at least sensed that she wasn't perceptive enough to be the person I should be talking to.

Then, just like that, I was beginning to feel like I was under a microscope. Instead of being relieved to find someone I could talk to, I just shut down (or realized that talking about my fears with this woman was just not going to happen,) and diffused her questions with lighthearted (if you could call it that) small talk, well-being of the in-laws, and... rent.

***

There seems to be a common theme in those times, and for several occasions and moments after. The way my brain was working. For all of the hard times I've had in my life, I've been able to look back now and understand that for what I was lacking in being able to acquire things/resources to make my life better, to help myself, it has been FAR less due to being wiser on this side of the fence than it is the compounded number of dramatic things to have happened in my life in those days, less than a year after having been behind the wheel of a rollover in August of 1999. My head was bashed around so bad that I was in ICU for three days with a concussion, and I've had to wonder just how much that head injury affected all/any of my abilities to process things in a logical fashion.

I have been hesitant and irritated to develop this theory too far. It doesn't speak to the choices I made, it doesn't excuse the shit decisions I've employed, and it wouldn't get me off the hook for anything. But I am curious just the same. A whole lot of unspoken, blurry time was spent searching for answers when I couldn't even recall the simplest exercises in memory (where I left my house key, my papers for school, even how the campus layout was from the year before) and then when my fog cleared--or what I thought was my fog clearing--my responses were always emotional, not always rational, and concentrating took on a whole new effort. I would get headaches from concentrating on something--the kind of pain I had after the accident.

Sometimes, even today, 12 years later, I will feel myself get dizzy from time to time. It's only slight, but it feels too familiar... I think that I would have made ridiculous jumps in conclusion for just about anything, but most especially when I was in a state of stress. Being the mom of two young girls, being young myself, and having a young husband in the hospital living with an aunt who upped the rent every month of our stay with her and threatened to call Child and Family Services on me when I couldn't fathom what or why out of thin air would qualify as stress.

It wasn't until I worked at the crusher of a local excavating company and had lots of time to journal, reflect, and otherwise beat myself up about stupid shit in my life that I actually felt such a clearing of my mind, I had to wonder if I snapped. Lucky for me, my snapping came in the form of realizing the world was opening up and I could match logic to emotion (a sweeping miracle for someone like me!) It was to be the beginning of being responsible for myself, rather than waiting for someone to come rescue me and live for me; and I was relieved for that. But it was extremely painful to take a look on my past with that puzzle piece in my hand and see with new understanding all that I could have done.

The aunt

2011-03-31T12:34:00.003-05:00

So when we got in, it was a bit of a whirlwind. My so-called, so-very-different-from-me friends were right behind me in the doorway with some of my belongings. I had my 5-month-old in one arm, a bag and my 2-year-old's hand in the other. I budged into the tiny entryway area, hesitant to track in snow or grit, encouraging my girls to go into the stranger's home. Both girls took one look at the woman in front of them, who was already wobbling toward us, not helping us with our things, and clung to me. My baby twisted in my arm, turning her head over my shoulder away from the woman she did not know, and clenching my jacket. Even my sociable, bubbly 2-year-old was wincing and finding protection behind my arm. The friends who had driven me two hours to get there were dropping my belongings at the door.

The flurry of activity and rush to get out of the January cold subsided momentarily. In the arrested moment, I couldn't dispel the feeling that washed over me that this was not going to be good. Small, needless talk was made. Whatever introductions and formalities were exchanged between the friends dropping me off and this aunt of my husband's were so fleeting and perfunctory that whatever hope of good there could have been from this new arrangement disappeared as quickly as we came in.

I feebly, desperately thanked my friends, the wife-and-husband duo I'd been living with for two months prior. My gratefulness for them bringing in my belongings was washed away in a moment of desperately wishing I could turn around and go back with them. But it was done and I knew it. We were here. Now. And it hadn't been working out between the three of us and our three kids (my two, their one), so here I was. I knew they were probably just relieved to get their house and life back; not have a living zombie of depressing emotions moping around in their house and the wife of a cancer victim to make their lives depressing. It still stung, though, when the moment for them to leave came and all of us stood in the entryway with nothing more to say and they left without pomp or circumstance. Nor telling emotion. The way they swept out of there made me wonder just how relieved they were to have me off their hands.

It was kind of a theme in my life. Needing way more emotional support than anyone could give. It made me realize that I asked too much of people. So instead of figuring out how I could fix that, which I neither had the time for or the patience (and that time in my life being when I needed someone to feel sorry for me the most,) I just balled it up and choked it down, just like every other injustice I'd learned to tolerate. I did it again just then, in that moment the door closed behind my friends, and I turned to the next endeavor. The aunt.

* * *

Did she welcome us? Smile? I don't remember. What I do remember is standing in that strange new doorway, feeling as alien and wanting to hide as my own children, praying and hoping that this would be a welcoming new start. A place to find refuge from the tsunami that was my life just then. I also remember the aunt, with her waddling gait and cold black eyes, who didn't give me a warm impression at all. If she was trying, it got lost the moment my 2-year-old started to whimper and the aunt dragged her away from me telling her to come into the house, forcing adjustment on my little girl, rather than waiting for her to warm up with my support.

I remember her taking the baby from my arms so I could take my shoes off, but when I finished and stood up--all of a minute--she was in front of me with my two children. The picture of this strange woman, who I'd only met once before then, with my children beside her, was an eerie snapshot of wrongness. The aunt looked almost... what was that look... defiant. Without being able to put it into words, I just knew it didn't feel right. I moved in towards my children to comfort them and take them back. It was a silly thought and I shook it out of my mind as I stepped further and further into this strange house, strange life, strange world to reassure my little ones that Mommy was right there. But it was just the thing that haunted me, an inaudible and undefined feeling: take them back. It was a ghost of a feeling that would stay with me for my duration there. What was that? What was that exchange? It was just another of many more gut feelings I'd learn to set aside. What else could I do with no landed immigrant status to get a job, no car, no money, none of my family around?

Not one to be easily defeated, I followed her to I don't remember where. Did she show me around first? Did she show me my room? Did we sit on the couch that day? It doesn't matter. I proverbially and literally tip toed around everyone in that house---the aunt, the uncle, their daughters, who were practically my age and remarkably normal in comparison--and tried desperately to keep a low profile so I could do what I was trying to do, and get out.

It wouldn't be that easy.

On top of everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING else, I was 21 years old. To everyone else around me, I was still just a know-nothing kid, which pissed me off. It worked against me in every way youth works against even the most level-headed, ambitious, qualified or intelligent person.

It is for this very reason alone, I digress, for why I can never and will never tell a young person that their opinions don't matter or wave off concerns I know, standing on this side of the age fence, they will outgrow with some dismissive, diminutive gesture or guffaw. Even when my ear has been bent by the same person for the same things ad nauseum and I get frustrated because I don't feel like they're doing anything for themselves to better their situation, I still shut up. I just listen. And then I try to ruffle up some inspiration with a tidbit for them or use my creative ability to offer a suggestion or two, based on the limits of their situation. (You'd be surprised about how giving someone something they can really chew on will actually enable them to see where the options are for themselves.) The fact is, you just don't know what their life is like. You can make intelligent assumptions, you can make belligerent ones, you can make generalizations, you can be as self-righteous or as concerned as you want to be, you can even be really good at understanding. But at the end of the day, you don't wear their shoes and you don't put your head to rest on their pillow. That deserves understanding.

Irony that isn't irony

2011-03-25T08:52:00.004-05:00

When I say something, nine times out of ten, I'm serious. As in, I meant what I said. For the other one percent, I'm usually kidding around, but if you know me you can tell. My humor is not that dry, and I usually fill those "gotcha" kind of one-percenters with funny expressions, eye brow shapes, and puckered mouths. I've even taken to doing this nod thing with my nose where my chin kind of stays elevated to signal that, yes, indeed, I'm joking around.

But ten times out of ten, and when it has to do with critical subject matter, I mean serious business.

What does it take to get people to LISTEN?

The fact that I have to declare that at all makes me crazy. I don't have time for this today. I have an exciting performance tonight with the youth symphony playing at the mall! To me, having to declare or question why I can't be taken seriously speaks to the way in which I may have been perceived, perhaps depending on the way I've carried myself, and finally what weight or worth my words have. It even speaks to the possible opinions/perceptions of those who regard my miseries as misfortune I have simply brought on myself, which I have been told, which have stung, and which in actually reflection is only about 2% true.

I thought I had the right balance of seriousness and sarcasm/humor. At least the kind of balance I wanted where when I was joking, people would know and when I was serious, they would take what I had to say and digest it or at least... shut. Up.

I know, right? Sounds totally deluded. Like, WHO do I think I AM, right? Or at least what makes me feel like my words should be regarded with such weight, right?

Well it seems I there is a recurring theme of not being taken seriously in my life. I could factor in where I was, where I've been, the people around me, where they've been, what's brought us all to that point, my various inabilities to gauge when to stop joking around (my dad was big on getting us kids to realize we constantly overdid the humor thing,) my astrological sign (Geminis are known to be "childlike",) my idealistic take on some things, but at the end of the day, each time I was fighting to be taken seriously was time which amounted to the summit of experience I had in my life at those times, thus deserving (I figured) the same damned respect I've given others, even those with far less life experience. And since I do have a buttload of life experience (I've thought about doing stand-up, wondering how I would organize my material,)--every year adding a little more--I figure that someone, at least one person or a few, would recognize when to laugh and when to shut. Up.

But maybe I'm not worth taking seriously. Who knows. Hard to say. I don't really care. Save for how it frustrates the ever-lovin' bagoomus out of me. I just got another message from a guy I knew a long time ago, who tried taking advantage of the vulnerable situation that was me back then, who I deflected, thwarted off multiple times, deleted, blocked off, chopped off just after stating my position of "NO!" clearly and bluntly, and eventually was able to forget. Leave it to Facebook to open new avenues of "connecting with friends" !@#$%! Besides angering, it's humiliating. Absolutely humiliating.

I don't have time for this crap. I don't have the time to keep looking back, nor the desire to keeping looking back, on a former line of living that involved serious, grievous, erred ways of thinking and relating to others, especially on account that I still have yet to grieve the loss of my marriage and am concentrating on this wonderful, relatively new relationship I'm in now. It feels amazing to be this loved! The things I have learned! The ways I have grown!

But even if it wasn't this to aggravate my running theme of people in and out of my life not respecting boundaries, it would be something else, somebody else, and I'm sick of it. Maybe I'm being foolish to think I am wise, but then if I am a fool, I should rejoice because there will come the day where the foolish shame the wise.

Spring fail!

2011-03-21T10:38:00.022-05:00

It's days like these that just make me want to brood. Cloud cover and still tons of snow on the ground hamper the mood of seasonal change, just when the weather was starting to be sunny and melty. It's as though the snow and gray themselves are a heavy blanket over my shoulders and face. Argh.

I'm really okay with not having a job to go to and having the time to write during the days, smoking my cigarettes, and deciding what I want to truly do with my life, jumping up sporadically to do laundry, housework, or go snow-shoeing, but it's been a bit of a mental struggle to be okay with it. I have worked every day of my life since I left home, in some fashion or another, knowing and feeling it was never okay to just sit around and laze around on my bum (which is what I would rather do!) I have also never had this much sit-around time.

(Click on the various photos for fun facts.)

I go to my French course, take bassoon lessons once a week, and play with the youth symphony (above photo is of the conservatory), but those are in the evenings, so the day time has seen me grow more accustomed to spending time on the computer, reading, and practicing. I've always scoffed at these kinds of people--the person I am being right now--who don't have day jobs on account of some artistic excuse, but even if I could let that go (or change my position on it--after all I am artistic and idealistic,
what use is there in denying it?), there's the whole question of what I am contributing to the overall well-being and betterment of my own life and consequently, those lives which surround me when not bringing in money, not furthering my education (save for some mastery of the French language), or doing anything of worldly substantial value.

Blown glass museum in La Baie

It really speaks to the idealistic side of me, the side of me that is tired of taking on 'petty' jobs (even to help myself reach the ends to the means), when I say they're not really helping me. It's idealistic, if not a little deluded, to say such a thing because I did learn a lot about myself and others, even my capability to encourage others, be a better leader, be better at serving others with all the other jobs I've had; and I am not above any job or any person. These were jobs where the most education involved was a high school diploma (which is what I have, so I speak carefully) and those with more were the kids coming back for summer jobs, yet off to bigger and better things.

What hampered things somewhat was the locale, isolated, left to its own devices, the closest neighboring city being four hours away, and the dwindling population/reduced number of choices of available jobs, never mind higher education. (Where I was, they tried, but it didn't coincide with my music, and I just couldn't relent, no matter how much the locals raved.) I'm sure that added to my experience dramatically because when I think about the differences between a thriving big city and a small, northern, isolated bush-town, I am almost convinced that my options would have been a little greater in number and the chances of feeling good about a means-to-the-ends side job (the job that helps me get through school or advancement of any kind) would have been higher, even if only for the difference in size and despite overall economy.

But none of these jobs were entirely fulfilling because I was not maximizing... something. My intellect? My capacity to understand intricate instructions? My craving to be challenged? I had some level of those factors in all of my previous employments, but even when I rose to the occasion, there was always someone else who was there first, who did it longer, who did not appreciate that some newbie coming in could keep up, or something wrong with the way I performed a task. In fact, I realize how much I had compromised the ways (and manners) in which I thought, acted, and talked after experiencing conversations and interactions with others outside of the place where I was living. I could use the language I used once upon a time (the one with the "big words" that I was made fun of), I could talk about abstract concepts without getting the Glaze-Over or the Old Stink Eye, or even worse, the good, old change-the-subject tactic. Even getting back into music and sitting under the conducting of a professional with other professionals (yes, these kids are professionals) reinforced the 'maybe I used to be smart' thought with "oh, effing sweet! I know what they're talking about!" and brought me the relief of a thousand years. I'm really not crazy and over my league after all--I'm just who I am! I really am that person! This kind of stuck my idealistic theory in the ground like a general with his flag that I do need an educated job.The worst thing about these realizations, though, is that I sound like a complete effing snob. A real pretentious snipe! And this exactly the reason I hunkered down and took on jobs that I felt were a little humiliating. I had no more qualifications on paper that could land me a higher-paying job, I was not (and still am not) above any job, and at the end of the day, I was damned lucky to have any job, regardless of position on the globe and with respect to global economy. I have ex-military brothers qualified to get into law enforcement of land security/patrol-type jobs who struggled to keep their jobs when the economy took a dive. I remember my mom agitatedly reminding me that I was not above any job, too, when I was pregnant and young. Maybe it was just the situation and my attitude that gave her a little panic about my idealism, or maybe it was a plain lesson in life, but it has stuck with me all these years.

At the end of the day, though, snob or not, unreasonable or idealistic, those jobs were not fulfilling. Or at least not in a way where I could go home and leave work at work for a general majority of the time. And let's face it, I'm 31 years old. I'm too old to be fluffing around. Getting another job like that, here, seems counterproductive to what I was trying to do by coming here in the first place. It seems like I'm waiting for the perfect job to come to me, rather than going out and looking for it, even though that is not entirely, exactly true. I've always been of the mindset that a person has to make their life what they want it to be, rather than standing around waiting for it to just fall onto their laps, although I haven't necessarily practiced it. But in the end, after all the go-get-it, dive-in, make-it-happen Cazares attitude to life I've had, after 7 months of feeling self-conscious about what I've done or not done to significantly add to my life, which I will share with my girls, I know I'm being groomed for something even in spite of seeming like I'm not taking all of the grooming into my own hands. While it doesn't feel like it now, I know I'm learning something about life and how I'm going to go about it on my terms, without apology, exhibit the strength I'm trying to teach my girls about going after what they want (living what I preach), and not relenting to what others would have them (or me) do, like I did before. I've had so many new experiences, met so many new friends, and such a healthy outpouring of such different mindsets (keep in mind, I spend my whole adult life in that small town, forming a shell of collective, amassed opinions as my own guide for how to live there) that I feel refreshed and more installed of the real me than I've felt in years.

And now I'm here where I get a chance to rest and see the gray clouds and talk about them, as well as wrap up to go do some housework, which is just as relaxing as writing because it's productive.

Ice-breaking Coast Guard boat (La Baie)

Le Pyramide de Ha! Ha!--made of yield signs

Ice fishing cabins organized over La Baie

The bridge in Chicoutimi

La Petite Maison Blanche--one of the only little houses to survive the 1996 flood in Chicoutimi;
The Saguenay Symphony played its season premier opener here last summer

Overlooking the Chicoutimi River

Life is hard, but hope is vital

2011-03-19T14:45:00.006-05:00

Life is hard, you know that? It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, what your background, what your ancestry, what kind of job you have, how much money you have or don't have, life is just damned hard.

Consider the following:

1. A country whose leader is refusing to step down and turning on his own people with military force, even despite an international warning to back off (several countries working together at an emergency summet in the U.N. this week), which hangs on a delicate balance---this fool's pride/arrogance/deranged-ness. An entire people, innocent and wanting change, prospectively attacked, the families of those people potentially suffering--all the very real effects of extremist behavior that have happened in the senseless taking of lives in the history of the world. Yet this man in power is so.... what?.... so within his own fucked up sense of right and wrong, entitlement or demonstration of force that the situation has become the very fragile potential to singularly ripple through dozens, if not hundreds or thousands (depending on how it unfolds) of relatively innocent human beings? How does one person get to that fucked up state of mind? Even much more than that is how do similarly insane people get so much power?

2. Two girls whose dog gets put down after only 8 years with her due to a chronic degeneration of the hips. They have to learn about loss and about the hard things of the world over a Skype session, just months after their parents split up. Meanwhile their mother can't even be there to hold them. They have to learn about what they can and cannot control, true responsibility, and grieving from a truly personal place. They are only 10 and 12.

3. Men and women who come home from war only to discover their world was not like they left it, even in the most ideal situations where the spouse has guarded over every detail of their lives and waited faithfully with devotion, but keeping in mind for every one good setting there is an unknown, multiplying number of shitty situations, far from ideal and end in heartbreak, domestic warfare, mental issues, post-traumatic symptoms, and inability to keep jobs. Even the ones in the middle who manage to come home and live productive lives, they are never the same. War kills the soul.

4. The kid whose vivid memory of his dad leaving him at 2 years of age and being bullied on the playground surging into the scars of adulthood. He grows into a respectable man who knows and lives responsibility, taking on the tasks of life with fervor and with reverence, but the pain of rejection is never far, and so he has to work twice as hard as anyone to overcome fears that would not otherwise cripple another. He has to differentiate between realistic concerns and irrational fears more analytically. It plays into all of his relationships.

5. The mom who is teaching her toddler to use the toilet, hitting and missing, having to clean up messes, having to pull from a basic parenting skill set but more or less flying by the seat of her pants to ensure her own parenting is what she wants to make of it, including the love she gives and all the things she does to encourage her little one. She realizes this is a part of growing up and is excited for her Baby, but it pulls at her heart strings because she knows these years are precious and fly by too quickly.

6. The spouse who watches over the other in a hospital because he/she is sick, dying, or somewhere in the middle. Day after day of looking into an even more uncertain future than those simply struggling to make ends meet. Life and death is on the line, their point of relativity changes, accomplishment and success are suspended or at least take on new meaning.

The point to my Depresso Rambling here is that none of this is without hope. None of it! The very real problem is that it seems hopeless, feels hopeless sometimes, but that's because we give up first. We really do. We feel defeated because we see trends in society, percentages of failure (rather than success), get balled and bagged down by our own experiences, the news, other people's experiences, wondering at last if there is anything substantial about this life. But that's just what that the negative forces of existence are expecting us to believe. Because it draws our attention away from all that is positive, good, right, light, and loving. At the very least, we are at war for our souls--trying to save them from despair and there being an exponential increase with people (and groups) who are trying to help us win that war (think of any proactive group you've heard about, types of really exemplary people our generation alone has known, the importance of taking care of ourselves, the return to hope and love), but there still being a host of crap in the world that would fight us no matter how much hope we hold onto.

You don't have to be an emo to understand these things, either. While I confess to a few random emo 'moments' in my early twenties, I've generally been a hopeful person. Even when I was going through all that I went through (which was mind-numblingly boggling, intense, angry, contemplative, bargaining, unresting, and unfair--and probably more than any emo could make up) I refused to give up on my beliefs. I didn't feel good about it because it didn't change my situation and it didn't make me not angry or not resentful---and the much cooler choice would have been to wall up and tell the world to fuck off---but I believed in the promise we were given in and around 2000 years ago and had seen so many really, super-drenched good things that such things were proofs in and of themselves that something so much better than this life existed. How can a person refute an inexplicable silence in a whirlwind of storm in the heart where, when pleading for these impossibly grave things to pass, an inexplicable wave of peace settles over the core of the body, allowing tears and relief to flow? It only happened for a moment, but it was just the morsel I needed to carry on. True story.

The fact is, very few believe that kind of stuff anymore. It's time to turn our heads back to our Creator already.

Souffrance

2011-03-12T16:42:00.011-06:00

What is suffering? What do we know about suffering? Why do we suffer? Why can some of us deal with it and some of us not?

Well I don't have the answers. I don't know any more than any psychologist. And quite honestly I believe that at least half of psychologists have barely the same or worse ability to deal with their crap than the rest of us--talk about the blind leading the blind! Not all of them, but enough. Don’t get me wrong, psychologists and psychiatrists are also human beings who are no less prone to life full of hardships and the struggle that comes with us trying to heal from them (or not—some just don’t live by their own wisdom) and they are a valuable asset for the least and the most of us, but it is rather hard to stomach getting help from those who cannot help themselves. I would know. On two accounts. 1) Receiving advice from those with personal, massively scarred history that was still bleeding OR could not even begin to draw from any relatable prior experience; 2) giving advice when I was struggling with my own inner toils. In the end, I still believe in the healing their profession brings and studies in that field to date which bring a scientific method to overcoming our personal wounds.

Anyway, I don’t have the answers, but I have done a lot of thinking about it. In these past 7 months, with my daughters living over 2,000 miles away, it has been its own kind of hell and I've had lots of time to think about the decisions I've made that brought me here (to this point in my life, to this particular location on the map, everything.) No mother has ever been as upset in the world as I have been for having to apply theory to reality: understanding that children need the freedom to make choices, giving them that choice, and having to follow through--allowing their choice to stand. The pain of their absence re-roots itself like a knife in the soul every single time they experience something I can't be there for. And though all things in life change and will change, especially as the cycle of life renews itself, it must be stated that sometimes there are just no other ways out.

That being said, it is not them I blame. No way, not for one singular, tradable moment in the world. I blame myself in adequate measure. I blame myself primarily for letting my own life get to a point that I felt like leaving drop, stock, and barrel--with them--was the very last but only, critically singular option there was. I also put fault with a few other things, other situations, and yes, some people in equally adequate measure, adequate to mean ample but not overdone. But this is not about that blame. This entry isn't even about what I can and cannot control, or how hard it has been to stay the course without having been able to fully explain these things that have taken me years to come to. It's about suffering. Everyone suffers, even if not continuously.

And what suffering brings.

Is it supposed to bring something? Interesting thought, isn't it.

Generally, yes. It is. Suffering was designed for something, and not just to make us feel like crap and emotionally paralyzed. If we go back to the first account of human suffering, we could take Adam and Eve in the bible, when God kicked them out of Eden and told Adam he'd have to sweat and work his butt off to bring home the bread ("till the land") and to Eve she'd have to experience pains in childbirth. Immediately, obtaining food and bearing children, things that God was just going to give them for nothing, were to become the rewards for the hardship.

But Adam and Eve didn't get away with such a clean break. They had to learn how to make clothes, take care of their children, one of whom ended up killing the other, and surely a great number of other things that we could read in the book of Genesis in the bible, or only speculate on as their lives unrolled until they died. Through their choice to disobey, they came to know suffering.

But God did not abandon them. Through their choices, they lost paradise, they had to suffer, but they were not alone. Their creator was still there with them, manifesting Himself with them, speaking to them, and giving them morsels of relief, companionship, and establishing an order.

The NON-depressing part of this new routine Adam and Eve came to know, of what we now know as the daily grind, is that because of this first stupid oops, a plan of hope which was set to unfold was engaged. Yes, even with evolution of man or creation and the thousands of theories to befall or explain our existence on this planet—all human explanations, mind you—there was suffering (suffering to get what we needed and then what we wanted), but just as instantly there was hope in being told (by God himself, through prophetic persons, and later by Jesus himself) that a saviour was coming. A new hope to be relieved of our suffering. Even people who didn't believe it or thought the news of some promised man to come ('future king', 'saviour of the world', or other such terms so foreign on the tongues of secular or pagan crowds) was far-fetched were aware that Jesus was someone people believed in; and were no less prone to suffering than anyone else.

So he came. This light of the world, prince-of-peace fellow came into the world. And he suffered. He suffered so bad—more than any other person in the entire world because it was physical and emotional torture of literally, all ages—for the sake of every person in the entire world to have existed or would exist, whether they accepted him or not, giving every single human soul all the chances they could handle in their lifetimes to choose (or not to choose) to make heaven their final destination—an infinite afterlife with a loving, majestic god, his loving son, the spirit that unites them, all the angels and saints, Mary, Queen of Heaven (just to name a few), loved ones, with experience of love so full and brilliant, it encapsulates the soul, saturating a soul with the kind of bliss it could not contain. (Imagine that high school crush falling in love with you, a major epiphany in your life, a warm towel after a shower, the glee of going to your favourite musician’s concert, and the sun in your eyes altogether in one heap of emotion times a billion, I’m guessing.)

In that ultimate price, ultimate suffering, and ultimate redemption, humanity was given multiple chances to make that choice on their own, multiple choices of right or wrong, to screw up, to get it right, to learn, to grow, but every single time a choice that was completely and totally his or her own until death. He suffered for us as a human, among us in our very corporal humanity, so that if we ever chose to come to him, to see him in our lives, to invite him into our hearts, or even just to open ourselves to the hope of his message (which you can’t argue was pretty damned convincing and loving) for even ONE second, we could never accuse him of not understanding us.

At the very least, Jesus was so central a figure in history that we measure time according his existence on earth. B.C., or, before Christ. All of us humans, only on this side of the A.D. fence, know what life is like on this side of the fence--since the days of Christ. Whether we are Buddhists, Christians, Taoists, Catholics, Muslims, protestants, the hardest core atheists, agnostics, white witches, satanic followers, extremists, diplomats, peacemakers, scientists, fanatics, communist, socialist, democratic, common man, simple, however instrinsic, intelligent, bright, handicapped with disability, whatever country, whatever creed, whatever race, we ALL measure time in A.D.

We only know the values that came from life after Jesus was on earth, every generation imbedding their own take on the next generation, based on what they were taught, since the dawn of time and of the days of Christ, regardless of faith, in spite of or in connection with any given moral set. His existence has created more controversy over beliefs and system of choice than any other figure in all of history or time, even to say that the ancient religions prior to Christ were also affected in some way after Christ because they are not all practiced in their purest forms today, if there is such a thing.

Confucius in all of his wisdom still doesn’t quite stir up the kind of animation that Jesus did. There were far less divisions of basic faith systems before Christ than after (generally derivative of Christianity) and all matters of creed and belief were changed in some way, even for those who could say their beliefs were not changed because no one in all of history has sparked so much debate and reflection as this one man. Whatever calendar we measure by, whatever inaccuracies are in those calendars (Gregorian, Julian, Aztec, Chinese, etc.), whatever variances in the time line created by Before Christ and everything Anno Domini, it is all still measured by that point in history, and when we have to work together as a world, we still arrange meetings, conferences, summits, roundtables by the calendar, the calculator, and the clock that was configured A.D.

God knew this.

But he gave us the choice. To believe as we choose, to be inspired by the precepts of others or swayed by fallacies, to discern between them, to ignore them altogether, to pretend like none of it matters or choose nothing at all. He gave us the choice between right and wrong and with that, the right to choose the same thing over and over again, to stop choosing, even the choice to reject or accept his very proof of love for us (an only son, the only truly pure thing he had to give who was the only soul capable of taking on the literal weight of the world for the stains of many.) He gave us all the choice to accept love, too, a concept evermore declining in the world’s society, the choice to accept mercy, compassion, loyalty, holiness, and devotion, even in a world today where consolation, touch, emotion, and vulnerability have been tragically abused. He gave us all the choice-making freedom we could handle from the very first day. And he did it for a love of a people he created, even those that would reject Him or “just” break his laws.

He did not grandstand Adam and Eve on the day of their sin, with his almighty power, to make them feel scorned and shameful, nor did he damn them. He asked them one simple question, which he already knew the answer to, and which implied accountability as much as truth. “How did you know you were naked?” The consequence of their choice to eat the apple was immediate awareness of their bodies and subsequently to hide themselves and to explain to God why they were hiding. God was teaching them this accountability, which any parent might recognize as the root of the lesson, but he did it with love.

Their self-consciousness was not to be the only consequence of a seemingly harmless act, but also their removal from Eden and engagement with suffering and the suffering for the rest of humanity. Suffering became the price we would pay for our disobedience, not just one time but repeatedly over time, not just individual but also communally, and not just for Adam and Eve's mistake but also for our own.

However, it was not without recompense. We would eventually learn that it was not the punishment of a wrathful entity, but part of the plan of a loving god—the way it had to be so that humans could come to appreciate Our Father for his love and forgiveness. (How much more do we appreciate good days because we have bad days?) God himself promised aid and protection all throughout the history of the bible as long as we remained devoted to him, but in our freedom to choose—free will—humanity chose repeatedly to concern themselves with themselves, rather than God, and so therefore were defeated or chastised or ignored by God.

With the suffering and resurrection of Jesus, a new order of love, life, suffering and forgiveness came into effect and we could put our suffering to different use. Even if Adam and Eve, the tree, and the serpent are all just primeval analogies for the way man began and simply give us a general base of morale, there is still a more powerful being than us who taught the first lesson in responsible decision-making and that consequence always follows choice. In the plan he designed, the plan he created with love out of love because He is Love, he gave us choice because, in love, it was to be all the sweeter when the subjects he loved chose to love him back.

A staggering moment of many

2011-03-05T15:56:00.005-06:00

What was he thinking? Was he thinking it sucked to be sick again? Was he afraid for his life? Did he think about dying? Upset, shocked, defeated most definitely. Was he worried about his kids? His wife? (In that order?) Did the numbers cross his mind? Numbers like 30%, the pieces of paper that were electric and rent bills, days of life lived, 1 year of marriage, 6 months of remission cross the desktop of his mind in a flash before his eyes? It's no wonder I balled my eyes out listening to "Seasons of Love" at the broadway performance of "Rent" in the city less than a month after his hospital release. It was our first post-hospital date. F-- rights: Measure your life in love.

He was only 23. He turned 24 in the hospital. Following the news we received that one fateful night, we didn't talk much. Dialogue was refrained and minimal for the most part. Maybe because we knew there wasn't much that could be said. Maybe because we were too scared to. It's hard to say, even after all this time. A lot was exchanged through knowing looks and reading body language. For the words that were exchanged, it was tactical communication--make sure arrangements were made and that we knew of our own arrangements. That's all.

After leaving the northern town we hardly had time to attach to, the 8-hour ride a blur, we sat in the hospital admissions waiting area. My father-in-law was there, I think my mother-in-law, and our two children. I was still nursing at the time and wondered when the baby would get hungry while praying that I could keep my toddler occupied. By miracle and by grace, she didn't fuss once. At least I don't remember if she did. I think we waited around 4 hours to get through admissions.

The last time we were there was the prior week, being led through a series of halls and waiting rooms before the critical moment of seeing the doctor. For the first time in a long time, I didn't have my girls under my arms while my mother-in-law held them and we followed the nurse into an exam room. It is a room I will never forget.

There was no point in dramatics, no point in questioning. The look on the doctor's face said it all. I wanted answers. I was thinking about my girls in the waiting room, the maddening inconvenience of it all, my poor husband whose legs were dangling over the exam table, desperately needing to throw blame somewhere. I was feeling an absolute loss of control over every single facet of my life. I felt the swelling of heat and anger rise in my throat, the urge to cry and then to scream because no amount of purging would release the knot in my chest, which I would learn was not to go away for a very long time. I opened my mouth to start the barrage, but something of a feeble muttering fell out instead. I was so surprised to hear how weak my own voice sounded.

Being the daughter of a nurse, I knew a fair share of technical vocabulary, how not to be a pushover, and that it was important to ask questions, but it didn't make a very solid bravado. Words and numbers and procedures blurred together. The doctor had done this before. He delivered each stage without sugarcoating the facts but knew that it was not the time to let his years of having to tell patients and families the same devastating news steel his interior and be removed from compassion.

Consultation. Hmph. That's a word for going to the boutique and getting the girl behind the counter to give you make-up suggestions. That's a word you use when you are building a house and considering a loan. It's a word that suggests advice and a choice to follow or agree to that advice, or not. What we got was not advice. It was a professional, life-threatening ultimatum.

We would take the challenge. We would be a family no matter what. And I would show him that he made the right choice in a wife. I ignored the thought that made me think of the damning, cruel twist of it all--of being married so young, being acosted by life so hard, and wishing to flee. I hunkered down, I found my resolve, choked my tears, and braced myself for war. I would cry later. I had a husband who needed me.

The third time

2011-03-04T20:38:00.003-06:00

Just a short time after the special area groups conference concluded and all the northern province teachers were back in class, the oncologist called. For the first time in our fledgling marriage, we were just getting settled into our first home, a small apartment. My husband's first year teaching school was off to a promising start. Our 18-month-old was adapting to being the older sister, and our baby girl was already displaying personality up the wazoo.

I came into the living room just in time to see his face change. I didn't know who was on the phone. A week had gone by since the conference and also his 6-month checkup. His doctor was in the city down south, but he had gotten his job in the north, so it became prudent to do both at the same time. I waited until he could talk.

I don't remember my exact reaction.

I just remember being angry. I remember crying. I remember there being a swirl, I couldn't get my thoughts together. I think I remember giving him a hug. I wanted to hold him more than anything.

I remember the fallen look on his face, the margin of defeat, as though a thief had just come and robbed him blind and then set his house on fire.

I remember storming back and forth, down the hall to the laundry room, making trips with our clothes, angrier every time I came back through our apartment door. It wasn't fair. I was angry. Hurt somehow. Confused. I tried to push my love through those screens to comfort my husband, give him support, but it was a thwarted, minimal endeavor when I just wanted to scream. I slammed the basket down harder every time I returned, throwing laundry into drawers or on the couch, some folded, some unfolded. Being a fairly health woman my whole life, I surprised myself by getting so worked up I felt major body ache while climbing into bed.

Then came the consultation, for which we had to travel back down south for, confirm the news with the oncologist, see a small presentation about the treatment and procedure they would do on my husband's cancer, and return home only to get hit with the reality that we would not be able to keep our apartment or even sublet it. At all. We had one week.

The treatment was to be in-hospital. Chemotherapies- yes, multiple -were going to be administered via a PICC line (what was that?) An autologus bone marrow transplant. T cells. Blood counts. IVs. Plasma. Visiting procedures. There was much information to take in. In the room where a few rectangle tables were pushed together to form a "U" in front of a television on a rollcart, the air was somber. All my mother-in-law and I could do was look at each other with a number bouncing off our heads: 30%. It was all the doctor could give us for success of cure. It was a number that hung in the air worse than second-hand smoke in a bar. We had a week to come back and get my husband moved into the cancer ward at Health Sciences.

Into people's basements, garages and school staffrooms went our stuff. All of our belongings were thrown into boxes. I could barely think straight. I hadn't even had time to think about post-partum anything, writing a budget for our new lives with new income, or get out of my poutine-eating, cookie-dough-eating slob self before being hurled into a world that meant entire uncertainty. Where would I live with my girls, what were the most important items to bring, what was I supposed to do? What would happen to our belongings? Why did I feel like we were refugees fleeing in fright?

My mother-in-law was not happy with my half-done packing job when she came up north to help us. The friends who ultimately agreed to take us in came to help, too. They also lived down south. After hundreds of trips up and down the stairs with boxes and furniture, a trip to the ER after my husband slipped on the stairs and busted a lamp into his palm, and a scoop of the girls, the place was empty.

The raw things

2011-02-28T22:18:00.008-06:00

So it's like this. No one will hear this. No one will read it. And if they do, they probably wouldn't care. But that's okay. This needs to be told.

When I was 20 years old, I got married. I got married to a man who was a real sweetheart. But he got cancer. I didn't know him for very long before getting married, so him getting diagnosed was a real shock and an even bigger tragedy. I had planned to spend the entire rest of my life getting to know him, having fun exploring the nitty-gritty hardships, and feeling like it was in our power to overcome anything. I had not expected such a hard test so soon, though, that much I can say.

My daughter was 18 months old when we got married. When my husband was my boyfriend, he was so sweet with my daughter, talking with her, playing games with her, and even babysitting her for free when I had to go to work. I had already known a lot of stress in my life by then, having been a single mother who could not afford to pay rent, so finding someone who was caring and loving of both me and my daughter was not only soothing, it was all I needed for proof that surely this man must be the one. She even called him "daddy" before I was ready for it!

He wrote me a poem once, using words like "starry night" and admitted that he loved me and my daughter, because she was an extension of me. Somewhere in the eight months from date number one to our law office vows, he wrote this poem and said a lot of nice things to me, which I'm sure he meant, but those were the only memories we'd have to work from after cancer...

We had already been preparing to move to Canada at the same time we learned his cancer had come back. Yes, he had been sick with it once before, in the July of that eight-month stint we called "dating," but it had been operated on and removed. This time, instead of the remaining testicle, the cancer "metastasized" into his lung.

He was treated, went into remission for a few months, then got it again. Only this time, this very third and awful time, the diagnosis was bad and we had just had our second daughter (for he considered my girl his first.)

It was bad. It was so bad. I can't even tell you how bad it was. So bad that after he went into remission and we got to resume our lives, I cried for months without tears inside my chest. I never tore any boxes down, for fear of settling into our new apartment too much. But funny thing, just when I thought I'd get to tell my story, no one listened, so I just learned to shut up about it.

I learned to shut up about many things. I learned to shut up because I learned no one gave a shit about what you did, they only cared about how things were going in their own lives. So I trained myself to not think about the aunt that took advantage of us while living with her, the constant prison I was in having no immigration status, having no friends nearby, no family, no car, and absolutely fuckall to do or to resource while my husband was in the hospital; because, you see, all those things happened when he was in the hospital, and more. No one knew how much I was suffering because no one called me and I didn't call anyone.

But I was supposed to be strong. No place and no time to be a ninny. I've just kind of always had the sense to know people weren't listening anymore, and I've just about never been surrounded by the kinds of people who would listen. I knew they didn't exist. No one had the capacity to understand how scared I was, how nervous, how sad, angry, trapped, stressed (oh my sweet Lord stressed), lonely, isolated, unforgiven, pressured, forgotten, lost, and stupefied I was. I was just expected to do... what? I don't know. I was expected to do or be something that meant understanding no one in the world would be there for me or come to my aid; and if I wasn't, no one surely told me. I was too overwhelmed to think. I was overwhelmed to a screaming degree ALL. The. Time.

Between Cancer No.1 and Cancer No.2, we got engaged, were in a horrible automobile accident (rollover), got married, went to Nevada for Christmas, found out I was pregnant, and moved to Canada.

Between Cancer No.2 and Cancer No.3, we lived off of his two, minimum-wage jobs in his dad's house, found him a teaching job up north, had our baby, moved 800 kilometers north with a 2-week old infant and two year old toddler, and just barely settled into our shoddy apartment.

The amount of time between our first date and Cancer No.3: 1 year, 8 months

While my husband was in the hospital for No.3, I lived in two places back down south because we had to give up our apartment for his hospitalization. In the first, it was with friends who had grown tired of my presence there and offered to kick me out. In the second, it was with my mother-in-law's brother and wife, who stabbed me with raising my rent every month and tried threatening to get my children taken away, talking to everyone under the sun about it before talking to me. Turns out she was baby crazy and a 'little' mentally unstable, but I didn't know that. All I knew is that she lived in the same city where my husband was laying in hospital and offered to let me and my girls live there. I have forgiven her, but I never talked to her again.

While I was trying to suffer this aunt to remain close to the girls' daddy, I was also at the hospital every day, watching our daily mix of "Northern Exposure," "Three's Company," and "Golden Girls" while making him toast, helping him sit up, watching nurses fix his lines, asking questions, learning about stem cells and T cells, and trying to make his room as un-hospital-like as possible. Also things I did: wake up on the cot in the middle of the night to the sound of him cough-gurgle-puking; accompany him to the lower floors to make sure his pants stayed up in the halls; wash his soiled pants; sponge-bathe; clean his PIC line; hold his hand; bring the girls occassionally; meet his cancer friends; brave the death ward every day for four, very long months; and watch him sleep.

Do you know the color of a person's skin after being chemoed to death? Yellow. Sometimes bluish. Splotchy. Gray. It's the color of life going away. His eyes were so dark and sunken that with the loss of his eyelashes, I could see the whites of his eyes almost all around the whole eye. He looked liked this almost immediately and I was terrified. This was the man I married? What?

Between the house of the aunt and my days at the hospital, my life was hell. How did I get so irreversibly stuck in the bowels of life? I was filled with resentment and desperation more and more each day. Luckily, my girls made me laugh and smile. They kept me going. I had to keep it together for them.

Resuming our lives to some capacity (by which I mean being a family of four in a home and my husband resuming his teaching job,) involved transition of living with his dad for a few months to remain close to the hospital. He was not allowed to be outdoors very long and not allowed to breath or be around freshly cut lawns because asparallagus was a mold that came from cut grass and could get trapped in his freshly chemoed-to-shit lungs. He could not move around too much or he would risk opening the sutures of his freshly removed lung lobe (the upper part, about 20% of his lungs). There was no cuddling.

I waited for him to see that I was right beside him, that we could figure things out, that I stayed beside him the whole time, but he didn't say anything. I was hoping he could tell me before we got back up north how much I meant to him. But he didn't, and I figured it was because he was so ill. Poor guy. I didn't want to be making wifely demands for affection just yet.

I waited some more. I waited for him to look at me in some moment of stillness and quiet and utter grateful, sweet words of appreciation. Words that would melt all of the pain from the whispers off his lips, but I would wait until he was feeling better.

I would be waiting a long time.

One morning, after we did get back north, I was sitting on the floor with my daughters, playing with them, relieved to the point of tears, to be in my own home, with my own things, safe. But the relief was to be short lived, because after the school year started, my husband came home with a pulled groin muscle that actually turned into 5 more years of playing wait-and-see of crumbling, deteriorating bone joints.

Nobody I know understands what it's like to live with and 80-year-old 26-year-old. As the doctors struggled to diagnose and subsequently replace the joints, which were full of dead bone tissue and grinding together bone-against-bone due to the steroids he was given in-hospital, we had to deal with about a million doctor appointments, 1600 kilometers a pop (sometimes by car, mostly, thankfully, by plane), and having to "say good-bye to Daddy" every 3 weeks or so at the airport.

Some people know that. Some don't. But no one has an ever-lovin' clue of what my life consisted of after he was finally confined to a wheel chair in a town where there was no, absolutely none, handicap-friendly buildings; having to take the wheelchair out of the trunk and put it back in to go anywhere plus two small children in carseats; building the muscle to lift the chair with him in it to avoid potholes in parking lots; having to squeeze past people when you just don't want to intrude in busy places, tiny restaurants, church; taking out the trash, chopping the wood, carrying the groceries in, doing the heavy lifting, getting the tots in the house, plus all of the rest of the work women in isolated northern towns do: cooking, cleaning, washing, folding, sorting, checking over school work, putting the children (my precious, precious daughters) to bed, getting them to brush their teeth; and making the occassional batch of actual, real, homemade, from-scratch bread just to make the house smell good.

I just wanted to be appreciated by the man I loved. Before there was the realization that we, too, were crumbling from the inside out, I did more than just talk about loyalty and devotion. I lived it.

Curses!!

2011-02-19T21:49:00.005-06:00

I just spend the last two hours or so working on a blog entry that I thought would be of some interest, but thanks to the faulty power cord of this computer and the power cord to my computer completely fried (along with my battery,) I lost it all! I am especially angry that I had, yes, been saving my work as I went along, knowing full well that the laptop could be powered off instantly with just the slightest wrong movement, the touchy bitch, been powered off twice when I went to shift my legs a few times while writing, restored my session with Firefox, HAD my work saved and appear when I restarted, only to find the last and final time, everything had disappeared.

Worse yet is when I went to navigate away from the page trying to be smart and checking to see if the older, fuller draft was still saved as I left it, I accidentally used the Save shortcut trying to paste the text I did have on the page in front of me to a notebook document, instead of the Copy shortcut (Control + S versus Control + C), which automatically saved the draft in front of me, rather than have any hope that the old draft was still there. No go, fool. Epic fail.

So, instead of that post, you get this one. I just wanted something big, and impressive, insightful and thought-provoking, but no, you get my blunder, all of which I might have been able to avoid. Argh! See ya 'round, punks!

Marc-André used to work with the homeless

2010-12-12T21:24:00.006-06:00

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present a newcomer and contributing author, Marc-André, to add some spice and flavor to this otherwise drab blog. During the Christmas season, the surge of people without places to go seems to rise, or at least can be felt, and has at least been a very real issue during the year as well as the holidays. When a very good friend of mine was leaving work the other day (she is a teacher at a Catholic school), a man with nowhere to go and with nothing on his person came to her and pleaded for help and compassion. Luckily her principal was close by and able to help her by taking the man into his office and making some necessary calls, but it begs a very real question about what is happening in our world. How often do we ask ourselves if we are feeling blessed today? What if the homeless man had been violent? How do we help them, show compassion, and still regard safety?

Well my very significant other worked in a shelter for 4 years with the homeless and decided to share his invaluable insight with me, which I would like to forward here. If you think you want to help, go donate to a local shelter--clothes, money, food, even toiletry items.

Without further ado, may I present:

Marc-André
Source: 4 years of experience, training + my colleagues

It is quite a coincidence that I am still so closely in ties with the MGR Bouchard foundation, and that I am going to resume employment with them after Christmas. (The foundation here offers shelter, used furniture, used clothing, employment for those with special needs).

As to your friend, I think she dealt with it the best that she could. She had to protect herself. It was best to get some backup. This person needed to be referred. It is not typical for a homeless person to come off so strongly asking the help of a woman. It would not be safe to trust such a person no matter how sad and believable the story. This is based on statistics and consistent observation.

I would distinguish two types of homeless:

The seasoned crowd, the overwhelming majority of which are dealing with untreated mental issues, have criminal records, the ones who fell into the cracks of the system at some point. They may not be ready to get back. Some people genuinely choose the streets because they hold a grudge at the system. They harden themselves, they become extremely apt at surviving. They will manipulate and extract anything they can from anyone they meet, not out of bad intent, it's just the only way they know. Even as a social worker, I have been lied to and conned. Some are genuinely unable to help themselves, but for those who can, even a little bit, as long as they can suck the system dry, they will not have incentive to help themselves.

The second type, people I have known who are simply going through a bad time, they are capable and healthy people who simply do not know where to get help. We at the shelter would offer them a place for three weeks typically, stabilize them and get them through the employment center, or see if they are eligible for welfare. There are programs for disabled people to find work suited for them as well.

For the first group, used to living on the street, 'losing their papers' is so common, it's almost an excuse to make themselves appear more pathetic and get money. I've heard every story there is, and some of these homeless men I have known had more money hidden in their shoes than I make in a month. A typical intervention for me at the shelter would be to sit down with the person, find out what exactly happened, write down their vital information help the person contact government agencies responsible for re-issuing some documents and in many cases get them temporary papers issued until the real papers come in.

I wouldn't be too worried about the typical homeless person, except if we are talking about a woman with children. It is more rare to find those. There are resources available for women that are super effective, because women are so vulnerable, shelters here will stop at nothing to get them out of harm's way. As far as men, even here in Canada where it is much colder than in the U.S, homeless people will not typically die of cold on the streets. The only way that would happen would be monoxide poisoning from their car, or falling asleep in the snow from being drunk.

Police can be used for assistance if one does not know how to deal with a homeless person. They can act as an entryway into the system. They know where to drive the homeless person to get help. They will assist homeless people to save their lives. Unless they have pending warrants against them, a police person is not likely to start harassing a person who is genuinely in need of help. Anyway that's the way it is here. Police are generally, really willing to help, even when the task is not easy (intoxicated, incoherent smelly people who don't really want help, for example.)

Police would call us or drive someone to us. We at the homeless shelter would take them at that point, give them a shower, find them a place to sleep for the night. If I didn't have a room for them it was my responsibility to find them a place to stay elsewhere. I would keep trying until I found something. In a big city I don't think they can do this for every individual. But even in a place the size of about 100,000 people, I am assuming some homeless shelters would go the extra mile.

In all cases all need to be dealt with the help of professionals. No one individual can or should be expected to provide everything such a person would need. You can't let a person know where you live. Giving them money is not likely to help either. They need comprehensive intervention to give them the tools they need to get themselves out of the situation they are in. The network of social resources available is typically much more extensive than the average person would know about. I myself was constantly surprised at what was available once we managed to get a person back into the system. One need to be in a position to make the phone calls, get the gears going. Some would accept the help, get themselves on their feet again. Many would relapse. The services were there, often it was the person not willing to take advantage of it. There is a window of opportunity in order for this to happen. The homeless person needs to be at a very specific place within themselves where they are ready to do what is required, and they need the advice and push of confidence to go ahead and act.

A little smile, a kind gesture, a prayer for them, encouraging them to go get help. Keeping the phone number in your pocket of a shelter near you or your workplace, if you ever are in such a situation. That is pretty much all you can do. Donate directly to a homeless shelter instead of someone on the street. Such donations are extremely appreciated and make a huge difference.

God bless you! Merry Christmas!

Intelligence Squared: Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world

2010-12-09T14:33:00.005-06:00

I just had to re-post this...

December 7, 2009

Hmm. I think I'm too worked up to sort it out before going to bed, but it's worth considering, worth blogging, even at this late hour. I might mention that I feel compelled to be thorough, so this won't be short-lived.

I just watched a five-segment debate as done by BBC World (and posted on YouTube) that featured four panelists (two for the motion, two against) debating on whether or not the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. I have to say I was immensely disappointed.

The two panelists for the motion were the Archbishop of Anuja, Nigeria, John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe, a British MP who converted to Catholicism after protesting the ordination of female priests in the Church of England. The two panelists against the motion were Christopher Hitchens, who writes for Vanity-freaking-Fair, and Stephen Fry, an accomplished British TV personality and actor.

Let me reiterate. The two panelists for the motion were a well-known (to Africa) clergyman, an archbishop of the Catholic Church, THE Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, and at a glance the hope of an entire church to sufficiently and masterfully represent the church in its entire complex, gruesome and blessed history; and a stuffy, old British female politician staunchly rooted (or self-embedded, as it were) in staunchly traditional Catholicism (by which I mean personally [to her] fundamentalist principles.)

And the two panelists against the motion were an extremely well-articulated and accomplished writer, well known for his radical views, and frequent contributor to a haute couture magazine, among several other publications; and a perky, cheeky, left-wing television/radio personality who, to add to the controversy (or the ratings of said debate), is also homosexual.

Why could they not have chosen more articulated spokespeople for the pro side? Better yet, why did they not seek out as equally eloquent and vocal representatives for that side of the argument? It's an argument you at least know is going to heated, and at most will require adequate (matched) artillery, why not give both sides a real, running, gunning go?

Yes, I'm saying the side against the motion far outweighed the side for the motion! They did so by what appeared to be leaps and bounds. What's more is that I am personally a huge proponent of the motion that the church CAN be (and has been) a force for good in the world and was holding onto my breath waiting to hear what the rest of the world was (in theory) waiting to hear.

The sheer lack and disregard for a 'fair fight' by all those involved in assembling the debate notwithstanding, the debate itself began with the Archbishop at the podium, trying in what seems to be all earnestness to open up the doors to all the watching eyes of the world by delivering a dutiful opening statement that quickly dissolves into the all-too-familiar rhetoric by the Church. And then followed by Chris Hitchens, against the motion, back to Ann Widdecombe, who was for, and then closed by Stephen Fry.

The opening statements by both speakers opposing the motion were precisely articulated, clear and concise, eloquent. The points brought up were emotional, appealing, and spoke for a secular truth in the world. Raw emotions were brought up here.

But the opening statements of the two supporting the motion were not. They were the very stereotypical rhetoric by which the Catholic Church has been grievously known for and is perceived in current times, which only adds insult to injury in the eyes of a waiting world and, more namely, this believer. Especially when there have been motions and actions by people of the church, well-known and barely known all over the world, to have made a positive difference in the lives of others and significant impact on the history of the church (which I will get to.) None of which was mentioned.

There was little to no acknowledgment for past sins, compensation, explanation from a historical perspective, or delivery of what to hope for, what the message is (which I will also get to), what the church has done and is doing to do to progress, change and improve, what the church is sorry for. There was no mention of the past, present, or future, and furthermore, no acknowledge by either speaker of the repercussions the opposing side brought into view.

What of the emotions of the members of the church whose beliefs and vocations were betrayed by the monstrously sick actions of others--the members who have believed and acted in good hearts and real faith only to be slapped in the face by the evildoers, misrepresenting one in the same church? What of the points made by the opposition: the compensation for four ages of inquisition, for the epic horrors of slaying, brutalizing, ostracizing, and judging those with different beliefs over the centuries? What of the responsibility the church holds for its members acting out of ignorance, hate, intolerance?

There DOES need to be full-on acceptance by those most in place to own it--the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the people who committed the crimes, and more than anything, the very souls whose dark, shrouded, and debauched judgment were the hands of these grave, grave sins. There should have been statements in the debate by the supporting side demonstrating that extensive research concludes that massive reparation must be made, that a vital, integral element of that full contrition, expiation and absolution of that reparation must include the unfailing transference of knowledge by the church to her members, so that what is known by the world can (and should have first been) known by its members and there can be NO excuse for ignorance.

But there should have been statements that showed where the church has owned up to the sins of the past (past popes' apologies, Pope John Paul's request for forgiveness in his March 2000 address in addition to an apology.) There should have been statements by the supporting side that full and extensive research shows a full history of good in the church, that the majority of her members from the top down are working toward a more reconciled church (worldwide missionaries in third world and war-torn countries), that old, dated teachings of a wrathful God are currently and continuously being replaced by teaching a message of a loving God in a sweeping, unifying movement (vast changes in catechism curriculum, worldwide sermon content, the direction of vocation education, clergy and lay newsletters circulating with a variety of Catholic authors acknowledging this much more peaceful, loving message); and that IN that new message is one of tolerance. Of love. Of peace. Of freedom to live in the love of God. A message which teaches us to not judge because we are ALL God's people. ALL people. And there could have been specific resources of these changes and movements named, referenced, called into light, presented.

But there were none.

I even watched the Archbishop's argument twice because I had to stop watching and come back to the debate to see if a second chance would reveal something I missed; and still nothing.

There could have also been statements to direct attention to the fact that there is access to all kinds of information on spiritual enlightenment, that all souls no matter their station or religion are responsible for their own levels of personal and spiritual maturity, that we as a church have suffered the humiliation of those members but don't have to be defined by those imbeciles; and that anyone who is willing is able to harness that information. As well, the fact that there is awareness of this information and complete and total access to it at all is a step in the positive direction.

There could have (should have) been more references to the motions Pope John Paull II made to work on bridging the gap between the old, staunchy, rhetorical idioms and rituals of yore and current times through his significant contribution as pope and one of the most influential leaders in history and the hope that that offers. There should have been more references to the late pontiff's remarkably nontraditional steps outside of the Vatican circle, his contribution to aiding the end to communism, his unprecedented request for forgiveness of the church's sins, his profoundly humble address in the Novo Millenio Ineunte, which urged a universal call to holiness, all of which was delivered in the spirit of hope and reconciliation between ALL peoples.

The problem with the church--or the perceived problem by all those struggling to accept the church in its entirety (from her painful past to its blessed output and everything in between)--is that in the the true deliberation of any given topic (especially in regards to change, hope, and goodness) under a true sense of the divine accompaniment which is in true communion with the Holy Spirit also needs pure minds and pure hearts, free from any influence, to come to a deeply holy and spiritual decision; but these minds and hearts belong to human beings, who are far from perfect and even in the holiest of states, are not perfect and cannot make perfect decisions. We, as the watching masses dissolve under pressure and timelines, struggle to accept (if not right out deny) that there are reasons for deliberation. I know as a parent that the best way to make a decision concerning the children is to deliberate with my partner. Sometimes making a decision involved asking other parents around me. But I have learned in my short life that the best decisions are not made hastily and for the ones that are, it was more luck than love that made them good.

This kind of deliberation takes time and almost immediately incurs doubt because there is lack of patience. Impatience for time creates the perfect loophole for all those resisting anything the church has to say/offer/extend and it justifies the doubt which seeps into the minds of those fed up with the entire entity and gives those resisting the critical value of the church to write off the whole church. These thoughts and feelings are very human, but it must be said that one cannot judge simply because those imperfections are license for one human to judge another, or a group of humans to judge another group. If we are all trying to be better people, then better people we all must try to be, in its very principle.

To be fair, no priest, bishop, archbishop, nun, lay person ALIVE, no person, no human being on earth could have come that far and answered for the monstrosities and abhorrences that belong collectively and historically to the Catholic Church. No one person could have stood under the barrage of fire, no single human being anyway, intelligent or witty, charismatic or otherwise, and answered for the single most humanly corrupted entity of religious authorities on earth. But we did not have intelligent and witty or loving OR emotional representation of any kind. We had no way of relating to the pained masses because we did not have adequate spokespeople, nor was there a basic, unfettered acknowledgement OF that pain in the debate, of those sins, of the wrongs of the church.

There were no clear, demonstrative answers of relenting and contrition, no mention of the late pope's recognition, apology, and asking of forgiveness for in an unprecedented move towards the beginning of the millennium (though he realized, as do many Catholics the world over, that that is only the beginning of the road to healing and reconciliation), no mention of the enormously different kind of pontiff Karol Jozef Wojtyla was at all, no mention of all the good that has been done in the church by its members, no mention of the hope its upstanding and holy members gives us. Doing so to the contrary might have proved more by action than lofty rhetoric that the Church DOES see its mistakes, that the Church DOES want to move toward whole and complete body of virtuous members, toward whole and complete contrition (from the act of apology all the way to compensation for victims to perhaps a suggestion of far stricter, faster, and swifter punishment for the violators--I'm thinking isolation in a dark dungeon far below the Vatican for all perpetrators and bread-and-water-only diet), and that there are already motions and actions in place (a wide host of documents I'm far too spent to amass containing that information, but that anyone curious enough this late at night could surf and read for themselves) for showing that the Church CAN move and is moving toward a brighter, more healed future, and that the Church CAN be and is a force for good in the world.

*---
Update: those videos are no longer posted on YouTube. The owner removed them.

Why the Do-Over then...?

2010-12-02T21:13:00.003-06:00

Well, because I had no idea, absolutely none, that what was coming was coming. No clue at all. I wouldn't have wanted it had someone told me it was going to happen, I would have rejected the notion entirely.

It is so entirely deceptive in its appearance, no matter how much I wish the world would understand. The unfolding of the treachery wounds me to tears even now. I understand how my friends feel. I understood it before they even knew it was coming, in the tender, quiet that was the space ahead of the storm. I understand how my girls feel. Their every corner and strain of their world torn; my every fiber longs for their well-being. I was concerned about how this would affect them even before leaving. I cried with them, I held them and comforted them when we landed here. I held them. I held them. I held them.

When I went back to fetch a few things, get my dog, and see my girls some two months after leaving, I saw the family picture we took. It had come in the mail after leaving. The picture was taken nearly moments before I knew I would go--that is, with things between the old us changing already and feeling more and more not meant to be, but before I even pondered such dramatic exit. I had wanted a professional family photo taken for ten years. How could I do this? My eyes fell upon the image, stacked among other wall hangings in the old entry way, and assaulted the part of my chest which still aches.

Nothing of this takes away from what my girls have been going through, how mortally this affected them. I knew it would. I prepared for it the best I could. And still I failed in one respect. In the respect of the world. But they grew, they healed, they even smiled. And my only concern is them. Not the world.

I did not see it coming. But I should have. Growing apart for years, there was refusal and denial about the actual state all around. We made it look good, but it was truly good for parts of it. It just wasn't enough. As long as we were taking turns at the wheel by ourselves and not working together to take responsibility, it would always be doomed.

(...continued from previous entry...)

2010-11-08T13:37:00.007-06:00

It's just all so.... "messed," as my pop-jargon-savvy 10-year-old would say. I grew up far more emotionally conscious of myself and others I think than a lot of others around me were. Who knows why that was so, but it is the wheel behind the prolonged torture I put myself through. What I mean is, being that aware of my own emotions and the emotions of others really put me at a disadvantage well over the majority than the advantages it brought. While the rest of the world was taking off, not giving a shit, or just plain growing up like normal kids, I observed how selfish they were being, or other various observations. Not that I was any less selfish. It's just that I processed the same kinds of things they did in a different way; and I took stock of my observations. And then I had to try to do this in the adult world, where most functional human beings were working on various stages of putting childish things away, and I was only getting started. In this same observational mindset, I also took stock of my observations and noticed that fundamental truths were created and developed, etching their creations right on the inside of the person I was, fortunately most right and true, but like any erred human, not always right and not always true.

I see this in my daughter already. Both of them, actually. But the older one most of all, right now at this point anyway. It makes me proverbially raise my eyebrow and take note. I do not want her (or her sister) becoming the over-analytical freak I became. It has caused me so much unneeded duress in my life. Well, I guess not knowing how to handle it is what caused the duress, but in the dealing of it (coping, learning, processing, rejecting, whatever), I came to know rather suddenly that parenting from an emotional state is not always reasonable (simply for the fact that it can screw up in the way their worlds are supposed to work; and because I learned this the hard way), and not the most responsible core to start from. I try to maintain a balance, and learned to try for the balance when I became aware, so I'm not going to jump to my mommy pulpit just yet, but as any parent knows, there's no job manual for being a mom. It is definitely marked on the back of my brain.

The most important part of the journey is how my previously-mentioned spirituality filled (and continues to fill) the gaps. Besides learning how to be practical (over emotional), rational over theoretical, I've also learned how sacrificial love is.

" I really did feel like everything I did was about..."

2010-11-05T17:21:00.007-05:00

I really did feel like everything I did was about 50%. I didn't want it to be that way, and I really tried putting 100% into everything, but as long I kept feeling let down no matter what kind of effort I was putting in, I knew something wasn't sitting right.

It wasn't as though I wanted these things to happen. It is, though, that I didn't make the decisions for something else to happen. I was, in part, looking for somewhere else to throw the blame if something went wrong. When I finally thought about what kind of decision I should have made, could make, and consequently did make, it was almost too much to bear. At first it was unthinkable. Then it was necessary. And it's like my dad told me (which I all-too-inconveniently forgot): If you don't make a decision, someone will make it for you. I let people make decisions for me for years without even realizing I had gotten in the habit of it. I did not realize it exactly like that. It explains so much. A puzzle piece in the big jigsaw of life. But then the other part to Dad's piece of advice is to make the decision and execute it. If it was right, then move forward, if it was wrong, make it right. Seems so simple, doesn't it. That's how easy it is for us to complicate things. Even as a woman who was raised to think like a guy and reconciled with the woman I really am, this makes sense. I complicated things ALL the time, unnecessarily. And why? Because I was too busy trying to "prove" something, to make it look good, all the while not investing with my whole heart. In a phrase: I was lying to myself.

And how bitter that seems!! How terribly raucous it is to put my life and the tremendous sorrow I have for the hurt I caused people into a simple paragraph! This was not an easy conclusion to come to. Not for one second. The elaboration of which I'll have to save for another entry, but suffice to say for this entry, it comes with heavy, heavy consequence and the duress of a summation of approximately 13 years. However, I am still not bitter.

And I was thinking about love. What it means. How we say it. How it is true. Most of all, in terms of myself and how my life has led me to really give it a good, hard look; and how it still means something, now more than ever. The other day, I was sitting on the bench outside staring at the supporting post of the balcony above, and the words "love" and "not enough" breeched my thoughts. Never in my wildest dreams did I think about my non-choice way of living exactly like that for a really long time, or that finally taking responsibility for my life, myself, and my actions (finally!) would bring me here, but neither did I think my life would unfold the way it did; and it occurred to me that sometimes, love just isn't enough.

Proper communication (learning how to speak the other person's language and giving it importance), matched fundamental values, short term goals, long term goals, and a solid base of all these things IS what's "enough", it's what sets the tone to the degree of compatibility, but most of the world gets automatically bored with the idea, especially because the advanced stages of love are not being taught--the crucial, underlying truths of what love can be. (There are marriage preparation-type courses for a reason! And yet we all cry that divorce is as easy as changing our snow tires.) The world is (and even I was, to a surprising degree) lacking in the concept of building a foundation, fundamental to the core of a relationship. Everyone gets to the point where they are at a loss for what to do after the "ohmygod I think I'm in love" love (or whatever version of thought gets us into the state of fundamentally unhappy couples) fades into something else. Here's a hint: it's supposed to mature. It becomes a decision then, an action, and it is love like that which supports the structure built on afore-mentioned foundation like layers of a pyramid: likes, dislikes, common interests. It is love that can sustain the soul during conflict of the initial layers and it grows from there, if nurtured, but it does not generally shake the foundation. Love grows, but it also transforms. Most of all, it is an action. Love is an action that requires sacrifice, but sacrifice comes in all forms--but usually means letting go of our pride, allowing our walls of defense to be softly penetrated, and when done right is the most tender, precious thing in the entire world, here or thereafter.

Things Not Allowed in Love: bitterness, lukewarmness, indifference, lack of action, blandness. That's what I think, anyway. Even intense negativity is better than absolute lack of participation, because at least it's dedicated in some way (although it doesn't have a good place in a relationship.)

Now. Here's the thing. None. Of. These. Things. Are. New to me. Not once, ever, in my existence as a wife of a cancer victim, or as a mother of two, or as a woman exposed to the attrocities of the world, or as a person whose sense of emotional awareness/perception was her own flogging, or as a person whose made a bazillion minor-to-major grave errors in her whole life, did I not live these things as best as I could. I knew, even if I struggled like an s.o.b. with knowing better, what love was supposed to be. How, exactly I can't describe, but it was always something intrinsically inscribed on the walls my soul. Perhaps taught to me through the faith my parents transcribed unto me, perhaps acquired through years of observations watching them miss the mark with each other every time they opened their mouths, watching other couples, watching the nuances and inconsistencies that created hardship and strife, but most of all, living exactly as I have lived, eff-ups and all. It has only become all the richer now...

Lest I become a sermon from on high, let me be perfectly clear that I am among the generalizations I have made. I have no more place to mention these things than say, a criminal or banished sinner. I am just, in a word, sharing.

...to be continued...

Odyssey of the TransCanadian Highway

2010-10-15T09:39:00.013-05:00

So I've been thinking long and hard about many a thing. I've lots of time to do just that. Eighty-four hours to be exact. 42 straight hours of road between here and northern Manitoba, and 42 hours straight back with a mere day, in the northern town I left, to break up the odyssey that was this trip and hold my beloved daughters in my arms once again.

To even begin cataloguing and scripting the topics on the road which were discussed and expanded upon at incredible length alone would be a feat of its own to track.

It would take hords of tremendous time to remember, thousands of sheets of paper to record, and massive amounts of energy that we just don't have after a trip of that magnitude to account for, commit to paper, and have complete (or even partial) reference to the entire experience.

But to delve into the contents of said shared and elaborated conversations would probably take, literally, an entire lifetime to document. There was just so much that was shared and consequently (fortunately) understood within a road and expansive, extensive frame of time that it would be difficult to conceive surviving. Yet, we did. And with two dogs in tow, a trunk full of the bare necessities, and a will power that could not have sustained itself by itself for that long--truly there were other good and merciful forces at hand.

Interestingly, there was an equivalent amount of time to think about the things which did not require talking. Most of all, the tender realizations that I thought about and almost immediately contemplated sharing here immediately because for the ones I love who read this, it's important that they have a walking knowledge to take with them when it's convenient for them; and for any stranger to stumble upon this to maybe take away some insight, some measure of understanding or peace.

It's also important to give all my loved ones a chance to do whatever they want with the information they have access to here.

I think, also, I'm going to start exploring the situations in my life in the next few entries which explain things I've never shared aloud before or with others, just like I had started some many months ago, and see where it leads. Generally speaking, I'm not about publicizing personal things, but I'm only interested in exposing what's mine to share, and not that of friends, whose trust I couldn't breech, so that maybe, just maybe it could help one tiny little moment in one single person's life.

It was an excellent way to start telling my story without inflicting it on any one person.

I don't really think that anyone wants to read these things, either, nor do I think I'm all that important, but neither is this format such a public format that all the world will see this. It's just a little blog that is not like anyone else's. Somehow...

... it's just easier for me.

Northern shore of Lake Superior

from the Terry Fox look-out

Terry Fox memorial (Ontario)

(on the road back, about 20-some hours in on the second leg of the trip)

(a very eery, very desolate stretch of Ontario before the Quebec border, where it gets MUCH prettier)

Trouble's new home

Fall in Quebec

2010-09-30T16:18:00.003-05:00

Redaction

2010-09-19T20:46:00.005-05:00

Yes. Did I forget to mention something very important in this blog post? The answer is undoubtedly, unequivocally yes, I did.

It is a word that bears repeating out loud, after having thought about it, felt it, poured from every cord of my heart, my feelings, and my mind multiple times of consequence and conscience. It is an element, a vital step in just about every kind of moving on, that dwelt so loudly in me that I almost missed saying it.

It deserves to be broadcast on top of a mountain, the New York Times, on prime-time TV, perhaps even a tiny blog like this one, but it is more appropriate to center it in the hearts of those who need to hear it.

It is something I could never afford to keep to myself and is something I would never want to keep to myself. It is something that I have felt for so long and known all this time towards all the ones I love and have known, above all and despite all other processes in my life to date, that there can be no resolve without it. There cannot even be hope to resolve if it is not said and stated loudly and clearly, no real hope of truly moving on and certainly no hope to expect forgiveness if I do not express it. Especially if I do not express it like I have been feeling it for so long. Especially since the form in which I have done most of my processing is also the form where now it needs to be addressed.

It is also something I was not too quick to blurt out, at the risk of saying it too quickly or it sounding too convenient, as it was anything but easy or convenient and it needed to mean everything to those who needed to hear it; and even to those who didn't, as the truest essence of it (love) is not bound to the limits of human perception.

They are two of the most difficult words in the English dictionary to say; and even though I've never considered myself too proud to say them, I almost missed saying them myself in the deconstruction/reconstruction of the massive, percussive tide of my decisions and their consequences:

I'm sorry.

I really am. I'm sorry for the hurt I caused, for the confusion, the apparent hypocrisy. I'm sorry for stringing everyone along (even though I wasn't intending to) because I was stringing my own self along. I'm sorry for looking everyone in the eye, pretending to be going one way but planning another. I'm sorry for the worry I caused, the initial and potential damage my leaving caused; but most of all, for hurting the ones I love the most.

I haven't stopped loving you, haven't stopped caring for you, and in that I make my full conscious plea with you for your forgiveness. But with or without your forgiveness, I shall forever remain sorry for these things and carry on. I pray that we can work through these things individually and in private; I will be holding onto those days and hoping for reconciliation.

Les canards

2010-09-17T16:21:00.005-05:00

Every day I get up, get a coffee and have a cigarette out side. When I first got here and the mornings were still warm, I'd go "all the way out" on the dock and watch the ducklings. (I've been here two and a half months.) I would take in the open blue sky, the towering evergreens, and the thicket of forest where all kinds of creatures hid in the safety of their refuges while standing over the water feeling like the floating dock would take me away.

It was the only thing that kept me from dwelling on the world that I left, an entire other life that felt sacked by me up-and-leaving (a life that I had grown rather accustomed to living.) I breathed in the fresh, pine-heavy air, and struggled to appreciate that I was there and incapable of turning back before I could change my mind.

Before the girls went back with their father, my youngest would come out and greet me a sleepy good morning and sit with me. And after they were gone, it was a place I would go to collect my thoughts and wake up. I've had many a day here like that. Almost every single one. This haven, this beautiful secret garden, has been the refuge I've needed to clear just about every basic (or complex) thought I've ever had.

It has also been, much to my charm, a world unto itself. The ducklings grew and more seemed to join the family. And they've gotten fat eating off the ground where the birds spill their seed. As well, I've had the privileged delight to witness not one or two, but three blue jays, which I've never seen before. Between the birds, the squirrels, the wasps, the dragonflies, the two odd otters (one day only), and the odd porcupine, it is enchantment best saved for the movies.

The funniest thing though, is how the ducks have made a path in the grass with their waddling march to the tree where the bird feeder is. It's truly a delightful little show of mother nature's humor.

Mass in French

2010-09-12T13:29:00.006-05:00

What an enriched experience Mass is in French when you have a small stash of vocabulary and the little missal in front of you!

I came here under premonition, decision, wincing in preparing for the barrage of fire, but the one thing that helps me even when I'm feeling like the scum of the earth about my decision to live here like I am is to go to this massive cathedral where I am just a peon.

In the whole sense of the word "blessing", it just doesn't matter what the whole world thinks for a moment in your life. For just one hour, you get to be a person who could be worthy of forgiveness, a person full of graces, and part of a family. For one hour, you can focus on something so much sweeter, nicer, more loving, gentle and warm, forgiving than the weight of all the raucous crap people feel entitled to give you just because you made a decision to do something with your life, and every person you ever knew, ever loved was hurt or pissed by it and had something to say on Facebook about it. (True story.)

For just a few moments, you get to shed the unraveling of the prior week (or weeks), the pain them feeling betrayed. In French, "blessure" means "to wound." In my studies of eternal matters, I have found that many of the saints refer to this "wound of love" that pierces them. It is this pain that they rejoice in because it signifies death to self and a welcoming of the eternal love that floods the soul through the light and mercy of our most Eternal Lord. (Can you imagine the light pouring in your eyes? The pressure of joy bursting from withing your gut? The sheer, overcoming relief of total welcome?) Isn't it something that we refer the the word "blessing" without really even realizing its sheer and pure, yet absolute meaning.

Funny thing is, the scenes didn't all unfold caustically until human judgment got in the way; and, like it or not, I'm finally realizing that it isn't their forgiveness I'm seeking. (Although it used to be. Weird, huh?) But I digress. I still felt like this (refer to "peon" paragraph) before I made the decision to move here and eff up everyone's perceptions of me, hurt their feelings, shock them. You know, when I was a Stepford wife.

That doesn't mean that you are reprieved of the things that you do which suck, or that your journey to be a good person and make fully conscious decisions, complete with consequences just stops there. It means that for a concrete, singular moment you get to breathe. Which is a blessing.

Of course, it seems easier when the people in the church don't know your every last sin, but when you're sitting there with the uncle of the man you're with on the other side, and he knows that you are there under some matter of dramatic sequence, you know you are going to be facing the music eventually.

But even then, it's okay. It's peaceful. Because even when they know my story (at least the people closest around me), I know they're not going to be the type of people to judge. Even if they heard all the gory details down to the final indiscretion, these people I already love already love me and this life, here, is already its own proof that I am not the same person who just lays idle about life and allows everyone else to define her boundaries.

Ici est la cathedrale de Chicoutimi: