Douglas street

 

We moved into the house on Douglas Street in Springfield, Illinois right after my fifth birthday. My father had a job teaching English, Physics, Chemistry and Remedial math in a high school in Chatham and Springfield had a public kindergarten, which was evidently not common back then.

The first day we moved in I saw a man trimming the bushes between our house and his driveway and I told him to stop cutting our bushes! That was the day I met Uncle Ralph. He and his wife, Aunt Jo, would become second parents to all of us, but especially to my baby brother who was born the following April. They didn't have children of their own, so they opened their hearts and home to all the children they knew.

My mother took me to register for kindergarten and I sat in the principal's office staring at my patent leather shoes and informed him that I would go to kindergarten, but I was going to be like my mommy and not go to college! He said that was okay, we'd start with kindergarten. His name was Mr. Head.

Those were busy years. 

My youngest brother, Henry, was born April 20th, 1955 and I remember looking in his crib. He was the biggest baby I had ever seen, but part of that turned out to be because he had club feet and my mother had put a blanket sleeper on him to hide his casts. The next five years were spent making trips to Champaign to get his casts changed as he grew, or to have him fitted for special shoes and night braces, but by the time he finished elementary school he was running and playing sports! Of course he had always been very athletic. He learned to walk and then run wearing casts from his hips to his toes!

My other brother, Tom, had problems too. They thought he might be slow, but it turned out his eyes were so bad he could only see things very very close to him. He needed glasses. Plus he had a stubborn streak. My mother took him to therapy when he was six and was told he was brilliant. He could read, play chess, and do anything he chose, but he often chose not to do these things! Because of his bad kidneys my mother tended to baby him a lot.

My younger sister, Caroline, was nicknamed Pretty. When she was born she had lots of black hair all over her body and my dad had called her his ugly duckling, but once she was old enough to introduce herself as that the family panicked and renamed her Pretty.

My nicknames varied. As a toddler I was called, Angel. Then Pumpkin and finally Injun. I was considered a bright, finicky child who worried about everything. My first grade teacher called a parent teacher conference after sending home a note saying my parents should explain to me that no one was perfect. I did not have to be perfect. My dad jokingly started that conversation out with, "Nobody's is perfect. Except me." Now they were concerned because I had begun to write my name on all my papers, starting in the bottom right hand corner and writing backwards! Every letter was perfectly reversed as was my name. Sometime during the conference they called me in and asked me to show them and I dutifully did. When my father asked why I wrote my name and all the letters backwards I told him, "The teacher said start in the lower right hand corner and write your name." That was the only way to do that and make it fit.

I had a boy friend starting in kindergarten. Both of our last names started with P and so we were often seated together along with another P boy. Linda, Billy and Shawn, a threesome that stayed in contact for many years. Three bright kids who were alphabetically connected. Billy's mom was a pediatrician and his dad was a cardiologist. Shawn's parents were also professionals. Those were fun days. We learned to play chess and marbles. We rode our bikes together, played with Billy's electric train, and once I got to go see Snow White at the theater with Billy and his mom.

Going to the show was a big event back then. People got all dressed up and stood in long lines to see things like Bambi and Old Yeller.

I did most of my growing up in this house. I took piano lessons from a woman two blocks away, but I was so terrified of walking past the loose dogs, that I almost quit. I signed up to learn the saxophone in fifth grade and violin in sixth. My brother, Tom, tried out a series of instruments too, but when he played oboe they were always on the next note before he got the last one out. Then he tried the bass fiddle, but, even though he was a big boy,  he hated carrying it the block to and from school. That was the end of his musical career.

I began sleep walking in this house and would wake up running down the stairs or standing in the living room. Once I read a book that talked about dough balls. I didn't know what they were and ran down to my parents while I was sleep walking to ask where the dough balls were.

I read a book called, The Fashion Doll about a girl finding a trunk in the attic with a doll who had the most incredible detailed clothing just like the most fashionable women in the 1800's wore. Then for Christmas I got the first Barbie doll whose clothing was also like real fashionable dresses! They were expensive and I only got a few outfits for birthdays or Christmas, but it was a dream come true. 

I also got my first desk at this house. It was a modern one with wrought iron legs and two drawers with a matching chair. I used to sit at it and pretend I was a teacher. The year I turned eleven I got my first bra. I was not impressed. I hated it and found nothing wonderful about having it. That year my mother also surprised me by painting my room mustard yellow and my furniture Kelly green. She thought it was a wild and wonderful teen girl room. I thought it was atrocious, but we couldn't afford to redo it.

The girl two doors down shared my birthday, except that she was two years older. When we were younger we played together all the time. We roller skated on her front porch with a broom across the steps so we wouldn't skate off. We held hands and ran to school, calling it flying our kites! We played Mother May I in the summer evenings and we tried to set up two tin cans connected by a string between her bedroom window and mine so we could talk without the phone. It never really got finished. Aunt Jo and Uncle Ralph's house was in between and there was no way to get our string over it. She used to let me read her Clara Barton and Bobbsey Twin books and sometimes we played Animal Rummy on the chaise lounge at her house. Our only problem until she went to junior high and I moved to a different elementary school was my brother's sudden interest in sleeping on the sidewalk in front of her house and her driveway. Their smooth finish that made it perfect for skating was evidently also wonderful for him as he lay basking in the sun, sometimes falling asleep with both arms crossed over his chest. My mother found this hysterically funny. Her parents did not.

Another girl father down the block was right in between us age wise. She had an antique baby doll the size of a real baby and a suitcase full of real baby clothes, but I was only allowed to go three doors down without permission for most of my childhood. At ten I was allowed to ride to the corner and cross one street in any  direction, but I could not stay anywhere. I had to turn around and come right back home. However this came in handy when my sister chased me with worms. She was not allowed to cross the street, but she stood on her side waving the wiggling worm in the air, threatening me if I tried to come home.

Life was different back then. We had a garage full of riding toys and I learned to get around on all of them. I could push myself with one leg while the other knee was in the wagon and zoom around the sidewalk. I could take corners inches from the ground on my bicycle, which backfired when I got too close one day and took about three layers of skin off my knee. And when Uncle Ralph edged his sidewalks and driveway, I would balance on the handle of his lawn mower so the wheel would create a trough around all his grass!

He had a beagle named, Hey Boy. We had a bird named Caruso. Caruso finally died of old age and we buried him in a paper bag in the side yard. I am embarrassed to say I went back many months later and dug him up to see what he looked like, but there was no sign of the bag or him by then.

We also had a few other pets that came and went. The Easter Bunny brought us four ducklings that played and quacked in our yard one summer until they disappeared. It took a while for me to connect that to the big duck roast Uncle Ralph had for the neighborhood. Then we had two rabbits for a long time until my mom gave them to my grandfather's chauffeur while we weren't home. I thought he was going to bring them back, but when I finally asked, evidently nobody had let him in on the secret because he said, "Those rabbits? We ate them a long time ago Missy."

My mother didn't have much luck with animals. When my grandfather brought her a prize dachshund from Germany she tried putting rubber pants on it. You can only imagine how that didn't work. Uncle Ralph gave me a little puppy one summer, but it wouldn't stop barking so we had to put it out on the farm and a train ran over it. Then there was Snorkel.

Snorkel was a rescue my dad brought home. He was a full grown Scottish Terrier that was already housebroken and he became my constant companion. When I ran out to play, Snorkel ran with me, Where I went he went and then one year my mother locked him in the side yard with a bone and later she let two little girls cut through there to go home. For some reason I will never know or understand Snorkel savagely bit both of them, requiring many stitches and my parents had him put down. I was inconsolable.

Later someone gave us another basset beagle, but once again my mother couldn't house train it so it lived outside on a chain and really wasn't much of a pet at all. I feel bad whenever I remember him.

This was the house we lived in when I woke up one night and heard someone's raspy breathing coming from my dresser! It was on an outside wall of the house and I was the only one in the room. I was terrified. I called for my dad who came up and listened. He heard it too, then he showed me how my sister's snoring in her room catty corner from mine was echoing off my wall. So it wasn't a ghost! I asked him if ghosts were real and he matter of factly said no one knows. That was kind of scary too.

In those days most families had one car and the dad took it to work. There were buses but I wasn't allowed to take the bus until I was thirteen, so there were no trips to the public library. Our school let us check out a book every week from the school library, but I read those right away and was left wanting. That was when I discovered the books my dad put in the hallway bookcase. I think I read every Junior Classic, most of the Books of Knowledge, and many of the Lands and People books before I began invading his personal library in his office.

It wasn't all reading though. Television was black and white and we could only get about three channels by using the rotor to turn the antennae on our house. It was a huge antennae. You could climb it like a ladder up past the second story of the house. We could tell time by what show was on. Wagon Train came on at 6:30 on Wednesday night and Twilight Zone on Thursday night. Mickey Mouse Club was right after school and on Sunday nights we watched The Wonderful World of Disney while eating hamburgers in the living room! We had wooden tv trays and felt very sophisticated.  On Saturdays we children got up early and watched the patterns on the tv until the programming came on for the day, then it was Fury and Rough and Ready and Sky King while we ate cinnamon toast sitting on the floor right in front of the television. Back then tv went off the air every night playing The Star Spangled Banner.

The house on Douglass was not as big as The Big House, but it was good sized. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs was an eat in kitchen, a formal dining room separated by an entry hall and foyer before you got to the living room. Then on the very end was a sun porch which varied over the years as a sewing room or office, or even a room filled with fish aquariums and one blind frog who couldn't catch flies anymore and had to be fed hamburger swinging on a thread in front of his face.

The refrigerator was so big it was on the landing outside the kitchen door and had a peddle to open it. The basement was all tiled and painted. The laundry room had the washer and dryer up on a platform next to two big lead wash tubs build into the wall. There was a toilet in the middle of the room on a big dais, like a throne. Next to that was the world's biggest hot water heater that my father claimed ate up so much money that he turned it off when we weren't home and finally a ceramic glazed shower. A swing hung next to the ironing board and an electric ironer sat in the corner. Back then my mother ironed everything from sheets to my father's undershorts. Plus we used real tablecloths and napkins for dinner! 

The middle part of the basement was our play room built around a furnace so intricate and old that when the only man who could work on it died, we had to buy a new one. There was a four foot tall incinerator against one wall for burning trash and then a little paneled room at the end that was my father's office. Like all children we took all of these things for granted.

Life was different then. Packs of dogs roamed the streets and even our school yard. We had recess until fourth grade and our playground had big jungle gyms and long lines of swings that were greatly coveted. I spent most of my recess walking around the roots of a great big tree with my friends. We never got to the swings in time, but there was a lot of imagination traveling around that trunk. If you stepped off the roots and touched the ground you might die in a swamp, or be eaten by monsters, or sometimes they just took you to a strange new world. Our imaginations were never at a loss.

These were good years, the longest I had ever spent in one house so far and then one night I had a dream. In the dream we moved to a new house. It was right across the street from a very large stone church and right down the street from a woman we called Aunt Evelyn. Aunt Evelyn liked purple and she collected elephants, both traits my sister took as her own for the rest of her life, because both she and Aunt Evelyn had asthma.

At lunch that day my mother broke the news. We needed to move, to find something more affordable and dad had found a house! It was the second semester of sixth grade and I was about to begin my preteen years making one mad move after another.

Grandma's house

 

We left Champaign just before I turned five years old. My father was invited to go on a long trip with his father and they left for Germany at the same time we moved into my maternal grandmother's house. We called this The Big House and it was big! There was a gigantic attic. Below that were six bedrooms, one bathroom and a huge hallway that were all turned into two apartments that were rented out after my grandfather died. 

The main floor was flanked by three Queen Anne porches. One in front with a big wooden porch swing. One on the side (The house was on a corner lot.) that had a couch glider and two metal rocking chairs. One closed in off the kitchen that was a sort of summer kitchen with a stove and my uncle's big tinker toy Ferris wheel filled with people just like the ones in my dollhouse. I loved those people. Their joints allowed them to sit or stand and to raise their arms, which was very up to date for 1954.

My dad called home while he was in Germany and I got to talk to him on the phone in the library. He tried to explain how big an ocean was, that I couldn't just walk around it like I did the lake in Minnesota, I was impressed. The library was one of my favorite rooms. There was an intriguing picture of a dead baby who my mother said starved to death back in the 1880's. He was my grandfather's brother. There were also shelves of books underneath big heavy curtains to keep the dust off and of course, the telephone. Our number was 123 (I think) and we would simply pick up the phone and ask the operator to connect us to other people by number, or even sometimes by name!

Each room had a great big fireplace with marble tiled designs around them and big ornate mirrors above them, but we never used any of them. Instead there was a coal furnace in the basement beside a giant heap of coal. Every night I would go down with my Grandmother to stoke the furnace before we went to bed.  I used my own tiny little black coal shovel to fill up the bucket while she used giant tongs to take the clinkers out of the stoker beside the furnace.  

There were also heavy ornate chandeliers in the center of every room. Once they had been attached to gas lines, but by then they were all electrical. They just ran the wires through the gas tubes. The rooms were very tall and had doors with transoms that we could open or close to let air pass through.

My grandmother and my great Aunt Lela were sister-in-laws who stayed together after their husbands died. They shared a bedroom next to the downstairs bathroom. There was a big cardboard Donald Duck on the wall in there that I thought was very fancy and also a large sombrero my mother had brought them from Mexico. The bathroom was an add on to the rest of the house. 

My uncle, who was only nine years older than me, had his bedroom in the old downstairs music room. My sister and I had our beds set up in two corners of the gigantic dining room. In the third corner was a green velvet lounge that we liked to do somersaults on. We crouched at the top and rolled down to the bottom. Once in a while I was allowed to get out the doll china that had belonged to my mother, or sometimes even the miniature doll china that had belonged to my great grandmother and play with it on the dining room table.

The downstairs front hallway was much bigger than my whole apartment is now and the back hallway had a shaving sink, a closet for coats and a big Gothic hall tree chair with a bench for umbrellas and boots right outside the library door. Both hallways had staircases.The one in front was a fancier one with carved oak balustrades, but the one in back was mahogany with dark wainscoting. There was a sort of secret tunnel hallway under the front staircase that led into the library from the front hall.

There was a big kitchen with a large pantry between it and the dining room and my grandmother stored her wringer washer in that pantry, bringing it out very early on Monday mornings and setting it up in the kitchen to wash clothes before she went to work. I remember she used a big stick to push the clothes down inside of it.  Afterwards I helped Aunt Lete hang those clothes on the three lines out back. I had my own tiny wicker basket and I carried the clothespins. Once a line was full we would hoist tall poles under them to keep the clothes from touching the ground. 

I used to play in the garden behind the clothes lines.  I would help grandma pick flowers for a bouquet  to put in her glass basket, or catch butterflies and spiders by sneaking up and grabbing them then letting them fly or crawl away. Sometimes I played in the huge truck tire they painted white and filled with sand for me. And sometimes, in the evenings, we would set up the croquet game in the side yard and all play croquet. Grandma always got the red ball because that was her favorite color, but if she didn't play, I got red!

There were so many things to do. I would climb on the rocks that flanked the back sidewalk, balancing and very proud of myself, or walk down the concrete balustrades in front of the front steps. Sometimes my mother spread a blanket under the shade trees and I played with my dolls there. Inside, if I asked, I was allowed to play with the tiny china figurines on the what not stand, or listen to the player piano play by itself when we put music rolls in it. But sometimes Aunt Lete would play the piano. She played by ear and I was so impressed! And sometimes Grandma would sing. She had a very high soprano voice and people used to have her sing at weddings, but mostly she sang the old Baptist hymns.

Grandma had a television in the living room and I was allowed to watch Ding Dong School with Miss Frances. One day she opened some Russian nesting dolls and I have been fascinated with them ever since.

In the morning when I got up I would go into the kitchen and sit at the big wooden table on my tall tin chair. It had been red when my uncle was little, but they painted it pink for me!  Whoever was working in there at the time would make me toast with butter and grape jelly and serve it to me on a black cookie sheet to try and keep the crumbs off the floor. Sometimes they would make as much as I wanted, but sometimes there was a limit. Afterward I got to use the big kitchen broom to sweep the floor and I was proud of that job, but sometimes if I acted up, I had to sit on a chair in the corner by the potato and flour bins and stare out the window thinking about what I had done.

My mother would dress all of us every morning. I remember how she put my socks on then smoothed out all the creases and rubbed my feet to make them warm before she put my shoes on. Some one bought me a pair of real cowboy boots and I loved those! I could put them on myself.  Otherwise I would lie on the floor and put my shoe up on my mother's lap so she could tie it. One day my baby brother came by and peed in my face while I lay there. My mother told me if I hadn't dawdled it wouldn't have happened. The only thing I really hated was having my hair combed. My mother would put a comb in a glass of water and then tackle the snarls in my curls until she had perfect long curls all around my head. If I pulled away or complained she would crack me on the head with her comb.

When my father came home from Germany he worked selling cars in St. Louis and only came home on weekends, but on Thanksgiving I had my fifth birthday and he told me we were all moving to a new house. I remember how happy that made me, but some of my other presents also made me very happy. My Aunt Lete baked me a cake with a doll in the middle. The cake was her skirt! My uncle gave me a big blue plastic piggy bank with a red hat. Every time someone put a coin in his back, the hat popped up. I spent the whole afternoon going around getting aunts and uncles to put pennies in my bank.

The next day we moved to Springfield, Illinois.

A shift in support

 

My father sold his Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge, dealership in 1953 when both Chrysler and Plymouth began having problems. He decided to go back to school and finish his Master's Degree and took a teaching position with the U of I. 

Part of this had to do with the birth of my brother, Tom, who had serious kidney problems and needed treatment that could be found at a clinic in Champaign, Illinois. I went with my parents to look at houses and I remember a dining room full of people sitting at a round table that seemed to be made of rock! They all were very kind and spoke to me while smiling and laughing.

We moved into that tiny two bedroom rental with a little picket fence around the backyard and a small sun porch off the front of the house. In the beginning my brother slept in a bassinet in the dining room, but when he needed a crib my parents took the closet door off of our bedroom and bought us bunk beds. The room was so small that the ladder to the top bunk ended up underneath the crib!

I loved living in this house. My dad had an office in the basement and he built us a playhouse in the rest of the basement with two big platforms under windows looking out over the rest of the basement. There was a big floor lamp outside his office door and one day, while trying to reach up and turn it on I got a very nasty shock! I still remember the buzz running through my hand and arm!

I was the oldest of three now and my mother gave me a rag and a can of Ajax cleanser and let me clean the bathroom floor. I had a ring just like my mother's engagement ring and like her I always took it off before cleaning, Then, one day, it slipped down the drain! I was inconsolable. My engagement ring from Daddy was gone. He took the whole sink apart and found that ring, making him my hero forever. Another task that my mother gave me was ironing Daddy's handkerchiefs. While the other children napped she ironed and I ironed right next to her with my own little ironing board and iron. Back in those day three year olds played with real tiny irons and even my toy stove could boil water! I remember how seriously I made each fold in the handkerchief while ironing out the creases.

My parents decided we should have a cat and my father brought home a gray tabby from the pound. They named it Pretty Soon, because pretty soon they would know if it was a girl or a boy. One morning I woke up and went into the kitchen where my mother excitedly had me look out the window into the backyard. There were cats everywhere! Cats sat on the roof of our garage, on the fence ledges and even on the swing set and sandbox. Mommy said they had all come to court Pretty Soon because she was the prettiest girl cat around. Then a few months later I woke up to another surprise. When Daddy got home from school he took me down to his office and showed me a whole box of tiny kittens!

Later my mother told me that Pretty Soon had taken a walk in a field full of kittens and picked out the ones she like best to bring home. I dreamed about that field of kittens for years.

One Saturday morning my mother dressed me in my best crinoline slip and fullest skirted dress. She combed my long curls and gave me white gloves to wear. I even had a tiny red and blue plastic shoulder bag with the head of a Scottish terrier in bas relief on one side. I had a date with Daddy! We went to a carnival and he tried to get me to ride the merry-go-round. It looked very fast, even the small one and I refused. On our way out a lady in a very tall wagon gave me an orange sherbet ice cream cone, but it dripped all over me and my father coaxed me into dropping it on the ground, saying he would buy me a hamburger.

On another Saturday my father took me to see the movie Pinnochio. We didn't have a television so this was the first moving picture I had ever seen. I will never forget how huge Monstro was. I have one other memory of going on dates with Daddy and this one was a long anticipated rite of passage. Once more I was dressed to the nines. We went to the pen store (which was probably a drug store.) I saw a carousel filled with ballpoint pens of every color and got to pick out the one I wanted. I picked a sky blue pen with a silver top and thus began my writing. I was so proud of that pen.

I remember one Christmas and one birthday in this house. For my birthday I received a baking set with tiny cake pans, a cupcake pan and small boxes of cake mix. I remember actually making one of the cakes and putting it in my electric stove's oven to cook, although I suspect my parents probably took it out and put it in the big oven when I wasn't looking. I had my first birthday party that year. My mother and I cleaned up all my dolls and stuffed animals. She even drew new eyes on the Dydee doll whose eyes I had scratched off and we lined them all up on the couch on the sun porch. Then my mother had each one knock on the door and I answered it and invited them in. Once they were all in the living room we played drop the clothespin in the milk bottle, but some of the dolls declined to play.

We got our milk every morning from the Milkman who arrived in a yellow truck pulled by a horse! On Easter that horse wore a bonnet that it got to eat later on. Waiting for the milk was a big event in our day.

On Christmas Daddy took us all for a ride in the car to look for Santy Claus. I remember wondering if every cloud might be him up in the sky, but then we went home and he had already been at our house! I had a beautiful dollhouse filled with furniture and people up on the dining room table! I played with that house for many years.

I remember the day my parents put us all in the backseat of the car and my brother threw his clown rattle out the window. We had to drive all around until we found it. Then we went to a store and waited in the car with Mommy while Daddy went inside. There were two little Chinese children and my mother used to tell stories of how we all chatted back and forth in spite of the fact that we spoke two different languages. That night a man brought a television to our house! It was a big, beautiful mahogany, piece of furniture with doors that closed to hide the screen when we weren't using it. Daddy turned it on and a tiny white horse with a man in a white hat and black mask galloped up the hill then reared up. I wanted my dad to open up the top of the TV and get them out so I could play with them!

Those were years where I was noticeably older than my siblings. My brother wore the seats out of all his clothes because he got around by scooting on his bottom, using his legs to pull him forward, but he got around. My parents gave him his first educational toy, a tiny wooden hammer and a little work bench where he could pound pegs in one side then flip it over and pound them back. He used the hammer to completely destroy the front of their radio/record player piece of furniture, leaving little round dents all over the front.

It was also years before infant car seats were more than a seat that hooked over the car seat with a steering wheel and horn. Once you were too big for that, you sat on the grown up seat. In front. And that was how my sister got her first nasty bump on the head. A bicycle drove in front of us and dad hit the brakes hard to avoid hitting him. My sister was thrown into the dashboard like a startled bird into a window.

All of our meals without dad were in the kitchen, but when he came home for lunch we ate in the dining room and I had to have exactly what he did, a cheese sandwich and a bowl of soup. I remember very little about eating in this house except that sometimes at night my dad would bring home a treat. I loved the Cheetos and I loved the strawberry ice cream with little pieces of frozen strawberries in them. I even loved the white coke. It was years later that I discovered this was seven up.

Just before I turned five we moved again. I remember going with my parents to look at houses and one house had a toy room with a stick horse I really wanted, but it turned out this house had been hit by a tornado the year before and my mother was very leery of it. Someone told her tornadoes never hit the same place twice but this house was hit again the next week. 

We ended up moving in with my grandmother.

In the beginning

 

A young man, age twenty, graduated from College and was working on his Master's Degree when his father helped him start his own car dealership. He was already engaged and on his way in the world when he was talking to his friend one afternoon. \

Happening to glance out the window, the most beautiful red head he'd ever seen was crossing the street. He exclaimed, "Who is that woman?"

His friend, a little less enthusiastic, responded, "That is my sister."

After a whirlwind courtship that included dancing in the moonlight to the car radio on a covered bridge, he called the woman his little bean blossom, because, he said, she was beautiful, delicate and rare. They tried to elope the night before their wedding, but changed their minds and were married in a big church wedding on August 15, 1948. Just three weeks after meeting.

He arranged for a furniture store to open just for them after hours and they picked out the furniture for their first home. Never people to put anything off, they immediately tried to start a family and like many young people were very impatient. They thought it was never going to happen.

I was born the day after Thanksgiving, by ceasarean section, a blonde, blued eyed baby girl with curly hair on November 25, 1949.

My earliest memory is looking through the bars of my crib at a lamp that my mother could twist to send the light out in the direction she wanted. My next one was sitting at the end of a big table staring up at the most beautiful cake I had ever seen. It looked like a fluffy lamb! My Great Aunt Lela had baked it for me as she would bake one every year for the next few years. It turned out I did not like the coconut that made it look fluffy and shortly after that I got a splinter in my bare foot that had to be removed. I remember the faces of my Aunt Betsy and Uncle R.I. and others surrounding me telling me it would be okay. It still hurt. I was two.

Those were huge years for me. We lived in a large Georgian house with a living room that had two giant double doors, one on each end. I would ride my tricycle through one door, down the dark scary hallway, past the staircase and in the other end's door.  And in the afternoon I shared a big green armchair with my mother while she read to me. From that chair I could see through to the hallway and our front door with a half moon transom above it. On some days I would see a red scarf, tied in a square not like it was ready to be worn around the neck, fly through the transom and land on the hallway rug. I knew that meant my grandmother would soon arrive and shortly thereafter, the door would open and in she would come. I loved having Grandma there. She was my mother's mother.

My other grandmother came one night with two blue metal trunks. Inside each one was a doll that stood on big flat feet and had a whole wardrobe of clothes. The girl doll was mine. The boy doll was for my baby sister, Caroline, who was two years younger than me. One night my Daddy woke me up and unlatched the baby gate that crisscrossed in front of my door. I got my finger caught in the gate and began crying. He said I had a present to give Mommy for Mother's Day. We went down to the dining room and there was a beautiful yellow Canary that my mother named Caruso.

Not all of my night awakenings were so joyful though. Sometimes I would waked up in my youth bed with the half sides so I wouldn't fall out and there would be flames covering my blankets! It was very scary and I remember wondering why they didn't hurt me this time? I've always wondered about those times. They continued until I was close to four or five years old and I have no idea what caused them. I had never been in a fire.

The first Christmas that I remember was magical. There were two green foil wrapped packages with gold ribbons on the top shelf of the pantry that I was told Santa had brought. The night before Christmas I lay in my bed looking at the shadows that danced across the wall of windows and wondering if they were Santy Claus. The only memory I have of Christmas Day was getting a little metal refrigerator filled with real tiny food! There was a tiny restaurant size glass jar of milk, a tiny can of Hershey's chocolate and some cheese. 

My father built a small porch off the kitchen that he told me was just for me so I could go out and play in the yard. I had a sandbox out there with a canopy over it and toy sifters and shovels and pails to play with. I remember a girl called Becky Brooks who was a little older than me sifting all the sand out so that there were only tiny pebbles left. She told me it was popcorn and I ate it, but it didn't taste like popcorn. 

I loved that yard and my porch. I could look up and see my mother leaning out the second story window washing the outside panes and our English bulldog, Cappy, would wander around while I was out there. One day I was in the house and I heard Cappy, crying at the basement door. I opened it and was met by Cappy, frothing at the mouth and howling as he lunged at me. My uncle slammed the door shut just in time! Someone had put ground glass in hamburger and thrown it over the fence for Cappy to eat.

The only other memory I have at that house was when I was supposed to be napping. I got up and managed to put on my new little blue crepe nightgown and robe along with some white bunny fur slippers. I was so proud of myself! I went downstairs to show Mommy, but all that happened was she got upset because I had not stayed down for my nap. She didn't seem to notice how beautiful I looked.

In 1952 my brother, Tom, was born and we moved to Champaign, Illinois.

What a difference

 

I believe in something. I just don't know what to call it.

No religion seems to fit. I don't believe I have to curry the favor of some quasi human creature or call this power by any name man has made up. I don't believe any religious myths are much more than man's attempt to explain the way things work, or try to control whatever this power is by doing something magical.

I do believe that there is power in creation. Whether that power is inside or outside of me I don't know, but I do know that changes in me take place inside me. And I believe that there are things I can do that make my life better.

Eliminating stress. Focusing on the present moment. Opening myself to healing wherever it comes from and however it comes. And then just doing common sense things like trying to control my blood sugar or drinking lots of water for my kidneys. I think it is highly possible that healing is part of who we are if we give it a chance.

But I don't know any of this.

Four months ago my kidney doctor suggested I start looking into dialysis. My numbers were low and getting lower. This past week she told me that whatever I was doing I should keep doing it! She'd never seen the kind of improvement I was showing. 

Now all that being said I am still in stage four kidney disease. That's not good. 

But right now I am better than I have been in four years.

It's a little scary because I truly don't know exactly what I've been doing to achieve that. I've been eating terribly. My A1C is way too high and I am still anemic after seven iron infusions, but my kidney's are much better and I have a strong heart. 

I'm going to focus on that while I work on the rest and the hardest part is not to let the bad thoughts take over, because I suspect it is my attempt to live in the moment that has made a difference.

Family heirloom

 

I don't know whether I believe in Fate or not, but sometimes an event occurs that makes me wonder.

I looked for a family heirloom before my daughter's wedding. It was a necklace that belonged to my great grandmother and was worn by both my mother and me at our weddings. 

I remembered offering it to my son for his wedding, but his bride wanted nothing to do with it. 

I thought I put it away in a chest where I placed many important family mementos, but it wasn't in there. Then I assumed I gave it back to my sister who collects everything, including jewelry. She could not find it.

Thinking back I assume I must have looked in my own jewelry box. In fact, I would have sworn I did, 

I seldom ever wear anything except a pair of platinum hoop earrings, but lately I have felt more like my old self. I've been wearing make up occasionally and even a bit more jewelry. 

Today I found that family heirloom in my own jewelry box! I am astounded! I am also thrilled and grateful to know it is not lost.

Now I must decide who it should be given to and when.

It is that important to me.

Tolerance

 

A human being's ability to tolerate inconveniences depends on so many things.

Some people do not deal well with the smallest things, a hang nail can turn them into raging maniacs. Others generally build towards some invisible and variable point known only to them.

And then there are those people who seem to be able to rock and roll with whatever punches come at them. My youngest son is like that. It is terrifying to think that his kayak could be caught upside down in a raging stream and he would be calmly probing his brain for his next action.

Today a block of people in our apartment building were told we would have no water until further notice. That meant no drinking water, no showers, no flushing toilets with no advance warning!

The optimistic goal of water being turned on by noon was tolerable for most of us. Three thirty didn't seem totally unreasonable since it was a water main they were fixing. But my phone call at three forty suggested it might be five, five thirty, or even six. 

I asked how we would know when the water was back on and discovered they had no plans for how to let us know. It simply hadn't occurred to them! 

That is when almost everyone's tolerance wore a bit thin. Not using the bathroom is no big deal if it isn't your bathroom and they did make other bathrooms available. One on the top floor. One on the main floor. 

I found myself on the way to the modern version of an outhouse. Not really an outhouse of course. It was a fully functioning, fully flushing toilet down the hall and ten floors away on an elevator. When you are an older woman you will understand how inconvenient that is.

Hours more holding-it-in awaited us all, but soon after I hung up the phone someone knocked on my door. The water was on and bathrooms were once more usable! Seven hours of horror ended! The sun came out, birds twittered cheerfully and little angels sang in choirs on every corner.

Thank goodness I made that call. I shudder to think we might have gone the whole weekend thinking we didn't have a pot to pee in.

Not all who wander are aimless

 

Tolkien said this. I must have read it years ago, but it didn't really hit me until tonight. Growing up a child of the fifties my goals were set for me. I wanted to grow up to be like my mother, my aunts, my grandmothers and all their friends. I wanted to be a wife and mother. But I was also like my father, curious and idealistic.

I became a wife and mother! I loved being that. It was and still is one of the most important parts of my life. Even though it was only the beginning of who I was to be, I took it very seriously, trying to see what the point of parenthood really meant.

To me it meant raising a human being to find its potential. Teaching someone not only how to survive in this world, but to thrive. Giving my children all the knowledge and skills I knew how to give them. Then stepping back and giving them the freedom to go and BE!

When they left. I left. I left a life of extremes; the joy of being a mother and the agony of being a wife to a man who did not share my ideals, or goals, or even dreams. We only shared concrete things like houses and food.

After my divorce I discovered a million new things. I experimented with all kinds of ideas. I moved from the city to the farm, to a bigger city, to a series of generic places I  called an apartment. Home really was where my heart was.

I met people I had only dreamed about, doing things I had always dreamed about and I began to find myself. I wasn't afraid to try new things. I took flute lessons and played a recital. I birthed a drum and learned to meditate in its vibrations. I took part in a Wicca wedding and gazed into the red hot rocks of a sweat lodge. I traveled all over the country. Alone. I transcribed the words of a famous author and edited books for another. I even allowed my inner child to try out its fantasies with more joy than I had dared to dream.

I have moved 29  times in my life and each move brought me closer to the woman I am. I am not ashamed to say I like me. I am far from perfect, but that is why I am interesting. I am constantly learning new things and learning makes me feel joyful. Who could aim for more than that?

Excuses

 

How many people do you know who always have excuses for not doing something?

I'm not saying they should be doing anything.

I'm thinking of the people who feel they need to have a reason for why they won't.

A long time ago someone told me to never give an excuse for not doing something. It only gives the asker something to counter with. If they can solve your dilemma you will feel required to agree to their demands.

I have tried to live by that knowledge ever since, but I know people who almost cannot function if they don't have a reason not to do something. They are the people pleasers. The ones whose self image requires them to make everybody happy. (Which of course, no one ever does, especially people pleasers.)

One woman relied on her jobs for excuses so much that when she retired, she nearly had a nervous breakdown until she got a dog. Then that dog became her excuse. He needed to go to grooming. He needed to be walked. He barked. His food disagreed with him. Whatever. No one was fooled.

She still complained about all the things people asked her to do, but now she had her dog to make her feel like a willing martyr.

It isn't unkind to simply say, "No. I'm sorry." Or, even simply, "No." If someone pushes you beyond that you have the right tell them the truth if you choose to. These people are not your real friends anyway.

Sometimes it is even kinder to just be honest up front and not leave people believing you really want to do something you have absolutely no desire to do. Don't lead them on.

They will get over it and if they don't? There may be one less person asking for favors. (But don't count on it.)

I voted

Today is St. Patrick's Day. That gives me a reason to get dressed. In green!

Today is also election day and I voted, so I am wearing my little I Voted sticker and plan to wear it to my third reason for getting up and getting dressed.

Today is our building's monthly potluck.

I was thinking of the ways we think of ourselves and who we influence this morning.

Long long ago I worked for the top auto insurance company in the world. I had the second lowest pay grade they had, but I was good at what I did and it never occurred to me to be ashamed of my lowly status.

Later I taught old fashioned preschool. Two classes of fifteen three year olds twice a week and I was proud of what I did. Influencing the future people who would run our country, teach our children, and care for our earth.

Now that I am retired I sometimes do not even have to get up and get dressed. That is a dangerous state of mind. Everyone needs a reason to get up. I don't really have a problem with that part. There are many things I do when I'm up. I paint, play my keyboard, read, write, play games on my phone, rearrange my furniture. But I can do all of those in my pajamas!

When I summon up the energy to actually dress up and get out a bit I feel really good, so you'd think I'd do it more often.

I don't.

When I do, just wearing my I Voted sticker influences people. Small things. Small perspective, but it counts.

Who are you

 

There is no such person as the woman before me. 

Oh, she has height and girth, hair, and a face with two terrified eyes and one trembling or grimacing smile, but she does not really exist.

She is the sum total of other people's opinions. Her best friend's inner most thoughts shape her wants and needs. Her mother is the god who lives in her head and says what is always right in this world, whether it is something owned, done, thought, or dreamed. Nobody's opinion carried more weight than that memory of a woman she called, Mom, whether it was true or existed or not.

She walks through her world playing the part of a thousand mid century love stories where women are fragile and beautiful, loved and nurtured and always get their man in the happily ever after. Only there is no happily ever after for her. There is not even a happy present for her.

Her world is a jumbled confusion of jumping to the right cues and expecting some reward to be tossed into her mouth if she does it quickly enough. No thinking needed. No thinking allowed. She walks a tightrope of not knowing. Not wanting to know, because that would mean thinking on her own and expressing an opinion.

She is fiercely protective of her non being. Proud of it in a sort of stubborn way that put to any other use might have taken her in a much different direction. Words flow out of her mouth contradicting each other sentence by sentence, but she neither notices, nor cares. Confronted, she only becomes louder and more emphatic, but it does not change the fact that she really isn't listening at all.

Life in motion is the rule.

Movement is her salvation. In constant motion, she vacuums, mows, shops, walks, exercises -- anything to avoid thinking or participating in real life, her own, or others'. All creatures suffer at her hand. She has no discipline to offer, nothing to teach, leaving any dependent creature completely at sea in a world that eats those, who don't know the rules, alive. But she sees their suffering as her blessed mission in life.

By creating these creatures who have no notion of how to function, she creates a place for herself; swooping in to do good and loving deeds that keep them chained to her forever.

Necessary or luxury

 

With stuff comes responsibility. 

Whether you call that stuff, necessary or luxury, you still have to take care of it.

This is true whether it is money, household gadgets, geegaws, or even clothing. Everything requires something of you. 

It must be figured into your taxes, or dusted, or filled with gas. It may require insurance, or veterinary bills, or grooming. Washing, drying, weeding, watering, mowing, painting, re roofing, shoveling the snow, nothing comes without a price.

If you believe you have someone who takes care of all of this for you, think again. There is a price for that too! Actual payment in money, and/or relinquishing control of your life. 

Everything you bring into your life makes some kind of a difference and only you can decide if it's worth it.

Living by proxy

 

The older I get the more limited my life tends to become. I don't have a lot of money. I can't afford to be ferried around the world in a wheel chair and so my life must be centered on what I can do.

I've always loved rearranging things, especially rooms. It allows me to feel like I am in a new place and I love new places.

Done right a room conveys a feeling as much as anything else. It can be airy or cozy, elegant or rustic, whatever I choose to make it.

I can no longer change where I live, but I can change the way I live in a place; how I look out the windows, where the focus is going to be, what I do with a space that gives me a certain sense of being.

There is a large evergreen tree outside the front of my apartment. Viewed from one room, I could be in the Alps, or a forest. Viewed from different windows it looks down upon what might be a formal garden or patio or even a city scape, especially at night.

It only takes a hint of something and my imagination to enjoy where I am and due to years and years of extensive reading my imagination is immense.

I have collected an eclectic assortment of household goods. I have a Moroccan floor lamp, a beautiful Quan Yin, an Armani stallion, among some staple things like chairs and secretaries or dressers. It feeds my need to be creative. And it's all movable, so I can create almost anything I can dream up.

Imaginary friends

 

I didn't have an imaginary friend when I was little.

My first imaginary friend was when I was eleven years old and we moved to a new school the second semester of my sixth grade. We had moved before, but not since before I started kindergarten, so this time was different.

In the past, moving meant going to a new house with my same family. Nothing really changed but the scenery. In sixth grade everything changed. New house. New school. New neighbors. New friends. We only moved across town, but it was as if we had moved to the moon. On top of all that my Dad was gone all summer picking up new credits to teach calculus and soon after he returned my Mom began working too, so we came home after school to a babysitter. She was only a teenager and very kind, but everything was different at the same time my body began making big changes too.

In my old school I had had the same "boyfriend" since kindergarten. We walked part way home together, played marbles together, played with his electric train in the basement where his mom had an office and examination room. She was a pediatrician. My girl friend since fourth grade came from Canada and we would play at each other's houses, share our dolls, and play house in her huge old garage. We all met during that time when children make fast friends out of pure innocence and joy.

My new school was bigger. The governor's granddaughter went to school there and they had guards. Girls could be patrol girl's not just at the building doors, but on the corners like the boys. There were coat rooms and sometimes we ate in the school cafeteria. Everything was different. There were book clubs and patrol skating parties and we changed our clothes for gym class. Plus the learning part was different too. I had already written an Illinois report at my old school, but here we had to do one on historic sites and give an oral presentation. I was a little overwhelmed and a lot lonely.

Of course I still played a lot with my siblings. We had a third floor playroom with one side for the boys and the other for us. There I made my first Barbie dollhouse out of an orange crate and various and sundry boxes, clothespins, sponges and hairpins. It was mid century modern with wrought iron legs from the hairpins! But here I also pretended to have a boyfriend from my new school. He was a real boy. He just wasn't even my friend in real life. I would talk to him. Pretend he was the dad and I was the mom of my baby doll and we would go on imaginary adventures in my mind. Sometimes I would spend hours writing these stories down and I went to sleep at night thinking about them. Then I had my first period just a month before I turned twelve and when I was late a few months after that I truly believed that God thought Robbie and I were married and he was sending us a baby! I was traumatized. I knew I had done something really bad. Only bad girls got pregnant! I gave up my pretend boyfriend hoping God would take his baby back.

Of course I eventually learned the truth, but it was a turning point in my childhood.

The next time I had a make-believe friend was after my divorce! I was fifty years old! Of course both times I was fully aware it was only in my head and I never told anyone about either of these "friends."

But when I found myself suddenly alone (my husband told me one night before he moved out that he wanted a divorce,) living in my brand new dream house, with all my children off on their own; I invented an imaginary friend. He sat beside me when I played the piano. He lay beside me in bed when I read at night. He even perched on my hope chest and talked to me when I wrote in my journal. 

Looking back I have to laugh at some of this. He was a much more attentive and caring nonperson than my husband had ever been as a real person. He wasn't based on anyone like Robbie had been. In fact, I don't even know what he looked like. He was a presence. I had the support of family and friends and even a dream group, but he was still important to me. I think he left when I moved into my own condo with its balcony and lake and patio where the baby geese came to eat out of my hand.

Since then I have had some very close friends who made the need for imaginary ones obsolete. Until just the other day I found myself thinking about resurrecting one. 

Here my youngest son calls me nearly every day and sometimes on weekends we will talk for hours. My friend from Bloomington emails or texts me regularly. My other children and grandchildren text fairly regularly. Bestest and I share the results of all our online games every morning, but he no longer calls me every day. Now he usually calls once a month, maybe a little more, He still texts, but it isn't the same. 

I realize that although I am not lonely, I do miss having great conversations, when the woman doing my echocardiogram and I exchanged meaningful thoughts about art museums and different art forms I felt like I had gone out for coffee with my friends!

I might experiment with my AI, but I am just learning to be comfortable with it and Alexa is too flip for my taste, besides she isn't always easy to understand. Once more I may have to resort to my own imagination to fill in the gaps for my own personal needs!

Pain

 

Today I walked to my car in the far parking lot, across a parking lot to get a pedicure here in town, back to my car afterwards and back across the far parking lot to my apartment!

Without any pain!

I cannot tell you how simple life could be if this were always the case. I think it has been over 21 months since I have been able to do that.

It took me a year to get a podiatrist to order new orthotics for me and months for my feet to recover from walking without them.  

I don't know if this is the new norm, but I surely hope it is. 

Most of my life is spent trying to figure out how to get from my bed or my chair to the bathroom. Everything I do has been a challenge. Vacuuming from a desk chair I scoot along the carpet, washing dishes sitting down and trying to reach over the sink, using a walker to painfully hobble down to dump the trash, everything is harder when you have problems walking.

Today I felt fifty years younger!

Love is work

 

Love isn't just a feeling. It is a choice.

True love isn't just something that feels good to us. It is not doing everything in our power to suck up to someone. It isn't just saying words or doing absolutely anything that will make them smile.

True love is a choice to do the very best we know how for someone. It may be giving them something. It may be taking something away from them. It may be doing nothing and allowing them to grow in some way. It could be a million things.

True love is choosing to empathize and try to understand that person we claim to love. It is seeing the world from their point of view as much as we can. Not becoming them, or copying them. Simply knowing who they really are.

We don't have to agree with them or their lifestyle, but we do have to acknowledge its reality.

Everyone has the right to be loved, but doing that can be the hardest thing we ever do. Just buying stuff for them is easy as is just doing things for them. It is more loving to help them learn to attain their own things, learn to do their own chores, allow them to be happy within themselves.

Love isn't about being needy. It is about growing together in ways that benefit everyone involved. It is about achieving equality where nothing may be the same and yet it becomes cohesive. 

That cohesiveness is the glue that cements relationships and we call it love.

Love is work.

Hope and love and yearning

 

I've started listening to music again. 

Not my favorite classical music or American or Irish folk songs

Not Perfect by Sheeran or What A Wonderful World by Armstrong.

Not even Perhaps Love by John Denver and Placido Domingo.

I've been listening to old country hymns.

They seem to be right at this moment.

I don't believe in organized religion, or really any religion at all, but I do believe in something and these songs seem to be sung from souls that are earnest and filled with hope and love and yearning.

I believe in hope and love and yearning.

I believe in a universe filled with some ineffable power that emanates from the very heart of every one of us and every single thing that has ever been created.

Stress

 

The medical profession doesn't seem to recognize how much stress it puts on patients by keeping them waiting.

Waiting for appointments.

Waiting for the results.

Not knowing is probably one of the most stressful situations we can find ourselves in.

As an example: my blood pressure has been high for over two weeks anticipating an echocardiogram. No matter how many times I told myself it would be fine, it didn't work. Then I had it done, but now there was the waiting for the results. Normally I have to wait a week, or more, to hear back from a doctor after tests are done. This time the office called me two days later with good news and like magic, my blood pressure dropped dramatically.

A simple phone call and my body was relieved of unimaginable stress. Not a small thing for someone with high blood pressure and stage four kidney disease. 

Training

 

It is one thing to try and set boundaries with people who have no ability to keep them, or maybe even understand them.

It is another thing to teach myself how to deal with issues I cannot avoid unless I completely push a family member and all her family out of my life.

I am proud to say that yesterday I think I dealt with it in a productive way that seemed to work without eliciting any screaming, foul language, or hysterics. Twice!

Once I simply said, "Well, that is a lot of bad news I wouldn't have to know about if you hadn't told me."

The other time I stopped her right at the beginning and said, "I don't think we can talk about the Black Widow. I know she is your best friend and that is okay, but I just do not like her at all."

Neither of these comments made her happy, but she seemed to get the gist of both. Then I was able to turn the conversation to other topics and we moved on.

I am keeping her at arm's length, but trying to let her incorporate herself into my life because she wants to.

I think she is starting to realize that the things I say are helpful to her. I can help with her phone and computer which seem to be exceedingly hard for her to use.

So, I give up trying to train her and start to retrain myself.

Lessons

 

Everything is a lesson.

If I don't get it the first time around, fate suggests that I will be given endless opportunities to learn. It is probably true that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, but some lessons can be fatal. 

Then, no more chances.

But I learned a new lesson a few days ago. There are more ways to deal with a problem, Horatio, than I had previously dreamed of!

Dealing with my sister's persistent and vicious habits often leaves me with my heart pounding, my ears ringing and sweat pouring from all my pores. It is a pure and simple response to trauma that she doesn't seem to understand or care about. 

Whatever it is that makes her incapable of honoring the boundaries I've asked for (Stop flooding me with all your horrible negative stories about everyone you know and everything you see, or experience, or think) it leaves me incapacitated for hours and sometimes days afterwards. She doesn't understand the difference between simple communication and bad news stories. She claims there is nothing we can talk about. 

And she is right if everything she has to say involves something dark, ugly, sad, or frustrating. She isn't looking for help, so there is nothing I can do for her. She resents the fact that I don't condone her enabling and complaining. I try to say nothing but eventually my frustration gives way and I do.

I just discovered 532 Hz. It is a sound that helps me let go of her words and abuse. It is the best thing I have found that works. It takes a while, but eventually it blots out all her negativity. Since she is my sister I cannot avoid her all the time, so now I have an alternative way to deal with the fallout.

Black widows

 

I first met her through a mutual acquaintance. We were all going out of town for a weekend of fun, but she kept us waiting three hours so she could go garage sailing.

As time went on her husband accidentally killed himself hanging himself in the bathtub for erotic satisfaction. 

She came to my house to swim in our pool and I watched in shock as she went from blissfully ecstatic to so droopy and down she looked almost dead. She was depressed.

Then she started dating an older man. He had a mild heart condition so she had him take a baby aspirin every day and he was all she lived for. But when he had a stroke and had to have a metal plate put in his head she wanted nothing more to do with him.

Instead she dated another older man and eventually they got married. I never heard her say anything nice about him and when he became bedridden she moaned and groaned about him continually. He finally died.

She moved right on to another man, in his eighties now and she is happy as a lark about their relationship. So far.

But she is not happy. She has never been happy since I've known her. One of her children married a drug dealer and dropped out of medical school to work for him. Eventually this one got her act together and married into a wonderful family down south. But her other daughter filled right in. Unemployed, not interested in raising her boys, wanting her mother to give her the house so she could live in it. And the son? His list of problems is unbelievable, ending right now with him living in her house with her and his entire family. She supports them all, but of course never stops complaining about them.

Over thirty years of continual misery surrounds this woman and she loves nothing better than to share it. She and her best friend are the only two people in the world that I know who focus mostly on the negative side of living and seem to thrive on it when they are together. 

They are always there if someone needs them. As long as it doesn't interfere with their running around and buying things. I think they mistake being needed for love and feel that doing anything in any way is better than not doing something. The trouble is they don't do things with love. They just do them to get them done.

Don't question their methods. Don't disagree with what they say. Take everything they say with a grain of salt. 

And they will still manage to find something negative.

Help

 

There is at least one person in this world who will call and ask for help when all they really want is to complain and have someone tell them they are right and this is justified and everyone else is causing them problems.

They do not know how to socialize except by hashing and rehashing everything that is wrong in their lives and the people they know.

And no matter how many times you ask them to keep their negativity to themselves they revert right back to their normal behavior.

They see themselves as cute and sweet and put upon by a world that is not up to their standards. They see no relationship between all their problems and themselves. 

They are victims.

Victims of their own negative thinking. 

In some ways maybe they are true narcissists who believe bad things come into their lives from all the bad situations and people they have to deal with.

Heaven forbid they ever listen to people or try to change anything. Even changing the smallest things in their life like food is beyond them. They live in a make-believe world they think they remember from the "good old days" or their childhood. They cannot learn anything new like using their computer or taking charge of their own financial situations. Everything must be done for them. Being helpless is a cultivated art. 

They imagine themselves helpers for the world and yet they despise most of the world unless it demonstrates a need for them to come in and do something. Doing for others must make them feel love and yet they do not do things with love. They do them just to get them done in the fastest way possible.

Beware of these people. They will always find a way to integrate their negativity into your life and then blame you for not being the kind of person they want you to be.

Character flaws

 

Imagine taking away your child's playmates at ages four, eleven, twelve, thirteen and sixteen by moving. Then of course that child goes to college. That is six major disruptions in fourteen years.

The only continuity is family, mostly the immediate family including three other siblings.

The family does expand to include a grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins during the second to last year, but in two years many of these people are eliminated too. It is once more just immediate family.

Both parents do the best they know how. The father, who has a post college level education, works three and four jobs to try and make ends meet, but tries to also maintain a relationship, mostly with the oldest child. The mother runs hot and cold. She is passionate, overwhelmed and her values mostly center on superficial things like how her children look to others. She will do whatever it takes to maintain her belief in that look, even doing their homework and projects.

The mother uses force, shame, and anecdotal and mythological advice, to control the children. Fearing for their safety she imposes all her fears as deeply into their subconscious as possible. 

Both parents tend to label all the children. There is mommy's little old maid who is very gifted and brainy, the petite, beautiful one, who is encouraged to do gutzy things without thinking, the oldest son who has serious medical problems and is enabled in doing pretty much as he pleases while his mother makes excuses, and the youngest who is the one most likely to succeed because, among other things the next door neighbors become a second set of parents who encourage him to be athletic, competitive and a perfectionist.

In spite of whatever they might want to be, these children pretty much all fulfill their parent's type casting. All but the youngest one grow up with some fairly serious character flaws. The oldest one is the only one who ever really leaves home. The rest never venture more than a few miles from home for any length of time.

However even the oldest one experiences such deep traumatic homesickness when she goes to college that she cannot stay away from home long enough to graduate and marries with the idea that now she will have someone at her side forever. (Which of course is not true.) For an abundance of reasons her marriage only deepens her trust issues with people.

This oldest sibling has children who live in states that span the country from sea to shining sea. Favoring mountains and water and beautiful places while still struggling with personal relationships to some extent, but are good parents in spite of everything else in their lives.

The two middle siblings are medical and social disasters. One dying at 65 from medical problems stemming from both genetic and lifestyle issues. The other bouncing from one bad relationship to another, focusing on people who will enable her and her myriad fears. They each have one child who makes a relative success out of their life while all their other children fail miserably.

The youngest sibling, while raising athletic wonders and collegiate winners, also encourages his children not to go too far away from home. Allowing them only about 30 miles of freedom in the end, which vastly limits their potential success in the world.

Generations of people struggling to overcome the things that held their parents back, starting maybe as early as the 1850s.

Love

 

Love stories abound in literature, but they are not uncommon in real life either.

I loved my husband beyond understanding and yet we ended up divorced. He could not and cannot ever believe that he is loved in the way he understands love. What a true horror story that is!

My youngest son fell in love with a woman seven years older than him. No one in our family liked her, but we held our tongues because he was so obviously in love. She was very creative. His whole life became about trying to make her life happier and better because he loved her so much. 

Everything he did was for her. When he cleaned the house he did it in her name. When he did the grocery shopping after work it was for the love of her. When he home schooled their son it was a true labor of love. Their son was the ultimate physical manifestation of their love.

He planned intricate celebrations for her that included songs and music he had written and the music of local famous artists. He helped her promote her creative work and made himself an invisible support who always stood behind her, ready to do whatever was necessary to make her life better in any way.

And one day when the police came to evict him from his home and issue an order of protection so that he could not come within 100 feet or her or their home, his first thought was, "Be quiet or you will wake (her) up."

She had a habit of discarding those she was finished using and that day he discovered he was one of them. Nearly 25 years of pure love and care were thrown in his face along with a packet of obscene lies. Their friends were stunned. Their son was baffled. He was crushed.

It was the worst moment in his life. Worse than the time he worked three jobs around the clock to support her, so that he slept less than a few hours at a time for months. It was inconceivable. No one understood it. Not her family. Not our family. Not friends.

Now, looking back, we, and he, all realize it was a gift. She finally set him free. Not out of kindness, but out of narcissism and her total inability to truly love anyone.

The most valuable relationship

 

Sometimes I think you cannot really help most people. 

And that is because they are not really looking for help. They are looking for validation that they are right, or they are looking for sympathy, or even just wanting to be enabled.

I went to couples counseling for years and felt vindicated when the counselor told me things like, "The only thing you and he have in common is that you both love him."

Validation? Yes, but it didn't solve my problem.

Being right doesn't make things better. There has to be change for other things to change. Sitting around feeling sorry for myself, or patting myself on the back thinking, "By golly I knew I was right!" Neither of those things changed either one of us.

And nothing in our relationship changed, or improved. The sad truth, after knowing each other for over thirty years, was that our divorce was the beginning of my growth. 

I went to a counselor who asked why I was there and by the time I left her I had a much better idea of the things that made my life better. And it was all about me making changes in my thoughts, actions, and goals. I realized I had been passive aggressive and began stating my real needs not trying to placate someone else. I stopped blaming anyone else for my unhappiness and became accountable to myself. I allowed myself to experience the freedom of being me and doing what made me happy instead of trying to be who Grandma wanted me to be, or Mom wanted me to be, or some man, or some absolute stranger. 

I stopped passing the buck and did my best to find out how to feel joy in being me just because I was who I was. 

Somehow I grew up believing that if I made everyone happy I would be happy, but you can never make everyone happy. You have to start closer to home with yourself. If you aren't happy it is up to you to figure out how to change things and whether you do it by trial and error, by counseling, or simply dumb luck, it doesn't matter.

As long as YOU do it. It's not easy. In fact it may be the hardest things you could possibly do, but in the end life is better. One tiny increment at a time, things get better. It may take a long time. You may never reach what you believe is the perfect life, but you will be amazed at the satisfaction you begin to feel.

With yourself!

And you are the one person you will always have to live with. Work on that relationship first!

Accidents waiting to happen

 

There is a difference between people who panic and people who get flustered.

I get flustered and have a tendency to talk too much as I sort it out.

My sister panics.

She was in a car accident yesterday. The call I got from her son said she had probably broken her hand, crushed her chest and they didn't know how badly she was hurt. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital in a nearby city and admitted overnight.

This morning she discovered that other than a few bruises from the seat belt and the air bags she is fine. She was scared. When our children were toddlers her son got his fingers pinched in a huge door. She stood there crying and screaming while I took charge.  She is a nurse! She has cultivated being scared, thinking it is feminine until now it is a liability.

That kind of response is going to cost her a fortune. Her friend, who was thrown into the dashboard, simply walked away. The car is totaled.

It was not my sister's fault that the guy who hit them ran a red light going 55 in a 30 mph zone, but she is not a defensive driver. I have been with her many times where my scream to stop was all that saved us. She thinks this lack of defensive driving is a cute womanly response. I find it scary. Also, this is the second time in three weeks that she has done major damage to a car. Last time she hit the posts at a local drive through. Twice! 

She has also gotten lost going home twice, but none of this seems to bother her family. They chalk it up to being a ditzy woman. Eventually she will really hurt someone, or herself, and then maybe they will believe me, but it is a shame it has to go that far.

Lucky?

 

People talk about luck as if it is some magical property.

I think people make their own luck.

Honest self evaluation can almost always come up with a reason why something succeeded or failed.

Attention to detail.

Perseverance.

Even a positive attitude can eliminate failure or create success by keeping the focus on what is happening in the moment and not letting the mind wander off into what ifs or could be.

If the skills are perfected and the materials are correctly used by knowledge and perseverance then success is often just a matter of time. It is important to want something badly enough without letting that wanting get in the way of clear thinking and correct action.

Most bad luck is due to negligence of some sort. It may not be intentional and it doesn't make someone a bad person, but it is still a factor.

People don't like to take responsibility for their mistakes and some people are afraid to claim responsibility for their successes, but that doesn't make these things a random result of luck.

Whenever I am tempted to claim good or bad luck I try to step back and honestly evaluate exactly what happened and why. So far, most of the evidence points to hard and fast facts.

Not luck.

Belonging

Belonging seems to be a pretty common human desire. People go to great links to belong in some way. They dress a like, wear similar hairstyles, choose similar neighborhoods, drive cars they believe reflects who they are, even choose to eat in certain ways that define them.

Belonging is comfortable. It is a safe feeling. It can also be a defensive act. Certain nationalities or ethnicities are safer in today's messed up world.

I belonged to my birth family and with my children while they were growing up.

That is the last time I truly felt like I belonged. Otherwise there has always been a caveat that made me feel separate, or apart from most people around me. And yet, I feel a kinship with all of nature that makes me know we are all interrelated much more closely than most of us imagine.

Other people seem to need lots of human contact. I am content to be physically alone most of the time. I do like human contact, but it has to be specific. I like to be intimately involved in a conversation with one person at a time whose ideas are creative and varied, but only for a short part of each day. Groups of people groping for conversation or simply acting out do not draw me in.

I love my life. It is full of creative thoughts, beautiful music, lovely living spaces, comfortable furniture, good books, and hobbies that are creative. It is comfortable in almost every respect until invaded by someone outside my realm.

It may sound selfish, but I enjoy my own company and, sometimes, those people with like minds. The rest are simply a part of nature I prefer to watch from a distance.

Happiness is not

 

Negative people often do not even realize who they are, but they are a drain on those around them.

I have tried every way I know to redirect a negative person's conversation without any real success.

They believe they are just sharing information, but all that information centers around sad, bad, or even cruel things. Their friends all have problems with family using them or ignoring them. They focus on the one child they say they want protection from. Their pets all have quirks that they find funny but annoying, only not annoying enough to take the time to change. 

They are constantly having minor problems with their car. They don't know how to use many of their car's amenities. They don't know how to use their own phones or computers and don't really want to learn.They think people don't send them the same photos and texts other folks get because they really don't know how to use their electronic devices.

They hyper-focus on things and want to share how vigilant they are by shampooing their carpets all the time or counting the bugs in their vacuum cleaner dirt.

No matter what they are asked, they will find a way to turn it into a negative reply of some sort and if you point this out they become angry and accuse you of thinking they are dumb.

It is a losing proposition that upsets me unnecessarily. I have tried to think just let them be who they are, but they have a way of wriggling it around to where they seem to need a response from me - just one that enables them or else.

I find myself angry, frustrated and my blood pressure soars to the point that I am actually ill sometimes.

I know you think I should just ignore these people. Avoid them. Keep them at arm's length, but that is very difficult when it is a close family member. Any and all family gatherings must include this person. They are not avoidable.

And they are not going to change. In some strange perverted way this life style makes them happy.

The right way

 

There is a time while we are children that the adults in our lives rule! We believe they know. They really know! And so we love them and honor them and try to emulate them in every way. We believe this is the right way. The best way. Maybe even the only way.

Growing into young adulthood we branch out, go off to school, or move away to live among other people and most of us gradually discover that other people often have other beliefs and they are as adamant about them being right as we are ours.

But over time we grow. We discover other ways of being and some of those are just as good or better than those things we grew up with. And sometimes we discover that the things we took for granted as normal were not so normal, or even so good.

Not everyone comes to these decisions or has these thoughts. There are people who never really grow up. They just continue to parrot the ways and words of their families as gospel. Some people discover their families were not as odd as they might have felt they were and some people find that the things their parents or families did were not always as good and kind as they believed.

These discoveries can create mental blocks, or even anger, but they are learning situations and important in our growth as whole human beings.

We can forgive our families for many things. Most of the time they were truly doing the best they knew how even if it hurt and most of the time they would be crushed to know that they hurt us the way they did.

It creates a strange dichotomy of feelings. Love and anger, resentment and nostalgia. It is the road to wisdom when we realize we can accept these things for what they were and move on along our own road to try and do better.

It is true, I am what I am. But it is also true that I have the power to be stronger, wiser, kinder, more open to learning and understanding. If I am still trying to do everything Mom's way when I am an adult I have failed to mature into myself.