Once I was happy

 

Honestly, I am seldom deliriously happy. I am not crazy, but a good chunk of my life, especially the last twenty odd years, I am more than content most of the time. It is why I smile so easily in pictures. One of my Facebook friends, also a relative, once asked me if I was as happy as I look. I am.

But not during quarantine and not during Trump's four years in office. I was so unhappy that I was actually sick. Truly sick and tired. That is not just a phrase. It is an apt description of how you can feel when you are not content with your life. Those months grated on me. Bad news, isolation, covid, family members who were intelligent, but didn't have their heads on straight, it all added up to misery for me.

My bestest friend came up and spent a week with me in an Air B&B after we were both vaccinated and I was so worn out I could barely function, but that was the beginning of my comeback. My achilles heel is actually both my feet and they act up when my life does. But little by little I realize that days are getting brighter. 

Even though it's winter.

I am feeling more like my old self. Hopeful, happy, excited about things. I have more energy. I want to do things. I want to play and paint and build dollhouses. I even want to cook and entertain. 

Once I was happy and then I was forlorn, but now I'm on the road again and smiling like a blooming idiot at the strangest times. Even my dreams are happier. And I am grateful.

Grateful for my life and my friends and the gift of being able to bounce back.

Christmas

 

My daughter is having her first Christmas far away from everything and everyone she is used to. She and her boyfriend moved to Tempe, Arizona for better jobs and it is actually working out for them. They both have good jobs and they have a nice apartment.

What she doesn't have is her youngest daughter hanging around waiting to do everything with her and neither her boyfriend, nor his adult son are too interested in tree decorating or perpetuating the Christmas myth. Not to mention it is too far for her oldest daughter to show up on Christmas day

Myth, you say? Christmas isn't a myth! But the idea of Christmas, that we are fed from infancy on, really is a myth. It is supposed to be one big celebration complete with a sound track of Christmas songs while the family sits around the perfect turkey at a formal table for twenty after exchanging a billion dollars worth of fantastic gifts. The fireplace roars in the background. The tree twinkles. The cookies were decorated by Martha Stewart.

Nobody is sick, or tired, or wanting to leave and go play on the X-box. 

Everybody sits around oozing love and feeling appreciated for who they really are.

Really?

What big family gathering ever really goes that way? It is a ton of work to make Christmas happen and while most people can put up with the celebration, they don't want to do the work. After the kids are older, and before they are adults away from the nest, they aren't too interested in decorating trees, or cookies.

Christmas is a pageant directed by one member of the family, usually mom, who thinks it is so important she is willing to do almost all the work, cheer everyone else on and convince them that this is what is it all about. As long as that one person keeps it up, the ruse is perpetuated.

Once no one is interested in directing this production our dreams of Christmas have to be adjusted. It can still be fantastic. In fact, it could be better, but people have to have realistic expectations. If no one has the energy to cook, you go out, or pot luck it, or have french toast! It isn't about the food, or the tree, or even the presents. 

Christmas is a time to come together and enjoy each other's company in the best way possible, whatever that is for you,  and the more people who believe that, the better it will turn out.

Here and now

 

I grew up wanting to be and marry a man like the men my father worked with. Professors in tweed coats, smoking pipes and discussing art and poetry and great ideas. 

Then came the sixties and I wanted to be a farmer's wife, living off the land, eating food we grew, making my children's clothing, writing poetry and getting back to nature.

In college I met a man I thought was like my father and he had a beautiful name. Times were turbulent and emotions ran rampant. I married him convinced he was the love of my life.

Of course he was in Vietnam most of the time preceding our marriage, but those were the days my friends. I really thought they would never end They did. He was a good provider and for a couple of years he was even a good and faithful husband. 

My father always used to say that Adam and Eve got married. Then they got bored and decided to raise a little Cain. I thought if we only had children our marriage would be better. Nobody worked harder than I did to have children. I had nine miscarriages, was a foster mother and then we adopted two children. Right after that our youngest son was born and I loved those children more than life itself. I thought that was enough. I made their clothes. I made their baby food. I made them the center of my life.

But it was not enough.  I suffered through the lies, the betrayals, the other women and the pain of knowing I was not enough. There are a million ways to hurt your wife and my husband was exquisitely adept at most of them.

Now I am a divorcee of over twenty-two years and while life is not perfect, I have learned it is pretty darn good. The people in my life choose to be here and I want them here. I have had time to learn who I really am, warts and all and I can not only live with myself. I like me! I find it hard to think about, or talk about my good points, but I believe I really do have them.

I do have a professor to talk to, but we don't sit around in tweed jackets smoking pipes. We find it much more satisfying and fun to do a thousand other things. I no longer want to get back to nature, except from the lovely bug free shade of a screened in porch. I can still write poetry, or stories, or just my dreams if I choose. I still love my children more than life itself, but I don't need all the props I thought were necessary to feel fulfilled and happy. 

I am happy being me. Here and now.

Forgiveness

Forgiving is a term I honestly do not understand. I understand the concept, the words, the idea, but not the feeling. And yet I believe I forgive without any of this.

I forgive as a child does. It is part of my makeup. It happens organically because I breathe. 

I cannot seem to choose it. It doesn't work that way for me. To choose it, I would have to have some understanding of how it works.  I don't.

And yet, I have that feeling of peace that floods the light when forgiveness occurs. Sometimes I don't even know it happened except in retrospect.

I am like a child. in so many ways. Once I thought this was not a good thing, but as I grow older I realize it really is.

Normal

I have lived in the town of Normal off and on for the better part of fifty years. A little more on than off even though I don't live there right now.

But I never appreciated normal as much as I do this evening.

I have been incapacitated in one way or another since the year before last. I was sick for a while, then there was the quarantine.  My doctor prescribed a bunch of drugs that nearly did me in. I was so weak I could barely walk upstairs, then I developed gout from the drugs and ended up with my right foot in a soft cast that caused me to injure my left foot!

I was due to stop wearing the boot on that foot last week when I injured some muscles in my back and was in more pain than I can ever remember experiencing in all my life. I spent my 72nd. birthday in agony. 

Now, today, the boot is off, my back is so much better, and I am wearing new shoes with special inserts that feel so good. 

I feel so good!

I feel ten years younger!

I made Christmas cards for my youngest grandchildren, mailed Christmas cards, and started thinking about putting up a tree! I don't think I've felt like this in, well, so long that I don't even remember.

I'm almost afraid to say this, because I don't want to jinx it, but instead of thinking like that, I'm just going to savor it.