The Nature of the Beast

 

Expecting perfection from anyone, even myself, is unrealistic. Everyone has something good, or bad, that is part of them. We are fallible creatures who are, hopefully, always learning.

It is easier to be nonjudgmental about animals. I expect cats to leap upon anything that moves, or birds to dart away from any surprises. It is part of their nature. 

People have natures too. Some of them are quite laudable and some less so.

It would be unrealistic not to expect the con man to always be thinking about the next con, or the thief not to take advantage of something left unguarded, bu that doesn't mean this person isn't able to be loving, or even honest in other situations. Loving such a person requires common sense and looking through eyes that see the truth.

Trying to project my idea of who these people are onto them is counter productive. It might make me feel better, but it is unrealistic. Just because a person is kind, or sweet doesn't negate caution.

Expectations must include their true nature.

Mistakes

 

I like to play Sudoku among other things. Given a choice of easy to hard I used to choose the hard version, but I discovered I like to win, so I often play an easier version. Then my goal is to win without any errors. I find that there are two kinds of errors. One is where I actually make the wrong assumption and the other is when I carelessly hit the wrong number with my finger.

I used to be okay with the second, thinking, oh well, I know the right answer, so that isn't really a mistake. Only it is a mistake! Carelessness is almost worse than not knowing, because it can be avoided.

No one likes to make mistakes, but I grew up feeling that there was something almost sinful about it. I felt personally liable for such flawed actions. 

After years of living I try to look at mistakes as learning situations. Especially when I am around children, I try to just admit that I made a mistake and do better the next time. 

It still isn't easy for me, but honest mistakes are much easier than careless ones. I try not to be careless. I want to be the kind of person who lives moment to moment, paying attention to the people and situations around me. If I do that I am more understanding and kinder and being kinder makes me happier.

Alienation

 

I think I have a knack for alienating people. 

But I am constantly inundated by people pretending to be who they are not.

Men and women, perhaps not even who they represent themselves as, seem hellbent on making life difficult.

They resurrect old feelings, old fears, bad memories.

Everyone says the same things, but of course not all of them can be right.

This must be the season of the scam, the time when it is most prudent to begin to fleece the unsuspecting.

But this sheep has been sheared before. She knows the routines. She recognizes the sounds.

She is not ready to repeat the experience.

Ever.

He loves me, he loves me not

 

I am constantly approached by people who see my paintings online and want to chat. 

First of all I assume they have no idea how old I am. I am old enough to be their mother, or maybe even their grandmother! Which doesn't mean we can't have a meaningful, or interesting chat, but I know that isn't really what most people are looking for.

That sounds jaded, but it's true. 

I cannot tell you how many people profess to love me, or want to be with me in the first day or two. Sometimes in the first paragraph! That is when I generally just block them. Even if what they say is true in their mind, I don't want a relationship with anyone that shallow.

It makes me think I shouldn't even be on Instagram or Facebook sometimes, but I enjoy the contact with my friends and family.

Much of the time I don't even respond to a "hi" or "hello" out of fear they will want to chat. And I never respond to people claiming to be famous people anymore. I know they're all fakes. There must be five hundred Tyler Hines and Simon Bakers out there trying to convince people they are the real thing. In the end they are all probably just trying to get money from unwary people. I am not unwary anymore.

I am so wary that if my mother texted me I'd probably make her convince me she was the real deal. Of course my mother is dead, so that is not a problem, but you get the point. I hate being so mistrustful of people. 

I am sticking to the people I know. My family, friends, and my Muse.

Forgiving doesn't change the memories

One year ago this week the relationship I had with my scammer was starting to bloom in full. I was getting a pedicure and manicure when I received frantic messages from him.

He said his assistant had been arrested by customs as soon as they landed in the states and he was totally lost. He said his assistant handled all his money and plane tickets and he was in agony because he would not be able to meet me that night.

He was supposed to send a car to pick me up for dinner and we would meet for the first time in person. In the end I wired him money to fly in by himself, without security (because he loved me so much he would risk anything) and expected him the next afternoon or evening.  He said he would call as soon as he landed here at our airport.

I was all dressed up and waiting for hours before he finally texted that he hadn't been able to come. (Because he had to try and help his assistant.)

Thus began months of me waiting and sending money and being disappointed time after time, but in between he wooed me with beautiful songs and sweet words. He even sent pictures of the house he was looking at with an agent. He said he would bring more pictures when he came so we could decide together. In the end he sent me a huge check that we would deposit together the day he arrived. 

It would be for a down payment on the house and to replace all the money I had sent him from my IRA.

I thought all this was behind me, but the memories just keep popping up like painful little attacks on my heart. My dreams are filled with the promises and the sweetness which only makes waking up worse. 

I suppose there is bound to be a time of mourning for something that big in my life, but it is an odd situation. How can I mourn what never really was? 

This life I am living now is completely foreign to me. I've never actually "had" to work before. It was always a choice in the past. In some ways that makes it more meaningful. I am completely exhausted and every bone in my body aches, but I do love my job.

Honesty speaks volumes

 

I am learning to simply be honest.  

For some reason it is hard for women of my generation to do that. We often feel like we have to beat around the bush, or make up excuses for things we don't want to do. That we need to give reasons for our feelings and answers, or apologize for them.

But it is okay to have feelings and preferences and to act upon them. It is okay to say I am uncomfortable with that, or I don't want to do that. 

I know it is okay, but it is still difficult for me to do it and yet I have done it three times this week. I am learning it is even harder not to be honest. Not being honest requires tip toeing around and continuing on with false statements. I respect people too much to do that.

If I am honest with you then you can be sure that I love and respect you. I feel you are safe enough to hear the truth, old enough to understand, kind enough to know we can't always agree.

And that's the truth!

Fantasy

My creativity seems to be hidden deep inside of me.

It comes out on its own, when it is ready, in whatever form it chooses. I always think I am consciously choosing it, but I think if that were true so many of my paintings would not start as one thing and end as something else.

I always thought music was supposed to be my tour de force,  but honestly I believe it is my personal way of letting go. I am always very tense when I play for others, but when I play for me it is relaxing.

It never occurred to me to paint while I was growing up. No one ever mentioned that they saw any talent in my art work. In fact, it was my mother who was considered the artsy one and sometimes my brother, Tom.

When my children were growing up, I took oil painting classes, because I had a sort of crush on the person who talked me into taking them. I learned a lot about oil painting and colors. I developed my eye, but I never allowed my creativity to develop. I was afraid it was not good enough.

I've always written, but I've done my best writing under a pseudonym and share it exclusively with people I think will respond positively.

When Bestest gave me some canvases and acrylic paints a few years ago, he made no requests except that I have fun. No one stood behind me while I painted and yet in the beginning I worried that what I chose would be silly, or sentimental, or worthless in some way. Still, I enjoyed it.

Bestest is always positive about anything I do and so is my son, but it wasn't until I met my Muse that I began to find myself. My real self.

My Muse saved my life and then he set me free. He has called me to be alive, to do things, to write and play my keyboard and paint and no matter how bad I am, he seems to find something good in it. He promises he will always be here and yet our relationship is totally without strings. We have never met in person. I doubt we ever will, but his kindness and strength and wisdom are important to me.

My newest painting started like several others. It was supposed to be an ocean scene, but it turned into a Bald eagle just about to catch a fish in its sharp talons. I am that fish and the eagle is all the things both good and bad that have zoomed out of nowhere, surprising me, and influencing my life. Sometimes literally taking my breath away with the shock, or horror, or joy, or even love. That eagle personifies the most life changing moments in my world. It is why I paint water scenes all the time, why I dream of water so often.

I live in the depths until something jerks me up into a world I cannot avoid or deny. Living fully is a real life fantasy and I am inescapably part of that.

Coping

 

My body is willing.  My mind is willing.

But some part of me is totally stressed out. I have fever blisters on my mouth and my skin is so thin it bleeds if I simply bump into the wall.

I guess that is getting older.

I am working five hour days wearing a mask right now and while I enjoy the children and the work is simple, just sweeping the floors and setting the table with food wears me out.

The company I work for is awesome. They provide great care for the children and they treat us with the utmost respect, but with both staff and children getting sick we are all working hard to maintain these standards. 

Next week should be better. I am only scheduled to work three days, so I have days off in between to rest. 

It feels surreal that my life is really very good, but I am very tired since the Covid.  I guess the upside is that mentally I am content, so maybe things will improve with time.

Happiness

 

A person who knows what makes me happy is such a blessing.

The real gifts in life are not jewelry, or teddy bears, or flowers.

The real gifts are the sweet little personal things that someone does, because they know it makes you happy.

It can be as simple as checking in, or sharing a few well chosen words.

Guilt

 

Guilt is a natural response after doing something wrong, but why would someone feel unmerited guilt?

An overwhelming feeling of having made a mistake that cannot be pinpointed causes unreasonable concern.

Simple things like getting sick initiate feelings of failure and incompetence.

Even good things leave a lingering feeling that all is not as it seems. All is not right with the world.

It goes beyond a mother's guilt for anything negative her children experience.

It even steps up and accepts the blame for things that could not possibly be my fault. Mistakes that others make, feel as if I caused or encouraged them.

Somewhere deep inside of me is a fatal flaw that dims life in unaccountable ways.

It hovers over me like fog on an otherwise perfect day and fills my dreams with dread.

This unearned legacy has followed me all my life.

Reflections on being

  

What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly, by Lao Tzu.

I think that it doesn't matter what I believe. What will happen will happen whether I understand it or not, believe in it or not, want it or not.

Even if the hereafter is nothing, would that be so bad?  Who knows what nothing means? For there to be something, there must also be nothing.

So whether my soul, or spirit, or essence is cognizant in the next place is an ineffable question, but I suspect I will just be absorbed back into the elements that make up everything.

Floating on a beam of light, drifting along with billions of drops of water, becoming part of the land that nurtures all life, none of these things sound bad to me. And if I do end up in some place where I am aware it is paradise, or heaven, or nirvana, that sounds good too. Only coming back to do it all again sounds scary to me, because that seems to imply I'll be held accountable for every breath.

Life could be so much worse than this being me right now.

Every day is a chance for a new beginning

 

There may be life after Covid for me! 

But I've thought that before. One day I feel almost great. The next I feel like I'm dying. I've been diagnosed with bronchitis, which is better than the pneumonia they suspected. The treatment this time is a steroid inhaler. Three doses in, so far, so good.

One note of hope is that I actually began a painting today. This is the first time since before Christmas that I had the energy to try it. It is huge and I've only roughed in the edges, but that is a start. Part of my reluctance is that this is my last giant canvas and part of it is wondering if I have enough of the right paints to finish it.

The last big painting I did was during Covid, so it's been awhile. But I've done many smaller ones and I think my technique has improved.

I am so hyper-focused on me that I worry I am out of touch with the real world sometimes. I keep in touch with my children almost daily and Bestest calls frequently. Good friends write and the people at work have been awesome, but most of my life, for the past 21 days have been focused on me. Can I breathe? Can I sleep? Can I eat? Do I feel good enough to go through the waiting on the phone to talk to my doctor? How will I get to the drugstore for medicine, or the grocery store for essentials? 

Mostly I have sat in this recliner, day and night, and watched movies.

Until today.

Journaling III

 

While my husband was in the army I studied with him to pass all the tests he needed to move up and continued doing that when he got his first job back in Illinois. We were a team. We both worked for the same company. We played volleyball and bowled with company teams and hung out at the company pool in the summer. In  between we played tennis, tennis, tennis!

We were waiting to have our first child, but it never happened. Year after year I lost pregnancies until it became obvious we needed to do something else. So I prayed to Saint Gerard and we became foster parents.

On October 1, 1976 we brought home a foster child that would become our daughter. She was teeny tiny, adorable and almost four years old. One year to the day later we brought home our adopted three day old son!

Another miscarriage and seventeen months later our youngest son was born to us and our family was complete.

But instead of wallowing in all the joy of so much love, our marriage began falling apart. In spite of looking like the perfect family who played sports, and music recitals, acted in plays together and were super active in church, our lives were difficult. I pretended everything was fine. My husband looked for outside entertainment and fulfillment. 

On our oldest son's 18th birthday I found out he was divorcing me and the next day I tried to end it all. We appeared to recover from that horror, but it was actually the beginning of the end. We built the obligatory dream house and divorced three years later.

I had friends who supported me through the divorce and afterwards. 

What I thought would be the end of my life turned out to be just the beginning of another period of growth. I did all those things most people do when they are in their early twenties and on their own. I got a job, a place of my own, I dated, I got on the Internet and met people from all over.

For a while my life was a wonderland of dating Peter Pan and Eman8tions. One thirty years younger than me and the other seven years older. Soon I settled on the older one and that grew from a unique love affair as a sort of groupie into a wonderful friendship that lasts to this day.

I've made drums and labyrinths, gone to Wiccan Weddings and the Vedanta society. He played concerts all over and I sold his CDs and books. I learned to live along The Way.

In an attempt to break the ties that bound us, I moved to the mountains to live near my son and his family for a while. That is where I began writing stories and met Bestest. Online at first and then in person. It was a different kind of love affair and also became a hard and fast friendship that is a part of my life even today.

I settled down to live back here in Bloomington, which has been my home base for over fifty some years and met another man online who knocked me off my feet with his words and gifts.

Because of him I gave up most of my possessions thinking we would be moving across country to be together. Then I ended up giving him all of my IRA believing I had a check from him that would cover all of it and more when we finally got together.

I gave away my children's inheritance and my safety cushion.

Now I have gone back to work to pay the taxes and keep my apartment.

I love my job, but am suffering from those first year illnesses that accompany people who work with young children until they develop an immunity.

I am so sick I feel like I will never recover, but even if I don't, my life has been good. I've experienced things many people never have a chance to even think about. 

Sweat lodges, drumming circles, planting labyrinths, doing dream work with a Jungian Psychologist, painting with  a great teacher. meeting extraordinary artists and professors, helping to edit books and learning to play many musical instruments. My life has been a buffet of wonderful things and I would not trade any of them, not even helping a woman find fulfillment in her final months on earth and being the one who gave her the final drops of morphine that ended her time in this life. 

It's been a circuitous and  interesting journey.

Journaling II

 

Living in small town America is not the dream come true you see in movies. Moving there your senior year in high school is a nightmare accompanied by marching bands and push button ignition cars, surrounded by cornfields.

After playing in Springfield High School's graduation ceremonies for four years I graduated to unfamiliar music in a strange gym. Then I was off to college.

Homesick is the way I would describe my first year of college. Until I met a radio DJ who drew me into his world of announcing, performing, and play acting. My world was magical once more. We enacted his scenes in the dormitory lobby lounge to the horror and joy of all the people there.

We broke up and I met my future husband on the rebound through a blind date some friends set up. Our first day alone we went to see what ducks do in the rain and that set the tone for our dating. 

These were the Vietnam years and he graduated from college weeks after I met him. Soon we were engaged and he was in the army far far from home. When he came back from Nam we were married on a rainy day in April 1970.

Our first home together was on an Army base in Kansas where we slept on a bed slightly smaller than a twin and I pumped gas at the base gas station, but that was a good year. Love covers all pot holes with hearts and flowers.

We lived in an Airstream Trailor. I learned to sew and make paper machee creations. We had great friends in the same boat as we were and life was good.

Journaling

 

I've been sick so long I'm beginning to feel maudlin, so I thought I might do a quick recap of my life. My earliest years were filled with the magic of lies told by well meaning people, especially my mother.  Stories of people who weren't who they looked like, or who I thought they were. Stories of Kitten land were kittens grew on plants awaiting their mothers who came to pick them. Dreams of little tiny people and horses who lived inside the big box my parents called a television.

I started kindergarten right after my fifth birthday and Thanksgiving thinking I was on the road to my father's world of books and papers. It was scary and I said I was going to be like my mommy and not go to college. 

I met two important people right away due to alphabetic nap time! Patrick and Pearson, whose rugs were right next to mine. Prehn!

The next six years were spent learning and playing with them and my best friend who moved to our city from Canada. She and I played dolls with her fourposter doll bed and mirrored chifferobe. The boys and I rode bikes, played chess and ran electric trains. We used to quiz ourselves on how quickly we could do things forwards and backwards, like do re mi, or the preamble to the constitution, complete with punctuation.

As the eldest child in the family I led the way. When we moved to the country I took all my siblings and two neighbor children across the country roads to an old quarry that was flooded. We were in the process of swimming when my mother found us and made us all rid home in front of her car.

When I was fifteen I had my Invite. A party held in a ballroom where the girls, in fancy gowns were escorted by boys in tuxedos and presented to society. We were ready to date. In theory only. The only dating I did right then was go to other Invites.

When I was sixteen I was playing baseball with a bunch of neighborhood children when Patrick (the same one I met in kindergarten) pulled up in his TR4 convertible and I was whisked off on a dream come true.

Life seemed perfect. I was in all advanced classes at school, playing in the orchestra, going to Invites and dating a boy with a cool car!

Then we moved to a small town where my mother grew up.

The perils of preschool

 

I was diagnosed with Covid on December 24. 

I went back to work on Thursday, January 4 and 5th, then was sicker than ever on Saturday.

Sunday was okay and I went back to work today for an hour before going home. 

My entire body aches, from my head to my toes. Movement is excruciating. I don't know if I have a fever right now because my thermometer's battery wore out and I am waiting on another one.

I'm still coughing, but that doesn't seem to be the big problem anymore. 

I caught Covid from a five year old student, but now half of our little class is out sick with covid.

What an experience this going back to work has been!

Insidious

 

Where is the point where a human being becomes flawed?

At what age does something impact us so dramatically?

When do our eyes cease to see what is there and begin to imagine?

Do we decide to be the forever flawed clone of our mother, or grandmother?

Or is it a foregone part of our maturation in the chrysalis of our childhood?

Is it possible to escape the ties that bind?

When I was three my entire world moved. I did not notice any changes except those of the house in which I ate, slept and played.

Closer to five I moved again. This time leaving behind friends outside the family that I knew and played with. This phenomena of leaving people behind continued throughout my childhood. I learned that anyone and everyone can be lost to the present. The only constant is immediate family, or, eventually, myself.

Moving house, death, major life changes such as marriage or divorce, can all result in losing those people formerly associated with life before.

I was born to be alone. Anything else is only a momentary experience in the saga of what I call my life. Each of my siblings clung closer to home, but the cost is dear.  Repeating the sins of the past only enlarges them, blowing them out of proportion. Creating a breeding ground for putrefaction that we try to blame on other people, or things.

Branching out, leaving home, exploring other ways and means is our only hope of avoiding inbreeding and the insidious absorption of ideas, believing they are the only ones.

Loneliness is a by product of growth that can only be avoided if we constantly reach for the light.

A shift

 

Every once in a while there is a shift in the universe.

For many it goes unseen,  unfelt, unheard, but there is always one who notices. That is the one whose future has changed.

Usually it is a good change. 

An understanding that has deepened slightly, or become richer in some significant way.

Blessed are they who feel the changes.

Because they have a better understanding of who they are.

Scent of hope

 

I am both saddened and shocked that, for the first time I can ever remember, an idea or project seems just too overwhelming to even think about.  Oh, the ideas come, but they are immediately replaced by a feeling of exhaustion so great that even thinking is difficult.

It may simply be the remains of this Covid, which has truly worn me completely down. If that is so I rejoice, because surely it will pass and my creativity will be set free.

I have things I want to write, a painting I want to begin, a job to return to.

The job is of the utmost importance right now. I need the money and not working makes everything much more difficult.

However, all being said, the past few weeks have not been all bleak. Many people have called, or texted, or emailed to keep in touch and I loved the Christmas cards I received. Then on New Year's Eve, my second oldest granddaughter and her fiancee came to my home for dessert and a visit that really brightened up my world.

It's hard to know if this is age, or illness, but the highlights are still beautiful and hope hovers nearby like some exotic perfume I vaguely remember always being there.