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.