Love and Sadness

I have been sad for the last little bit. 

This is not depression.  I know what depression is, and how it feels in my body and in my head.  When my son, Seth, died, THAT was depression.  I walked through mud.  I don’t know if my heart was beating because I wasn’t listening to it anyway.  I made it to work and was disgustingly efficient in my job.  Not because I gave a shit, but because if not, I would have had to slit my wrists with the tediousness of it all.  I did not have the energy to move, to breathe, to feel.  It was all a wash, I was the clouds, nothing felt good because nothing felt bad.  I was feeling nothing.  No pain. No anger. No hurt.  No love. No gratitude. No guilt. No connection to anyone or anything.  I didn’t even have the energy for lonely, because that was a far way off, and I couldn’t get there. I just didn’t care.

So this, this is sadness.

To be very clear, this is not about any one person.  He, well, he is just a starting point and an ending point to this little piece of the story.  I miss him.  Something terrible if truth be told, but not enough to hate him, or want what I thought we had, back.  I have learned.  What I miss, and what I am struggling with, is the part of myself that I felt while being there.  I miss how open I felt.  I miss how honest I was.  I miss the sense of building, and staying present, in the quiet spaces that seemed a thread in my world. I miss how I felt worthy.  How the sharing of deeper thoughts and deeper love moved me, helped define me, made me better.  I had seen through, and past, all the very surface flaws, in him and in myself, and had accepted that for grace.  I have no regrets.

In the process of learning all this, the feeling I have of missing part of who I was, and who I still want to be, I shared the whole thing with my children.  Yeah, yeah, go ahead and give me the lecture about adult conversations around children, but since this was directly in their path, their input on their mom’s journey is important.  Here is what I learned:

      

     My son was totally taken in by the facade.  He believed the lie.  He had adapted himself to believing that people are always good, something I had always encouraged.  He understands about lies, and actually thinks he is a good liar (He is not, but he is 11. He might get better). He also understands, without a doubt, that lies are a choice.  That there is never a good excuse for a lie, no matter what you tell yourself, and that lying never actually helps, even if you think so in the short term.  He also gets that he had nothing to do with the lie, and it said nothing about him, and everything about the teller.  My son has lied, been caught, had to pay the consequences, and more important, been decidedly made to actually have to stand up for the lies, own them. In person. Take the fall out.  He learned, perhaps the hard way, that not everyone sees life that way, and won’t come through for him.  But he doesn’t want to give it up. That would be a dangerous place for him.  It would mean that the lie won.  And from an 11 year old perspective, there is only win and lose. For my end of it, and what I learned about myself is that I take full responsibility for his anger, his doubt, and his ability to adapt.  Bad things happen, but who you are in the midst of bad things is actually the best judge of your worth.  I put someone capable of lying in his path, and trusted, myself, that my judgment was not skewed. I was wrong. My judgment was completely wrong, blinded even, but I helped my son understand that even though there was a lie that caused the pain, it was not his or my lie.  We stayed intact, and true to our own beliefs about trust and love, and that we did not want any of that to change. Not ever.  We would not let this, my son’s disappointment and confusion, define us.  We got to stay exactly who we are. And he was sad.

      

     My daughter was not even remotely taken in by the facade.  She saw everything.  She knew, for her, and without a doubt, that talk is cheap, actions mean more, and that consistency of actions make the most impact.  She knows that people are flawed, but that recognizing flaws and doing better is the only way to make things work.  Watch, learn, do something different the next time.  Apologies are not needed in her world if not accompanied with actions that make the apologies real.  So, lie, but figure your shit out and don’t do it again, like ever.  Judge, but figure your shit out, and don’t do it again, like ever. Be sarcastic, and cruel, and distant, and hurtful, but do it because you didn’t know better, and then when you know better, do better.  She saw, without a doubt, that the same mistakes were being made in our world that had been made in others, all without remorse, responsibility, or attempt at change. And that while she knew that my son and I were being taken in the wake, she was gonna stand out and watch until we figured it out, and did better.  She knew we would.  She had seen both of us live with our hearts on our sleeves before, and come through when we finally had it stomped enough to have a lightbulb moment.  She decided she loved me, if not the relationship, and knew, even as I doubted myself, that I would get out of it eventually, ethics and honesty would win. She was right.  And could point it all out in black and white, accurately and unquestionable.  She was worried that I had lost myself, that I didn’t see. And she was sad.

     

      Me.  Well, I saw the facade, ignored it, and let my heart lead.  I saw how things didn’t add up, but also believed that “surface” was not my point of view.  I was confident about my own worth, about my own authentic part.  I was truthful and forgiving, and accepting, in a way that I wanted the real people in my life to be.  I was my son and daughter combined. Open, but too trusting.  Honest, but giving away too much.  Building and present, but with a foundation that was too unstable. Aware, but too forgiving.  I had done exactly what I had hoped I wouldn’t do, and exactly what I wanted to do at the same time.   No matter how healthy I was in my approach, in my actions, in my trust, if the other person I picked couldn’t keep up or adapt, then my progress forward both inside and outside of the relationship was flawed.  I could do nothing about it, but watch the trainwreck occur, sure, for some completely unnameable reason, that love would be enough. And I was sad.

So back to the sadness.  I am sad because I miss him.  Something terrible if truth be told, but not enough to hate him, or want what I thought we had, back.  I have learned.  What I miss, and what I am struggling with, is the part of myself that I felt while being there.  I miss how open I felt.  I miss how honest I was.  I miss the sense of building, and staying present, in the quiet spaces that seemed a thread in my world. I miss how I felt worthy.  I am sad because, for this one moment in time, I was wrong, and love was not enough.  That is a rough lesson. 

But here is the other lesson I needed to remember.  Love is an action.  Love as a verb meant that this was perfect. I knew exactly how it looked, how it felt, who I was, and what kind of gratitude I was made aware of every day simply because of the flaws.  I had my own beliefs about love tested, and I did not fail.  My sadness is that there are still people in my world, in my children’s world, who don’t get it.  Who still see love as some kind of feeling that requires no work.  It took having this sadness to realize that maybe I need to work on it more for myself.  Love myself with the same kind of love (as an action) as I have been giving.  Let myself feel everything I experienced in giving it away to stay in my world and grow.  The sadness is that it is not there yet.  I am still in doubt.  Can I do it, find love where it already lives and work to keep it, grow it, cherish it? No matter what kind of package it comes in, especially if the package is me?

Nope, not depression. I care about this.  And sadness will serve me just fine to move me forward.

Emotional seaglass

I went for a walk on the beach this afternoon.  Seems like the usual thing to do when you end a relationship, it’s Father’s Day and your dad died 7 weeks ago, it is the Summer Solstice, and, in the absence of any clarity, you just keep moving. 

This is not a bash-my-ex kind of blog, not really.  Anyone that knows me will tell you that I write to release emotions, tell my story so that I can find my own journey and responsibility, learn, in some written flash of brilliant insight, and stop the spinning in my head that keeps me from taking it to the next level.  This should be like that (keeping fingers crossed) because really I am not clear, possibly about anything, and this is how I cope.

So I was walking on the beach at Surf and Tide.  A wonderful beach for families and bbqs and all the kinds of things that you would expect from a summer weekend when the weather is nice.  Low tide meant lots of things to look at, and since I was there to avoid families (feeling a little like I don’t have one now, both by design (the break up) and uncontrollable circumstances (my kids with their dad for the weekend, duh, and my first father’s day without my own dad) I wasn’t really in the mood to people watch.  I was in the mood to find seaglass.  Like a ton of it. Nothing says emotional stability like broken glass, right?  I needed to have something to use to slit my wrists or at least cut my foot.  Pain, I was looking for pain.  Feel anything, Elise, anything at all.  I hadn’t cried about any of it yet, and with my biggest fear always being that I will feel nothing, and no one will come get me because I will be invisible, this was a rather pathetic goal. Wallowing and shallow, and completely twisted in its fucked up kind of misery, but a goal.

So I rolled up my pant legs, took off my shoes, and started walking. No glass.  I kept walking, closer to the shoreline. No glass.  I went into the surf, took off my sunglasses so I could see the reflection of the light.  Still no glass.  Surf and Tide to Wharf #2, almost 2 miles and NO FUCKING GLASS.

What I did get was out of my head.  I couldn’t think my way through this.  I was smack raw in the middle of emotions I had been holding under for a really long time, and now, all I was getting was anger. No glass, and I had been looking.  Trying. Knowing it was out there, I just needed to be smarter about it, more careful about it, more sure about it.  And nothing.  Not one thing.  Empty beach, empty heart, emptiness that truly had been there for months.

On Friday, in an attempt to just be out of my office and away from my boss (a sleazy oily little man with zero integrity) I had attended a workshop billed as an opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship.  Starting business, finding capital, blah blah blah.  If you look up Steve Blank, or Phil Randazzo, you will understand that there were going to be some heavy hitters, and I could learn a lot, if I cared.  I didn’t.  I just wanted an excuse to have my place of duty be somewhere else, and this was perfect. 

I knew I was in a place of transition with my job, my writing, my now-over relationship, but hadn’t any clue how to start the conversations necessary to make the leap to the next level.  How quickly or slowly I made that leap was entirely in my hands.  I was stuck in old patterns of thought, though I didn’t know it yet. Though by noon on Friday, in the middle of a small-business workshop, I had just listened to a speaker who had nothing to do with any business dealing, talking to us about clarity, and moving forward, and finding authenticity, and making decisions about relationships, and not settling.

I had a light bulb moment, with not many skills to act on it.  I had made a decision about my relationship needing to move into something else (I had already defined it as friendship in my head by the end of the talk) and while this was not really going to be a fun conversation, I knew both Jim and I would be happier about it if we could stay talking as openly and honestly as we had for the last nine months, and could become an amazing life long friendship.  I was excited.  Petrified, and confused, but excited.

Oh yeah, I guess I need to say something about my relationship at this point.  I have been in a relationship with what I can only describe as a complex man for the last nine months.  We met online, he asked me out, and we met three days later.  Just breakfast. No real touching, but the conversation and energy (in my heart) had me knowing I was already heading into something deeper than casual dating.  I also knew he was an alcoholic.  He admitted much later, after he had been sober for a few months, that our first few dates he had been pretty much drinking heavily.  I knew that.  It kept me at a distance, and I even wrote a blog about it in a couple months in (if you want to go back and find it, it is in Nov 2014) But he was changing, our conversations were becoming deeper, meaningful.  We stopped being guarded, if we ever actually were.  I was totally present, always authentic.  I never, not even once hid who I am from him.  Our dates became days.  Our days became weekends.  We didn’t do much more than cook or hang out, sometimes going here or there, but always there was conversation. Intimacy that rivaled anything I had ever done, and he said it was new and scary for him too.  The physical was a chore, neither one of us being what had been usual for past relationships, but it was good when it happened, and (again, in my heart) based in love and true affection, the way I had always thought long term relationships ended up with each persons desires ebbing and flowing, and negotiable.  I was liking it a lot, letting the love portion fill me up as the emotional intimacy grew. 

That probably would have been fine, but for the addiction.  Turns out that old relationships can be addictive, too.  Bad ones.  Ones that feel normal because it is all you had ever known.  Ones that you seek when emotional intimacy scares you, and the physical with the other person was the best thing about your world.  That happened in a full blown, and completely caught in lie two months ago.  I should have walked away then, when already I was compromising some my more intellectual desires for travel and adventure, and for shared reading, and for activism.  I had already convinced myself that I could do without those things because the man was kind and open and as we grew we would find out own paths both separately and together and start sharing support and love in whole new ways.  I was sure of it until that moment, the lie, and instead of being a fucking bitch, I listened and kept and open mind and found the time to admit my own struggles and found a level of forgiveness I didn’t even know I had. 

I know this now to be my codependency showing up in this relationship too, and I was determined not to go down that path.  Delusional somewhat, (okay, calling my own BS, completely delusional) but it was okay because I would talk with him, we would work it out because that was what love looked like in our world, and in the world I always thought I wanted to create inside of relationships, different from what I have ever done before.  The real me.  The trusting me.  The authentic me.  And sadly, in the process, I taught him how to treat me.  It became acceptable to lie, and then the lie became inevitable.  No matter what we talked about from that second on, the possibility to lie would always be there. And, because of fear, addiction, not moving forward on his own clarity, I became invisible.

Invisible?  Yeah.  I knew everything about this other woman in his life, and she knew nothing about me.  Well, maybe about my presence, kinda sorta, but nothing what-so-ever about the relationship we had created.  Nothing about the conversations. Nothing about the promises and commitments.  Nothing about plans, though vague, and had each of us committed to staying, to asking to stay, to not leaving out any conversation, about never being afraid, and showing up and making the emotional intimacy the strongest most important thing in our lives.  Creating bonds, that even if not clear, would be strong enough and we would build a friendship that would be able to weather anything just because it could.  I already knew that kind of emotionally intimate bond could happen, because I gratefully have one with someone else (who, when he reads this, and he will, will know how grateful I am).  So I was sure that all my effort, all my staying in truth and love was totally worth it, even if/when our relationship changed. 

That seems to not be that case on his end.  Seems, when it came to conversation he was having with this other woman, I meant nothing.  In the version she got, I was barely a friend.  We had never kissed. We had never touched.  We had never made love. Our conversations were shallow. His attraction to me was nonexistent. His words of commitment and love to me (and my children) had never happened.  I was completely invisible in his life. Unloved, unimportant, and unclaimed.

Whether or not any of that is actually true, I have no way of knowing. But what I do know is that on Friday I knew something had to change.  Something life changing.  Something about me, and I invited him along to join me in this leap forward.  A chance for us to get MORE emotionally entwined, but in a more healthy way, something new for both of us.  Something that gave me my visibility and dignity back, and allowed him to step up his vulnerability and truth, both.  Change. The next level. Clarity. Serenity.

Saturday morning, more of the misnamed entrepreneur seminar continued.  I had invited Jim, signed him up, almost begged him to come.  I knew something amazing was about to happen, and I wanted him to be part of it.  I love(d) him that much that even as I was becoming more clear that our relationship would be changing, I saw it as a positive, where we could both grow and understand and find clarity in our path.  I heard more words of inspiration about keeping yourself in light and honesty. I was sought out by a teacher/coach who listened to me for more than a half hour explain my fears and short comings and taking myself for granted an allowing that from other people.  I was taught words and techniques and feelings about how to improve my life right that minute with a tiny shift of the compass needle (and a little help from Jesus and some black magic) I would move my relationship, my thoughts, my life into a 100% better place, even if the change meant doing things differently.  I was clear for the frist time in months.  I knew.  I could not go back.  I was excited to share this with Jim. To help him grow, too.  To understand there is enough joy and light and happiness in the world for everyone, and we could both have it and still love each other.

As is true in my world for every time I am in transition, that did not happen.  In the course of one evening, one morning, and one short afternoon, both of our lives had changed.  I was moving out of codependency and towards more authenticity, and he had allowed the presence of the other woman to change his path away from his spoken choices. While I was seeking friendship, he was seeking dissolution.  Every conversation about growth together, every commitment we ever made to staying honest with each other, ever scared and unclear step that we had made together, was gone in one very pointed telephone conversation.  I was not given the chance to share everything I had just discovered, because he walked away.  His fear and insecurity and inability to change his past had just evaporated the us we had created.  I had a place of strength.  He had gone back to his past. He did not give me the courtesy I had asked that we talk and share in person.  He emotionally vomited all over me, and did so without any courage, over the phone within earshot of the woman who was now in control of his world.  The selfish alcoholic he had been 6 months ago was back, even if he hadn’t picked up.  I was just one more lie.

So all this came to me as I sat there at the end of the beach, angry, without seaglass or any other implements to commit suicide (ok, I am not suicidal.  This is a blog, and I am a writer who has some emotional license, get real folks).  And as I started to cry, realizing I hadn’t yet, I looked up and saw a single shiny piece of copper amber glass, not two inches from my foot.   I picked it up.  I laughed.   There was my sign, right in the fucking middle of my path, that I was on the right journey.  I got up.  Stopped my head spin right then, and used the gifts I had been given over the previous day to steady me.  Strengthen me. Lift me.  Reframe my way of thinking. 

And I did.  My reframing got me to where my father was not suffering any more and could be, if I was of a heaven and hell kinda nature, be holding my son in some really comfy chair in the pasture of forever.  My reframing got me to where I could see Jim as flawed and worthy, but not someone who could meet my needs, maybe not ever, as long as he keeps himself in darkness, and I don’t have the ability to stay there. I like the light, it is not an illusion.  I know better.  And I could also see how his absence in my path, though heartbreakingly sad in this moment (and it is, I am kinda a mess missing him, if I am honest), just created a space for the next level person to occupy.  I had no ability to invite that into my world with my honesty if I was too busy keeping closed with me moving pieces, that didn’t quite work, around hoping to find the fit.  I will be worth it, and not invisible.

On the walk back to the beginning of the beach, along the same exact path I had come, I found dozens of pieces of glass.  Shiny. Easy to see.  Right there in my path.  I did not even have to look for them.  It was easy. Showing me that I need to remember that even things right in front of you can’t be seen without the right mindset.  And that once I change my game, change what is acceptable, the path becomes inevitable.  A whole collection of seaglass to prove it.

once you know...

I have a weight issue.

Before you think this is a whine about how people see me, or some sad tale of discrimination, it is not.  This is my story, but only as it relates to the way I am trying to live my life in complete honesty, completely in the present, more so than ever before, and how this one issue had (has) me living with fear, clouding my thoughts, and even running to a place that could best be described as hiding. 

I don’t like hiding, though as I tell this story, you might get some of why I did, and why I could very easily do it again.  I own it, I am fucked up. This is my shit.  All laid on the table.  If I can get all philosophical and empowered for a second, I am going to quote Maya Anjelou and say I did the best I could, and when I knew better I did better.  This is part of my doing better, more bricks and matches, building strong places to be, and burning the rest.

At my current weight, I am still a little over 50 pounds over the absolute top of the scale for “healthy” weight for my height and age.  This is actually a slight point of pride, because there was a time (admittedly while taking large amounts of hormonal fertility drugs, injected daily) that I was a little over 100 pounds over that top number.   No praise for the weight loss at all because honestly most of it came off when my marriage ended and I stopped taking the meds. Oh, and I stopped eating because everything made me want to throw up.  I was a mess, and only by the Universe’s grace did I not disappear completely.

I was a fat kindergartener. It was the first time I had the word obese put on my medical charts, when, at my 6 year old check up, I was 62 pounds, when the national averages chart had kids my age around 42 pounds.  Yep, 20 pounds over what I should have been.  I was a popular kid, had tons of friends, was already smarter (as measured by some other national averages chart) than most of the kids (okay, all of the kids).  I learned right then that I could hide behind being smart and clever, and if someone (even as an elementary schooler) would say something I didn’t like, I could burn them to the ground with any one of a dozen things to make them feel like idiots.

I didn’t like that about myself even back then, and changed the whole mean kid thing by junior high, when all of a sudden having people (read that as boys) actually like me for being a nice person seemed important.  I learned really quickly that if I made friends with the popular boys by getting them through their classes, then I would never be picked on for my weight.  I was strong, and semi athletic (I got chosen pretty quickly for teams), and had the backing of the academically challenged boys on my side.  I never did their homework for them, or in any way cheated, but I did tutor them, teach them on the side without anyone knowing, praised them completely, building up their self-esteem as the competent leaders I always saw in them.  For my effort, I had all the boys as friends, protectors, confidants. What I didn’t have was any boys paying attention to me in a way that let me be a girl.  I was already invisible that way, and the few crushes I admitted to having in a spark of complete honesty was always (almost without fail) met with “You are great, really, but….”.  I knew, already, that boys would always see my outsides first, and not see any more of my insides than I showed them.  Huge huge walls.

Around this time, I was also placed in a “program” for fat kids.  Once a week, my mom took me a meeting with other fats kids at the hospital.  There we were supposed to talk about nutrition, about having a good body, about how our eating patterns would get us judged, about shame and worthiness.  I don’t remember ever once talking about what we could actually do to get our parents (who all seemed to have food, alcohol, drug, or control issues) to buy something other that crap food.  It was 1978.  I drank real sugar Kool-aid and ate butter laden foods, and had a mom with completely messed up ideas about starvation and food-waste.  My dad was fat, I was fat, and my brother was stick thin because he refused to eat most of the time.  What I do remember about the class was that we weighed in every week, and as a reward for losing a ¼ pound at any given time, we were allowed to color a section of a drawing on a paper that would show our progress.  The most sick thing about that was that the drawing was of puffy bubble letters that spelled the word “FAT”. I am not sure I ever completed a whole page to fill in the drawing before my mom made me stop going because clearly her daughter was too unwilling to change enough to lose weight.

Unwilling.  Yeah, that became a pretty big accusation.  It must have been my stubborn streak and my complete disregard for everyone else’s feelings that kept me fat. I was told that over and over again.  I would be so pretty if I just lost weight.  I was so smart, too bad I was so fat.  If I loved you, I would just lose the weight so that you could be happy, be willing to be around me, and maybe, just maybe, love me back.  My mom, my sex partners, my husband, all let me be just my body, no matter how much my heart was breaking.

So I played the game.  If they were going to only see my packaging, I would not show them anything else.  My fat suit became my justification for no one ever being allowed to know me.  I built walls and told myself that I was safe.  A total fucked up lie, but my lie, and I was good with it.

Until I wasn’t.  Until the love I was giving to my husband became a weapon of verbal abuse.  I have written tons about this before, about my own sickness and depression, and how I allowed myself to stay there in some messed up safety net.  I didn’t want to have to change.  I didn’t want to have to think something new.  I had hit my own type of pathetic bottom, and finally left the marriage, battered and bruised and hurting, and no tools what-so-ever to cope.

So, I went back to old patterns. Give the relationships (read that as men) what they wanted, and they never had to see me.  And I could wear my fat suit, and justify being not seen, and I could just become whatever they wanted or needed.  A total fucked up lie, but again, my lie, and I was good with it.

Until I wasn’t. 

For a long time, I just did not get into any relationships. I recently had the opportunity to talk to some of the men I had been doing this with. I asked them “Tell me something you know about Elise?”  The answer varied.  Two men said I gave good blow jobs (Was that a compliment?).  One said that he liked that I didn’t mind that he left after sex (I did mind, but I never told him that.).  The most complex conversation (with a really intelligent man who I was fucking every other weekend) was about how he thought I was great, but that he never knew who I was, and that even when he asked me to move to another state with him, he knew it was only to meet his needs since that was all I ever did for him, and he had gotten used to me being that for him.  I told him about being told I give good blowjobs, and he laughed, and said yeah, duh, but that he wondered if that was just me hiding some more.  He never even knew my kids’ names.  We had “dated” off and on for 7 months.  He knew almost nothing about me.

Back when he left, my world started to change slightly.  I started to work on myself.  I started to reach out to make the relationships (not with men) start to work.  I opened my heart up to friends and started being super honest about everything.  I started working on building my village and finding support for my failings, and letting people call me out on my bullshit.  I got lucky, blessed even, that in that building of friendships some small shift in the way I saw myself changed, and all of a sudden my body was not the most important aspect.  My mind and heart, and dare I say my love, took over.  I thought, for the first time in a long time (could it have that time of recovery since my divorce?) that everything I felt about my body would and could be over ridden by enough love.

And I opened my heart to that complete possibility.  If you need to know the details, go read my blog titled “cracks in the mortar” about falling in love, and being really good with who I was, who I am inside of love.  I was free to love completely.  It was amazing, and has been amazing, to feel that kind of release of me not hiding.  All in.

But, back to my weight.  Very, very recently, that nasty little issue cropped again.  I am fat.  Let me say it again, at my current weight, I am still a little over 50 pounds over the absolute top of the scale for “healthy” weight for my height and age.  What the fuck.  No matter how much love I have to give, no matter how honest I am inside of relationship, I will still be fat, and that either needs to change, or I need to go back into hiding.

For the first time, maybe ever, I know better.  If I am going to live in complete honesty and continue to build real relationships, I need to want to do something different.

And for the last ten days, I have.  With the help of two serendipitously coincidental events, I have had yet another small shift in my world.  I admitted, with some tears and some fear, to the best friend I have ever had, that I needed some accountability to keep my health and my body from being yet another time that I go into hiding.  At the same time, I had some professional photos taken.  The photographer has always had a gift for finding the most amazing light and angles that leave the viewer breathless, and the subject in disbelief. 

Out of the set, one photo (of a whole group of amazing photos) still leaves me feeling the most beautiful I think I have ever felt.  You cannot see my face at all, but the front of my body, nude but for a silk robe, from my neck to the middle of my body.  My breasts are partially exposed, but not in a rude or vulgar way.  What makes this photo different is the other participant.  A man, who for all reasons unknown, I have been 100% honest with.  I have not hidden from him, not even once.  My heart completely open, completely vulnerable, completely willing to love him with no expectation of him ever feeling anything in return.  But in the less than five minutes that it took to get that photo, he was present to me, too, and it was caught on film. 

Knowing now, that in this moment of my life, my body is important.  I never knew that.  It has so often in my past been a source of cruelty and judgment, a tool to control, and a justification that I could hide behind. But, because of this small shift, Maya Angelou has hit me upside my head with one of my own bricks and said “enough”.  Take off your fat suit, get your shit together, and do better.  Not just the weight, but the whole emotional fucked up blockage that the fat suit brings. 

Okay, for the self love people out there, who are about to bash my thinking, don’t worry.  This is not an attempt at becoming thinner or measuring my body by someone else’s design.  I think I it is just me thinking that I want something different.  I WANT to feel the way the photo made (still makes) me feel about myself.  Loved. Honored. Beautiful. Worthy.

Now, what am I going to do about it? Well, I am going to do what I have been doing successfully with my emotions for a while now.  I am going to ask for help.  I am going to take every bit of advice I can learn, and I am going to trust the people in my world to love me.  I am ten days (and 6 pounds down) already.  See the photo below and know that it, and some amazing support, might just make all the difference.  Patience for sure, and time.  It will not be easy, I have no doubt, but that is okay. Everything worth having is worth working for, and I know that better now. Turns out, love is like that.   So maybe it was not a weight issue at all.

Fake Flowers and other 5th grade tragedies

I continue to struggle with what is real and what is not real in my world.

There are only 6 days left of school, and my son is feeling every single one.  In his world, he stopped learning things of any value a month ago.  To his defense, he is one of the smartest, fastest learning kids around.  Things in his head just click, and common core standards have left him bored with the lessons that are taught 12 different ways so that everyone gets it, when he got it the first time, finished all the lessons and enhancement materials on the first day, and has to sit, often for another week, with nothing to do.  This in not a whine about the failing health of the school system in California, or even a justification to let him be a slacker (I don’t let him, read on), but more of a baseline for how to balance what is real and what is not. 

My son is 11.  He has started puberty.  Yes, every bit of it.  Hair, height, food, sleep patterns, disgusting smells, and the over use of hair gel. What has also come with it, for an overly intuitive, smart ass, super witty, hysterically funny kid, is a complete sense of loss of reality.  His body doesn’t quite fit, his voice doesn’t quite sound right, his desires don’t quite match his abilities, his logic is totally flawed even when the argument is flawless, and he is angry. Angry, like all of the time.  There is zero justice in the world, good things happen to bad people, while good people get hurt, and he gets no say.  He has decided that the real world is not to his liking, and since there are no actual requirements to participate, why bother.  He has already passed 5^th grade even if he does not go to school for the rest of the year, so why bother.  It, for him is one more way that the world is showing him that it hates him.

But that’s not real.  The world does not hate him.  The world, more than likely does not give a damn about him.  But I do. 

He may have figured that out.  I mean, I am the person he is taking all this anger out on, and I am the one that hasn’t left. Anger is real. He gets to have that and I get that it is testosterone infused emotion, fueled by introspection, and a little bit of laziness. He hates transitions.  And in a world full of them, especially in his recent past, he is struggling. He is questioning his place in the universe, his value as measured by someone else, and how to break out of that while still wanting to be taken care of.  How much of the real world, (that couldn’t care less about his 5^th grade science project), does he still have to put up with before he can be done. And does he, in the true sense of the world, need to rely on anyone else for his own sense of freedom.  If everything in his world is subject to change, how does he know what is real?  If everything can change, his body, his heart, his mind, that what can he rely on.

On the sill of a bay window, in a kitchen I have been spending a lot of time in recently, there is a new bouquet of artificial flowers.  They are sorta pretty, until your realize the red is too-red, and the green is too-green, and the narcissus are too-white to be actual paper-whites.  I won’t even talk about the Styrofoam and glass marbles in the clear vase hat make up the base, because there is no water.  No movement. 

I know how the flowers got there, and heard the story of why they are preferred.  It seems fake flowers are preferred because they do not change.  There is no fading of color.  There is no stagnation of water.  There is no dropping of dried petals or crinkled leaves.  There is never any imperfection.

I thought about this for quite a while, about why this might be a desire at all.  I got it, the need for stability, to have something in the world on which you rely, which you can predict to be the same.  Lasting.  Forever.

Except nothing is forever.  Everything changes. Lasting, without change, is not true. The only thing real is that which you create.  Real requires work.  Fake, well, fake is an illusion.  A mask.  A charlatan’s crystal ball.  No one gets to know what happens.

So as I try to explain to my son that everything changes, nothing (including the school year) is forever, how do I also help him know that I am real?

This week some of that belief about what is real, and what is not, hit me.  With some words I did not create, I was labeled as invisible. Non-existent and dismissed inside of a world I was creating.  This hurt me more than I realized when I thought it through, but not for the reasons you might think.  Yes, I still have all my deep seeded fears about no one ever getting to know me, and about no one seeing me, and well, about being disposable and worthless as judged by my mere existence.  I know the words were just words of self-protection and zero ability in the moment to make the hurt stop, truly.  What hurt was my own self-doubt that I could change.  What if I was the fake flowers, pretty for a time, but with no substance?  What if I really was surface and shallow and not able to adapt and learn?  What if my being real, flaws and all, wasn’t enough?

So I picked real anyway.  I am real.  I adapt and I change.  I will not stay the same, without growth and I decided to try this in practice.  What if all this frustration my son is feeling is much the same as my feeling of not wanting to be fake (I mean, really, how many more times do you have to do math papers you aced three months ago just to get to the end of the semester). 

I want my world messy. Calm, easy, moving forward, but messy.  I want leaves on the counter from real bouquets. I want conversations that are hard but real, and filled with love.  I want to change the way I do things even as I make mistakes.  I want my son to get that, too, that I will change with him as his needs changes, and we will be okay as we figure it out.  That transitions are real, and that I will help him through it as I transition myself.  I want him to see that modeled in my life with other people who are real so that he can see that change is okay, and maybe grasp some (of my hard learned) lessons that life and love are fluid, always adapting.  I hope he sees other models in his life doing the same.

It is exciting.  Scary.  Terrifying, actually.  To get to move out of fake and in to real.  I also hope I get brought flowers (apricot-colored tea roses and dutch irises are my favorite, just in case you need to know that), and I will happily clean up the fallen leaves to open up space for more real in my world.  Join me.

Just a beginning list.

Gratitude. A not complete list. Just a list for today. A small micro-shift in my outlook.

1) Coffee.  Not having an allergy to coffee. The social aspect of coffee.  Having coffee made for me.  Having the coffee made for me brought to me.  Having my own travel mug for the coffee made for me.

2) A job. Accrued time to take off from the job.  The paycheck that the job provides.  The money from that paycheck that lets me pay for my life. A boss who gets that I have a life.

3) My ex-husband’s claim of sobriety.  My ability to see how his lack of sobriety affects me.  My ownership of how toxic our relationship was. My ability to see my role in our toxic behavior.  My belief that genuine sobriety exists and that he can have it.  My self-trust that I can see myself clearly with or without his sobriety.

4) My children. Everything about their amazingness in this world.  The knowledge that we can fight and still be amazing.  Faith that they know I am doing my best.  My best being good enough. Their best being good enough.

5) Chocolate.

6) This quote: “The light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion.  The tunnel is.”

7) Email.  Spell check. Keyboards with backspace keys. Not immediately hitting the send button.

8) Willingness. Openness. Honesty. Mistakes. Forgiveness. Ownership. Freedom to take another path.

9) People. People in my world who keep showing up even when their path is hard, too.  People who love me. People who see me.  People who talk.  People, who, when they talk, talk with me and not to me.  People who are flawed.  People who are human.  People I have the grace and good fortune to be allowed to love.  People who let me in.  People who hold my hand.  People who kiss my tears. People I trust.  People who trust me. People, who, when they read this, if they read this, know who they are.

10) Journeys. Growth. Change. Progress. Backsliding. Learning. Sharing. Giving and receiving support.  Letting go and holding on. Knowing when each is important. Knowing how.  Failing at knowing how. Starting again.  Trusting that I am on the path I am supposed to be on.  Hope, that when I am not on the right journey, something with guide my path.  Never giving up. Acknowledgement that if I can change, I can hope for it and see it in someone else.  Holding hands while on the journey so as not to get in each others way.

11) Emotions. Every single one.  No hiding. No Fear. I get them all.  That any single emotion is not all-consuming.  That the strongest emotion is love.  That love really does work.  That I can love without apology and without regret.  That I can be all in and not lose any part of myself to it when I remember to do it from a place of love.  That the people in #9 get them, too. Humility to understand that I cannot control someone elses emotions, nor have any right to.  The wisdom not to try.

12) Happiness.  Not as an emotion, but as a state of being. Knowing I can claim it and not take anything away from anyone else. Grace to not flaunt it. Happiness where happiness is.

13) The amazing power of truth.