Things I lost

I have four young women who work for me.  They are all in various stages of their early lives: one recently married, another engaged, another just moved in with her boyfriend.  I hear about their lives and I remember mine.

I want to tell them, keep it safe.  Remember this.  Remember what you do and how it feels.  Write it down.

It just wasn’t that long ago when Mark and I, long ago, packed our belongings and headed to California.  We found a place.  We bought a bed.  We played backgammon and listened to music and ate in restaurants.  We walked in AIDS walks.  We went to the gym. 

I know now that the riptide was already there, undermining our relationship.  I didn’t know then, though.  Then, we had our lives together and it was okay. 

And if he were alive, we could have talked about some of this.  We could compare notes and laugh about things.  The time he came home with a Keith Haring figure on his arm from leaning on a wet poster.  Our coworkers.  Our computer, that failed so spectacularly one day.  The time we bought two megs of RAM and felt like kings.  Reading William Gibson novels and Foucault.

We shared books and movies and experiences.  For ten years before Charles was born, Mark and I were together.  Sharing.  How about that morning I asked him about World War I artillery.  How about that time my dad died and he picked me up from the airport with no expectations except to hold me while I cried. 

He was the only person who shared those memories with me.  Even the early years of kids.  He is the only one who remembered the games we used to play with Charles.  Once Will was born, Charles was old enough to remember, so I have someone I can talk to about this…even if it is just a little.

Lately I have missed that comradery.  I think the young women at work remind me.  It was not so long ago that long ago Mark and I were together.  Write it down, I should tell them.  Remember it.  Keep it safe.

Summertime

With the rain and hail continuing unusually into July, it doesn't feel terribly like Summer.   But the season is here.  Last summer was too windy for fires.  This summer is too wet. But the season is here.

I have a new pastime this summer.  Every Thursday at work there is a cookout and Student Life grills burgers and brats and hot dogs.  There are potato chips and pickles and friends.  We sit at the hot picnic tables and chat and see each other, emerged for once from the little hobbit homes we inhabit across campus.

I like this little summer ceremony every week.  I like seeing how people come together.  There is music.  I wish we had a piano we could push outside.  I'm not ready to play in public, but I am sure someone is.

I want more parties. I think I have been alone too long and the presence of others is more like a medical necessity than a frivolous desire.  Can I get my doctor to write a prescription for parties?  And if she would, could I convince my introvert friends to come on by?

I want a hot evening and a bitter cocktail.  I want friends at my picnic table and around the firepit.  I want a simple menu with halumi and margherita pizza. 

My firepit is full of water so I will leave you with a cocktail recipe only.

Mix campari with vermouth and a little soda.  Drink with ice and friends.

Actual Knitting Content

I have suffered from years of "hey, grandma, watcha making?" and "My grandma did that too, but she used a hook" and "I have no time/patience/talent for that"

Ugh.

1. Grandmas don't all line up for knitting lessons.  Most people, men and women, learn way before that.  I learned because plain black sweaters were widely unavailable in the 80s and I was a plain black kind of girl.

2. There is knitting that uses hooks, but usually they mean grandma crocheted and they don't know the difference. They are not talking enough with their grandmas to know...remind them to call.

3. Time and patience are up to you.  And talent means nothing anyway.

Knitting is a great, productive, hobby.  There is a huge social media community surrounding knitting.  I am happy to be a part of it.  I know knitters around the world and they have been there for me during some happy times and some difficult times.  Sure we met through knitting, but we have stayed together through personal experience.

More people should be making things.  I know there has been a huge surge in pinterest and diy activities.  I also know that doesn't always translate into actual making.  It often translates into the buying of materials.  Just like all the people with gyms in their basement gathering dust. And the owners of gourmet kitchens who only use the microwave.  We are not always honest with ourselves about what we want.  

Making things makes you.

Talent is a fool's game.  I work among artists and while many of them have innate skill, that is not what makes them successful.  What makes them successful is the constant work.  This is far and away the hardest lesson for students.  Those who have always been told "you have so much talent" fail as fast as those that weren't.  The thing that art students need more than anything is drive.

When I learned to knit I couldn't see my stitches.  But man, I had drive.  I remember being given some double pointed needles and sitting down with a magazine and some yarn and those needles and teaching myself to knit in the round. No youtube.  No yarnshops.

I have subsequently tried to teach all my knitting students to see the stitches early on.  Many have, some have not.  It's not talent. It's education.  I recommend seeking out Ira Glass's discussion on Taste.   Talent doesn't get you far if you won't work.

Work. 

Fighting the darkness

I have a friend who says my joy receptors are clogged.  That is the only explanation.

I have been low for months...really for the past year.  Maybe a little more.

I have been doing things I typically enjoy.  Things I have loved in the past. I get satisfaction from a job well done, but I haven't felt that joy that I am accustomed to as someone who has never struggled with depression.

I have lived with depression, just not mine.   In my brother's blog post about Mark he talks about the family fight with Black Shuck.  I have seen it in my siblings and Mark, of course.  I have just always, somehow, not had that fight.  And now I do.  Life is gray and there is not much joy.

I get up and move and do all the things that have brought me joy before.  I feel like maybe I put enough of them in my path, it will work.  My joy receptors will unclog and I will be free.  Or maybe not.  Maybe I will continue this stupid struggle.  Maybe it is part of menopause, which I have otherwise been experiencing symptom free.

I know so many people with bone-deep depression.  I worry that what I am fighting is ridiculous in comparison.  I don't want to say that what I am experience is anyway like that.  Remember, I lived for decades with Mark.  I remember what it looked like.  There were times that getting out of bed couldn't happen for him.  I have never been so stricken.  At the same time, my feelings are legitimate and I need to pay attention.

Maybe I need new joys.  The old things are not working.   I have added more exercise and new experiences for me and the kids.  I talk to my friends, who are beyond wonderful.  I try to throw myself into work.  I feel like I might have a tidal wave building and I don't know what direction it will send me. My dance card is filled with things to do. Taking kids to see Shakespeare.  Planning our meal for Bourdain Day.  I just want to wake up one morning and go running and feel what I used to feel, that rush of the joy of just being outside in the morning air.  The joy of seeing the kids after work and listening to their thoughts.  The joy of watching a bonfire in the evening air.

Thank you for sticking with me through this.  Let me know how I can help with your struggles.

Church dinners

I have spent a bit of time in church.  As I have mentioned before, I spent many Sundays and many Wednesdays at church as a young girl.  The kids could run a little wild, waiting for their parents to finsh the eternal talking (or the talking of eternity). We watched the silliest of movies (Pigs is pigs)
We sang songs. We ate.

Midweek dinners were memorable.  It seems like my church arranges for food nowadays, but back then it was all potluck.  We were exposed to the most midwestern of casseroles on a weekly basis.  When I still had Mark's grandmother's personal cookbook, it was full of those recipes.  Often given classy names "a la roi."

There was little spice and no adventure.  My mom might have tried, longing as she was for the food she could get in in Southern California that she could not get in the suburbs of Chicago.  

I don't remember what I liked to eat.  I do remember the time several of us kids reached into what we thought was a bowl of potato chips and instead was potato chip casserole.   In the spirit of the church dinner I attended a few weeks back.  And in the spirit of trying to bring some humor to the world, I leave you with a recipe for potato chip casserole.  It is best when piled high with chips and deception.

Potato Chip Casserole

• 2 Tbl. butter
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1 can cream of celery soup
• 1/2 cup mayo
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/4 tsp. coarse ground black pepper
• 1 small can of mushrooms
• 1 (12 oz.) can tuna, well drained
• 1 cup shredded swiss cheese, divided
• 4 cups uncooked egg noodles, cooked al dente and drained well
• Potato Chips

Instructions

In small sauté pan, melt butter and add onion. Sauté until tender. (about 6-8 minutes on medium-low to low). Don't brown. Set aside.

Cook the noodles

In a large bowl, stir together the soup, mayo, milk, and pepper until creamy and smooth.

Fold in mushrooms, tuna, sautéed onion mixture, shredded swiss cheese.

Fold noodles into tuna mixture.

Bake uncovered in a 13x9 casserole at 350º oven for 25 minutes. Top with potato chips and bake 5 minutes longer.

A Bad Winter

It has been a bad winter.  Leaving my school.  Starting over.  A bad fall in December, rendering me unable to run.  Separating from my friend in January.  Trying to recover.  Snow.  Bomb cyclones.  Power loss.  A favorite colleague moving on.

And on May 21st, waking up to yet more snow and a freeze that might kill my roses.

I am trying to think of this winter as time passed.  There is so much good that has risen from the darkness.  I started swimming again since I couldn't run.  I started piano lessons because I couldn't focus on reading.  Learning so much more about my work, the new stuff, the old stuff.  I have opinions that aren't always appreciated, but I have room to grow.

And the school year is ending for the children this week.  After a month of presentations and award ceremonies, I'll be suddenly free.

I don't feel totally okay.  I just don't.  There has been too much change in too short a time.  As irritating as I find routine, it is also nice to know pretty much what is going to happen today and next week and next month.

Last Sunday night we attended a dinner at church to discuss the future by a telling of the past.  I was the first one who went to the microphone to talk about what the church means to me.  I left a lot out.  I talked about growing up in the church and wanting the same for my children.  I didn't bring up being in church after Mark had left the family and the young woman who gave me her number and said she could babysit.  That was such a horrible time and I didn't know what was going to happen in the next hour, much less the next week.  I didn't bring up the fact that Mark is still there, in the columbarium eternally.  All that is time passed.  What is important is the now.  The children in youth group and the big boy who read to the babies after dinner.  The fact that Mark's parents have joined me and the children in that space and community.

As long as I remain not unstuck in time, time passed is time passed.  I can look back, but that is as ephemeral as crayons in the summer sun.  The only thing I need to concentrate on is what is happening now and what I plan for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is more meetings at work and some laughter with colleagues and children at home.  Everything will be okay.

Spring

And just like that it is Spring again.

My lone tulip is dropping its petals.  My apple tree is blossoming in the most glorious way.  Soon there will be lilacs.  Then the roses will start.  Later in the year the 4 o'clocks will show up. 

Always there are the pansies I plant every year right around Will's birthday. 

And also there is Mother's Day.  Looming.  Is it really seven years since that terrible Mother's Day when I called the cops on Mark?  I guess it is. 

I am feeling gloomy this season and I don't much care for it. Spring should be a time of renewal.  As it is, I think I might not plant the vegetable garden this year.  I'm not sure I have enough nurture in me.  With nobody looking out for me specifically, I don't know that I want to look out for one more thing.

Work is interesting and I'm finding my way.  I want to concentrate on that and on riding my bike and swimming and running and caring for kids.  Not plants outside suffering under the summer sun.

Which may be why I love my flowers so much.  Only the pansies need a little of my time.  The tulip and the apple tree and the lilacs and the roses and the 4 o'clocks just show up.  They are like friends showing up with dinner and wine, unbidden. If I sit on the back porch very long I will be covered in apple blossoms.  It is beautiful and peaceful.  I had a bonfire last night as the apple blossoms slowly drifted down like slow snow. 

Through Fire

In the very early 1980s I rode to Boise with my younger brother and father. Dad had a blue pick up truck that we would fill with any can on the side of the road.  There was a certain start and stop quality to the trip.  I was along for the ride.  Dad wanted to take Alex, but he needed time to work in Boise.  I came as childcare.  Also. Adventure.

There were potholes, chuckholes in Dad’s parlance, in Red Desert, Wyoming.  No seatbelts.  Alex hit the top of the truck and knocked the shifter out of whack.  We made it to the migratory bird refuge near the great Salt Lake.  Start and stop there too.  Pheasants cross the road randomly. Alex and Dad were birders.  I was a teenager.  If I had had a smart phone back then I would have been the worst possible teen. As it was, I was as limited a person as I possibly could be.  We saw ruddy ducks and phalaropes and coots.  I was dying inside.

We got near Idaho and there was a brush fire that crossed the highway.  I held Alex in my lap as we drove through the fire.  A couple on a motorcycle in front of us worried me.  The woman was in a tube top and no helmet.  Driving through the fire we couldn’t even see them in front of us.  Visibility was so bad. I was frightened. Dad was calm.

We spent our time in Boise uneventfully.  I think there was a fair we attended and I played my recorder and Dad worked and Alex and I just hung out.  We stayed at a house of some random journalist Dad worked with.  I remember too little.

I remember the fire.  We were frightened.  Dad was calm.

In late 2006 or early 2007 Will and Charles and I visited the North Park Nature Center in Chicago. We went there often.  It was the closest nature we could get to. Charles could handle it even when he was most frightened of the world. I didn’t expect the controlled burn would be completely unannounced.  But it was.  We got there as usual and went into the woods, but within a very short time I just realized we were surrounded by flame and smoke.  I did the only thing I could think to do.  I picked up Will, I grabbed Charles’ hand and we just ran. I stayed as calm as humanly possible in the moment.

There have been times when life experiences felt like walking through fire.  But there is nothing really comparable to ACTUALLY walking through fire. 

The boys were so little then, but they remember it.  Both of them have written about it for school projects.  Alex was so little on that trip to Boise, but he remembers too.  And I remember thinking about how Dad must have felt inside driving through that fire.  The way I felt in the nature center.  All the power of that fire and as a parent we have to sometimes just hike a kid up under your arm and run.

Credible Threat

On Mother's day seven years ago, the threat was credible enough that I called the cops and had the guns taken away.

The threat wasn't against me or my kids, but inwardly driven. 

The past couple of days there has been a credible threat that kept all students on the front range at home.  I understand credible threats, having experienced my own.

My feeling is that you do have to respond appropriately to credible threats and I'm glad the school districts did what they did.  I wonder about the woman from Florida who apparently was running naked through the woods with a gun and ended up dying by her own hand.  I wonder if she has never heard of ticks, because I don't know many people who would run through Colorado forests in the spring without some kind of clothing on. Guns may be okay protection, but not against a tick burrowing into your skin.

I wonder about that woman because it seems to me the end was inevitable.  She may have been threatening outwardly, but the display and the publicity suggest to me she wanted the notoriety as much as anything.  She got it and she got what she probably wanted, an end with a splash.

I'm not impressed.

I have seen some incredibly cogent and eloquent posts on social media about the most recent incident, and it reminds me of things I have written in the past...and that I feel I can't now.  I am so done with all of it.  Guns/no guns/deaths/threats I don't even know how to respond anymore.  It's such a circus and a horror.

Children raised in this period have maybe two choices, start running through the forests naked, or start fighting back, as the Parkland kids did last year.  I am firmly on the side of the young people from Parkland and elsewhere, because my own limits seem to have been reached.

Repetition

I have just been writing out a play-by-play for running my household.  I am going to a conference next week and family will watch the kids. 

I was just so bored by the time I finished writing it out.  SO much to do and remember everyday, but it is always the same stuff.  Does anyone wonder why I occasionally look past my exit on the way to work and wonder what would happen if I just kept going west, instead of turning?

Routine is all well and good.  In an autism family, it's necessary.  But the thought of stepping away from my routine for just a few days makes me feel oh so very happy.  I have been trying to vary our routine.  I have planned hikes and outings and vacations for the summer.  The planning is fine.  The day to day is still there. 

I don't know how to make the day to day better.  Well...kind of I do. Piano lessons and swimming and helped me.  I feel like I need to make more effort to change things up...but that takes effort.  Routine is easy, just stifling.

Springtime will bring a much needed break in routine.  It is time to garden and be outside.  Bonfire season is coming, if it isn't so windy this year.  I am looking forward to not planning, but just doing the things that are not routine.  I'm looking forward to the end of the school year, which brings a much loved change in the morning routine. I'm looking forward to running in the cool summer mornings. 

The conference will be helpful.  I hope to recharge my professional and personal batteries by time away from the usual.  I hope to come home recharged in all ways.   You can't run away from yourself, but you can run yourself away.  At least for a little while.

Patience

I'm an impatient person at heart.  Watching the story unfold irritates me.  I have been known to read books and magazines from back to front.  I don't mind spoilers.  I can concentrate on the art of the writing if I'm not wondering what is going to happen.

That said, there is no way to do this in life.  It tends to make me a little snappish.  I want the plot to move along, but so much of life is work-a-day and the plot doesn't show itself for years.

Sometimes I try to sit back and figure out who is the protagonist for this part of the story. Sometimes I just am done and want to run away.

These days I am somewhere in the middle.  I feel like it's my story to establish and tell, but running away briefly sounds pretty good.

I'm still recovering from heartbreak, but I feel like it is all better.  There are whole HOURS I don't think about him.  HOURS!  I'm trying to be patient with myself too.  There is so much that can happen in the blink of an eye.  All of a sudden the years have passed and the children are taller than you.  All of a sudden the toddler is a young woman, a force of nature.

Patience is a virtue they say.  So I am breathing into it and letting life wash over me.  And I remember that the point of life is living and the plot only becomes visible when it's over and you can't get spoilers for your own future.

Talk about messy

There was a bomb cyclone this week in Colorado.  Also known as an explosive cyclogenesis, this system creates a huge drop in pressure and creates crazy weather.  We had 70 mile an hour wind gusts and hundreds of thousands of people lost power.

We were one of the households that lost power.  We were fine Wednesday, snuggled up and watching movies.  When the power went out I pretty much went to bed.  Since then I have struggled to keep things together with the kids.  They were off school Thursday and the house was like ice.  I made the executive decision to take a day off and move us to a hotel.   Our power was finally restored this morning.  We were the last block in the area to be without power.  I like to think my tweeting the energy company at 6am helped them figure some things out. 

It has only been a few days, but I had to get rid of all my freezer goods.  Everything had thawed and was refreezing.  Hello, dangerous meat!

Then I started thinking about Puerto Rico and the water in Flint, Michigan.  We had three days and were going crazy.  I have enough money to get us to hotels.  Other families had to go to shelters.  We are lucky.  All we lost was dangerous meat.  The fish and hamster survived.  Refugees don't get the options we had.  Yes, we were cold and miserable, but it was brief. 

The world is a messy place and natural phenomena make it messier.  I feel like there are not enough answers and the US infrastructure is not in a good place these day.   Some of the potholes on Denver streets are large enough to swallow small children and yet we voted against measures to fix streets.  So much of this is the unwillingness on the part of some humans to help humans who don't resemble them so much.  But all of us get sick from dangerous meat and all of us need water and shelter. 

I have had a lot of conversations the past few days with people who lost power or didn't and we bonded.  I hope that something as awful sounding as a bomb cyclone can leave us feeling more like a community.

Messy

Life is messy.

Sometimes I think we need to be handed this on a card at birth.  Life is messy.  Don't expect tidy endings and complete stories.

People leave you and you depart from places and there is sorrow and grief and joy.  You can shut yourself down or you can feel it.  For those of us who feel it, we feel completely. There are days I wake and I am fine and there are days I wake and I am not fine.

I am currently awash in one of those inexplicable hiccups of grief. There is nothing for it.  I breathe and I work and I keep moving forward.

Life is messy.

I am a tidy person.  As a little girl I loved putting my toys away.  I loved a clean room.  I had the good fortune to share a room with a sister who taught me that life is messy.  A clean room is nothing without the contrast of the mess.  Mark, too, believed that a thing belonged where it landed, not in any specific place.  So while my nature longs for tidy, I acknowledge that I am not going to get it.  I respect the mess.  I respect the contrast.

We will feel the mess sometimes more than we want to.  I want to wake up tomorrow with joy on my hands and in my heart.  I want to look at my little girl's room and be okay with the explosion she keeps in there.   I want it all to be okay.   I also want my messes to respect my desire for tidy every now and then. 

The dead husbands club

Mark would have turned 50 this coming Saturday.  My bank wished me a happy birthday month today because of it.  I had to go into the bank to get that fixed.  Apparently our birthdays had gotten mixed up.

I don't love the reminder.  I was with Mark for a long time.  He should still be here, sputtering and angry.

I am a member of the Dead Husbands Club.  We met, a few of us, on Sunday to talk and laugh and compare notes.  How are all the kids doing?  How is your love life?  What are the pain points?

There are too many of us in the club.  We always wish it was smaller. But when me met in late 2015, it was being thrown a lifesaver.  They are the only people in the world I don't have to explain myself to.  We met in a grief group.  We all had kids and our husbands (or exes) had all died by suicide.  One woman was several years out.  Most of us were fresh.  Some of us had been divorced, but not all.  Even those of us who were divorced talked about how close we still were with our exes.  Many of us had anticipated the suicides, at least one of us was taken completely by surprise.  We had ups and downs as a group, but often I felt like we were best friends when sitting in that room.

We have stayed in touch.  Seeing people last Sunday was a breath of air.  It felt good to talk about the trouble our kids were having or not having.  It felt good to know that at least one of us had gotten married again.  We discussed dating apps and whether or not to list ourselves as divorced or widowed. 

We have always laughed too much maybe for a grief group, but it feels right.  We are facing so much every day.  The exhaustion of solo parenting cannot be explained easily.  There is no us.  There is only me.

Swimming

Have I ever mentioned that I used to swim a lot?

It took me awhile to learn. Once I did, I got better in the lake at summer camp...enough that I could not just learn the rowboat, but the sailboat and water skiing as well.  I sucked at water skiing, fyi.

When I was about 9 years old, I would walk to the local pool on my own and spend the afternoon. 
Then we moved to Colorado and one of the neighborhoods we lived in early on had a summer swim team and I was convinced to join.  I swam back stroke and never learned how to properly do a kick turn without getting water up my nose.  The summer I was on the swim team I was as blonde and brown as was possible.  My hair turned green from the chlorine.

I kept swimming into high school and college.  Just for me.

After I broke my ankle, I went back to swimming because that was all I could do.

I made sure all my kids could swim.  I have spent hours with three children attached to me in the pool.

In the past few years, getting into cold pools has been harder for me.  I don't know why, aging?  Arthritis?  Common sense? 
But a few weeks back I was at wits end and had the fortuitous discovery that a local pool is heated.  Not the pool closest to me, but not too far away.  I have managed to go swimming many times in the past little while and it feels like coming home.   I have been so unfocused since the break up.  Swimming has helped.

As much as I love running, swimming was my first love and it's still there for me.  I can swim and feel better about life. I don't even pretend to attempt a kick turn though.  The scene of some old lady dying at the end of the pool would traumatize the young swim lesson kids.  When I am in the pool I am nine years old again, hoping adult swim doesn't happen any time soon and wishing I had brought a dime for an ice cream sandwich.

Blank

*filed under things I can't blog*

What happens when you have spent the past almost 30 years doing things for others, taking care of others, prioritizing others...when nobody has been doing that for you?  I wake up some days feeling blank.

A friend who just ended a long standing career in academia said she feels the same.  Just blank.

We are both trying to build new lives, but can't see ourselves in the crowd.  I am trying to do things I like, but I'm no longer really sure what I like.  I know what my kids like and I know what the men in my life liked.

I enjoy things, but there are big empty gaps right now.  I am trying to discover what I want to do.

I think this happens to moms a lot but it is not only the realm of the mom. My sister has written for others for years and has found she has trouble writing for herself.    We give ourselves to others because that is what we do.  What happens when the others are done.

I am searching.  I find joy in small things, but don't have any long term plans for myself.  I never have.  Plans for myself have always included someone else and now I'm realizing I have to make plans for me alone. 

I think I need suggestions.

Four years

Four years ago Mark made a choice to step out of our lives for good.  I had been basically single parenting it for quite some time at that point.  The change in our circumstances was, unfortunately, not that great.

I have said so much about Mark in the subsequent years.  Our lives together, raising children, dealing with autism, job losses, depression. One does not start a life together thinking about how terrible things could get.  Things just get terrible on their own.

I miss Mark.  I miss his dark humor and his intelligence.  I miss drinking whiskey with him in the evenings after our divorce when we could still talk for hours.  I remember he explained a thought he had about politics and political stances.  I thought it was brilliant, but I can never remember exactly what he described.  I told him to write it down, but that was one of the last times I saw him.

I was one of the last people to see him alive.  The kids were the last.  I will never know what pushed him to take that final step.  The bill I handed him very early in the morning?  The eviction notice I found out about later that day?  I don't know. He was so troubled and so helpless.  All I know is that the intervening years seem both very long and very short.  When I think about it too much, the exhaustion sets in.

Mostly, though, the days are days and the nights are nights and the children are growing up and I am growing old and he is gone and I miss him still.

Humiliation

We all know the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

But when you are mourning a relationship I think there is an extra stage. Humiliation.

When you have shared your deep down secrets and spent years with someone...you have given a lot of yourself.  When it's over, there can be a deep shame.  I remember how divorce felt.  Shame was a huge part of that.  Infidelity leaks onto both partners involved.  My grief over Mark's death did not include that humiliation stage, just the end of our marriage.

Luckily I'm not dealing with infidelity this time.  I am dealing with the shame of apparently loving someone who did not feel the same way.  There is no real answer except to ride the feeling and let it go when it passes.

I don't think I have ever read or talked about this feeling, but I think it is probably common.  Every now and then I flush at the thought of having been so vulnerable.  It triggers my flight or fight response.

I wish I had something pithy to say about this, but I am still processing.

I'm back

Awhile ago, on another forum, I posted about my "Somebody worth knowing" journal.  Many of my readers rose to defend me "You have always been worth knowing" and I appreciate it.  I think I wasn't entirely clear, and I definitely wasn't fishing for compliments!  So I am going to try again.

I think I have been an okay friend to people and am raising my kids as well as I can.  I have not, however, always felt self worth.  I really started that journal as a challenge to become the best me I can become. So I learn to feel that I am someone worth knowing, who has value.

A man I knew puts little orange dots on all his art supplies and anything he doesn't want to lose.  I used to tease him about it, but I understood.  He valued his tools enough to not want to lose them.  They were worth looking after. 

I have a small orange dot tattooed on the back of my wrist as a reminder.   I am worth looking after.  When I got the tattoo, it wasn't about him, but about me. A reminder that I need to look after me.

So I am looking after me.  Despite my overwhelming sorrow and panic this past week, I know who has my back. I also know I have done what is best for me and the kids.

This new blog is going to be a continuation of my paper journal.  I may even include some of my essays in the file marked "Things I can't blog."  People have often complimented me on my ability to talk about the hard stuff that many avoid discussing.  I want to think about and write about the hard stuff.  Maybe this is a way for me to continue the journey that started with the words "Somebody Worth Knowing."