How I Built My Summer Kitchen

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten  ~  Natasha Bedingfield

If I stop and look back at the past few months I find that I have been in a very bad mood.

I try very hard to be an optimist but I have to admit that lately I find myself standing with my toes on the edge of that fine line that crosses into the land of pessimism. It has become harder..near to impossible…to keep the mask of optimism in place.

Perhaps it’s the never ending angst and calamity in the world. In the interest of time I won’t list all of the hate by category, i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation….. so let’s just call it what it is:

People against people.

These stories seep into my brain to the point I want to scream out loud and I have to turn away in despair and utter exhaustion.

I know there are still many, many good people in the world. They want to make things better, make things right. What I am finding the more I look around is that this is becoming an uphill fight. Up a hill the size of Everest.

In addition to any outside influences, my inner turmoil is affecting my already finite patience. It is at this point little more than a distant memory. I have none. My desire to be nice seems to have packed a small bag and joined the exodus. I feel like an emotional volcano, waiting to erupt at any moment without warning spewing crazy, burning rain down on the world. Anybody and everybody in it. I have been taking ‘fake it ’til you make it’ to a whole new level.

I have just felt like checking out, moving out and moving on, disappearing into the proverbial woodwork.

My life is run like a machine. Constant movement. Continuous motion. No time for anything but what the job entails and yes, I have days when I think of raising my children and running my household as a job. One with lousy pay and meager benefits at best. On the rare occasion I find my self alone in my car, on yet another tedious errand for toilet paper or some other trivial shit, I turn up the music and consider never coming back.

My sanity returns just long enough to scream, “Stop!”

Yes, it is mentally draining to hear about the indifference or disdain people have for one another but why am I letting the pessimism and anger of the world affect me so drastically?

When will I wrap my head around and learn to accept the fact that with age comes change and not all of it good?

Why would I even consider for a millisecond leaving a home full of the people I love the most, who love me back and consider me their most important person?

Because sometimes it’s hard? Because I’m tired?

Fuck that.

Yes, life can have periods of time when it feels like a load of bricks with one, two, or three more being piled on daily. It can be painful and the struggle to carry it can seem impossible.

If I lift my head for one moment….raise my eyes to life level and see what is in front of me, have the good sense to shrug off the weight of martyrdom and self pity for just a moment, I will see many in front of me. Folks with wheelbarrows and work gloves paired with strong shoulders and willing hearts to help me unload that burden.

If I shrug off a brick at a time, two if I’m able, I can focus on what’s important in each minuscule and very fleeting moment in time.

I know if I just allow it more of those bricks will fall away or be lifted away by others I didn’t expect.

I imagine one of the most interesting thing I will find is that of the people standing in front of me there is a mix of not just family and friends. There are strangers, too.

I am making the effort to bring back kindness to my life.  I realize that this is the only way the bricks will fall. My life is not a job. It is a gift. Every day I wake up warm and healthy and each night I will go to sleep clean and well fed, surrounded by people who love me even if these days they are simply tolerating me, and I get to do things so many others wish they could.

I get to hold these precious people, my family, for every single second that they allow me and thankfully that is still quite often.

Most importantly, I simply get to live. Where is my gratitude for that simple grace?

So today, I will work on dropping the bricks. I will bring the kindness back.

I will be generous with compliments.

I will hold open a door.

I will smile at strangers.

I will pay something forward.

I will make time for silly.

I will love and be loved.

With each act of kindness another brick will drop.

And I will use them to build myself an amazing summer kitchen.

 

In my recent mindset I have had a terrific case of writer’s block. This post was quite literally written in my head while my husband and I were laying bricks for a summer kitchen on my back deck…proof positive that a writer’s inspiration can be found just about anywhere. 

 

 

 

The Help of My Soul

I will not be commanded,
I will not be controlled
And I will not let my future go on,
Without the help of my soul

~Greg Holden, The Lost Boy

I hunkered down in my tunnel. I know there is a light and I know how to find it but I chose to sit in the darkness and wrap it around me like a comfortable blanket, oblivious to the shimmer I see out of the corner of my eye known as hope.

After all, everyone else is allowed. So why not me? Why can I not wallow in self pity and feel sorry for the fact that I have to do something I really don’t want to do and then let the guilt of that knowledge eat me alive from the inside out? Why should I not be able to blame everyone else in the world for my sadness, my anger, my stress, the unfair hand my family has been dealt?

I recently wrote about the fact that I am raising my grandson, have been for what will soon be four years. His mother is an addict, his formative years were chaotic and he has pieces missing that we may never be able to find.

His mother, my oldest daughter, recently came back into the picture and for the first time in a long time, I felt hope. I thought she had finally had enough and would slowly take the steps to heal herself and eventually be able to mother her son.

I no longer hold that hope.

I suppose when you step out of the prison yard and are just grateful to be free you will make promises to back up your foxhole prayers and put on the face you suspect everyone wants to see. Then the day will come when you feel a little more sure footed and small step by small step you will walk backward into old habits and behaviors, because trying to do things a different way will just be too fucking hard.

You will look at your own son, being raised by someone else but still accessible to you and you will think, NO. Too fucking hard.

You will make plans to spend time with him and tell him of these plans and when they fall into the hole that is the chaos you create, you will leave it to someone else to break his heart. Again.

What you don’t know is that his heart didn’t break. He took the news with the composure of a person much older than his seven years because he is used to being disappointed by you. He doesn’t expect anything from you. I bought him a sub and took him to the park. He swung like a madman and enjoyed every moment. Are you disappointed?

Good.

I wanted to tell you about the meeting I will have at the school on Monday, the day kids return from Spring Break. You see, I’ve had all of this week to think about it. To wonder and project how it will turn out.

This meeting is with his first grade teacher, the principal, and the guidance counselor. This boy has had so many possessions taken from him in the most important years of his life, material and otherwise, that when his teacher tried to take a beloved item from him that he was distracting the class with, he grabbed her hand and tried to twist it. As it turns out, her hand has a possible fracture.

He is seven.

Seven.

In the end I won’t tell you because really it is not your business and it serves absolutely no purpose.

I haven’t always gotten and still don’t always get it right. I, like many other parents, get it wrong. Probably far more often than I care to admit. But I get up every day and I start over. I don’t take the easy way out.

And yes, I believe you are taking the easy way out. You are still blaming everyone for all the things wrong with your life, especially me. But guess what! I have made my amends and I have made my peace. This is all you.

In the past week, I sat in my car at a stoplight more than once and thought about driving away. I thought about leaving the car and walking away. I have contemplated throwing plates of food across the room. I have screamed into pillows in the privacy of my bedroom. I have cried in the shower. I have hidden in the closet with the kids blissfully unaware that my heart is racing, I cannot feel my hands and feet or catch my breath, and wondered how long it would take before someone found me because I knew I would die in that closet.

I cannot take it anymore. I will not do this anymore.

I don’t know what will happen at the meeting on Monday. I don’t know what I’m going to decide about you and the fact that J has taken three steps backward since you came back into the picture.

What I do know is that you aren’t coming back for him. I know this in the depths of my soul. It doesn’t matter if you do because soon enough the choice won’t be yours anymore. It will be his. And he will not choose you.

And so, I will now turn my head toward the light. I will walk to the light that symbolizes hope. With every step I will remember to be grateful that this is all I have been given to deal with, that I’m strong enough to do it, and that I am not alone in it.

You will have to find your way. I am tired and my rescuing days are over. Live your life how you wish. It is yours to piss away.

I still feel the remnants of the depression and anger right at the edges, but they are beginning to fray.

It is fucking hard.

But I’ve done it before. And I’ll do it again.

 

 

photo credit: The girl in the pink scarf…. via photopin (license)

How To Save A Life

I’ll be your keeper for life as your guardian
I’ll be your warrior of care your first warden
I’ll be your angel on call, I’ll be on demand
The greatest honor of all, as your guardian

~ Guardian, Alanis Morissette

I opened the door and there they stood. My drug addicted daughter, who had the good sense to leave her piece of shit husband in the car, and my 3 year old grandson. My first thought is always that he looked so pale and dirty. And unhappy.

They walked in with his tiny suitcase, which I will open later and find it holds only a few items of clothing, most of which don’t fit. There were no toys. No stuffed animals. No books. Nothing offering the comforts of ‘home’.

That is likely because he didn’t have any of those things. Including a home.

She walked in to the kitchen where my husband and a notary are waiting, papers lined up on the kitchen table.

Two days prior, my daughter called me and asked me if we would take her son. They had no home. She and her husband fought all the time. He was a thief and a drug addict. Come to think of it, so was she. They needed someone to take this boy…because he’d become inconvenient.

My husband and I scrambled to find a family lawyer that could get this done quickly before she had a chance to change her mind and take off because neither of us believed this little boy would survive what was coming.

I don’t believe she doesn’t love him. I know that she does and I know the pain she was in at that moment as she approached the table and eyed the words on paper that, instead of legal jargon, said in her eyes, “I’m a failure as a mother. I am giving up the right to call my son…my son. I will have no rights to him. He will no longer be mine. I am giving up this little person who loves me more than anything, despite my faults.”

She signed the papers and with a quick goodbye, she walked out the door. She walked out the door without her son. For all intents and purposes, he was now mine.

In the midst of lawyers and judges all in a span of two days, I had made him a room in this, his new home. There was a big bed with clean sheets. There were toys offered up by my then seven-year old son. There were stuffed animals lovingly placed on the bed from the stash of my then eight-year old daughter. Clothes that my son had outgrown that I had been saving for him were now clean and folded, stored in the drawers of his very own dresser.

The delight in his eyes was heartwarming yet sad because there is something he didn’t know.

He doesn’t know she isn’t coming back. The task of telling him has been left up to me. What is worse? He doesn’t know who I am. He thinks I am a random stranger because in their whirlwind life of addiction and chaos we didn’t see him much for two years. The only time he’s ever stayed at our house overnight was the night my daughter was being arrested for shoplifting at Macy’s and I had to go pick him up so they wouldn’t call social services.

He came to live with us on September 15th, 2011. My daughter asked us to keep him for six months.

He is still here.

I love him and I’m happy to have him. I think my daughter did the right thing and I never in a million years would have said no. Never.

Since the day she left, she stayed high. She’s called me suicidal and I’ve spoken to her on a cell phone, trying to find out where she is while having my mom on the land line calling 911 to send help to her. I’ve put her in rehab facilities, hospitals, and pulled strings to get her into a domestic violence shelter while her husband was sitting in jail, only to have her leave and go back to him as soon as he was freed.

For two years I raised a troubled kid, because all that he had witnessed and been subjected to had fucked him up. He was holed up in dark places with only God knows what going on, moved from place to place. The first time I put him in a bathtub to clean his dirty body and hair, he screamed like a wild animal the whole time. Why? He was three and couldn’t tell me so I had to let my imagination take flight which wasn’t a good thing. He wasn’t potty trained and wouldn’t be until well into his sixth year. He was prone to violent outbursts. He didn’t have any idea how to interact with other children. To this day he has a hard time making friends. He had no filter and no boundaries and they are minimal today, at best. As recently as this past December at a family dinner he asked me how I knew his mother. WHAT? He still has no idea how he fits in with all of us even though it’s been explained several times.

He didn’t hug. He had never been read a bedtime story. It took him two years to say I love you in response to the same. If I told him I loved him he’d say, ‘Okay’.

She filed for divorce from the asshat but didn’t leave the addict life. She did what she had to in order to feed her demon and I never saw her or heard from her. I think she was just quietly waiting to die while I quietly waited to find out she had.

Her addict lifestyle eventually caught up with her and she went to jail. Then she went to prison. The downward spiral was quick and, I’m sure, very painful.

Whether or not there is a happy ending to this story for them as mother and son remains to be seen. She was released in December 2014. She is living with her grandparents and, thanks to having a family owned business, is gainfully employed. She is working on one thing at a time, keeping her expectations low so as not to overwhelm herself with all that needs to be done to once more become a responsible member of society. She sees her son every week at our home. He deals with it the best he can, usually by becoming obnoxious, because he has no idea how to play the hand he’s been dealt.

Because it sucks.

Except for the fact that he has a very good life. It has had its challenges and not just for him. My other children have had to make adjustments over the past three and a half years and not all of them have been easy.

I had never, ever been called to the principal’s office at school. I have now. Twice.

I’d never been physically pushed into a bathtub by a four-year old. I have now.

I’d never carried a crazed screaming child across a parking lot in 100 degree weather with strangers staring at me like I was a kidnapper. I have now.

I have never felt like I’d saved someone’s life.

I do now.

He has lived with us now for what will be four years this September and there is no doubt he will be with us longer. His mom has a long way to go and being a recovering addict myself I know it’s a tough road she has ahead. I know life would be less stressful if he could just be our grandson, visiting on weekends so we could spoil him and send him home to his mother.

Sometimes that’s just not how things work.

I don’t write this so that others will stand me on a pedestal and tell me how wonderful I am. I’m no saint. I realize that my own active addiction had an impact on my daughter. I am not a victim of circumstance. I am not a victim by any stretch of the imagination.

These are consequences of a chain of addiction, silence, shame, and fear in our family history. I know I am not alone.

That is why I write this.

 
photo credit: Teddy via photopin (license)

To the Man Who Broke Me

I saw you.

Leaving the football field after a Sunday afternoon game, you were leaning into the back of a Jeep,

you still drive a Jeep

putting something in the back. I didn’t see what it was. All I saw were your eyes under the ball cap. The eyes that met mine for only a few seconds when you did a double take. Did you recognize me? Or did you just think I was pretty?

you did twenty five years ago

I knew it was you. It is very hard to forget the eyes of the man I once thought was the love of my life

you broke me

and ended up being the person I feared most in this world.

I don’t remember when the switch flipped and you started saying the most vile things to me, or the first time you hit me. I hated lying to people about the bruises, especially my own parents,

did they believe I really hit myself in the eye with the car door

but I did. Every time.

We should never have started drinking again. Life was good when we were sober. But then we were never sober and life was bad.

so very bad

I don’t know why you didn’t trust me. I don’t understand why you acted as if you hated me.

I loved you

Do you remember slamming my head into the dashboard,

I do

driving down the highway like a mad man, threatening to beat the shit out of me when we got home because it was what I deserved?

Do you remember screaming at me, so close to my face the hate in your spit burning my skin?

I do

Do you remember the day I left you?

I do

And still we continued with the insanity of coming and going, drinking and drugging, loving and leaving, both of us inflicting pain on one another, vengeful and sick. Until the day came when the papers were signed

the damage was done

and I was broken. I stayed broken for five years.

that felt like eternity

Did you recognize me?

I hope so

Did you see that I survived?

I thrived

The man walking next to me across the lot? He is the love of my life. He found me

and I found him

and taught me that love doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t leave bruises and it doesn’t bring shame.

this is what I deserve

These children walking with us? Yes, they are ours and they bring light to my life every single day.

no more darkness

As I stood at the open car door I looked up one last time and know I was not the only one broken.

I forgive you.

 

 
photo credit: Broken Heart via photopin (license)

Awake

Originally posted on October 17, 2014 

I remember a day when being awake in the middle of the night was a normal part of who I was. Of course, there was usually alcohol or cocaine, or both, involved and I was much younger. I also thought I was immortal, could scale walls, and nothing in the world could touch me.

This night, some thirty years later, when I am up at this hour (which happens to be 2:30 am) it’s due to short term insomnia and anxiety. I suppose at this moment I should be thrilled I didn’t wake in the throes of one of my more vicious enemies, the 3 a.m. panic attack.

My heart isn’t pounding, I’m not fighting to breathe or drenched in cold sweat. But something is bothering me and it is enough the keep me awake tonight.

Did I mention that I hate to be awake in the middle of the night?

It brings reminders of days I would much rather forget. Sure, the house isn’t full of people talking over each other in a drug induced certainty that we know all the world’s issues AND how to solve each and every one, not realizing in the morning that we will just be paranoid, sleep deprived idiots lucky enough not to have killed ourselves this time.

This night, still some thirty years later, finds me in my corner of the couch already drinking coffee since I know I won’t be going back to sleep. I am writing this post in hopes of expelling, at least temporarily, the demons that I fight even in slumber. At least this time they haven’t crippled me to the point where I am struggling not to wake my husband, begging him to make it go away or considering calling 911 because I’m convinced this is the heart attack I’ve been waiting to happen for years now. My children sleep in their rooms, still hours to go before they need to wipe the sleep from their own eyes and get about their days.

So I sit where I find comfort, in the ‘worn to the shape of my butt’ corner of the leather La-Z-Boy couch and I write words for whoever might be listening and hope that someone will say, ‘Me too.’

Not because I want someone else to feel this same lack of control over their own thoughts and feelings or because I want them to be lying awake perpetuating the cycle considering all the things that will be wrong today because they didn’t get enough sleep.

I just don’t want to be alone. I despise my own company in the middle of the night. I catastrophize. Seriously….we are out of pickles and hand soap.

I wish I could anticipate these issues. In reality I should have. We have had sickness in the house, the flu or another virus running the course of our house, touching everyone in its wake and has had two kids home from school for days at a time, Jeff is leaving again today for the fourth time in as many weeks. I’ve been sick and behind on all things which are piling up to become the mountains I loathe. (Actually they are hills. Tiny mounds really. But perhaps you know). It’s the lack of control, the disorder of things normally ordered and routine.

I’m certainly not solving any world problems, or local ones for that matter, tonight. I’m also apparently not sleeping since it’s time for me to wake my husband so he can get on the road. Again.

In the light of the day I will be able find the patience I need to claim my rational, sane side once more and I will likely forget this happened.

Until next time.

photo credit: Victor Porof via photopin cc