Act the way you want to feel

Monday, June 25, 2012

I have a photograph of my late grandmother Florence Drennan on the wall facing where I sit and write. The photo was taken in 1929. Grandma is 14 years old and one of eight young girls in wool cloche-style hats trying to be still for the photographer. Some of them are laughing. My Grandmother has an ear-to-ear closed mouth grin and looks ready to bust a gut at something funny that must have been circulating among them that day so long ago.

I found the photograph among my Grandmother’s things after she died at the age of 91 in 2006. It’s my all-time favorite photo.

It resonates a “carpe diem” lesson for me. The fresh young faces whisper to me the message about not wasting time waiting around for the right moment to do something that makes me happy.  I am reminded to live out loud and that I deserve to be happy.

I think we all deserve to be happy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about happiness, having recently been introduced to someone who among other attributes just finished reading “The Happiness Project.”

On Page 23 there is a Buddhist quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

I’ve had the same book sitting yet unread on my bookshelf since I bought it shortly after it was published in 2009. I started reading it yesterday.

A counselor I saw in late January while I was on the bleeding edge of a personal tragedy told me outright that I deserved to be happy. At that moment when all was dark and cheerless I really didn’t appreciate the happiness warrant for my life but I soon discovered that he was right and that he was talking about the attitude I take to my life table of contents.

“No deposit, no return.”

I believe in and I love myself. I think I’ve done a very good job of coming back to a full albeit new life, while honoring the one I had to leave behind on that brutally cold winter’s day. I’ve worked very, very hard to do that because I believe I deserve to be happy.

Some people have said to me, “That was fast.”  I try not to let the comment hurt my heart because I know the archaic reaction is usually based on the old and rusty rule of socially acceptable time frames born in another century. But it hurts anyway.

None of us really has any business making a comment like that to someone who has been through the grief grinder. This much I know is true.

It’s very easy to sit in yesterday. There’s no challenge in doing that. The tape reel is recorded and burned and doesn’t mind replaying for us as many times as we would like to sit in on it.

And for all my self-care work there are still times when the past would have me sucked into its movie where I am welcome to mope until everyone else thinks it’s time for me to move forward and direct my own play.

Moving forward through the intersections of life is risky. Look both ways and go.

It is my belief that grief, no matter the source, is not meant to be overcome. I don’t think we are supposed to conquer grief, but—to paraphrase the poet Rumi, to treat it honorably because someday somewhere somehow it may be clearing you out for new delight.

The balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly, but I will never stop striving for everyday happiness again.

Life is windy and as my new friend reminded me, “You can’t change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.” Thank you.

I may be a child of the wind to my dying day, but I’ve got a big sailboat and her name is “Bring It On.”

The bond around here sticks like glue

Monday, June 18, 2012

The news has probably been out there for a long time but I just found that our ear lobes never stop growing.

That’s just great—there goes one more part of my body headed south without my consent.

Perhaps I could postpone the imminent downward droop with duct tape. Goodness knows the super adhesive is my back-up plan for putting other things in their place.

I’ve used duct tape to hold my pinky toe against its digit neighbor so it didn’t hurt so bad after I broke the little buddy kicking a big rock that I couldn’t pick up.

I’ve also used it to tape extra car keys to the underside of my car, although know that I’ve made that a public announcement I’ll be forced to find another locations for said keys.

I’ve also used duct tape as a substitute for a hair removal system on my upper lip.  I only did that once.

I seem to recall that my ex-husband, Peter, used duct tape to wrap my Christmas present. After the flat-stare look on my face, he only did that once as well. 

 

As an entertainment technique I’ve used it to cement my five-year old grandson to the kitchen floor. It was his idea, although I’m sure he got the inspiration from his Granny, who is well-known in her neck of the woods for her (albeit empty threat) cautioning thrown to her mischievous little peppers, that ignoring the house rules will result in being duct-taped to the wall.

My grandson had a rip-roaring time in his attempts to extract himself from the vinyl flooring and in the end required the assistance of his “taper” to wiggle free.

Oddly enough the experience did not deter him from challenging the house rules five minutes after he was re-mobilized.

And all I heard after that was “Can we do that again, Granny?”  In my mind’s futuristic eye I pictured my grandson standing at the front of the class during “Show and Tell” at school as the teacher asked him to share what he’d done over the weekend and him blurting out in pinching detail that his grandmother had duct-taped him to the floor. The teacher would make one call and I’d have a child advocate counselor on my doorstep.

And while I did not follow through, I will admit that I desperately fought the compulsion to duct tape my daughter’s 18-month old golden Labrador to the side of the barn after it ran like a wild racehorse through my yard headed for my garden, during a recent dog-sitting weekender.

My own canine capers, which stood motionless on all fours with their jaws dropped open and struck stupid by the visiting terror, I think would have helped me secure their nemesis after she bowled them both over during a flying leap over my picnic table.

Using my Alpha voice I threatened to duct tape the dog if she didn’t settle down, but my Hurricane Tribe must have tipped her off about my meaningless uttering.

However I did put Mya on the end of a leash and tried to walk the excitement out of her. The result was my upper torso thinking it had just been “dragged down the street by two Great Danes.” I came home dragging my knuckles on the gravel road and duct taped my popped-out shoulder joints back into their sockets.

Currently, as I sit here thinking about how to end this column I realize I am pulling on my ear lobe.

What are some of the best duct tape decisions you ever made? Sometimes you know right away when you do that. Sometimes it takes a bit of looking back over your shoulder to see that you did.

In this moment I cannot lay claim to the latter.

I looked back over my shoulder to see if I’d left the roll of adhesive on my dresser and a big wad of my nice long hair got stuck to a wide upended piece of duct tape that was sticking up from where I’d wrapped my shoulder joint.

Help.

Sometimes I do know what I'm talking about

Monday, June 11, 2012

I don’t imagine a lot of 16 year olds read my column. If my own daughters were still in that age group I know for sure this writing space would be the last place they would cast their eyes, because they’d be sure to find their haphazard and often dramatic ways cloaked in feeble anonymity and spread like alphabet butter in a 600-word essay.

Today my young women are spread across the 20-something years and they have learned—since I began writing “The View From Here” in 2004—to tolerate their mother’s often public musings on their messy bedrooms, unwashed dishes, and piles of dirty laundry et al.

Still, they may roll their eyes. I have loved and raised them as best I could. We’ve had many ups and downs. I’m still learning how it all clicks and so are they.

But I was reminded recently just how tenuous the parent/child mosaic remains out there.

 

Even when parents do the very best they can, 16-year-olds can pack up and leave home under the belief that something better exists outside the four strong walls of love and opportunity they’ve grown up in.

Memories of yesterday flooded back to me, poked at old wounds, cast old shadows of soul drought and of desperate times of the heart.

12 years ago one of my own children left home just short of her 16^th birthday and although I tried to move heaven and earth in as many directions as I could to keep her at home, the winds of her change eventually trumped me.

Most of the time I knew where she was, but sometimes I didn’t and the stress of all of it rotted my stomach. Thank Heaven for a rib cage or my heart would have leapt from my chest in those distressing times.

There was a part of my psyche that wanted to hire Special Forces to kidnap my daughter and plunk her premature would-be independence on a remote island made out of duct tape.

I ended up in counseling and I learned a hard, hard lesson in what degrees of control I had.

My daughter didn’t return to live at home after the age of 16. It broke my heart. I missed out, and so did she, on some good “at home” years and she knows it.

 

My daughter took the bumpy road and it was difficult. She wouldn’t dispute that.

She stopped going to school and because of that choice alone, and the fact that she did not hold herself responsible; the education crust in the pie of life was unfinished. 

If you asked my daughter today she would of course agree that her hindsight is 20/20 on many levels during those tender years. 

I have never stopped believing in her despite some “tough love” choices I chose to make and I am infinitely proud of the wiser woman she is today.

That said, I would still go back in time and try to change her mind the day she packed her things, because from a mother’s point of view it wasn’t the right choice.

But as Leslie Poles Hartley penned, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

In spite of what I cannot change, today I am restless to run screaming down the street with a red flag and magic wand.

I wish 16-year-olds who leave good homes would read this and believe me when I say what a grave lapse in judgment it is.

I wish I could change a young mind just like that. If only it were that easy.

Do the hardest, most unthinkable and most mature thing of all and go home with your suitcase and hug your mother and hug your father and spill your heart, tell the truth, face consequence and accept compromise.

Home is where the heart of your young life is. This much I know is true.

June kickstarts with color

Monday, June 4, 2012

I love the month of June. In fact, aside from my birthday month of October I think June takes the cake. 

I say that now, while my lawn is still two days off another cut. Usually by the time I’m done mowing it and because I have a big yard and there’s only one of me, I’m not quite so thrilled on the bursting green rapid growth that happens in month six.

But today I like it.

I am most in awe of the new green needle tips on all the many branches of the massive evergreen trees that line my driveway. I am at a loss for how something so incredibly huge manages to draw in enough energy each year to produce new green at every finger of its limbs.

It is perhaps the most promising sign there is for me, that life is driven to carry on despite the challenges of getting from A to B. 

Another “awe awe” moment was watching a C-130 Hercules with 20,000 pounds of fuel clear the runway in a heartbeat at the Fort Frances Airport on Sunday afternoon at the end of a very successful annual Fly-In event.

I felt like a 10-year old standing there as the reverberation of the four-engine megalith vibrated in my chest when it raced by all of us lifting off in a roar, banking sharply around for a low pass over a crowd of thrilled onlookers.

After its second such roundabout pass I shot a fist into the air like a trooper, turned around with a little jig to see my dad standing there with a grin as big as mine. We looked straight at each other and without words we knew exactly how each other felt in that exhilarating moment.

Hats off to members of the Canadian Air Force Squadron 435 for a job well done.

“June Bugs” are out too—ages one through six—and they love to play with the garden hose that “Yours Truly” rigged up from a pump at the creek for my weary skeleton who didn’t want to haul pails to the repeated watering needed for my herb and flower gardens.

Quite simply, the simplest form of entertainment for children on a hot summer day is a garden hose. Second is a whack of sidewalk chalk to brighten Granny’s patio stones and cement steps to the colors of the rainbow. 

However I forgot to ask my little peppers to remove their shoes before coming inside, and in so not doing had a pink, blue, green, and yellow chalk trail through the porch to the kitchen and into the bathroom, where small feet had trickled as the day wore on.

Most entertaining scene of all was when “Ozzie” the cat, in his usual display of how pleased he is with life, ventured outside and laid down on the patio stones and rolled around in kitty-like fashion.

I’m still kicking myself for not taking a photograph of the cat and his amazing technicolor dream coat derived from all those lovely chalk drawings.

 

Seeing him lit up like that reminded me of my slightly askew high school days and my own version of said coat.

Mine looked like a shag rug made into a vest and indeed was a colorful array of long wool fibers. It was a one of a kind accessory and I’m not even sure where I got it.

All I remember is that it was right up there with plucking my eyebrows too thin. The response from my classmates was not very favorable. 

But Ozzie looked impeccable in his and still believed that he was king of the hill even though he looked like a wad of cotton candy from the Emo Fair.

June also has reintroduced me to Rainy Lake and just how spectacular it is at sunset while floating in a boat in Sand Bay.

Thank You to the two good hearts who scooped me up and delivered me to the moment of power that I’d been talking so much about. Now.