The Very Best Moments

If you had to name one—and only one—moment in your life that was your “very best,” what would it be? Could you honestly do that? 

I thought I could. I even picked “that one time when . . . “ and gave it due credence, but then right in behind it another good memory vying for best flowed in on the breeze of my many gratitudes.

Homemade macaroni and cheese can move me. It can move me to swoon, time and time again, over the very best moment when the warm cheesy gobs oozing over the spoon reach the palate and drown the senses in comfort and carbs. 

I was recently reminded never to underestimate the power of a dinner invite to a meal prepared with love for the purpose of conversation and appreciation that includes my homemade macaroni and cheese. “It can be refuge in a digital, confusing, pressure-cooked world.” Homemade macaroni and cheese? Yes indeed, spoonfuls of it (especially the ones snuck from the dish of leftovers) can create some of the very best moments.

Slipping under the flannel sheets of my bed on a cold winter’s night after the electric blanket has been turned on—no question one of the very best moments of my day.

I keep a diary. I’ve been doing that since I was 11 years old. Sure, I’ve missed a time or two here and there, and yet I always return to the page where some of the very best moments are the ones I write in permanent ink.

I watched my first granddaughter delivered through my daughter’s caesarean section. I laid my eyes on that living miracle in the moment before she was touched by a doctor’s hand about to deliver her from the womb into the world. It was a remarkable best moment.

Facing the church congregation as I said my wedding vows, when once upon a time I was married, that too, a very best moment, even though it is long since gone into the history books.

A photograph that hangs on my living room wall captures the happy moment on a playground slide in the mid-1990’s, when my three daughters, then “Littles,” smiled back at me. Oh, so very much a best moment.

Holding hands in the night with my special someone while we sleep—my favourite best moment. 

Listening to snow melt off my roof, watching my cats play, checking my bank account when its not in overdraft. Oh my, those make the list too.

Seeing my father today, at 90, healthy and wise, smile back at me from across the kitchen table, during that meal prepared with love by my mother for the purpose of conversation and appreciation of family. We were there—a very best moment.

If you had to name one—and only one—moment in your life that was your “very best,” what would it be? Could you honestly do that?  I hope not.

Thinking back to now

I’ve believed it for years and years. I am exactly where I am supposed to be. 

I believe in the words of the “Desiderata” - created in 1927 - and I carry it with me always. I most especially believe in the part that says– “Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.”

So it shouldn’t surprise me that I am here once again on the crest of memory of a cold January day five years ago that unfolded, as I know it to be, into the most defining moment of my life thus far.

That was the day I learned what it meant to be alive.

Yet I am here wrestling with a muddled bag of alphabets and trying most desperately to pull them into some kind of meaningful scrabble—again—a checkerboard of words of value about what I know to be true about that day, when life changed in an instant. 

First of all I am compelled to remind anyone who reads this how important it is to practice three golden rules any time someone needs to share feelings on their grief, loss, and crisis.

“Mouth shut, ears open, presence available.” 

Really try hard to be the ears and not the mouth. It isn’t easy. Most of us in crisis aren’t asking for your advice. We just need to be heard. Put away your opinions. Shut up and listen.

Furthermore, and I say this with the upmost humility and respect for the journeys of others. Purpose is sacred to each of us—this I know for sure—and I respect yours, whatever it may be.

I’m still ever edging outwards in healing from my own storm damage.

Mark Nepo wrote, “The current of life requires us to stand up, again and again, and we are not defeated when we are worn down, just exposed anew at a deeper level.”  This I believe.

I am puzzled by many things, some worth piecing together and some, not so much. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I think about.

I think again about that question posed to me some time ago by a friend. “What’s the goal of your life, Beth?”

Much to my surprise I couldn’t answer it promptly and that bugged me—a lot.

I felt stymied in some internal way, as if the fact that I couldn’t answer the question meant I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

Eventually it dawned on me that, yes, of course, I know what my goal is. It’s what I live for and in one way or another I write about it all the time. It was the primary lesson I learned when I came face to face with the suicide of a loved one.

Nepo writes “That we insist on keeping old wounds alive, is our curse.” He’s right. It’s what we focus on that manifests itself.

“When I focus on the rake of experience and how its fingers dug into me and the many feet that have walked over me, there is no end to the life of my pain. But when I focus on the soil of heart and how it has been turned over, there is no end to the mix of feelings that defy my want to name them. Tragedy stays alive by feeling what’s been done to us. Peace comes alive by living with the result.”

What is the goal of my life? My goal is to be happy. I deserve to be happy. We all do.

The happiness balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly, but I do the work anyway, because life is short and thank the Universe, I’m still here.

Plugged back in to the once unplugged

In May 2012 I’d had enough of cult television and cancelled my satellite subscription, leaving me with only “Netflix” movies. I lived in that bubble until just before Christmas 2016 when I decided to re-engage with the “media-ogre” world.

I had had four years of commercial-free living, save the banner along the right-hand panel of my favorite online weather website, which repeatedly depicted a computer-generated “before and after” wrinkled face of a woman in an advertisement for some obscure miracle facelift company. “Google” also had tried to influence me too, of course, mapping out my favorite go-to websites and placing them strategically along the top of any number of pages I visited. 

However, seeing as how I lived in a rather structured “online bubble” that involved learning about sailing, most of the advertising was for boring stuff like braided halyard lines or pulley wheels for my mast.

No tv satellite meant I didn’t watch comedy series, no “CSI” or “NCIS,” no hyped-up news programs, no Hollywood or music award shows, no cartoons, no political rhetoric, no drama. Life was simple and most of all my decisions about “stuff” weren’t based on what the “boob tube” told me to buy, say, do, or believe. 

This is not to say that I didn’t keep up with world events. I listened to the radio a lot, read the good old newspaper, or clicked the headlining news story online and scanned it for the parts that interested me.

This also is not to say I didn’t miss out on a lot of really good informative television by walking away—and hence one of the reasons why I decided to step back in to the digital race and get myself re-rooted in an optional course of life.

I hadn’t seen really good high definition television in forever, save going to a friend’s house where the tv was on, or sitting in the entertainment lounge at my local tv dealership watching the small hairs on the back necks of the football players sway as the brutes ran the field for a touchdown. It was time to check in.

I can only imagine what I must have looked like to a seasoned “televisionee” as I watched—bug-eyed—my first hour-long current television series in more than four years, dipped every few minutes in the most amazing commercials for shampoo, cars, “Viagra,” ocean cruise lines “to where!!”, the newest mobile technologies, and of course “GEICO,” ads in which the lizard hasn’t aged at all since I last him in 2012 (it must be that miracle facelift!!)

So far I’ve been “Bachelorized,” “Pawn Starred,” and watched zombies walk the earth, dragging that one foot—which I gather is a popular pastime for couch potatoes? Good heavens.

But perhaps the best of all the shows I have wandered in and out of over the past three weeks was the “Golden Globe Awards,” broadcast live on Sunday night from “good ol’ Hollywood,” which hasn’t changed a bit. 

It’s still glitzy, glamorous, and full of opinions—the most memorable of which being that of Meryl Streep, who in her “understated” yet dignified speech reminded us out here in “La La Land” that we’re in for a rather unwelcome change.

What I learned from a duck

In 1992 a shipping container fell overboard on its way from China to the United States, releasing 29,000 rubber ducks into the Pacific Ocean. 10 months later the first of these rubber ducks washed ashore on the Alaskan coast. 

Since then these ducks have been found in Hawaii, South America, Australia, and traveling slowly inside the Arctic ice. But 2,000 of the ducks were caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents moving between Japan, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and the Aleutian islands. 

Items that get caught in the Gyre usually stay in the Gyre, doomed to travel the same path, forever circling in the same waters—but not always. Their paths can be altered by a change in the weather, a storm at sea, or a chance encounter with a pod of whales.

More than 20 years after the rubber ducks were lost at sea, they are still arriving on beaches around the world and the number of ducks in the Gyre has decreased. 

This means it is possible to break free. Even after years of circling the same waters it is possible to find a way to shore.” 

This isn’t a column about rubber ducks, but the history lesson did strike a chord with me. As I see it, the duck gyre paralleled one of the great mysteries of the human experience. 

Do we risk it and break free?

Imagine a fork in the road of life. A fork in the road, in my opinion, leaves me three choices. Go back to the old way from whence I came, or go left, or go right. 

One of these three choices can lead me to back to a comfort zone and two of them to try unknowns. Any choice can lead me to stumble and fall. 

Choice can lead me to leap and fly. 

Choice can produce the flat stare, make me use swear words; make me laugh, cry, smile or jump for joy. Choice can lead to wonderful experiences I’ve longed for, some lessons I’ve needed to learn and some I wish I’d never known. 

What I know for sure is that I don’t want to be one of the lifers who are destined to travel the path of least resistance, forever circling in the same waters and not thinking I have the power to choose. I don’t want to wait around for my course to be altered by a pod of whales or a windy day.

I want to be the one to break free.

The music band “Five for Fighting” challenges with their lyrics, “What kind of world do you want?” 

I’d like to think simpler times would be nice. Times that don’t crowd our days and nights with stress and worry and the incessant blathering of television news programs that perpetuate the frenzy and hype of the terrible misfortune of others.

Turn off the television and connect with human beings. Tell stories of when you were young. Put away your cell phone. Stop texting and really talk to and listen to the ones you love. Make the choice to connect the old fashioned way. 

Life is short. Make it count.
-- 

Out with the old house mouse

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”

A.A. Milne, of “Winnie the Pooh” fame, penned that quote long ago, but I’ll bet you a box of chocolate-covered cherries he stole it from his wife, Dorothy, when he overheard her whispering what he thought was an optimistic comment.

In all likelihood, she was glaring with gritted jaw at the heap of pants and socks he’d left on the floor on his side of the horsehair bed—and under the pile of clothes she discovered the moldy cookies in his pants pocket responsible for that “smell” she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Me? I found mouse poop in my trunk of Christmas decorations.

The last page of “O, The Oprah Magazine,” where Oprah Winfrey writes her column, “What I Know For Sure,” is the first thing I flip to every time I pick the magazine off the rack at the grocery store. Oprah’s sage advice hardly ever disappoints. 

The column I’d read was all about pleasure and gratitude, how to recognize it every day—however small and even when things really stink. 

So, of course, it got me to thinking. What pleasure is there in the discovery of mouse poop in the trunk of Christmas decorations?

Upon further investigation, I discovered a number of treasured keepsake ornaments made of glitter glue—all born of my daughters’ long ago primary years—shredded into chunks of disorderly nothing. Where, oh where, is the gratitude in that?

This “exciting discovery” made for a spilling of expletives from my mouth further lessening gratitude and drowning out the pleasure of “Superstar Christmas” music playing through my Bluetooth stereo. 

 
I dreaded digging further into the decorations to assess what else had been damaged. Everything Christmas was stored in that trunk 11 months out of the year.

Lo and behold, the pest had been creating mayhem for some time, with evident layers of assault on decorations to back up his crimes. Paper bells from Grade Three were toast. A old popcorn ball rolled in red glitter was now Swiss cheese and the little red bows once tied to a dozen tiny antique china bells were frayed and virtually unrecognizable. 

Tinsel shredded, egg carton ornaments pulverized, and my Christmas stocking holier than the nativity scene.

At any given time of the day at least two of the four cats that live here with me have been sleeping within feline earshot of the Christmas trunk—quite clearly unaware of the savory morsel lurking in their midst.

But as I flipped open the lid of an old “Noma” lights box stuffed in the bottom of the trunk the mouse hiding in the raffia I’d stored in there shot me the beady bulging eyes of panic, cleared the top of the trunk, hit the floor and blew past a cat who’d been poised on the rug. 

A short time later said cat returned licking it lips as if to say, “Yes, pleasure and gratitude really are found in the small things.”

Does this make me look short?

Most of the time I would be ever so grateful to be one or two inches taller.

For a short time when I was ten years old, I towered above everyone else in my class at Sixth Street School, and then my growth hormones decided they had better things to do.

In my preteens I stood on my tippy toes and stretched in front of my dresser mirror, hoping my shell would crack. I tried hanging from the door frame letting my legs dangle hoping gravity would make me taller and that I’d reach a new mark on the measuring stick graphic drawn by my dad in permanent marker on the wall of his carpentry shop.

When I was a youngster I believed my short stature was the result of being stunted by guilt after a stern warning by my Sixth Street School principal, the late great Ernie Buchan.

He’d figured out it was me who had made several alterations to the daily attendance sheet in my four-grade classroom when no one was looking and confronted me about it after school one afternoon.

For reasons I still don’t understand, I was convinced that I wouldn’t get caught (while waiting for the bus in my classroom) rubbing out the “P-for-Present” beside every other student’s name but my own, and penciling them all in as “A-for-Absent.” 

Though Mr. Buchan’s reprimand amounted to nothing more than a reminder about right and wrong, it cancelled out any and all seedling plans to be a mischievous kid ever again.

My short stuff harangued me in Grade Nine gym class. I couldn’t volley the ball over the net, I couldn’t spike, dribble, or slam dunk my way through any sport on the gym floor. I despised gym class for that reason. I also wasn’t allowed to shave my legs or underarms when I was 13 and I really, really needed to do that.

By the time I reached the end of high school, my goal in life was to be an airline stewardess. I had taken deep thought stabs at psychology and biology careers but given that I always got a “D” in math class and dropped out of math as soon as the powers that be allowed it in high school, those job options appeared a tad far fetched.

I opted for a two-year course in Travel and Tourism Administration at Confederation College in Thunder Bay. I could be a travel agent and a stewardess. I was glassy-eyed about catching the red eye to France.

I went post-secondary with bells on, until our lead professor in the Travel and Tourism program asked each of us to tell the class what we wanted to do when we graduated in two years.

He pulled me aside after class, and though kind on his words, said I was too “short” for airline duty. Talk about having your hopes crash-landed.    

        

I also was blessed with the curvier end of the Greek figure and the “XL” tattoo on my behind. In all of my life I don’t think I’ve ever slipped on a pair of pants in a department store that aren’t two-sizes too big in the waist to compensate for my the junk in the trunk, with three to four inches of extra length in the leg to remind me that I did not make the “average-to-regular” percentile list on the sewing room floor.

And though on numerous occasions I have declared a personal boycott of pantyhose that claim to be “thigh and tummy slimmers,” I continue to buy them, as I do the large Hershey milk chocolate bars partially responsible for why I wear the demon nylons.

I continue to pull a groin muscle and strangle everything below my belly button inserting myself into the undergarment, pushing that last little bit of curvy fat down into the waistband while turning blue.

And though I always manage to pour all of me into the evil contraption, I’m left with rolls of extra nylon pooled in wrinkles at my ankles like an elephant’s back leg, because I’m too short--my height and weight don’t match the chart on the back of the product card—ever. 

Here comes that Christmas party dress again short stuff. Hold your breath.

It was a scene to remember

There is that frozen moment in time between this second and the next when all possible scenarios play out as a movie in which I am in a long, long hallway and being sucked toward an inevitable fate . . .

I was on a reconnaissance mission of sorts in my garage, digging for hibernated winter coats and boots that were gaining fast appeal on cold and crisp November mornings.

I found more than I bargained for. I should have known it was going to be one of those days as I reached in behind one box to check out another without a visual line of sight and felt something furry at my finger tips. Upon further investigation with a flashlight, I found three dead mice—one in a trap by itself and two “Hatfield and McCoy” saps in another that must have fought for the last piece of cheese and landed a dirt nap.

But it wasn’t going to be the mice to blame for the next discovery.

Low and behold my winter boots and my skates were impacted with  whole dried mushrooms and pine cones. I needed a sharp pointy instrument to chip away the cemented crud before I could see the insoles. That was a squirrel’s doing for sure.

I was still hot over the destruction last fall of my favourite red plaid wool coat that I’d stored to my satisfaction in the garage until I found it shredded like parmesan cheese by said squirrel who had used it to build a winter nest in a bag of Christmas garland on a different shelf.

Obviously my “100^th time” extermination plan remained a failure—this time stewed in mushrooms and pinecones.

It wasn’t until I found the hole in the fascia board outside, did I realize that my ongoing battle to batten down the hatches of my garage was about to meet with victory. 

But by the time I’d found the hole, I also had pulled nearly everything off the shelving and discovered multiple hiding places for squirrel stashes including in a box of old dishes where all the newspaper I’d wrapped so carefully on each plate and cup was now diced by squirrel teeth into bits of confetti layered with dried mushrooms, pine cones, and sunflower seeds akin to a vegan lasagna.

By the time I found the hole I was so hot under the collar that I was climbing the ladder with my roll of chicken wire and steel wool, hammer and nails, using very bad words and vacant of all sensibility and caution.

I reached the top of the ladder and shoved my muzzle up into the hole with vicious contempt and came face to face with a beady eyed, vibrating, chattering hot mess of a rodent on drugs.

There is that frozen moment in time between this second and the next when all possible scenarios play out as a movie in which I am in a long, long hallway and being sucked toward an inevitable fate . . .

This and that and fat

I’m back in Boot Camp, where most of the food is green, protein is lean, and exercise takes a sweaty heart pumping front seat to an evening of good tv and a glass of wine. Or two. 

Leave it to me to procrastinate until just four weeks before Christmas before putting my big girl panties on. Correction. It is because I cannot get my big girl panties on without lying down on the bed and writhing akin to a spoiled child, that I’m up for change. There’s no turning back until I can see my toes again. 

I began this umpteenth health kick one week ago and was doing so well until about 5 p.m. that day when I went to Menard’s to buy cat food for “G-man’s” cat and passed by the chocolate bars on my way to the pay clerk. A ‘Whatchamacallit’ had my name on ii (being my favourite American chocolate bar in the world.)

It never occurred to me how empty-headed I was until I’d left the store, driving down the road with half the chocolate bar shoved in and the other half at the ready--the wrapper already thrown aside.

Oh folly! Oh fate! My eyes bulged out.

“What are you doing?!” I shouted to myself. “What is that chocolate bar doing in your mouth?!” I squealed. “Have you lost your mind?!”

I ranted and kept poking in the “Whatchmacallit” because heaven forbid I couldn’t waste it!

That’s the way the world has gone ‘round for the first week, as if there are two of me—the healthy wannabe who starts to make a salad and the “chocoholic” who drags her knuckles along the cutting board thinking up every possible sabotage to leafy green vegetables she can muster.

 

I have a desk job and it’s making me fat. I swear, no sooner did I sit down two years ago and the Buddha belly morphed into 10 more pounds of jiggle goo. Everything in my closet is getting bigger, creeping up sleuth-like as if I wouldn’t notice—one size beyond the beyond mark I swore I wouldn’t go beyond ten years ago.

Just this morning, staring down at the scale, sucking in my ‘buddha” so I could actually SEE the numbers and I was still trying every trick in the book to fake it out—naked, hanging on to the wall with one foot off the scale while holding my breath until blue-faced. I couldn’t hide anymore.

Right then and there I blamed every man I’d ever married or dated—for who else was there to blame for everything I’d eaten in moments of relationship roller coasters, but the MEN!

Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit of this and that. This chip bowl, that vat of dip, this glass of wine, that one too, that desk job, this comfy chair at home after work, that chocolate bar, this one too, and no sweat.

The “this and that” list is going to change.

Life in the animal kingdom

Life is busy and there isn’t much down time. 

I used to think the busiest chunk of my life was when my kids were “littles,” but even then I found time to read a novel while they all played together at the park. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book unless it was to dust under it. There’s just no time.

As if juggling two and a half jobs, country home upkeep, and three needy cats isn’t enough for one mere woman. As if I didn’t already have more than enough shenanigans living with me by the name of “Millie,” “Muffin,” and “Louie,”—three felines who believe it is my job in life to feed them pate from a can and allow them carte blanche on counter tops and furniture.

I drove two hours to pick the next two instigators. I drove my brand new 2017 SUV—complete with pristine upholstery and that unmistakable smell of a new bank loan. I drove two hours having never seen the animals in person; knowing them only by story and photograph and that I wanted them very much. 

My lower jaw is still sore from where it hit the ground that day when I laid eyes on them as their caregiver did the introductions and I realized I’d just adopted a small lion and a gazelle.

It was a “What the . . ?” moment as the two six-year-old Great Pyrenees/Border Collie mix canines bounded out the door of their caregiver’s house and unconditionally into the back of my brand new SUV.

“Tank,” weighing in at nearly 100 pounds should be in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records’ for the longest strings of dueling drool ever carried on the lower lips of a dog. The slobber swayed precariously near my ear on the drive home as ‘Tank’ loomed panting over the back seat. 

By the time we reached my house he’d managed to slap a trail of goo on every inch of upholstery he could reach, and on both back seat passenger windows where the drool dripped down the immaculate interior into the storage compartments on each door, pooling in the yet unused water bottle stations. 

And that, as they say, was just the beginning. I’ve had the dogs for almost 60 days, three hours and 10 minutes, but who’s counting. 

They have extraordinarily good temperaments and gentle ways—a tribute, no doubt, to their upbringing with their first caregiver who did an awesome job.

I’m addicted to those loving, saucer eyes and soft noses—drool and copious hair shedding not so much. The wag of tail at sight of me after work and the doggie hugs—priceless.

Now only if they came ready to feed themselves and knew how to open the door and go outside for a poop in the dark on their own without bolting off into the field swift on the scent of something unseen. 

I wish it had been the squirrel from my garage. Alas, a skunk.

    

Still learning what it all means

I just turned 56 years old. Where has the time gone? Where have I been all my life? How did I get here?

Just like the song, “7 Years” by Lucas Graham, I turned around and I was 10, chasing after crayfish shells along the creek and reading fairy tales that I believed in. I turned around again and I was 21, and married. Married at 21?! Wow.

I turned around and I was 30, with three little children, 34 and a single parent. Spin ‘round again and crowding 50 and so many questions; and now here I am suddenly closer to 60 and oh my, I’m still feeling as if I haven’t yet begun to know who I truly am.

I was born the day before Halloween and as a kid my birthdays always were full of spooky celebrations with my girlfriends. 

We would sit in the dark and pass around bowls peeled grapes, cold spaghetti, jiggle Jell-O, (eyes, guts, and brains) --pseudo body parts--that my mom had prepared for us giggly goofs to sink our fingers into while we sat in a circle and told ghost stories. It was gross. It was so much fun.

Then, my mom would top it all off with a birthday cake that had a new Barbie doll standing in the middle of an inverted sponge cake that billowed outward and was decorated like Barbie’s party dress. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and best of all; the Barbie was mine when all the cake was gone.

Inside the cake, my mom had hidden ten-cent pieces wrapped in wax paper. Magically we all managed to find a dime in our piece of cake. It was amazing and I, for one, felt rich.

Ten cents would buy a handful of candy at the local store near the school. I think it even bought a chocolate bar.

When I was one year old, I put my face in my birthday cake. Plunk. Just like that. Oh, the undeniable free spirit of the young at heart. I did it again when I turned 18, a calculated move. Plunk. Hilarious.

I still have my Barbie dolls in a box. I still love birthday cake, spooky stories, and chocolate, and fairy tales.

I still wonder where am I going and what this woman who is me is going to learn about herself today. Some of it I will like, and some of it I won’t.

I wonder about the tomorrow river and the circumstances that are sure to come along, as they always do, that I will not understand and if I will remember to do as Pema Chodron wrote: 

“The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart—to the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart. You are given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.”

Here I go.

Hello Me, I'm back

 I’ve been away.

I’d love to say it was because I was in the places of my heart--hiking the Pacific Coast trail or the magnificent mountain territory of Wyoming or long highway under the clear blue skies of Iceland.

Nope. Alas, those destinations remain in my shoebox full of goals called a bucket list.

I’ve been away from the page because I was very unhappy and I don’t write well at all when I am unhappy.

A part of my life had become unmanageable, like really bad hair. I left it uncombed too long, it got matted and mouse-nested and instead of giving it loving care, I just gathered up my unhappiness in a bun and pretended it was okay, and made excuses for why I should live with it. It stole my sense of things and buried it in the manure pile behind the barn.

I kept my mouth shut and my head down and I got sideswiped by a severe case of codependency. I got lost and I didn’t really know how to find my way back to being true to myself.

I would look back at my path over the last few years and think, “Seriously? Haven’t I had enough rough patches? When is my turn for once? Why does life have to be so hard all the time? I must deserve it.”

I fed the bad wolf. I played the victim role to a “T.”  

I wore that long, flowing black cape of unhappiness like a pro. Sometimes it was two city blocks long, double-knotted around my neck. Sometimes my unhappiness cape was there with me in the shower, it covered my pajamas at night, and lay around my feet at the kitchen table in the morning during breakfast.

Even when I was driving in my car my cape followed behind me billowing in the wind and as soon as I slowed down it snapped to a stop and fell in around me.

But let’s be clear on one thing. This was not depression. This was failure to be true to myself and I used all the tricks and excuses and scenarios in the book to convince myself why I could not just stand up and say “No” to this black caped sleuth.

And then something happened. That one needle in the haystack of unhappiness poked me in the toe and woke me up. It was time for change, to follow through on difficult decisions, and be true to me. I got my wings back.

Every story starts with that first word, maybe three.

I’ve been away.