Muchness and Light

Please learn to rule with your head, not your fist, and those lessons that you learn will carry on.

After Max was born, I remember reading some parenting book (though I can’t remember which) that said not only does your newborn not know that it’s not an extension of you, it doesn’t know that it’s not you.

It makes sense. The baby’s entire existence has been literally attached to you, dependent on you for everything. This doesn’t really change for months, especially during those first vital weeks, when your entire life feels like a never-ending game of Keep the Freakin’ Baby Alive!

But there does come a time when your child starts to articulate its own personality. It was fascinating to me (still is!) to see the ways Max and Tricky both looked and acted like me or DH—and the ways in which they didn’t. No matter if your child has your dimples and the other parent’s cheekbones, they will eventually exhibit certain characteristics that are totally uncharacteristic of either parent. It was always fascinating to me to discover my children.

While mine are both biologically mine, I suppose parents of children who aren’t born of the parents’ biology have their won type of discovery. The determination of Nature versus Nurture would be necessarily different, though just as fascinating. In no way do I mean to denigrate that experience; it is simply one I have never had.

Regardless of how your child comes into your world, you have dreams and hopes and expectations for it. Of course, this is at the heart of construct of gender and social stereotypes, and the later pressures that can come from such constructs, but it also inevitably shapes the ways in which you parent your child.

I try not to judge other parents. There are, of course, parenting choices that I wouldn’t and didn’t choose, and there are choices other parents make that I would never make for Max and Tricky. Sometimes I do find myself privately harsh when speaking of those choices. But, generally, I believe each parent must make those decisions for their own child, knowing them and loving them in ways only a parent can.

One of the things I was adamant about when the boys were young—and got great support from DH on this—was not forcing them to be any certain way or to have certain thoughts. I always tried to give them information and to help guide them toward the decisions that were best for them, even if those decisions were counter to the ones that I would make for them or for myself. Of course, sometimes I had to use a parental veto, and that could be met with disdain or anger or outright indignation.

When Rango and I were together, we argued regularly about how his approach to the boys was counter to everything they’d come to expect. He expected them to fall in line with whatever he said, and respect was code for obedience. I have encouraged them to express their emotions, even in an impassioned way, as long as that expression was respectful. I do not tolerate name-calling and insults, though they have certainly slipped into heated conversations at times, whether toward each other or toward me. I am just as adamant that they make the repair after they inflict damage.

As I have said for years, I am not raising children; I am raising young men. I expect Max and Tricky to be self-actualized adults, who are capable of self-sustenance and educated decisions about their own paths. I hope that they are happy, healthy men, who successfully navigate whatever path they choose, but also who can admit to their mistakes and apologize for their transgressions, whether toward someone else or toward themselves.

All I have ever been able to do is to try to give them the knowledge they need to make the right decision for themselves, in line with their own moral compass.

Max graduated high school this year, spent a month abroad as part of a cultural exchange, and started college as a sophomore. Together, we made the decision that he would live at home this year. In many ways, it has given us both time to adjust to his burgeoning adulthood.

If he were living in the dorms, I wouldn’t have any clue what he’s doing in his spare time. I wouldn’t know if he’s eating healthy or getting a reasonable amount of sleep. I wouldn’t know about his extra-curricular activities. And so, I’m trying to give him the freedom to explore his new world, with the encouragement and support to do so safely.

In so many ways, it’s like when he became a toddler, demanding to explore the world on his terms but running back to me for a hug and a soothing kiss when he got scared or hurt. Sometimes I have to let him fall and then offer him a hand to get back up. I cannot take the hits for him.

Mostly I hope that I have given him the tools to make smart choices about which hits to take.

No matter what, Max and Tricky aren’t me. No matter how much they can remind me of teenage DH at times, they aren’t their father. They are wonderfully intricate, self-contained psyches made up of the best and the worst of everything they’ve experienced, including their parents.

This is at the heart of the teenage rebellion—a rejection of what you have mastered in order to establish your own identity. It is painful for both teen and parent, and adolescents can be complete assholes, but they’re essentially overgrown toddlers playing dress-up with incredibly high stakes.

I have no doubt that I defied my parents’ expectations. I am positive I was, at times, a complete disappointment. I have no doubt that they would have chosen differently for me, if they’d had a say in it at all.

And, the fact is, many of my choices were (and continue to be) in conscious, direct rebellion to their wishes. I am independent and stubborn, often flouting their notions of an ideal child. But I was left to take care of myself from a young age, and I bypassed normal childhood almost entirely. I stopped seeking their permission and their approval long ago, and I feel absolutely no obligation to meet their expectations of me—nor do I care to psychologize what those expectations are now.

In reality, I hope Max and Tricky will eventually do the same. I don’t want them to be grown men who need or strive for validation from their mother. (I’m sure I’ve done enough to screw them up that that doesn’t need to be another topic for their own therapist’s office.) They shouldn’t need my approval to make choices for themselves or their children, though I will always be happy to offer advice and support and encouragement. I may snark about their choices privately, but I will have done my job (and kept the freakin’ baby alive!) if they are in a position to even make those choices.

I will always be, as I have always been, present for my sons. I will always ask them about their day and listen carefully to their response (even when it’s just a grunt). I will always encourage them to make healthy choices and then take them to the doctor when they need it. I will always give them information and ask for their opinions regarding decisions about them. I will always try to give them what they need, not what I think they should need.

In the end, they are living their lives. It’s not me making those decisions or walking their paths, any more than they can walk mine.

But I will continue to offer them a hand and a hug and a safe, reliable place to return, because that is what good parents do.

 

 

Everything has changed. It's a different kind of Christmas.

The first year DH and I were separated, I couldn’t stand being at home for Christmas. The boys and I packed up all our gifts and drove three hours to Alabama, back to family and where DH and I had grown up and where the boys had been born, locking our jaws tightly on high-held heads and got through our first Christmas as a family of three. The second year, I couldn’t stand to drag out the Christmas ornaments we’d collected as a family for years, so the boys and I made our own decorations that year. The court-mandated visitation schedule had begun, and Max and Tricky spent the first half of their Christmas holiday with their dad and his then-girlfriend. When they came home on Christmas Eve, they were sugar-coated and excited, announcing that we would be doing Christmas Guatemalan-style! and opening gifts at midnight. I made breakfast at 2 a.m., and that was the last time both boys slept with me in my bed.

For the next three years, we incorporated Rango into our new tradition. He didn’t have fond Christmas memories from his own childhood, and he was amenable to adopting ours. The day of celebration and the celebratory menu changed, depending on the visitation schedule and on his food allergy. He refused to participate in our annual viewing of A Christmas Story, saying it reminded him of unhappy Christmases growing up in a dysfunctional family. He would game elsewhere, while Max, Tricky, and I piled on the couch and yelled lines at the television, like we’d created our own Rocky Horror Christmas Show.

This year, without Rango, we weren’t limited by his food allergies or his ghosts. When I casually asked the boys what they’d like to eat for middle-of-the-night breakfast, Max cried out and demanded Waffle House.

“It’s Christmas. They’ll be open.”

And this is how a new Christmas tradition was born.

Traditions are beautiful. They tie you to a shared past and anchor you in loving nostalgia. But they are not fully fixed and are open to adaptation, to making them contemporaneously cogent. Some changes are welcomed—a new baby, a new marriage, a new home—and some are not. Since my divorce, both of my grandmothers have passed away, and childhood memories of being at their houses for the holidays are forever frozen in time. While the respective families have worked to create new memories and new traditions, it is bittersweet to conjure those last Christmases with my grandmothers.

I know many families who are creating new traditions this year. New babies make the holidays seem so much brighter. The loss of mothers and children and beloved family members can blur the holiday lights with slow, hot tears. But another Christmas, another new year, is coming and going, and how it is marked is completely up to them.

This is the last Christmas I know for sure that Max will be home. My baby will be graduating high school soon, and he will begin the slow embark on his own adult life. Eventually he will establish his own traditions and schedule that may not include me or his dad or his brother, not in the ways it has through his childhood. He will always be here in some way, but I don’t know how many more times I will get to hear the cacophony of my little boys parading down the hall to open gifts, or the sound of wrapping paper being ripped and tossed at light speed, or the boyish squeal of delight at having received just what they wanted.

“I’ll always come home…. I have to get my presents!”

“But you may be at your girlfriend’s parents’ ski retreat in Aspen,” I retorted.

“Yay. More presents for me,” Tricky chimed in.

But even when they are grown and bringing their babies home to create new memories at Sass’s house (yes, we’ve already agreed that Sass is the likely grandma name), Christmas at midnight—even if it’s on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Day or by phone—is something the boys and I can always share. Waffle House is always open; middle-of-the-night hashbrowns can come any day we like.

We were surprised to find our local Waffle House half-filled with grown families, dressed in spirited dress wear, as if they’d come after midnight mass. Two were apparently regulars who’d come to share a meal and bring a gift for their regular server, who hugged each of them and wished them a merry Christmas. Our new tradition of leaving a generous tip for our 1 a.m. server wasn’t original, but it did help to anchor us in this time, when it is still just Sass and her boys, for the inevitable coming change.

To everyone who is living tradition-challenging change this year, go with it. No matter the reason, find something in the newness in which to anchor yourself, and make it your own. There may be laughter or tears, unequivocal joy or breath-stealing heartache. Make them into what you need. They are yours to do with as you wish.

I wish you all love, light, and peace in this holiday season.

 

 

In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I shall meet.

Since my thyroid radiation in July, I’ve been struggling with still feeling like general crap. Fatigue and brain fog have been intermittently worse. A pretty leisurely two-mile walk with Rango and the boys recently wiped me out for two days. My bloodwork shows wildly-swinging levels of thyroid hormones, indicating that the regrown tissue is indeed dying off, though it may be months before it normalizes.

With that has also come more weight regain and self-recrimination and outright self-loathing.

I have tried to get back into the gym even semi-regularly. It’s hard enough to juggle work and school and kids successfully, and trying to find even six hours a week for myself in that is sometimes unmanageable. Of course I know the exercise will actually help me to feel better, but the fatigue that comes with hypothyroidism can be unimaginably oppressive.

Recently I started a series of virtual races through Yes.Fit. Of course I chose the Alice in Wonderland themed races. After I complete so many miles, as tracked by my Misfit activity tracker, my medal is sent to me automatically. As of today, I’ve completed three of the six Alice races, totaling more than 60 miles.

As it does every day, Facebook was kind enough to remind me this morning of memories from this day in previous years. I find it interesting to see how life has changed over the last few years, but I tend to face those reminders with some trepidation. I love the pictures and funny quotes from my boys from their younger days. Sometimes the memories are useless or now meaningless, or sometimes even too painful, and I’ll delete them. Sometimes I leave the painful ones, knowing those ghosts will haunt me again next year, because I’m either not ready to deal with them or I know they’re so important that I will need the reminders again.

But today, there were two things, from 2010 and 2011. Not surprising, there were pictures from a 2010 concert, of a band I loved then and love now. It was the second in a series of shows that were seminal for the changes that would come over the following two years. A year later, it was the memory that was down 99 of the 115 pounds in total weight loss. Yet another year later, I’d just separated from my now-ex-husband.

All of that has fueled my writing since 2010, which began with the realization that I’d lost my muchness--just like Alice in Wonderland.

I have said repeatedly over the last year that, for a variety of reasons, I felt like I was back in 2010 and didn’t know why I was reliving such similar circumstances. Regardless of the logistical changes and strides I know I have made, I have replayed the past in tandem with the present and come up with only confusion and emotional failure. I have continually grappled with figuring out which choice I didn’t make or should’ve made differently. I’ve tried to re-learn whatever lesson I obviously needed to repeat.

But somehow, I keep sliding farther and farther into the past. Where 2010 may have felt like a rabbit hole, 2016 is feeling more and more like the other side of a looking glass. Where then felt new and exciting and rebellious, now feels reflective and reversed and exhausting.

What is it? What did I miss? What do I need now that can only be retrieved from then?

It just so happens that Alice Through the Looking Glass comes out on DVD this week. Of course I saw it in the theater when it opened--how could I not?--but I really didn’t love it as much as I did the first one. It was beautiful, and I looked for the clues to my missing lessons, but the torment of Time was unsettling to me. I could willingly believe in a lost young woman traveling to surreal place and conquering her fears, but it was almost impossible for me to suspend my disbelief as the same woman mended old wounds.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe my path has been a big circle, and maybe the obstacle is an unturned stone.

Certainly I can pinpoint errors and mistakes and regrettable decisions, but I feel like I have done everything in my power to apologize and make amends for those actions. I would say I have done my best to move on, but I damn well know there are frozen moments that continue to haunt me.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something. It is maddening, appearing and disappearing, always just out of my reach.

So I’m starting back at the beginning, at Alice. I am literally retracing my steps, one foot in front of the other, until I can find a way to the next landmark on this destination. I don’t want to believe that I am personally destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, that there is literally no way to avoid spiritual repetition. I’ve already seen the White Rabbit, I just passed the Cheshire Cat and am making my way toward the Mad Hatter. There is still the Caterpillar and the Queen of Hearts.

After that, I’m seriously considering the Pac-Man races, where I get to eat a series of brightly-colored ghosts.

I fall to pieces each time I see you again.

Last Thursday night, I was the recipient of the 2015 Georgia Occupational Award of Leadership. This was a huge honor, and I worked very hard for the award, as did my amazing competitors from the other schools in the Technical College System of Georgia. Any one of us could have been named this year's winner, but it just so happens that it was me.

Rango and Tricky were at the awards banquet, as was my mom who'd driven in from Alabama. Max was with DH's mom at his mandatory band concert at school. My dad was in Alabama, helping to care for my dying grandmother.

I called him after I made it back to my hotel room that night. He was leaving her house after helping to care for her all day.

"She's asleep right now," he said, "but your uncles promised they'd tell her that you won when she wakes up."

The next night, he called to tell me that she had taken a turn for the worse.

My grandmother was 14 when she met my grandfather as he did his Vaudeville-style magic show on the steps of an Alabama courthouse. They eloped to Mississippi when she was 15 and he was 22. They built the house they lived in, literally with their own bare hands. They moved into it when it had only subfloors. She stained all of the cabinets and paneling. He wired the house, and they hung the sheetrock together.

Paw-paw levitating Maw-maw, circa 1955

More importantly, they raised a family in that house. Four children and seven granddaughters and two great-grandsons. My teenaged parents lived with me in that house for the first months of my life. We later lived next door to my grandparents, as did two of my cousins. My aunt, who is six years older than I am, used to race each other down the hall and slide across the slick, poured floor in our socks and slam into the heavy, wooden front door as we laughed breathlessly. My memories of childhood are filled with Saturday nights in that house, sprawled across the makeshift bed of piled blankets and pillows, laying on my stomach and watching "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" with my aunt while my grandmother brought us bowls of hot, buttery popcorn that she'd cooked in an iron skillet on the stove.

My grandfather always got the first bowl.

When I was sleepy and it was time to go home with my parents, she would sit me on her lap and put my shoes on my feet for me.

"She can do it herself," I remember my dad saying to her once. I was probably about eight and totally capable.

"I know," she shushed him, rocking me and hugging me close.

More importantly, more poignantly, I can remember her singing. She would sit me in her lap and draw pictures for me, anything I asked to see, and sing. My first memory is of her changing me on her bed and singing to me. As she would work around the house, especially when she was cooking and washing dishes, she would sing, usually the country classics by Jim Reeves or Hank Williams or Patsy Cline.

And my grandfather would sing back.

He would be in one room while she was in another, and they would sing bits of love songs to each other. They would randomly, without request or prompt, walk up and kiss each other. He would pat her affectionately on the back of the head, like he did all of us.

"I love you, doll," he would say.

"I love you, too, hun."

She had magic.

 

Painting of Red and Dean, by my uncle

 

Red and Dean Quinn taught me, taught us all, what true love could be. They would argue ("We're not arguin'—we're just discussin'.") and they would make up. They cared for each other in the good and the bad, and they loved each other.

Four children, seven granddaughters, two great-grandsons.

I drove to Alabama last Saturday, having waited only long enough for the sun to come up behind the morning rains. Having camped all over the southeast with my grandparents as a child, I love a good road trip. Without Rango or the boys, I delved into my music and the podcasts I hadn't been able to get to over the last few weeks.

I came the way I always do, which takes me along the road where my grandfather died in 2006, where his car veered gently off the road and came to rest against a grassy embankment. As I made the turn and realized where I was, my iPod tried to kill me.

I fall to pieces each time I see you again....

I bawled my eyes out as Patsy Cline sang on. I thought of how every time my grandmother would sing Patsy Cline, she would make sure to tell me it was Patsy Cline and then cluck her tongue and shake her head and lament the immense talent lost to tragedy.

And I thought about how it would've killed my grandfather to see her in pain, to see her in the least bit of sorrow or agony. How she wailed when he died, how it surprised no one maybe more than her that her broken heart didn't kill her.

When I got to the house, it was quiet. My aunts and uncles and my dad were there, plus my grandmother's last remaining sister. She was being kept very comfortable.

As I sat in the kitchen in the early afternoon, anxious and helpless to do anything but watch and wait, I started to think about what was coming. I had a moment where I saw the house empty. In my mind's eye, even with the furniture moved away and none of us there, their energy made that house glow. They are ingrained in every fiber of that home.

My grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary, my grandmother

A few hours later, as the end approached, we gathered around her. We held her hand and told her how much we loved her. We cried.

I leaned down to her and very quietly, so that only she and I could hear, I sang to her. A song I know she loved. And with my father and my uncles and my aunt, I stayed with her through the end.

I could've left the room at any time. No one would've blamed me for being overwhelmed by my own emotion or theirs, for feeling the weight of the moment as more than I could bear.

But it felt important, necessary, to bear witness to her passing, to hold her hand and tell her how much I loved her, to offer her any comfort I could in her last shining moments on this earth. She was 37 when I was born—almost six years older than I am now—and for more than half of her life, she'd been Maw-maw, in addition to Mother and Mom and Daughter and Sister and Aunt and Friend and Wife and Dean.

I last saw her two weeks before, when I'd stopped working on the end of my semester work and GOAL prep so I could make sure I saw her. She was uncomfortable, though not in a lot of pain, but she knew what was coming.

She was lucid but quiet. Tired. She would talk for a bit then stare at the soundless television that she let my aunt leave on the Food Network, just because the pictures distracted her from her thoughts. She would talk a bit more then look to an old black-and-white framed picture of the first Quinn family portrait—my grandparents with my dad, all blond and in a bow-tie.

"I'm just glad there's no babies to take care of right now," she told me.

We talked about my school and my boys, about how they'd grown. We talked about how she kept me company and sane when Max was an infant and I was a frightened new mom, totally unsure of how to take care of the baby I'd fought so hard to bring into the world. We talked about the cakes and the soups I would make for her and my grandfather, both as an excuse to try a new recipe and to have a reason to visit them.

"I'm sorry, Steph," she said.

"Why?"

"Just because...." She was so tired.

"No," I told her. "I'm sorry you have to go through this. I'm sorry we can't do anything to make you feel better."

I spent a few hours at her house but had to leave to get back to the boys and my schoolwork.

I hugged her now-thin frame and kissed her cheek. "I love you, Maw-maw."

"I love you, too, hun."

Those were the last words I got from my grandmother. 

Today, while I stood crying at the casket, my dad told me how proud she was of me, how proud she was that I'd won GOAL.

Even when I was a pill of a child, or a pain in the ass of a teenager, I never didn't know that my grandparents loved me and were proud of me. It has been an honor and a blessing for more than 42 years to be able to call Dean Quinn my maw-maw.

We are a strong, close-knit family. We gripe and grumble sometimes—we're not arguin', just discussin'. But because of the example Red and Dean Quinn set for us, we are loving, functional, responsible people who care for each other every chance we get. When we make mistakes, we do our best to make up. But we are family, no matter what.

At the service today, the minister said, "Grief is the price we pay for having loved so well."

In that case, I don't think any two people have ever been so loved.

 

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on?

My grandmother died over the weekend. 

She was 85, and she had been sick for a very long time.  Steadily declining health had forced the decision to move her into a nursing home a few years ago.  Hospice involved a few months ago.  After a few days of infection she just couldn't fight anymore, she went peacefully in her sleep. 

It was a difficult blessing. 

I have a lot of thoughts about her, but I'm not ready to share them publicly yet.  I may never be.  Regardless, I know the woman loved me very much.  She adored my children. 

My Amazonian build came from her, my maternal grandmother.  The long legs and large frame, the big hands that look so much like hers.  My strawberry blond hair and wide open laugh. 

But I'm not ready to delve into that yet. 

The funeral was low-key and relatively quick, just like she wanted.  My brother and cousins carried her pink-rose-laden casket from the hearse.  My brother asked my 13-year-old son to help.  It was first experience in bearing the pall, which is an honor and duty all Southern men must learn to carry.  My dad and stepdad and uncles have all had multiple turns, burdening the final weight of loved ones as a fitting good-bye. 

While the men did their duty, I kept Tricky, who is still too young and spindly to be of much use.  He wanted to be with his big brother and his uncle, though, so I distracted him with my niece.  Glamigail is almost three, and she has a 4-week-old sister, the Glitterbug, who was sleeping soundly, scrunched in a sling on her mother's chest. 

The kids were sweet and quiet through the graveside service, through the remarks of the preacher and the final prayers.  Head down and eyes open, as respectful as possible, I watched the two of them, making sure no mischief ensued in those few moments when no adults would be looking. 

After it was over, Glamigail took off across the green expanse of the cemetery.  Just two weeks after Memorial Day, there were flags on graves, waving at her on a hot, Southern breeze.  The flags were tucked into vases of brightly-colored flowers everywhere.  How could she not go and explore?

Tricky was back and forth between her and Max, still in that time between being outgrowing the child and becoming a man.  He wanted to play with the little blond dynamo of a cousin, but he also wanted to stay with his brother, with the burgeoning young man he relies on and idolizes as fiercely as he sometimes punches him in the gut.  He wanted to be with his uncle, who is goofy and cool and always has kind words for his nephews, especially when he knows their father is so conspicuously absent. 

But it was Max who broke my heart.  Gone is my fat, blond little baby boy.  He is tall (5'9 already) and lanky, lean and long just like his father.  From the neck down, he is DH.  They have the same feet.  They have two moles on their backs in the same places. 

I could see how much he looks like his dad now.  How he has the same gait and the same movement of arms, the same determined look on his face that accentuates the gorgeous cheekbones. 

On Saturday, to escape the grief and the anxiety, I took the boys to stay with Pandy for the night.  A quick visit to PandyLand is always good for me, but the boys adore her and her family.  Tank is always so sweet to let us invade his home.  It's hard enough when it's just Sassafras and Pandy together, but then add the kids—Max and Tricky, plus 2.0 and Leon and Professor X, then even Huffy made a quick appearance!—it is just goofball chaos. 

But Tank talked to my kids like they were just people.  Not kids, not condescending, and with the same liberal life views and geeky interests we have.  He turned Max onto a couple of new shows, and he showed Tricky manly things from the tool box and the shed.  He and I talked music like we always do. 

Ultimately, it was Pandy teaching Max how to throw a football that was my favorite moment. 

Pandy knew DH long before I did.  She knows part of my list of the next great man in my life includes the one who would teach my sons how to throw a football.  I waited for years for DH to do it.  We waited for years. 

I watched her, strong and patient, caring for and attending to my sons just like she does her own.  My hoohas are her hoohas, and vice versa.  And my boys adore her almost as much as I do. 

I'm watching my babies grow into men, slowly and sometimes shakily.  They are as unsure of themselves as I am.  I know it's impossible for me to be everything to them.  Honestly, to fill every gap in their lives with my own brand of Glamazonian crazy seems almost cruel, like I'm setting them up for a lifetime of ridiculous expectations. 

But then I have these moments when I am blessed with friends and family who love my children, who love me, and who extend their own open, glitter-dusted palms to our hearts and grab on gently, refusing to let go even when I am stubborn in my attempts to be everything and more than even I can manage.  The ones who see my exhaustion and know the truth of its source, who know how I am castigating myself for mistakes and missteps, drowning in a sea of OhGodhowdidIdothistomyself?

In those moments, when I see the past and the future colliding in these children, in the hoohas, I can't breathe.  It is beautiful to see a little girl squealing at a half-deflated birthday balloon in the cemetery at her great-grandmother's funeral.  It is stunning to see my sons growing into these perfect combinations of their parents, the intensely wonderful result of two fucked-up people who managed to give the best of themselves to another person long enough to make that perfection. 

And it breaks my heart to know that I wouldn't see the beauty in this, that I wouldn't appreciate such smallness, in quite the same way had so much not gone horribly awry. 

In forty years, it may be my turn.  It may be my rose-laden casket and my golden-haired great-granddaughter.  It may be my grandsons bearing the final weight of me.  I hope beyond hope that my legacy is their being able to appreciate the beauty without having ever had to experience the pain of heartache like this firsthand.  Maybe, just maybe, that their fathers will have learned some secret truths that the Inner Circle and I were able to share with them, that they listened better and learned better how to live and love without tearing each other apart.    

 

It's just prediction, then fate collides. Not sure if I'm surprised.

After a conversation with Hot Pocket and my therapist, I finally made the decision last night to go to the Hunter Hayes show at the Fox, just to see if Bounder would show.

He didn't.

It was okay.  I'd told HP that I expected he wouldn't.  But I knew if I didn't go and give it the opportunity that I would never know what happened.  I would constantly be rolling around in the What-ifs.

It's over.  It's done.  It makes me a little sad that I'm unsurprised by his refusal to show--or even his cowardice at not letting me know so I could at least sell the tickets.  But I'm honestly okay.

I don't know what's coming next--or who--but I'm ready.  I'm ready to just get on with my life without this constant dark cloud chasing me. 

So tonight I'm going out with a new friend.  It's a second date.  And I'm okay with that, too.

Fate has something else in store for me.  I probably won't see it coming, and I'll probably flail about when I feel her hot breath on my neck.  (She always comes in from behind.  She's like that, you know.)  But that's okay, too.  It'll happen when it happens, and I'll be better able to handle it with one less albatross haunting me.

 

Related articles

What a beautiful mess.

She's in a daze, without a care.

Today is Tierney Cavanaugh Johnson's 41^st birthday.  Tierney and I share a lot of things—a dimple, really great hair—including a birthday. 

I had a talk with her last night about what the last year has been like for her.  She went into 40 with a new body and utterly revised outlook on life.  There have been substantial ups and downs:

She separated from her husband of now 19 years, working her way toward divorce.

She met Greg Dulli.

The story of the first 40 years of her life was released into the world in a very public way.

She finally saw Concrete Blonde live. 

She blew a disc in her neck again and spent another few months battling that chronic pain.

She had crazy adventures with her girls.

She went back to Wicker Park, where so much of her story began to change, and got her first tattoo.

She finally realized that she's pretty.

She fell in love again, albeit with another alcoholic. 

She literally laid both new and old ghosts to rest.

She's happily raising two amazing young men. 

She finally realized she's worth far, far more than even she ever knew. 

I checked in with her to wish her a happy birthday.  I told her that I understood fully what an incredible year this has been, and that I have a few hopes for her upcoming year:

I hope she can finally get finished with this divorce process.

I hope Junkture finally gets their new record out and that she loves it as much as the others.

I hope she finds the inspiration to create both new art and a new story.

I hope she steers clear of injury and pain.

I hope she and her girls laugh their way uproariously through their next year.

I hope she both gets back to Chicago.

I hope she's able to get that new tattoo she's considering.

I hope she sees her own beauty, inside and out, every single day.

I hope the next great love of her life is sober and emotionally aware and available.

I hope her ghosts stay dead.

I hope she continues to be the best mom possible to her amazing young men. 

I hope she is comfortable in who she is and that she is able to tap her own potential fully.

Tierney thanked me, giggling and grinning as we sat on my deck and chatted.  For me, she said, she wishes the same things.  And then she thanked me for lending her my strength, even when I thought there was no way in Hell that we would get through this year. 

In all seriousness, thank you to everyone who touches my life every single day.  You may be with me for a moment or a lifetime, but you are part of me.  Just being here to read my words is enough to make you matter to me.  Many of the successes of this last year have been wholly internal and haven't been shared in detail on Muchness and Light, or anywhere else.  But know that I am grateful for each person who offers me their time and their shoulder and their smile.  Your support has brought me this far, and it will help to propel me into what I hope is another unbelievable year. 

Related articles

Getting bigger and brighter, wider and lighter.

Another life for her to put down, pick it up any time she might find enough to get her high.

If I fall through that hole, would you pick me up, if I lose my control and break your loving cup?

Sometimes life hurts.

This is something we all know.  Hell, the mere act of being birthed is probably painful—being squeezed and pulled and prodded into a less comfortable, brighter, louder, more chaotic new world.  (Plus, I think gravity just has to suck after being a relatively freefloating form for the entirety of your previous existence.)

Pain is a natural response to damage.  It's the body's way of telling us something is not right.  We are injured or in danger or did something outside the scope of our normal limitations.  Pain is a necessary device of physical form.

But I'll skip the physical pains associated with being human; I'm pretty sure we're all well-familiarized with bumps and bruises and accidents—the inflictions and afflictions that become our personal histories, filled with anecdotes of our agonies. 

It's the emotional pain that is so often the most debilitating and longest lasting.  Whether it be pain from an outside source or from inside ourselves, our souls are molded by both the nature of the damage and the way in which we react to it. 

Jealousy, anger, sorrow, grief... all signs of emotional pain and some kind of damage.  Betrayal, malice, negligence, parting, death... all naturally occurring events in virtually everyone's lives. 

But it is how we face these pains that determines if and when and how we heal from them. 

Sometimes the damage is minor—your best friend canceled dinner plans with you, again, to see her sometimes boyfriend.  Sometimes it's more substantial—the death of a beloved pet.  And sometimes the harm is so great—betrayal by a lover, death of a close loved one—that we find ourselves paralyzed, both physically and emotionally, in that injury, unable to escape the constant gnaw of harrowing discomfort. 

Just like it's physical counterpart, emotional pain is a necessary part of life.  If we are to move forward on our paths—whether individually or with another—we must encounter hardships.  To never feel the deepest despair means we will never feel the greatest joy when the pendulum swings back the other way.  And it will; it always does. 

If it ebbs, it will flow.

If there is no counterbalance, if we are always in the middle of the road, we can never fully appreciate the wonderful without fully understanding the terrible. 

When emotional hurdles are tossed onto our paths, we do have options:

Stop.  Become still in your life and never get past that place in time. 

Go around it.  Pretend it wasn't there and keep moving forward.  Any time we look back, that hurdle will still be there.

Destroy it.  Smash it.  Bulldoze through it.  Throw it into the briars.  It's still there, even in bits and pieces, but now we're exhausted from the exertion.

Go over it.  Jump, climb, crawl or step—whatever works best.  Conquer the insurmountable in the way that suits each of us best.  It can still be tiring, but the force of energy needed to deal with the hurdle is manageable. 

Regardless of how we choose to deal with the obstacle, it's still an obstacle.  It warrants respect and reverence for being important enough to alter our path, no matter how long or short its wielding of influence may be. 

The key to healing from the damage that's causing such anguish is to feel it, to recognize and accept that we cannot go up until we hit bottom.  We must let our feet touch the hard depths in order to get our footing and push off again, bounding to the top.  Floating freely and erratically in our pain may feel comforting for a while, oddly reminiscent of being in utero, but it will not end until we push hard toward the light at the end of the tunnel that is still squeezing and contracting around us as we go. 

It's incredibly difficult to watch someone you love live their pain.  We want to protect those closest to us from harm, but it's impossible.  The acting of even trying to protect them can inflict more damage than we can imagine.  Everyone has to deal and heal in their own way and in their own time.  Sometimes the best we can do is to offer help—a bandage, stitches, or a hand to squeeze when the pain is too much.  Sometimes a lullaby or a soft shushing will be support enough.  And sometimes all we can do is mutely watch them fall, waiting for them to hit their bottom and come bounding back, rushing toward their light.  Our love may cushion them, but it can never fully break their fall.

Sometimes pain leaves scars.  My physical scars are like a topography map of what I've seen and where I've been, but they are a manifestation of healing from deep trauma and heartache that was inflicted by others but mostly by myself.  At the core of me, I am the same person I've always been, but that old Stephanie isn't exactly the same as the one I am now.  I am grateful for the comprehension of joy and love and truth in ways I'd never experienced before, even if it comes from having my world and my head turned upside down.  I am sometimes disgusted by the proof of my own self-inflicted carelessness, but I also understand that it's made me better able to pause in my journey when needed, to ask myself if the choice before me is healthy or unhealthy.  It's all proof that I was, and still am, ready and able to move forward, no matter what obstacles lie ahead. 

Mom and dad had a lot of plans for their little man.

I was on the phone with Growler this morning, babbling away in my bubbly way, in the midst of my morning rounds of phone calls to the inner circle.  I checked my Facebook feed quickly.

"Oh my god!" I gasped suddenly.

"What?" Growler asked.  Her tone shifted as she heard the dread in my voice.

Another friend had posted the first link to the news about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  I couldn't talk.  I was just horrified.

I read the first article but couldn't look anymore until very late in the afternoon, when I accidentally turned on network news.  Chris Cuomo was recounting the morning's events and talking to various people about what it meant and how it might have come to pass and how the victims and their families might be feeling this evening. 

I can't even imagine.  Like, really, I can't, or I will lose my fucking mind.

When my elder son was born in 2001, I realized pretty quickly that maternal instinct was just a fancy, convoluted term for paranoia.  I really had become that way when I was pregnant with him and some horrific news story about a pregnant being murdered garnered national attention.  At that point, my obstetrician ordered DH to stop people from telling me bad things.  My blood pressure was spiking, and my stress level was insane.  I just quit watching the news. 

About the time I started again, a few weeks into a mild anti-depressant, my baby was a few months old.  It was September of 2001. 

After seeing the initial news report this morning, I talked to Tiff for the second and third and fourth time today. 

"I don't get it," she said.  "I just don't understand how someone could kill little kids."

I don't think anyone does.  There will be speculation and reports and anecdotes over the next few days and weeks about how Adam Lanza, the presumed shooter, was damaged or abused or neglected or misparented.  Maybe, as Tiff suggested, he was just broken from the beginning. 

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be his mother—who was, unfortunately, one of his victims today.  It doesn't have to be him, per se; I could just as not-so-easily step into the imagined thoughts and emotions of the mother of Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold or Kip Kinkel or Jeff Weise or Timothy McVeigh or any of the other infamous figures who have viciously destroyed the lives of innocents. 

I tried to envision how I would feel if one of my children committed such heinous acts.  I can't.

If I try to go there, my mind and heart and soul throw up a wall, a huge, clanging shield to stop those thoughts from crossing the mind-brain barrier.  It doesn't want there to even be a memory of my having tried to go to that place.  It's like Frank Herbert's Bene Gesserit witches trying to take themselves to the place where only the Kwitsatz Haderach can go, finding sheer terror and abject fear at the mere thought of such an attempt. 

Love for your child is truly unconditional.  There is absolutely nothing my sons could to do make me not love them.  I remind them all the time that I will love them forever and always and no matter what.

"Even if I killed someone?" my elder son asked one day.

"Even if you killed someone.  I wouldn't like it at all, but I would still love you."

"Even if I killed my little brother?"

He wasn't asking if he could or offering to do it.  It was just a question of curiosity, the next seemingly logical step down this path of discussion. 

Clang!  Up came that wall. 

And I tried, just now, to type that such thoughts were the worst things I could imagine.  I know they're not.  Logically, I know there are worse things I could imagine.  But to do that would be an exercise in driving myself insane—possibly for real and forever. 

Does it matter what went wrong with this kid in Connecticut?  I don't know.  It doesn't change a damn thing.  Maybe it helps victims and their families to try to understand.  But no matter what went wrong in his life, it's only a potential reason or explanation—it's not an excuse.    

Regardless, it makes me incomparably sad.  Not only do the families of these babies have to deal with their loss, the families of the survivors have their own heartache and trauma to endure.  And then there is the Lanza family, who has to try to make sense of this tragedy from the other side.  It seems an unendurable torture, no matter which side of this you're on.

Feel free to comment.  I will not engage arguments or ridicule or But you're just wrong! rants.  I don't care if you think guns should be outlawed or should be given to every citizen when they turn 18.  I won't respond.  But if you start to tell me how it's God's will, or how it's punishment against an evil society, I will block you from my life and I will probably have a moment where I wish bad things upon you, followed immediately by a moment of being so aghast at my own loss of control that I am shamed by own sorrowful thoughts. 

And for the dozenth time, I will cry.  For you, for me, and for all of those whose lives will be forever altered by the incomprehensible acts of someone else's child. 

It's my role, it's my soul.

What are you afraid of?

Me, I'm afraid of the feeling of falling to my death in an elevator, the dark, and strangers taking and harming my children.  These are the exact reasons I can't watch Towering Inferno, Hellraiser, or The Minority Report.  (Okay, so there are a multitude of reasons for that last one, but stay with me.)

But what other fears plague you?  And I don't mean phobias.  And I don't mean the irrational bullshit apprehensions—like not holding your breath when you cross a bridge, or frogs.  (That last one's all me, I know.) 

Fear can be healthy, certainly.  Fear is at the heart of fight-or-flight: is this situation dangerous enough that it needs to be confronted or avoided?  Should I eat this morsel of unknown origin that might or might not kill me?  Should I cross this busy street, filled with fast-moving, honking cars?  Should I trust this stranger with candy?

There is a comfort in knowing what to expect, in being fairly certain of the outcome of your actions.  The world makes sense when you can kind of guess how it's going to go.  If I do this, then that is likely to happen, or not to happen. 

More often than not, I think it's the fear of the unknown that's really at the heart of our undoing.  It's the unidentified result and the anxiety of consequence that fill us with the most foreboding. 

Irrationally, anything and everything is possible—the consequences of acting or not acting are almost infinite in their possibilities.  It is the plausibility of the outcome that is most likely to determine if we do or don't... and whether or not we're willing to live with the potential consequences. 

For years, I lived in fear of what my life might or might not bring.  It was easy to stay in the comfort zone—of food or television or being fat.  Even if I didn't necessarily like how that felt, I was so accustomed to it that I could be okay in it.  The numbness of it all wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as the thought of actually changing it. 

But where was that getting me?  Where could I see my life going?  What were my plausibilities, if I continued on the same path I'd been on for-seeming-ever?

Disabling myself from moving forward felt horrible.  Being staid was wretched.  But I was safely tucked away in my fright until I ripped away a little part of the cocoon, just to see what I could see.  There was a life out there, outside of my apprehensions and my four suburban walls. 

In the end, the fear of not seeing what might happen, of not experiencing some unknown thing that may or may not even come to pass, was more powerful to me than the fear of being stuck in who and where I was.  I ran from plausibility toward possibility.  I stumbled and I tripped and I busted my ass, time and again, but then I picked the gravel from my bloody knees and got up and kept going.  I winced around the pain and reminded myself that I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn't keep moving than of what would happen if I stopped. 

And where I am a year and two years later is extraordinarily far from where I started.  I can barely even remember what the starting point looked like, let alone see it.  But what I can never, ever forget is the fear I felt in that place, the fear that kept me motionless and holding my breath, somehow waiting for my life to start. 

In Greek mythology, there were three Fates—Clotho, who spins the thread of life and the things that are upon her spindle; Lacheis, who measures the string of things that once were on her rod; and Atropos, who cuts the string of things that are yet to be with her shears.  It was said that Atropos, who was the shortest and the oldest of the three sisters, was the one who could strike the most fear in the hearts of men.  Her abhorred shears chose the mechanism of death and the end of the life cycle for each mortal, and even the gods themselves were bound by the decisions of the Fates. 

As much as I believe in Fate (and fate), it is the fear of not living every moment as fully as possible, as fully as plausible, that keeps me from stopping again and from settling back into the comfort of self-constraint.  I don't want to face Atropos, even in the mirror as myself, and stammer how I could have done it so much better if only.... 

I don't want to live my life if only....