starcrap....

I am a superstitious gal...

Embarrassing to admit (maybe) but it's true.

I have a silver angel trinket that I carried to work with me every single day I was a floor nurse...and each morning I would say a prayer, kiss the angel, and hide it in my pocket. That angel was with me for each chest compression of a patient struggling to stay in this world, each swipe of the time clock, and every drive home.

Somehow I have created another ritualized superstition...perhaps even more embarrassing...because this superstition involves a video game.

Star Craft. If you haven't heard of it then you obviously aren't a uber geek.

I'll wait while you make fun of me...

All done? Any questions? Good. Then let's get back to the story...there's an epiphany coming!

Back more than a year ago...when my heart's love had put some distance between us...I would try my best to give her the space she had asked for. This was impossible but I tried my very best. Thinking of her constantly, I would naturally wonder if she were thinking of me. I didn't even know where she was (traveling abroad? Staying with family?) and it nearly drove me crazy. To distract me I would create a Star Craft scenario that was difficult to beat...nearly impossible in fact, and say in my mind "If I can beat this level, that woman is out there thinking of me, missing me, and loving me".

And I would lose. And try again. And lose. And try again...until I won.

Sometimes I would say things like "If I win this time - I will call that woman and she will answer!!"

And I would lose. And try again. And lose. And try again...until I won.

Somehow that silly ritual eased my mind, helped the time pass and managed to distract my broken heart.

The games can last for hours...and I would save my progress from time to time...calling the games things like "shewillcall" or "dontgiveup"...my nomenclature might seem pathetic when viewed through the lens of a more rational person, but to me it was more like a mantra for the evening.

Of course I felt silly...but as I have mentioned before, I was raised by feral wolves and don't always behave like the so-called "mature adults".

These days my mind is weary with struggles at work. I am so accustomed to being well-liked and successful in my work environs that I don't even have a frame of reference for my new job. I seemed to have either stepped into a looney bin masquerading as an "office", or my inter-personal skills have deteriorated  by an exponential degree since the last time I was an 8 to 5'er.

In either case I find myself unglued when I think about going to sleep, waking up, and returning to my desk.

So I stay awake way way way past my bed time, playing my games.

The game begins by me saying things like "If I win this game I will have a good day at work tomorrow" or "If I win no one will yell at me tomorrow". And for the hour or so it takes me to play the game my mind is empty of stress. Gone are the feelings of gloom and panic. Electronic meditation?

And when I lose, I try again. Feeling silly for attaching the outcome of my game to a wish for better things...

But I then I realized something. Electronic epiphany ;)

It isn't that my strategic efforts in the game have any real impact on whether or not my girlfriend calls, or how successful my upcoming workday will be...it's the fact that I don't give up when I lose.

I don't really believe the game has anything to do with finding a solution to a problem, but my dogged determination to win definitely does.

I don't give up. At games...in love...or in anything. When I lose, I try again.

This evening I called my game "icandothis"...and I won on the first try :)

And somehow, silly as it sounds, I am ready for work tomorrow!

a world of work

I was listening to some interesting ideas this evening...

My sister dragged me kicking and screaming to the kind of thing I would have mocked ten years ago...or maybe even ten days ago

This group of people who get together to try to get better. They might find it offensive for me to put it so simply. Or they may think I am missing the point...but it's my blog :)

Get better at life, at love, at letting go. Get better at enjoying sunsets and jokes, get better at riding out the storms and listening to the ones you love.

So I sat with these people, fully expecting to make fun of them the entire time...

Because I am kind of an asshole like that.

The discussion was on letting go. Let go and let God. Finding the faith to trust that a higher power has your back. Turning away from negativity and obsessions. Trusting that all is well.

Riiiiiiiiiiight.

As a gal with a touch of OCD I can fully and whole-heartedly admit that I am absolutely in charge. I have learned not to just survive, but thrive, in a world that was stacked against me. Poor, uneducated parents with no apparent social skills raised me. I was kicked out of church for who I loved, forced to leave college because my parents wouldn't co-sign a loan...etc....etc....I was on my own completely by aged 20.

Everything I have I made for myself. Navigating the way with no role models. But I fear that my obsessive struggles to maintain even keel are keeping me from enjoying my life. I have fought so hard to get where I am that I may have forgotten how to enjoy my successes.

So tonight I will try to begin to let go....and try to believe that everything is just as it is supposed to be.

I am currently in a job that I dread to go to, hundreds of miles away from my missing piece, and days go by without a call from my circle of friends. So even writing "everything is just as it is supposed to be" makes me sad. It doesn't make any sense that my destiny on this earth was to parent alone, in a 2 bedroom rental, working along-side peers who openly contempt me.

But I suppose this is exactly why I need to re-evaluate my life. I want to love and feel loved every day. I want to believe with every piece of who I am that I am on the right path. There are real problems in the world.... I don't want to let self-pity and self doubt distract me from being the best version of myself I could be.

I ran across this tonight in some reading....and it makes me feel like maybe I can do this. Maybe I can get better :) And for my heathen friends, try to read past the heavy handed verbiage and just hear the message.....

Isn't this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed  free  and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry  and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter — when you see the naked, to clothe  them,  and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn,  and your healing   will quickly appear; then your righteousness  will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.  Then you will call,  and the Lord will answer;   you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression,  with the pointing finger  and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry  and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light   will rise in the darkness,  and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide   you always; he will satisfy your needs   in a sun-scorched land  and will strengthen your frame.

so hard and so easy...

Beginning sixth grade was a big deal for my little big man.

He has had to adjust just about everything he knew about school. He has studied harder, pushed himself beyond what he though he was capable of learning. And he is succeeding :)

The social game, however, is tougher to navigate. Girls want to get his attention, and he is clueless absolutely lost trying to find his way. That perceived indifference makes him a target to the girls...the girls, being smarter about the social game, find him easy prey. No one has ever teased my son...no one has torn away at his self esteem in his 12 years on this earth.

I can't honestly tell him that it gets simpler as an adult. I find in my daily wanderings that my fellow grown ups can behave just as cruel as the middle schoolers. Very few people are striking out with the intention of being mean...but the result is the same. 

One would think, at such as advanced age as myself, I would be accustomed to this...but the days when my son comes home upset, fighting back tears, I can always relate. It's my job to be his parent though, so I resist the urge to commiserate. I don't make him soothe my wounds.

But there isn't much difference in his school world than there is in my office...which is pretty damn sad if you ask me. So as best as I can tell, my purpose in parenting is to give my son better tools to handle the barbs. Hoping that I am building a well-adjusted adult.

But as an adult who was raised by feral wolves....with very few working tools in my own toolbelt...I do wish for a rock of my own. Someone who was waiting at the end of my day to hear my stories of a psychotic office mate throwing her stapler in a rage, or another bursting into tears and wishing for the failure of my project because apparently that would "SHOW US ALLLLLLLL".

This is why people drink ;)

Because we really are still in middle school, aren't we? And there is no recess in sight!

christmas christmas christmas...

I can't believe it has been eight years since my father died. I don't know if I should be "over it" by now...since I don't really have anything to compare it to. My close friends haven't lost their parents yet, and heck, as a culture we tend to reserve talk of grieving to only our spouses.

In movies the death of a parent is a turning point for the characters. Past conflicts are resolved on the deathbed and the surviving child walks away and moves forward. Sad, but stronger.

It wasn't quite like that with my Dad. He refused to admit he was dying for as long as he could speak. All efforts to get him to even see a doctor in his last few weeks were met with curses and meanness. Thinking back, I suppose he wanted to lay in his own bed, in his own house and slowly die without anyone making a fuss. To this day I don't know if I did the right thing to deny him that.

I called my mother a few weeks before my Dad died - a routine call just to check in - and she let it slip that "Your father sure sleeps alot these days". I asked her what she meant by that, and she replied "Well he is probably awake about an hour a day".

We knew he had end stage liver failure from a lifetime of Budweiser and vodka tonics...but he had been playing golf and working his job as a taxi driver the week before. I packed my bags that minute and drove to Central Florida immediately.

I found my father in a dark room, with a space heater running, hiding underneath twelve blankets. He wouldn't talk to me about how he felt, knocking aside my questions with comments about just "needing to sleep". I don't know if he actually believed he had the flu or if that is what he was telling us to send us away. My mother, with fifty years of submitting to him under her belt, was too terrified to challenge the flu notion, but I knew better. But getting him in the car was nearly impossible. I literally had to threaten to call 911 if he refused - and it took us about 3 hours to force him out the door.

Of course he expected to drive.

I absolutely refused. He wasn't in any shape to even sit upright....weakened by his dissolving liver and weeks of not eating or drinking. That was the first day since him teaching me to first drive that my father sat in the passenger set next to me. An ominous feeling overcame me, I was certain this was worse than I had initially thought.

My father had the same doc he had used for years. I had never met the man but was about to show up at his office without an appointment - so I hoped he was decent. He was not. The doctor told me that my Dad most likely had "the flu" and should go home and rest. I stood blocking the door and asked the doctor when the last time he saw him was. It had been a month. Apparently my Dad had been feeling queasy for that long. I asked the doc how much weight my Dad had lost in the month. Nearly thirty pounds was the answer. I then began asking about lab work, the condition of his liver, etc etc until the doctor relented. Maybe just because he realized I wasn't moving away from the door until I had an answer....so he agreed to admit my Dad to the local hospital.

My Dad would be dead within 10 days. Up until the last 8 hours of his life his doctor was constantly telling us we were worrying about nothing and he expected my father would be good as new as soon _______. The blank consisted of that doctor milking medicaid for every test, procedure and medicine he could throw our way....up to and including physical therapy.

It broke my heart to watch my father try to perform on a recumbent bike when he didn't even have the strength to lift his own arms in the air. But my Dad was in agreement with the doctor...he felt like he wasn't as sick as I was saying...and the last coherent thing he ever said to me was "How the hell do you expect me to get any better when you are putting nails in my coffin!!!!!!"

But I knew better. He was throwing up blood (and had been for weeks - hiding it from my mother somehow), couldn't eat because of varices in his throat, and his liver enzymes were higher than I had ever seen.

By the time I had beaten the doctors into getting hospice involved my Dad wasn't even able to talk.  Hospice was wonderful. They stopped all the unnecessary meds, controlled his pain, and stopped the physical torture of the exercises.

He died less than 10 hours after hospice came on board. The nurse woke me up at 2 in the morning to tell me. I had to wake my mother and tell her the news. My son was a toddler. The entire evening was surreal. Painful. The one member of my family who had loved me for who I was....gone.

It was Christmas Eve.

My son asked us how Santa would find us. How could Santa know we were in a hospital far far away from home?

Later, back at my mother's house, trying my best to control my grief enough to be of some comfort to my mom....my sweet little toddler came into the room, and announced that he liked things better when his grandpa was alive.

"Me too baby bear"

Each Christmas Even I hope that I don't have to relive that story in my mind....but so far I haven't been able to. But it does get a teeny teeny bit easier.

I know my Dad would hate that I still grieve. And I know if his brain hadn't been poisoned by the chemicals produced as his body was shutting down he would have done a better job leaving this world...

Miss you Dad....and thinking of you this season.

moment by moment..

After a long week at work...

Transitioning into a new job...

Which means, at the very least, a new routine, new faces, new skills, and feeling totally helpless...

And after struggling with finding my bearings yet again in a long-distance relationship...

My Friday evening ended with the conclusion of an overly violent, unintentionally psychologically intrusive movie.

So I was trying my best to dust off my negative feelings and get my little man to bed.

After 12 years of tucking my son in, I can be honest here and tell you that some nights I just don't feel like I have it in me to do take 10 minutes out of my night and stroke his hair, rub his back, and give him kisses as he drifts to sleep.

So I did the 3 minute version. My mind was elsewhere as I fluffed his pillows and told him  goodnight. But as I was leaving his room a wave came over me...I imagine my angel 10 years in the future and living far away.  So I paused in his doorway and saw him curled under the blankets...looking as sweet as the first moment I saw him...and I turned around. I laid down next to him on the bed and wrapped my arms around him...

His entire body relaxed and he sighed as he whispered "yay"  :)

I stayed with him for a few precious moments...and drank in that connection - of being totally present, totally loved, totally loving...

Who cared that the dishes were piled high in the sink, and the laundry was spilling out of the basket onto the floor, and I hadn't been on Facebook to see exactly what my childless friends were up to on this Friday night!? I was able to let go of my funk and everything else hard about my day and just BE with my little guy. And it was a fantastic moment....one of thousands we have had together. And I plan on having many thousand more! Provided I can keeping remembering (each time I forget) that the absolute best way to connect with someone is just to put down your own piles of debris and connect.

Sleep well baby boo...thank you for reminding me (all the many times I forget) what my best self can be.