Thinking it Through

I guess it started on my walk this morning. I was mumbling to myself about what a huge mistake I had made marrying my second husband. Fourteen years of misery. (With some wonderfulness...) but in the big scheme of things I fell in love with the wrong guy and tried to make it more than it was. Just a nightmere of a marriage. I knew on the honeymoon that I had made an enormous mistake. I even had my bags packed and was going to go back home but I stayed. (I can go into all the stuff that he did wrong and believe me there was an avalanche of stuff and he is not a good man...) but the thing is I am learning to take responsibility for my actions and that I am not blame free. There were two of us. And I stayed. And kept coming back for more. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That was me. Completely insane. I lost everything too. Even had to declare personal bankruptcy. Talk about apt metaphors! Anyway I survived it and I did learn enormous lessons about me, about love, about relationships. And in some way that horrible mistake was my path. I needed to learn those things. And everything I went through made me into the person I am today. The one in a wonderful perfect for me relationship doing all the right things. So the big thing about having gone through that second marriage is I had given up. I thought he was my only chance to ever be married again. And that I had to marry him and stay married. Or I would always be alone. God there is so much I could write about from there but I guess what I started with is that if I had just trusted that the right person would come along I could have avoided all that and here I am at 60 with the exact right relationship for me. A little late. But here. Just like my mother died very early. That was her path. That was mine too. I had a wonderful mother but only for 13 years. Now I have a wonderful marriage (we are living together) and it is more like marriage than either of my two official marriages...So it is happening for me late in life. But the point is today I am in a great relationship. Everything I had ever hoped for ....dreamed, fantasized about. I have it. Jeff. OK> so I was going on about the magazine I write for and how I could have botched it if I had not kept the faith....(see I did learn from that bad marriage...) and the magazine I would like to write for....and the piece I submitte. I need to get dressed for work and go but this is where i will take up: scheduling changes at RIS no more than that...and we cant know what is going on at More and if they ever even got it. so I need to also learn patience.

and faith.

Pig in Mud

I am so completely in love. Jeff. He is my wonderful. The man I was always supposed to be with. Lucky me. Sometimes we just look at each other and giggle. I am 60 and in some ways even though I have been married twice and had a third about to be husband Jeff is my first real boy friend. He is 68. So it can happen. Of course he was married for 40 years who by all accounts was a saint. So I digress to give her some credit right up front. She probably did all the training and nurturing. And he has an amazing 90 year old mother who also must get lots of credit here.

Now to Jeff. He is perfect. Kind, handsome, tender, bright, funny,loving silly athletic and just larger than life. And he is humble. I have never seen him try to be something he is not. He walks in a state of grace. He is honest. He is unassuming. And he has all his hair. So this is my life.

How do you meet such a man? Where do I even start. The short--very short--answer is J-date. I met him on-line of all things. Something that just four years ago I would not have considered even briefly. I was out of my mind at the tail end about to spin completely out of control trying to be god knows who. I was just leaving my insipient alcoholic stage emerging with a full blown problem and convinced I was the only human in the world. I had just left my second husband who to be fair was a terrible choice for me and incredible teacher. If it is true that we learn from our mistakes he had volumes to teach me and that he jumped in with both feet is serving me well today.

circuit overload

I am on circuit overload. Doing way too much. No time to write, take walks, buy new dog food or cat food...or people food for that matter. And I am paying for it. I only made two meetings this week too. So when I forget about me I start feeling it right away. I suppose this is good. If I want to feel good I have to take care of myself and that of course means doing less. Taking fewer commitments, making fewer promises. When I am like this I tend to get sharp. Screetchy. And my stomach gets tied up in knots. So I need to stop. Take stock. OK. That is what I am doing. I did not do my pt but at least I checked in and wrote even these few lines are a something. And tomorrow morning I will get to one of my favorite meetings. Today the meeting I finally made it to felt crummy. I kept thinking there was too much testosterone but of course it was just that I am off. It would have been a fine meeting if I had just joined in and shared instead of resisting. It really is an inside job and I better take better care of mine. It is also Yom Kippur at sundown tonight. Atonement. Ammends. Must be similar things. Are sins the same as character defects? Maybe.

chilly sunday

This morning Jeff and I had a quiet leisurely breakfast and Jeff told me stories about his sons when they were 10 and 11. Baseball, little league stories. I love these. He was such a good father and Lois must have been a great mother. The boys are amazing men today. But back then I love it when Jeff tells about each one. He says Robbie was the most beautiful baseball player in the world. He was perfection. Eric too in his own way. Perhaps more powerful, less graceful. But this is not about them right now. It is something random. Jeff was telling in the telling of the boys and baseball about a camp they went to for the summer. Jeff taught tennis there. Anyway one of the heads at the camp he tells me was an alcoholic. He woke up groggy and slowly because he had been drinking the entire night before. And he was slow and out of it the next day. I wasnt like that. I only remember having the whirllies once. And only once do I remember passing out. Towards the end of my drinking career I was at a shower for my daughter-in-law and they kept filling my glass. With snowflakes. (Those are cosmopolitans only made with clear cranberry juice instead of red. ) Anyway when we got back to the house I went upstairs to the bathroom and apparently laid down on the tile floor and passed out. No one knew I was drunk, I was apparently making total sense, and just laid down. When Wiley realized I was upstairs and had not come down he woke me up and I got into bed shoes and all. This does not mean I am not an alcoholic just that our common perception of what an alcoholic does is off. To be sure there are zillions of alcoholics who get drunk and behave badly. And I did now that I think of it get very very drunk--two bottles of champagne--and drove drunk and got a dui that was lowered to reckless driving. I almost never drove with alcohol in me after that. I never thought I was an alcoholic then either. I went to a probation officer and reported in once a month for six months. She talked to me about her compulsion: buying clothes. She said she had closets full of clothes with their price tags still on bunches of them. I listened like the good little people pleaser I am, trying to make sure that she liked me and never really talked about myself. My take away from all of that was that it was ok to drink just not to drive if I had anything to drink.

You Dont Cut The Tail of the Dog off Slowly...

You don't cut the tail of the dog off slowly. One of my father's sayings. He had a ton of them. Like bumper stickers. Easy does it and One day at a time. The men in his law firm loved best his saying, "keep your eye on the chicken salad...not the chicken shit." No matter which one. I hear him all the time. "You deal in shit...you get covered in shit..." "Figures don't lie...Lier's figure." I hate that he's dead. The other day I looked at my cell phone half expecting him to phone.

scout

I have a rescue wheaten terrier named scout and she is my favorite dog ever. I am learning a ton from her too. She was in a puppy mill for her first two years of life which in her case means she was kept like a chicken or any other barn yard animal. In a tiny box that measured about 2 feet by 2 feet all alone. My stomach is turning over as I write this and I feel like I should be going into the bedroom where scout is asleep on the huge chair in there that she has taken over as her bed and just petting her. But I know I need to write about it first. She had no contact with other dogs unless she was in heat. Then they would bring a male dog in, she would "have sex" and she would get pregnant have a litter of puppies and she would feed them till they were sold to pet stores. (At around 6 weeks.) She is small for a wheaten probably because they started breeding her as soon as she had her first heat around 6 months. So what comes to mind with Scout is how she never had a real puppyhood. She doesn't really play the way dogs do that I have raised from when they were tiny puppies...for me this is somewhat good because we never had to endure chewed leather shoes, glasses, blankets, you name it whatever I liked best has remained untouched. She doesnt bark either. She apparently had to wear a collar when she was in the puppy mill. The kind that shocked her if she barked. We know she can bark because we heard her bark once. And sometimes in the middle of the night we hear her cry. And when I come home from a long day away she greets me with a sort of strained crying. Trying to bark but to squelch the bark. Anyway it comes out very silently and muted. So the neighbors never get angry because you would never know we have a dog unless you saw her. And she is so incredibly sweet and grateful. She is getting much more confident and she even begs now which we think is wonderful. It makes her seem like a real dog. It is not an overbearing begging, she just sits near us at dinner and looks on eagerly till we give her a bone or something. And she does respond well to food. And she plays with some dogs now when she stays at our pet sitters for day care or overnight if we are away. But much of the time Scout breaks my heart. I hate that they took her childhood away from her, made her cower, and just took a lot of her spirit away. That said little by little she is coming to life. After a walk (which we also had to teach her to do...she did not really even know how to take a walk...) she makes this crazy dash around the house quickly and with great gusto. Glimpses of the dog she was meant to be. And I must identify with her in some way. My childhood of course was much better than hers...anyones was....but I get it. And I am thrilled to be coming back to life. To be making some huge runs around the house in my own way. Now I will go in and rub her stomach. That she adores and is always ready for.

Lying down on this coffin sized cot I tell myself I only do it because I have to. It is cold, metallic feeling, like lying down on an inverted refrigerator. I arch my back involuntarily, put on the protective goggles—green--with a pin-point sized hole in each eye. The elastic strap makes my hair go funny in the back and I wonder if it will leave a ridge.

The buttons, after I have resolved to stay lying down here, are to the side. I reach down, causing my bracelet--my mother’s bracelet--to slip down and touch both buttons practicing which one to push first. The one closest to me the attendant has told me raises the lid up. The other button brings it down. I am to push this button, this farthest away button and bring it down as close as possible—up to 2 inches—for maximum tanning.

If my skin were better I would not put myself through this. When I came in wearing no make-up I was sure the attendant looked right at my bad skin, knew how ugly it made me look and felt sorry for me. I push the farthest away button.

A noise like a dentist’s drill fills the room at exactly the same time the lights all flash on. Lower and lower the lid to this metallic feeling cold bed is coming. Alight! I can feel its heat and see the light under my goggle protected eyes. How far to bring it down? I am in trouble here my naked save for bikini body and I. Maybe I will not bring it down any further. Be brave. How else can I look good again and quickly? I lower it some more. The heat is growing. I begin to sweat. Such heat! My cheeks have a pulse of their own now. The heat is working. I lower the lid all the way down until it feels like it is almost touching my skin, 2 maybe 3 inches away. I do not take my goggles off to check though. I have read the sign on the purple door telling me of the possible “harmful effects of the ultraviolet light on the naked eye.”

I let the button go. The top is wobbling above me. I feel it swinging side to side, the lid to this tanning coffin I lie in because I want my skin to clear up right away.

It still swings, so agitated its journey down from the ceiling has been. What if it falls just from all the swinging gentle though it is--sometimes that’s enough to do it—comes off its hinges? It would scorch me like when an iron hits your hand and the blister. Would it leave 4 vertical bulb imprints seared into my skin? Would the bulbs break, glass shattering as it sizzled?

Or what if it stays in place—the lid has stopped swinging, the heat is just uniform now, comforting even, a beach warm sand in the summer—will I be sunburned instead of tan? That hazy-red-raw color? That color the radiation made my mother’s skin when they had her in that tiny room that we could look into the round window in the door through. Through that round hole we little girls watched her get her radiation treatments. Mom’s arms down by her sides on the narrow white bed, her face turned up to the ceiling calmly--almost deadly--submitting to the blinding light the radiation gave off as it lit up her face, her whole body, turning it from its flesh tone color to that hazy-red-raw sunburned look right as she lay there even as we watched. Even as we watched every week. In between radiation times there were other lifesaving techniques; a breast that was removed and covered neatly with skin that they grafted from her thigh, chemotherapy—wonder drugs they called them—that made all her dark brown hair come completely out, made her want to throw up, caused her to loose so much weight her bracelet slipped off her wrist when it was down by her side as she lay there under the radiation light. As we watched through that window this process in the door I wanted to go in, put the bracelet back where it belonged. But the nurse told me I could not go in there, could only watch through the window. I have no idea why my sister and I were present for those treatments, but that round window we watched through is etched into my mind.

So I pop my head up, still seeing through that round window, rip off the tanning goggles risking all kinds of eye damage I suppose and look just very quickly at the door.

There is no round window there. Only one solid purple board of a door, an eye hazard warning sign, and it is closed tight. I swing my head out first, then the rest of my body in one fleet and less than graceful motion, throw on my clothes not even bothering to button all the buttons and say nothing to the startled attendant who screams after me that I still have another twenty eight minutes paid for.