Out of the Desert

Dear Followers of my Desert Journey

My life that existed when I began this blog is no more.   As I begin a new life in a new state and new city, I thought it only appropriate I begin a new blog with a new name.

Please join me at http://thewanderingjewel.wordpress.com as I wander my way into a new life near the gulf waters that bring much needed healing to my soul.

This move is a huge undertaking and the first I've ever done completely on my own.  But if I fail, I shall fail magnificently and have sooo much to write about.  Yay.

My Mother's Heart

I am laying by my pool catching some sun, fully sun screened to, fingers crossed, prevent reliving my mother's history of skin cancer.  Damien Rice is playing on my iPod and I am wondering if my headphones are about to short out from the tears that are cascading from my eyes, running past my temples and pooling in my ears.  I have been crying since 7:42 this morning.  It is now noon thirty.  I have time as I tan to think about my heart and the place in it that is invulnerable to devastation by anyone but my child. 

This last year, my heart was smashed, shattered, broken, bruised and beaten.  I thought that every cell of my heart had been through the wringer and had survived.  Until this morning.  One wrong deed, one well intentioned communication and I have been disowned, disarmed and dissed.  Unfriended and now, it seems, unloved because I am imperfect and because he is seventeen.  My heart is now broken in a wholly different way.

I broke my Mother's heart, I imagine, more than I will ever know.  As the youngest daughter of three, I was the only one left to live with Mom, just the two of us, during my teen years. I'll never know what I did, but one summer I did something bratty or selfish or ungrateful and she went for two weeks without speaking a word to me. I had broken her heart, it seems, one too many times.  She and I became friends as I grew into motherhood with my own children and she forgave me long before she died.  As my own heart breaks today, I feel her nearby, understanding the hurt in my mother's heart and I am grateful to her for how she lived her life despite years of devastating pain from my Dad and then from me.  My mother fought to remain cheerful, loving, funny and full of life.  If she had bitterness in her heart, I never saw it.   

Now very sad and crying in the sun, I think about my heart and the place in it that may never heal because he will always be my child.  No matter what he does or doesn't do, says or doesn't say, I can't and won't stop loving him. The place in my heart that came to be at the birth of my first child will stay vulnerable to the pain this child can inflict.   But like my mother, I will not let my heart be protected by bitterness even if it is years before this child and I reconcile or it's on my deathbed that we come to peace.

Happy Mother's Day, Beverly Jean.  I miss you.

Life is like a Box of Roller Coasters

'Your hands are beautiful'.  I am 15, working my first job, an ice cream parlor, and this is the first time an almost-man, has ever said something so personal to me.  Mr. Ice Cream Parlor boy works behind the grill flipping burgers and dunking fries.  I work behind the counter scooping ice cream or waiting tables on $1 Banana Split days, splattered at the end of my shift with sticky hot fudge, maraschino cherry juice, yellowed whipped cream and a muddy rainbow of various ice creams.  He says 'your hands are so slender, delicate'.  Never having before thought of my hands as anything but hands, I look down at them and see them through his eyes and hear 'I want you, I love you, I see you'.  One date and a few kisses later the romance is over.  Without him I feel once again unwanted, unloved, unseen.  The words that never stop echoing in my head when I'm alone.

Multiple romances followed.  Like slowly climbing to the top of a dozen roller coasters, electrified with anticipation at the mind-blowing ride ahead, then dropping to the bottom and finding each ride over with no hair-raising inversions, no death-defying twists, no euphoria at having survived.  You have beautiful ~something or other~ and I would hear 'I want you, I love you, I see you'.  Before I was 20 one ride lasted eighteen tumultuous, impetuous, passionate months and ended with my heart so deeply devastated I thought I would die.  Once again, I was unwanted, unloved and unseen.  

Four years later one more 'you have beautiful eyes' came along.  I was lonely and weary of the ride ending the same way.  He was lonely and ready to get married.  Three amazing children and 26 years later, the longest roller coaster I'd ever ridden came to an end.  But this time it didn't slow to a stop and come to a rest at the station where we could buy our picture  in the gift shop.  This ride careened off its rails, crashed through the guard rails and flung me out into the atmosphere, completely unsure of where I would land or if it would kill me when I did.  I wasn't just unwanted, unloved and unseen.  This time the words weren't just echoing, they were shouting that I was alone, abandoned and that I deserved it.  They drowned out my own voice of reason and for a time I went a little mad.  I left my near grown children without a moral compass or a parent they could count on.  I made some choices that I'm still not sure of.  I left my 17-year old son alone too much.  I tried to make Christmas normal and in the process nearly wrecked the whole thing.  I gave away books and clothes and crap from the garage that maybe I should have sold later because I'll need the cash.  

And then I landed and I wasn't dead.  Deeply bruised and my heart lacerated, but not dead. On the contrary, flying through the vast uncharted regions of loveless and lonely air I discovered my life.  I discovered me.  I discovered that I'm an optimist, I love to laugh, I love to write, I love to read, I love to dance, I love a thousand kinds of music, I love making new friends, I love connecting with old friends and I have incredible friends; I can find a job, take some classes and enjoy every day for what it brings.  And some days bring nothing but pain.  I still don't have a job, have no idea how I'll pay the bills a year from now, don't  know where I'll be living at the end of November, don't know if this single thing is forever-until-I'm-dead-permanent, but I really love my life.

If I ever climb aboard another roller coaster, I am thoroughly prepared to enjoy every twist, every turn, every scream-inducing plunge knowing that if or when the ride ends, I will still want, love and see me.

The Angst Machine

The Royal Typewriter, antediluvian even in 1973, sat on a desk in our dining/music/whatever room.  The desk was built by my Dad to perfectly match the broken piece of our glass-topped dining room table that had split into a sweeping configuration when he placed a hot cup of coffee down during dinner.  The desk was 60's groovy.  The typewriter, not so much, but it helped to save my Mom's life and then it got my two sisters and me through high school.  I can only imagine how Beverly must have felt as she went back to college and typed her way out of the anxiety and fear her life had become married to a man who couldn't stick around for more than a few weeks at a time or hold a job for more than 3 months.  As Dad moved us around like gypsies running from or to God knows what, Mom knew it was up to her to provide for us, so she took The Royal and became a teacher and gave us a home and an education.

My sisters and I used that typewriter to create term papers, book reports, letters, poems and short stories.  Its clickety tap clickety tap clickety tap ding zip, a firm certainty in the uncertainty of our lives.  Paper after paper, with the typos whited out and typed over.  The carbon paper with its ability to rip at the wrong time or smear the final draft of a paper due the next day and often used much longer than its natural lifespan in order to save money.  The Royal planted the seeds of a writer in my sister, Tracy, who became a professor of English and  just published her first book, My Ruby Slippers. The Road Back to Kansas (www.tracyseeley.com).  It planted those seeds in me too, to grow into a blogger and a lover of words spoken, thought and written.

The Royal came to live with me in 1988 when, with my husband and 5-month old baby, I returned one last time to Wichita for Beverly's retirement party.  Long after the purchase of an electric typewriter had left The Royal forgotten and collecting dust it rode back to Texas in  a rented truck with the rest of my belongings I rescued from the purging garage sale that was to come before Beverly retired to Arizona.  In just a few short years my baby, now 3 and joined by his 2-year old sister, would clack away on The Royal's keys, listening for the ding of the carriage and pretending to replace the long-dried out ribbon.

After many more moves, The Royal was finally relegated to the attic where it remained for the next 10 years until this last fall when one more move and the breaking of our family brought it out of seclusion.  Grasping at anything that felt solid, anything that would help me bear up against another tempest of anxiety and fear, I grabbed for The Royal and anchored it to the table in the entryway of this house my son and I will share until he leaves for college.  The Royal, ignored for years but old enough now to be ironic, has been rechristened "The Angst Machine" and given a place of honor in this new season of our lives.  Once again, this marvel of an invention that saved my Mother's life, partnered in a thousand papers and formed the writers in us, is now serving a third generation of this family in ways the makers of The Royal never dreamed into the plans.  In brief moments throughout the day, my son will stop by The Angst Machine, dash off a few choice words to vent his anger or frustration in his own darkly creative way knowing that the ribbon, being as dry as his wit, is a trustworthy keeper of secrets.

The Angst Machine is also a metaphor for my life....Despite the neglect, dust and tiny pieces of attic insulation that can't be completely dislodged from the inner workings, the clickety tap clickety tap clickety tap ding zip still work and we both have plenty left to say.

Babe

I have a baseball bat.  A high-quality, maple, close-grain timbered Grand Slam Louisville Slugger.  My bat rests against the headboard post of my king-sized Temperpedic bed within arm's reach because for the past 5 months I've slept alone and my bat's presence makes me feel a little bit safer.   This bat really belongs to my son, but I adopted it, gave it a name and it lives next to my bed.  I believe that if God named each and every star  then my bat deserves a name, so I call it  Babe.  Mostly in honor of Babe George Herman Ruth.  I don't know if Babe Ruth played with a Louisville Slugger.  I could have Wikipedia'd George and found out just to make it look like I knew and isn't that neat how she would know that, but I didn't because this isn't about Babe Ruth, and it isn't about my bat.  It also isn't about Babe the Blue Ox, even though my bat was also named after that illustrious character of American folklore.  Faithful companion, that Ox, just like my Babe, the duck-tape handled and slightly mangled Louisville Slugger.

This is about new beginnings and how I'm finding some aspects of my new beginnings easier to adopt and embrace than others.  One of these new beginnings is learning how to sleep alone in a king-sized bed when I'm only 5'7" and 118 pounds.  Do you know how much room such a tiny frame takes up in such a large space?  Well, not much.  I've kept to "my side" of the bed these past 5 months.  My side consisting of about 1/5th of the square footage of the acreage I nestle into at night with two cats,  my body pillow and not much else.  But I had an epiphany last night during another one of my many tossy-turny sleepless nights.  I could sleep anywhere on this giant bed!  Anywhere.  I could sleep on the other side.   I could sleep in the middle.  I could sleep sideways, or completely the other way around ala Pippi Longstocking.  I could sleep anywhere in anyway I wanted.  "Dang!"  I thought.  "This is gonna be sweeeeet!"

So Babe, with the grey duck-taped handle, for a better grip when I have to kick some bad guy's ass and the chip out of the bottom where I think my son may have bashed something other than a ball, rests against the head of my bed.  And I get to rest anywhere I want.