Somewhere My Love

My life feels of one confused piece this past few days, and yet I know that despite the confusion, I am doing well. This is big for someone in lifelong recovery.

Lifelong recovery doesn't mean I am defective. My "first phD " from the school of hard knocks almost left me with that message. But I left so that he could see who he was in all that mess of the life we tried to live together.

So lifelong recovery. What does that mean? To me, it means I am doing my best to get back to the innocence of childhood, letting go of the errors in how others perceived me. It means forgiving myself for getting caught in their balls of yarn to begin with. It means opening my heart completely to forgive them for guarding their own innocence and trying to fix my vulnerability.

I have reached out across the years to a man I have thought of a good deal over the past few decades. Only in the past year, did it occur to me to type his name into google. I found many others with his name, or even the same person listed in different ways, but no way to know if ANY really were him. Certainly I had no "business" drawing attention, nor did it make any sense to go looking for him there. So I've let it be.

Until Facebook, which, like many things in my life, I feel ambivalent about.

So on Facebook, one can do many things socially that feel more like an ongoing party to me, than genuine heartfelt communication. The good thing is, here you can choose who has access and who does not, and you can set boundaries with folks in many ways.

I saw my first love's photo, and I knew I didn't want to "friend" him, intrude into the space of his current social milieu. I thought about waiting a day or a week or forever to write him. Wait until the right words came. But he had always wanted to know my first thought, not the edited one, So I used the more private avenue that suits me best and shared simply, with almost no backspacing.. and with no attachment to a reply. As I pushed "send" I said my prayer. In this way, I reached into the future and the past, to the first man who befriended me and to whom I said "yes" long ago allowing him to know me when I was yet a girl myself.

I have to say this, Maia Fern Lessinger Haykin's death last May was a catalyst in reclaiming my story. The death of my childhood friend brought me back to my own innocence, my girlhood. My mission from the time I heard of her death until now, has been to understand what I am here to do with my life. So that her dying will not have been premature or overly tragic. Or a mistake.

I reached out to "No" for many reasons, and I suspect it is part of the trajectory from last year's spring break near Fernandina Beach camping with my family. I began by listening to tapes each morning, to calm my fears.... little knowing I was preparing for a long year of looking back and reclaiming my story. This was months before Maia's death. But God had me preparing already.

Yesterday, I began listening to that tape again, on a road trip. I was stunned to hear the map of my current journey, described on that tape!

I heard the theme that has made order of my ball of yarn this entire past year. Reclaiming the past. I can also think of myself as being a miner, staking a claim on what I now realize is material that is rich with potential. Not a miner going in with greed or ambition, but a miner going in to glean the tiniest nourishment from gold that is life-sustaining.

Brother D. moves in

It has not been an easy path for my brother this past five months. He had a house under construction (final phases) when the bank failures occurred last fall. It was not going to be easy to get a regular mortgage on the house, as a few things remained (carpet, painting..) that made it hard to get a conventional loan.

The bank of "Koverma", our parents', was toying with my brother in a way that would remind any normal reader... of a horrible fairy tale.

A BPD parent at their worst, CAN feel just like a wicked witch of the West, or the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel.

My brother and I are not children in the earliest sense of the word, but I did go back to childhood pain for a good month while I saw my own inability to help him out, and witnessed our BPD parent finding all the reasons in the book. to not help out her son.

Just yesterday I heard the good news. The woodcutter was allowed to rescue his son's family! My brother, his wife and their three children (the last just born in January), are unpacking in their new home. Our parents did come to help, almost at the zero hour.

I am grateful that our parents did come through, but my gratitude has a stain on it, for all the unnecessary suffering that I witnessed. The stain of shame our BPD worked so hard to create and nurture.

I ask myself, will my family of origin ever allow us to have gratitude for them doing the right thing at the RIGHT time? Without shame?

Can a writer write without a deadline?

The past few weeks, a deadline has loomed in my home, like a big elephant that none of us can walk around. The deadline has kept me from feeling good about any JOY that did not serve IT.

Right now I am writing peacefully on this blog with no interruptions from the gremlin on my computer that causes it to freeze up when I least expect it. This past two days, whenever I got most serious about my deadline, my computer was crashing as soon as I made any significant progress on my article.

This is the third year that Augusta Magazine has asked me to take on an assignment that would otherwise be a challenge to execute from their home city. Three years now I have gotten to take visitors around the Lake Oconee area in my "story".

This is the second year that the gremlin has courted me during the peak part of production. And with laryngitis striking me just as I was attempting last-minute interviews, this is second year that sickness added something besides sheer enthusiasm as a motivator. Now, it is as if I have a mountain to overcome to get to the goal, and not simply an "assignment". Is there something in the pattern that I can learn from?

It is important for me today, to really GET that I have done a heroic job this year and last. I actually done something I normally love, under duress, where I could not trust my tools and could not listen to my body. What more do I have to prove?

I think my near depression of today is a let-down from anxiety-produced motivation. There isn't much left in my emotional bank account when technology and a bad cold intensify the hard and serious work of writing an assigned article.

Tonight, may rest come well and truly feel well-deserved.

May I consider strongly this audacious thought: that maybe for me to be a truly responsible writer I need to avoid deadlines.

Zena