you're amazing just the way you are

For the rest of my life, I want the title of this post to be my theme song.

possessions lost

I hope the person who found the watch I lost loves it as much as I did.

It would make me happy to know it was making someone else happy.

I temporarily forgot there's better days to come...

The last time I cleaned my daughter's room because I could not stand to see the filth any longer, I got yelled at. My husband, like me, hates the way she doesn't clean her room and will talk and talk and talk about it until I cannot stand listening to him any longer so I go in there and clean it up. It makes both of us feel better. Having the entire house clean except for her room--which is a total disaster--makes us feel like we're keeping a dirty little secret--like we're fake clean people. But when my daughter comes home from work, he will yell at her about how I had to clean her pigpen of a room and then SHE will yell at me for cleaning it because she doesn't want me in her room blah, blah, blah. So I decided that would I resist cleaning it because it feels wrong to be yelled at and sneered at for doing something nice for someone. It's like no one is happy with it dirty and no one is happy with it clean, so why bother? Anyway, I just went into her room to put something away and it's back to being a disaster area. Her trash is overflowing, there is a glass half-filled with orange juice, there are old receipts laying all over the floor, clothes piled all over. I walked out, closed the door and am now trying to pretend that there isn't a mess behind it.

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My husband has to work out of town on Saturday and asked me to go along with him to keep him company. This wouldn't be a problem, but my youngest daughter usually comes home on the weekend and will see this as me slighting her in some way. My life is filled with overly needy people pulling me in opposite directions. I try to stay above the fray by tuning out most of their noise, their pulling, their needing. There is nothing about my life that is how I imagined it would be at this point and I'm trying to forget how I dreamed things would be to make it easier.

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I've been fighting this feeling of envy lately. I'm not jealous, I'm envious. I think jealousy means I want to take something from someone else that they have that I want, and envy means that I don't mind them having something, but that I want what they have for myself as well. Maybe I'm justifying these feelings so they're not so hateful, I don't know. It's just that I'm envious of lots of things lately. Some people would tell me to get off my ass and make things happen for myself, and I would say that's a valid comment to make except I don't know how to make things happen for myself anymore. I'm just lost. Stuck. Trapped.

~~~~~~~~

When I'm out running, I don't feel like I'm part of the world anymore. Everything disappears so it feels like I've popped a magic pill that takes me away from all the things that make me want to scream and scream and never stop screaming. When I'm out running, I sometimes wish I could fly like I can in my dreams. I want to soar above it all--take it all in from a different perspective--clear my head. I want to see what it looks like to be me--what I would think of myself if I could take off then look back to where I am living here on earth.

annoying

You know what I hate? When I have a blog in my reader and forever I have been reading that blog in the long feed and suddenly the blogger decides to cut the feed to the short feed so that you HAVE to go to the blog to read it.

I don't mind clicking onto the blogs that are on short feeds from the beginning, but I hate it when bloggers switch midstream. Most times, I delete those blogs from my reader because I have lots of blogs that I read and I don't like being annoyed and the switching to the short feeds is an annoyance to me. I think there was one blog that went from long to short feeds that I have continued to read but she's funny and interesting and a great writer.

Anyway, carry on. Just wanted to get that off my chest!

losing my religion

"Everyone who seeks truth from wisdom will fashion wings in order to fly away and escape from the passion that inflames human spirits. The seeker will fashion wings in order to escape from every spirit that can be seen." - The Book of Thomas from The Secret Teachings of Jesus


Without any regret, I left my religion behind a year ago. It was after lots of searching for the truth and more reading than I have ever done in my life that I decided organized religion was not for me anymore. It hadn't been for a long time, but I did not allow myself to feel comfortable about that choice until I took the time to find out what I needed for me to walk away without feeling anything but peace. It took a lot of time to get here and it was not without lots of sadness for things I felt I had lost along the way--traditions, beliefs, faith in people who were in positions of authority over me for a lot of my life. You wouldn't think that losing a life of lies would be painful, but it was.

After being raised a Catholic from birth and attending Catholic schools all my life, I had never read the Bible. I don't ever remember seeing a Bible in the home I grew up in either, I only remember seeing Bibles in the hotel rooms we would stay in when we went on trips. So I took the time to read it from cover to cover--I did not breeze through it--I studied it. I knew all of the stories from school, but reading them for myself gave me new insight. I came away from reading the Bible having more questions than answers, though, and my experience isn't something that I feel I'm able to articulate properly which is why I haven't written more about it. I felt further away from God, I think, further away from the truth after reading the Bible.

I read everything. I know I said that before but it bears repeating because it means I opened my mind to things I hadn't before. I gave up having to be right about things I was clearly wrong about and it opened up the world to me. When you take a good look at everything, you are able to sift through it all to find what's true. That's what I learned that I will never forget--that you need an excess of information from all sides to get at the truth. I also learned that the truth should be able to withstand all sorts of questions. If someone wants to tell me that I am wrong for questioning things, if they want to shut me up or silence my inquiries, then I immediately know that they are not interested in the truth and I move along.

I read a book a while ago called The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden. In it, the author talks about how we are all connected to one another--how there are no empty spaces between any of us. There are lines of energy connecting us to other people and other things--we can't see them, but they are there. He talked about how even non-living things experience change when we are in their presence.

The invisible connections that leave behind changes which aren't noticeable to the naked eye help drive home how powerful we are. So much of the time, we are taught to look outside ourselves for answers or for help. The part of the Bible that rang truest for me was Jesus saying that the Kingdom of God is inside us--how we didn't have to look any further than ourselves to find what we're looking for. I believe this is a truth that no one in power really wants to teach us because that would mean we wouldn't need them anymore to tell us what to do, how to live our lives, or what to believe. The funds would dry up if people didn't need organized religion anymore and we can't have that. When big money is at the center of things, I connect the dots and find corruption.

In the end, I come to this: The divine is inside us, outside us, and all around us. The connections we have to everything and everyone brings comfort that we are never alone. We are infinitely more powerful than any of us realize.

what motivates me

The emotion that motivates me to move is anger.

I do a lot of things out of love, but anger motivates me like nothing else.

Al Sharpton speaks the truth

“Americans overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected Barack Obama."-Al Sharpton





Yay! Socialism!

Who's a conspiracy theorist now?





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On a positive note, we did our taxes, and a miracle occurred. We did not owe thousands of dollars in taxes this year. We even got a very little bit back. We are grateful we are still employed in this takedown of the middle class battle.

We are battle ready. We are resilient.

insert sarcasm here

I don't get many comments here which is fine with me because I stopped writing for comments long ago. I write somewhat anonymously because I hate all the drama associated with blogging. I consider this blog my space and I write for myself because it's what I love to do. I know of a couple of people who read this blog occasionally, although I suspect I have at least one follower from my old blogging days at aol who never comments but seems to check in on me a lot. I don't even mind that it might be someone I know who doesn't want me to know that they've found me as long as they leave me alone and don't start up drama. I've done the drama thing and don't want to go back there. I think most people come here accidentally, however, and never come back. I like it that way because I am not looking for an audience to love me or hate me. I just want to write.

My blog isn't a place I come to so that I can listen to a bunch of blowhards argue with me about what I write without knowing a thing about me. Because that's the thing about blogging--we show people what we want to show them about ourselves--at least that's how I blog. I show you a small part of myself and just trust me that you are not getting a full picture of me or my life. There is no way I can write it out for you, even if I wanted to. I will always be more and less than what you think I am.

So when I received this comment from "Christa" whose profile doesn't lead to anything but a private profile page, I was reminded again how much I despise most people in the blogging world because they tend to make false judgements about people they do not know at all. I've witnessed how hateful these self-important people can be when they comment at blogs where they disagree with what's written or how they perceive a blogger is living his/her life. They're like vultures enjoying a battered and bloody carcase on the side of the road. They're just despicable.

Here's Christa's comment:

Christa has left a new comment on your post "not a hero": Oh give me a break. Seriously, the "if they like their home country so much..." argument is one of the clearest signs of a bigot. Your kids are so lucky of all that you've taught them [insert sarcasm]. Thank God they're being exposed to a little more than the "Heavenly Father" BS you teach. Posted by Christa to Breathe Through It... at March 6, 2010 4:05 PM


Oh no, the bigot card was thrown out at me in an attempt to shut me up. She totally ignores the point that I make about the insanity of these radical, puke liberal professors LYING to their students and rewriting history by telling them that Mao is a hero, a visionary, a poet---instead of a cold blooded evil killer who murdered 70 plus million of his own people. Christa is just happy and relieved that my kid gets exposure to someone who lies about China and Mao instead of telling them the truth. We wouldn't want anyone to think badly of China now would we? That wouldn't be politically correct, would it ? We must make sure that we do not offend any minority because being politically correct is way more important than telling the truth. This is the exact sort of bullshit that is ruining our country. I'm going to call things as I see them and if radical pukes want to call me a bigot or think I'm a bigot, so be it. Radical professors who hate America and pine about the good old days in another country while smack talking America under the guise of educating our youth probably should go back to the land that they love because we don't need them here. We have enough Americans hating on our country as it is and striving their hardest to fundamentally change it into something else.

Christa ends with some nonsense about the"Heavenly father" BS that I teach my children. And this is where I am wondering if Christa is mistaking me for someone else because I have never mentioned religion here except in reference to my personal journey of moving away from organized religion because I do not believe it in anymore. My children were not raised in any religion and this is why I can't stand having some buffoon that doesn't know me from Adam (oh my, a religious reference!!!) coming to my space and making a comment based on nothing that is real. I don't need lectures from an anonymous asshat who doesn't leave a link to a blog she keeps so that I can go to her place and make sure she is pumping out material that suits my beliefs the way she came here to insist in a passive aggressive way that I should think and write things that are more to her liking. I feel really, really bad that I'm did not live up to Christa's blogging standards of political correctness (insert sarcasm!).

When I started this blog, I thought about turning the comments off but it's something you have to remember doing every time you post and I always forgot. I'm putting my comments on moderation so that I don't have to see comments here by people I wouldn't bother knowing in real life. Christa and her ilk are all for being tolerant until someone doesn't say or think just what she considers acceptable and then tolerance gets thrown out the window and the claws come out. She can start her own blog for that purpose. I'm not obligated to give her my space to climb up on a soap box and spew her crap.

something so beautiful

I was thinking about doing the right thing--how I think it should be easy to always make decisions based on what is right and how I sometimes choose just to go along with things I know are inherently wrong simply because I don't want to make waves or make a scene. I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's an indication of a deep character flaw on my part, but I'm fairly certain that it is. I know it's impossible to be perfect, to live the perfect life, always choosing wisely. But when I look back on my life, I see so many instances where I should have done things differently, when I should have spoken up or questioned more, or fought harder to make my truths be as important as I allowed everyone else's truth be for them. It makes me feel like I've given away important pieces of who I really am--a selling out of my soul for a few moments of serenity that never make up for what I've lost.

I know people who are not afraid of speaking up and defending their truths. Some of them are much younger than me and I wonder where they get the courage to be so strong so early in life. I study everything about those kinds of people looking for clues to see how they make it look so easy. It's taken me half a lifetime to get to the point where I am not afraid anymore, but even now I still find myself tempted to keep my mouth shut because there will be less fallout, less drama if I allow my truths to take a back seat.

Here's the thing: I want to be better than that. I want to risk being uncomfortable. I want to be what I know I can and should be. I've tried to remember back to when it became important to me that I just go along, and all I can remember is that it's how I've always been. I want to be someone different than that because I do not want to regret not changing after recognizing the error of my ways. I don't watch Dr. Phil anymore, but I used to. I think he would say something like, "when you know better, you do better"--and I think that's a perfect sentiment.

Playing it safe for the sake of a false sense of peace is wearing me out from the inside. The people I love best in this world are the people who say what's on their mind and don't worry about anyone else. And I think what I love most about those people is that they seem to have figured out that they are only saying what everyone else is thinking behind your back. They find a way to live their best lives without all the censors most of us have drilled into us and though they might not have a bunch of superfluous friends on hand like everyone else, the people they do have around them are pretty stellar. That's what I've discovered.

When I do the wrong thing, it inevitably stays with me forever. I replay scenes in my head and I think about how free I would be feeling if only I was brave enough to stand behind what I know is right. I'm going to work on that. I want to feel free.

snoops

You know what is really creepy? Writing a private email to someone and mentioning something like weight or cooking or vitamins then the very next day (or maybe even sooner) getting lots of spam emails from different places about weight and cooking and vitamins.

Coincidence? I think not.

not a hero

Wow. My son came home from college last night and this is what he learned from his Chinese professor: Mao Zedong is a hero and China is not a communist country! When two out of the fifty students objected to this propaganda (lie), he told them that most people think Mao's a hero but some think he's a bad man (the families of the 70+ million Chinese people who died on his watch perhaps?) In whose world is a murderer of 70 million people considered a hero? And what on earth is wrong with those people?

Three out of four of my son's professors are foreigners (not that there's anything wrong with that). Last semester he had a Canadian professor telling the class how much better Canadian's healthcare is than ours. Honestly, if these people love their home countries so much, why don't they stay there and teach? It was an anthropology class so the professor really had no business giving lectures on our healthcare system. It's not enough that American radicals have infiltrated our educational systems to rewrite history, erase history, distort the truth and outright lie. We are now employing foreigners to help us along in our destruction. Wonderful!

(For the record, I don't support Obama's healthcare takeover. It's a tax and nothing more. No healthcare services will be implemented until 2013--that means we pay for at least 4-5 years BEFORE anyone gets anything out of it--at which time they'll cry in their soup that costs have risen and they will tax us even more--for LESS service! They simply want to steal more of our money and spend it foolishly. Perhaps more alcohol is needed for Nancy Pelosi's plane as she jetsets around the country with her family on MY DIME!!! WHERE ARE THE JOBS??????????????????????????????) People want JOBS!!!

I'm really sick of what's going on in our world. I'm sick of the right and the left and everyone in between. They are civil servants but they rule as though they are kings and queens. My children know real history because I took the time to teach them, but many, many others sit inside classrooms and listen to these communist pukes teach them lies so that lies become the truth in their minds. The White House had a Mao ornament adorning its Christmas tree this past year. Huh? This is unconscionable. How do we fight that? How do we recover from the calculated deceptions which lead to someone thinking it is a great idea to put a Mao ornament on a Christmas tree?

I try to remain hopeful but it's difficult. I wish for a world away from this world where me and my family could go to get away from this madness. People think communism is great because they do not know what the word means. Go live in China then come back and give us a report on how wonderful it is to have to get a permit to have your one allotted child. I am so sick of stupid people. Stupid people are dangerous and I am telling you right now that stupid people had best stay far away from me because I am liable to slap them upside the head with reality should they start spouting the propaganda taught in schools and disseminated on the news.

Stop poisoning the people with lies, especially our children who are our future.

the 7 o'clock hour of dread

Just recently I have been noticing a growing sense of dread coming over me when the 7 o'clock hour rolls around. This is the time of the evening when my youngest daughter has taken to calling me to chat about her day. When I say chat I guess I really mean complain. For 30 minutes to an hour, I get a run down of what's been happening since the last time I spoke with her (within 24 hours at most.) Her list of complaints gets longer by the day and sometimes I think my brain will burst from all the negativity. Here are some of the things she complains about:

....being really, really tired, her feet hurting from walking to and from class, how much homework she has, how overly liberal her professors are, how hot it is in her dorm, how her roommate is super messy, how her roommate keeps her up at night because her classes don't start till the afternoon, how the food in the cafeteria sucks, how much she hates the showers in the dorm, how her head is aching from one thing or another, how uncomfortable her bed is, how she is out of diet coke with caffeine, how there is still an infestation of ladybugs in her dorm room even though I've called to complain about it numerous times as has she, how late the buses always are, how heavy her book bag is and how it is making her shoulders ache, how hot or cold it is outside that day, how slow her computer is, how her phone is getting on her nerves, how she hates her haircut, how she's bored, how she's out of money, how she forgot her favorite top at home the last time she visited and that's what she wants to wear tomorrow....and on and on and on...

Since August 14th, I have been getting these calls on a nightly basis, and it's taken until this past week or so to finally feel I'm at my limit. At around 6 PM, I start feeling edgy, anticipating the call, and when I see her name pop up on my phone, I think, "Oh, here we go again!" I flip open the phone, take a deep breath, and ask her about her day.

A number of years ago, when my children were young, I wrote a poem called, A Good Mother. The poem listed all the things a good mother would do that I did not do. It starts, "A good mother wakes up in the morning and makes her children eggs..." because that's what I've always thought good mothers should do. Me? I served toast and cereal because it was easy and fast. I slipped eggs into their diet at night when I would occasionally serve breakfast for dinner, but I never felt I should get credit for that because it felt like I was cheating. Truth be told, I was too lazy and grumpy to make eggs in the morning and as far as I was concerned, that's what a good mother would do.

That poem felt like a purging of all the awful things I felt about myself as a mother--all the "shoulds" I couldn't manage to do---all the ways I felt I was falling short. I'm not sure what happened to that poem but if I find it, I'll post it here so you can see where my head was at. There is a quiet sadness about stay at home mothers that nobody seems to notice. We never hear enough good things about how important and difficult our job is. Never.

That poem came back to me today when I started writing this because I imagine if I wrote it today I would probably say something like, "A good mother would listen to her college age daughter complain without watching the clock to see when the call might be over." After hanging up with her, I find myself heading to the kitchen to look for something crunchy to eat like pretzels, or something crunchy AND sweet like Frosted Mini Wheats which I eat out of the box until I have my fill. I crunch and crunch and crunch and crunch. Can y'all hear me wherever you are?

If I'm extra lucky, on those same nights I get a call from my daughter, my husband will be out of town and call me to recount his list of complaints so that I get a double dose of downers. I can be bobbing around the ceiling like a helium balloon all day, and in no time, my feet are planted back on the ground where good mothers and good wives listen with compassion, and promise with conviction, that tomorrow will be better, for sure.

you wanted something more than this

My husband is in one room and he hears the water running but he thinks it's someone taking a shower. I am in another room, with my daughter, watching a Jersey Shore episode I have DVR'd and saved to watch with her when she comes home on the weekend from college. We cannot explain why we love that show--we just do. We laugh about their accents and their hair and the ridiculous tans they get from tanning beds when the beach sits right outside their front door. I hear water at one point, but it is raining outside and so I shake my head and tell myself it's just rain. More time passes and I hear the sound of water again and I think to myself that something is not right, that it sounds as though it is raining INSIDE the house. I walk out of the room and I turn towards the sound of the water and discover it is coming from the bathroom. The toilet has overflowed and flooded everywhere.

I start screaming OMG but then I shift into clean-up mode. I am good in a crisis. I panic initially for a number of seconds, but then you can count on me to find a way out of whatever mess I am in with quiet and cool. You want me on your side because I can make you believe everything will be ok, that I can fix anything. My husband is just the opposite. He can be counted on to help, but he cannot give up on his raging against whatever mess we are in. He screams and he rages and he does not get that nothing he says will change the fact that we simply need to shut up and deal with what's in front of us. He makes whatever mess we're in a thousand times worse just because he cannot keep his mouth shut.

We spend the afternoon wet vacuuming up the excess water and attempting to dry the carpets with big, industrial sized fans. The entire time we are dealing with this mess, my husband is screaming his lungs out about everything. How he is sick of living this way, how hard he works and how much he hates living with the insanity of toilets overflowing, etc., etc., etc. He can turn the smallest thing into the biggest problem and the biggest problem into something much worse without even trying. In my head I am plotting how I will leave him even though I know I will never go anywhere. It helps to pretend there is a place I can go when madness is all around me.

That evening, after cleaning up all the toilet water we've been knee deep in all day, we head off to see the play Annie downtown. It is still raining outside--the freezing kind of rain that makes you think the whole world is crying, and our parking space is two blocks from the theater. We do not have an umbrella because I forgot to bring one and if I don't remember everything, then nothing gets remembered. We are drenched and so very miserable. I am heartsick about everything, mostly about being stuck in a life that sometimes feels like a trap I can't find my way out of, but then Annie comes on stage and starts singing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow and I feel my own heart start floating back into its proper place from where it fell inside me.

Sometimes I am amazed at the level of dysfunction I've created for myself without even knowing I was creating it. I own it all, even the crazy, because it's all part of who I am.

the bearer of unconditional things

I know this is really strange, but every once in a while I go to my brother's flicker site and go through his pictures--a virtual stalker, if you will. I have two brothers who don't speak to me, who I have not seen in over 20 years. My one brother doesn't speak to me just because (really!). My other brother who doesn't speak to me, basically cut the whole family off and I was just collateral damage thrown into the mix because he severed ties with them. Even though I did nothing to him except love him, I got cut off, too. I've spent a lifetime trying to process this. I cannot tell you how it feels to be erased like that from someone's life because there are no words. I never talk about it to anyone because I don't know what to say. I know that a lot of my childhood years have been forgotten because of this.

I cannot remember so many things. My sister will ask me if I remember this or that and I have to tell her no. I try to remember, but I can't. I was literally erased from their lives, then I think my mind erased most things connected to them. I do remember my older brother being a know-it-all and I remember him playing the Elvis Costello song "Alison" over and over and over again. I remember this about my little brother: When he first started school, he cried and cried, and could not be consoled, so I would stand in line with him to take him to his class in the morning so that he would feel safe and stop all that crying. I have never been able to stand seeing little kids cry.

Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a trip down memory lane where I get all weepy over lost relationships because I'm at peace with my life at this point. What I wanted to write was that as I was going through my brother's Christmas flicker pictures, I noticed something weird. There were pictures of the inside of his house decorated for the holidays and what I noticed is that both my sister and my brother have almost 100% copied the way my parents furnish and decorate their home. They all have open beams on their ceilings. They have the same type of rug in the family room. Their kitchens are set up in identical ways. Their wooden tables all have a sheet of glass on top and a white doily runner between the wood and the glass. There are built in bookshelves in the family room of all their homes. Their fireplace mantles are adorned in similar fashions. When my parents started to collect a certain kind of expensive pottery, my sister went out and bought a ton of it herself. My mother has an extensive collection of Hummels and I noticed that my sister started collecting them as well. They all have the same type of curtains in the windows, too. Let me be clear, their homes are beautiful. But it's like this weird copycatville where they all seem compelled to be carbon copies of each other. I wonder what they think about when they visit each other. I'm guessing they think what good taste they all have since they all have the exact same taste.

I'm trying to figure out what this means because I think there has to be some reason why they both felt the need to replicate our parents home inside their own homes. I think it might have something to do with needing my parents approval and knowing that they would have it if they copied them. What else could it be? There's no hint of originality in either home that screams, THIS IS ME, I AM DIFFERENT FROM YOU.

I guess I just find it fascinating to know that there isn't anything in my home that resembles their homes. If I never moved away, I wonder if my home would mimic theirs. I wonder if I would reside in copycatville as well due to the pressure of living in the same area, or if I would have the courage to be the me that is different from them that I feel free to be because I am so far away.

Blue moon ringing in a New Year, 2010

There's an eclipsed Blue Moon tonight, so I am taking that as a sign that 2010 will be good.

2009 has been mostly wonderful. I am enormously blessed. I look forward to the promise that a new year brings and will do my best to honor my life here on earth. I will continue to seek the truth in all things and I will work to acquire the knowledge I need to help myself and my family navigate through this world. I will look for the divine everywhere and in everyone. I will strive to remain in the light.

Happy New Year!

May health, happiness and prosperity be yours.