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.

Have a nice day

I got up this morning as usual and prepared to go for a run. It was sprinkling just a little bit so I decided that I'd do a little housework and wait to see if it cleared. Around 9:00 AM, someone rings my front doorbell and starts knocking on the door. I peeked out the blinds and saw a 20 something male standing there kind of shuffling around. I know I shouldn't have opened the door, but I did and he immediately went into some spiel about his mother being in a bad accident and how he needed gas and/or money for gas so that he could go to the hospital to see his dying mother. He was crying and very dramatic about the whole thing. He told me he owned a pressure washing business and that if I gave him gas or gas money to go see his dying mother, that he'd be happy to come back and pressure wash my house and driveway. I told him that wasn't necessary because at this point, all I really wanted to do was get rid of him because he made me nervous with all his shuffling around. He also had really bad teeth--they were black and this gloomy gray color and they kind of freaked me out. I immediately chastised myself for being judgmental and told him I'd check in my garage to see if we had any gas. I closed the door and locked it as quick as lightening.

In the back of my head, I knew that I wanted to tell him straight up to just go away, but I've been trying to find my sense of compassion towards other human beings again. And I've been working hard at removing fear from my life because when I stopped to think about all the things I fear, I found the list was pretty endless. I hated knowing that a lot of my life has been defined by fears that simply stole away time I could have used being happy and productive. There is so much to be afraid of and I think our society plays on those fears so that they can push through agendas that do not benefit any of us. Lately, my mind has been filled with fears about our disastrous financial situation, and the swine flu fear mongering seems to escalate by the minute. It's just endless and I decided I did not want to participate in all that fear anymore so when I feel the panic rising, I retrain my brain to calm myself down about whatever it is that is making me feel scared. I've been very successful at stamping out fears over which I ultimately have no control, and as a reward, I feel much happier.

So when I closed the door on the jittery man out front--even though a part of me sensed something wasn't right--I decided I'd give him money because I tried to think how I would feel if I was alone in the world and I needed to get somewhere and I didn't have any money to buy gas. I thought it wouldn't hurt me to give him money and whatever gas I had in the gas can in the garage because I have enough of both and could get more any time I wanted more. When you're blessed with riches, it costs nothing to give some away--I truly believe that. I tried to see past his exterior into his spirit where I know goodness lies in all of us, and decided I could trust this person I did not know for more than 3 minutes.

As I was digging out my wallet, my son, who was home at the time, came out of his room and asked me what I was doing so I told him the story. He informed me that a cop was out front and, of course, started in on the "don't ever open the door for anyone" lecture as if I was the child and he was the parent. The cop rings our doorbell and asked us if we knew this man and we told him no and I recounted the tale he had told me just moments before. He said he'd been called by some other neighbors and that he was going to look into the background of this fellow.

Long story short, Mr. jittery-black-teeth-money/gas-solicitor was lying. Apparently he's some sort of druggie/dealer. Pretty soon police cruiser number two arrives, then police cruiser number three. It was quite a show. They handcuffed him and hauled him off to jail!

All I could think about today was how these rotten, lying scumbag people ruin things for everyone because they make you harden your heart, they make you suspicious, they make you not want to trust anyone, or do nice things. I was thinking what must go through the mind of someone like that to come onto private property and blatantly lie to scam money to buy drugs. In a million years, I cannot imagine myself in a scenario like that and for that, I am grateful. Still, I feel ridiculous that I chose to believe him, that my kindness is a weakness that other people see as an opportunity to take advantage of.

There is never a dull moment in this neighborhood. I could toss out all the TV's we own and just sit by the windows and be entertained both day and night. I couldn't make up half this stuff even if I tried. I look around me and there's so much dysfunction, so much moral depravity I can hardly stand it. It's hard feeling like you're the only normal person in a world full of whackos.

Think of me...

"...there will never be a day when I won't think of you..."-Andrew Lloyd Webber

I haven't seen or spoken to one of my brothers in more than 20 years. The reason why is as big a mystery to me as to anyone who might read this. I think he got furious with me that I upset our parents over something that had nothing whatsoever to do with him, and so he decided not to speak to me ever again. I have three children he has never met. When he had his first child, I decided to offer up an olive branch even though I knew I had done nothing wrong to deserve his treatment of me, and put together a package of things for his new baby daughter and mailed it off to him. I knew how much I had changed just from having my children and thought perhaps his heart might have melted, too. I never heard back from him, not a thank you, nothing.

I have another brother who cut ties with everyone in the family when my parents disapproved of an older woman he was involved with. This was approximately 15 years ago. I had moved away with my own family at the time and so my connection to him was always through them and when he cut them off I guess he threw me in there as well because in my world that's just the way it goes. I guess we're considered a package deal and so we were all severed together.

I spend a lot of time trying not to think about this, and about what it means to me because it's very difficult to accept, at least for me, that I could be so easily erased from the lives of my brothers. I never tell anyone about them either because how do I explain the reasons why when I don't know them myself? It's this secret sorrow of mine that the world knows nothing about, but I might feel better if I write it down, if I try to let it go. I grew up in a family of people who never discussed difficult things, so that was the norm for me. My parents must know how awful I feel knowing that both of my brothers live their lives as though I do not exist and yet they say nothing. It just never gets mentioned because it's the appearance of happiness that's most important in our world. Nobody does surface-level-living like we do.

Here's something you should know about me: I am good at learning to live without people that I love because I think of it in terms of completing a task. I set my emotions aside and do the work involved in meeting the goal. It's only in the quiet of the night or on holidays or when I know it's their birthdays that I allow myself to feel the loss I know I've learned to live with so well. I wonder how they are. I wonder if they ever think of me.

Today I was wasting time on FACEBOOK and decided to type in my brothers names to see if I could find them. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me to do this before, but it hasn't. I could not find the brother who cut ties with everyone, but I did find a picture of my other brother. He looks nothing like I remember and yet I see my mother's face in him. I felt a mean little thought about how time has been kinder to me than it has been to him and then I stopped thinking that because I should know better by now than to be so spiteful.

It does feel better writing this all down. It doesn't change anything, but it does feel freeing to some degree.

Here's something else you should know: My brothers missed out on knowing and loving someone fabulous.

Me.