Happy Birthday Mom!!

On August 25th, 1924 my mother, Ella Celestia Good (later  Olsen Parlette) was born to Aura & Fred Good.  My mother has been gone now for 18 years, she would have been 90 years old today.  She was my best friend, the one person in this world who knew me best and loved me without qualification.  I could talk to her about anything, and did - we had great conversations!  Her family was her everything, and she worked very hard to not carry the baggage from her own broken childhood into mine.  She wasn't perfect, and neither was our relationship.  But I always knew for sure that I was loved and that there was one person on this planet for whom I was the center of their universe.

I remember when she died, one of my thoughts was that I'm an orphan now, no longer anyones child. I was only 32 when she passed and I remember how incredibly alone I felt, knowing I was no longer someones child.  Might sound like a funny thing to say/feel but think about it, it's a very "untethered" feeling, like a balloon just floating free, nothing and no one now to anchor you.  I was not married at the time and I never have had children.  Even getting married a few years later I never had that "I belong to someone now" feeling, although I think that was more a function of my particular marriage, not marriage in general.  But it is a very different feeling once your parents are gone - regardless of your age at that moment, that is when you realize (or I realized) that your childhood is truly and finally over.   There's no one left to ask what you were like as a baby, or hear the story of how your parents met, fell in love, what was going on in the world when you were in your mother's womb, or any of those other questions that remind us of where we came from.  I know not everyone had a good, healthy childhood or even parents that were in love with, let alone married to, each other.  But that's my story, and I'm really grateful for it.  Grateful that I had two parents, for however long I had them, that really & truly loved me, wanted me,  loved each other and modeled that for me.

There have been many moments since my mothers passing, mostly in the last few years as I have begun the process of becoming more conscious to life, that I have been able to see some elements of our relationship that weren't all that healthy.  I believed for years, most of my life, that I was a moody person and that that wasn't an attractive personality trait to the world, men especially.   What I know and accept now about myself is that I'm an introvert, and I can reach a point where being verbal with someone else is simply not possible until I "recharge" by going within and shutting down.  My mother struggled to understand those moments when I wasn't very communicative, and she would push me and keep pushing me, constantly asking what was wrong when there was nothing wrong, I just had nothing left to give for the moment and wanted to be left alone for a while.   But I was exactly like my father in that way, and she either had forgotten how he was (he died when I was 14) as I got older, or maybe it had bothered her about my Dad too, who knows.

Anyway,  I loved my mother deeply and never could stand being separated from her.  I still can't, I still feel like nothing has been quite right since she left.  But at the same time, I believe she needed to go and move onto whatever was next for her, and I needed to be without her for my own self-development.  I miss her, I miss that sense of knowing that all would be right when I was with her.  I miss knowing that for one person, there was no one more important than me, I came first for her.  But I still walk through this world with her love, hers and my fathers,  and that love has molded and shaped me in so many ways, it has given me the strength and confidence I've needed to survive this life without her.  I'm thankful and grateful that I had 32 years with her, that I was privileged to know the amazing woman that Celeste Parlette was (she stopped using her first name long before I was born) and most of all, grateful that she loved me.

Happy Birthday Mom, I love you.

Finding others like me ...

Just had to share this Tedx video I just saw.  Really spoke to me in a profound way ,,, she's telling her own story and we're all different, but it's like she was also telling my story.

Take a look:

Glennon Melton

I found her through another post on her website, which if you're interested is:
http://momastery.com

She's a recovering bulimic, alcholic and drug addict, who it also sounds like has discovered she's an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person).

One of the things I love about how she presents herself and talks, is that it's obvious she's in the same 12-step recovery program I am because of some of the vernacular she uses.  But she doesn't just quote from a book, she uses her own words.  I love that, it's kind of rare.

An acceptance of things just as they are, has been washing over me lately.  It feels a little like waking after a long nap where you were dreaming vividly, thinking your dreamworld was real.  Then you wake, look around you and what you see isn't necessarily bad compared to the dreamworld, it's just different.  And at first you think this real world is the dream, but in time you come to recognize that this is, in fact, what's real.  When I drank, and my whole life prior to 19 months ago revolved around drinking to feel, not feel, plug-in, unplug, celebrate, grieve, etc., that felt like some kind of dreamworld - But I thought it, and everything in it, was real.  So odd sometimes, and yet really grounding & serene, to realize this is real, that was not.  No more blackouts, no more gaps in my memory that made me feel sometimes like I was literally going insane.  I may not always remember clearly what happened two weeks ago, I am 51 years old after all.  But I wake up each and every day remembering what happened last night, who I spoke to and what I said/didn't say, did/didn't do.  And the grace that I feel erupting inside me every day from that alone is something I could never have expected when I lived in that dream world, so desperately wanting grace and having no idea how or where to look for it.

I am blessed - thank you God.

I woke up this morning feeling very happy, content - for no particular reason, but I haven't felt this way in some time.  I slept really well, Bella beside me all night as I lock her in now so she can't wake me all night barking at raccoons, foxes, cats or whatever else seems to disturb her at 3am.  Don't think I had a night sweat all night, and that alone was a blessing.

I can't help but wonder at the significance of finding this flower blooming beside my driveway last night.

I thought it was a weed, it's certainly not something I planted there.  After much discussion on Facebook and googling, I believe it is a night blooming Moon Flower.  In the light of day, it's no longer blooming, which explains why I've never noticed it before - I don't go out much at night.

Someone said the flower might be Gods way of saying I'm on the right path, and I like the way that sounds.  Might also be why I woke up feeling happy this morning, and slept so well last night.  I am letting go of parts of my past that no longer serve me.  Not with anger or resentment, or even sadness, just acceptance that life is different now, I'm different now, things change.  I am really grateful for that acceptance, it's been quite a process to get there.

So today I'm just being as lazy as possible - it's now 1:30 and I'm on the couch watching episodes of Merlin on Netflix.  I plan to be here most of the day, not leaving the house.  I haven't had a day like this in so long.  Balance is something I've become aware of this past week, needing to find more of it.  Not really a message that is easy to get from outside sources, it's something that life will remind us of though if we're not careful.  And Bella is snoozing right here beside me, always comforting.

Blessings!

Robin Williams

His death is just feeling so heavy to me, and I think to many others as well.  I'm disheartened to hear so many people judging his final choice.  I truly have no idea what it feels like to want to end your life, that thought/those feelings have literally never come into my head, which I'm so grateful for.  But I think I can understand where the judgement comes from - it's from fear and pain.  We look at someone who seemed to have so much going for him, seemed so gifted and full of joy, and yet his inability to feel the joy that he gave to others is very scary.  And we feel pain from anger, he took himself from us, denied anyone the ability to reach him through that pain.  It rattles us when someone takes their own life, it feels so wrong, not part of Gods plan, something so out of synch that we can't make any sense of it.  A life just gone, over, aborted, disrupted.  That's how it feels to me anyway, no good bye's, no chance to get used to the idea of a world without that person.

Some years back, I knew a woman named Linda.  We became good friends very quickly, and were involved in some of the same, shall we say, extra-curricular activities.  I'll leave out the details for now.  Linda was beautiful, smart, funny, had a great job and good friends.  But she dealt with clinical depression and bi-polar disease, which I didn't know.  She was on meds, but they didn't always work. I hadn't heard from her in some time, and a mutual friend finally asked me if I had heard the news about her.  I called her phone and her parents answered, hoping it was me ,,, she'd told them about me, about our friendship, but had cleared the numbers from her phone.  Linda had paid all her bills, checked her dog into a kennel, cleaned her apartment, and with champagne & sleeping pills, ended her life.  Her sister had found her, after not hearing from her either.  Her mother was very sweet to me, told me Linda had wanted to go for some time, had in fact tried it twice before, and that we needed to let her go in our hearts.  She'd been in pain, deep emotional pain, most of her life.

That was so hard for me to accept, I grieved Linda in private for some time.  I have one picture of her and I together, and I will always treasure it.  It's so hard to imagine how someone can just end their life on purpose, what those last few moments must feel like.  I can't imagine frankly, and finally, with Linda, I stopped trying and just let go of her.  But Robin's death reminded me of how that time felt, and how we never really know what's going on in other people's minds & hearts.  I couldn't help Linda, no one could.  But I know I touched her life in some small way, and perhaps she took some of my strength with her into what came next for her.  I can still hear her laughter and see her smile, so in some small way she left a bit of herself behind with me too.

Hugs to all. xoxo

Elephant in the room

Thought I'd share something that has occurred to me recently, and you know what a visual person I am (if you don't know that you soon will)  :-)

The further away I get from the woman I used to be, who used alcohol as a way of processing emotions and feelings (good bad or indifferent), the more I am able to see just how lost and inauthentic I really was.  All the things I thought were wrong with me,wrong with my life, were really just delusions that I fueled with the drink.   Its like living in a room that I thought was painted this grey/taupe color.  I was fine with that, didn't know anything different so all good.  But in time and with distance from my drinking,  I'm able to see that the room wasn't actually grey/taupe at ALL ,, that was the huge elephant in the room, which was my drinking.  It was so huge, so invasive and I was so close to it, that I thought that WAS me, my life.  Now I'm learning that the room is actually multi-colored, vibrant & beautiful - green, pink, blue, orange & red.  And in that room, sitting on the floor, is a little stuffed elephant, a reminder of how myopic I used to be ,,, and could be again if I fall flat on my face.

A new poem I just finished.

        Strangers

Yeah, you never knew me
You saw what you wanted to see
I showed you who you wanted me to be
But you never really saw me.

All those years, the good times we shared
It was all smoke and mirrors
I was just lost
And my soul was never bared

You kept me around
I was your unicorn, your clown
We mystified each other, you know it too
It was an illness - alcohol and you

You are such a deep part of who I used to be
It’s the past, no longer true 
That you and that me.

Pain and yes anger, that’s what I feel
I would not or could not be who I was, be real
Love, now I don’t even know
Hard to say, when we are both letting go

Yeah, I never knew me
I saw what I wanted to see
I gave the world what it wanted of me
But I never really saw me 

My vision is clearing