It's All About The Hope

At the age of 34 I have seen a lot of things that I can't agree with in this world...dead beat parents still make me the maddest of all. I'm not talking about the parents who try their damnedest and the kid still manages to screw up...it happens, we are human after all. I'm talking about those of us who are left behind, wondering what we did to “make” our parent not want to even see us anymore. Because that's how we see it.

Little hearts are broken open and minds are damaged from something that we can't control in life. We try so hard to be good, do right, speak well, be what they want us to be...but the disappointments always come. They don't show up when they say they will, they don't help Mom (or Dad) buy the school clothes we need, they give us that look that says we've shamed them in some way. Little by little, seed by seed, they plant the fears, doubts and self loathing into our tiny little bodies. I've wondered for years if he knew that's what he was doing...if he cared. I know now that he was too selfish to ever have given it a second thought. He is just HIM...there is no inward reflection of himself or what he has done wrong. He doesn't think he has anything to be held accountable for. So what makes me pick that wound again and again? Those damn seeds are worse than weeds...they won't stop growing no matter how many times I chop them down, but I keep trying.

Not so long ago I did manage to kill off a few of those nasty thoughts in my head that creep up from time to time. I no longer sit and wonder if I will one day get the approval that I so desperately wanted all those years...I know it's not coming. There are too many voids between us, too much time, too many hurts...I've grown too far beyond his comprehension of self. The final straw was after 15 years of silence, he said he wanted to meet face to face, to talk. I battled with so many raging emotions trying to make one of the hardest decisions in my life and all the while thinking, “It shouldn't be THIS damn hard to decide whether or not I want to see my biological father.” Yeah, I just kept “should-ing” all over my self. I don't know how sincere his approach really was, though, because he tried to set up the meeting through a message on facebook over the Christmas weekend and when I didn't reply after two days he sent a note letting me know he had written me off for good this time.

The funny thing is, the thing that should have broken me clean in two, set me free in so many ways. I still have a lot of the fear and self doubt, it's not going to change over night, but I don't have to sit pining away for what I now know will never come. He's not capable of being the man I want him to be...I had unreasonable expectations. But the things that I've gone through have led me to be the woman I am today...a little neurotic, a lot of fun, and a mom who tries very hard to make sure her kids know EVERY day that they are loved. My mom tried, too...but like too many young girls, I didn't listen so well. The only time these hurtful thoughts even come up these days is when I hear about one of the “other kids” going through it.

See my Heart Family is made up of sisters and brothers who have kids and I love them just as fiercely as any of my neices or nephews. A while back one of them told me some things about how he felt and what he wanted to say to HIS dad who was right there in the same house, but the gap was still there...his mother's the dead beat, his dad just has some issues that include communication gaps. I told him that he'd know the right time, but not to wait until it was too late...sometimes it's better said than left unsaid, no matter how hard it may be to get it out. We talked over a few other things and I let the matter drop. His dead beat mom said some very hurtful things to his dad, untruths that the Other Kid couldn't let hang in the air. He finally told his dad how he felt. I'm so proud of him because I know how hard that must have been. He gives me hope that the damage really can be repaired when one or both of our parents are “less than”...he's lucky that his step-mother is a gigantic greater than in his life, that he has a lot of people around him that love him and he's got his listening ears on. “Hope springs eternal” and he is part of my hope for the future.

The Power of Family

Families are made up of a multitude of personalities, races, genders and appearances. This doesn't make them any less of a family, it just makes them different...much like the rest of the world. That's right, different. Abnormal, exceptional, unique...the list can go on for a while, but it all boils down to the same thing: there is no such thing as “normal”; especially in a family. We may have the same nucleus as other families: Mom, Dad, two kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc; but we've found that the heart can love people outside the “traditional” family titles as much as the ones that are more conventional. Sisters and brothers of the heart is what we call them. This weekend has been full of that family.

A Saturday trip to the beach condo with Higher Briars and her cousins was at the start. Monster Teen hung out at the pool while Toddler Troll and I hung out at the beach. Hours of silliness ended in all of the kids playing in the condo while the adults talked. Higher Briars is, most assuredly, a sister of my heart...we each accept the other, “warts” and all. She's one of only two women that I've ever trusted completely with the real me. That person inside that we hold in reserve because we're not sure that anyone can really accept the total package. I never have to hold back with her; I laugh loudly, speak my mind, and never for a second worry that I'll be judged for anything I feel is a deficiency in my personality. THAT is family.

It doesn't have to be defined by blood relation. It's a feeling deep in your heart that says, “You belong.” Duckie and I have been questioned on this feeling many times in our 15 years of marriage, but even more so within the last year. The Land of All Ducked Up has received a Path of Recovery and there have been a few people who have been added to our list of family along the way. People who mean the world to us and have been instrumental in developing that Path of Recovery to it's full potential. We spent the entire day with them yesterday starting with watching one of them get baptized at their church and ending with a barbecue/pool party with several others.

A cook out with some of the blood relations will end this long weekend and we'll love every minute of it, too. Where once I may have dreaded an event with some of them, I now revel in it...I've learned that their “warts” aren't as bad as I had made them out to be and their beauty is absolutely worth every ounce of my love.  They have the power to lift us up when we are sad, love us until we can love ourselves, laugh with us, cry for us when needed and never give up on us.

We have such a phenomenal cast of characters in our mixed up world and I wouldn't have it any other way. 

Wake Up and Smell The Childhood

Today I took my two boys (ages 3 and 14) to the beach near our home to meet up with our friends at their family's condo. The beach is an experience that I only had a handful of times growing up and so I definitely revel in being able to take my children as often as humanly possible before the jellyfish come out to play. That's part of the beauty of being a parent, sharing something we loved from our own younger years with our children. It brings back the memories of Padre Island, my mom and aunt laughing together as my sister, cousin and I play in the sand or water. Many of us have had moments like that; happy instances in life where we acted silly, laughed hysterically and will forever remember. That is the legacy that my mother gave to me and that I in turn hope to pass on to my children.



My 14 year old decided to leave the beach and hang out up at the pool with his buddy. So I enjoyed a day of experiencing life through the eyes of a 3 year old. He laughed at the seaweed washing up on the shore, throwing it back in the water with great glee; told the little crabs to “GO! GO AWAY! GO BACK IN YOUR HOLES!” because he didn't like the way they looked; and joyfully plunged into the waves. All the time that we were there another family was not too far away from us; a mom, dad and 3 children. As I laughed at my precocious toddler I was also aghast at the fact that the mother sat in her beach chair next to one of the children playing on a DS the entire day! The dad got out in the water with the other two kiddos who were consistently ignored by the mom when they called out to her.



I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the best mother in the world...I may not even rank in the top 100, but I do have a couple of firm rules when it comes to family time.

These rules have been put into place for several reasons and the greatest of these is that we only have one childhood. Our kids are kids for such a short amount of time and then they run off to become mouthy teens who don't want to hang out with mom and baby brother at the beach. If we don't get them out of the DS and on to the beach, why the heck did we even bring them with us?! Get active with them, relive that moment that you loved WITH them. Let them dunk you in the water, bury you in the sand and chase you down the beach with their sandy little hands formed into monster claws. Let go of everything that is stressing you out and take an active role in their day. Get down on their level, wake up and smell the childhood that is still alive inside of YOU! I did and I have the sunburned spots where the sunscreen was missed to prove it! I also have a Monster Teen who enjoyed getting a day away from his mom, came back to me with smiles, hugs and an, “I love you, Mom!” and a Toddler Troll who was so worn out he fell asleep 5 minutes into our car ride home.



Yep, I think we've made some great memories today.

Levels of Importance or The Curse of the People Pleasers

While flipping through facebook status messages I came upon one that was from The Dearest Deacon that led me to some pondering. She was sharing that her occupation often leads her to do things that were left over due to someone else's perception of a lack in importance. So what makes things important to one, but irrelevant to another? And how do we prioritize the merit of a task when we don't know another's view on its value? These and other questions are what ramble around in my brain.

Let's start off with the obvious: We are not mind readers. We have absolutely no way to determine what someone finds important unless they tell us. We can assume based on our own desires/needs/wishes, but that is the limit to our abilities. My list would start with doing something for one of my children, but someone else may decide that they're own needs are far more important than that of their child's. Is that wrong of them? Perhaps, but I think that it depends on the situation. If a child has to go pee in the middle of a changing room while mommy is trying to find a pair of jeans that will actually fit her, this mommy is going to get her own clothes on as quickly as possible and get the child to a bathroom. (I don't like cleaning up messes and I believe that “better safe than sorry” is a valuable rule.) Another mom, knowing that her child has the ability to hold his bladder, might tell them that she just needs to try on one more pair of jeans. Which one of us is in the right? Here's the crazy thing...I think we both are.

How can two people with different takes on the same situation both be right? Because we each take with us our personality, life experience, stress of the day, etc. I can no more judge her for how she deals with the situation than she can me. We each come at the day in a different way and only our own Higher Power can judge us for that. There are definitely times when accountability comes into play, though. Such as when Person A is asked to do something for Person B, but Person A already has a day full of tasks laid out in front of them and doesn't get to the desired chore. So we can ascertain that Person A found the job to be less important than the other duties they came upon during their day. It does not change the fact that it was very important to Person B...or that it didn't get done. Person A had a choice when asked to be up front and clear that they did not have the time/ability to complete the task for Person B (or maybe the choice of completing the task at some point in the day no matter what else was on their agenda)...they didn't take it. I think this is where the real issue resides.

We are human. We are fallible. We say, “yes” all the time when we really mean “no.” It is the Curse of the People Pleasers. Something that I am all too familiar with. I have offered to do things, go places, give my time to other people for most of my life whether I really wanted to or not. Sounds silly, doesn't it? But it's a compulsion to be needed, liked, wanted around that drives me to walk away from the best one word sentence in the English language, “No.” And here's the thing, if we do something for someone else at our own expense, without love in our own hearts, it negates the good of actually completing it...it's really like we never did it at all. Yes, the task was completed. Yes, the person is satisfied. But I now have a list of reactions that will wash over me: shame for doing something I didn't want to do (not that the chore was shameful, it's guilt for knowing I didn't want to and still doing it); anger because the person didn't react to my doing the job with enough gratitude (yep, I'm that shallow sometimes); or fear that I'll be roped into doing more and more for the person now because they'll expect it now that I did it once....and that means that I am disgruntled and feel no joy from doing something nice for someone else; item thus negated.

I'm not proud of those reactions. They're not “nice” or even really necessary, but I blame it on that darned edit button being broken. I'm working on erasing those thoughts by learning to say, “no” from the start. I've learned that if I'm upfront about the situation, I gain respect from the person and lose no ground in our relationship. That's the power of friendship...if the person is really worthy of it, they understand when we need time to ourselves. It doesn't change the importance of the task, it doesn't erase the need of it being done, but it lets the person know that I'm not available so they can make other arrangements. If more of us did just this one little common courtesy it would greatly improve the way the world works.

Today I am grateful because The Dearest Deacon picked up someone else's slack and did a wonderful thing for someone else. It's one of the things that makes her a beautiful person...she cares deeply for the people around her, she listens with an open heart and she always greets you with a warm smile. She is truly a gift in the lives around her.

On Mothers And Control

The amazingly awesome Bestie called me today with a dilemma. The same one she had called her mother with earlier in the day. She's unhappy with some things in her life and she wanted some support, some comfort, from her mother...that's what they're there for, right? It's the one thing she didn't get...she never gets...from that source. That got me wondering: “What is a mother really?” In the Land of All Ducked Up she is a compassionate, loving woman who listens to you when you're hurting, tells you the truth (even when you don't want to hear it), and NEVER, NEVER makes you feel less than. Sound impossible? It's absolutely not. It's the woman that I call mom and the mom that I strive to be.

So what about Bestie? She got the standard answer, “Come home to me...I'll take care of you.” Sounds loving and compassionate, right? It's not. It's full of subtext, innuendo and maliciousness divine. What it really says is, “I told you so. Come back to our house so that I can show you how to fix your life since you don't know how to run it on your own.” You may think that I am over-reaching, but I've learned over the span of my 22 year friendship that no matter how benign her comment may seem to be, it's actually much more malignant. So what do you do about someone like that? Is there anything you can do? The quick answers: Nothing and no.

The long form to that is that at 34 I am just beginning to learn that we can do absolutely nothing about the people around us that make us feel insignificant. They will be who they are and I have not an ounce of control over them. Doesn't mean that I like it. Doesn't mean that I don't sometimes want to “scream into the wind” over it. It just means that I let them be who they are without letting it upset me. I'm not always good at it...I've had far too many years practice at being a control FREAK, but it's all about the progress. And even when I accept that her mom isn't the person that every child deserves in a mother, it doesn't mean that I say the right things to my beautiful, phenomenally gifted friend. I make mistakes, I'm human, but I'm more aware of those mistakes these days. And I'm out to change me into the woman I've always wanted to be...you know...the one that's a little less ducked up.

Repairing The Edit Button

It's the strangest things that will make me think of a person I haven't seen/talked to in some time. A song on the radio (Chicago songs still have the power to send me back to my 15 year old mindset and think of cassette tapes made by Mr. '79 Chevy Silverado) or a smell (that one perfume that mom always wore when I was little still makes me smile) or even a sound (thunderstorms crashing outside are a certain reminder of Montell, TX huddled in a hunting cabin with family). Tonight it was the street light near our house blinking.

Kentucky Girl is one of the nicest people I've ever met...she quickly joined the band of crazy women (that would be a compliment ladies) that I call friends. She shared with me a wonderful story about running in the evening around the parking lot of the apartment complex she was living in at the time. A street light would flicker as she came upon it, pass it and continue on. An occurance that most of us would have never thought twice about kept her running long after she would have usually stopped because it's something that happens to her that makes HER think of someone. You see Kentucky Girl lost her dad when she was very young and since then she feels his presence whenever there is a blinking street light near her; and now I think of her whenever I see it happen.

Such a random thing and yet, it now sparks instant thoughts of another person. So what? You might say...well, it's those thoughts that usually lead a person to reach out and contact the one they thought of, but not me. The edit button in my brain is broken...it adds in thoughts that shouldn't be there and deletes thoughts that were pretty good. I think of the person, I smile, I WANT to contact them, but I usually don't...that darned edit button will start adding in these malicious thoughts that tell me the person doesn't want to hear from me, or they've got no time for a conversation...and the next thing you know it's too late to call/text. But I'm breaking that pattern...I'm slowly mending the circuits that run to that edit button.

Tonight I knew it was late, but I texted anyways. I let Kentucky Girl know that I was thinking of her because if I don't I allow a wonderful friend to slip away and I don't want that to happen to me anymore. The cycle was broken this time! YAY FOR ME!