life of uncertainty

I feel very conflicted about my feelings these days. Sometimes I wonder if I'm coping or if I'm denying or if I'm glossing. I guess it is all normal. I feel like a new evangelist or something. I want to spout all this wisdom I feel like I've learned over this last year but on so many levels I don't want to follow it. I've noticed that it is so very hard to be around happy people, couples in general. I miss all the familiarity of a random touch, of all the familial labels. I still get a kick out of being able to refer to him as my husband, even as it injures. I want everyone to be happy, to be living their true potential. I want the universe not to work the way it does. I don't want hindsight to be 20/20, I don't want people to have to walk a mile in my shoes to understand. I want all my agony to be for some better good and not just for myself but to be contained in a bottle so I can inject or spray all those around me.

As I reread this I guess this IS positive. If I retain and really learn how to use it. How to be open and nonjudgemental. How to cherish the small moments. How to set my boundaries. How to slow down. How to work on myself and not seek out in my neediness.

It's on the verge of a year since my whole world turned upside down. My view out my window totally captures the day to day. Bright, sunny, dry inviting one moment. Stormy, wet, cold, dark the next. I know you have to have one to appreciate the other but I'm tired of not being able to hold on to the sun. I'm tired of carrying around this anger, I'm tired of all the hurt, sadness and yet I guess I'm at a crossroad because I'm afraid to let it go. Because then I'll have to face the emptiness?

I'm not done caring. I'm not done hoping. I'm not done trying to make him the person I see in my mind's eye and it is all holding me back. I think I've moved to the point where I really get that this isn't temporary but then I see the small holes in my story.

I'm a crier if you don't know that already and yet I haven't done so much lately. I guess maybe I did so much in the early days. Maybe jumping right into counseling from the onset is helping more than I realize? I guess I'm just scared. And maybe I'm too scared to admit that I'm scared about the future, about moving on, about rediscovering self and so I tell myself that I'm not REALLY coping, not REALLY letting my feelings out. Always trying to make something wrong with myself.

I need to remind myself this isn't such a linear path. I need to remember that how I feel today really means nothing until the next life event. But there I said it again, there is always some kind of baited breath. I guess letting go of this grief is so hard because it is ALL i have left of that life. I have expressed this SO many times, a couple here even, I know I need to write it all out but I keep making excuses. I need to really say my piece, and not just to the imagined audience, but it is time to start finding the appropriate words, semi appropriate at least, to the intended audience. I'm afraid that moving on will somehow let him, others, forget the depth of what transpired here. And I get that that is the point, that somewhere down the road this will be less painful, less acute but it will always be THIS transformative for me. I guess I'm still at square one in so many ways, I don't care that someday taking the higher road will be comforting or whatever pleasant word you want to insert. I care that I had to suffer. I don't meant to insinuate that I'm above suffering or that there hasn't been some suffering on his part but do you know what I mean? I don't even know what I mean anymore.

Posted by Hennifer at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

options

Posted by Hennifer at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

options

Ok. So this was going to be a post about music inspired by the events of the last few weeks and a blog entry from the fabulous J. I suppose it will continue to be but I am now highly frustrated because I deleted the wonderful J's comment because I'm a goober who checked the boxes inversely from what I wanted to do. Lame.

J, if you read again and remember even vaguely what you had to say about your family history I'd love to hear it.

Ok, so music.

I love music, adore it! I can take you into my fold if you have an awesome riff, your voice strikes a chord with me, a lyric is poetic, or I can move my fuddy duddy body to your rhythm. And you don't have to do all, even just one pathetic low note and I'm your best friend. As a youth I LOVED, LOVED if your jacket included the lyrics. I would make it my mission to memorize all the words so I could sing along. I love to sing along! I don't care how I sound I just like the connection, the emotional release that comes with for me.

Now don't get me wrong, I can't sing in the shower or the car, or just to amuse myself because my seemingly unlimited gift for memorizing lyrics has a hole, a gaping one. I can only sing along if the music is on. Which I do wholeheartedly. Twice in my relationship history I've been with people that don't like the singing along. That can never, ever happen again! I can barely sing nursey songs to my children. I make up the words. I make the ABC song a heartmelting aria. Recently, experiencing my youngest sister singing to my daughter I realize I should just stop. Even if I truly had a voice back in jr high I can't say as much today. Of course I won't, stop that is. I love music too much. I often dream of picking up an instrument again.

Somehow despite my passion, adulation, obsession with music I have not managed to pass that love along to my son. I'll keep my daughter out of it for now because I hope we are about to start a new path.

My son has become an American.Idol fan. I think he's expressed some interest in the past but this year the game is on. He is very particular, he's probably a pretty easy judge. He's a David.Cook fan. Not that I'm saying those are related. E got a postcard from his aunt, it was a Beatles postcard. This sparked some conversation about them, my love for said quartet, and a lot of discussion about those Beatles who have left us too early. He asked his dad how he felt about them and of course said Mr. doesn't like them. Side note: this should be a huge sign, along with the one mentioned above.

Anyway, it is with great delight? that the AI contestants have song 2 weeks worth of the "Lennon/McCartney song book". E asks me after every performance how I liked it and why, is it one of my favorite songs, etc.

Last night he asked to lie in bed and listen to music with me at bedtime. No decent parent could or should be able to say no. He wanted to listen to the Beatles. We chose disc 2 from 62-66. It had several of the songs that have been covered these last 2 weeks and my alltime favorite, Norweigan Wood. Let me just tell you that moment was about as perfect as it could be. Both of us chiming in to sing to Yellow Submarine, the boy asking me about each song as they played, needing reminders of what contestant sang which song, and in the end me commenting to him on a song only to find he had drifted off to sleep.

One couldn't/shouldn't ask for a more perfect ending to a day that started, with some severe questioning on my part, how this relationship of ours is working out :)

Posted by Hennifer at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

options

Thanks G for being my vocal audience. It really does somehow make writing more fun for me, even if it somehow adds an odd pressure :)

Ever since I was a small child I've had this weird fondness/eeriness for things "older". I recall my mother taking me out to the hills in West Salem to the Salem Academy campus. The buildings are older (or were the last time I was out there somewhere around a decade ago). You can peek in the windows at the very tiny little wooden desk-chair combo desks. We usually were there on a weekend or whatnot so it always had this kind of ghost town feel about it. I could go real quiet inside myself and picture my mother as a child, in a school uniform, playing about the yard. I could smell the chalk, hear the joyful plays. Sometimes I would get a signal of foul things that happened too. I always felt transported right back to that time. I honestly have never known the correct way to describe what happened, then or now. I get the same out of body experience when I watch anything about Vietnam. I used to have breakdowns when watching China.Beach. Maybe I was just too sensitive of an adolescent for that kind of stuff? I think there is more to it.

I was always disappointed that my parents were so young (born in the mid 50's). Whenever we had dress up ocassions at school I never had any resources. No poodle skirts, no penny loafer, no bell bottoms, no butterfly collars. As an adult I realize that had more to do with who, what, where and when kept the momentos than it did the year they were born. I'm fascinated by all that is missing as glimpses into my parents lives as youths. It only got ever worse when my mom, in fits of whatever, burned even stuff from their earlier life as a couple. Several, frequent moves lost whatever was left.

I don't remember much before the age of 10. At all. What I do "remember" I remember from photos. I love to visit former places of my youth and try to conjure up what the colors, signs, smells were at that time. If I listen closely I can hear the thudding of feet, the shrieks of joy when the seeker is rewarded, I can feel my grandmother's nails soothing me to sleep. I guess it is the sensation of having something so interior tickled so delicately.

I am deeply saddened by changes to the fluff of life. I don't want Circle.K to get a new color scheme and repaint. I don't want Kix New and Improved. I don't want entrees to have new and improved kitschy names for the new millenium. I am depressed when historic buildings are destroyed, I could even go so far as to say remodeled. The buses don't need to be replaced, the cars should stop getting so streamlined. I want to wander in musty halls and feel all the old energies. I want to pour over photos of myself as a girl, of my grandparents as newlyweds. I want to climb inside of them and be enveloped in some sort of make believe security. But even then I'm not sure if that is what this is all about.

Posted by Hennifer at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

options

I forgot to save my entry. ugh.

Thanks for the comment G. It reminded me of one of the things my therapist said the other day. I was relaying the story of digging through the box of momentos and how finding, touching, reading some of those things gave me a glimpse of who I was. It was disjointing to realize how far from that person I had become without ever realizing it. She reminded me that I had to discover who I was now. What? That just isn't fair. I don't want to do that. I just want to not be the ME I am today. I want all the neediness and misery to fall away and my wonderful self to be there. Much like writing a paper I don't want to just throw it out there and keep reworking and reworking until it is polished and spectacular. I want to chew on each little word over and over until I find the perfect one, fit it into a well thought sentence and as I type it out delete it all and work it all again. Each line tearing down my esteem, my hopes, but in the end having a product that is barely passable to the perfectionist and who knows what to the audience? Why? I operate that way on SO many levels.

I saw a bedroom set in an add that was beautiful. Muted browns and blues, odd geometric shapes. Damn your living room is taking over! I thought geez, I have to have that. It is only $. Wouldn't it be nice to have that in my house making me so happy? And then I realized, what if I bought it, liked it for a while, even continued the decorating theme throughout the house and then...

CHANGED MY MIND!

What then? Then I want more changes but I'm stuck because I can't throw money away like that. That per my norm I'll just keep using it despite my hatred until it is worn and faded and worthless. Until I have no choice but to replace it with something economical and utilitarian.

I know this all seems a tad disjointed but it comes down to not having enough small joys in life I suppose. I live in drab most of the time and then I go big and it feels good for a while and then just turns to burn out.

Add to that that I'm running scared. What if I'm copying the inspiration of others around me? What if I'm letting everyone else's dreams become mine but not really. or worse? What if I find this perfect happy life of doing what I want when I want, wearing what I want, hanging what I want and someone comes a long and wants me to make room for them and I can't remember how? or past damages keep me on guard? or neediness grows and lets me throw it all away again. I have no faith in growth being anything but temporary.

I could go on and on at the moment. I need to go though, work is calling. I really want to throw logic to the wind and buy a laptop and get internet and make this place inviting, spruce up myspace, research high paying jobs, live in a binary world of color and music and people and shopping. I feel my bi-polar family history waiting in the wings at times like this.

Mostly I worry, I worry about all the things I would neglect should I go the computer route. I guess I should try to stick to journaling or something. I hate writing though, not for the reasons listed above but because I'm never comfortable. I always have more to say than my hands can tolerate, the pages too big or too small. ok. I've overstayed my brain's welcome.

Posted by Hennifer at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

options

I'm blogging, begrudgingly. I feel so uninteresting but let me share it with you.

I realized this weekend that as we approach, in days, the anniversary of the beginning of the end of my marriage that I'm finally able to think of myself as single. I've lived apart from my spouse for 9 months now. We are not legally separated or anything yet. I've held on to hope that maybe it would be true, maybe he'll realize he's a dolt and come back. It isn't likely.

I bought a new shirt this weekend. I also bought a self-help book, calendars, kitchen supplies and finally tamales at Costco. I saw a Guns N' Roses cover band this weekend. It was surprisingly fun. Earlier in the week I was digging through a storage tub of momentos dating back to high school. I found "love letters" from my ex. A lot of sorted emotions of course came from that but I did finally get an inkling that maybe, some day, I might actually believe he loved me once. It is small but I'll take what I can get these days.

I guess I feel more like crying than I've been admitting to myself. I thought I might finally write something here that wasn't related to my lost love relationship. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

Posted by Hennifer at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

options