|
This is the journal that is really hard to write. Mostly, because I didn't even realize it was an issue until this weekend when it really started to sink in. It was one of those things where you intellectually know something, but don't really know it in your heart or understand it in your head. Until that acceptance occurs, it's just words, even if you are the one saying the words. I love this place, as you well know. It's amazing for all of the reasons I've described. NOW that I have experienced living up here, I can't imagine living anywhere else. I can barely REMEMBER living anywhere else. I'm very grateful to Eric for showing me something and giving me something that I didn't even know I needed. It's so lovely I could cry. What I was not prepared for other than just as a remote idea (with the emphasis on "remote") was the extreme isolation. As I said before, I intellectualized it, but I did not internalize it. Friends have been a dicey subject for me for a long time now. There was a time in my life, back in the 1980's and before, when at any given time, I had a huge surplus of friends and acquaintances. I spent most of my adult life not only in the work force, but also on Air Force bases around the world, which are by nature given to camaraderie and companionship. Paul (my first husband) and I were very social and always had several couples to hang with, play cards, drink, etc. Every weekend, we were with friends, I saw friends through the week and talked endlessly on the phone. When we divorced the first time in 1991, the pain was so extreme that I did a full withdrawal from anything even remotely social. Ultimately, I didn't even have anything to do with my Witchy friends. I pulled away from everyone I knew, hid and had a total break down. My poor kids took the worst of the madness from me and I'll never, ever be able to make up for that. Extreme pain and depression does terrible things to people. When the clouds started to part on that dark part of my life somewhere around the end of 1993, it was as though all of my mental furniture had been rearranged and I was, in nearly every way, a totally different person. I gained about 80 pounds. I had a baby during that time, my beautiful Delena. I "woke up" from sleepwalking for about 2 years and found I had a whole different life; some was good, but most was not. I decided to make the best of it and worked to better myself, but I was so far behind in so many things and so many ways hat it was a losing battle. Paul was due to return from 2 years in Japan and when he asked me to marry him again when he got back, it was a godsend (I thought), so I said yes. After we remarried, we didn't socialize with other people much. Our feeling was that perhaps in our first marriage, we had invested too much energy into other people. He didn't like the same people I liked any more. Still, we pretty much built lives apart from one another living in the same house. I worked for a preschool and thought well of my job, even though I was the polar opposite of the other two women who worked there. We were friends, but I didn't really extend myself much beyond that. When Paul left me a couple of years later for another woman, I did the opposite of what I'd done before. I turned to my friends. I had the two there in Idaho and I knew people in California and Texas, so I relied on them a lot for support. Ultimately, I met Pagan people in Idaho after the divorce, which led to me meeting Eric (my current husband), who was visiting mutual friends there. That resulted in my moving to California (Sacramento). I knew two people there in addition to Eric, so it seemed a good idea. God knows I did NOT want to be stranded in freakin Idaho. When I got out here, it was a circus to try and make ends meet. Eric and I were just friends and although I was still friends with the other two people I knew there, life kept us from being able to spend much time together. From that point on, having friends slipped away. I was busy being a single mother and trying to get bills paid and kids fed. Until we married, Eric never knew how poor we were or the trouble we were in at times. When Eric and I got married, he didn't bring many friends to the union, mostly because we spent our time with each other instead of other people. From the time we were married on, we always had Witchy friends, but we only say them a couple a times a month for meetings. Some, we didn't even know their last name for a year or two. I became a stay at home mom in early 1998. That cut back my involvement with others even more. Around 2001 or so, I realized I had no friends to speak of. I knew people, but I never did anything with any of them. I whined about this in my journal and Georgia, one of the gals from our Witchy group, wrote and said, "Pfft, what am I, chopped liver?" I thought about it and realized that I really, really liked Georgia and did want to see her more than in just the group concept. I was shocked at how nervous I was at the prospect, but after an awkward first lunch at Olive Garden, we began friend dating at least once a month and had a big ol' pile of fun. Not long after that, I mean a new friend, Leslie, and she and I started having lunches and early dinners together. Lotsa friends now! It opened up an important non-Mom, offline part of myself that I didn't know I needed to experience. It was an important validation process. That went on for a little while with me happy as a clam. Then things changed. Leslie disappeared off the face of the frickin earth just after the first of this year. No one knows what happened to her, but her e-mail address is invalid, she doesn't answer her phone EVER and doesn't return calls and snail mail is not acknowledged. She might be dead. Dunno. Leslie was always a bit flakey. Then I moved up here and it's almost two hours from Georgia, who's wicked busy getting ready to move and I never, ever see her. She's going to live in Washington or some other godforsaken place and then she'll be my online friend. I have a LOT of wonderful online friends, don't get me wrong. They are all really wonderful people. There's just something about face to face, real life friendship that fills a void in my life. SO here I am on a mountain, far, far from civilization. When we moved here, there were and still are neighbors. Our home is actually in a subdivision, but each property plot is at least an acre, so there's a good bit of distance between houses and you can't always see your neighbors. Our house was, in fact, the office and model home when the house were being sold and built. Across the way is a man who has been a minister for 30 years. He and Eric have long, soulful talks when the guy is in town (this house is their second home). Behind us is a single father who works on cars and that fulfills Eric's Alpha Male needs. He has kids the age of my kids and they are crazy about each other. There is not a single person on this hilltop for me. The wife of the minister is very quiet and withdrawn and doesn't say much. He is of the variety that believe that women cannot know or speak the word of God because they have been cursed via Eve. Eric doesn't agree with that, but they hold a lot of the same ideas about spirituality and the way that we, as people, manifest God into our daily lives. The guy behind us, whose father lives with him, is a really good guy and Eric loves the manly man aspect of that. They work on cars together, go fishing, other man stuff. Nothing there for me. I'm not saying that in this whole town, there's no one I can be friends with, but it's going to take some time. I can do spellwork to draw good friends to me, which encourage me to cross paths with the right people with whom a friendship would be mutually enriching. I haven't done that yet, mostly because I've seen a pattern here and I think I need to investigate what is there for me. At this point, I think it is safe to say that I have no face-to-face friends. I will see some of my writers in July at the GH Fan Weekend and I am looking forward to that in a big way. I will probably see Georgia maybe one more time before she leaves. Since we both suck at good-byes, we may not even do that. All through the past year, there was Georgia, there was occasionally Leslie and there was Arnie from down the street, who was a fascinating man in his 70's. When I moved up here, visiting became very difficult. Driving 1 1/2 - 2 hours is a long haul to see someone. As I look back on my life, I can see that I've been led to this in a kind of bottleneck effect. I'm not really agoraphobic, but I didn't leave my house very much before I moved. I went to the grocery store, to the thrift store, out with Eric and such maybe twice a week or so. I had no idea how much that was filling me up in a social way. Now, I'm in the house all of the time. I leave maybe once every two weeks and when I do, I get sick from driving in the mountains, even if I take meds. I can walk, but most of anywhere you walk around here is uphill (it's a geographical oddity) and I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack. Even there, there's not anywhere to go. The one bonus is getting out of the house and breathing nonkid air. It's definitely taking its toll and I think that's the source of the tension headaches. I'm working on alternatives, like Eric taking the kids out to the creek while I have quiet time. I know I'll meet people at the Hamburger Nights that start next week. This is a very close knit community and surely there are some cool people here. Now, if there aren't any cool people here... ...which could happen... I know that when Nathan starts school in August, a mere three months from now, I'll have half days on my own until after the winter break, then it'll be whole days. I can then do anything I want to with my time. By then, we should have 2 vehicles and the world is my oyster. So this is temporary and situational. I just need to think it all through and stop pouting and get my head on straight. I'm just lonesome and over-kidded for the time being. The cool thing is that I really do like myself and enjoy my own company. I can't imagine how hard this would be if I wasn't at some kind of peace with being alone. I know some people need constant companionship or noise around them to feel safe and validated. I'm grateful that I'm OK with being alone. I miss the laughter and the girl talk and the companionship, but I think I'll be cool once I get the hang of this whole thing. I'd say I'm well on the way to being the crazy, writer woman who lives in a little house in the mountain and has a ton of cats and talks to herself a good bit. I'm good with that. I just need to more peacefully engaging the road that takes me there. :) The good news is that you folks get a whole lot of attention. This morning, my electricity was out for about 2 hours and I really missed the TV and the computer. :) New topic: I've decided to get a bicycle instead of drooling after a gazelle. I had about 3 people write to tell me that the gazelle gave them or people they know motion sickness (yikes!) and while I was walking on Tuesday, I was thinking a bike would be really cool. But I already talked to you about that. I told Eric and he was very supportive ("I want one too and I want to make sure the kids all have bikes!!" "You aren't coming with me. I'm a loooooone biker, baby!" The last thing I want is to have to keep track of what kid is tooling down the middle of the road or leaving me in the dust. This is just for me! I finally ordered a new exercise ball since mine got skewered and I keep having to reinflate it all the time:
This one has MASSAGE NODULES!!!!! :) Great buy on ebay! Time to think about starting dinner. Then time for a sit outside and breathe for a while. These kids are making me crazy. Love,
|
