December 25, 2002
8:00pm

AAAGHHHH!!!  

It's back!!  I have this pendant in bronze.  I got it in December of 1998 for Yule from my friend, Erick, not to be confused with my husband, Eric.  I had been wanting a Venus of Willdendorf and Erick surprised me with it for Yule.  I put that sucker on, knowing it was a strong fertility symbol, and got pregnant that very night.  A friend of mine reached out to touch it and comment on it and got pregnant the night afterwards.  This thing packs a whallop.  I wore it my whole pregnancy with Nathan and then took it off after I had him to symbolize my movement away from the Mother phase of life and toward Crone.  After I took it off, the little beast disappeared.  When I was looking for the Yule ornaments (normally quite an event since I have a very busy garage but HEY, I bought a gigantic red Rubbermaid tub - Target had them for $8.00! - to store the stuff in this year, so it'll be easier to identify), I came across a weird box that contained my mini-cauldron, which I'd been looking for since we moved here and the wrought iron holder for it.  (yayyy!)  Also in the box was a gallon pickle jar full of foreign coins (Canadian and Korean) that I sat aside to give to Eric later.  

Picked up the jar again tonight and was going through it only to find, LO and BEHOLD!  The beast had returned!  My personal fertility has defied logic.  I've had babies despite, condoms, jellies, foams, pills, natural family planning, Today sponges, diaphragms and (un)luck of the odds (like the only time in almost 2 years WITH a condom and a sponge on the last day of my period).  Finding this powerful little amulet tells me someone is likely to get knocked up sometime very soon.  Any takers?  I'm betting if you rub the picture of it on this page, you'll instantly ovulate and may even conceive on the spot, possibly without the benefit of sex (with a guy). 

I've had a lot of smart ass comment about my fertility.  It was downright ugly during my 5th pregnancy.  I was a single parent and still looked fairly young way back then (I've always looked younger than I am, which sucked when I was 17-18 but is GREAT now!), so a lot of people I'd meet in connection with my job would naturally comment to ask, "Is this your first?"  When I'd proudly answer, "No, it's my 5th," it was fascinating how quickly their look would turn to total horror.  It's amazing what a stigma is attached to having more than that perfectly average 2.5 child family.  I got responses like, "Haven't you figured out what's causing it?" and "Don't you know about birth control" and "You must come from breeder stock!"  Someone I once knew recently confided to me that when he heard I'd had another child after my 4th, he'd referred to me as  "brood mare."  It's just amazing what people feel at liberty to say, even to your face, so I can imagine what is said behind a person's back.  

Although only 2 of my children were planned and 3 of them came at what would be considered to be the worst possible times (#3 I learned was coming the week my husband had a vasectomy, #4 was immediately following a divorce and so was #5, who I found out I was having as part of my pre-operative lab work for a tubal ligation) and some of the pregnancies took a real effort to get used to adapting into my life, all of my children have been incredible blessings to my life.  They were so well worth any inconvenience a pregnancy (alone) or extra child incorporated into my life and I would not have missed a one of them for anything.  When people would say those horrible things, I was sad to realize that if I'd aborted the babies who were inconvenient to me, that would have been fine and much more socially preferred, but since I welcomed my children with open arms and a loving heart, even though it wasn't a good time, I was labeled as stupid, promiscuous or somehow mentally deficient fulfilling my life and love through having baby after baby.   

Everyone has their way of dealing with unexpected pregnancies and mine happened to be that if I was going to trust the Universe in all other situations and if these babies had come to be despite all manner of birth control, they must be determined to be here for some divine purpose, so who am I to interfere?  If I trust, I have to trust all the way, no matter how tough the road might be.  It hasn't failed me yet and the people I have birthed are 6 of the most fascinating people I've ever, every known and they have brought me joy that greatly surpasses any adjusting I may have done at the time.  Sure, I've had the equivalent of the entire Brady Bunch spring out of my body, but at least I was adding kind, loving, intelligent people to the world, so I consider it doing my part to raise those qualities in the macrocosm via 6 little microcosms.  

After I had Nathan, in fact, just two months after, I did have a tubal ligation and it went very well.  I was surprised at how much post operative pain was involved (my first & only abdominal surgery, so I was a wuss), but I have been at peace with that decision ever since and I'm now ready to begin my time as a Grandma.  I've decided I want Eric and I to be "Gramma and Pappa."  The inlaw grandparents are free to pick out their own damned names.  None of my older children, 20, 22 and almost 25, have blessed me yet, which is fine.  They all have very good reasons for it not happening yet.  Joe (25) mentioned something about it the other day and I realized that it's something I really do feel ready for and will enjoy, but gratefully, he and his wife, Sandra, both want to wait until they are closer to us (they are in Canada) to have the babies.  That made me feel a little weepy and very warmly touched.  I have boxes of special baby clothes in the garage (probably blocking the last box of Christmas ornaments I couldn't find) ready to go to the first little conception.  I'm gonna make a great Gramma and Eric is going to be the youngest, best looking and most fun Pappa in all the land.

Meanwhile, I've got this little, fat, bronze powerhouse that I accidentally touched as I was going through the jar.  If I get pregnant this time, it's going to be a bigger miracle than all the others put together.  I wonder if it's too late to put the candles in the windows for the Wise Men so I can get some cool gifts.  The gold will cover the rest of my immediate debt (as in getting me back to minimum payments instead of 2-3 months retro) and both Frankincense and Myrrh resins smell wonderful when burned on charcoal.  I think I'd better pack her away in a Kryptonite box and use tongs to extricate her for the next victim.  

Hope everyone's Christmas was blessed!  I know there's one very happy Sage down South of here who owes a very special Santa some favors for the gift he received!    I'm sure he'll be telling you all about it.

Take care, all!!

December 24, 2002
3:45pm

OK, So I Have Questions...  

In the culinary preparation of the beast to the left, do we fry?  Broil?  Perhaps bake like a turkey or a Cornish hen (Did you know that there really is not a breed of chicken, small in stature, called the Cornish hen?  They're just babyish chickens!!  I was shocked!  I thought they were like Guinea hens who were just miniature chickens!) so that the basic shape is intact?  Don't tell me I'm going to have to choke down feathers, beak, feet and eyeballs!  If so, I'm going to require some seriously Krispy Kreme doughnut to wrap it in!  More importantly, can I have this on Atkins?  But more on this in a bit.

FIRST, I want to brag that a really wonderful friend of mine treated me to luxury beyond luxury yesterday.  Not only did I get to try out a new Italian restaurant with her treating, but she also took me out for (get ready!) a PEDICURE!!  I was rather apprehensive, because my feet are a bit personal to me.  I'd had a manicure many years ago, not one where they massage your hands, but just having acrylic nails put on.  I have feet about as lovely as Fred Flintstone's from going barefoot a lot and didn't want these little Vietnamese ladies talking about them where I couldn't understand.  They may have done just that, but it was such a glorious experience, who cares?  It's like having IV Valium for a wisdom tooth extraction and thinking that it's so great, they could do an oral hysterectomy on you and you'd be just okey dokey with it.  So we get there and I was really nervous and Leslie had to go pee, so instead of us getting to get done at the same time like we wanted, of course, I got called first and had to wing it.  They have these giant throne chairs where you sit and there's a little tub at your feet where you soak.  I climbed up onto the throne, already pretty high from the smell of the acrylics going on elsewhere and immediately they began to push the eyebrow wax and manicures.  Nope, nope, nope, just do my tootsies, please!  So this gal comes over and pulls up a little stool in front of the foot jacuzzi and starts to work.  She had me put my feet into the most perfect hot water I've ever felt.  I'm sure there was some foot soaking stuff in there beyond the water because it was really effervescent.  Well, whoo hooo, baby, it didn't stop there!!  She there a switch and the jets started and it was AWESOME!  I was going to be happy if the whole day just ended there.  But she oh so gently took out my feet and started trimming and gently digging and buffing and putting cuticle lotion on and all kinds of stuff.  It was sooo nice!  Leslie FINALLY came out of the bathroom and got into the throne beside me and said, "OH, check this out" and showed me a little remote that was dangling from the chair.  I saw it before, but figured it was for the very nice TV that was (good news) set to ABC and One Life to Live but (bad news) had the volume off.  >:<  Well, noooo!  It made the chair vibrate and heat up and pulse and all KINDS of stuff!  I mean, this just kept getting better and better all the time!  So Leslie and I chatted while this little woman preened me and then, check this out, she started to give me this incredible foot and leg massage!  If I could have packed this woman up to take her home with me, I would have.  Just over an hour after I got there, I walked out a changed woman (with very pretty feet).  I will definitely do this again, especially since it only cost $20.  I highly, highly recommend it, folks (this means you, Vicky).

So on to the crow eating fest.  As a lot of you know, you don't get past 40 without breaking a few eggs to make some omelets and picking up some bad feelings, a grudge or two or ten and an owie here and there.  I was telling a friend of mine, who is younger than I am and just got sorely dumped in a not so nice way after a long term relationship, that it's a rite of passage that we go through.  Nearly everyone has someone that they perceive totally did them wrong in a really heinous way.  I have two.  One is my double ex-husband and the other is Michael.  

Without going into a lot of details, our breakup was not pleasant and left me in a very bad mental state and pregnant and alone and owing a lot of money that were really his debts.  Unfortunately, they were debts that had to be paid and could not be abandoned (and were in my name, phone bills and the like).  I've held quite a grudge about that for a long time, especially that I had to take the grocery money while my children barely had enough to eat to pay his bills.  That was the worst part.  

Other than one very brief and overall regrettable period of contact with him back in 1996, I haven't heard from or of him for 10 years, largely by my choice.  Sometimes, you just have to cut your losses and press on and let the past take care of itself.  Except that it never really does.  It might not show up for years, but if you just push something down and don't resolve it within yourself in some way, it WILL come back and haunt you.

I thought this was buried just fine until a couple of months ago when I got an e-mail from him, just out of the blue.  It was a benign enough e-mail, basically just indicating that he'd found me through the website, wanted to know if Delena and I were doing OK and hoped that we could establish some kind of civil dialogue and heal the past.  >:<  Here is was right in the middle of my "just gotten good" life.  Crap.  The last thing I wanted to do was to dig back into something long dead, give it a poke and rev it up into life again.  I thought about the letter for a while and wondered what would be the best thing I could do with it.  For one thing, I'd dreamt about him not long before I received his letter, so I knew this was Universally driven, so it must have some importance to it.  Crap again.  I thought of my friend, who was fighting to keep it together after a guy had done her wrong.  Then I knew what I could do.  First, I wrote to Michael and asked him what had changed about him as a user that I would even want him in my life again, even on an e-mail basis.  Then I told him that I sincerely wanted to know where a person "like him" ended up.  Where do those guys who come along, steal your heart and then wreck your life end up ten years later?  It was an anthropological/ humanities study.  I could pass it along to my friend afterwards.

He and I exchanged a few e-mails back and forth, parts of which got rather heated (not in a good way) and it was obvious that we both still had hard feelings about the situation.  He did, however, bring up some very good points that I had to drop my anger to see.  Again, without getting into details, I learned a very, very good lesson in this and I felt very humbled in the face of it.  

What keeps coming back to me is what Maya Angelou said, "You did what you knew to do and when you knew better, you did better."  I think that nearly all people get into situations that they just don't know how to handle and in their efforts to extricate themselves from that painful situation, they often will balls it up in a very big way, making a mess everywhere they turn and destroying everything they touch.  It doesn't necessarily make them bad people, just confused, scared, reactionary people.  I thought about the deplorable things I've done in my life, things that I will never be able to forgive myself for doing.  Others have forgiven me and that is a great consolation.  I have definitely and most severely wronged people that I loved 100 times more than Michael loved me (and I do believe that he did).  I would be DEVASTATED if those people were to take that fraction of time, that moment in my life when I was at my worst possible self, lashing out and not knowing how to handle the things going on inside and outside of me, and used that moment to define who and what I am.  I understood that it was what I was doing with both Michael and Paul, my ex-husband.  I was judging them by the worst things they'd ever done when they were in situations that challenged them outside of their ability to cope in a loving and nondestructive way.  I made that the sum of who and what they were in my memory and that just wasn't fair.  Because they did something to me and the people I love that I couldn't understand or justify, I made that overpower anything good they'd ever done for me or that I'd ever experienced with them.  

I've always heard that no one person is all good or all bad and for the most part, I think that's true.  There are some real exceptions, but overall, I think we're all just people, trying to get by, working with what we have and what we know or what we think we know.  That doesn't mean I'm ready to sit on the corner with these guys and throw back 40's and talk about old times.  It's part of my past, but now, more than a few months ago, it's a healed part of my past.  I can forgive them both for not being perfect, for being human and making mistakes that cost me dearly.  I am in a good place now, not that either of them facilitated that in any way.  I've screwed up more times than I can count in my life and I've hurt people plenty.  That's not who I am and usually it was because I was hurt or angry past the point of what I thought I could handle, so I have to believe that they are also not defined by how they behaved at a really horrible time of their life.  There were parts of those men that I loved and those wonderful things about them, I still miss, even if it's a part of my past that can't and shouldn't ever be brought into my present or my future.  Taking this new outlook on two very sore places in my past that I thought I'd healed as much as I could has freed up so much of my energy.  Even if you think that mess is dead and buried, it still runs in the background, like a computer program that continually runs in your system tray, even though you don't even use it any more.  Even if you aren't thinking about it, it drains your resources and takes away from what you are able to give to your present life and to the people in it.  I didn't even know that until I was able to let it go.  

As a side note, my mother never sends Christmas cards or gifts.  She used to, when I first left home in the late 70's, but as things got tough, it stopped happening.  I was OK with that, because I got over my mother not giving herself or gifts to me way back when she was in and out of the hospital when I was growing up.  I've been away from home for 24 1/2 years now.  Where'd it go?  It feels like yesterday.  That's given me plenty of time to get over not having a mom to speak of or the nurturing process in my life.  If you've read my journal for any length of time, you know that although I'm over the idea of that one person not being able to me my mother, I do miss having one.

Today, out of the blue, I got a package in the mail from my mother.  (?!)  I was really surprised and it was quite heavy.  When I opened it, I found something that took my breath away.  For one thing, a very, very old story book of mine from 1965 was in there, but there was also a notebook (binder, loose leaf type) that was filled (82 pages, back and front - so 164 pages) of poems my mother had handwritten over the past several years.  The pages are in page protectors and her heart and soul are all over those pages, written by her own hand.  There are poems she wrote about her father, who died when I was 6, about her sisters and her memories of their childhoods spent together.  There are poems written when her second husband passed away.  There aren't any poems about me in there, but there are plenty about other people and places and situations.  Many are laced with her feelings about faith and the feelings that she's had as she has walked the Christian path, her relationship with Jesus and experiences she's had in that respect.  There are many poems about how trapped she feels now being physically disabled.  It's such an intimate and prolific part of herself that I was completely overcome with emotion.  I still don't quite know where to put this in my head and in my heart, but I do know that since it came a couple of hours ago, I can't seem to stop crying.  Once again, something that I thought was long ago managed is on the surface, demanding attention and hoping to be resolved.

I'll get through it!  I know I will, but wow! What a brain, heart and soul full!  Anyway, I just wanted to share that with all of you.  I so appreciate you being there.  :)

Have a fabulous holiday season!

Love,

PS:  I wanted to share a couple of my mom's poems with you.  Some how, some way, they are on the net:

http://www.poetry.com/publications/display.asp?E=1&ID=P0499505&BN=029&PN=1

&

http://www.poetry.com/Publications/display.asp?ID=P2077680&BN=999&PN=1