Badly Dressed

 

1.  ragged

(ragged - battered - broken - dilapidated - disorganized - fragmented)

In retrospect I realize that I haven't done so badly through the last decade or so.  I lost both of my dads, I lost my mom and her sister who was like a mother to me.  I lost my honest and forthright Uncle Roy.  I lost my sweet and funny Aunt Jo.   I lost 2 brothers and a cousin who was like my little brother. And a whole host of friends.  Here I am clinging madly to my little handful of BIOLOGICAL family, my kids, my grandkids, a brother and a sister, a treasured Uncle and a handful of precious cousins.  I have practically lost the entire history book on my life.  The stories of how I looked, what I did, what I meant to them throughout their life and mine.  Everyone who is left...almost....is younger than I am, therefore they don't have a lot of history of mine to talk about.  I have written or delivered eulogies through near paralyzing grief for people who took great chunks of my heart with them.

I have repeatedly been pounded on the head with losses that fell on me like a row of deadly dominoes set carefully in a line only to be kicked over by a ticked off toddler.  My earth dad and 2 bonus brothers went one right after the other....boom, boom.....and boom.  The boys who called me names but offered to fight my battles........gone.  The man who took someone else's kid and made sure she had a great life.....gone.  The woman who gave me life....gone.  And that one,  my friends, was awfully hard.  I have no full fledged biological siblings.   I had 2 step-brothers (I hate that word) and I have a half brother and a half sister.  But none of these people and I shared my mom biologically.

When she passed I was left badly dressed (see definition above) and drowning in the remains of her life.  My days became endless sessions of sorting, shredding, gifting, selling, donating....and crying.  Crying over the things I found and sometimes the things I didn't.   My nights were sleepless and fitful events,  knowing that there was so much left to do and no one who could do it but me.

My only recourse was disassociation.  I clicked on the auto-pilot and navigated as well as I could.  I kept myself upright and I kept my job and did as much for my partner in life as I was able.  It wan't much. My husband couldn't help as much as he would have liked either, as he was in the process of losing his parents as well.  So we passed like friendly ships in the night, each of us needing things neither one of us had enough of to share.  Fortunately, for Roger, he did have some of his siblings and therefore someone who fully grasped his grief.  My children helped me as much as they could but that job belonged to me since I was the holder of mom's history.  I was the only person who could say "that thing doesn't matter" or "yes, we need to keep that."  The greatest gift they gave me during that time was the gift of letting me process and not expecting the mother they actually deserved.

When I say I disassociated I mean truly.  I had no time to be the person I really wanted and needed to be.  I had to just be and I had to move through it at my own speed.  No one grieves the same and there is no handbook for an appropriate timeline.  And multiple losses do not allow grief to run its course and settle.  Each hit brings every previous one roaring back demanding that to be felt again.

Now, I realize that I never did the "please pity me" or "please feel sorry for me".  Traditionally, I lose my crap over little things and the big stuff just sets my jaw and my shoulders and I soldier on.  Not silently but still......I get through eventually.  I guess I just thought that some understanding and awareness would be a given....that people would grasp that I was going through some stuff, physically, mentally and emotionally and even though those things didn't touch them personally, they would be there to help pick up the pieces of normalcy when I was ready.  Nope.  There were expectations.

You need to be more patient....here wear this and we will like you better.  You need to be more present.....here is a shirt you can wear with those pants we gave you before.  You need to be more selfless, you need to not be sad, we only like happy people.  Each thing that was expected of me was given like a ratty piece of clothing that if I put it all on and just pretended then everyone would like me better.  And yet, these things weren't verbalized.  Again, no one thought to ask "hey, what's happening?"  or "are you okay?"  But perhaps the thing that got to me the most was the emotional outfit I was supposed to wear that would indicate that I would not stick up for the things that were truly important.  The things that every wife, mother and grandmother just does organically.  I wasn't combative, I was simply withdrawing more and more into the camp with the people who weren't expecting me to look, or act or "dress" and behave in a certain way they deemed appropriate.

I didn't matter one bit what I had done in the past that was good.  There was always a hidden agenda or a deliberate affront attributed to each and every move I made.  The slightest offense either real or perceived, sent me back to the penalty box to watch all the "real" team members play the game.  And guess what?  I kind of started to like the penalty box....it didn't require anything of me.  If I was having a particularly bad day, it didn't judge and every time I was able to feel my feelings without judgment, an article of someone else's clothing for me dropped away.

I have come to identify quite closely with a past President who never got the benefit of the doubt.  Whose every action, word or expression became the topic on which people judged worth, or lack of.  Both of us have had more than a passing glance at the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" intersection in life.

What I am finding almost funny is that the person I am today is the person I was always meant to be.  I am honest, forgiving, thoughtful, loyal..........and steady.  I feel like I have been forged in the fire of true emotional, gut wrenching pain and come out a warrior clad in truth.  Under all that disorganized, fragmented, battered wreck of a person was a truly unique individual with a lot to offer.  If you knew me 10 years ago, you don't really know the me I am now.  I am different and I am worthy and I will no longer wear the suit of clothes others choose to make for me.

But, what I will do when the day comes your world falls apart over and over and over again, is hold your hand, listen and try to help.  What I won't do is judge how you handle it....I will let you wear your most comfortable clothes and love you anyway.

The Problem As I See It

 Living a long time puts you in a very interesting place.  You have seen the end of the Dust Bowl and watched our parents crawling out of the Depression era.  You've watched those young boys with smooth faces go off to a war they never should have been expected to go to and waited to see if they returned.  And some didn't.....and for what?   You've seen the girls in their zippered knee high boots and mini-skirts with their straight long hair swinging getting ready for an actual he comes and picks you up date, applying that God awful white lipstick and cat-eye jet black liner.  (My uncle Roy once told me "you are a pretty little thing but right now your eyes look like two pee holes in a snowbank."  Hmmmmm  You've loved and listened to music referred to as Doo-Wop, you've closed your eyes and swayed to the folk tunes, you've shimmied and shook to Wipe-Out and you've even sat and watched your mother dancing in the kitchen as she listened to Stardust Melody by the great Nat King Cole on a 45 rpm record player.  You lost your composure in the back seat of the car when the Beatles came on the radio.....demanding that your daddy "turn it up!"

Then you checked out for a while to raise a kid or two, you found that working brought a level of stuff to your life never before experienced.  Some of us parked our kids in front of Sesame Street simply to get a kitchen floor mopped.  We've married, we've divorced, we've lived single, we've made bad decisions and we've learned from them and done better.  Some of us had more than a passing flirtation with substances and quickly learned that there are only bad decisions happening in that neighborhood.  Some of us got better and moved to a more righteous street and sadly, some of us did not.

We've watched our contemporaries burn bright and flame out early.  We cheered and watched some achieve so much success in life that it inspired and gave us hope.  We've watched some struggle and we've tried to help as best we could.  Sometimes the only thing we had to offer were beat up knees at the side of the bed praying for help that only God can bring.

There is little we have not seen, or heard.......or felt.  And yet, we find we are constantly being discounted as out-of-touch.  I am not sure how a generation that has been able to embrace smart phones from their initial experience of a long and 2 short rings on a party line phone wired to the wall....can be out of touch.

And so.....from my vast bank of almost 72 years of observing life and human nature I come to this:

School boards used to be comprised primarily of "parents"....and somewhere along the way we decided this needed to be political and we started to fill our school boards with lawyers, school administrators, teachers, etc. and very few parents.  I have absolutely no problem with these people on school boards but they have to be balanced out.  They come with a pre-planned agenda whereas parents come with the well being of their children in their tool box.  I think we need to rethink this and make sure that SBs are heavily weighted towards concerned and active parents.  Which means....people have to get involved and stop ASSUMING that other people have your childrens' best interest at heart.  The question I always ask myself is this....."your child and my child are in a burning building....which one will YOU run in and save?"  People we have to start standing up for and representing our own best interests, particularly in the education of our children.  And, it is OUR job to teach them how to be good and worthwhile human beings.  Stop allowing the world to teach your kids....you know more than you think you do.

Politics is a crap hole and why anyone wants to do it is a mystery to me.  Therefore I have to assume that it is all about $$$.  Therefore, we need to start looking closer at the people who represent us.  If they've been in office for 4 or 5 decades and are still spouting the same tripe....THEY.NEED.TO.GO!     And, I've been saying for years now that the party represented by the donkey always goes a bridge too far.  When something nefarious has actually worked out...instead of being careful and stealthy the next time....they just go balls to the wall full out and usually run themselves into a water filled ditch.  This is actually NOT doing their constituents any favors.  Yesterday, I actually heard a Dem contributor say that McAuliff's comments about parents not deserving to have a say in what their kids were learning, made her cringe.  You know why?  She is a mother and no one thinks they can do better for their kids than a mother or a dad.  It might do well to remember that most of these people with all these high flung ideals don't have kids in school anymore, heck they don't even have grandkids in school anymore.  They are wholly out of touch with the reality of humanity and wholly engaged in the shiny prize of socially manipulating the human race.  But, they are trying to swing the pendulum too far and like every other thing in motion, once a certain point has been reached it either comes untethered or it swings back in the other direction.  

Ordinary, average Americans have no soapbox or platform upon which we can stand and deliver our manifesto for what we want.  Only the rich and powerful and those of a celebrity status have that ability.  The ability to skew truth and sway minds.  For this reason, we have to use every tool at our disposal to be heard.  And.....and I can't say this enough or with great enough emphasis.....WE HAVE TO STOP BEING AFRAID.  America was not built by cowards who could be forced into their homes to await their doom.  They went out and met their death bravely and with vision and they sure didn't do it so we could passively hand our country over with a whimper.  It is time to roar, my friends.  And instead of thinking people are crazy for speaking their mind.....ask yourself "what do they know that I do not?"

For my part, I have come to realize that power and money are the greatest corruptors of our nation and they can absolutely influence a person's behavior and rarely are they influenced for the better.

Start holding people accountable, don't automatically discount what people say just because it doesn't fit the narrative of the day, become active in your own life and pray that the pendulum begins to swing back to sanity.  Back to a time when we were Americans.....all of us.  We could disagree on whether the Cowboys were the best football team on earth or not and still sit down at the Thanksgiving table and remember that in the end we loved each other enough to allow everyone to be themselves.

Peace out!