Learned Lesson Number Three: Start Where You Are

As I begin this post, I don't know where I am going with it. I only know that I am feeling a strange mix of gratitude and emptiness, faith and uneasiness, hope and terror. I want to say something that will mean something, because I feel like where I am at this moment in time is important to my future. Not that every moment is not; I think each millisecond of life is an important building block of the whole structure. However, I also believe there are crossroads, and rest stops, and passing of beautiful vistas, (some with really scary drop-offs) that weigh heavier than others as we take this great Road Trip of Life. I know, not a very original metaphor. But I spend a whole lot of time driving, so Road Trip of Life is the metaphor you get.

Earlier this week, after 2 long days of driving, I was awakened by a much-anticipated phone call from a friend, who asked me, "Where are you?" My response was "On my son's couch." My friend was looking for a more specific answer, but the question sort of launched me into this thought process. Where am I really, and where do I go from here? Yesterday was Christmas Day. The week between Christmas and the New Year is traditionally a time to reflect and assess, to make plans to improve our lives in whatever way that we, in our wisdom, think they need improving. I used to really look forward to the Making of the Plans. I was very good at the Making of the Plans. Get the organizational tools, play the motivational pep talks in my head, see myself in that whole new place, just One Short Year down the road. As it turns out, I am not so good at the Carrying Out of the Plans. In fact, quite frankly, I kinda suck at it. So I have kind of stopped partaking in the Making of the Plans ritual. After keeping a journal for some 35 or so years, and seeing the same items repeated on The List year after frustrating year, I began avoiding The List. All it does is haunt and condemn me. And it's not like I'm going to forget anything on that blasted list anytime soon. It is pretty much acid-burned into my brain.

So where am I going with this idea? I don't know. I am starting where I am. Where I am is yet again sitting on my oldest son's couch, in his bachelor pad of a house, where many 20-something boys, some of whom are related to me, live, party, play music and video games, and exist in a world that I have to wonder how much of a hand I had in creating. I don't think it is a bad world, in fact I live here myself some of the time, but it is not what I imagined for them when they were little boys in my care. My daughters and I put up a miniature Christmas tree and cooked a turkey, and did our best to bring some of what they grew up with into the house for the Holidays. We all went Christmas shopping together, and it has been a great week, full of fun and just hanging out, along with an unexpected surprise or two that warmed my heart. And then today I went to church alone, which was both uplifting and a little sad. But that is where I am.

Where I am when I am not here is in a bedroom at my parents' home, working furiously on a college degree and trying to keep my youngest son from wanting to flee back here, where his brothers are. Where I am now is in a physical form that I don't recognize when I look at photos, and that I know I am capable of changing, just as soon as I have the time. Where I am now is far more aware of what my true weaknesses are than I was when I was married. I am also far more aware of my true value than I was when I was married. For this I am grateful beyond words, even though the process has been painful, and I am certain will continue to be so. A lot of where I am is a place I really hate to be, yet some of it is also a place of cautious hope that I don't remember ever seeing in my life. That can be a thrilling and a frightening combination. But it's where I am.

Maybe what prompted this thought process was my journey through bad weather to get from Utah to Arizona for Christmas. This trip was not very well-planned, and came on the heels of what was an exceptionally dark couple of months for me. I was horribly sick with something resembling pneumonia, and I learned the hard way just how evil a tiny little body part called a gallbladder can be. There was also fun with finances and harsh lessons in health insurance. With all this going on, I almost dropped the ball on some of my classes, which I was thankfully able to bobble and retrieve before my academic house of cards came crashing down, but just barely.

I consider myself to be pretty good at finding the positive in the challenging, or at the very least, the humor in the tragedy, but I gotta admit that something about the past month almost took me down. I am extremely grateful that I found myself facing all of this while in the protective embrace of my unbelievable parents. I am convinced that I have so many siblings because when the parents were distributed in Heaven, there was a mad dash for mine, and many were disappointed. I am also convinced that I was in much better shape at that time, because I obviously got to them to stake my claim before anyone else. Smartest move I ever made.

Anyway. Back to travelling through bad weather. I looked out my parents' window on Monday morning and saw snow flurries, remembered something on the weather about 4 days of snow coming, and hustled Sean and all our vital travel tools (good drivin' tunes, snacks, 2 pet rats..) into the car. I was hoping to get ahead of the snow, but it just got thicker and thicker, until I was creeping up a mountain behind an 18-wheeler going 3mph, and doing all I could to stay in his wheel tracks. Cars were sliding off the road everywhere, and having experienced that myself, I did not want to take any chances. I was cursing myself for not getting up earlier and making a better plan, and then I realized that I was where I was... in a blizzard. So where do I go from here? The answer was "forward, and slowly". Although my knuckles were whiter than the snow, I managed to relax enough to plod on through. Torrential rain followed the snow, and it took us 2 days, with a fun-filled stopover in Las Vegas, before I found myself safely on my son's couch. Which felt like a pretty safe place to be after all that.

So where am I now? Still on this couch, but feeling better about being here, and knowing I won't always be. In this all-important week, I will not be constructing a detailed and impossible list of all the things about myself that need correcting in the New Year. ( I used to get this list unsolicited from the ex, fairly regularly, actually. He thought he was doing me a favor.) Instead, I will be making zero lists, spending time helping my sister paint, hitting a movie or two, hanging with my kids and other favorite people, and trying really hard not to fear wherever it is I am going from here. I will not beat myself up over where I have been. I will check the weather before I leave town, and in the coming New Year, I will start where I am. Every day. It's all you can do.

“Holidaze” versus “Holy Days”; Learned Lesson Number Two

Halloween has come and gone, which means that we have been officially launched into the Holiday Season. I have a love/hate relationship with the Holidays. Well, maybe not hate, necessarily, but rather, fear. A love/fear relationship. This has to do with the stress and the cost that inevitably accompany the “major” Holidays. As anyone who has known me for more than 5 minutes can tell you, several of my children were born on Holidays, and I love to tell people this. I also like to pretend to blame this obviously genetic anomaly on my father, who was born on Christmas Day. He tells me it was not fun as a child to share his special day with The Whole Wide World, and for this reason I make the effort every year to give him a birthday present that is separate from his Christmas gift, and is also packaged in distinctly non-Christmas-themed wrapping paper. It’s the least I can do.

My kids are a little more fortunate, in that their personally-claimed Holidays are a bit more fun to share. Zach was born on the Fourth of July. Independence Day. Fireworks and barbeques, just for him, all his life. Breck was born on Thanksgiving, which means she only rarely has to share the day, and there is always a feast involved when she does. Ethan is perhaps the luckiest, having been born on Halloween, delivered by medical personnel in costume, who were having fun that day. This explains a lot about Ethan. He also got double candy every year while Trick-or-Treating, just by looking up with his big blue eyes and telling the candy-givers it was his birthday. Kylie was born on Pioneer Day, which might be considered a “secondary” Holiday, unless you live in Utah, or are a member of the LDS (Mormon) Church. My own memories of Pioneer Day, as a child living in Utah in the 1960’s, were that it was just as big a Holiday as the Fourth of July. There were parades, and we decorated our bicycle spokes with crepe paper. July was Holiday Month. Which is maybe why I had half of my children in that month, I don’t know. Sean and Jeremy were the rebels, being born on “non-holidays”. This actually makes a lot of sense if you know them.

Since the word “holiday” originates from “holy day”, I think it is important to be able to sift through the “haze” of the chaotic “Holidaze”, to the sacred part where the celebration originated. A holy day is a sacred day. Which is not to say that there should not be fun involved, where appropriate. Christmas should definitely be both sacred and fun. In fact, I maintain that “fun” is an extremely vital ingredient in a balanced life. Which makes it also a sacred thing. All of the days on which my children were born are holy days to me. Whether they are holidays or not.

Today is Veterans Day. When referring to what, in this culture, is known as the “Holiday Season”, it is the more “major” holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Years’ Day, that people generally think of. Although Veterans’ Day falls within the “Holiday Season”, I think it sort of gets tossed aside and grouped (along with Memorial Day) in with the “secondary“ holidays, like Presidents’ Day and the like. A day off from school or work. A day to shop the sales. Unless you are a part of a military family, or have personally lost someone to the ravages of war, this holiday can slip through the cracks.

On this particular Veterans’ Day, I experienced directly the richness of character that a soldier brings home after having served. My sons’ roommate, Evan, served two tours in Iraq. Today he anticipated a need that I had and just stepped in and took care of it. This was not unusual, it is in his nature. I celebrate Veterans’ Day as a “Holy Day”; not just a holiday, but a day to commemorate those, living with us or beyond the veil, who make this choice to serve through sacrifice and then return home (either in this realm or the next) with a character that has been polished and refined by fire. What better Holiday to launch us into the Season?

This Holiday Season, set aside the stress and the chaos, (it’s tough, I know) and sit still long enough to be able to see through the haze to what is sacred. Identify what makes those days HOLY to you. Then celebrate them with those you love, through music, through worship, through fun, through gratitude. And through service. So, to all of you, I wish a Bounteous Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Hopeful New Year, and blessed days before, after and in between.

Lesson Number One: Nothing is Wasted

In assessing my life up to this point, I have done a whole lot of beating myself up over "wasted" things. Time, opportunities, supposedly misdirected love, etc. When one goes through divorce after having invested many years in that one person, it is hard not to feel like all those years and everything contained within them are just spiraling down the proverbial drain right in front of your eyes. But I am learning that to buy into that visual is to discredit everything of value that was borne of those years and the refining trials that came with them. And to do that is to dismiss God. As a person who believes in and relies on God, I cannot do this. I trust that He knows far more than I do about what is or is not "wasted". So my job now is to find the diamonds within the coal, to make sure I see clearly and am sufficiently grateful for what I have to show for those years.

The first and most obvious example is my children. I have six amazing and talented kids, five of whom are now "legal adults", all of whom are healthy, and one of whom has been kind enough to provide me with two incredibly cute grandsons. They are, each and every one, representative of all that I am proud of in my life and in myself. As they have all managed to navigate, in their own individual ways, the dividing of their parents, I have seen them use tools such as humor and perseverence, as well as a strong support of each other, to get through. This amazes me. They are my best friends.

Sometimes, when my mind starts to wander down the dark path of regret and despair, (and attempts to persuade my heart to follow) I start thinking about lost loves, lost youth, unrealized dreams, and all the ways I believe I have let myself and others down. When this happens, all of my flaws are magnified; I watch too much TV and go to too many movies and concerts, I am overweight and undisciplined, I don't take life seriously enough, I have wasted the talents God gave me. If I allow myself to continue to think this way, it feels like it is too late to fix any of it, and I want to give up trying. This leads to despair, and despair shuts down progress. I am learning to "just say NO" to despair. This is how:

Everything in our lives is assigned value by us. We decide what is important and what is wasted. So I have decided that nothing in my life is wasted, and everything is a gift.

My love for all things entertaining is a major factor in why I have such rich relationships with my kids and their friends. The painful parts of my life have honed my sense of humor, which is maybe my strongest personal asset. The fact that I have dealt with weight and discipline issues my whole life is why I am not judgemental of others. This is also one of my strong personal assets. And when it comes to my marriage, which, taken separately from all other things, could feel like the biggest waste of all, I have chosen instead to view it as 23 years of "Marriage Boot Camp". Training for the real deal, should I ever have that opportunity again. And I hope to.

There is a scripture about the Lord "making weak things strong" for us. Our part in that is to recognize the strengths in our weaknesses. When we can do that, when we can spiritually and emotionally "recycle" all the things in our life that we have viewed as "wasted", then we will be saving more than the planet. Nothing, nothing that we experience, is ever wasted.