What I think - Chapter Two:
Don't expect a remarkable story. I'm not remarkable and neither is my story, though I believe every person, every family has an interesting story, a history, worth telling. It's just that so few have the time, ability, or desire to tell it this way.
I have had my heart sliced in two. I have tasted the worst imaginable pain yet felt the fullest love, and experienced the greatest joy. That's what life is about. You measure the good against the bad and in the end we hope it's all worth it.
It is. I believe it is. And I hope you do too.
But who really cares that I am a mother of four, a wife? Who would take note? Nothing extraordinary in my life that makes me better-off, worse-off; That I live in a not-so-extraordinary house in a not-so-extraordinary city, that I go to work every day at a not-so-extraordinary job? I have no special story to tell, so don't read this believing my story will draw you in like a Stephen King novel. Instead, look for the parellels of my life and yours. What I've found is that everyone is very different, yet everyone is very much the same. My stories will echo similar to yours. My heartaches, my disappointments, my victories...all are much like everyone else's. Yet, I feel I have led an somewhat extraodrinary life as eveyone's is extraordinary--and I've enjoyed looking back and seeing how the course of my life has been embroidered, similar to a tapestry, with knots of bright colors, twisted yarns and course fabric. It is my landscape, as you have yours. Touch it, feel it.
For twenty years I have lived in this same, simple home; and twenty times I have seen the trees in my yard drop their leaves after their metamorphisis every autumn. I find comfort in that, counting my trees and watching their leaves die and fall every year, knowing they'll come back bright and green in the Spring. For now they litter our yard just as they do every year and my feet make crunching noises on them as I walk over them. Our nearly-bare tree branches, twisted blackly above me in the dusky light, make me think of not just winter here, but winter there, where the other, "winter-part" of my heart lives, in Minnesota. But for twenty years I have made this my home and I feel safe here, secure in the sameness. Prior to that, even during the first half of this 20 years I speak of, I did not feel safe and my life careened out of control, just as I think everyone's does, somewhere along the line. The zigs and zags of life!
After leaving Minnesota as a new 19 year old bride in 1980, I enjoyed some of the best 7 years of my life. (Though leaving my mother would be the hardest thing I'd done) I made a new life with myself with the "boy-next-door-sailor-out-of-the-Navy" that my parents were so worried about. They need not have been afraid. He was so good to me. He loved me purely and fully and I him. I never knew love until I met him and I never knew pain until I lost him. Oh, that fateful day in March of 1986 when my perfect china plate was broken into a million pieces! I could not imagine that it could and would get even far worse? But I won't write of those lost years now. They were the darkest days of my life and I don't care to dig them up now in order to show you something decomposed and ugly. It is gone and best left buried where it belongs. It's my "compost". It was the time between Raymond and Richard. Anyone that knows me and knows me well, understands that already without my saying more. The distance between these two points are best left to drift away, like dandelion seeds in the wind.
Fast forward to present day, I am wife to Richard. Mother to Catherine and Michael, Kimberly and Joey. Grandmother to Mya Ray, Joseph Ray and Heather. It is a good life and I am content; I have much to be thankful for!
I am blessed with a truly wonderful, deeply intense and powerful friendship that is foremost in my heart. (My life-friend, my half-sister/half-twin Rebecca) I have many secondary friendships that are also truly valuable to me though they garner less of my attention, less of my heart.
It is an easy kinship with Rebecca and I and we are bound as sisters; I love her as a sister and want to grow old in her friendship. My marriage isn't always as easy, much as I love Richard our souls don't speak as mine and my girlfriend's do. It is the marital relationship in which the changing pattern of my life disrupts; yet those same changes in pattern of my life bind my girlfriends's love as she understands and accepts it in a way no one else can. Both relationships are beautiful and sacred to me. Their self enclosed perfection wears the freshness of a Spring morning.
It is true, of course, that both original relationships are very beautiful, like a shell. Like two different shells, unique and individual in themselves. Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love, when two people stand as individuals, without past or future, facing each other. One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution. Like its parellel in physical passion, the early, ecstatic stage of a relationship cannot continue always at the same pitch of intensity. It moves to another phase of growth which one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes Summer after Spring. There can also be a dead weight accumulation, a coating of false values, habits, and burdens which blights life. It is this smothering coat that needs constantly to be stripped off, in life as well as in relationships.
Certainly, one has the illusion that one will find oneself in being loved for what one really is, not for a collection of functions. but can one actually find oneself in someone else? In someone else's love? Or even in the mirror someone else holds up for me? I belive true identity is found by going into one's own ground and knowing oneself. It is found when one loses oneself, paradoxically. There I can refine my strength, the strength I need for this second half of my life.
I have had my heart sliced in two. I have tasted the worst imaginable pain yet felt the fullest love, and experienced the greatest joy. That's what life is about. You measure the good against the bad and in the end we hope it's all worth it.
It is. I believe it is. And I hope you do too.
But who really cares that I am a mother of four, a wife? Who would take note? Nothing extraordinary in my life that makes me better-off, worse-off; That I live in a not-so-extraordinary house in a not-so-extraordinary city, that I go to work every day at a not-so-extraordinary job? I have no special story to tell, so don't read this believing my story will draw you in like a Stephen King novel. Instead, look for the parellels of my life and yours. What I've found is that everyone is very different, yet everyone is very much the same. My stories will echo similar to yours. My heartaches, my disappointments, my victories...all are much like everyone else's. Yet, I feel I have led an somewhat extraodrinary life as eveyone's is extraordinary--and I've enjoyed looking back and seeing how the course of my life has been embroidered, similar to a tapestry, with knots of bright colors, twisted yarns and course fabric. It is my landscape, as you have yours. Touch it, feel it.
For twenty years I have lived in this same, simple home; and twenty times I have seen the trees in my yard drop their leaves after their metamorphisis every autumn. I find comfort in that, counting my trees and watching their leaves die and fall every year, knowing they'll come back bright and green in the Spring. For now they litter our yard just as they do every year and my feet make crunching noises on them as I walk over them. Our nearly-bare tree branches, twisted blackly above me in the dusky light, make me think of not just winter here, but winter there, where the other, "winter-part" of my heart lives, in Minnesota. But for twenty years I have made this my home and I feel safe here, secure in the sameness. Prior to that, even during the first half of this 20 years I speak of, I did not feel safe and my life careened out of control, just as I think everyone's does, somewhere along the line. The zigs and zags of life!
After leaving Minnesota as a new 19 year old bride in 1980, I enjoyed some of the best 7 years of my life. (Though leaving my mother would be the hardest thing I'd done) I made a new life with myself with the "boy-next-door-sailor-out-of-the-Navy" that my parents were so worried about. They need not have been afraid. He was so good to me. He loved me purely and fully and I him. I never knew love until I met him and I never knew pain until I lost him. Oh, that fateful day in March of 1986 when my perfect china plate was broken into a million pieces! I could not imagine that it could and would get even far worse? But I won't write of those lost years now. They were the darkest days of my life and I don't care to dig them up now in order to show you something decomposed and ugly. It is gone and best left buried where it belongs. It's my "compost". It was the time between Raymond and Richard. Anyone that knows me and knows me well, understands that already without my saying more. The distance between these two points are best left to drift away, like dandelion seeds in the wind.
Fast forward to present day, I am wife to Richard. Mother to Catherine and Michael, Kimberly and Joey. Grandmother to Mya Ray, Joseph Ray and Heather. It is a good life and I am content; I have much to be thankful for!
I am blessed with a truly wonderful, deeply intense and powerful friendship that is foremost in my heart. (My life-friend, my half-sister/half-twin Rebecca) I have many secondary friendships that are also truly valuable to me though they garner less of my attention, less of my heart.
It is an easy kinship with Rebecca and I and we are bound as sisters; I love her as a sister and want to grow old in her friendship. My marriage isn't always as easy, much as I love Richard our souls don't speak as mine and my girlfriend's do. It is the marital relationship in which the changing pattern of my life disrupts; yet those same changes in pattern of my life bind my girlfriends's love as she understands and accepts it in a way no one else can. Both relationships are beautiful and sacred to me. Their self enclosed perfection wears the freshness of a Spring morning.
It is true, of course, that both original relationships are very beautiful, like a shell. Like two different shells, unique and individual in themselves. Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love, when two people stand as individuals, without past or future, facing each other. One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution. Like its parellel in physical passion, the early, ecstatic stage of a relationship cannot continue always at the same pitch of intensity. It moves to another phase of growth which one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes Summer after Spring. There can also be a dead weight accumulation, a coating of false values, habits, and burdens which blights life. It is this smothering coat that needs constantly to be stripped off, in life as well as in relationships.
Certainly, one has the illusion that one will find oneself in being loved for what one really is, not for a collection of functions. but can one actually find oneself in someone else? In someone else's love? Or even in the mirror someone else holds up for me? I belive true identity is found by going into one's own ground and knowing oneself. It is found when one loses oneself, paradoxically. There I can refine my strength, the strength I need for this second half of my life.
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