Happy

I feel so grateful to be where I am, and for all the love in my life.  Our situation is not perfect.  It's hard and messy but like a good bra I feel supported from all sides.  (and it always comes back to the bosoms) I feel more capable than ever to face challenges and cope with them.  And then there is this place -




I spent a lot of time on the four wheeler this summer, flying down dirt roads, sometimes trying to escape the sadness, frustration or grief that comes with divorce.  Other times I just wanted to feel the sun on my face and the wind racing over my skin and feel happy just to be.  Usually I'd get to a place out in the middle of nowhere and turn off the machine.  I'd lay back on the four wheeler and close my eyes and listen to the wind scouring the farmers' crops - the lonely sound the rustling of wheat stalks makes filling up my ears.  Other times I'd watch pairs of hawks circle overhead.  Without thinking too much I just observed what was happening around me in the moment.  It was incredibly healing.  I can't wait for the snow to cover the ground so I can go snowshoeing out into those same fields. 

I love my savior.  I know He personally atoned for my sins and felt every little agony that would happen in my life.  When I feel as if my heart is breaking I feel comforted that I am not alone.  I know He called my name in Gethsemane and walked beside me through the twisting paths my life would take.  He knows me.  He loves me and I know He loves you and has done the same redeeming ordinance for each one of us.

Life is beautiful, and it's meant to be, even when the beauty is laced with pain and sorrow. 

Freckles

My oldest daughter, Ava is nearly nine.  She's in that stage where she's still so much a little girl, but is inching ever closer to tweenhood.  She's sassy and moody, yet sweet and incredibly helpful at times.  She's gone from believing I know everything to being suspicious of me knowing anything at all. 

I've made a conscious effort to not talk about my physical hangups in front of her.  I don't want her to remember me hating on myself.  I want her to remember me for the way I loved her and for the way I respected myself enough to know my own worth.  I've been working so hard on loving myself, not for who I might become, or who I once was...but me, right now, imperfections and all. 

The message to be beautiful and desirable and blah, blah, blah is all around us every single day.  So recently after a session with my therapist she challenged me to focus on what is great about the thing I dislike the most on my body.  It was really like a buffet of criticisms to choose from each and every time I look in the mirror, but the thing I loathe the most is my stomach.  So I had to think something good about it every time I looked in the mirror or noticed it and started to think negatively in my head. 

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy and the fact that it seems revolutionary to love something that we are taught to find undesirable about ourselves underlines the sickness within society and ourselves.  My youngest daughter, being three and brutally honest said something to me the very next day about my fat tummy.  I said, "Fat is not a nice word.  We don't ever tell someone they are fat."  She said, "Well it's only your tummy, Mom."  I nodded and I said, "Yes, but I just love my tummy.  Isn't it so nice that when you cuddle with me that I am soft and warm..."  "You are, mommy!" she agreed as she laid her dark head on my tummy in love.  I shook my head, because I didn't quite believe it although I had just proclaimed my love for something I used to affectionately call the gelatinous mass. 

So yes, I'm not quite there yet, but it's okay and I'm learning to quiet that critical voice as I peer at myself in the cold glass at the physical shell that houses who I really am. 

Tonight Ava, the almost nine year-old, told me she didn't like her freckles, or her teeth.  I took a deep breath and I told her that our bodies are constantly changing.  She'll have braces on in January, but you know those freckles...they may always be there and I love each and every one of them.  I know this may work for now.  But in the future the viewpoint of a mother who loves you is not at the top of your list for a real life assessment of if you are beautiful and desirable and all that crap.  Before I left her room tonight I laid down next to her, rubbed her back and studied her face as her eyes fluttered sleepily open and close.  The words left my lips and as I said them to her I felt the weight and the truth of each one, "Ava, I know you may not like your freckles, but the Lord makes us in a certain way and nothing that God creates is ugly in any way.  You are beautiful to Him, and you are beautiful to me not for how you look but for the most important part of your self...your soul." 

For my part when I look in the mirror I smile, although I still may notice the things that bother me about my appearance, I also love that which God has created.  This body will break down, but the spirit...the most important part of any one of us, if nurtured and cherished, only thrives from the living and loving of this one incredible life we have been given. 

The Mandarin made me Cry

I was on my lunch break.  I drove past the Chinese place that my husband and I used to eat at before the kids came along.  And just like that I felt that sinking feeling.  I drove to a parking lot and turned on NPR and tried to focus on the Ebola crisis, or all the road checks that people in the south of Mexico have to pass through because of the influx of immigration from central America, but all I kept thinking about was he and I sitting across from one another reading the Chinese horoscopes on the back of the laminated menu. 

We were just starting out.  I wonder if our fortunes had predicted we'd be divorcing two kids and twelve years later if we could have even comprehended it.  Could we have done anything to prevent it?  I'd like to think so because there are so many regrets and should haves, but maybe it was because we barely knew each other, or because we didn't have a whole lot in common, or because we married so young.  I don't know.

Finding meaning in a trial is tricky.  I think it's essential though.  If no insight is gained from something so hideously painful then isn't it all for naught?  Aren't you doomed to repeat the same scenario over again?

I'm in a lot of therapy right now and I liken it to vivisection.  You're exposing every tender part of yourself and holding it up to the light.  The dark places you hid away so you didn't have to feel the pain is like trying to hold a hungry tiger in your arms without it consuming you. 

My daughter was assigned to talk in church this past Sunday and the topic was - The Family: A Proclamation to the World blesses my family.  I put the girls to bed and started looking for some talks on the topic.  It became glaringly obvious to me that reading any of these things would hurt and it did.  It hurt like Hell.  There beneath the liquidized crystal in black and white were the things we did not do, the things we tried to do and the things we won't ever do again.  I cried.  So I put on my robe and went upstairs and cried some more to my parents. 

I wanted so much for my children to have the blessings mentioned in that document.  But I had failed them, and he had failed them and none of it was any of their fault. 

So today while I sat in my car in an empty parking lot, heart sore and vulnerable I dialed his number.  I wanted to talk to someone who knew how bad it hurt, because he was hurting too.  I wanted to say, "What happened?  Why?  Why didn't we make it?"  And to a large degree I have those answers, but on the other hand I wanted the comfort of a familiar voice, a voice that might take me back to that lost girl sitting on a vinyl bench across from a lost boy and the two people they were that used to love each other. 

But he didn't answer, and even if he did he wouldn't want to talk to me because it's painful and far too fresh and raw to pretend to be friends after so much damage has been done. 

So I went back to work and cried silently at my desk as I did paper work and prayed to God that one day the pain will end and I'll be able to drive past a restaurant without feeling like bawling my eyes out, that I'll be able to read and teach about eternal marriage even if I never enjoy that blessing while on earth, that I'll be able to call him and talk like two people who care about each other do.  Because I do care and I always will, damn it, even though I wish I didn't. 

Feast on your life

Love After Love

“The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
― Derek Walcott

I really don't know what to blog lately.  I'm kind of a drag right now really.  I read this poem the other day and loved it.  I know poetry is not for everyone but words have always held power for me and this one rang true.  I'm not sure I've ever truly known myself, much less loved myself.  I do know how it feels though, to see someone walking toward you whom you love.  That rush of joy.  To feel that about yourself would be quite extraordinary.  I think the point of this poem is that to love yourself is the first step in loving others.  To love yourself just as you are, long nose, flintstone toes, a witchy laugh and thighs for days.  How can we expect someone else to love us unconditionally if we don't practice that same kind of love on ourselves? 

"A woman's strength isn't just about how much she can handle before she breaks.  It's also about how much she must handle after she's broken."

My marriage is over.  I'm doing my best to handle things.  I pray a dozen times a day for strength, for healing, for wisdom.  I cry in the shower, and in the car after a job interview, or late at night when my girls won't see me.  I hurt.  I hope.  I try to believe it when people tell me that I'll be happy again.  I take comfort in the love of my friends and family.  I thank my Heavenly Father for the parents I was fortunate enough to be born to, for them giving me a soft place to fall, a shoulder to cry on and encouragement when things look bleak.  I falter when we sing Love At Home, because it's such a beautiful fantasy...one that I couldn't breathe life into even though I tried.

And now I move forward...wherever that may lead.

Crossing the Line

I sat in the dark turquoise chair and squeezed the red ball in my hand repeatedly.  "Your veins are just tricky.  Deep and tiny.  Let's try the other arm," the middle aged woman in the scrubs told me.

I cringe inwardly every time a doctor asks for a blood draw.  This time she wanted to do a Vitamin D panel and general health panel because I'd told her about how I'd been in a depression deeper than I'd ever known for the last six months.  She upped my Zoloft dosage and recommended I get outside more. 

Two weeks later I felt better than I had in years.  The house was spotless, the girls were happy and I was singing in the shower again.  Now here I sat at the clinic trying to be chatty and upbeat as I was on my second phlebotomist and the fifth attempt at getting a vein to elicit some blood. 

This one kept slapping my arm.  My youngest came close and watched with big blue eyes as the woman abused her mother for no reason in particular.  I started to wonder if I should ask for the woman who finally got a vein last year while she talked about her love for Vampire Diaries, the irony of which was not lost on me as I tried to curb my grin.  This woman was all business though.  Slap, slap, slap.  She seemed to be enjoying it a little too much. 

The silence loomed and I started to get uncomfortable.  Torture me with needles all you want, just keep up a stream of conversation so things don't get awkward.  I've kept up ridiculous conversations in the past to simply keep the moment from crossing into the inelegant.  Probably overshared things I shouldn't have all in a bid to keep things light. 

Like some salt and pepper haired savior a man in slacks and a dress shirt and tie came walking down the hall towards us.  His stethoscope was slung around his neck and he was in very good physical condition if I might be so bold, and I was feeling pretty bold at the moment.  He smiled and said hello before entering a room with the name Dr. Weir on a placard adjacent to the door. 

The thought came to my mind.  I have thoughts like this all the time, but usually I keep them to myself.  But the silence was stretching on like an unremitting strand of taffy on a mechanical taffy stretching machine.  I cleared my throat.

"Uh.  What kind of sick do you have to be to see that Dr. Weir?" I said apprehensively trying to keep the lecherous tone from my voice.  

The phlebotomist looked me full in the face, trying to determine if I was being funny or just creepy.  I blushed.  She decided to stick to her professionalism and answered, "Any kind of sick."

But I couldn't let it go.  The joke had to play out.  I had already committed to it when I opened my mouth.  "Because he's cute!  I think I'm coming down with something," I finished wanting to cover my face with my hands. 

This time the phlebotomist cracked a small smile.  "Pete's a good man.  In it for the right reasons.  I've worked with a lot of doctors and he's one of the best," she said. 

I  nodded and bit my lip as she slid the needle into my arm for the sixth and final time.  The vein refused to be found and the weary phlebotomist suggested coming back at a different date after hydrating myself properly.  I nodded.  Thanked her for sticking me three more times and made a beeline for the door before that dashing Dr. Weir could exit and have me arrested for sexual harassment. 

Distillation

The sun gleamed on the smooth snow.  My daughter raised a ski pole at me and bravely angled her skis down slope.  Slowly she pushes off, angling across the run one way, then back the other way.  That's my girl, I think to myself.

Nana is at the bottom of the run capturing the moment with her camera.  Ava angled sharply toward her and toppled a couple of feet away, distracted by the audience.  Papa chuckled next to me as I likened Nana's camera to a magnet pulling Ava straight for it. 

The wind bursted suddenly through the aspens and pines.  Stole my breath with it's iciness.  Even the sun couldn't warm my skin in the gale.  I breathed in and out.  In and out.  I looked at my father-in-law, my babies' papa.  He breathed in and out, his skin somewhat ashen.  I listened for some clue, some hitch in his breathing that would give away the devouring sickness within.  He is dying.

It's been two years since we received a text message from my mother-in-law with the diagnosis.  Lung cancer.  Inoperable.  My husband crumpled into his pillow next to me.  He quietly sobbed as he said, "I knew it.  I knew it." 

David is not my father.  But I love him.  I can't help but think at moments like these that it could be the last time he watches his granddaughters accomplish something.  Will they remember how much joy they brought him?  How much he loved cradling them as infants, turning a hard stoic exterior into a mushy baby-talking grandpa? 

Watching the men in my life has shown me one thing - the fathers we might have known - strict, stressful or too busy - all of that is scoured away with grandfatherhood.  They are no match for the generation that came after their own children.  Easily manipulated and a willful partner in crime they become a grown man child with thinning salt and pepper hair. 

Ice cream? Sure.  Wear your pink feather boa? Absolutely.  Bedtime?  Who cares, we'll let your parents worry about that when they get home at midnight. 

How do you wrap up a person - a complicated being - and store them away as a memory?  How do you document the love of father, a grandfather and accurately portray the way their eyes crinkled when you walked on chubby legs for the first time, or when their hand encircled your smaller one in theirs on a Sunday walk?  How do you distill the essence of a person after they are gone? 

For now Ava clips out of her bindings and steps into Papa's waiting embrace as he fusses over her.  She smiles up into his face, and he smiles back. 

Confessional

Item 1: When I was pregnant with my second daughter I'd keep a fresh loaf of French bread between the files in one of the drawers of my desk at work.  I'd slide that drawer out every so often, reach down and tear off a hunk of the pillowy soft bread, slink down in my seat and chow down behind the computer screen.  Mama was hungry.

Item 2: My friends liked to tell people it was my birthday every time we went out to a public place together...usually with boys on dates like the wagon ride up sardine canyon culminating in Lefty the singing cowboy forcing me up on stage and tricking me into kissing him - On.  The.  Lips.  What if that had been my first kiss?  How disappointing.  Far more disappointing than my actual first kiss in sixth grade with the boy I was "going with" by the pop machine at lunch in a mock wedding ceremony. 

Item 3: I often let people call me and my family by the wrong names instead of the awkward business of correcting them.  For example the manager at Lowe's referring to my husband as Greg the entire two years he worked there, or my neighbor/friend assuming Brielle's full name was Gabrielle and letting her call her that for a good six months before Ava corrected her while on a play date at her house.  Ava gets Eva sometimes while I'll gladly answer to Lisa, Darcie or Dawn. 

Item 4: In the early days of Facebook I decided I wanted to look up people from high school without actually joining so I set up a fake account with the exotic name I'd always desired - Monique.  Of course not wanting to go the full crazy I decided to use my last name Cooper.  Because that's just reasonable.  Not being very savvy I also put down my true hometown and birth date.  Boy was I surprised when I started getting friend requests from people I knew.  How did they know it was me???  Imagining them snickering behind their computer screens still makes me blush.  Remember that girl from high school?  Denise Cooper?  Her name's Monique now.

Item 5: David Copperfield magically switched my panties onstage with another girl about 14 years ago.  He never switched them back.

Item 6: I've read Scarlett - the sequel to Gone with the Wind about six times.  Written by a different author and peppered with a few naughty bits some say the sequel's not up to snuff.  Some people think too much.

Item 7: When I'm passionate about something I can get very single-minded to the neglect of everything else.  I'm looking at you Familysearch.org.  Damn you for making my kids eat off of the lids of Tupperware bowls because all the other dishes in the house were dirty because Mama spent a week trying to find Grandpa Craig in the Irish census of 1830. 

Item 8: I've thrown down a towel over the spot where my infant daughter peed on my sheets during a 2 AM feeding, laid down and gone directly back to sleep. 

Item 9: Most nights dinner consists of jelly sandwiches, mac and cheese, or spaghetti because my husband works evenings and really - what's the point?

Item 10: I watch Honey Boo Boo.  I know they are crude and an embarrassment to the good state of Georgia but I'll be danged if Sugar Bear and Mama June aren't a love story for the ages.

The Timeless Art of Seduction

I was sixteen.  He was eighteen.  I used to stare at him on the bus ride home.  Not like a stalker stare...I'd like to think.  More like I'm-pining-for-you stare.  There were a few things I knew for certain about him: He loved Depeche Mode.  He wore preppy clothing.  He was far too cool to live in our small town, thus he was far too cool for me. 

He was my crush of the moment.  I'd transfer my ardent pining from one hometown boy to the next as the weather changed.  They never knew of course.  I'd just admire from my front step as he passed by in the cab of his john deere tractor wildly flipping cow poop all over the road like a Jackson Pollock painting.  Oh, but that was a different boy.  Let's focus on B. 

It started with my friend Jill.  She started dating a guy from the next town over.  A drummer in a band.  It sucked our little group of friends into our emo phase.  We'd watch Dead Poet's Society and contemplate the futility of youth.  Eventually I even dated a smelly friend of theirs that was of German descent and was not of my faith.  I was a rebel.  Rebelling against the truth of the odor signals traveling from my nostrils to my brain.  But that was after B.

I was always looking for somebody to love me as teenage girls do - to prove to yourself that you are loveable.  I had had a thing for B. for a very long time.  Although he wasn't in the band, he hung out with the guys from time to time.

That summer the stars aligned and on Pony Express Day I was finally held in B's willowy arms.  Pony Express Day is the day our small town celebrates...ponies...antiquated postal services...oh I don't know but it's an excuse to congregate on the town square and eyeball the neighbors anyway.

In recent years I've noticed the live band/dance on the crumbling tennis court that caps the end of the day's events has really fizzled.  But back in the day - your know the late 90's - blankets filled the slope directly adjacent to the tennis court.  Couples two-stepped while tweens separated themselves into boys and girls and would occasionally work up the nerve to dance together. 

We were there pretending we were too cool for the music, for the neighbors, for the whole affair really.  The band from one town over was there too.  The lead singer did the worm under the stars and we squealed in admiration.  B. was there giving off the vibes that he was too old for this.  But he smiled and laughed with us anyway. 

A slow song started and people paired up.  In a bold move very unlike myself I looked at B. and suggested we dance.  He shrugged and said sure.  I always thought of myself as a great conversationalist.  Sure maybe my curly hair wasn't your thing.  My mayonnaise skin in the middle of Summer didn't exactly give off the "healthy" glow.  My smile was too gummy and my laugh too abrupt and loud, but dog-gone it I was smart and I could prove it.  All I had to do was open my mouth and B. would look past everything else and fall in love with my mind...like 18 year-old boys do. 

So I opened my mouth and nothing.  "Ahhhh," I began.

"What?" B. asked.

"Nothing," I stammered flushing red.

"Oh." B. said. 

I knew B. wasn't religious but he must have really respected my values because there was at least two triple combination scripture widths between our torsos.  A real gentleman, I thought dreamily to myself. 

I searched aimlessly in my head for a coherent sentence that would really intrigue B.  I've known this girl my whole life and never saw her for the shining jewel that she so clearly is - B. would be compelled to admit to himself, and then to me of course that he had always been in love with me.  He just hadn't known it.  After a quicky marriage...in the temple of course, I'm not that rebellious...we'd ditch this small town and head for the open road.

I tried again.  "Ahhhhhh..."

"What did you say?" B. shouted over the band playing. 

I stared into his deep brown eyes.  Eyes I could figuratively swim in for days if he'd let me.  He looked back at me with growing concern.  Oh how sweet.  He's worried about my mental health, I thought to myself.  (And probably for his own safety.) 

Slowing, gently, caressingly I reached up, up, up.  My thumb and pointer finger opened like a lobster anticipating being pulled from the tank at a fancy restaurant.  They closed firmly, inexplicably, annoyingly on B.'s nostrils. 

"Honk!" I exclaimed.

"Ow!  Why did you do that?" B. demanded releasing me from his chaste embrace, scorn forming in his eyes. 

I stared at him dumbfounded because I didn't know.  Why had I just honked the nose of the coolest boy in town?  He shook his head as the romantic strains of music died behind us. 

I stood glued to the spot of my ultimate mortification staring, my mouth agape as B. walked over to his friends and told them he was leaving. 

I learned a valuable lesson that night.  There is no place for nose honking in seduction.  It exists strictly within the confines of an annoying sibling context.  That was the night B. forever slipped through my fingers.  Er...that is his nose slipped through my fingers.