Departures are hard

A few days ago a friend of mine told me that she and her family were moving to Colorado.  It was casual, just a quick drop-in comment amid a conversation we were having, but it hit me in the gut like a punch.  I sat there, staring at my phone, trying not to cry.  I was crushed.  This was one of the only friends who didn't treat me differently after my daughter was born. She was the first person I told I was pregnant.  She has never questioned who I am, or asked me to be anyone different.  She talked me off the ledge every time I said I was afraid of being a bad mom, and she listened to every one of my crazy rants about how nervous I was, or how I felt like I was a bad person for not crying while I boxed up my daughter's newborn clothes, or not getting emotional when she hit new milestones, and each time she reassured me that I was ok, and that not everyone falls apart over little things like outgrowing an outfit.  She is my only friend who has never expected me to be more than what I am, and she's leaving.  I'm heartbroken.

I'm at this strange place in my life where all friendships are precarious.  People I loved, people I valued, people I would have given the shirt off my back, people I accepted for who they were despite their flaws, they're all disappearing.  It all started going down hill last January when my daughter was born, but it's just continued on and on to the point where my weekends are spent at home watching Netflix and communicating with no one.  If it weren't for my sister, I'd have just about no one left.  I don't know if that's my fault, or the fault of other people, or if it's just life and how people evolve, but it's sad. It's sad because I sill need people.  It's sad because I truly believe it takes a village to raise a child, and my village is gone.  It's sad because I feel like the reason is, as it is so often, because I am who I am.  I have tried, oh my goodness I have tried, so incredibly hard to be someone else, but at the end of the day I default back to this flawed and busted version of myself and it never seems to get better.  I have gone to therapy, I have done the work, I have pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and I have come up with the same conclusion each time.  At my core, I am me, and I'm learning that it's not what people want.  I try.  I try every day, in my work life, in my home life, and I'm pretty sure that every day, I fail.

Last week my family was in a state of upheaval, which is so often the case with my family, and the insult that was being wielded like a weapon was that people in my family were just like me.  Being like me was being used to insult other people.  It was clear that the general opinion is that I am the worst thing a person could possibly be, and I had to sit by and swallow that and pretend it didn't matter.  But it did.  It mattered a lot.  It just reinforced years and years of people telling me that the biggest problem with me.....is me.  Then I heard the same thing at work.  And I'm starting to wonder, some days, why I exist at all.  This isn't being said in an attempt to assign guilt, or seek some sort of pity.  It's a true and valid question I ask myself quite often.  Everyone is supposed to have a purpose.  Everyone is supposed to be here for a reason.  I just.....I can't seem to figure out what mine is, or why I'm here.  I hope it's to help my daughter to be so much better than the flawed and broken person I am, but I always fear that I'm going to pass my flaws on to her, and I'm going to leave her sitting in this same place 30 years from now, asking herself these same questions.  It's a huge fear I carry with me every day.  I've been told that my daughter deserves better, that I should be better for her sake.  The crushing thing about that statement is the assumption that I'm not trying every single day to be better, to be stronger, to be different for her.  So, if my purpose is to be a better example for my daughter than the one I had for myself, the implications here are that I'm failing at that as well.  And there are some days when I just need a win.

So....I guess that's why it hurts so much to hear that one more piece of my village is leaving.  I know we'll still have ways to communicate, but it's hard.  It's hard to know that when I need someone to celebrate with, she will be so very far away.  Her family has often included us as their own.  When her sister graduated college the same year I did, they threw a party for her, and when I arrived I saw that my name had been added to the cake.  No one had celebrated my achievement to that point, and there I was, at a party for someone else, and they thought to include me anyway, because that's who they are and that's what they do.  I will miss her.  I will miss brunches, and New Years Eve, and summer kickoff parties every year on the last day of school.  I will miss my friend.  Probably more than she will ever miss me.  She will always have her village, no matter where she goes, and I don't even know if she realizes how important she was to mine.  I just hope that distance doesn't prove to be impossible to overcome like it has in the past with other friends who have moved away.

I will miss my friend.

I miss all of them.

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What was I afraid of?

Today my husband and I met up with a friend at a local museum to see an exhibit that's housed there through the end of the summer.  We took my daughter along in her stroller, and she clapped and danced to the music playing in the exhibit.  Later we took her to an outdoor area and let her run around and look at animals on a working farm.  She seemed to have a great time, and we brought her home for her nap.  She woke up and played with her train set, shouting "Choo choo!" and rearranging the houses and trees on the train table.  She ran through the house, playing with toys, and on occasion when she'd run from one room to another, she'd do a run past me or my husband and climb up onto one of our laps and give us a big hug before going back to her playing.  At one point as she was hugging me, she said "Loooove you!" before sliding down onto the floor to run back to her toys.  I sat there for a moment, watching her look back at me with a huge grin on her face as she hugged a toy bunny and thought "Why was I so afraid of this?".

I'm always afraid of the unknown.  I'm afraid when I can't plan, can't anticipate what's going to happen, can't get ahead of the unexpected.  There were a million things about bringing a baby into our lives that scared me to death.  There were a million things about being a parent that scared me.  There was so much to be afraid of that I never had a chance to think about all of the things that wouldn't be scary.  And, if I'm being honest, even the scary things weren't all that scary.  I totally resent having to get up at 6:30 every morning, and I don't love having to work a day around nap time, but the big things I was afraid of weren't really worth being afraid of.  The payoffs you get outweigh the things to fear, and I wish I had known that.

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Unnoticed lessons

Last week my mother bought my daughter a new toy.  This isn't really a shock, since my mother has a habit of buying things for my daughter whether she needs them or not.  This time it was a baby doll that has a stroller it can be pushed around in.  My daughter loves it, not because she loves baby dolls, but because she loves pushing things around.  She loves to be pushed in her stroller, and she loves pushing this baby doll in its stroller.  The doll itself is one of those weird dolls that makes noises when you squeeze its tummy, so it says "mama" and "dada" and then cries.  All of this is unremarkable, to be honest.  It's just a toy for little kids to play with.

So why am I bringing it up at all, right?  The thing is, after my daughter got this relatively unattractive doll and began playing with it, my mom sent me a couple of photos and a text message.  My daughter was kissing the doll in the first photo, and in the second one, she had picked it up and was hugging it.  The text message said "When the baby cries, she gives it kisses and hugs and picks it up and says "ohhhh" while she hugs it".  That was the moment when I realized that she knows what to do when a baby cries because she knows what my husband and I do when she cries.  Right down to saying "ohhhh".  My husband does that a lot.  He will hug her and say "Ohhh, it's not so bad.  It's ok".  I pick her up and give her hugs and kisses.  She knows how to love something else because she experiences us loving her, and that's really something I had never thought about up to that point.  I never really considered that so many of the lessons she will be learning are not through us sitting her down and actually teaching her, but through watching us interact with each other, and with her.  Every day, we are teaching her lessons in how to treat other people, how to behave in social settings, how to understand and interact with the world around her, and we don't even realize we're doing it.  I guess that, for not realizing this has been happening all along, we've been doing a pretty good job since she's a fairly well adjusted kid so far.  In reality, all that means is that if she's a reflection of what she's been watching us do for the last year and a half, it's a decent indication that we're not total assholes.  Hopefully.  I guess time will tell.

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Thoughts on understanding

Over the past week or so I've read several blogs written by people of faith that have gotten thinking.  I'm not a person of faith, and generally speaking, I don't really like most people of faith.  I find them closed minded, bigoted, exclusive, and self righteous.  I understand these are sweeping generalizations, and I'm sure there are people of faith out there who are not like that.  I know a few of those people, and I appreciate them for who they are, but I also would contend that they're in the minority.  This leads to the question, "Why were you reading blogs written by people of faith if you don't like people of faith?" and that's valid.  But, I try to be a well rounded person, and I read a lot of things written by opposing viewpoints from my own because it's good to see all facets of this life we live.  Honestly, I've been reading one for years because I find the person so polar opposite in point of view from me that it's like learning about a completely different world.  And I think she's a bit nuts, so there is a pretty high entertainment factor to it.  The other ones I've read recently were from blogs that were not about faith at all, but about home renovation, or organization, or children with illnesses, and the faith just sort of came to the surface with recent posts.

The sad thing about reading some of these posts is when you find pieces of yourself in them, and realize that you probably still couldn't be friends with these people because the differences between you are still insurmountable, but you also see that there are connections.  Tiny little things that tie you to that person in some similar way and you think "If only we could grow that thread and ignore the rest of them", but that's not what life is like most of the time.  This morning I read a blog that was largely about missionaries and faith, but touched on being a parent.  Specifically, being a mom.  It talked about how being a mom is hard, and it's a big deal sometimes, and to ignore that really large piece of a person's life serves to make them feel isolated.  To make them feel they're misunderstood.  That hit me between the eyes.  It's so true, and I related so much to that one sentence.  It's what I've been doing for the past two years.  Trying to help people ignore that aspect of my life, which has just led to me feeling more and more isolated.  More and more misunderstood.  More and more alone.  Yet, I still try to help people pretend my daughter isn't a part of my life.  I hide her away when we have friends over.  I plan things for after she's in bed.  I clean up the toys as best I can.  I try not to talk about her.  I take a piece of myself, and I slice it off to appease people who don't "want to deal with it".  But, what that means is that people don't want to deal with me.  They don't want to deal with a huge part of who I am.  And while I never let my daughter be the dominant focus of anything, pretending she doesn't exist so that others feel more comfortable isn't fair either.  It's not fair of them to expect me to do that so that we can maintain a friendship.  I find I'm working so hard to make things easier for others to deal with, but they're not doing the same in return, and I have to ask how that's fair to me at all.  It's not fair to me.  So for others to feel ok, I have to feel isolated, misunderstood, cut off, alone.  When I read those sentences in this person's blog, I flashed to the many posts I've had on here over the past few years about feeling isolated.  Feeling alone.  Feeling a need for connection to other people that I used to have, but that seems to have died.  This person, who I will never be friends with, who I will never sit across from at a table having coffee, this person gets me.  In one sentence, they understand this piece of me.

The blog continued on about how those are the times she leans on her faith, and I started thinking about how simple life could be if I was the sort of person who could lean on something like faith as a foundation.  There has to be so much comfort in something like true faith.  There's comfort in the ritual of it.  Comfort in the sense of community that comes from it.  Comfort in the ability to feel like somewhere, someone else is always looking out for you and doing the right things for you for the right reasons.  Comfort in handing yourself over to the ritual and familiarity of faith, to turn off all of the voices sometimes and go on auto-pilot with ritual and repetition and to come out on the other side feeling whole and renewed.  I can see the appeal.  I just can't, personally, suspend my own sense of disbelief and skepticism to accept it.  I can't be a person of faith.  I've tried.  I don't think I necessarily want to be a person of faith.  But there are moments when I envy that trust.  That ability to feel cared for by a higher power when times get dark.  I envy those who can see everything as the plan a higher power has set out for them.  Personally, I look at the world and I see no plan.  I see happenstance, and inexplicable tragedy, and so many things that make me question how a divine plan could be out there working for the greater good.  There are days, though, when I wish I had the comfort of that belief.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here.  These were just some thoughts going through my head after reading some of these things.  It's really just rambling of things to continue to think about.  And perhaps it's about me going through my own sort of learning as I read things by people on the opposite end of the spectrum from me.  That, no matter how much I disagree with the majority of what someone thinks, or says, or does, there may still be some small thread of understanding that connects the two of us, and if people in staunch disagreement can find that thread, maybe everyone would be better off because we'd be less apt to destroy one another over disagreement.

Just some thoughts.

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Mother's Day

Another Mother's Day has come and gone, and I find that Mother's Day is a weird holiday because you get to "take a break" as a mom, but then the next day you're just left doing all the stuff you didn't do when you were "taking a break".  It's just an illustration that you can't really take a break from your life.  Everything is still waiting for you when you get back.  It's ok, though.  It's nice that people want you to take a bit of a break on a day that's supposed to be special for you.

I think Mother's Day is generally weird for me.  I spent years functioning as someone's mom without getting the credit for it, and then I had a baby and everyone acted like I was suddenly hitting my very first mother's day and made a huge deal out of it.  But, because it's not just my Mother's Day, I find that we spend a lot of time doing things for other mothers, like mine, my mother-in-law, and my husband's grandma, so the whole "celebration" piece of it seems focused on other moms.  I think that's just how it goes, though.  Everyone has obligations to their moms, and you have to share the day, which I think would be easier if our families all got along and we could truly share it instead of bouncing from one house to another all day long.

I think the most striking thing this year was the contrast between this Mother's Day and last.  Last year I had a million text messages wishing me a Happy Mother's Day from all of my friends and family.  This year I got messages from the some people, but it was greatly reduced.  I think maybe that had to do with last year being the "first" one, but I find myself wondering if some of it was because people are putting distance between us.  It's been ongoing, it's impossible to ignore.  It's not just one or two people, it's almost everyone I know.  The only people who reached out this year were people who never got weird after my daughter was born.  People who, despite any flaws or missteps in the past, still show up when things matter.  The group is very small, but it's interesting to see who is still around a year later, and who still reaches out.  I'm sad that things have gone the way they have, but it's also not entirely in my control.  I miss a lot of things and a lot of people, but I'm not the one who pulled away so I guess that's just how things are now.

On the whole, as Mother's Days go, mine was nice.  We went to dinner on Friday to celebrate since we knew Sunday would be spent making the rounds to everyone else, and my husband and kids got me a lovely gift certificate that I look forward to using.  That's about as extensive as it got.  I think that's ok, though.  I don't love being the center of attention most of the time, so keeping things low key was nice.  And I got a lovely card filled with scribbles from my younger daughter, and a very nice card from my older daughter and her boyfriend that was filled with love and kindness.  That's really all anyone could ask for.

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It's like the ocean

Last week I was talking to a co-worker about her life and a friend she has who she feels she's drifting away from.  She was saying that she just feels like it's hard to continue to be friends with this person because they don't ever seem to just fix their own problems, and it's frustrating.  I told her that I understood, but that people have said the exact same things about me before and it sucks to be the person who hears that the reason people don't want to be around them or whatever is because they don't just "fix it".  She seemed surprised that anyone would have that opinion of me, but in her defense she's my co-worker and it's not like she knows the deepest depths of my soul or anything.  She said that her friend just has so many problems and is always going through a rough patch and it's hard because she's not fixing herself.  So, I gave her this analogy:

Imagine you're out in the middle of the ocean.  Everywhere you look it's just water, and no sign of hope that anything good can come of this situation.  You're treading water where you are, and you're starting to feel a lot of despair.

Then a friend flies over you in an airplane, and they can see from above that there's a sand bar just 300 yards from where you're currently treading water in a bottomless depth of ocean, and upon seeing the sand bar they shout down "Oh god, just swim a little bit and stand up, you're being so dramatic!" and fly off.

The solution seems so easy to them, because they're outside and they can see it and they don't know all of the variables you're facing in the water.  They don't know if you're a strong enough swimmer to make it that distance.  They don't know if you've been treading water so long that you're too exhausted to actually swim.  They don't know if getting to the sand bar will REALLY solve your problem, because you'll still be in the water and maybe you're getting hypothermia, and at any rate, even if you can stand up, you're still in the middle of the damn ocean and you've got to get to land.  What they know is there's a simple solution from their perspective to fix your current situation.

The other problem is, they tell you to "swim a little bit and stand up" but they don't tell you which direction to swim, or how far you'll need to swim, or anything else.  All you know is you're being "dramatic", but from where you sit, all you can see is ocean and you're afraid of drowning.

Sometimes that's what it's like to be the person who "won't solve their own problems".

She looked at me as if I was some sort of incredibly wise individual, and said she had never thought about it that way and maybe she had the wrong idea about what was causing her friend to have these problems, and maybe she should consider the true cause instead of just looking at the situation in simple terms where a solution seems so very obvious.

I guess, in the end, I hope I helped her relationship with her friend.  But, if I didn't, at least I know I can craft a damn good analogy.

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Maybe I'm a Vulcan?

I'm sure my geek husband will be a fan of the Star Trek reference here, but this is something I was thinking about the other day while I was painting my guest room.  That's how things often happen, I'm working on something that is relatively mindless and can let my brain wander into lots of other topics while I work.  Roll some paint, think about how absurd it is that some cultures used to believe in human sacrifice.  Roll some more paint, think about how easily hula dancers move their hips and wonder if it was hard to learn.  Role some more paint, and so on and so forth.  This weekend I was thinking about myself, because sometimes I'm self absorbed, and my life and some observations made by other people and why things are as they are.

Basically, I have a habit of taking care of a lot of things in my home and in my life.  Things that others may not think about, or things that may go unnoticed.  Things that I think people would only really remember to do themselves if I wasn't around to take care of it.  Sometimes, that's exhausting, because it's a lot of day in and day out cycle of work that makes your life feel like there's not enough down time.  For example, I cook dinner almost every single night, and after dinner I'm also the one who does the dishes.  In most households, the person who cooks doesn't have to clean up and in so many ways that sounds like SUCH a luxury to me, but it's just not the reality of my living situation.  I've argued with my husband about it a million times, and he always says things like "If you don't want to do the dishes, don't do them.  Just leave them.  Someone will do them eventually.  Your problem is they don't get done on your timeline".  My challenge with a statement like that is that, yes, eventually they will get done.  But probably not before I have to use them again to cook and I won't be able to.  So, if I don't do them, no one will do them in a timely manner, and I'll just be unable to cook after a day or two because there will be no clean dishes left.  I suppose I could leave everything sitting and just wait for someone to step in and do it, but I feel like that's more frustrating and stressful for me than just doing the stupid dishes.  I'm annoyed that I have to do them every night, particularly when I'm cooking food I won't eat (I'm picky, I don't always eat what's on the menu for the week) and then washing dishes for the food I didn't eat.  It gets annoying.  In the end, though, the reality doesn't change that the next day I will need to cook again and I will need clean dishes and if I leave the dishes in the sink overnight, no one else is going to take the initiative to do them.  So I do them.  I still don't love it, but I've started to take a sort of Vulcan-esque approach to my thinking about the situation.  I have three other people in my family, and they all need food every night.  They need clean dishes to eat that food off of.  They outnumber me.  Maybe I need some down time, but I'm only one person.  So, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  This means I do the dishes.

When I look at my life on the whole, that's how I've always handled things, really.  I've been called selfish before, sometimes by people who are closest to me and I always feel like they should know better.  I have spent my whole life doing what's best for the most people.  I always did things with my siblings in mind and made sure that their needs were handled growing up before mine.  I have supported friends repeatedly through rough patches, when in reality what I really needed was support myself for my own challenges I faced, but I never asked for it.  Their needs came first.  I've been selfish at times, I'm sure.  I actually hate the idea of being seen as selfish, because I try so hard to be selfless, but I'm sure there are times when I've been a bit of a petulant brat about things.  On the whole, though, I typically put the needs of the many first, and the thing is, I'm not bothered by that.  I mean, sure, the dishes thing kind of pisses me off sometimes, but on the whole I don't mind that I'm never first.  I feel like people often think I should be bothered by the lack of balance there is a lot of the time, but I'm usually not.  And when I am, it's typically when it comes to something dumb like chores, because I just hate being the only one doing daily chores while everyone else gets to sit around and do once a week chores.  Yeah.  That sucks.  But, it's not like it's a deal breaker in my world.  There's a piece of me that actually LIKES making sure everyone is taken care of.  At the end of the day, I bring a lot of it upon myself by not telling other people they have to do things differently.  I don't think the chore thing would change, since I've already had a million arguments about that, but I could tell people I need more support, or that I can't make sure everyone is taken care of all the time.  I just don't really want to.  I think that might be a problem from someone else's point of view, but it's true.

I think that the only time it really becomes a true problem is when I need other people, and they're just not there for me the way I would be for them.  That's hard.  That's when I want to become a selfish person and say "I would do it for you!" but I've also come to understand that it's often expecting too much and that I'm seeing the world as I am, not as it is.  Just because I would do something for someone doesn't mean I should expect the same in return.  That's been a long and hard lesson to learn, but it's also true.  I've also learned that while it's often easy for people to give a gift card, or a meal, or a donation to something, the hardest gift to give up is their time.  And sometimes that's what people need, it's your time.  I know I've had friends who have needed my time from me and I've made that work, but it's been a struggle on occasion and it's often done with a sacrifice on my part of something else I may have wanted or needed to do.  But, it wasn't easy.

And that's where the Vulcan part of me comes in.  I've always just been like "Well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and that's who I am.  And, I guess, I kind of like that about myself.

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