Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Keeping the real peace

So, we've just gotten through the time of year during which family gathers and celebrates the warmth of the season. And most of the time, hopefully, that season is truly warm, and not a hot mess.

I think it can easily be said that every family has its dysfunction. Most of the time, we are all doing our level best just to "keep the peace" and go along. It's kind of what's expected from mature adults. Sometimes everyone walks away from the holidays unscathed, sometimes not so much.

Life in general is an awful lot like that, and usually, the dysfunctions and challenges we face with family and friends leave us with one simple choice: do we just go along, or do we choose to be who we are at the risk of upsetting the apple cart?

I grew up, as most of us did, in a household where the expectation was to keep your head down and not make waves. While I could arguably say that my household carried these ideals to an extreme, they aren't uncommon expectations. We're all expected to behave ourselves and not make trouble, and most of the time, I'm pretty sure that's a noble pursuit, or else we would all be in the midst of a lot of turmoil most of the time.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I think that some of us have spent so much time bending over backwards to avoid conflict with everyone else, that we tend to lose ourselves, and I'm not so sure that's fair or even as beneficial to the greater good as we are raised to believe.

I face this issue every holiday season, and I usually start thinking about it by the end of September. Since commercially we seem to nearly skip over Thanksgiving and go straight to Christmas, it's pretty hard to avoid thinking about the inevitable sooner and sooner every year.

My mom and I haven't spoken in almost four years, and I have a handful of relatives whom I work very hard to simply avoid for reasons that are deeply important to me. My break with my mother stems from the realization that, unfortunately, she just has a very toxic effect on me and has a habit of being very self-centered and vicious. It's difficult. As for my aunt and her children, I find it very difficult to be around them, because it usually means that I am witnessing them suck my grandmother completely dry.

It makes November and December especially difficult. Riding the "high horse" isn't something I do to intentionally make things hard or out of fun. I've had to find myself "in the saddle" because, sadly, I have tended to want to believe that I can "fix" things, and I am always proven even more sadly to be wrong. It took a great deal of my adult life to understand that you can't fix people, they have to want to fix themselves, and most of the time, they don't see anything wrong with how they behave, so why would they change a thing?

And since I can't stop trying to right the wrongs, I have often found that I allow myself to be harmed in the wake of those wrongs. I finally decided that I valued myself more than I valued the peace that came from just going along. It's actually quite hard to put yourself first. I feel guilty about it every year, because it means that I don't spend the holidays with anyone in my family, however limited they may be. I'm not loud or obstinate about it. I'm quiet and evasive. I haven't found a better way. This year has been no different.

As the birth of our daughter quickly approaches, I fear that all of this will become even more challenging. I have no doubt that our lack of contact hasn't managed to prevent my mother from knowing that my husband and I have relocated, and that we have a baby on the way. It would be nearly impossible for me to conceal these things forever. The question already has been raised whether I really intend not to talk to her about Willow. The truth is, she has been so toxic and hurtful, that I don't intend to talk to her about anything, least of all the precious little human that I would gleefully do anything to protect.

But it isn't really fair. All of this strife and avoidance means that I won't be able to as freely share our daughter with my grandmother, who was such an important part of my own childhood. I won't feel secure just dropping her off to spend a weekend playing in the kitchen or getting into mischief with the woman who would happily stop to pick up every box turtle between my home in the city and her house in the country. It makes me sad. And understandably, she doesn't understand the reasons why I stay away, and why I became so protective of myself. Until you've been very, very harmed by someone you trusted and loved, it's an impossible thing to relate to.

This year has been a very different one for me. I started off deeply and emotionally "in the red." Months of being battered and bruised by loss and turmoil led into more months of being battered and bruised by loss and turmoil. I've talked about it, but it bears repeating. I became the kind of person that not too many people wanted to be around. I lacked the wherewithal to find my own sense of grace many times. And without always realizing it, I was hurtful. It hasn't changed anything about the relationships I harmed, but the only pride I take away from this time period is that I take responsibility for who I was and I accept, though with sadness, the bad feelings I cannot change.

I like to think that's the difference between those of us who are toxic for a time, and those of us who can never see themselves through anyone else's eyes and are toxic at their core. I never expected anyone to shift or be different on my account during my toxic time, I was just too consumed in my own storm to find a way out.

Since realizing that there are people who have the ability to cause me immense damage, it has always been my choice whether to put myself in their paths or not. I've never been the person to be avoided, and I've never been in a position to observe when someone else is choosing how to get out of the line of fire. I understood why I had to "leap" out of harm's way, but until I recently saw someone else I love very much make a similar "leap," I didn't really understand what that sometimes means.

On the one hand, it means you just aren't willing to accept being abused by someone else, even if making that decision isn't the most comfortable choice for everyone else around. But I think there's a more important meaning--I think it also means that you have reached the point where being true to who you really are is more valuable to you than promoting a false peace. I realize it's not a fair price for everyone else in the mix to pay, but as someone who has been faced with that price for so many years, the person choosing is the only one who can say whether it's worth it or not.

I can't make the choice for my grandma that my aunt and her sons not continue to take advantage of her. I have to respect that she aids and abets their poor life skills and inability to support themselves, but I can choose whether I want to witness it or not, or have my child be a witness to it. I can't make my mom understand that being around her is exactly what I would want to do if she wasn't fixated on making herself the center of attention through hurtful and terrible actions that she can't ever take back, but I can choose not to allow myself and the family I am making to be the victims of what she has to offer.

They aren't easy choices. Life frequently doesn't give us easy choices.

I am fortunate. Though still a very tumultuous time, my own storms started to abate halfway through this year, and it is my great hope that all of the happy things that have presented themselves as the clouds finally cleared hold a lot of promise for the next year. Whatever the case may be, there is one thing I do know: out of all of the hard time, the peace that's returned to my life isn't the false kind. It isn't the kind that comes from people around me compromising themselves to accommodate me and my lashing out. It's the kind of peace that comes from having a handful of people who loved and understood that I wasn't going to be in that horrible place forever, and that I needed them all the more. It's the kind of peace that comes from owning who you are at every moment, no matter how terrible you may sometimes become when you find yourself in dire straits. It's the kind that comes from understanding that some people needed to protect themselves from me, and respecting that, even though it's hard.

So, while I believe that peace is a worthwhile pursuit, I suppose I can only accept the real thing. And sometimes the realest peace is the peace that comes from choosing what's right for oneself, over what appears to be right to everyone else.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

It's time to begin, for real

So, there's no question I should be doing something else this morning. As we embark on our second move in just over three months' time, and Christmas looms, the next several days promise to be incredibly busy. I should be bubble wrapping something even as we speak, or at least putting something into a box. But as cable and the Internet will also be going away for the next couple of days, I thought I would take a little time this morning to put some words into a box.

While in general, this year has been a tumultuous one for my family and me, we find ourselves ending on some high notes, to be sure. Life gave us an "opportunity" to relocate and restart in a way that may not have been very welcome, but sometimes positive change doesn't come in a beautifully wrapped box with a ribbon that is too pretty to pull apart.

We started the year in "the winter of our discontent" to be sure. It's not as if 2013 was the beginning of hard times for the Blanchards, but I think we would both say that our faith in everything around us, except perhaps each other, was at an all time low. Things, especially hopes and dreams, seemed to be coming to an end left and right. I don't think we were always cognizant of how powerful the overwhelming sense of hopelessness had become in our everyday lives.

With the sadness of losses we could not calculate, failures we could not face, and unraveled relationships we could not rebuild, I never imagined that there was any hope of anything new coming our way. But almost six months ago today, I was proven wrong.

I had most certainly given up hope that there would be a little Blanchard to run around our home, but when we least expected it, or would have thought it a fantastic time, hope shifted. We were three weeks into Jeph's desperate job search, I was getting ready to start a new work situation, and our future was anything but certain. I guess that's when things could begin again.

Probably one of the few "angelic" moments in her little life.
In spite of the timing, and all of the crazy things that had happened, and were still happening, when I realized a baby was on the way, I somehow knew everything else would be all right. Suddenly, every sense of fear and uncertainty I had was erased. I do understand that I should have been scared shitless, but we had lost and given up so much, I guess there was just part of me that understood nothing was really up to us any more and we just had to go where life was taking us.

When dramatic things are happening, and redetermining your path, you don't always have time to understand or process them. We relocated three hours south of where we were at the beginning of September, and have found ourselves in one of the quietest places in existence. We have both been very used to a lot of noise. I assumed that I would have major adjustment issues--after all, for much of the last decade and a half, I have been a "runner" and "escape artist" when it comes to life, and now I live someplace that I finally don't feel like running or escaping from (and let's face it, during this pregnancy, I have hardly physically felt like running or escaping were plausible options most of the time).

Toward the beginning of our third month here, we finally started to feel like we should settle in, and we found a place to put down some roots. As we worked to buy our home, to start the process of furnishing it and making it a place we would be able to have company and raise our daughter, it started to occur to me that it was a very different feeling than I had experienced before. We had bought a home before; we had bought furniture before; and we had thought about the future, but not in any realistic or concrete way. When I look back at the last time we did these things, it's almost as if we were "playing at it."

As we circulated in and out of furniture stores, sitting on sofas and debating the merits of this or that purchase, all the sudden, I felt like we were just starting our lives together. That's a weird feeling to have at nearly forty-two, especially given the fact that we have spent the last twenty-one years together. This is hardly a "new" relationship. But as we have chosen every stick of furniture, as we have considered paint colors, and even whether or not to put a rug beneath our first real dining room table, a new relationship is exactly what we have.

Every part of our existence is indescribably new.

As a stay at home house Frau, I have a lot of time to think and reflect. I've probably spent more time thinking about this than I should, because occasionally I feel flashes of guilt about where we are--not in the sense that we are in a bad place, but that we were so busy doing other things that we never got to feel this newness in our lives before now. Maybe all of our running, traveling and doing had very little to do with how long it took us to get here, and this is just the natural order of things for us. We have always been odd by comparison to those around us. We have always approached our path very differently than everyone else our age. We have always done things our own way. People have frequently looked at our lives through green lenses, not realizing that we were looking at things through a kaleidoscope, not really knowing what direction we were going or what color we would see next.

There are more than a few things to be said for certainty and stability. I think we ran and escaped because we were afraid to make the wrong choices. That's probably the number one reason why we waited precariously long to have our daughter--leaving it to the nearly impossible last second. What if we got it all wrong? The fall out wouldn't just be on us--it would be on her.

In the last few months, as I have had time to be pregnant, and I have had time to think, I have become more acutely aware of my mortality than any time in my life. I am safer and more secure than I have ever been, and yet I am finally becoming aware that the thread has two ends. I think about our daughter and worry about being there for her for enough of her future to give her everything she needs. I worry about having enough of her myself. In one moment, I have not felt so young and new in forever, in the next moment, I have never been more aware of my age and its limitations.

Always before, I worried that choosing to have a child for the sake of having a child was a selfish thing to do just because you were trying to stick to a timeline. Now, I worry that choosing to wait until there was no time to waste was equally selfish.

What I expect to be norm.
Through technology, we have had the ability to see our daughter multiple times in the last several months. I already have memorized the shape of her eyelids, her lips and her nose. I love her grumpy expression as much as I love her serene sleeping face. And I assume when she looks at me for the first time, every new and old fear I have will be put in perspective. It's not for me to decide how she will view this new start in life that her father and I have made. It is for her father and I to love her everyday without thinking about how long we will have with her, and to hope that when she looks back on the time, she will think whatever that time has been, it was all well spent.



Ordinary Love--U2

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Sometimes things have to get real hard to become real simple

So, in recent years, a lot of people have started to talk about things like "simplifying their lives" and "and getting back to basics." I've come to assume they mean things like downsizing homes, offloading responsibilities, cooking foods from scratch or only wearing earth tones. I never really thought about what these things might mean to me.

I haven't made it a secret that the last few years in the Blanchard household have been kind of tough, and that a lot of unpleasant, and unexpected things have happened. We certainly haven't been the only ones, but when you're in the thick of it, you frequently walk through your existence with blinders on. You can only take on so much, and when your plate is full of your own stuff, you start to be very choosy about the stuff from other people you can deal with, even if you care about them very much.

I would completely own that I reached a point where I was so overwhelmed by the complications and pain in my own life, that I found myself no longer able to fit anything else on my plate. I know that I lost friends as a result. It's not something I'm proud of, and I have found myself thinking about it more than a little bit lately. It's hard to reach out to people who are done reaching back. And in some ways, I have come to realize that these losses are the collateral damage of a war I was neither equipped to fight, nor successful at. Sometimes, things just can't be repaired.

A few months ago, I left a job I had been doing for fifteen years. I had been wanting to leave for a long while, but would never give myself permission. It brought a lot of unhappiness to my family. I had worked very hard, and I had been raised to believe that if I just did a really good job and worked very hard that I could achieve anything. That was naive, and it perpetuated a deep feeling of resentment when that belief was proven wrong. It was difficult to accept that in many situations, relationships are more important than values and work.

As the months that preceded my departure leveled more personal disappointments, my professional disappointments were also more difficult to ignore. My husband found himself looking for a job in a different location, and I found myself expecting a child and not even remotely interested in looking for the same work in a different place. I no longer believed that I could give what the work deserved, and I knew that many days, I was barely floating along. It's hard to accept a sense of failure in yourself, no matter how real or unreal that failure appears to others.

We ended up moving to a place where I know one or two people, but I spend most of my time at home with our dog. I have a handful of dear friends and a couple of family members who check in on me regularly. Until this move, I was used to talking to people all day long. It wasn't always easy. I'm an introvert by nature.

In the few months since our move, however, there is one person I see more often than ever, and whom I miss more whenever he isn't around--my husband. I knew that with his traditional schedule and with my very non-traditional schedule that we didn't spend much time together over the last fifteen years. For a great many of those years, I found myself to be a "runner," always looking for something to do and someplace to go. I found it very difficult to be satisfied idling. In retrospect, I think it's because in my free time, I was alone with myself, and I wasn't really happy in my own company.

When our lives truly reached the point of unraveling at the beginning of the summer, something in me finally realized I had no choice but to just let go. It was really hard at times. I'm not the kind of person who likes to admit that I can't change certain things--especially the minds of people who came to believe that I wasn't worth salvaging. What I didn't understand was that like any time that happens in life, there would be people who remembered, or learned who I was at my core and they would find something in me worth valuing no matter how hostile and "feral" I had become.

And even if there hadn't been anyone else, there was always Jeph. He came to be the only person who knew who I always was. He became the only person who accepted me at every single moment--broken heart and all. It was probably because (even though he wouldn't use the same words) his heart was broken too.

When we moved away from so many things and people we knew, I had no idea how I would adjust to being at home by myself so much of the time. Of course, there was the relief that I had finally allowed myself the decision to let go of something giant in my life that wasn't really working, but what would it be like to just hang out everyday? It is surprisingly simple.

A few weeks into this "experiment," Jeph came home from work and in one of the worst weeks of my pregnancy, I broke down. It would probably amuse most people to know that this break down was over food--specifically not being able to eat it, and getting sick cleaning up after it. I know he thought it was something more. He looked at me very pointedly and asked if I was really okay being here by myself so much of the time. Without reservation, I told him I was.

Other than knowing myself well enough to know how truly introverted I am, I also have come to know that the reason I am okay is because through some weird stroke of fate (or strokes, given all of the pot holes in life's road that we have come across), I finally have everything I ever needed.

No, I don't have an income, and I am slowly, but surely scraping the bottom of what I earned in the last weeks of my work. I may get out of the house once a week. I hear from a couple of people just about every week, usually via Facebook or text. And the only person I see everyday is Jeph.

But all of that is okay, especially the last thing--I get to see Jeph everyday. It seems that while everything else in my life seemed to sort of unravel, we are the one thing that became stronger. And in the months ahead, when I will be at home with our new daughter, and be even less able to get out and about, that one face I see everyday will quite simply and basically be even more important--if that's even possible.

Wild Honey--U2