One More Perspective

The world goes on whether we are living in it or not.  The sun rises whether we have the wherewithal to raise our heads or not.  Let’s do a whirlwind tour through select parts of my life:

– At age 2, I was told I had to be moved to the 3-year old class because I was more age-appropriate for their development level
– At age 6, I began riding public transit alone in our city because I had been doing so with my Mother my whole life until then, and had all of the numbers/routes memorized; by age 12, this extended Hungary-wide and at age 13, I flew to the US by myself and back for the first time
– At age 17, when the immigration official at the American Embassy in Hungary threatened me with not being allowed back in the US, I put up one hell of a proposal for what I was going to accomplish in the US (and knew I would simply waste away in Hungary)
– At age 19, I decided in order for me to pursue college/career, I needed to get married so I didn’t have to deal with dating and could focus on academics/career (maybe telling my new Husband this was not necessary)
– At age 25, I was experiencing my Husband as disengaged and a childish, financial liability not a Partner and Father, so I moved many states away with my one-year-old to ensure I could support us with my education and job
– At age 30, I got the promotion 50-yr olds were coveting and kicked ass
– At age 33, I found myself with a second disaster of a marriage despite these men’s (that of Husband1 and Husband2) educational and financial backgrounds.  I marched myself to ALANON where I learned about the illusion of control and I once again let my marriage go, this time caring alone for three children under the age of 9
– At age 37, despite a career still moving upward, a decent, devoted Husband3 actually helping me raise a Family, life saw it fit to point out I was not the heterosexual woman I thought myself to be
– At age 43, after years of internal turmoil and therapy about it, I kicked up my whole heterosexual life and I, with three Teenagers, married my Wife
– At age 45, accelerated by the stress of the loss of some of my most critical relationships, I found myself thrust into the mysteries of menopause.  Eventually, I leveraged the tools and resources life had already provided for me to, across a number of years, wrangle my changing hormones in and thrive on
– At age 50, in the middle of my career slumber making all kinds of accommodations and internal compromises to try and finish out my federal career, I got an early-out with benefits I’ve earned, and young enough to make another career go at it

Why am I making this inventory?  …because life and I have never ultimately gotten stuck and I find it important to remember that when inevitably, there are challenges.  …and there are always challenges for us humans.  It’s part of everyone’s life.  Everyone’s.

Annelle:  “I really don’t think things could get any worse.”  Ouiser:  “Of course they can!”

These lines are from the 1989 film Steel Magnolias, something I’ve watched a hundred times in and following my freshman year in college where it was available on television for free.  I was closer to Annelle’s age then, and I’m closer to Ouiser’s phase of life now, but along the way I’ve come to deeply appreciate a number of things that I find consistent about life: 

• “Every Form of Refuge has its Price” as said the Eagles.  Compellingly, everything about life is a trade-off.  There are always compromises and negotiations, “and anyone who says otherwise is selling something” (from The Princess Bride, of course.  The point?  There are no formulas and perfect paths in life.  Two kids and two dogs with cat are not the only way to have fulfilling, productive lives, despite the messaging ever so strong in our society.  There are many paths to and definitions of a whole, joyful and fulfilling life, including solo
• We either grow or we stagnate.  The so-called status quo is already stagnation
• Life is inherently messy.  Life will keep throwing shit at us to help us learn; it’s up to us how fast we do it and how many rounds we must go with any particular topic, so it’s best to be curious about the issues or conflict that arises, early
• There is no turning back the clock but there are constructive things you can do to acknowledge and begin living with anything you regret about your past decisions and/or behaviors
• There are 99 facets to each human.  I began formulating this realization as I rebelled against how I was simply labeled as angry, crazy, even a Nazi by my own Mother.  No person can be summed up based on one aspect of their being.  Each person has a light and a shadow side
• “When you know better, do better.”  I am not quite sure whom to credit for this one (aside from my Wife), but I love everything about this simple pointer
• Gratitude is happiness.  Now this one was my Grandfather’s gift to me.  To cultivate happiness is a daily choice he taught me, and so far as I’ve seen, the only path to lasting joy and contentment in life.  My Grandfather earned his wisdom the hard way in a Soviet prison in the 1950s, separated from his three Children and Wife, my Grandmother.  I actually consider Ouiser’s quote quite in line with my Grandfather’s emphasis on gratitute.  If you deeply accept life is messy and could always be worse, then you get to notice and account for the abundance always around you…and keep your mind on growing the joy, the jar around your challenges, grief and regret.

I’ve written a whole section on Grief and I refer to this visual frequently:

So here we go…the bigger jar.  I envision this as short writings to which I will continue to add.  I will capture events and thoughts that allow my own attention toward growth, adding space and grace around my sadness I’ve anchored on, processing for the last five years.  Why?  …because I want to do better.  I want to keep orchestrating my own continued growth.  I want to spend the next years living abundantly.  …abundant in gratitude, joy, resilience, health and usefulness to others.  The only way to get there is to radically accept my jar will forever have my grief, but I can tune my capacity toward emphasizing the good that’s always in the universe aroud us, and deserves the dedicated stage in my head.

I had an epiphany last month.  I have been living in our home for nearly fourteen years.  I had two eleven- and one fourteen-year olds when we moved in and I was married to Husband3.  It was fine, until it wasn’t.  With Husband3’s then-professed understanding, he and I slowly moved toward a dissolution of our marriage in this home, and with his full knowledge and support, I explored my life beyond heterosexuality.  In that order.  Though he would soon flip this story and make himself the victim.  One more thing beyond my control, despite my best efforts to care for him and his outcome.  

My Wife moved into this house with the Kids and me a few weeks after she and I were married.  I simply had no grasp of how quickly time with (by then) Teenagers was fleeing.  That was seven wedding anniversaries ago.  Since I took early retirement from my federal government career earlier this year, it opened up a whole host of options I would not have considered otherwise.  Did we really need to live in our house of five as just the two of us?  Our younger Son had moved out (for the second time) two years prior and had just discussed another lease-renewal with us for his place, so what was keeping us in this house?  The more I thought about it, the more excited I became about the thought of graduating from this infrastructure that constantly reminds me we are minus three.  What we really need now is mobility, lightness (of furniture and all else) and no yard work.  We need two bedrooms and two bathrooms so we can always have guests, so we turned our eyes to renting out our house.  We have no intention of letting the property go (to sell), it is simply time for it to house another Family of Five or so.  In the moving-out process, we’ve been able to be generous with others by giving away to random strangers a lot of great furniture and household items and to receive the amazing generosity of our Friends. 

Our heartfelt thank-you to our dear Friends who: 

• late into the night at our chaos of a house wrapped up what seemed like a hundred delicate model airplanes my older Son loves
• came to our home to give us acupuncture treatments because we couldn’t make it to your office
• is housing a lot of our stuff we didn’t want to pack into a PODS unit for storage and will even soon house us temporarily
• is listing our home for rent and you carried heavy items to make sure our professional house photos looked inviting
• lent me their mentorship and friendship as I continued to hone in on where I want to take my professional life from here
• check on us from California, Washington state, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Oklahoma and even Hungary.  It’s the warm-fuzzy we keenly appreciate.

One more thing I want to capture here is the story of the giant plastic tub that has lived in our attic for fourteen years.  It’s among my most cherished possessions (and I only have a few).  It contains three Children’s worth of baby, toddler and little-kid clothes, shoes and artwork.  It’s a lovely collection of everyone-wore-everything and some unique girl clothes, as well as the I hope you Dance CD about which I wrote previously.  Some of these baby clothes not only my Children wore, but also some of their Cousins and beyond.  These items represent the best of my memories.  …and I am so grateful for them.  They make me very, very happy, even though I am the only one with these memories.  For the occasion of our upcoming move, I began to repack the items into newer boxes, then about halfway through I abruptly stopped.  I realized newer boxes meant these childhood things that are a collection of three Children and more, would have to be separated.  No box was as big in capacity as this tub.  That made me sad.  So I repacked the old tub.  Everything all back together, how they belonged.   …at least in the tub.  …and in my heart…bursting with gratitude.