Silence is Golden!

   I so do not want these blogs to all seem like a nightly bitchfest, but here we have another evening of something that has bothered me for a while and has come to a head today. Luckily I didn’t show my anger about it (baby steps), but it has eaten me alive all day. I have come to the realization that silence REALLY is Golden.

I will be the first person to tell you that I am a talker. I wake up singing, I sing when I am working, I talk to almost everyone I encounter. I have always thought, that it was a good quality in a person. Time is telling my otherwise. I am currently 35, and have acquired enough family medical history to know that 35 is probably WAY past middle aged for me. I was thinking on this today, and stewing on various things, and realized that for half of my life I have talked and no one really listens to me.

 Recognition of this was first noticed when my mother would ask the same questions over and over again..I thought it was simply her aging mind and left it at that. I also noticed that my twins did it as well, I chalked it up to WELL, TWINS!!  However, I started getting griped at over not telling people something, or forgetting an  item from the store, or even being confronted with “You didn’t tell me that!” So I started paying close attention to the things I said to others, and started making list and reminders, and little notes assuring myself that I haven’t lost my mind. I started noticing stories that I had told were being told back to me with an “I don’t remember who told me this” at the beginning.  Questions about information that I had relayed earlier were raised daily, and in every aspect of my life. It took three months of monitoring my communication to reveille that absolutely no one around me listens to a word I say.

I’m in tears, tears over the impact of it all.  Why in the hell do I even speak to anyone. I try my best to keep 4  people informed, on schedule, and up-to-date with things that are going on in their own lives…Not even that of my own, and the reception of it is wasted, useless, unwanted, and whatever other words can describe the way I feel right now. For months, hell maybe ever years, I worried about my frame of mind, and after I finally get my shit together and actually look for the answer, I am slapped in the face with the FACT that my family, my friends, my church family and half the waitresses in Madison County don’t hear a third of what I say. “I said gravy on the side!” should be my pitiful motto. Sounds pretty farfetched….I KNOW, that’s why it hurts so much…

As of today I have made a decision in my life….I think I have talked enough in the first half of it to make the second half a little quieter. I am going to speak less, and see where the chips fall. Not to say that this will go unnoticed, it won’t, and I will make no response or excuse about it…I’m just resting voice and my mind.

Let’s hope tomorrow’s blog is a happier one. 

Incomplete

   I'm starting my blog a little early today. I have been heavyhearted all day over 2 words from a friend “Mom passed”

Damn! I hate to hear this…It ripped through my chest and hit my stomach like a ton of bricks!! The first thought in my head was “Fucking Grief!”  

All day today I have been thinking about heartache and grief. It happens every time I see a friend lose someone close to them. You see, I consider myself to be an expert in grief, an acquired expert at that. I have buried a husband and a father. These experiences have given me two very different types of grief, but they both hurt just the same.

I remember sitting on a couch on the top floor of the Wells Fargo building in Bryan, Texas. My past weeks have been spent on this couch talking to a therapist who heard about my misfortune and volunteered his services. At first I didn’t understand the importance of his offer, but weeks later the impact of grief would set in and I would long for his insight, his guidance, and his unbiased ear. After several sessions, and many tears, I remember screaming at him “I just want things to be back to normal again! Tell me how to get back to the way I was before all this shit happened to me?!?”

I will never forget his response, he leaned forward in a matter of fact composure and said “Oh Erin, Please don’t think that your life will ever be the same, EVER again.” I left that day feeling hopeless, powerless, and pissed off at the world…fucking grief!!!

Being the somewhat of a control freak that I am I went home and read everything I could get my hands on about the process of grief. “There are 6 phases of grief: shock, denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.” However these phases are not guaranteed in any order, and can and will overlap.   Also, 5 years later I can rightly say although the phases seem to dissipate, they will sneak up on your ass at any given moment…. Driving down the road and a song comes on, BAM! Tears!! I see someone post FML on Facebook, and I will go off on a rant about how fucking hard their life is because their BF walked out on them (Anger), Give me a break, Fuck you!!

Anyway, back to my research, it got me nowhere! Grief is a bitch of a process that has no pattern, no cure, no bounds and seemingly no end. For a few years my life was a roller-coaster, and I’m still on that ride. However, the twist and turns don’t bother me as much. See, I am a firm believer that time heals NO wounds, we simply learn to live with the pain. We also forget how much happier we were in life before the death of a loved one. We simply grow accustomed to the pain and move on with our lives.

And this is one of the many ways grief has changed me….I hear of a passing and my heart breaks for the pain of the loss. I know what they will go through. I know of the insanity of people hugging you, the amount of food that will never be consumed, the words spoken that will never be remembered and the one million offers of “If there is anything I can do, please let me know!” I know the helpless feelings, the regrets, the sleepless nights, and when you do sleep, you dream of them; only to wake up and have to realize that they are gone, AGAIN. Oh, how I wish I could take the pain of it all for them, but alas it’s a part of life, A HARD PART OF LIFE!

I guess it all comes down to the realty that there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do to make this better., and for me that is a big deal.. I’m a helper! I’m a fixer, I want no one to hurt likes I have, I long to make people happy in hopes of preventing such pain….but it’s hopeless! All must suffer in life and in the end the reality of it all is that it’s necessary to grow, BUT it’s the pain involved in the growth that hurts me….I simply can take it!!  I guess the only thing to do is pray, pray for the loss, pray for the pain, pray for “healing,” and pray for grace.

 I’m not really sure how to end this blog, so I will leave it like grief leaves all of us…up in the air and never complete.

"It requires more courage to suffer than to die." - Napoleon Bonaparte

Im a Bitch, Im a Lover!

As much as I would like to think of myself as a pretty versatile person there is one thing in life that I have always avoided. Today I found out that this one thing is unavoidable in any role I play…conflict.

I am sitting in pain, pain in my back, pain in my arms, and pain in my neck. I had to cut firewood today…seems like a normal chore, and It would be a normal chore if I was a little more in shape and actually built to do something as masculine as chopping firewood…but I am not! I assume that my anger at the time, that I attempted to release with every swing of the ax, didn’t help much, but the job got done and I shall heal soon enough. My anger was geared toward a man, a man who I had in fact paid to deliver firewood 3 weeks ago. A man who knows how important it is that there is wood for my mother’s warmth. A man who was about to see me in rare form…We were going to have a conflict!!!

I will spare this blog of the details of the confrontation, but will say that one usually does not know how to react to me when angered. You see, I am huge fan of kindness, I love to show it more than anything else in this world. I am not saying that kindness comes easy for me, no, kindness is something I have to muster up every day toward everyone I know.

I was raised by parents who never said a kind word to each other and one in particular was a VERY negative person. There was never any praise for anything we ever did, but if there was ANYTHING negative to say about any one of us it was going to be said, over, and over, and over again.

I grew up with that same trait and fortunately noticed it in my early adult years. I made a promise to myself to praise, complement, and lift up everyone around me. I was never going to have negative things to say toward anyone (I am still working on it, don’t judge).  So now I am known as a girl a woman , no a lady who is always happy and always has kind words to say, and for the most part that is true. However, I am also the person who allowed herself to be screwed over every chance there is a chance of conflict. Well, after today of physically hurting myself, possibly threatening the quality of care I give to my children and my mother, I'M DONE!!!

Once again my pain (physical this time) has caused a realization…If I am going to continue to try to embrace being single and head up two households conflict is going to happen, and happen often. From now on I need to let go of kindness toward every aspect of my life and take care of business. One can’t not take care of business without being authoritative, and with that comes having to be a bitch. In all honesty, I LIKE being a bitch; it’s bred into me!!!

With that being said my hour is up and I need to hunt down something better than a barstool to sit on in my nook. Leaving this on a positive note….I got a cord and a half of firewood delivered today and he took my chainsaw. He will be repairing it because of my pain and suffering!!!

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.” ~ Stephen King~ Dolores Claiborne

Coming Into The Closet!!!

2013 has been a good year, let’s hope 2014 is the same!! This year I am going to try to satisfy an urge, and knock a resolution out all with one stone. For the next 365 days I am going to take an hour out of my day to write......This may seem small to some, but for me, this is huge!!

I am what I consider myself to be a selfless person, and when I say selfless I mean I give my all to others and nothing to myself....EVER!!! For example, since having children I have managed to cut my bath time down to 13 minutes (shaved, shampooed and towel dried.) Being a selfless person means that one will acquire a whole slew of people who expect you to be at their beck and call 24/7; This is something else I plan on working on next year....ME TIME!!

Once the idea was put into my head I thought about how impossible it is going to be to write. Then I started thinking about how great an hour a day would be....an hour to simply put my thoughts into words to everyone or no one...who cares...I will be getting things out of my head and off my heart and have a WHOLE hour to myself. YEA ME!!!

I have already overcome a bump in this road...privacy. My whole house is consumed by my children. I have one who sleeps with me in MY room, all three think MY bathroom is theirs to use at any time they please (There have been up to 6 people in my bathroom while I have been bathing.) All of the televisions are hooked up to game consoles, and my office is wide open to the whole house as sort of an open invite for senseless chatter and word for word replays of every fucking argument they ever have! So needless to say I needed a place to be ALONE, a place to call mine...and then it came to me......I started quickly, reorganizing, moving shoes, boots, shit like my high school 4h jacket(Why do I still have that SOB?), and moving most of my clothes to the other side of the closet …. VOILA..... the left side of my closet is now MY writing nook!!

So, for the next 365 days I will take a simple hour of my time and write......It may be about something profound, something mundane, or something that I should have kept to myself, but alas I will write about it.  

~Kindness Matters and Always Flatter~ E