No, not forever

My version of the story is the one i am sticking with. i think my father is having a mid-life crisis. although he cannot see that. for him, mid-life crisis-ing is for weaker minded, less original people. No, he simply has come to the rational and not crisis-induced conclusion that he wants nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my mother and nothing to do with my sister. Should he have a major heart-attack and barely survive it, I am not to come to his side- I am not to even call. If my mother dies tomorrow, i am told, I will not be welcome at the funeral.

Oh, how the mighty fall.


I spent six hours on the phone with this bruised Ego, this disillusioned man-child. I was bewildered and perplexed by the time i got off- still in my pajamas. I was abused, and he abused my care for him, my concern for my own place in the family. He wanted to hurt me. He made me literally sick.

The next day i couldn't focus at work. I could not. I felt sick in my stomach, light-headed, fuzzy. i felt bruised up inside.

i felt out of control and i was... i was at the mercy of his tantrum.

my dad has earned his crisis: he has been the chief contributor to it. My dad deserves to rage: lots that is presently making him crazy is not entirely his fault.

But not a bit of it is mine either, so i am not paying the tab.

I am going on with my life, the only one i have. I will not invest in his breakdown, though i honestly hope he regains his footing.

Once my aged and wise therapist held my hand and told me that i could not be the stabilizing force in my family. He told me he understood why i had tried, that he believed me when i said that i played the part i did because i feared the chaos that would ensue if i did not.

He told me I had to let happen in them what would happen-

and now I am doing that. I let them destabilize in my absence because i cannot struggle with them forever.
my son is growing up too quickly for that.

Rolling with it.

I am the type pf person who really gets into the movie or tv show she is watching.
I really need to identify with the characters or there is no point in my watching... i don't inherently value stories about people i do not relate to.

That said, i am in the fifth and final season of Six Feet Under and

Hot F-in Damn.

that is what i have to say. I have to give props to my girl, Nancy Oliver, for her mad screenwriting skills...
okay, ditching the vernacular i want to talk about a special crazy phenomenon that i just experienced.


In this season, without giving too much away about a show that aired its final season about three years ago (a shout-out, too, to the netflix people who keep old shows fresh for years) ,
Nate breaks up with Brenda because they fight too much; he's tired of it and they don't seem to "fit."

And i got totally sucked into that world and remembered that not that long ago Chris and I were seemingly ill-fit, and though we weren't really fighting with each other, it felt as if we had been fighting for our life-together for as long as either of us could remember and we were tired.
sick-tired, nauseous-tired, dreadfully-tired, bone-tired. marrow- tired. and we felt like the brave thing to do, i definitely thought that the brave thing to do, would be to break-up: to walk away and cut our losses and face the world as individuals. individuals, the parts that cannot be divided being the ones we keep. let go of each other and stop fighting the very matter of reality and give in.

We didn't belong together it seemed. fate was apparently against us and we were

fatalities.

i have struggled with a dreadful sense of fatalism probably since my youngest sister died. it makes sense, you know? And this was that all over again- the need to let someone go even though everything inside of you is begging and pleading for that someone to stay, to live with you, to be with you. So i mustered up the idea and then the will to face that maybe, just maybe,
we were doomed. star-crossed.
for real.

It was at first a terrifying thought and since it was i knew i had to face it, i knew i did. so i held the thought in my mind and tried to embrace it with my heart and sat with the notion for about a month. yes, a month. for a month i did not look away from the tired sad thing we had become together, from the misery and the despair, from the existential questions that seemed legion.
I did not say to myself that God was with Us or that we would See with our Eyes some Good from this Pain. I did not make excuses for the rot and decay of the years set into our blood and bones; a sepsis and cancer. I did not look away to some better future.

as an exercise of the moment. to be present and to be brave.

tonight, watching nate and brenda collapse reminded me of that haunted time. the echoes of disappointments and disapprovals, of unfinished business and buried hopes filled my ears. i heard and i remembered the hollowness and illness.

and no one around me could answer for it, because it isn't the question of the mind hearing or realizing that the night has passed.
but of the ear listening past the echoes for what is now being whispered.
i heard something better tonight after the echoes.
something solid and something hale.
something set aright,
Illinois.

Falloween PictureGanza

Our House, The Bag of Autumn, & My Favorite Tree

Fall in Illinois is a beautiful thing and my little one and I took it upon ourselves to relish it by collecting leaves and examining ladybugs in the tree by our house. It's brisk here mostly, sometimes cold but every now and then it is warm again. In other words, it is annoyingly inconsistent.

Halloween was short-lived but really fun while it lasted. Judah is an A-list trick-or-treater. He scurried up to the houses and managed to get out

Trick or Treat, Trick or Treat, RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWRRRRRRRR!

Some pics of my little dragon:

This is a very scary dragon, as you can probably tell by his very scary stance. I believe Judah stated his goal was to "thcare them thso bad they run away crying and thcreaming!"
People dutifully pretended they were scared by a three-and-a-half foot tall adorable green thing.