More Important To Be Right Or Be Loved?

I am always amused and awed when I get an email from one of asking if I am okay. It makes me realize that I haven't blogged in a week or so and you are wondering if I have kicked the bucket. Blogging friends truly are wonderful. My regular friends can go months and not think anything of it. Kind of a sad commentary, no?

I think I mentioned that my mom has been watching the Oprah Network. Well, she has sucked me in, too. I like "the story behind the story" and I like shows that are digging for personal truth. Sort of like what I try to do here. If you are having difficulty in your life or your relationships, work it out. A show that is now ending on OWN is The Judds. Apparently Naomi and Wynona have had a volatile relationship forever. There are so many reasons for it and they get into all of them. I try to imagine being a teenager and having my mother for a mom and a boss. So not cool. That made the transition from mother-daughter to mother-friend an unnatural one. They love each other like crazy BUT...

I think about how hard it would be to work that out on television. On the other hand, if no one worked out their issues publicly, other people wouldn't have the opportunity to learn. If Chris didn't write her weight loss/life blog, no one else would have all that great information. If Phoenix didn't write her love each better blog, I wouldn't stop and think I could be doing that better. If Shoes didn't write his crazy ass blog, I wouldn't laugh every day. If JJ didn't write his philosophical stuff, what would I think about? If Lira didn't post her struggling actress tips for others, they wouldn't have that foundation. [I could go on and on about all of your great blogs but my hands would lock into position over this keyboard. ALL of you are amazing.] This is what we do for one another. We live our lives out loud for ourselves and other people. Some do it in writing and others on TV.

I have learned so many things watching Naomi and Wynona interact. First of all, people often are the most cruel to the people that they love most. Second, if there were a device to take words back, everyone would buy one. Third, revelation is a slow process. I think it is because you have to understand yourself before you can understand another. Think on that for a while. Yikes. Fourth, it is essential to speak your truth. Until you do that, you do not feel free. You are shackled by silence that eats your soul. It is only in speaking your truth at all times that you can remain free. That doesn't mean shouting it with the most pain and bitterness you can throw, but speaking it gently with the solidness of its truth. That is all.

Last night, Wynona said how important it was to her to be right. All of these years it has been so important to be right. She never saw before that if there were a choice between being right and being loved, being loved was so much better.

The answer here is not to cave in to everyone else on everything just so that you are loved and they feel good about themselves. That just makes you a doormat and you lose your truth (#4). However, everyone deserves to be heard and both can be right from their viewpoint. Acknowledging another person's rightness is okay, too. It is saying I hear and love you. And that is where Naomi and Wynona arrived. Some people never get there. One person is right and another is wrong. There cannot be two right viewpoints on the same situation that are different!

Look at what that little bit of learning did for their relationship. Now they can apply that to all of their relationships. Everyone who watched that show can start processing that in their relationships. Powerful stuff.

I called the kids on Saturday just to talk to them. I had been trying to get hold of H-Girl all week. I had talked to C-Man last weekend. My ex called me yesterday to wish me Happy Mother's Day. He told me that the kids said we'd talked the day before AND that they'd said they'd wished me HMDay then. I corrected him by telling him that I had called them, but nothing had been said about Mother's Day. After we hung up, H-Girl's cell rang. It was C-Man calling to wish me HMDay. He was rushed b.c. it was close to their bedtime. I thanked him and told him to go on and get ready for bed. I asked about his sister. She came to the phone, but she was clearly ticked off by her tone of voice. I asked her how she was, etc. I could tell that she was not going to say HMDay, so I just told her good night and she said good-bye. And that was that.

I sent my ex an email asking him not to do that in the future. The kids are old enough to know the holidays. If they want to call, they will. If they don't, they won't. But forced expressions of love are not love. And I am hoping that H-Girl unwittingly employed tactic number one on me. People are often the most cruel to the people they love the most.

DAY 2: DEAR CRUSH

Dear Marshall,

I have spent the last month trying to separate the man from the personas that you have created. I have read up on your story, listened to lots of your songs, am planning on watching your movie, but I think people continually evolve. You caught my attention with your most recent songs Not Afraid and I Love The Way You Lie. I understand that Airplanes 2 is also a recent recording. When I compare those songs to the earlier songs, I can see how much you've grown. Although, Lose Yourself, which is from 8 Mile, indicates that you were already beginning to move in this direction.

I understand why the songs that launched your career were so angry (Slim Shady), and contrite (Eminem), and moderated (Marshall Mathers). You explain that in Lose Yourself. "What if you had just one shot, one chance, would you take it?" You needed all of that to take your shot, and it worked. You were punching through the floor, instead of walking through the door, because you weren't invited into what was an all-black hip hop club. You had to work 10x harder to prove you were as good as they were. And you did it. In fact, I think you exceeded your own expectations. I don't think anyone knows what the downside of fame is going to feel like until it arrives on their doorstep. You weren't prepared. Your wife wasn't prepared and no one is writing a handbook. By the way, I am a writer. If you want to work on that project together, that would be totally cool. HOW TO DEAL WITH FAME: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE. I can see that wouldn't be your kind of title. HOW TO DEAL WITH FAME: KNOWING WHEN IT'S TIME TO TELL PEOPLE TO TAKE IT THROUGH THE MIDDLE FINGER. Yeah, the title is a little too long. We can work on it.

Anyway, the music was awesome. You were being paid to do what you loved. You had lots of anger issues from your childhood and it was therapeutic letting it out. But then the fame itself generated crap all on its own. Your marriage went to hell twice and that made for more anger than you could handle. You started doing drugs to take the edge off, because it was all just too much. And you had to have been thinking, "When did the dream turn into a nightmare?" And still you wrote because you had to or you would explode. The hate was so intense. The only love you had in your heart was for your daughter and your ex-wife was making that relationship hard on you. Nothing was coming easy.

Life was teaching you so many lessons and they were all bad. Trust no one. Love no one. There is no such thing as loyalty. Everyone screws you over in the end. Count on no one but yourself. The public will love you as long you are successful, but they will turn on you like wolves. Everyone is out for number one, so you better be out for number one, too. Screw forgiveness. You tried that with Kim and she just screwed you again. Fool me once, shame on you . Fool me twice, shame on me. Friends are only your friends based on your success rate. You really are in this thing alone. The only person who loves me for me are my daughters. That is it. That is the only part of my heart that is open. Everyone else can keep the hell out because I don't trust you, don't need you, don't want you, and don't believe you. The need and want part might be a lie, but the don't believe part is true, and makes the need and want part too scary.

I know a little bit how you feel. Friends have let me down. The last three relationships I have been in have been horrific. Well, two out of three anyway. But they were all very painful. You do that enough times and you get scared of even trying again. It's easier to have superficial relationships than to have a relationship with someone real. A real person has the capacity to hurt you. You and I are a lot alike. We are both on this road of reclamation; we are in the process of reclaiming our lives. You have already come so far by going to drug rehab, for you and no one else, and owning that. However, in order to really gain any ground, you have to go all the way. You have to spend some time digging out your pain, looking at it, and letting go. That is how you get your life back. Eventually, you will meet someone, hopefully not in the fame business, who is a real person and you will be cautious about the whole thing, but you will let her in. And it will be a beautiful day to start out the rest of your life. I am hoping for the same kind of thing for myself. It's not healthy going through this world alone. However, it isn't healthy jumping into something before you have mentally and emotionally "cleaned house."

Wishing you much happiness,
Robin


image blatantly ripped off from Miss Angie at My So-Called Chaos

MY FIRST LOVE

Today is July 5th. Every year this day rolls around and I pause, take a moment, and remember my first love. Today is his birthday. This is the 15th year he will be celebrating it without me.

As an aside, and I won't stay stuck on this, for those of you who participated in looking for Patterns Among My Crushes, the only Pattern that no one picked up on was First Love. I suppose that it wasn't so much a trait of the person (as in personality or the way they looked), which explains why. However, it was the tie that bound all of those really young fictional characters together. First Love. (Michael Guerin (Roswell), Adam Rove (Joan of Arcadia), Lucky Spencer (General Hospital), Jason Morgan (General Hospital), LLoyd Dobler (Say Anything), Seth Cohen (The O.C.), and even Logan Huntzberger (The Gilmore Girls)

I know that there are some people out there who marry their first love. They get it right first shot out of the gate. They live with that person for their entire life, raise a family, and eventually are laid to rest side by side. It happens. I know people that can claim that as their story.

Then there are the rest of us. First love. There is nothing better than first love and it will never feel quite that way ever again. The beauty of first love is ignorance. You rush headlong into it fearless. You wear your heart on your sleeve, trust everything that the other person says, believe that everything will work out fine, are fierce in your devotion and commitment, and if the other person says jump, you do. It doesn't occur that they might not catch you. You are reckless with your heart. Now, if you have chosen well, that turns out fine. If you have chosen someone who isn't ready to hold it, well that ends up hurting a lot. There is nothing quite like jumping off the cliff, sure that the other person is going to catch you, and when you are in the freefall, you see them turn and walk away. That is one hell of a landing.

After a landing like that, you don't approach relationships the same way ever again. You aren't fearless, trusting, reckless, and ready to jump. You now have "baggage" or "issues." I mentally picture people dragging all of their old relationships with them everywhere they go. In a way, they are. Each new hurt, gets thrown into the pile. It gets added to the list of "things to watch out for because I am not going to fall for that again."

So, even though this is my first love's birthday, and I think of him on this day, I also think of me on this day. The old me. The me before I knew him. The crazy thing is that he isn't a bad guy. He's actually one of the good ones. He just didn't know what he wanted when he met me. Check that. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to play baseball (catcher) and he blew out his knee playing football and that nixed his baseball aspirations. So, he couldn't do what he wanted, and he was floundering. Whatever he felt for me wasn't enough to anchor him, and it wasn't as much as I felt for him. However, I let myself get jerked around on his crazy treadmill for seven years, when I should have stepped off much sooner.

Just before I graduated college, he called me to tell me that he had joined the Army. We were broken up at that time. At this point in the relationship, it was very on again, off again. Granted, this was the longest off it had been. The fact that he didn't call me to ask my opinion before he made this decision should have told me something. (This was a potential time to call it off.) What it did was suck me back in.

He went to Boot Camp and I moved to New York City. I wrote him tons of letters and received none. Before he left for Boot Camp, he was going to see me after, because he was going to be stationed overseas. Boot camp ended and no calls from him. (This was a potential time to call it off.)

One night I drank way too much and called his house. He went on and on about how he read my letters and how mad I sounded. He said that he wasn't writing me back (true), but that he couldn't write or receive mail in Boot Camp. He knew he had really hurt me and thought it would just be best to leave things as they were. (This was a really good time to end it. When a man pretty much tells you he is too big of a baby to explain a situation and he would rather just allow you to sit in a mucky pool of hurt feelings, that says a lot.) However, I was really drunk and way too forgiving.

After Desert Storm ended, he was transferred to Fort Stewart in Georgia. I had a job in publishing and was at the point of advancing in my career. I could jettison my career and move to GA or I could stay in NY. (I should have stayed in NY.) I moved to GA. After he got out of the military, we moved to MI, and lived at his parents lake house, and I got an admin job (after various temp jobs), but I wasn't loving it. Our relationship went downhill fairly quickly after that. I left and moved back home to OH.

I couldn't see it when I was in it, but he was walking away from me all of the time. That was why our relationship was on again, off again in college. I never wanted it to be off again. The only reason it was off again was because every time I turned around I was looking at his back as he was leaving me. I got used to the hard landing. It started to feel normal. If a relationship isn't painful, well than it must not be love. How else do you explain taking someone back after that whole letter fiasco? I don't care how drunk I was, there was a next day to process everything. That was the day to call him back and say, "Thanks for explaining that Boot Camp made you more physically fit as a person, but you are still emotionally a baby who would rather walk away than do the work in a relationship. You have saved me years of pain."

Of course, the problem is that it has taken me 15 years to see that my turning point was that moment. I didn't know that until today. That phone call took place in the summer of 1990. So, it has only taken me twenty years to nail down where it all really went wrong. Of course, the best idea would have been to not call at all. Let him make that trip to Germany, go to Iraq, and the whole time be thinking about how he screwed up. Let him do some growing up. Some manning up. Because, like I said, he actually is a good guy. I just never could quite forgive him for always walking away. So, in the end, I walked away. I walked away probably about the time he was getting it together. I was just tired.

Anyway, if I hadn't made that call, chances are pretty good that he would have called me after it was over. Would I have been available? That I don't know. There are a lot of men in New York City. Would I have moved to Georgia? Not if I was smart. Let him finish his time in the Army, and if he wants the relationship enough, he can enroll in NYU. That is what he was doing ~ going back to school after he got out of the military. That would have changed my feeling about that relationship all the way around. It wouldn't have felt like me chasing him and giving up everything, while he had done nothing but walk away. That was the missing piece of our relationship, and why it didn't work. He needed to do something to indicate that he really wanted it.

Some people seem to have latched onto the idea that this is Music Monday. Well, I am all for anything that is music-related. Of course, this is the perfect song to complement this post. There isn't actually any video. It is a blank screen. It's just the song, but I think the songwriter must have lived through something like my story.

Don't forget to turn off my music player at the bottom of the page...

So, what do you have to say about First Love? Did you luck up and marry yours? Are you still friends? Am I right, wrong, or something in between? Please share your story....

SOMETHING TO HOLD...

This is inspired by a specific blogging friend, but goes out to anyone who is feeling relationship challenged. I know that watching fictional television relationships may not be the best answer (because they are always so accurate and right on the money). However, we work with what we have. I also know that the friend I have in mind watched this show once upon a time, but gave it up. I still love it. In fact, I have it on DVD, and every summer when I go into withdrawal, and I watch the entire series AGAIN. I am a sick puppy and I know it. I chose this first clip off of youtube because it actually offered some continuity, and stuck to just one relationship, which made it easier to follow. The second clip picks up with just one scene where first leaves off. Oh yeah, you have to scroll down and turn off my music player and turn up the volume on your computer. Sorry....





Well, then I thought that maybe those clips and/or that show just wasn't going to do it for you. The thing is this: if you are single and you want a relationship, you have to have hope. You need something to hold in your hand or in your head. Unfortunately, I tend go for the star-crossed stuff. I look over my TV shows on DVD and they don't feature a lot of happy endings. So, I decided to look at my movies. I had better luck there. I still think that the best movie ever was based on the book by Nicholas Sparks. Yeah, I am talking about THE NOTEBOOK. Although, all of his books make me cry. THE NOTEBOOK was his first novel and was loosely based on the true story of his wife's parents. I was really glad I read that book at home. I started crying about mid-way through the book and didn't stop until I finished it. I have yet to read one of his books that I didn't set me off on a crying spree. I have cried in public several times because I didn't see it coming and "Wham!" there it was.

I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard the rumor that THE NOTEBOOK set Jessica Simpson's divorce in motion. I don't keep up with the stars and their love lives, but I think she was married to Nick Lachey (sp?). Anyway, if the rumors are remotely true, seeing the movie hit a raw nerve. The thing with most movies is you get all of the anticipation and then the grand proclamation of love. Then the credits roll. In life, it is at that point that the story really begins, which is what makes it all feel so misleading. In THE NOTEBOOK, the story happened a long time ago and they weathered it. The "heroine" wrote their story down when she realized she was getting Alzheimer's and made her husband promise to read it to her, because she was sure it would bring her back to him. So, that is what he does EVERY DAY. And every day she wakes up not knowing him. And that is what separates THE NOTEBOOK from the rest. I hope that I haven't ruined it for you if you haven't seen it. I don't think so. Here's the trailer....





And this is the best fight scene ever....

THE DRAMA OF THE ONION AND THE CARROT

My vice is TV.  I love books and movies, too, but those don't seem to be considered vices.  Maybe because they are more artsy or have learning value  ~ sometimes.  Most of the reading I do is fictional, but not all.  I am really not a big documentary fan.  Of course, none of that is relevant because this blog is about my vice of television.

This world is a hard place.  All it takes is a couple of solid hits to the heart and pretty soon you're a master at not letting anyone in.  That makes for a fascinating character... complex, challenging, layered. It's like peeling an onion.  It is no fun at all in real life if you are the person doing the peeling or the person being peeled.  It's frustrating or scary respectively.  The kicker is that the person doing the peeling is convinced that they're going to be rewarded for all their hard work once they get to the center.  What if they don't like what they see?  Do they blame the onion?  The peeler now carries around a whole new "issue" in their arsenal and the onion has doubled the amount of peeling that needs to be done for anyone to ever get to their center again!  The irony is that the onion's center might have been beautiful to another onion.  It was an unfortunate circumstance that a carrot was doing the peeling.  However, from the onion's perspective it's whole heart was revealed and rejected and it was enormously painful and not something that onion wants to relive anytime soon, so bring on the layers.  Protect. Protect. Protect.

In a TV show, the viewing audience gets to see and process all of this.  We get it all.  We get to know the onion before meeting the carrot and vice versa.  We get to experience that first meeting.  Many of us understand right away that this is a relationship that will not work out because it is an onion and a carrot and the onion should be looking for another onion and the carrot should be seeking out another carrot.  We forsee the heartache in their futures way before they do.  We know this story will not end well.  We watch the carrot try to warm up the onion and the onion likes the carrot but senses what we already know and shies away.  The carrot is persistent.  The onion goes against its better judgment and allows the carrot access and the peeling begins.  All the while, we are thinking, "Stop, it's a wonderful onion, but not like you.  You are going to want to change the onion into a carrot and it cannot be done.  All of the peeling in the world will not make the onion a carrot.  Please stop." 

Of course, the beauty of watching this play out on TV is this: it goes on for weeks, possibly years, and we get to see our carrot and onion move on to other relationships that turn out maybe better, maybe worse, certainly differently.  But the best part is that we get to know what they think (what they truly think) and what they want (what they truly want).  And that is why I love TV.  It is the one place I get a long-term relationship with people (okay, characters)  and actually understand why they do the things that they do.  I know that with the last onion I truly loved I never did peel away enough layers to get to his heart and I never understood what he thought or wanted.

THOSE MAGIC MOMENTS

For those of you have managed to avoid all retail outlets since Christmas, this is your heads-up: Valentine's Day is bearing down on you.  It is tomorrow.  I have to admit that this has never been my favorite holiday.  For some reason this particular day of the year and my love life haven't exactly been in sync.  I can't say never, but it sure seems like, more often than not, we have been at odds.  If I have been in a relationship, it is right at the beginning and still fragile, or at the end and someone is wanting out.  Then there were times that there was fighting going on and no one was feeling particularly romantic.  Let's just say that I simply cannot recall very many Valentine's Days that were the stuff of which dreams are made. 

However, I have this "movie reel" of Jon moments that I sometimes play in my head when I want to smile.  None of them happened on Valentine's Day.  The first day we met when he threw open the door with all of that music roaring in the background and yelled, "What?!?!" at me nearly scaring me to death.  Sitting in the lobby of Kollen talking.  It was the way he looked at me.  That night at the beach which was so romantic. I don't even know how he did it, but he hooked his foot around my ankle, and then we were both horizontal and I was on top of him.  Very sexy.  You don't forget that.  His telling me I was beautiful for the first time at the check-out line at the grocery store.  He did have a way of picking his moments.  This time in New York that he was on the phone with his parents.  He was wearing a red shirt and jeans and the world kind of went into slow motion for me, and I stopped hearing what he was saying.  It was really strange, but I knew that I would remember it forever.  The day we recorded the answering machine message at the lake cottage.  We had to keep doing it because we kept messing up.  The last time the rabbit chimed in at the end, and we laughed and laughed.  We kept that one.  It was perfect.  We played board games at dinner.  He helped me cook dinner.  We laughed a lot.   There was a lot of laughing.

A little over ten years later I got a second shot with Jack.  Equally intense, just a much shorter reel.  Slow dancing.  Ping pong.  There was so much happiness and laughter here.  To this day my heart tugs a little when I see a navy blue shirt that zips at the top.  Actually any shirt that zips at the top.  Lasagna and bass pale ale.  I can't even feel the same about a kerchief tied around someone's head.  He said that living without me would be like living without sunshine.

And those are my non-Valentine's Day reels.  They are all magical for me; they just didn't take place on February 14.  The beauty of the romance reel  is that I can press "play" anytime.  Today I am content with my life just as it is.  I have good friends and a wonderful family, and that is enough.

IT WAS ON FIRE WHEN I LAY DOWN ON IT

If you read Robert Fulghum's second book, IT WAS ON FIRE WHEN I LAY DOWN ON IT, he was so blown over by a tabloid newspaper article about a man rescued from a burning bed that he named his book after it. The disconcerting part was in the answer the man gave to "'How did this happen?'" He replied, "''I don't know. It was on fire when I lay down on it.'" Robert Fulghum spent some time doing some mental head scratching over that one, so much so that he named his own book after it. I read said book in 1990 and still find myself thinking about it twenty years later. It was on fire when I lay down it??? Seriously?

My paternal grandmother, nanny, as all her grandchildren called her was a free spirit in her youth. And she said and did pretty much whatever she felt like later in life, too. I imagine she got a lot of that confidence from her mother. Now, her mother (my great grandmother) was divorced five times. She didn't let anyone tell her what she could and couldn't do. I didn't really know her but I think she was probably formidable. I know her family disowned her. You just didn't do that back then. She did.

One of the last conversations that nanny and I had before nanny's mind started to go was on her front porch when she confided that my grandfather (who died long before I was born) was the only man she ever truly loved. I didn't say anything because all of my questions would have seemed insensitive and I didn't doubt her sincerity. She'd had a lot of time to think about it. After all, he'd been dead longer than I'd been alive so there was no chance of them reuniting. Nothing she said to me would change the outcome for her. So we sat and rocked and I think we both felt melancholy for damaged relationships.

Unfortunately, my nanny's divorce from my grandfather fell under the sordid heading and details were never all that forthcoming (it wasn't a story told at Christmas around the dinner table) so the details, to this day, are somewhat unclear for me. But there was cheating (possibly on both sides/probably on both sides) that led to marriage on his side to another woman that was true love. I think that was the real sticking point for nanny and maybe the cause for her cheating. She may have employed the cheating to make you jealous device and it backfired. Who knows? Not me, because no one talks about it. More to the point, maybe nanny didn't know. She saw her husband falling in love with someone else and she just started doing crazy things. Her choices don't make sense. Had there been a camera crew and a reporter standing by asking questions, her answer would have made just about as much sense as this... It was on fire when I lay down on it. She knows she burned her house down and she paid the price. She lived out the rest of her life loving a man who loved someone else and then loving a man who was gone. It was on fire when I lay down on it. Seriously.