IT ALL BELONGS TO YOU

I found my first Quote Book about a month ago in a box of old books. From there it, and the rest of the books, found a new home in the guest room closet. I have no inspiration today. My thoughts are not positive, happy ones and yet I promised to post something every day. And then I remembered my Quote book, aka my loophole. I found a way out; I don't have to post MY thoughts today. Today I can post thoughts that have inspired me or simply stopped me in my tracks to reevaluate.


"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."
~Emily Bronte

"Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you."
~Aldous Huxley


"To get the attention of a large animal, be it an elephant or a bureaucracy, it helps to know what part of it feels pain. Be very sure, though, that you want its full attention."
~Kelvin Throop, III

"In the long run you hit what you aim for. Therefore, though you should fail immediately you had better aim at something high."
~Henry David Thoreau

"People will sometimes forgive you the good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you."
~W. Somerset Maugham


"Don't oppose forces, use them. God is a verb, not a noun."
~R. Buckminister Fuller

"While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important."
~Walter Lippman

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald


"Well, being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and the left.
~Jean Kerr

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you."
~Ernest Hemingway

THAT FIRST KISS

Do you remember your first kiss? Mine involved a game of chase on the playground that ended with a ragtag group of third grade boys pinning me against the monkey bars while a real live third grade monkey planted one on me while my face was thrashing all around. I suppose it landed somewhere in the vicinity of my lips, so I consider it my first kiss. Not stellar, insofar as kisses go, and since I didn't participate, unless you consider all that head jerking participating, it was rather one-sided.

In junior high school, I discovered the romance novel. The fact that the plot lines were more or less the same was reassuring to a young girl. The heroine was always a virgin with zero experience (check) and her circumstances were always less than wonderful (check) and she started out with no prospects in sight (check) but once she met her guy her story might have been complicated but all of her "firsts" were awesome. Even that first fight knocked it out of the park. How great was that?


Every summer my church Youth Group went to an amusement park. We alternated between Cedar Point and Kings Island. I think this was the year we went to Kings Island. All in all, Cedar Point was the better park for the roller coaster buff, but Kings Island does have The Beast and that is a very fine coaster. Anyway, none of the boys at my high school were kiss-worthy in my book OR if they were kiss-worthy, they weren't interested in kissing me. Life is just mean like that.

Anyway, I happened to meet up with a boy at Kings Island. I know that you can already see where this is going. He was nice. He was cute. We talked. We walked. We rode the rides. And then in a private moment of madness I let him kiss me. Full on french kissing for the first time. If you're wondering what I was thinking it was something like this, "Oh my God. What is he doing with his tongue? Is this kissing or invasion? His tongue is everywhere. It is one big piece of meat. Get it out. Out. Out. Out. Is he poking? Licking? Chewing? What is this? This is terrible. When will this be over?????????"


As I recall, I made a hasty departure after that because I was afraid that he might try to do it again and I couldn't take anymore french kissing. What were the french thinking? The duration of my stay at the park that day was now about avoiding the Mad Kisser. Eeeks. Unfortunately, I couldn't share this story with any of my fellow youth groupers because maybe I was the bad kisser. I had no basis for comparison. So, it was a silent game of duck and evade.


As soon as we piled into the van to head home I snapped the walkman on and hoped to slip out of my thoughts and into the music so that I could turn off the voices that were talking a little too loudly for my personal comfort. It was not to be. Okay. Worst case scenario: He was a really good french kisser and I will just have to learn to like it. Sort of like broccoli. I was really having a problem with worst case scenario because I really wanted to brush my teeth, tongue and gums for about ten minutes and follow it up with mouthwash and I don't like mouthwash. Moving on to a better case scenario: Maybe he didn't know what he was doing either. That made me feel mildly better. Moving on again. Best case scenario: When have I ever done anything at my best on my first try? Now that had my attention. My first try riding my bike? Disaster. First time making my bed? Crying fit. First time on skates? Skinned knees. Jumping rope? More boo boos. Now we were on a roll. I finally found a scenario I could live with, a Walkman to pass the rest of the time, and good old fashioned toothpaste to erase a bad taste out of my mouth when I got home.

WHAT'S YOUR DAMAGE?

When you feel like the universe is trying to send you a message do you get signs from multiple sources? I woke up this morning with a horrible migraine, a flash of an indian tent with moccasins lined up outside the door, and words spoken in anger by Sonny on General Hospital ringing in my ear. Uh oh. I knew immediately where today's blog was going and it wasn't anyplace good.



Let's start with the indian tent and the moccasins. The indians had a much better system for dealing with a broken relationship (i.e. divorce or separation) than we will ever have. I don't know who thought of it, but it was brilliant, because it involved no third party. The woman made the decision by placing the man's moccasins outside the tent as if they were walking away; it indicated he was gone and not to return. His welcome was revoked. It was very public and there were no take-backs. Because it was public, it was a matter of pride on the man's part to honor the decision and pick up his moccasins and walk away. There was no barging into the tent and demanding that his woman rethink the decision or else. Awesome system.

I could spend a lot of time defending my General Hospital addiction or not. Let me just say this. GH and I have had a relationship since the 6th grade. I had a mad love affair with Days of Our Lives that lasted way too long and when it was good, it was very good, but when it went bad, it was terrible. And I slinked back to GH and it forgave and I have been faithful ever since. Enough said. Anyway, what did Sonny say???? I don't have it exactly right, but it was more or less this...."Olivia, everyone else in this has admitted their mistakes but you. It is time that you own what you did wrong in this terrible mess. You need to claim your damage." Imagine that loud and intense and it should be about right.

I took two tours through Divorce Recovery Group at Warren Baptist Church after my divorce. One of the things that you had to do was claim out loud in front of the group your part of why things went wrong in your marriage. As close as I got to that was I enabled him to behave badly. That was true. I did enable him to behave badly and that was the truth insofar as the marriage went. In order to actually claim my damage I had to go back before the marriage. I got away on a technicality.

Today I get to own my damage.


We started dating in May 2001 and he proposed on Dec 31 2001 and I said "yes" even though it was too soon. I bought a house a few months later because my condo wasn't big enough for his kids when they came to visit. It was four bedrooms. After the buy I took a long, hard look at the living room and realized that the wallpaper didn't match our living room furniture. Egads. It clashed badly. My mother's golden rule is to never paint over wallpaper. Had I known that there was wallpaper on top of wallpaper I would have rethought mom's rule, but then I would have missed out on the most enlightening experience of my life. I thought it would take 3-4 days tops to remove wallpaper from living/dining room and paint. I called friends and family to start on Saturday. My Not Yet Husband (NYH) was working and we began. After going at it all day Saturday, we hadn't made much of a dent on the dining room. NYH worked 4 days on and 4 off and his first working day was the Saturday we started on the house. I was thankful when his four days off rolled around so that he could start putting some muscle into it. I was exhausted; I had worked on it all weekend and after work for the four days he'd been on 12 hour shifts.


I remember calling him to see how it was going on his first work day at the house. It was 2:00pm or so. He hadn't gotten to the house yet. What? When I got to the house at 5:00 or thereabouts his truck was outside but I couldn't find him or any evidence that he'd done any work at all. He was asleep in the hammock in the backyard. Two weeks later and with zero help from NYH it was almost time to paint. I had roped every friend I had into helping get the wallpaper down. Unfortunately there were places that it had pulled the sheetrock out and there were some gaping holes. Lots of putty required followed by lots of sanding. My friend, Norm, loaned me his sander because the holes were so large. Using sandpaper by hand would take forever.


It is just NYH and I at the house and the putty is dry and the sanding needs to be done. I ask NYH if he will use the sander on the large holes while I sand the smaller patches by hand. No, he will not. He's never used a sander. Well, I've never used a sander either but it doesn't look hard. Hold the sander against the area to be sanded. If you've never held a sander, that thing is heavy. It is also noisy. I didn't like what NYH had to say, but I was pretty used to his lack of willingness to help by this point. Mr. Fixit he wasn't. However, even I wasn't prepared for what came next. As soon as I turned the sander on, he turned it off. He claimed it was too noisy for him. It hurt his ears. I was just going to have to sand those large areas by hand if I wanted him to help. I plugged the sander back in. He walked out the front door. He came back in twenty minutes later to find me ON A LADDER HOLDING A SANDER ABOVE MY HEAD. Note: the sander is heavy and my arms are tired. My arms are shaking they hurt so bad. He stands there and watches me for several minutes. Apparently it isn't so loud that he can't stand and observe and then he walks through the house to go I don't know where. I'm thinking, "Who is this guy? I understand about feeling uncomfortable outside your comfort zone and I can forgive that. But where's your decency? Your common decency? Any MAN with any self respect would take over this job when he sees someone in physical pain. And if you can't even do that you could stand behind the ladder just to make sure I don't fall." Before I wasn't in love with him, but I had love for him. That day I stopped respecting him as a man and a person. I couldn't even like him. And that was the moment. That was the defining moment of our relationship. He didn't know it, but I knew it.


That night we drove back to the condo together and all I could see in my head was an indian tent and shoes lined up. Then I saw the front door of my condo and all of his shoes lined up like they were leaving and I opened my mouth several times to say it. "This is over. I want you gone. You can sleep in your truck, at your mother's, your sister's, a friend's. I really don't care. It's done." But it was stuck in my throat. And so my mouth kept opening and closing but nothing came out. And then we were back at the condo and it was too late. And then we were walking down the aisle and it was too late. And then his kids moved in and it was too late. But the words were always there, stuck.

I lost my voice and my self-respect. That's my damage.