I feel like those people in the Depression Meds commercials. Holding up the happy face picture to cover their sad faces. I spent some of the morning crying. And my Morning Pages are tear stained. So it's been a hard start to the day.
My birthday cake is still in the fridge. The candles on the counter. Never got around to the cake or the candles. And while writing the Morning Pages I realized I never got around to my Birthday Dinner of Pot Roast. Something is very wrong here. With me. With everything. I am not happy.
I am trying to read Where The Crawdads Sing. But keep getting interrupted. Everything I try to do gets interrupted. By someone else's needs and wants.
Thank you to all who sent birthday greetings. They were VERY much appreciated. And many thanks to ml for the beautiful images she sent. I love learning about new (to me) artists.
Am playing blocks with Emrie...be
ReplyDeleteHere in a while.
Love love
ok, she's taking her nap. I can respond more thoughtfully later, but would
ReplyDeletewant to say now that i HONOR your honesty and willingness to share yourSelf
this way...we could call it "publicly"...but in a certain way it is private too,
because those of us who come here and "read you" do so because we care about
you, love you. In a certain way, i think blogs are like writing to
sisters...family...sisters who live far from one another and correspondence
is the only way we can tell of our lives...correspondence as in the old days...
when we sat at writing tables and then slipped the letter into the envelope,
placed the postage stamp and stood outside to hand it to the postman..entrusting
it to travel the maybe weeks or months it took to arrive at the destination, to
the hands that would open and read and Know. Know what?, Know us. To be
Known. Fully, for who we Are. Maybe it's about that? It's my guess.
The granddaughter Alyssia is working on her Master's Degree in Social Work.
Back in the year or so before i left New Mexico, we talked on the phone. Sometimes i would be working through something and as i do, like you, i talked about it.
Often i would be surprised by her responses, the wisdom of them, but that came
from not just her, but what she was absorbing from her class work.
and she once responded that what i was saying was simply "developmentally correct"...and it surprised me that she could finish my sentences, my thoughts,
because they were simply appropriate to the developmental stage in life that
i had arrived at...and that they were Appropriate. How it is erroneous to think
that development stops with Adulthood. Stops with a point of having raised
children to full adults, stops with achieving a certain point in our careers and
in our life achievements of any kind. We don't cease to develop. We continue
...at the later point in our lives in a different way, with our inner lives
becoming so much more significant, the singular us, who we are privately, Inside.
And i think it's very common that we arrive at this point of elderhood and suddenly
feel like No One Knows Us. Husbands, family, even close friends, if we are
lucky enough to have close friends...maybe to have LET friends get close.
I may be way off here. You'll have to tell me.
But i believe that it's "developmentally correct" to reach points of self evaluation...to be Re~viewing our lives, and in looking back, wondering
WHY for so many things...realizing that so much of what we spent YEARS doing
has no meaning for us in this time of our lives. Does not Feed us in any way,
emotionally or spiritually. So, the task then becomes how to Feed ourSelves. In a way that is Energizing.
Which is different for each of us.
and if we feel like no one really KNOWS us, how it becomes the mandate to
do what we need to do to KNOW ourSelves...and do what we need to do to
Grow our Selves into what we want to Be.
??????
Such BIG LOVE, Joanne...like, Really Big
Love Grace's theory of blogs being as though we are writing to sisters and harkening back to a time when we had written correspondence....And envelopes, and stamps, and the postman.
ReplyDeleteA dear friend of mine and I were on a mission to revive the art of written correspondence once. This was prior to blogs. But we stopped after a short while, I guess it was just too time consuming , demanded too much energy. But blogging, texting, emailing do enable written communication and that is good . I, too, admire your honesty. I empathized with you today and wished you could regain your excitement about rearranging your house and having a 12' Christmas tree. Energy and enthusiasm can be very fleeting for me too .