I was talking to a friend, who had gone through a rough break up earlier in the year. She said something interesting to me, something I’d not considered before.

It’s good for me to hear you talk about Clay. Not just the good things, but when you tell me that you’ve had a hard time, or when you guys are frustrated with each other. That you don’t break, you both always bend.

In ten years, we’ve been through as much as two people can go through, together. One thing remains constant:

We.

Love comes unexpectedly, quietly. It comes despite your intentions to find it or to chase it away. It dispels the destructive lie of the fairytale. It is impossibly imperfect. It fucks up your vision of your charming prince on the white horse. You get your prince, but he rides forward on a nasty old mare with a ratty tail. Your prince may take your hand, gentle and strong, but his hair is all wrong and he smells like the mare he rode in on. He may gracefully dismount that horse and tell you that you are the most lovely creature he has set eyes upon, all while silently farting.

Love doesn’t replace reality. Love simply makes reality a little more bearable. Or less, depending on the day.

Love is never based on need and always based on want. That want should burn, slow and even like an ember. It will not come to you unless, somewhere in your soul, you believe you deserve it. If you do not hold that essential truth, all of the love you attract will ring false. You will wonder why the shine always wears off. Find the deserving you, nurture it. That is the one and only perfect love, because it will attract your match as dust  motes to a beam of sun.

Love is wearing your worst old sweat pants while doing chores and not caring how you look. Love is dirty dishes, squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube, putting the toilet paper on backwards. It is falling into bed, exhausted and filthy and safe. It is falling asleep with another person in the bed and for the first time, sleeping without fear.  Love is knowing that sex isn’t always great, isn’t always frequent, but also isn’t a chore. Love scrubs toilets, prepares meals that take hours and doing so after your partner’s snoring has kept you up all night.

It is knowing, that you aren’t always right, but that you always strive to be true. When you fail at that, you suck it up, say you’re sorry, mean it and do better next time. It is granting forgiveness before it is asked for. It is never promising to not hurt the other, because you will. Again and again, intentionally, unintentionally. But, it is trying, with your best intention and integrity to not do so. It is accepting that you too, will hurt. You will get hurt. You will drop your grudge, your shield, your weapons and grant the same forgiveness you seek.

Love is forgetting.

Forgetting old wounds, old wars and being present. It is stepping forward in each moment, it is restful. It is manic. It is all screwy. But it remains. It connects, not to your head and not to your heart. Both of those entities lie in their own way, for their own reasons. It connects with your gut, settles in tandem with your intuition.

It holds you in your weakness and leaves you breathless. It changes you and changes them and yet solidifies what is integral in each. It is sometimes underwhelming, while being utterly remarkable. It is the soul, finding what it can cling to, what gives not purpose, but reward.

Love is a reward. It is the only trophy that  is more work to maintain than it is to win.

It is fundamental, but it is never what we think it will be.

It is always more.

I have dreams of Bali, of water, of green. Of cryptic places, where I learn their mysteries. Taste those spices yet foreign to me, to be wrapped in velvet air, wet with promise. Heavy with potential.

Heady, these dreams.

I have dreams of flying, even though I always cry at take off, regardless of my destination. There is something about the gravity of this body, leaving earth. I envy the birds, who kiss the clouds. You know the ones. You used to lay in the grass in your young years, watching the cat shaped clouds pass through the blue. Interrupting an endless expanse. Being mindful of the beauty in imperfection.

Wildflowers grow against all the odds.

I feel my roots scooping down into the earth, holding me to places I’ve never been. Long arms reaching up and out, drinking in the sun I’ve hidden from, for so long. I have my swords, I’ve been a warrior and now?

I lay them down.

I’ve been in a cloud of funk for the better part of two and a half months.  In the midst of loss and mourning I’ve noticed two things:

Some people are wonderful.

Some people are mindless, vapid, ass boils.

There seems to have been some point where the universe decided to allow a glitch of evolution. That glitch allows for the dislodge or altogether lack of the filter between brain and tongue. Further, this chromosomal fuckupery results in a delusional sense of pride in said lack of tact. Declarations of pride follow the format similar to the following:

(says something assholesque) “Whoops, I have no filter!” (followed by a giggle and a half-assed apology for being a bung cap. Sometimes a quarter-assed apology, depending on the egregiousness of the offense.)

This, while annoying, can be forgiven because it does indeed contain an apology. Even if it is glossed over in a “aren’t I just so delightful with my lack of manners tee-hee-heeee” kind of fashion.

The ones that get me are those who are just flat-out chonchmouths, who have NO clue that they are total dillholes. I sense you begging me for an example. I shall provide.

“Oh wow, Christine, you’re really losing weight! I never noticed how pretty you are, I just always wondered how you did so much massage being overweight!”

My response, in my head: “So, basically you always thought I was an ugly fatass who was going to keel over in the middle of rubbing your naked ass, thereby stinking up my massage room like a beached whale? THANK YOU!!”

My response, from my mouth. “Thanks, I am working really hard to get the weight off.”

Because, you see, I maintain my filter. The person on the table? Clearly not so much and said person truly thought they were paying me a compliment.  Saying such a thing is terminally brave, when you have a big german girl standing over you with very pointy elbows.

You flit through my thoughts, gracefully entwined in the folds of my brain. Down, deep where no light reaches, there’s you. You wait for quietness, for rest to come forth and demand to be dealt with. There is no escaping this work that I must do.

My broken heart comes as a complete surprise.

I no longer see you, in your baseball cap and your flannel shirts. I no longer see you with your big voice. I no longer see you, head bent over pieces of paper, your pen in hand making life spring where there was none. I can’t feel the warmth of your big hands. I see you small, I see you fragile, I see you without life. I hate that it is this way, today of all days.

Last year I sent you a father’s day card, with only my name signed on it. No words. Me, with all of my words, for you I had none. Today my words tumble over each other in a frenzied sprint to see which ones can reach you first.

I am heartbroken you won’t dance with me when I marry Clay. You’ll never see my house, or meet my dog, or know me. You will never know me. You will never watch Stephen grow through this time into his own, or see Deb become a teacher, or watch Kelsey become an astronaut ballerina veterinarian fairy. You will never fully grasp the strength of Mom, how bold and confident and kind and righteous she is. How she did this all on her own, of her own. You will never see me succeed.

In some small way, relief for your newly acquired lack of suffering makes this all more palatable.

But not today.

Today I mourn you. Today I wish I hadn’t seen you die, even though being there was the closest to God I have ever been. Today I busy myself with the mundane and the necessary to avoid the picture of you, motionless and gone. Because we had unfinished business, you and I. While it is all forgiven, it is not forgotten. Still, in your absence, I have to fold up the textiles of our history. Line up the hems and smooth them carefully to be packed away. I have to do that alone and today, the thought of that is just a little too much.

So, in all of these words that I reserved from you, held from you, hid from you….today the most important to reach you, are “I love you.”

I love you.

It is amazing, the things that are seen once a being snaps into consciousness. The wording that is used, the truth, the propaganda. How aware, how present, how annoyed or overjoyed you can be when you are finally awake.

Being in the now is a remarkable thing. However difficult to maintain, when the cozy arms of yesterday call to you, siren-like and familiar. Live here, be here, I am what you’ve known, I am who you are. Except, that it is no longer who I am. This last month has changed me in a very fundamental way.

I run the risk of sounding cruel and cold and maybe a little bitter by saying my next truth. But, I will say it anyway. I let some careless words from my careless father, create an endless-loop in my head of worthlessness. I have let some careless actions, from my careless father, determine my self worth.  It is so inexorable, this link between father and daughter.  It has taken me 35 years to realize two key points :

1) It was never about me and was always about him.

2) Opinions of dead men no longer count.

He was no perfect man, but he was also not solely evil. As most of us, his light and dark make up the storms of our personalities. We are all made of moon and stars and all of the black sky in between. What occurs now is my choice. What occurs now is my responsibility.

What occurs now is my storm, my sky, my moon, my stars. I cast my own shadows, I throw my own light. I am now, unabashedly, unapologetically, unequivocally, unafraid. What do I have to fear? If you don’t like me, you never did, you never will. I don’t need your approval to be whole. Love me, don’t love me, either way, my days will start and end as they always have.

I will not hide me, to please you.

I am where I am because right now, I am supposed to live in it, live through it and learn. I am not ashamed. My mistakes sometimes large, sometimes small, serve the purpose to edify. My Grandaddy wrote in the margins of his bible “does it edify?”. My new goal is to make sure that every single step, all words and actions, every thought can answer “yes”.

Yes.

You’ve been gone a week now and traffic is still exactly the same. I still can’t do all of my grocery shopping in one store and I still haven’t gotten a pedicure. People still rarely say “excuse me” and the sun, in its careless way, manages to rise and fall as it always has. The world is all the same, except that you aren’t in it.

How can that possibly be?

I don’t romanticize you and think you something different than what you were. If anything, without the shroud of worry, I see you more clearly than I ever have.  All of these things, the hurt, the resentment, the love, the fear, they are all there in their varying shades. From pale to bold and all intensities between, but they are nothing in the face of this one thing I never expected to feel. I miss you.

When I walked into the hospice room, I harbored some hope that I would have resolution. That I would be able to say all of the things I wanted to say, to feel bold. To feel inspired or empowered. I didn’t feel any of those things. I just felt sad. There you were, 75lbs, barely breathing. I don’t know if you knew I was there, but when I told you I was sorry, you looked right into my eyes. For that moment, I felt you there. What I saw was resolute. Resolute in a decision that I wanted to vehemently shake out of you. There, so frail, you had your power, and I had none.

The man in the other room coughed and the moment was gone.

We held you, laid hands on you, talked to you. We absolved and loved and forgave and mourned. Cars drove down the street, in their careless living. Breeze rearranged the leaves across the sleeping grass. Your heart fluttered like a tiny bird, beautiful and fragile until it couldn’t fly anymore. 11:34 came and claimed you and granted you your rest.

This blue planet spins, we work, we live. You left some things a mess, these things are not to be fixed. Yet, we remain. We walk in your wake and soak up what is left of your warmth. We learn not to survive, but how to grow wild. We do this without you, as we did with you and in all of this extraordinary commonality,  traffic never changes.

We were stuffed into a yellow school bus, bun to bun in the late heat of  Southern California September. I hated every minute of it. The shaking of the seats, the smell of stinky, sweaty schoolmates, the stop and start driving of the busdriver.

We wound down the highway, air coming in through cracked windows and pulled into the park that housed all of the city’s museums. Several kids stifled groans and expectations of boredom. We filed with our field trip buddies in through the doors of the art museum.

Then, for me, the magic happened. Beautiful colors painted in bold strokes leaped from tall white walls, spilled with sunlight from vintage windows. Luscious fruit painted in dark rooms, looked ripe and vibrant even though the paint crackled with the sheer centuries of of clinging to the canvas. Tiny flowers represented as small touches of a brush, impressionist art was my favorite. It reminded me of how colors muted and morphed while I dreamed.

I was enraptured, enthralled. I wanted to know how to create those beautiful pictures, how to look at this world of science and logic and bring a little beauty to it. It inspired me then, to paint. It inspires me today, to write. A lifelong passion, born of busrides, packed lunches, and a museum. A lifetime love affair on the heels of a field trip.

I hadn’t thought about that specific trip in years, although the appreciation it spawned lives deep inside of me and is all around me. So, when Lunchables first contacted me about Project Potential, a program to give away 50 field trips, I thought “But, I’m not a mom”.

Ah, yes. But YOU are. Lunchables wants to instill the same passion in your kids that my field trip instilled in me. Field trips present things in an exciting, unexpected way and can absolutely fire interest in Science, History, Art and so many other areas into your child. Watch the video below and see what Lunchables is doing to help inspire young minds. Then get ready to nominate your kid’s class for more than just a field trip,

This is a sponsored post from Lunchables, I received financial compensation to write this post

He is not the dad I wanted. He is not even the dad I needed and certainly not the dad I deserved. He was and is and remains selfish, angry, mean. He has lived his life in a bubble of care, not ever having to fend on his own. From mother, to military to wife, his life has been a hand which has fed him. No more blinding example of cradle to grave.

Still, he is mine.

His vitriol captures huge pieces of my childhood memory, the harshness of him a gray plane just awaiting color. My sister and brother and I were never fully aware of what would flare his anger and what words would be leveled at us in the storm of his rage. We never knew that it was his fault that he was this way, and not ours. We never knew that his depression was a deep seated genetic gift from his mother. We never knew his father.

We’ve never known our father.

Within the crevices of all of this madness, it was easy to ignore that he coached our baseball teams, braided our hair, stayed up late playing Santa Claus. As an adult, I cannot ignore the thumbprint people he used to draw on our lunchbags. I cannot forget when I found him in a darkened kitchen, sitting at the table, struggling to find the right words to eulogize his mother. I cannot forget that he let me hold him, that he listened when I said in my 14 year old wisdom “Just say what you feel”.

None of these things can be forgotten, even as tiny golden bricks in a giant wall of regret.

He is dying. He’s made this choice that 67 years in this world is enough. His body is finally giving into his heart’s demands.  He weighs 75lbs. He cannot eat or drink on his own. His big, manic presence is compressing into a tiny whimper. In all of these years of our torment, of our struggle, in our silence, I look at him now and I face a choice.

Turn off my heart, or love him.

I am so many things that he is, also. Sarcastic, artistic, addictive. His temper resides in me and bursts forth in ways that often shock me. I have always blamed him for these parts of me. Instead, now, in the hours of his unraveling, I am choosing to honor the parts of him that are in my bones. I will love him. I will love his passion and his focus and his humor. I will into him the knowledge that his daughter loves him, even though he doesn’t love himself.

I will love those pieces in myself, not because I wish to maintain them, but to honor what is him. I will change into what he never was, so that his passing has purpose. So that his suffering has meaning. So that his legacy is a positive one.

I am choosing to love him before I say goodbye.

Anyone who knows this beautiful lady, knows grace, knows class, knows love. She needed a space to vent and I was happy to provide. Show her some love, won’t you? She bravely asked me to post the following and I know she would appreciate your thoughts.

Careful.
Reckless.
Anxious.
Thoughtless.
Loud, brazen.
Shy, nervous.
I avoid people.
I crave attention.
I shut off my feelings.
I yearn for tenderness.
Passionate defender of humanity’s good.
Derisive critic of strangers who cross my path.

I insist that women are beautiful. I tell my friends that I don’t think I’m fat. I pretend I think I’m smart.
I playact at a confidence I’ve never once felt.
I hate myself, I hate my mind, I hate my body, I hate it. I hate all of it.
I’m disgusted. I’m disgusting.

I never cry, when it’s me, when it’s my life, when it’s my feelings welling up.
I always cry, at the movies, reading a book, watching tv, on other people’s blogs.

I always say I love you but I never say I love you.

I maintain my exterior carefully. Tend to my surface, polish my veneer, smile big.
Inside it’s crumbling all to pieces, with no one left to notice.

I’m sometimes afraid that I don’t know how to be myself.
I don’t know who I am.