Quote of the day

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

~Pearl S. Buck

Dinner time

Here at the homestead, the roomies have started scheduling "At the Dinner Table" nights. On (some/most) Wednesdays and Saturdays, we eat dinner at the dinner table instead of in front of the tv. We also try to keep the tv off completely on both of those nights, and read, write or chat instead.  If there is a movie we want to see, we have bent the rules, but we don't turn on the tv blindly looking for something to entertain us.

On the surface, it seems kind of silly to have to schedule these sorts of things. I mean, why don't we eat wherever we feel like each night. But you get in ruts without really thinking about it, or even noticing it happening. The tv gets turned on without any particular show in mind, and just sitting down and enjoying a meal with each other's company seems like it needs some sort of special occasion.

This happened with J and I. We ate in front of the tv nearly every night, quite often with a laptop open nearby. We did it unthinkingly, and it was both a symptom and a cause of our dwindling communication. For my part, I wasn't actively avoiding conversation when I flipped on the tv, but that is what ended up happening.

"Date Night" also sounds a little silly for a married couple, but if you don't make an effort to schedule a night out, it won't just happen on its own. Of course it is that much more difficult, and less likely to happen, when you have children. It is always easier just to stay home, but easier doesn't mean better.

The dinner-table nights have been very nice so far. Turns out we have plenty to talk about, and leaving the tv off a couple nights a week is certainly no hardship. I have a stack of reading and writing that needs to get done, and with the tv off there are plenty of hours in the evening to get it done.

As clumsy and forced as it may seem sometimes, it often takes scheduling to make the simple but important things happen.

Christmas card

I forgot to mention my Christmas card in the previous post. In my 17th wheel post, I gave an example of being the odd man out when friends gathered to take Christmas card photos a year ago. I mentioned that I stepped back because I wasn't planning on sending out a photo card.

One of my readers challenged/encouraged me to send one out. Why couldn't a single person send out a photo Christmas card? I didn't have a good answer, but kind of forgot about it. A little over a week before Christmas after I had received a few cards from friends, I decided to do my own. I just wanted to say thanks to her for the encouragement and letting me know that it was "OK".

I also want to thank all the people who have supported me over the past year or two. It has been a difficult road, but there was always been a hand outstretched to push me along or help me up. I can not sufficiently express my gratitude for you and this life.

Happy New Year. Let's make it a better one.

Christmas

I had another nice Christmas this year. I have been living two states away from my family, so it was wonderful to be able to spend a couple of weeks with them over the holidays. The two weeks actually flew by as days and nights were filled up with fun activities with friends. I spent Christmas Eve with my brother and his family, Christmas morning with my folks, and Christmas evening with my extended family. It was an especially nice treat to see my extended family as I hadn't seen them all year. I am thoroughly blessed to have such a close family, and it has been an odd experience living so far away.

It was a wonderful week, but there was still something missing. This is the second Christmas alone and the first since the divorce became final. Christmas was already special to J and I, but it took on a whole new meaning when we were married. In fact I proposed Christmas morning ten years ago, so it kind of became "our" day. I am now back to Christmas the way it was before I was married, and as great as it is (and it is great), it isn't the same anymore. The divorce weighs on my mind lesser each day, but there are still moments when I feel the sting. Shopping for Christmas cards was surprisingly hard this year.

This seems to fall into the "you can't go home" category. It is like I have returned to the wonderful town I grew up in, but everything looks a little different. Moments that should be warm and wonderful still feel slightly incomplete. And I don't know if that void can be filled with friends and family.

I can understand why so many people find the holidays depressing. There is so much joy and celebration surrounding us, and it some ways it only amplifies the things that are missing. It is nothing so simple as finding a replacement person to make me forget, but that incomplete feeling will probably remain until I develop memories with someone new.

Christmas was wonderful, but some of the shine was missing.

Quote of the day

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS by Portia Nelson

I.

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost...I am helpless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes me forever to find a way out.

II.

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I am in the same place

but, it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

III.

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in...it's a habit.

My eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

IV.

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

V.

I walk down another street.

Hat tip to Crystal 

Who rescued who?

I saw this sticker on a car the other day, and all I could think was, Amen.

We adopted our pooch from the Humane Society in January of 2003. She and her mom had been given up as a result of a divorce. From her paperwork, she had lived at a home with acreage about three hours north of where we lived. I'm not sure how she ended up in a shelter so far south.

We had been talking about getting a dog as soon as we had moved from renting an apartment to renting a house. We had broached the subject with our landlord when we first moved in in August of 2002, and he was noncommittally open to letting us get a dog. We got more serious about a dog around Christmas of '02, but hadn't brought up again with the landlord.

I had some time between shifts and decided to walk through the Humane Society. I saw our pooch (or more likely her mother) and the thing that especially caught my eye was that she was the only one that wasn't barking. We had an upstairs neighbor at the house who worked odd hours, so barking would be a real problem. I wasn't really looking to adopt that day, and was just kind of killing time, but I mentioned the dog to my wife and she dashed down during lunch the next day. And she put our name down to adopt her.

The Humane Society called our landlord before we did, but fortunately he was cool about it. We both went down to meet the pooch in a "meet and greet" pen where you can see them up close, pet them and maybe throw a ball. She was more drawn to J than I, but seemed friendly and non-skittish. When we said we'd adopt her, we found out more about her history.

She had been raised on the large property up north, and spent her days with other animals and the stay-at-home wife. She had actually been adopted out once since then, but the person kept her for only one day. Even though the pooch had never been crated, they put her in a crate the first night. Then when they went to work the next day, they locked her in the bathroom. The pooch, not used to being penned up or away from people for any length of time, tried to chew her way out. The people returned her the next day. Turns out we were lucky these people didn't know what they were doing.

We picked the pooch over the weekend so we would be able to spend some time with her in her new home. The Humane Society thought she had some separation anxiety issues (in addition to the crating problem) so we spent time easing her into things. One of us would leave for a half hour and not make a big deal of returning. We'd trade places, and then we'd both leave for a little while. By the time the weekend was over, she seemed to have adjusted to her knew home and new people.

Although the pooch was more drawn to J initially, she was soon following us both around. We bought our house in June of 2004, so she now had a fenced backyard all to her own (the rental yard wasn't fenced so she couldn't be outside by herself). As time went by she was a little more drawn to me, most likely because I would take her for more walks and toss the Frisbee in the backyard most nights after work.

When J asked for a divorce, and it came time to decide who would get the pooch, J offered her to me. I don't know what her motivation was, but I wasn't about to question it. We had been living apart for about six months at that point, and I have to say that having the pooch there at home was a life saver. J had moved out, but the house was not empty. I wasn't really alone. There was a happy face and bouncing enthusiasm at a time when I needed it the most. I could hear the sound of my own voice without feeling completely crazy. And she was someone that I had to take care of as well. And in taking care of her, I was taking care of myself.  She was someone to accept the love I had, and kept me from a complete tailspin.

There are therapy dogs trained for all manner of illness and disability, but I think that every dog is a bit of a therapy dog. They can be a salve to the soul, troubled or not. I won't be so dramatic to say that the pooch saved my life, but I don't want to imagine what life would have been like without her.

And she is still by my side, wagging her tail, as I figure out the next stage of my life.

The 17th wheel

Sometime late in 1998, we were sitting on the bar patio at the restaurant where we all worked.. Many brilliant ideas came to life on that patio, and that night a friend thought we should do something cool together to celebrate the year clicking over from 1999 to 2000. She suggested going on a Caribbean cruise as a group. Of course we were all living on waiting-tables-wages, so it took a while to talk us into it, but eventually we had a large group signed up.

Along with several couples, there were three single guys going - Bill, Scott and myself. We were good friends and planned to share a room on the ship. In the summer of 1999, I met J and Scott met someone as well, so Bill ended up in a room by himself. He was the one single guy along with eight couples on the cruise - the 17th wheel.

We were all great friends, so the trip was a week long party where you mingle among the crowd, spending time with everyone. But of course there were still couples at the end of the day, and I know that Bill felt like the odd man out at times, no matter how much time we spent together as a group.

And it feels a bit like that for me right now. Nearly all my friends are either married or in a relationship. This is true both in Washington and here in California. Now don't get me wrong, this is not a plea to be included more often. Everyone has been very welcoming, inviting me over to dinner or to larger parties (I was invited out tonight in fact). None of my friends have made it an issue or made me feel like a second class citizen for being unattached.

But still, there are couple moments where I am the odd man out. Like last year when we were walking around town under the changing leaves of autumn. A friend said, "let's take pictures for all our Christmas cards!" Of course, I would not be sending out a photo Christmas card, so I just quietly stepped back. Another friend pulled me into a group photo, a sensitive gesture to include me, but at that point it was just awkward.

I am not looking to replace my group of friends, and I still love (love!) spending time with my married peeps, but it would be healthy to expand the circle a bit to include some new, single faces. Not people I am hoping to date necessarily, just people who might share common interests or introduce me to new things. People that might be struggling along a similar path. Other single folks in a married world.

Quote of the day

"You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality." 

~ Fred Brooks

9/11

Let me preface this with, I do not begin to say that my experience on 9/11/01 compares in any way to the tragedy that so many people experienced personally. But of course the day touched us all in one way or another. I have written a more detailed recounting of the day elsewhere, but as a small recap for those who don't know the story...

My wife and I were married on 9/9/01. We spent the following morning at a brunch with our family and some of the wedding party. We boarded a red-eye flight on the evening of the 10th/morning of the 11th that would take us to Jamaica for our honeymoon. We made our connection in Dallas/Fort Worth and hopped on the next leg of our journey headed for Miami. We were in the air between Dallas and Miami when the destruction of 9/11 was going on. Once we landed in Miami, no planes would leave the ground for several days. Our honeymoon canceled, and a tropical storm headed toward Florida, we ended up renting a car and driving from Miami back to Seattle, from one corner of the U.S to another.

The world had changed in an instant, and it was a somber drive home. We listened to the radio and read the newspapers as we drove, trying to put together what had happened. Everyone else we loved was thousands of miles away, and the people we saw along the way had the vacant stare of the traumatized. At the time, I joked that if we could survive this drive across the country together, that our marriage would be alright. The beach would have just made us soft. But I wonder what effect that day, and that week, had on the early part of our marriage. As I wrote in the earlier post:

We returned to Jamaica six months later. When we made it to our delayed honeymoon, I was the most depressed/out of sorts I have ever been. I’m not sure what all was weighing on me. 9/11 may have made me look at my life more closely. It may have been the jarring switch from the happiest week in my life to the worst for the country. Maybe it is the clearest manifestation of hatred I have ever seen. I’m not really sure. I haven’t put those feelings entirely behind me. 

Certainly, no one event took us down, and it was more about internal rather than external events, but it was a rough start to the marriage just the same. There was no honeymoon period, a time of excitement and great hope as we began our new life together. My heart was heavy when it should have been light, and I have no doubt that weighed on our marriage in our first year.

9/11 cut a horrific hole in our country, ramifications of which we are still feeling. I am not so foolish as to say that it was much of a factor in our divorce, but I think it may have been one of the hundreds of bricks in the wall that was built up between us.

How are you doing?

Right after I got sober (the first time), and interviewer asked me if I was happy, and I said, “Among other things.” 

~ From Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

So, am I happy? 'Among other things' is a great answer.

Through reading, writing, counseling, talking with friends and family, and the simple passage of time, things are easier than they were. The load I carry may be a bit lighter these days, or it may just feel that way. Like a backpack that feels heavy when you hoist it on your back, but the weight passes out of your conscious thought as you busily scramble up the hillside. Only when you stop to rest (or someone points it out to you) do you feel that weight again.

The painful thoughts are always there in the background, but they come to the forefront less often. The feelings of loss, regret, guilt and anger can still catch me off guard and even make me weep, but the feeling isn't as overwhelming, and I have been better at accepting (if not embracing) it. There was a time where I felt that my emotions were running the show, but not anymore. However, I am doing my best to let them come out and play, rather than burying them down like I did before.

And of course it isn't all bad, even if most of what I write here is about my struggles. There are many beautiful things in my life, and there always has been. I am surrounded by loving family and friends, and I don't ever take that for granted. Though I am often alone, I know I don't have to be. I have my relative good health, and I enjoy challenging my body to do things that on the surface it would seem it isn't capable of.

But I have been sitting in that neutral zone described in my post on Transitions for some time now. The months I have been down in San Diego have not seemed all that productive on the surface, but I know healing and recovery have been taking place. Even so, the feeling of limbo is starting to get to me. I feel like I need to be moving forward in certain aspects of my life. Maybe this feeling of frustration is a sign of healing, and a signal that it is time to be making the first steps in that direction.

Though I have been moving in a bit of a fog during this neutral time, I will catch myself waking up to moments of clarity. Sometimes it is the brilliance of the ocean or Grand Canyon that brings me around, but I have also caught myself goofily smiling while walking across a parking lot, just taking in the sunshine. These are not moments of epiphany, but moments of presence. Moments of living instead of merely existing.

This day nine years ago was one of the best of my life, and every time it passes by on the calendar it will make me pause. Though the meaning will continue to change with all that has happened since then, the beauty of that day remains.

The struggle continues, as does my desire to delve deeper into things. Though I will never find all the answers, there is still value in the questioning. I continue to learn new things about myself as I tell my story, and I hope you find something useful as well (if only in what not to do).