journey – Page 65

Hurting where you’re at…

Published on June 20, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay7 Comments

As part of a writing group challenge/link up, I was supposed to write on Hurt this week. This week… The week that my world has felt rocked in every negative way imaginable… This week, the week that I’ve had to confront every horrible feeling of abandonment from my own adolescence as my husband and I face horrible choices, as parents, that I just knew I’d never have to make.
This week, I don’t know how to write about anything but hurt. I also don’t know how to write about where I am. I think, most accurately of all, I feel like I no longer know how to write at all…

I am disjointed, broken, aching and throbbing on some metaphorical floor, while really I am numb and driving through daily details with reality hovering just over head. This reality, the blackest of dark clouds which funnel and threaten to destroy everything, it no longer scares me.

I am here, yet not. Tear empty and without thought… Nothing makes sense and I’m reminded that hard choices, tough choices, the choices that leave us hovering over the toilet as vomit spews from our mouth- those choices are the ones we never want, but will inevitably come at some point. I secretly wish that I could wake up one year from today and see that everything turned out ok, and that I handled these things before me beautifully. The scariest thing, (so I lied, I guess I am still afraid) is that neither of those things will be true.

When I lay bleeding in hospital beds, or bathroom floors, or that one time standing, in my neighbor Heather’s kitchen, miscarrying my babies- I believed I had never known a pain like that. Physically, I didn’t care what my body felt, but heart-wrenchingly that hurt was soul shredding… Years later when my sweet twin girls, who we’d had for 10 months and were adopting, were suddenly ripped from my arms, I revisited a different angle of that hell. Since I became a mom there have been many moments of ache closely similar, I guess because I’m similarly vulnerable, and because this motherhood journey has not been an easy one. This past almost-year though, nearly every day has felt like some awful Groundhog Day version of those moments, twisted into something achingly unfair and worse. I haven’t the strength for many more seconds of this, I haven’t the water for many more tears…

When things just are… or aren’t…

Published on June 17, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay4 Comments

There is so much happening, in life, at any given time. I was at a dental appointment yesterday, talking with my hygienist, and she mentioned I’d rescheduled my visit 3 times and was 6 weeks late in coming in. My eyes filled with tears and I had no word for her but Life. She touched me gently on the arm and said “I understand, it happens.” Moments later my dentist was telling me that my sleep grinding has significantly worsened and I’ve sustained damage to my jaw. This time her eyes moistened and she said “life”, so quietly. It was a rare human moment where, truth be told, I wanted to curl up and rest for a while.

Within that moment it was both safe and warm. There were certainties and kindnesses that don’t exist out here in the life part of reality.

For one who doesn’t cry, I’ve sure found myself in that tear-stained place a lot these past two days.

Sometimes our worst fears come true. Some of mine might be. Standing here, on the brink of that, I am both terrified and nauseated. I am sick and unprepared, but that’s the thing about life and revelations- these things were real and on course before I knew of them, so… There are things we all tell ourselves we will never, ever do. And then, then there are times when we stand on a precipice where we know we have no choice but to do them. I have to do this.

Suddenly, every God-awful moment before this one doesn’t feel as ugly as I remember. Here, wrapped tight within this heart-wrench, perspective beyond this is an impossibility. There is no later, other, then, when…

This becomes life. suffocating… deafening…

Broken life.

I’m standing in a place that I swore I would never stand, though I knew the possibility of it and kept it tucked in the back of my mind where I could pretend it wasn’t real, wasn’t mine, wasn’t a part of my options or realities. And yet, despite all of my swearing, and trying, and planning, and plotting, and loving, and fighting for (and with), I am standing here. Today my perspective can’t see past this moment, but I hope soon I can see a bigger picture, one that includes some hope, or at the very least, more than a mere sustainable trickle of oxygen…

In the meantime, I just needed to write from where I am at today. I may not have a lot of detail, nothing funny or poignant to say, but at least I’m not falling into a puddly mess at my dentist’s office, so that’s progress right?

On being very, very afraid…

Published on June 12, 2014June 17, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay7 Comments

Fear is like a cancer.

There can be one big, debilitating fear that cripples you or I to the point of inaction. As long as that inaction remains in effect though, the fear will spread and become other forms and types of all-consuming fear. A fear of failure can morph into an overwhelming anxiety of rejection. Very seldom do we hear of an agoraphobic sufferer who just woke up one day and could no longer leave their home. No. It’s slowly consuming.

As a writer I once feared failure. I once feared writing a book and attempting publication with query letters not leading to anything positive. This was such a consuming fear that when I finished my first book 9 years ago, I set the ridiculous goal of mailing out 25 query letters. I mailed off my 25 queries and of those queries I got 12 rejection “letters” back. (I say “letters” because if you’ve never had the privilege of receiving one, they are the most impersonal wastes of postage out there. over half of them were just strips of paper with a sentence typed out that said “not interested.” I have to believe when the very system began, it had a bigger point than that, but I digress…)

In regards to my first book, it was written from a passionate place. While fiction, it was inspired by the lives of the women in my family and when my grandmother passed away in 2006 and I made the personal decision that I’d rather keep that work tucked away and private, within our family, for now anyway. It worked out better, and I am grateful for the hindsight.

I no longer fear rejection, in that way. I personally believe the publishing industry is a broken and biased system so this is partly why… but the other reason is because, technically speaking I “failed” that ridiculous self-imposed goal, and I survived intact. I’m still alive and no parts of the world seemed to be disastrously affected by my failure so I realized it wasn’t a big deal.

Fear never really goes away though, like I said, Fear is like a cancer. Even once I’ve conquered one, I still need to keep myself in check because there are others. New ones that will creep up and my writing is where I’ll be incredibly vulnerable because this is my life’s work.

I finished my second book awhile ago. I say finished because it is written, from beginning to end. It also needs some revisions and I just can’t bring myself to look at it, so I’ve put it away for a while to work on another project. It is fiction, and a very personal story for me. I fear that it won’t be loved. I fear that it will be mediocre. Sometimes I get caught up in the harsh criticisms and judgements that people hide behind, online, and it terrifies me to put my work in their hands… And so I remember wise words from long ago that urge me to allow fear to motivate me, and I think “I can do that…” And I imagine fear motivating me to make this project that much better, but I also realistically embrace the inevitable- that it will happen and I have to be ok with that and not care.

As a young girl I knew my life was to write stories and words that would touch or inspire other people. As I grew, I knew that I had stories in my heart that others could relate to, and that could help them with their own hurts. This means everything to be but this hurdle between the place of fear and the having leaped- I just do not know how to get there…

So I worry the fear-cancer spreads. And sometimes I just look away and ignore my projects. And most days I dream of a boldness that has to exist somewhere deep inside of me, I just need to figure out how to harness and mount it so that I won’t be so afraid anymore…

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An itch you just can’t scratch…

Published on June 3, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay3 Comments

You know that one thing that drives you crazy in someone else, but deep down you are terrified (iow pretty sure) it’s a character trait you identify in yourself? This has been becoming increasingly blinding to me lately (the annoyingness of this in someone else), but then today it occurred to me that I think it might be a universal flaw in all earth-born species…

Let me explain.

I used to work for this teeny tiny company that you’ve probably never heard of, called Hewlett-Packard. While working there (in my VERY early twenties) I had this super scientific job where I donned plastic gloves, used gigantic tweezers (non-magnetized, mind you) and worked on circuit boards. (I lied. It was not scientific at all, but I really did love it. I’m a fan of routine, monotonous things…) I would, before sitting down to work, however, have to go through this decontamination process. Once that had happened, I could not touch myself at all. During training they warned “you will feel like you have hives”, and I thought they were out of their minds… But I did. I felt that way, nay, worse. Every single day.

Fast forward to now- while I can tolerate an itch for an extraordinary period of time, my 15-year-old daughter has the horrendously unacceptable habit of being unable to sit still for any matter of seconds when it is appropriate to do so. (ie: a formal event when it is still/quiet; sometimes at the movies; while we are speaking to her about something serious; any other occasion that calls for patience and quiet respect.) She gets shakes and uncontrollable itches, and phantom pains, and chest pains and invisible skin lacerations… The list really does go on and on. On the flip side though, during times that don’t matter, she is as stiff as a board. (i.e: reading a book, looking at a magazine, day dreaming, watching tv.)

I feel these are tied together someone but am usually so irritated by it that, well…

But then…

Tuesdays are garbage day. The gigantic green trash trucks come and, like clockwork, our two dogs go crazy. In an effort to protect us (and their food storage) they chase the evil truck away week and after week with their fierce and deafening barks. I am sure that, within the dog world they would be quite impressive. Within our house, they are not. Today, in an effort to use my Yoda mind tricks on Paisley (my lab who loves me unconditionally, without thought of self) I decided to stare into her eyes lovingly while reassuring her over and over what a good girl she was, in a soothing voice. Initially, she absorbed this attention and seemed to melt into my chest, despite the beeping of the trash truck in the distance. But then she shifted, our eyes still locked, and suddenly she realized I had ahold of her collar. She continued to stare and nuzzle while also trying desperately to get out of my grip. When I realized I had lost the battle, I finally let go and she was free.

Free to turn around and scratch an itch at the base of her tail, with her teeth, with a force I’d never seen before.

So there you have it, whenever you realize you can’t do something, suddenly the need to do it consumes you.