stay alive, drive 55

i'm about to turn the speed limit. for those of u who don't drive the speed limit, let me just remind u that its 55, double nickels as the truckers call it. so yeah, i'm about to turn 55.

its weird coz i stopped celebrating birthdays when i was around 40. its just another day now. like any other day. and part of the reason i stopped celebrating it when i did was because that particular birthday a whole slew of really crummy things happened to me and i decided it was as good a time as any to stop "celebrating" because it wasn't really a celebration. i mean after all, what r we really celebrating -- the fact that we haven't died yet?? that about sums it up if u ask me ...

so here comes 55 and i have to work that day and will probably have to drive my daughter back to college after work (which means i probably won't get home till after 10pm) and well that just shoots the whole celebration concept all to u know where ...

and really i might celebrate more if i was turning the age my dad will be (85) because then there really is something to celebrate (although i think he stopped celebrating his birthday a while ago too and since i'm not near him i can't make a cake for him, not that he'd eat it anyhow but that's another story).

but there is this part of me that sits here in amazement that i'm 55. its like -- how did this happen, more importantly, when did it happen ... because it doesn't seem all that long ago that i was a kid wishing my life away -- wanting to be 16 (so i could drive) or 21 (so i could drink -- which i still don't do so it was a wish wasted). but as i got closer to 30 i started to think, hey, wait, this doesn't seem so great coz i don't even have children yet and then when i did and 40 was looming large i wanted to slow things down so my kiddos would stay small just a tad longer and then menopause happened (early) and i was like, well, isn't this just the pits. and then i got divorced and well, the rest, as they say, is history.

and at a time when most ppl r thinking about what they will do during their retirement in 10 years, i'm sitting here thinking about how can i get a job when i haven't had one in 3 years and what is to become of me if i can't ... and that's enough to sober anyone... or make them want to start drinking just to try and mask the reality behind it.

so if i were a drinking person, i'd raise my glass to the last 55 years (even if they weren't all diamonds i am certainly blessed by my two beautiful children and my most amazing friends and papa god is keeping me near and dear) and perhaps say a prayer that i last at least another 55 ....

Harry Potter and the Ex

a couple of months ago my almost 18yo daughter (my youngest child) came to me and asked me if i would take her to the harry potter exhibit in boston for her 18th birthday -- coming up in january. at the time i said that if i had the money we would go. now in the back of my head i was doing this silent calculation of how much the bus down and back would be ($140) and the cost of the tickets (unsure) and what a taxi from the bus station to the exhibit and back would cost (also unsure) and knew that somehow this might not come to pass. but i also knew that i had a few months to try and make this happen.

one day before xmas my child asked me again and i basically told her that it wasn't going to be possible because #1 i didn't have enough funds to get us through xmas without help and #2 since my birthday is also in january my car needs to be registered (its all done by b'days here in NH) and inspected -- at least an extra $200 i didn't have. so i didn't see how it was going to be possible for me to take her to the harry potter exhibit. i suggested she ask her father, since she's with him on her birthday anyhow.

so, i guess she took me up on that suggestion. and mind, its my own fault for saying it. but at the time i was feeling a lot like the reason i was in the financial pickle i was in was because of his uncaring attitude (since he stopped paying me alimony after only three years). he seems to have an unending supply of money and not just from his job -- but for a long time his parents and brother were sending him money left and right. even though he really didn't need it. but whatever ....

at any rate, as the date for them to go to boston looms closer and closer, i find myself getting sadder and sadder that i can't take her and that he can. i find myself being resentful for his financial ability to give her whatever she wants whenever she wants and my inability to even provide the most basic of needs. and i know that i need to give it over to god because it just eats away at me and makes me dislike my ex even more than i had when i found out he was cheating on me.

all the statistics i've read have said that when there is a divorce 90% of the women and children live in poverty. when i look around at the women and children living in the housing area i live in, i see that statistic looming large. its not just that we can't buy our children presents or give them elaborate trips or parties. its that most of the time we can't even meet the most basic of their needs. in most instances we end up going to food banks to put food on the table or go begging the office for an extension on the rent.

if i could have found a job when i first closed my store, i might not be in such bad shape. i had been an administrative secretary when i left to be a stay at home mom almost 22 years ago (a joint decision my husband and i had made at the time). i left my career to be a full-time mom and did in-home daycare and had a 10 year sewing business which helped to pay our bills. my ex never saw that as "income" unfortunately. but that's another story. having the store gave me back a sense of self and confidence i had long since lost. i knew i was a great mom, but could i be a great anything else ever again?? of that i was not so sure.

through a set of unfortunate circumstances i found myself unemployable. after tearing the rotator cuff in my shoulder i was unable to get a job lifting things. after being out of the secretarial workforce for 22 years i find myself unemployable as that. add to this the fact that the job market sucks right now for anyone and u can see how this is going downhill in terms of me finding a job.

last night i realized that the one thing that i'm really good at is caring about children -- caring for children. its something i can do well -- and have done. i have been looking for the past couple of months for jobs where i could be a mommy's assistant or do daycare in someone's home. it hasn't been easy. everybody seems to want u to have some degree in child development. i don't have a degree on paper, but i certainly earned my credits by raising two children and caring for others over the years. how do u document that??

at any rate, this whole harry potter and the ex thing has brought me to a place of suddenly feeling like i have somehow failed my child by not giving her what it was she really wanted for her birthday. and for not being able to spend it with her this year. it amazes me how one small thing regarding my child can make me feel somehow inferior. but then i realize that for a long time i felt like being a good mom was the only thing i did well. and its easy to fall back into that pattern of self-doubt that i carried for so long. so this is another time when i need to turn to papa god and see myself as he sees me -- and not as i have perceived myself for so long. to him i am something so much more than just a mom -- and this whole harry potter and the ex thing -- in god's terms -- is but a blip on the radar to self discovery ....

thoughts on b'days when ur past the half century mark

so yesterday was my birthday and i turned um yeah -- 53 -- and someone reminded me that that's more than half a century and i'm like yeah u can leave now.... its not that i mind getting older, i just don't need to be reminded of it -- coz i already know it -- like when i roll over in bed and try to get comfortable and realize there is no comfortable anymore in bed. and really, in my view its just another day.

i'm a january baby and we tend to get short-shrifted in the present dept. like the december babies. but for me it was never about the presents. evidently i was born in the middle of a snow storm. my dad (a music educator at the high school) was having a meeting with students and parents at the house and my mom went into labor. not being the type to make a fuss, she waited till the meeting was over to tell my dad she was in labor. their first attempt to make it to the hospital in the snowstorm was thwarted and they had to take another route. the only way they knew where the road was was because of the telephone poles. good thing she was in labor for 18 hours -- gave them lots of time to get to the hospital. idk if she was awake or not because in those days -- they tended to knock women out with drugs during delivery. she wasn't awake for my brother's birth, but whether she awake for mine or not, idk. but i do know that my father was not present in the room when i was born -- fathers were NOT allowed to be present during the birth of their children.

when i was younger, i would tell my mom on my birthday how much i loved her and thank her for giving birth to me. even when i moved away from her home, i would call her on my birthday. some ppl would say that was odd -- i think it was appropriate considering all she did for me. that first year after she died was really hard for me -- the holidays without her were miserable, but when my birthday came around and i realized i couldn't call her with my usual message of love and gratitude, it was particularly hard.

i had two "parties" on my birthday growing up. one when i turned five (which we have silent movies of because that was BEFORE video cameras with sound) and one when i turned 16. my 16th b'day party wasn't anything like the ones u hear about nowadays. i think there were like 6 ppl there (including my then boyfriend and my best friend Patty who would eventually become my boyfriend's girlfriend -- we won't even go there). we have pictures. its not pretty (think early 70's and hippie clothing). when i turned 21 it was not a big deal and i didn't even go out and drink -- like most ppl do -- i wasn't into that stuff.

somewhere along the line, b'days became just another day. i can't quite put my finger on when it happened, but i was pretty much ok with it. i never liked ppl making a fuss over me anyhow, so it was just as well to try and ignore the birthdays. it wasn't that i was trying to stop time or turn back the clocks, although sometimes i would have liked a "do-over". i just didn't want the attention.

several years ago on my birthday i was having a bad time of it. my marriage was falling apart and life just generally seemed like the pits. i was doing laundry because it was "just another day". it was really cold outside and i didn't know that the drain pipe to the washing machine was frozen, so when the washer started to drain, water went flying out all over the place until i could get to it to get it stopped. i had to call the person who managed the apt. bldg. we were living in. he came out and took a blow torch to the pipe -- which was plastic (u could smell the melting plastic). unfortunately, he also tried to burn down the building because he set the fluff from the dryer on fire. i wasn't able to use my washer for a while until they could get someone out to replace the drain pipe that he melted. with two children in the house, that's not a good thing. i basically sat and cried and said it was the worst birthday i'd ever had. it was probably right around then that i resolved i was going to completely ignore my b'days.

i always made a big deal about my kids' b'days. i would always try to have a few friends over for them and do the whole cake and games thing for them. they had friends who had big deal parties, but my kids had to contend with smaller scale just because we couldn't afford to do a whole lot. i learned how to be really creative and stretch a dollar while still allowing the kids to have a good time. but there was one b'day for my daughter that was particularly bad and i won't go into the details suffice to say that it was controlled by one of her teachers at school and not by me and thus made for a bad time (she says) for her.

when i got divorced my daughter and i moved into our current abode a week or so before her b'day, which is three days before mine. she wanted a sleep over so i basically busted butt to make sure there was enough sleeping space amid boxes for the girls she invited. sometime in the middle of the night the freezer door got left open and all the food in the freezer thawed. i had to throw out a bunch of stuff and with no money to buy more i figured it was gonna be a pretty miserable month. actually, friends came to the rescue and it was all good. but my daughter basically told me that her birthdays were always miserable (and evidently that was all my fault). ever since then i've tried really hard to make them happy events, but she always manages to find something wrong with them. i have resigned myself to the fact that i'll never meet her expectations when it comes to making them happy for her.

at what point does it matter how many b'days we have. i mean they tout in the news the ppl who survive over 100 -- although even that doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore -- now its if u live to be 110. i think about what god wanted for us when he created man. that we would never know sin and never die. ppl lived hundreds of years. but our world just got more and more corrupt and as it did, our longevity went down the tubes. now we're content with 70, 80, or 90 years of life.

my dad used to say that living another year sure beat the alternative (death) -- he's turning 83 this year and can sometimes be a cantankerous old man. but i used to think (and still sometimes do) that dying wouldn't be so bad because i'd get to go be with papa god.

honestly, even with all the junk in my life, i have liked getting older and hopefully wiser. but i realize that things rn't like they used to be and never will be again. families don't live together for generations anymore and the youth don't learn -- or want to learn from their elders -- most of the time there isn't even any respect for their elders and y should there be when most of the time their parents can't be bothered with them for want of fulfilling their own needs. what i have to look forward to is being cantankerous like my dad, or worse yet, incapacitated in some way, unable to care for myself and not knowing who i am or where i am (like my grandma and grandfather were), possibly being subjected to abuse in some facility because my family can't be bothered with me (oh that's subject for another blog some day). my dad says that if he ever gets to the place where he can't take care of himself he's going to shoot himself -- i think he won't be able to if he can't even take care of himself, but w/e. let him live with the idea that he will control his demise if that keeps him happy. sometimes i think that my mom was blessed because she didn't have to suffer with some awful illness, she didn't have to know what it felt like to be incapacitated in any way and she got to be with papa god -- something i know she was looking forward to. but she missed out on getting to see her grandkids and be a part of their lives. that perhaps is one thing i will be sad about -- not seeing the next generations come into the world or seeing them develop.

i've seen a lot of changes in the world -- some good -- some not so good -- and i know that it probably will only get worse before jesus comes for his bride. ppl r rude to each other -- even when they r in the wrong -- there is no sense of value anymore -- we've become a throw-away society -- if it doesn't work, get rid of it -- even with our own families it seems. there is very little attempt on the most part to try and get along with each other -- find some common ground where we can stand side by side with each other and make things work for the common good. if it doesn't work, don't fix it, just throw it away. i'm as guilty as the next guy of that sometimes.

the only thing that birthdays do for me now, r to make me look at where i have been and where i am and wonder where papa god is going to take me before he takes me home. it's not exactly the kind of "celebration" that requires cake and partying....