Meet My Future Family: The Portables

Lighten up, Claudia, you’re about to lose half your assets!

When this house gets sold, I will be downsized, but not down. I just won’t be the grandma with the dusty whatnots stored wherever. I’ll be portable.

My new filing cabinet will be The Internet. I will try to keep only keepsakes that are really meaningful. I expect my daughter and myself to have some tug-of-war in this arena. If this struggle gets too overwhelming during all the other upheavals, we can temporarily rent a storage unit. Saving some valuable stuff for her to sell at a future yard sale would put a positive spin on this. But I don’t intend to move into a bigger place than the one we’ll be renting while she finishes high school, so a storage unit will be an interim solution only. After all, she’ll soon be off to college. That makes her portable, too.

Photo Courtesy of PicApp

 

Oh, Go Hug Yourself!

After the oftentimes 4:30-ish bladder matter was addressed, it followed with the occasional-times event of my gray matter wanting to be addressed, too.

What if? How will? The scenarios kept coming and I kept tossing.

Who will help me with all these changes? I needed a hug!

Oh, wait! Look who’s here! The proven-to-be-capable, dependable woman (read the resume) who has never left my side.

As the huggee, the afraid child’s voice was heard and comforted. As the hugger, the strength I have to handle whatever comes along was reinforced.

Mother and child went right back to sleep.

 

Realty Check

Today arrived with a lot of baggage.

The night before I called the realtor to schedule an appointment, I dreamt my daughter and I were living in my grandparents’ house which was supposed to be this house. Not a stretch since the reason I fell in love with this house was that it reminded me of my grandparents’ house. In the dream, some kind of Armageddon had happened, and people were just living out the days. There was nothing new. We just stayed in all the different rooms and used and ate what we already had, knowing everyone was doing the same.

The next day felt right for calling the realtor.

The last time I saw my grandmother, my father was helping her down the steps from the bedrooms upstairs. Her breathing was very labored. I hadn’t realized that she was that sick. She was totally self-absorbed in submitting to what she seemed to know– that this was her last time down those steps.

I was reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg and stayed in the empty house until my father brought Grandma to the hospital and picked me up to take me back home. The girl in the book’s world was warped and unhealthy. Sitting in the living room alone, I felt my grandmother’s house had turned thick with the same atmosphere. The memories of the happy days I spent there as a child felt far away and surreal. I was a troubled teenager, reading a book about a mentally ill teenager living in a world she had made up, and my grandmother’s face was no longer looking at this world or me.

I will feel comfortable working with this realtor. She seems to be a sincere person who will help me. I know what I need to do at this stage of the process and will do it. I know what she will be able to do to help me move on.

I told her this whole sprucing up the property thing is putting lipstick on a corpse, because my house, to me, is dead. But if this is what I need to do to, as the Depends commercial says, “get back into life,” hand me the lip-liner.

 

Earthdate: 2010. Are My Wrinkles and Baggy Eyes Attractive?

Right after my STBX stopped living here after an incident that I would not tolerate, he began looking at me like I was one of Mudd’s women after the Venus drug wore off. It was the most tell-tale change during our attempt at marriage counseling.

I used to appreciate his looking at me like I wasn’t aging. I would hear men saying how they miss how their wives looked years ago and felt I was blessedly immune from those negative comparisons. My STBX is 12 years my senior and I thought so much in love with me that I would always look lovely to him. The look was gone in an instant.

Now no one looks at me and doesn’t see a 57-year-old woman. Is that bad?

Stuff like this really gets you thinking about women and aging in our society. I think it’s, of course, natural for women to look more sexually attractive during child-bearing years than they do the years beyond because animals, humans included, are wired to procreate, and we can’t make a baby after menopause so that’s that.

In the “Mudd’s Women” episode of the original Star Trek TV series, Eve, beginning to look her age, takes a placebo and looks the same as she does when taking the Venus drug, a capsule that makes women look beautiful. When told she took only a blob of gelatin, she doesn’t understand how she can be beautiful without the Venus drug.

There’s only one kind of woman, says Kirk, (or man for that matter, says Harry Mudd). You either believe in yourself or you don’t.

But the problem with the whole thing, other than the fact that everyone speaks English on all these planets, is that Eve’s changed looks are not just beautiful, but young.

Are looking old and attractiveness always at odds? If you get in another relationship at an older age, does your gorgeous mind gradually blur your flabs and wrinkles in someone’s eyes? Do you look young or old when they love you at this age? Are there different types of attractive? Does the experience represented by an aging face attract anything besides a free Senior Drink?

When I was young and going to clubs, it seemed that I would attract guys when I thought my hair looked flat and my outfit looked stupid. When I looked in the mirror before leaving and thought “Not bad!” the night would often be a dud. That really throws a wrench in Kirk’s self-confidence theory. Or maybe it’s knowing that how you look isn’t really that important.

Who knows what looking my age and believing in myself might do at some future star-date. Maybe some lonely miner on Rigel 12 might see my wrinkles with dusty eyes. Or like the fact that I’ve been flying around the galaxy for awhile.

 

August 25, 2010

Today I just plugged along in the right direction.

The teen drama (those words condense to “trauma” to them) was handled. The too much to do at work was managed but not completed (as per the “too much” description). Was able to finish the mowing before dark. Looks like a bad haircut. The scheduling a time for the realtor to look at my shattered dream (glad mom’s not overdramatic) is no longer a procrastination—it’s on the calendar for Saturday.

Today I pretty much just worked on standing orders and am not looking for any standing ovations.

 

Dawn Anxiety

Does this sometimes happen to you? You wake up just when that secure cloak of darkness is starting to give way to a translucent window shade. You tightly hug the puffy layers of comfort around you and say:

“I can’t do this.”

Maybe you have another half hour before the alarm goes off and you try to breathe deeply and relax. Eventually you have to give up and get up.

But don’t you always, being up and around, see how slack everything is?

So what is the “this” that you can’t do?

You’re doing something.

So do that.

Then sleep, wake up and when you say:

“I can’t do this.”

Just answer:

“OK, I’ll do what I’ve been doing all along—living my life.”

 

Cleanliness is Next to Impossible

Photo courtesy of PicApp

Inside there are a lot of things made out of cloth, called carpeting and furniture, that you can’t toss in the washing machine. Outside there is soil. Where I live, the soil is reddish-brown. Shoes and paws walk on it. I have consciously allowed for this in choosing carpet colors to match the soil, and to select prints that will camouflage the dirt by their patterns. Congoleum and leather furniture make things easier, too.

My daughter and my STBX like to keep everything they own and buy new things to keep and own. He left most of his stuff here, and I can’t dispose of “marital property” (a.k.a. the two tubes of dried-up epoxy) before the mediation. If someone gave my daughter his or her Happy Meal toy during the third-grade field trip after the left arm snapped off, it has sentimental value and is here somewhere.

If I happen to drop in on someone, their pets bound over the pristine white carpeting to greet me. Yearning to feel normal as I visit the bathroom, I look for a speck of dust in a far corner of a shelf and come up as empty as my bladder.

It would literally take every one of my waking and some of my sleeping hours to get my house to look like that. I’ve noticed that people have hobbies and do things. Bikes go by my house on Saturday, and on Monday coworkers discuss leaving their homes, so people are not spending THAT much time doing housework.

I do have an old house, and I think they’re harder to keep clean, right? On the plus side nobody likes me so I don’t have to worry about a lot of visitors. And I never had the heart to be a Clutter Nazi to my family.

When it comes to housekeeping ability, I will always wonder what’s wrong with me.

But I do the best I can and try to live and let live.

I worked with a woman whose predominant memory growing up was of her mom’s back rushing away to scrub something else in the house.

 

Framing the Future

As I was doing some dusting this morning, I really became aware of all the framed cardboard. Two Octobers ago, my daughter began taking down all the pictures of her dad. I told her I thought it might be better not to, especially in the beginning when we were all still in counseling. At that point I really believed the family would survive, but I respected her wishes. Some of the frames with multiple places for pictures are more interesting because the cardboard is corrugated.

In a couple of years, she’ll be living in a dorm and displaying her life.

I wonder what my frames will be holding for me in two years? Will there be some old codgers my age now and then to fill some of the empty 2” x 3” ovals and 3” x 4” rectangles, both portrait and landscape?  

I actually visited someone years ago who had four or five collage frames filled only with pictures of cats. No humans. I love animals, too, but in every single space?

 Maybe I’ll finally find fellowship. Maybe there is a group of like-minded people somewhere and we’ll all be doing something cool together.

A picture of that would merit its own 11” x 14” frame!

 

Feeling Like You’ve Nailed the Parenting Thing is Like Relying on Forwards for Guidance

 Always diligent in citing my sources, the following is from:  Internet, The. Email, My. (Inbox, August 19, 2010).

“Raising teenagers is like nailing jelly to a tree.”

 

This is helping me feel like a good parent. I think my experience has been a little runnier than a preserve but firmer than a jam.

 

August 19, 2010

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”  

– Alexander Graham Bell

 

Is anyone else having problems with Alexander Graham Bell posting on their blog?

Anyway, I’m ready for a new focus. Rather than be overwhelmed about the logistics of moving, I could, thanks to Alex, feel the empowerment of simply phoning a realtor. Healthy lifestyle goal way beyond where I am? Well, yesterday I ordered nothing for myself at McDonald’s after my daughter’s doctor appointment—I waited and enjoyed a killer salad at home.

The only way to move beyond this old life is to get a new one. My new door seems far away, but walking toward it is nothing but steps. So I might as well look where I am going.