Recapping my own month is a habit as I near toward the end. I normally measure it in “how much money did I make this month” because I am keenly aware of the following month’s bills coming due. Oh, I know that success is not measured ultimately in dollars and yet it is what allows us to function in this world. Some days it is enough to simply have enough, though I am most happy when it comes through doing something I love doing.

This month’s end finds me physically tired. It’s been lovely to begin working in the yard, planting new and rearranging old. It also adds to my plate of things to do and my perception of so little time is reflected in the chaos of my house and car interiors. There are things left out that I hope to eventually find a home for, either in storage or recycling or (last resort) trash. Those things pile up while I am taking care of the immediate. It seems I am simply moving from one task to the next and not making any headway, though I suppose I can turn that look around and see that the fact that I am continuing to work as headway. This time last year I was borrowing money to make it through the month of April and May. Feels very good to be handling it well myself this year. That’s headway.

Money aside, what kind of headway have I made? This has been a month of growth in the relationship department. My son and his family have made plans to move here from Aspen and they will stay with me for a moment as they find their own home. I’ve been cast in a play that revolves around my character. The drama off-stage rivals that of on…relationship building. Some stronger steps are being taken to express myself in truth to my myself, which is easily the norm rather than not now. Headway.

The world seems to be truly shaking things up this month. So many earthquakes, volcano. It is becoming the norm to see that there has been yet another large earthquake causing devastation in someone’s life. We are becoming numbed out by the tragedies, so much so that we must shake ourselves and remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have right now.

Yesterday my daughter and granddaughter were driving through an intersection on a green light when a woman did not notice her own red light and crashed into my daughter’s car. When seeing the car coming at her, my daughter’s instinct was to turn and look at her own daughter in the car seat. My heart turns to a puddle when I think of the possibilities of that split second in time and gratitude overwhelms me to know they are unhurt and still lighting up my world.

I’m in rehearsal for a play that will be performed in a little over a month. One of our actors has been out of town for the first 2 weeks of working together and returned last night. I didn’t realize just how much I missed his presence until he punctuated the rehearsal with his sense of humor, quipping quiet, generally unnoticed little phrases that made me laugh, if not out loud definitely on the inside. Those little brief vacations from the business at hand made the evening much lighter.

Humor seems to be a choice, though once in the habit of finding the lighter side it is much easier to slide into it. Almost 2 decades ago I realized that I was looking at my world from a pretty negative viewpoint and made a conscious decision to “practice positive”. My children and husband gave me wry looks, mocked gagging and generally resisted my new way of being. Mom seemed to be someone they did not recognize. In time they got used to it and it started to seep into their outlook. It was infectious.

People want to laugh. People want to see the good in the world, the lighter side. Negativity is a habit and can spiral a person down into a dark abyss without so much as a “come on down and set a spell”. Positivity is also a habit. The benefit of developing this habit is that no matter what is going on around, there is an ability to find a resting place for our resourceful spirit, a gathering of self and an ability to keep swimming when a moment before we might have felt too weary.

So, the story. What is it? It is whatever you want it to be. We create our stories with our outlook. When I first moved to Asheville, a new acquaintance invited me to dinner and a basketball game downtown. As we were leaving the restaurant for the game, she suggested we take one car as her belief was that it is difficult to find parking in Asheville. I told her that I always found parking and I had a parking space angel. She scoffed and called me “new age”. I convinced her to give it a try. Pretend. She begrudgingly went off to her car and me to mine. I arrived maybe 30 seconds before she did in the lobby of the arena. I was quite happy and she was miserably mumbling. I asked where she had parked. “The garage,” she grumbled. “So did I,” I sparkled. The same situation, two different realities. I was happy. She was not. Case closed.

Eleven years ago I divorced myself from a 26 year marriage. That meant not just leaving my husband but leaving behind the life that I loved. Why, one might ask, would I do that? One, I didn’t think I was leaving my life behind or changing it up as drastically as it did. I simply thought I would exchange one husband for another. I truly believed that within one year I would be safely ensconced in a new relationship, one where that man and I would be so in love that we would always be together. 24/7 side by side, which was the backlash from not having a husband who was there much, if at all in those last years.

It didn’t happen. That relationship. In fact, there hasn’t been one committed relationship since. Therein lies the most significant pain of my existence. It is the most primary gutteral cry of my soul. Partnership, best friendship, such intimacy that I relax and I melt into each morsel of my being, available for his touch to melt into mine.

My efforts have been to find my survival mechanisms. I seem to be at last finding those in a much more grounded way. I have work that pays my bills, new possibilities for Verbal Remedies with a distributor of my images through matted prints and cards, posters and stickers for starters. I have renewed passion for that work. My creativity is just about to break at the seams.

And so I wake this Easter morning and find myself alone listening to the birds chirping, looking at the yard work to do, housework to take care of. Nobody to enjoy this with. Instead I am writing this. Hoping that by writing the story I will be free of  it at last and that man of my dreams will waltz into my life. Write on.

As every springtime, I have the sense that he is truly a breath away. At the same time, I know that I have had that sense every springtime to no avail. I watch as my friends search for and find love. I spend time with friends who have each other and have had for years. The cry becomes louder at the thought of being so outside of that realm, wondering what it is about me that keeps me the observer. When I was a teenager, I thought it had to be the pimples on my face and so I chose a boy with acne to date. Not much of a developed personality, just acne and a football jersey. And braces that dug into my chin as he kissed me. It hurt and I didn’t complain. I had a boyfriend. He was the second and last one until I found my future husband working at a department store just before Christmas of my senior year of high school.

I’d been in a play that fall. Lalume in Kismet. Lalume was the “sexy” lead female. She didn’t get the man either. Just as that play was over, my brother –who had been a plebe at West Point before being discharged medically after having an asthma attack during the summer bivuac– punched me in the face. I’d never been hit in the face before and everything surrounding my right eye swelled up like a golfball. The aftermath of it kept me from school or work for a week. When I returned, I wore a black patch. Black patch, black mini vinyl trenchcoat, black boots and long red hair. A femme fatal. Met future husband and fell into some kind of safety net that lasted for 28 years.

I was 18 when I married Scott. Almost 19. It was my big, fat, Italian, Polish, Irish, Catholic church wedding. I promised to love, honor, and obey. Maybe we left out the “obey” part. It was the 70’s and people were rewriting their vows. I think I took out the “obey”.

He lived in Long Island and I was excited to live in New York. I’d done some teen board modellng and thought maybe I could do more in the big city. I’d also had fantasies of being a fashion designer and knew there were world class schools for that in NYC. But…2 weeks before our wedding, Scott was transferred to South Carolina. No big city. Very little southern town with 2 sides of the track. For real. Black people on one side, whites on the other.

Within months of our marriage I was pregnant. When I was 16, I didn’t have a period for 3 months. My mother took me off to the doctor to be sure I wasn’t pregnant or some other thing wrong. I knew I wasn’t pregnant. No immaculate conception possible for me. I wasn’t Mary and doubted she had immaculately conceived either. No, I wasn’t pg, in fact the doctor told my mother over the top of my head that it was highly unlikely I could ever become pregnant. Not true, 3 children and 5 grandchildren later.

My children are by far the biggest blessings and best accomplishments of life thus far. I don’t know if they know just how true that is. If I left this world without doing anything else, I know that I at least provided them life and the gift of them to the world around them. And I am right now not satisfied to leave it at that.

I have the soul of an artist. As a child, my grandmother would bring me the simple gift of a coloring book and new box of crayons. It lit up my entire being to be handed such treasures. I particularly loved the Disney coloring books with tracing pages between. It is how I taught myself to draw hands and feet.

I didn’t consider myself an artist as I could not draw a realistic tree. Anything I drew came out like a cartoon. My talent was not considered a talent but child’s play, which at that time period in my family was not looked upon with any value. My brother was going to be the president of something, my sister an actor and me…well I was only “good enough to be a wife and a mother.” Said with resignation and prefaced with “we’re not wasting our money on sending you to school”. My mother doesn’t remember this. It was my father who said it. My darling father who I thought believed in me. If he did, he hid it in the public eye of the family.

Which brings me round again to the subject at hand. Relationship. For me. My father loved me. My sister says I was his favorite. I didn’t know that then as I didn’t think I was anyone’s favorite anything. Also, it was hard to tell what my father favored as he was the traditional father of the television 50’s and 60’s. He wore a suit and a hat and walked down the street to the bus to take him downtown to his job. He arrived home at 5:30 in time to sit down to the family meal in his tie. I remember his playing with us outside and lying on the floor in the living room when I was small. In the later years, he simply sat in his chair after dinner and fell asleep, unless he was ordered to punish us for something we had done wrong earlier in the day…which happened a lot. Not that we were “bad kids”. Our mother was unhappy and stressed. She found a way to vent it through her children.

After the punishment, my father invariably came up to my room and sat on the side of my bed apologizing, telling me he loved me, stroking my hair as I cried into my pillow. I didn’t understand why I was so bad when I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong. He gave me some solace during those times. I knew at some level he truly loved me, even though he “sided” with mom outside of those moments.

And so I seem to have been choosing men who loved me in secret but would not choose me to show that in public. Lately and through my life. I won’t go into the dynamics of my marriage in respect to my exhusband and children. At least not now. It takes 2 to tango and whatever happened between us certainly didn’t happen without my participation.

The very good news is that somehow this dynamic has changed. Recently a man, who is in a relationship, showed me very publicly that he feels a deep connection to me. I am so very grateful to be shown this and unhappy that he is in a relationship. I do not know if I would feel more than friendship for this man and will not find out as I have clear boundaries that I do not enter into another woman’s territory. I have told him so. And I have thanked him for showing me a new story.