Lately my blog postings have become fewer and fewer. As the list of things I have to do pile up, the blog writing gets put further behind. Not because I do not have the desire to write. It is because my head becomes so clogged with thoughts that I feel I have nothing of any significance to say. “It’s all been said before” kind of thoughts run through my head. Kind of bored with myself. I’ve had the same story running now for 11 years. Read on.

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.