A Mother's Musings and Mumblings

In Avenue Q, Kate Monster sings:

There’s a fine, fine line between a lover and a friend;

There’s a fine, fine line between reality and pretend;

And you never know ’til you reach the top if it was worth the uphill climb.

There’s a fine, fine line between love and a waste of time.

Following a break-up it’s tempting to say that I wasted four years of my life with Guido. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Honestly, I don’t want to focus on that. I want to explore the phenomenon of declaring a failed relationship a “waste”.

I’ve never been able to say that my time with the witchlets’ father was a waste because without that I would not have the witchlets. But other relationships, well, it’s a bit too easy to write them off as a waste of time, effort and energy. And I think that’s a common conclusion that is reached during the post-mortem examination of a relationship. It certainly was with Chuckles and I suspect Guido will go down in history in the same ink.

The trouble with that way of thinking is that it breeds an unhealthy approach to new relationships. You start seeing someone and all too often, all too soon you start thinking that if this isn’t going to last “forever” that it’s a waste of time. Once you buy into that fairy tale then it’s a leisurely stroll over to the conclusion that relationships should be thrown out at the first indication that it won’t stand the test of time (calendar time, not stopwatch time – follow the conversation, would you?).

This is all well and good if you’re looking for forever. After all, you don’t want to waste years hanging around while the clock is ticking. Or do you? Not “waste” years, but spend them. With someone. Who, at least at the time, makes you feel like you’re valued. Where’s the harm in that? I could say that so long as you’re not wanting to have children, there is no harm but even there, I have to think twice. The witchlets are good kids, well-adjusted by most measures, were they harmed by the time I “wasted” with their father? I can’t see it. I can see it in plenty of other cases but at least in mine that didn’t seem to be a long-term issue (we’ll try to ignore the 6 months I referred to him as “It”).

So where does this leave a Pagan Queen? I’ve always said that I’d like three witchlets and if there is anything to that then time is not on my side. But as I age, gracefully though that may be, I grow more at peace with the realization that the Goddess may not have that in mind for me. So if that’s off the proverbial table then where’s the harm in just killing Time with someone?

Well, for starters, Time has been my friend up to this point. I’m generally averse to killing my friends. Particularly given the state of my age and the role that Time plays in it’s expression. It might be a great year, or two, or five, but at the end of it I’ll be older and while men age gracefully, women too-often do not. Time has been kind to me so far but killing him may upset that relationship. So years pass and options are more limited than previously. Not a situation I’m entirely happy with.

But would it be a “waste”?  What if I were to spend the next couple of years just enjoying whatever comes my way? Could I keep Time happy enough to smile on me kindly when it’s over? And if I couldn’t? So what?

I think the “waste” isn’t if it doesn’t last forever. The “waste” is when the majority of the Time and energy spent on the relationship isn’t Time being happy and cared for but rather an exercise in beating your head into a wall and still not learning anything. And from that standpoint, Guido may have been a waste of Time.

Sorry, Time. I’ll try harder.

I’ve said before that part of my problem is not knowing what I want nearly so well as knowing what I don’t want. Now, to pretend that those two aren’t related would be false economy but even so, I’ve got the list of what I don’t want pared down so lean that there’s not a whole lot left out! So I’m going to start working on the shopping list of what I’m looking for. This isn’t going to be a single blog entry, this is going to take quite some time to sort out. And I suspect that there will be no small amount of trial and error on my part as I fumble through adventures in singledom trying to even figure out what’s out there. But at least if I start to organize my thoughts I’ll stand a chance of completing this mission.

Honesty: I’ve typically phrased this as a negative but let’s try it as a positive trait that I’m actively seeking. I don’t just mean someone who doesn’t lie, I mean someone who is honest. For Goddess sake, tell me. Don’t keep quiet because you don’t want to cause trouble or hurt my feelings, talk to me honestly about what you think or feel or want or did.

Intellect: I’m not looking for Einstein but I think I know at this point in my life that I need someone who can carry a conversation on just about any topic. I don’t care if he can type, but at least attempt to spell. Reading is not a form of punishment. Someone who wants to learn – not take classes but just learn new things.

Respect: There’s going to be overlap here eventually. Honesty should be tempered with respect. Respect should promote honesty. I want someone who respects me, my thoughts, my beliefs, my life, you get the idea. Rolling your eyes in private with a smile on your face is fine – public ridicule isn’t. Respect is the difference (well, that and good judgment). If I’m on the edge of losing it and I ask for a time out, respect me enough to give it to me. And respect my body enough not to strike it in anger. ‘Nuff said.

Responsibility: This gets back to the Boys/Guys/Men myth. OK, maybe men don’t exist. But there are guys out there who can pay their own bills, maintain their own homes and keep their word. If there aren’t, I’m taking my Barbies and going home! If you tell me that you’ll do something or be somewhere, do it! Late is fine, I’m not totally anal but there is a lifetime limit on how much slack I can cut any one person.

Touch: I am a superficial, shallow creature. I am the girl your mother warned you about. I do not handle sterile, sanitized relationships where everyone keeps an exceptionally proper distance from each other. No, I’m not a fan of being groped while loading the dishwasher….well, not all the time……but I do need a fairly steady diet of human contact to feel alive. Dogs don’t cut it. Neither does BOB. Must.Have.People. Because I’m talking about simple things like stroking my hair while we’re sitting on the couch together, or taking my hand when we’re walking. Those things make me melt.

Gravity: I’m struggling with this one because although it is crystal clear to me what I mean, I’m not sure I can express it. Or if I can, I can express it through the use of negative examples I have lived. I want to be in a relationship with someone who thinks of me as part of a life that we’ve built together. I don’t want to be someone/something that only gets consideration when I’m standing right there in front of them or when I’m on the phone. I don’t want someone that I have to remind to come home. I want someone who wants to call me and see me, someone who thinks about me when I’m not there. I don’t want to have to wonder: “If I didn’t call, would he notice?”, I’d rather be surprised by the sound of his voice on the phone calling “just because”. Fine line between this and crazy stalker, I know, but Goddess help me it’s what I want.

Tolerance: So far everything I’ve asked for is all about me. I think I need tolerance of others, too. I don’t think I could be with someone for very long if I felt like they couldn’t be tolerant of others – particularly others whom I count as friends. This one bears some exploration because I’m not sure what level of tolerance I would need. If they could be civil in public but didn’t have their heart in it, would it be enough? Clearly, tolerance of me falls under other categories and I’m an odd enough bird that being tolerant of me covers a lot of ground. But I do think there’s more. Something to think about.

Wow. That’s quite a list. My first reaction is that I should start paring it down because I’m being too demanding. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I had lunch today with a dear friend (see also “third date rule”) during which many, many topics were discussed. Face it, there are only so many people in your life with whom you can sit in a public restaurant and sing Monty Python songs. And that’s a good thing. So was lunch with Moishe (although I gotta say, first the wife, now Moishe. Does Fate have a thing for Shiksas?).

Now many of the things we discussed will remain classified because I don’t want the government to know that we can solve world peace over lunch. One thing we talked about that can be shared, and that I’ve been mulling over, is the nature of the male of the species. Actually a separate species, we decided, but I’ll humor those of you who don’t have the most up-to-date biology textbooks yet.

There are three types of creatures with an XY phenotype – boys, guys and men. Moishe and I talked about this but so did my Wife and I over dinner so these thoughts reflect both conversations. Boys are easy to spot and all too common. I know for a fact that I am not the only woman to make it to a third date only to realize she just kissed Peter Pan. It’s not that I mind housebreaking…..never mind, I do. I also don’t like cleaning up their messes or wiping their noses because they can’t figure it out for themselves. Boys have one advantage – they can be controlled and to a lesser extent trained. Other than that, I really don’t see the appeal.

Guys. There’s a breed I have some experience with. To the tune of 18 years of marriage (kindly ignore the fact that it wasn’t continuous or with the same guy). Guys grew up enough to take care of buying their own beer and mowing the lawn. They can fit in with the boys when need be and can be a reasonable partner if one doesn’t expect much in the way of self-reflection, open communication or an honest willingness to compromise. The biggest advantage of guys is that they are common and easy to find. The disadvantage is that the breed is highly variable making it difficult to know exactly what you’re getting into. Case in point: 18 years of marriage took me 3 “guys”.

Men are the easiest to understand and the hardest to find. They’re like unicorns – every little girl dreams of finding one someday and every little girl has about as good a chance of finding one as they do a unicorn. I have to tell you that my Wife disagrees – she personally claims to know several men. I can think of one that I know. So they’re out there but I honestly have never known one young enough to be able to state that they are born and not created. Perhaps that’s what drives so many of us crazy – the hope that we can have a man if we find a guy with enough raw potential and train him. Better to settle for a guy, I would think, and be done with it. Then again, that was the plan with Guido and look where it got me!

So while talking to my Wife about this and brainstorming about men we knew it dawned on me – RC may actually be a man. If that pans out to be true, there could be a very interesting character study there waiting to unfold because he certainly wouldn’t see it that way and I’m not sure how much that plays a role in the fact that he and I don’t speak the same language.

Random Thought: Is it totally pathetic that the only two categories I’ve identified for this blog so far are “General Ramblings” and “Relationships”?? Surely there can be other things on my mind…..

So. Now that we’ve satisfied the inner critic, let’s get back to senseless thoughts about relationships. Most of us are a little too well aware of the whole “feast or famine” phenomenon – there’s either no suitable partner in your life or there are a dozen. Numbers in between do not exist outside the pages of anything published by Hallmark. Case in point, if one more ex-lover crawls out of the woodwork and into my e-mail Inbox just to “check in” between relationships I might scream. Never mind the phone. Caller ID should have Rod Sterling’s photo on it!

But why is this interesting? OK, it isn’t. You got me. But you’re still reading so I’ll keep writing.

I’m not looking for a “relationship” at the moment. Not that I’d turn down perfection, but I’m not looking. And the biggest reason I’m not looking is that I don’t know what perfection would look like. It could walk right up to me and be met with a blank stare. And not because I’m an idiot (note: I didn’t say I’m not an idiot, merely that the state of my idiocy isn’t a factor in this case). I think the problem is that I’ve spent so many years trying to figure out what I could put up with and what I couldn’t tolerate that there simply wasn’t time or energy left to define what I wanted.

I spent a decade with the witchlets’ father slowly eliminating things that I thought I “needed” and carving away at the list of what I couldn’t tolerate until there were only a few things left. Enter Guido and I looked at my list (five items, mind you – I still have the 3×5 card) and decided that it was good. I set the bar so low that most mere mortals would have tripped over it. Pity I didn’t factor in for Trolls.

Guido wasn’t selected in an act of desperation. There were other options just look at my Inbox and caller ID this week. Remember feast or famine? Trouble was, I didn’t know then what I wanted so I settled for what would work. Faced with choices, I chose fast food. Not good for me, guaranteed to lead to regret, difficult to justify to anyone who cares about you but meets the bare minimum requirements to sustain you.

Fitting then that my friends referred to moving Guido out as my “diet”. Like any good diet I think that the weight loss (200 pounds!) was only one part of the plan. I think the bigger goal here is to establish better habits in the future. No more fast food – don’t settle for quick and easy things that will sustain you for a bit but leave you feeling like crap while your friends roll their eyes at you. It’s time to start seriously thinking about what I really want and finding it. That requires learning to believe that it exists and that I deserve it. No small task, that, but I’m an accomplished mistress of self-delusion and it’s good to have aspirations. Right?

Someone made a comment to me the other day that really got stuck in my craw. He said: “Everything in your life is a saga.”

A reasonable first reaction to that would be to feel wounded – but why? Is the wound that someone has noticed that your life is a series of poorly written one-act plays or is it that your life is no different than anyone else’s but you blow it into epic proportions in the telling? What’s the story? No, not the “saga” although if it turns into one you’ve no one to blame but yourself since you have a choice in websites to visit and yet here you sit reading. Don’t blame me if it turns into a saga.

My life does seem to have it’s share of drama – much of which approaches a magnitude that is nearly indigestible (at least to me). But why is that? What role do I have in this phenomenon? Do I play a part in bringing drama into my life or is the drama only in my head and my retelling of the events?

Here’s a novel answer to the question: It doesn’t matter. Life can throw itty bitty teeny weeny bumps at you or it can pummel you with soccer ball sized hail and it’s all up to you to interpret the events. Tiny perturbations can be seen as being massive blemishes on an otherwise perfect face and major disasters can be viewed as simple lessons in life. So what determines how we react? I’m not convinced that it’s entirely a matter of choice or outlook – there seems to be so much more to it than that. Thing 1 takes everything in stride while Thing 2 would have you believe that the world is ending when her shoe is untied. They have the same parents and (largely) the same life experiences. So there’s some role for Nature playing alongside Nurture as a headliner rather than supporting cast.

But let’s be honest, this isn’t about Thing 1 or Thing 2. Heck, it isn’t even about the bloke who made the comment to begin with. This is about me. I’m sick of the drama and the thought that I’m creating it is more than a little disturbing to me.

The last 12 months have been eventful – I can say that without making it a drama or a saga, right? There have been a number of events, many of which held significant emotional load and would objectively be expected to be stressful. Can I look at this year and shrug it off as “it is what it is” or do I need to view it as an ordeal? I think I’ve done a pretty fair job of the former although there have been individual events or days when the latter has been unavoidable. Today, for example, was both. Guido showed up and had to push his luck one last time (Goddess, I hope it was a “last”). I didn’t overreact at the time, I didn’t lose it or even tip my hand. I heard him out, talked to him as rationally as I could and held firm to my boundaries. No drama there. But once he was gone, I lost it. At that point I needed the open and free expression of emotion. I had to feel my pain and anyone who was near knew it.

I think that’s part of the deal for me…..I feel and I don’t try too hard to sanitize that for the rest of the world. It’s not a drama issue, it’s a socialization issue.

For the first many, many years of my life I was told what I saw, what I knew, what I felt. I didn’t have a choice in it – reality was constructed for me in a way that was sanitized to protect the guilty. Somewhere in the last decade I’ve reclaimed reality for my own. For the first time I get to experience my own life and my own emotions. But like so many other things in my life, I’ve never learned the socially acceptable ways to express myself or interact with reality. How could I? So here I am, perceived by others as a grown woman but with the internal social skills of a teenager and a seriously over-developed sense of social justice: I refuse to apologize for my perceptions and I lack the skills to sanitize them for public viewing.

The end result of all of this is that I express myself – my pain, my pleasures and my perceptions in my own way to a world that isn’t comfortable with that level of openness and interprets it as being dramatic. I don’t expect anyone else to experience the world or the events of it the way that I do but neither do I expect that I should have to sanitize my experience in order to meet the expectations of everyone else. So if everything in my life is a “saga” I think that’s understandable. After all, I’m the one living to tell the story.

It’s been over four years since Guido and I tied the knot. There were six cords, six promises, one knot.

The cords hung faithfully on our bedroom door until the day he moved out. I had to take them down but couldn’t disrespect them so they moved to my personal alter where they quietly slept, wrapped tightly in a scarf. I told myself that I could/would untie them after the divorce was final or when I felt that I could invite him to participate in a handparting.

Lately, that has seemed like false economy to me. Guido has a profile on a dating site listing himself as “divorced” and there is substantial evidence that he is actively pursuing another woman. My own actions have involved significant attempts at severing my emotional ties to him using whatever means present themselves (with all due apologies to any of those “means” who are reading).

So last night, I set out to untie the knot. I couldn’t. I sat with the cords in my lap, I smudged, I prayed, I couldn‚Äôt even touch them.

It took a phone call with a dear witch in NJ to figure it out – the moon isn’t right. We’re just past the new moon into waxing. This isn’t the time for endings so it just doesn’t feel right. I went to bed thinking that I’d have to wait at least until the other side of the full moon on the 22nd to do this.

But when I woke up, I had the answer. I’m not untying the cords to end a marriage – I’m untying them to release myself – to allow myself to begin again. This is a beginning, not an ending.

So after work today, Mouse and I went to the church together and she held space for me while I walked the labyrinth. The cords were wrapped tightly around my wrists and I paused at each of the quarters to honor the roles they had played in my journey to this point.

It took a long time to get to the center, the last three steps were the hardest, but I got there. Mouse even called out to me that I could turn back any time, but I didn‚Äôt want to. I walked into the center and untied the knot to release myself but kept the cords to remind myself of what I’d lost. I think I had to sort out the difference between those two before I could get to the center.

Those of you who have been through nasty breakups know what I mean. It’s not that I want Guido or the marriage back – it’s more about the plans and hopes and dreams. I’m not ready to throw those out yet even though I know that they’re not viable – at least not in that relationship. So I have to sort out what dreams are mine to keep and build on and what dreams will be buried with the marriage. I guess that’s the hard part of ending.

On the way out, I again stopped to pay my respects at the quarters but this time to ask them for what I wanted in my life going forward. I asked Water to let my tears flow freely when needed, Earth to keep me grounded and supported, Fire to bring me passion but only where it is healthy and Air to inspire me. I left the red cord at the South quarter as I stopped because I just didn’t want to carry it with me but I carried the rest loosely in my hands but not over them.

I was free and it was a new beginning, but like so many new beginnings, this one was accompanied by a bit of hesitation. I knew what I was leaving behind was something I no longer needed or wanted but I didn’t know what I was walking out to face. With that thought in mind, I was nearly as slow getting out of the labyrinth as I’d been walking into it.

Mouse helped by singing to me, picking up the pace a bit so as to move me along. It was a good reminder that I wasn‚Äôt dying, I was being re-born. When I emerged, she gave me hot chamomile tea with honey and a lovely present. Her “totem” is the egg so she gave me a small stone egg to represent the seeds planted tonight by releasing the knots.

We are a circle
within a circle
with no beginning
and never ending.

Blessed Be.

So, being the observant reader that you are, you’ve no doubt already noticed the date stamp on this entry. Comparing it to the previous date stamp you find yourself unable to escape the obvious conclusion:

I suck at maintaining good writing habits.

Now the casual reader might take such a conclusion as evidence that this blog is a total waste of time and wander off in search of something more meaningful to do – like picking at bellybutton lint. We’ll pause here to allow the exodus.

Those of you who are left (hi, Mom!) know that I’ve been writing frantically over the last month. I’m just struggling with issues of Internet security and the purpose of a blog. You see, I have a lot on my mind and would love nothing more than to organize my thoughts by putting them in writing. That’s how my mind works – I start writing and eventually wander upon a conclusion that makes sense to me. The trouble is, some of the “things” I have on my mind have Internet access. Some of them even have access faster than dial up! (did I just give something away?) So writing about whatever is on my mind could prove to resolve my issues swiftly but not to my liking.

What’s a Pagan Queen to do?

Well, I think that the solution is to just blog away. Certainly there are enough things on my mind that I can stick with general themes here and save the personal crap stuff for my journal. That does mean that I’m not going to be spending all my free writing time here so go on with you now, find something else to do with your spare time, but come back from time to time to see what insanity has visited my head this time.

And if you’re just here looking for gossip…..well……you might as well hang out for a bit. I’m sure I’ll offer enough details eventually to be able to pick someone out of a line-up. If I’m lucky such indiscretion won’t get me fired, dumped or sued!