Monday, May 29, 2023
Monday, May 22, 2023
Monday Mimisms ~ Toes Out the Window
I was seventeen.
 |
| Performing in 1974 |
My hair weighed more than I did.
We'd just finished a Beatles medley for the student body of our high school
and all I wanted to do was step out of the Yellow Submarine we'd build out of cardboard and slide into the passenger seat of my boyfriend's car
Toes out the window. Coca-Cola in my hand.
Hair-in-a-ponytail-happy-I was.
Fast forward forty-seven years.
and volcanoes are exploding in my pencil head
So much time on my hands
Thinking about the one I should have married
Thinking about the one I could have married
The one I shouldn't have married
The one I didn't marry
All of those shoulda-woulda missteps brought lifelong consequences unbeknownst to the long-haired girl.
The one who got away before I found myself at the ripe old age of thirty-something.
What is it about sixty-something that causes one to psychoanalyze the whole of a life?
Shouldn't I be knitting sweaters or something?
Who does that?
Me. This week. That's who.
Then I hit a big bodacious bad brick wall. SCREEEEECCCCHHHH.
BAM. OUCH.
Last Thursday night I was sitting on the couch staring at the wall in silence, evicting a few rickety ghosts from my head, watching them fly away into mist. Scribbling on paper. I'd been there awhile...just kind of numb. Needing to not-think. You get that, right? There had been unpleasantness, you see.
I don't like unpleasantness. I like peace.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Meditate. Pray. Listen.
Before I knew it, all the ropes that held me down had been untied. I lit a match and symbolically burned a paper full of angry words in my left hand.
Watched it burn. Watched it burn.
Ashes. Poof. Gone.
Then picked up what was left of those I-should-have-could-have-shouldn't-have people with my right hand and blew. them. away.
I looked at the clock. It was 2 am.
I straightened my dented crown and went to bed.
I've been on a slippery slope you see.
Trying to function and still save me.
There. I said it.
It doesn't matter how long ago your loved one last misused a substance or drank to excess or suffered a bout of depression, in a mother's head and heart they're always a fool's breath away from active destruction; except with addiction or alcoholism or even narcissism it's mutual destruction. A person with a substance use or personality disorder can look at you stone cold sober holding a Bible in one hand and Holy Water in the other and you still won't believe they're sober or truthful.
That's my problem, not theirs.
I don't want to cover it up anymore.
Not because of my beautiful loved one - he's been successfully working his sobriety for many years -
but because of ME.
Standing in the wide weary gulf between helping and enabling
when I found myself alone and climbing out of the recent brief foxhole we shared, 
it resurrected all kinds of emotional baggage from years and years ago when he was actively struggling with substances. Oh, the memories. We found ourselves dancing to that worn-out record despite ourselves
my eyes were opened
to what I had become
what I needed to deal with
what I needed to admit
what I needed to understand
what I needed to
stop
doing
Don't you hate that word?
What word, Mimi?
Codependency
Yes, I hate it.
The day I started blogging, half my face fell off
Then all kinds of wonderful adventures began
Today, this many years young,
I found the other half again.
There is a thin line dangling between the edge of authenticity and the need for dignity and privacy. My writing has always walked that wire. But in every word and every story I try to err on the side of transparency, in the same way I would want less shame-based words applied to the people I love.
Addict is not a noun or an identity. Alcoholic is not a noun or an identity. Codependent is not a noun or an identity. They are disorders and struggles, not moral failures. The disease is not the person.
Addict is not a noun or an identity. Alcoholic is not a noun or an identity. Codependent is not a noun or an identity. They are disorders and struggles, not moral failures. The disease is not the person.
I've wanted to say it for years.
That I am proud of him
That I love him with all my heart
That I see him
Despite me and my uneven walk with worry and faith
But just for a little while, I think we need a mini-divorce. 
Hush Homer. I'll be checking your medicine cabinet tomorrow..
Just until I regain my sea legs and he sprouts more of those beautiful wings.
He can be free to make his own adventures
I won't be holding him hostage with my smothering
I can be free to make my own adventures
not holding myself back with fear
What codependency does to your peace of mind is insidious and suffocating
You don't even know it's happening!
It's a learned belief and habit that I must unlearn
Have you ever seen your son or daughter nearly dead from a disease?
You'll do anything to keep that from happening again. Even when you no longer need to. Even years later. And therein lies the devil of enabling.
The job of addiction is to kill and destroy. When you enable (helping someone do something they can do for themselves) at first you believe you're actually helping. You feel good about it. You get a rush of feel good dopamine. Sound familiar?
Here's the problem. The real sneaky job of enabling is also to kill and destroy.
My hardwired need to protect, spills over into the decisions I make about everything and everyone else in my life. Now that was an eye-opener.
Codependency grows from a normal natural parental instinct which screams protect.my.child. Mothers have it the moment their babies are born.
There's no shame in it. It's motivated by love.
Sometimes I move about the world in shoe-drop mode, post trauma reactions that aren't even real in the moment. It's not irrational or hypothetical. The triggers of past events can still be seen in my mind and felt in my heart. 
So I make up my own scary stories in the now and convince myself that I need to DO something to prevent them from happening again. It's that dead-child-coffin-dream fear, to put it bluntly. It's very common for parents of children who've suffered from substance abuse. It's like you're watching a horror show on the big screen of your life. The substance has the starring role, the protagonist. Everyone is in desperately twisted love with the alcohol, the pill, the high, the drama. Your loved one is drowning. You are the unintentional antagonist. Everyone dies.
So I make up my own scary stories in the now and convince myself that I need to DO something to prevent them from happening again. It's that dead-child-coffin-dream fear, to put it bluntly. It's very common for parents of children who've suffered from substance abuse. It's like you're watching a horror show on the big screen of your life. The substance has the starring role, the protagonist. Everyone is in desperately twisted love with the alcohol, the pill, the high, the drama. Your loved one is drowning. You are the unintentional antagonist. Everyone dies.
You run yourself ragged trying to help. It doesn't help. It makes things worse because they lose the dignity of making their own choices. And you lose your mind watching them suffer.
I think I dented my crown when I hit that wall, my friends.
But I'll be OK.
No matter how many times I stick my toes out the window and put my hair in a ponytail, some days are like a roller coaster ride. You either hold on or fall off.
But mostly, I discovered the amusement ride in my head wasn't fun.
I joined a support group. I took an assessment. I signed up for a codependency class online. I wrote emails and ask questions. I watched podcasts on parents who also struggle with enabling NODDING and NODDING and NODDING my head.
Who knew I belonged to a club that no one wants to belong to all these years?
I didn't join to fix him. I joined to fix me.
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Monday, May 8, 2023
Monday Mimisms ~ Getting Back To Me
The housing market exploded into doom-for-buyers about the time they settled in. No reasonable rent to be found. No affordable housing on the horizon. 
I need rugs. And lamps. And art on the walls.
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Monday, May 1, 2023
Monday Mimisms ~ Hemlines and Shoulders
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| If you can imagine an off-the-shoulder look.... |
and eyeing that cute little dress hanging in the hallway just begging to be accessorized.
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Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Monday Mimisms ~ The Cherokee Girl
I am slightly north of fifty.
Most days I like my place on the chronological globe. Some days I want to string it up from the highest rafter and kick the bucket of wrinkle remover off the highest cliff and call it a day.
Today was a bucket kicker of a day.
I took my 6-year-old grandson shopping through the neighborhood yard sale boutiques. He had a pocket full of money (mine) a skip jump and a heartbeat of joy (mine) and most everything else in his wiry little body that you can count on in this world that means a blessed thing. And he’s mine.
Wrapped around my sinew and bone like a web-spun intricate cobweb of blissful peace.
He is.
Blissful.
Peace.
My hands have a few wrinkles.
I know they weren’t there yesterday.
And my eyes look tired. Must be the heat, I tell myself.
No.
It’s because I’m past-midlife-never-mind.
I know they weren’t there yesterday.
And my eyes look tired. Must be the heat, I tell myself.
No.
It’s because I’m past-midlife-never-mind.
And then I went home and got properly stuck on the age thing.
And why some days I look like hell
and some days I look like twelve
and how today I feel just like the Cherokee girl my grandmother was
I tried to wash my freckles away in the morning dew when I was 8 years old because she said they would disappear. Lo and behold, at 53, I am still trying to cover those blasted freckles and make my smile stop being crooked like hers and my nose wrinkling up oh.so.adolescent.like when I really really smile.
For years I fought it. I wanted it to shift into Hollywood styled sophisticated perfection. I wanted to pout like Garbo, sizzle like Marilyn, slink like Ginger. I did not want to effude giggles like a pigtailed Mary Ann. (Oh, I do alright in the catwalk department on a good ole’ day you see…..but it’s days like today …..when the sun is long and my freckles come callin’ that I see…I see…..(“I brought my grandson today, ma’am. His name is Baby Boy”) a wisp of her staring cold in the mirror and laughing cause she still sees the marks behind whatever makeup I put on (“Grandson? He’s not your son?”)……knowing full well I can‘t wash them off with the dew (“No, no,” I laugh, “my own baby is 30.”…) even though that’s what my greatly superstitioned grandmother told me (“That’s about what I thought you were.”) while she watched me wash my face with dewdrops one morning at 5am in the backyard trying to scrub them away….(“Oh DO go on, ma’am…I will buy everything you have in your garage today…“)
Whoever heard of a movie star with 
freckles?
freckles?I can't have both.
Can I?
Can I?
So I came home flailing all my will into a long dramatic selfish pout, casting winks and coy glances hither and yon for the birds and the squirrels and trees, splashing on makeup and dropping pearls round the long strands of auburn that also belonged to the glorified goddess of an Indian-laced grandmother and took this shot and that and that shot and this trying to see what the yard sale lady said she saw in the shadow of my grandson‘s smile this morning…...oh I was bound and determined to have a dandy of a roll in the whine fields if I couldn't coax that number down and have a long satisfying look in the yard sale lady's mirror...... I desperately needed those years to wash away you see and since it was not morning, but a sun-washed afternoon in my fifty-third year I felt time turning pages in the solstice of a day that I knew I was meant all along to land in with my grandmother laughing all wrinkled and joyful behind that willow tree looking at me flirt shamelessly with wildlife and memories......wondering how did I get here so fast in a spot where spots are signs of age and not of youth with no stopwatch to slow them down... down.... down....
Until finally I saw something in the lens I’d never seen before.
Something steadfast.
Something strong.
Something …..
Cherokee
a streak of stubborn
A chiseled chin
A bold lined woman
Who never takes no for an answer
and knows exactly where she's been
A chiseled chin
A bold lined woman
Who never takes no for an answer
and knows exactly where she's been
One random streak of grey
And freckles
Not in the dew
But in the new
And then
I had an epiphany
About perfection
And the lack of it
In me
And imperfections
And strength
in the middle of
imperfect things
that I no longer want to wash away
And freckles
Not in the dew
But in the new
And then
I had an epiphany
About perfection
And the lack of it
In me
And imperfections
And strength
in the middle of
imperfect things
that I no longer want to wash away
My grandmother's gift of stubbornness and grit might have been borne on the backs of those unsophisticated marks, but she knew what she was doing when she passed them on to me.
She knew I would need them
there's some kind of magic in dew
She knew I would need them
there's some kind of magic in dew
*NOTE 2023: Baby Boy is now in college studying Computer Science.
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Monday, April 10, 2023
Monday Mimisms ~ Do I Look Like Annie to You??
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| maybe I need to look in the mirror |
Thanks. Another day of this???!!
Anger. Let's say it. It's there because you're hurting, exhausted, and you want the pain to stop. Call up your best friend. Tell her to bring wine, a Bible, a witch doctor, a Priest, some herb roots, Reiki people, anointing oil from the Nile, snake-handling gloves, a Santana album for dancing and a box of very sinful chocolate. Yep. We're covered.
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