Traveling in Packs with Pacts

They fill the tables next to me at restaurants. And travel in packs.

“Look,” my friend Casey motions to me. We are seated outdoors on a restaurant patio for a friend’s birthday party. She nudges my attention toward the group of women seated next to us. Although they are carting packages and presents their mood is solemn. “You see that?” she whispers and then quietly announces,

“Look at their faces.”

I glance over my shoulder to see six women just a few feet from me. They may as well be at a funeral. None of them look happy.

“They’re married,” she diagnoses.

And I laugh. Not at them. But at something else. At a past that used to be mine in another life. And Casey’s too.

That used to be us.

“And look,” she continues her assessment like a sociologist studying another culture, “they all own one piece of jewelry. And no one is wearing a vibrant color.”

It’s all true. What she says. The homogeny continues beyond that. They all have short hair and many are a bit overweight. I imagine they all live in brand new split levels and drive their children to school each day in their shiny Yukons and Expeditions.

Never smiling.

Casey squeezes my hand and smiles, “That’s not us anymore.”

I smile back.

On another day at another restaurant I am seated next to another group of women. But this group laughs and jokes and shrieks. They talk about the Twilight series as if it is classic literature and make plans to attend a Lady Ga Ga concert. They are all in great shape and their hair, if not long, is trendy and youthful, their jewelry fun and varied. Their laughter wafts through the restaurant but it intoxicates not irritates.

You think I’m going to say they’re all single, don’t you?

Guess again. This is not the juxtaposition you are expecting, dear reader.

They’re all married too.

But it’s a different kind of married.

The kind where you don’t lose yourself or give up. Instead, the mystical kind where you find yourself and (gasp!) could it be?

Love your husband.

It is possible.

I saw it in the restaurant next to me just last week.

If I’ve learned anything these past few years it is this: life is divided into two camps, the happy and the sad, and they gravitate toward another like magnets. Happy attracts happy. Sad attracts sad.

Ever heard misery loves company? It does. But happy loves company too. Like attracts like.

I have since analyzed the gabillion reasons I stayed so unhappily married for so unhappily long. There are several but one contributing factor that it took me a while to realize is that in that life my friends were just as miserably married as I, if not more so! Several of the married couples I knew were just shuffling through the motions. I just thought that’s the way it was.

Interestingly? My unhappily married friends did not stay friends with me after my divorce. But my happily married ones did.

Isn’t that interesting? Yes. Mull that. It’s deep. It seems I abandoned an unwritten pact to stay eternally in despair with them. It has been a life lesson that has imparted deep wisdom of which I am so grateful to have, even if attaining it was through something so incredibly difficult.

Never again will I surround myself with friends who pity themselves, who settle for less, and who don’t believe that the power to find happiness resides within. Never again will I waste my time with people who portray themselves as victims.

Life is meant to be toasted to, embraced hard, and lived beautifully. And to do anything else? Is wasteful.

And sad.

Recently a new guy in my life asked me, “Why does it seem like when women get married they get fat and cut all their hair off?” I just laughed knowingly and said I wasn’t sure. But that the good news was I’d already lived that life.

For even if I ever do say I do again, my femininity and size four jeans are here to stay. Along with something even more beautiful and unwavering.

My belief that life is what I make it.

And I’m making mine?

Happy.

******************************
P.S. Just for the record? I do think I would have to draw the line at discussing the Twilight series as if it were classic literature. I'm just sayin' . . . :-)

R.I.P. Laptop!

My laptop crashed this week and my desktop wasn't looking too good either . . . who are these people who just sit in dark rooms and write viruses? Good grief!

I'll be back online Monday. I've had a fabulous week and life is grand. Hope the same for you, marvelous readers!

Love and blessings,
Audra

Sorry!

Going to blog tonight...pinky swear. :-)

~Audra

On vacation!

On vacation this week, readers, experiencing wonderful adventures with old friends and my littlest girl. I am blessed and I hope (know!) you are as well.

Be back next week!
~Audra

Cheating Jerk Follow Up . . .

I’ve been avoiding the topic of the big cheating jerk I dated from April to July (Refer to my “Dear Daphne” blog post if I lost you.) But I figured I’d revisit the topic at least one more time. You see, I just finished the book Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards. That woman is the epitome of grace. She endured much in this life: the tragic death of her teenage son, breast cancer, and the humiliating public betrayal of her husband of thirty years, Senator John Edwards.

For anyone facing any kind of adversity, I highly recommend you run, not walk, to Barnes and Noble and buy Elizabeth's words.

Therefore, in the style of this classy lady, I didn't want to give the cheater in my life too much attention on my blog. Mainly because I believe in positive energy. And this guy is so screwed up and so dysfunctional that there’s nothing positive about him. But the truth is there’s been a positive twist to the story.

And that twist is Daphne.

For once she and I were done discovering all the disgusting details, “He called you Blondie, too?!?!” we discovered something better.

A friendship.

In between moments of revelation, “What? He had pictures of the two of you on Facebook? I could only see two pictures on his page. He told me he didn't know how to really use Facebook! Good gawd, that man had his privacy settings Mac Daddy'd out!!" and epiphany realizations that we were intimate with him simultaneously (which, by the way, is the universal human definition of a dog) we eventually dug out of those discussions and found our way to more mundane commonalities.

Like similar careers, taste in clothes, and a love for wine and food.

We were soon giggling like school girls over lunch and checking in often via text and phone. I’ve even introduced Daphne to a couple guys with whom I think there may be some intriguing potential. (Just call me cupid!)

It’s nice to see her smiling.

I have a feeling Daphne will be a permanent fixture in my life and I feel so incredibly blessed.

Discovering I was being betrayed and used was not fun but the outcome is something I never would have expected. I found a kindred spirit and wonderful friend in the process. On top of that, this shared experience had helped both of us to discern that the shortcomings of others is not something we ever have been or will be able to control and is no way a reflection of our failings.

We are trusting and loving women and those are qualities we are both holding on to. This man was out for power and that was it. But he didn't get it and he didn't win. Because we will not allow him to steal our trust in others.

Elizabeth Edwards offers an acute assessment of situations like this in her book. Sometimes things happen to you that are tragic. Tragedy is sometimes unavoidable.

But it is an honorable place.

As the alternative is to be on the side that she puts her husband's mistress. And where Daphne and I put this man and his misguided motivations.

Pathetic.

Hidden Treasure

In December 1993 I was a senior in college. My application to law school sat on the kitchen counter and I was preparing for the LSAT. I was going to put my outspoken personality to use and become an attorney.

All those dreams vanished in an instant when I went in the bathroom and watched a pink plus sign appear on a little plastic stick.

I was pregnant.

And just like that.

My life changed forever.

I married a stranger and my life became a surreal dream. Or more like a nightmare. I woke up every morning wishing none of this was so. But soon I didn’t even have time to wish for anything more than one day to go by when I was not throwing up.

But I didn’t quit getting sick. Instead I vomited every day for the next eight months. I couldn’t win the lottery but I was one of the “lucky” 2% of pregnant women whose body treats the baby like an unwelcome parasite. I think my cells had a meeting and decided if they just made me barf constantly I could expel the baby that way.

It didn’t work.

So while my friends went on with college, parties and part time jobs I stayed home with my new husband in our meager apartment and stumbled through married life while trying to finish college and wondering if I was really ready to be a mother.

And?

I barfed endlessly.

But on August 4, 1994, I finally stopped throwing up when a black haired blue eyed cherub arrived in my life after 24 hours of labor. My daughter was born. And again.

My life changed in one day.

But this change was different.

While my friends graduated from college, got their first jobs and bought new cars I graduated not only from school but to motherhood, nursed my first born child and bought tiny pink dresses and ribbons for this sweet little angel.

That baby became a toddler who loved Barney and then a little girl who liked to play princess and Barbies. Her waist length long hair blows in the wind and her blue eyes sparkle forever in my memories of her childhood: pushing her swing and flying kites in endless expanses of green.

And somehow? Impossibly?

She is 16 years old. She wears eyeliner (some days too much), borrows my clothes (did you take my strapless bra again?!?!) and her bedroom looks like the aftermath of a natural disaster (what smells up there?!?!).

And in two short years this closet raiding slob with too much eye make-up will be off to college. And it is just surreal.

But I’m not sad. And I have no regrets. For life is flowing the way it always does and I have no control over time and transition. I learned long ago that when the winds of life change, sometimes the only thing you have the power to adjust?

Are your sails.

I had a beautiful baby all those years ago. Who grew into a beautiful braided girl and is now blossoming into a self-assured creative woman.

Sometimes our greatest gifts are plans we never would have made ourselves but unexpected detours in the road we’d so meticulously plotted and planned. I am glad I didn’t become an attorney. It would not have been the career for me. And I am glad I spent my 20’s playing dolls with my daughter. I’ve watched countless friends wish desperately for children who never appeared.

I’m lucky.

And blessed.

By experiences in places I would never have sailed into on purpose.

For it is there that I have discovered hidden treasure.

In the uncharted waters.

Of this life.

*************************************************
Happy 16th Birthday, Booga Wooga Bear. Thank you for coming into my life. Love you to pieces baby girl!!

****

The picture is of my daughter at age four enjoying the garden of a friend...this is one of my favorite pictures of her. And even though that little girl is no longer in my life, in her place is a young woman, tall, confident and full of hope and potential. I hope I have helped her cultivate the garden of her dreams as best I could.

Law school would never have held a candle to this journey....love you always and forever.

Love,

Mom

Today's Post . . .

Will be up tomorrow! My little girl turned 16 yesterday and it's been a crazy week. I'll have a post up Friday, thanks for reading. Muah!

~Audra

Ordinary Days

My toes almost touch the branches with every swing. I stretch some more.
 

Almost there.

 

 

Two wrinkled hands push my swing and off I fly.
 

Got ‘em!
 

It’s October 1979. I’m seven years old and swinging the afternoon away on a wooden swing hanging from my grandmother’s clothesline. I'm wearing a faded orange homemade pumpkin costume that my Gram unearthed from an old box in her attic a few hours before.

“Arms up, there you are,” she’d said with satisfaction as the green felt collar hugged my neck, “I made this for your mommy when she was little.” She tugged the draw string that pulled the costume tight about my waist and instructed, “Now when you wear this, just put on a green shirt and green pants and stuff this with newspaper to make yourself fat and you’ll be the cutest pumpkin!”

That was my Gram. Always giving instructions, always telling others the way things go. She’d been a teacher for over forty years but just because her classroom was gone didn’t mean her knack for taking command of everything else around her was. The wall above her desk was a testament to that, covered with plaques and certificates: president of this, chairperson of that; she always found a way to boss people around in a way that made them grateful she had.

Hours later I was still wearing the costume as the evening light faded. Kids do that, wear costumes as regular clothing every chance they get. My mom would be here soon, plodding around the corner of Gram’s old white house, walking on the lawn that was more clover and violets than grass, telling me to hurry up and then laughing when she noticed me wearing a piece of her childhood.

My Gram wasn’t really my grandmother, she was my great grandmother. Women had babies young in my family. My own grandmother was still in her mid-forties, my mother her mid-twenties. Gram was pushing seventy, so she just played grandma to all of us.

I don’t remember why I remember that ordinary day so vividly. The costume, the swing, the violets. I just do.

 

But isn't that what life is? A string of ordinary days woven together. Sure some milestones stand out more: weddings, the birth of children and grandchildren. But the truth of our lives when all is said and done is found in the mundane ordinariness. That's where the beauty lives, the breathes we took together, the smiles we shared, the simple summer afternoons spent on a backyard swing.  

It's 1989 now in my memory.
 

I’m bounding through Gram’s cluttered porch and can see her through the dusty lace curtains, rising slowly from her recliner and exclaiming, “My girlie is here!” She’s wearing her typical polyester dress and nylons with open-toed sandals. Her red hair is freshly colored and we eat cake doughnuts in her kitchen. She asks about things like what college and I am going to and if I’m going to be a singer.

Gram always loved to hear me sing. She’d come to every concert I gave throughout high school, perch in the front row and record my performances on her prehistoric tape recorder. She’d play them back later while she sat alone in her house. Smiling to herself as she read her tattered bible or clicked her crotchet needles.

It was a nice way to grow up. Having a devoted fan like that.

 

I still have all of those cassette tapes Gram made of my singing. They stay close to me, on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, reminding me always that there once was someone on this earth who not only loved me enough to make poor quality recordings of my voice in a high school gymnasium but to play them back to herself when she needed reminding that she may be alone in the old white house but she was not alone in this life.

And now, all these years later, I wish the recordings were not of me.

But of her.

Gram died when I was 25. Her fiery spirit faded like the red in her hair. The last time I sang to her was in a church.

But she couldn’t hear me anymore.

It’s been so long since I’ve heard her voice or seen her wrinkled smile but that doesn't mean I don't visit her often. I close my eyes and fling open the porch door of the big white house and rush inside to visit  my Gram. I swing on that swing, walk in the violets and clover, and sit with her at her sunny kitchen table and eat cake doughnuts with her again.

Long after her laughter faded, her love for me did not. She walked with me through the jarring reality of my divorce in my mid-thirties, the resulting uncertainty I felt in the years following as a single mother, and she even held my hand this summer when I walked down the aisle for a second time, her crocheted handkerchief encircling the prairie flowers in my bouquet, rejoicing with me at the love I had finally found.

For she has always been and will always be my biggest fan, my unwavering support, pushing my swing higher and encouraging my toes to touch the tree tops.
 

The lesson she imprinted on my life is eternal, that love's simple power is all we need to inject extraordinary magnificence into all of our ordinary days.

*************************************

Love you, Gram. Miss you . . . always. ~Your girlie

(This post was originally published in 2010. It was updated in September 2013 to include my newest life event that Gram shared with me - my marriage to my soul mate and best friend, Matthew Mehl. I wish she could have met him in this life - but I have no doubt she will in the next. And she will love him just as much as I do.)