Cuz I'm 50!

This Saturday I will turn 50 years old. Yikes! 50!!! That sounds like such an old number. In my head I picture 50 year  olds to have gray hair (um, whoops! I've got a few of those, but only a few), to sort of "act" old....you know, like wanting to stay home all the time watching reruns on TV (.....uh-oh!) and many 50 year olds have arthritis and old creaky bones (well for heavens sake...who doesn't have creaky knees?)  I don't know why, but turning 40 bothered me alot more than turning 50. I cried when the Hubs threw me a surprise party for my 40th. I asked him why would he do that  to me?! I even hid in my bedroom for a while, trying to get up the nerve to face all of those people who had been invited to help me celebrate. I hate surprises. Surprise parties, baby showers, unexpected Christmas presents...I hate being surprised. Wonder why this is? Me too. Must have something to do with thinking that I am in control of myself and my surroundings. At the wonderful menopausey age of 50, I don't feel like I want to control everything anymore. I feel so much more relaxed in my skin (a little too much skin, if you catch my drift. I still dislike my weight). But I feel like I can relax a bit more. I don't feel like I need to keep such a tight grasp on people, places or things anymore. I like myself a lot more too. I am learning to forgive myself for all of the crap that has happened in my life that I thought was (or wasn't) my fault. I am a child of God and I believe that I have been redeemed. It's hard sometimes to remember that I am redeemable, that God can and will and does forgive me for my faults. I think that I am harder on myself than anybody else. I forgive my children anything, and the grandson...pffft! He has no faults :)
I am learning, albeit at a slower pace to forgive my Hubs for his faults. I know that he is not a happy man. I want so much for him in life tho. I want him to feel better, physically and mentally, spiritually and emotionally. I want him to take better care of himself. I want him to eat better. I want him to not take life so seriously...to learn to go with the flow, to maybe even unclench his grasp on the things that are weighing him down. I want him to stop looking for someone to blame when things go awry. I want him to love God like I love God. I just want him happy, dammit! Is that too much to ask? Maybe. Maybe it is. All I really have control over is making sure that I am happy. That I am ok with myself and my God and my faults. I am still a work in progress. And I am still alive and kicking at 50 years of age.  I am looking forward to a fun filled weekend. Dinner out with my sister and her husband on Friday night, then a bonfire and a cook-out with family and friends for my 50th on Saturday, then a motorcycle ride to Wisconsin on Sunday. Hopefully there will be no surprises. Grateful for life and love and kids and grandkids.....blessed to be turning 50 this weekend. Many are denied the privilege (miss you Von)!

Holy Water

Whaddya do when you have no dreams? What do you do when all you want to do is cry? What happens when you finally realize that you can't fix another human being? How does a body continue to live in emotionally unsatisfactory conditions? What is wrong with a person who subjects herself to living in an unhappy home? Why does wanting to leave feel just as sad as wanting to stay? What happens to 30 years of married life? Where do you store a lifetime of memories? How do you pack them away? How do you get the scent of him out of your nose? This is not what I wanted this post to be about. But I am processing something here today. I am married to an unhappy, miserable, resentful man. He is dry...so very dry. Spent not one day in recovery. And I wanted it so bad for him and for us. I had visions of us sharing the road of recovery, the road back to normal life together. Ya know what I mean? His meeting, my meeting, maybe a shared open meeting. Working out the kinks of our ruined life and putting it back together in a wonderfully healthy fashion. Learning to forgive each other and moving on to a place of peace and serenity. Of living the next 30 years of our lives together smiling and happy just to be near each other. Today I realize that that is not going to happen. Never was. My program is mine. It's not for sharing with him. I need to fix and forgive me first.  But I gotta tell ya, it's pretty horrible watching a man go down in flames.... especially when he has lit that fire himself. And my codependant self wants to fix him so badly! He is so full of rage and self pity, martyrdom and sadness. He has no idea of the help that awaits him in the rooms of AA. I wish that I could tell him how wonderful it is to be accepted by others, others who are going thru the same thing. What a gift it is to be able to trust complete strangers with your darkest fears and secrets. To be able to share your pain, their pain, and to be able to help each other heal. To be in a room full of strangers and not ever feel alone or lonely. To know that help and understanding are just a phone call away. Sigh..... I am tired of watching him be miserable. I am tired of his angry, resentful tirades. I am tired of his preoccupation with himself. I'm tired. And sad. Is this the for better or worse part? Is this the in sickness and in health part? What if, after 30 years, you realize that you have to get out in order to save your sanity? To save your own sense of self? What if you also realize that you no longer have any personal friends that you can talk to because all you ever talked about to them was him and his issues? What if you are no longer employed and need, right now, to become employed? How do you ever earn enough to be able to support yourself? Scary, scary stuff. But I am more scared to stay where I am and do nothing. Something needs to change. Him? Me? My address? Today I am giving all of this and all of my fears to my HP, to God. Surely if I give it up to God, His blessings will rain down onto me. Thank you Lord for the gift of tears. They are indeed your holy water. They heal me as they flow.

Wedded bliss

Our daughter is getting married this weekend. So much to do yet! We will be going out of town and living out of a hotel for 3 days. Not real happy about that part of the festivities, but Hey! at least I will have a roof over my head, food to eat, a new dress to wear and we'll be celebrating the marriage of our beautiful daughter to our soon-to-be-new son-in-law along with all of our soon to be blended families. Our family weddings are always a great time. So much laughter and dancing!!! I can't wait for that part of the reception, where me and my sisters and my cousins (who are more like my sisters than my cousins) are out on that dance floor cutting a rug. My hubs no longer dances with me. Says it is too painful for him. I'm ok with that tho. I have a great time with my sisters and all of our kids. My daughter the bride is a little tense and nervous about the ceremony and everything else going smoothly. It is an outdoor wedding and they are calling for a 30% chance of rain. I can tell that she is trying really hard not to panic. The advice that I gave her was this: "Look... it won't matter whether you marry him under an oak tree in the glorious sunshine or whether you marry him in the middle of the reception hall because of the pouring rain.....at the end of the day, all that really matters is that you will have married the man of your dreams. All of the planning and money and decisions about beef or chicken, and cake or pie will mean less than nothing, should mean less than nothing, so long as you get to marry your best friend. It's all supposed to be about starting your married life together and not about having the perfect wedding." 
I didn't marry my best friend. There have been times over the years that I wish my hubs could have been my best friend. There were times he should have been my best friend, but it was not meant to be. He isn't best friend material. And I don't mean that in a negative way. He just is and always has been more concerned with himself and his wants and needs instead of mine. I learned early on not to confide in him. His alcoholism didn't allow him to empathize with me and my problems and on the rare occasion that I did tell him something that was personal and painful, he would file it away in his brain and throw those very same words back at me, like shrapnel, during his drunken rages. He wounded me with my own words of pain enough times that I never was able to recover enough trust in him to ever trust him with my innermost thoughts, dreams, fears and desires again. My daughter is not marrying an alcoholic, THANK GOD! So my hopes and dreams for her and their marriage are quite high. Here's hoping that they remain best friends for the duration of their marriage. Here's hoping that they have a life-time of wedded bliss together. And if I cry at the ceremony, please know that my tears might not be only for them and their happiness. They might just be for me a little bit too. For what I missed out on by not marrying my best friend. Course she's a girl so...um...ya....that wouldn't have worked out for me either. Haha! Here's hoping for great weather this weekend. Love will be in the air either way. We are blessed, always!

I can hear clearly now....

I'm just getting over a cold and my ears feel stuffed full of cotton wool. Whenever I get a cold, it goes directly into my ears. I can no longer hear out of my left one.  And don't ask me why, but whenever my hearing starts to go, I get real cranky. I wonder how deaf people do it. I get so aggravated and crabby when I am struggling to hear what people are saying to me. Tuesday morning I was on my cell phone talking with my sister-in-law/best friend while she was driving to work and she must have been going thru an area with no cell towers because her voice kept going in and out. I found myself saying to her repeatedly Huh? What? What did you say? Anyway this was really starting to make me angry, not at her specifically, but it was so frustrating that I could not hear her. So while I am struggling to hear her, my grown son comes up to me and starts talking to me at the same time as her cell phone is cutting in and out. So I asked her to hold on a minute,but because the connection was bad, she couldn't hear me. So I asked her again to wait a minute, to hold on a minute, but again she couldn't hear me. Meanwhile, my son is still talking to me. I couldn't make out what either one of them was actually saying to me and they both kept talking at the same time. And I snapped. What I ended up doing was screaming  SHUT UP in her ear, when all I really was trying to do was yell at my son to shut up for a minute. It came out all wrong. I could hear the echo of my voice in my head, I could hear how mean and angry I sounded as I screamed shut up into the phone. It bothered me for the rest of the day. Fast forward a couple of hours and my grandson is now at my house. He is cranky, and needs a nap and he isn't listening to his Granny. He is 2 years old. I could feel myself getting all clenched up inside. I was still feeling bad about yelling at my sister-in-law/best friend (can you say guilt) and now my grandson is crying and cranky and acting like a 2 year old who needs a nap. I can feel myself clenching my teeth. I can feel myself getting aggravated.... at a 2 year old boy yet! Because he didn't nap, I was unable to get dinner started. So when my son is ready to leave for work at 5:00, there is nothing to eat. And when my husband comes home from work at 5:15, again there is nothing to eat. So I quickly try to rectify this situation, throw stuff together for the both of them, while "Bampa" plays with the grandson. I'm feeling guilty all day for screaming at my sister-in-law/best friend, and I feel guilty for wanting the grandson to be quiet and take a nap, and I feel guilty for not being able to cook dinner for my son and husband. So I think to myself that I will skip my Tuesday night meeting and stay home and try to get some stuff done, that I couldn't get to earlier in the day. It took me about an hour to realize that I had made a mistake and that I really wanted to go to my meeting, that I felt like I needed to go to my meeting. In my car on my way there, I could feel myself starting to unwind. I could feel myself unclenching my hands and jaw. And I'm not in that meeting for 5 minutes when I realize that the topic for tonight is on detachment. Wow! What a perfect topic for me for today. I love when that happens!! A meeting where I hear just what I needed to hear.  I get to hear 15 different women commenting on how and why they detach. And I get to learn, again, how to let go of guilt and aggravation. Talk about lessons and blessings! I love this program!

A work in progress

I would like to tell you something that you already know about me. I am not a writer. I might be a blogger but I am not a writer. What I really want to say is that I am not a writer yet. I've mentioned this in the past, I think maybe in one of my earlier posts, about how other bloggers seem to have such writing eloquence. Others bloggers seem so much more at ease in their posts. Their words flow so smoothly; almost effortlessly off the page. Some of the bloggers that I read actually make me sit back and say, Wow! I wish that I could have written that or written like that. I've sat here in front of my laptop and actually cried while reading some of my favorite bloggers posts. Some bloggers I've really identified with but felt too uncertain of my writing skills to comment on their posts. I didn't want to sound stupid. Some stun me into silence with the beauty of their words and writing style. Some blogs have even made me see that my blog is a place to vent or that maybe it's my place to keep taking my husbands inventory and posting about it when really I should be more focused on my own inventory and recovery. Yesterday I reread all of my blog posts and I came to the conclusion that I really need to change my writing style and maybe even the feel of my blog. I appear to be missing that certain element that makes me feel good about what I am posting. I am supposed to be writing about the lessons that life is teaching me and the blessings that I feel God gives to me every day. Maybe I should keep the Alanon element out of these posts. Maybe I should just let the words flow out of me. Maybe that is what others bloggers do....let the posts write themselves. Already this post feels different  to me than the ones that I have posted before. It's still not what I want it to feel like, but it's a start. I am a work in progress. That is both my lesson AND my blessing for today.