Change of Seasons...Part 1

I am certainly enjoying these few days that are giving us a little tease of the wonderful weather that is waiting for us right around the corner. Don't get me wrong, I do love the beginning of summer with those hot days that finally lock away the bulky sweaters and coats and lay out your bare skin to the mercy of the sun as you beg for the warmth that only that big beautiful ball of fire can provide. That first plunge in the pool or those first steps across the sand into the ocean are the things of my dreams as the dreary winter has surely worn out it's welcome. Flip-flops and swimsuits make up the family's uniform from May until August without even a second of remorse for cursing the cold, wet winter and wishing we lived some place tropical.
Well I feel that way for most of the summer until maybe the end of August when any drop in temperature is appreciated and I'd gladly trade my swimsuit for my favorite jeans and cool breezy day.
This is that time that I wish could last forever. It's Fall and it is on it's way! There's an electricity in the air that I feel in a way that sends my senses reeling and my heart praying that the fall will stretch out just a little longer this year. I feel alive in a way that I can't describe. I feel the energy from the top of my head to the tip of my toes.
I want to savor all that the the fall offers up to me and tuck it away in a little happy place to brought out and used to perk me up the next time I feel my favorite season being gobbled up by over the top holidays and cold endless winters.
This is my time, my season and I can hardly wait to jump in!!

It's a shock to me too!

Well, I did it. No, not the "it" you may be thinking. I did not run away from home, leave my husband or get a tattoo. Actually what I did would probably not be a big deal to most people, but to me it was huge.
I registered for my first ever half marathon that will take place in December. Not a big deal to some, but the world to me. I'm certainly not delusional enough to even pretend that I could do a marathon. Hell, a half marathon sounds absurd when I say it to myself, much less to anyone else. I am not a runner. I am not an athlete. I've never been coordinated enough for aerobics and I'm pretty much too lazy to do anything that requires too much physical exertion.
I've run a couple of miles a few times when I was in an exercising kind of phase, but the last time that I actually ran and exercised with any sort of commitment was exactly 13 years ago during the summer that I got married. I was 23.
Let's just say that a lot has changed. Perhaps my 30s have opened my eyes to things that I never realized or maybe I'm drawn to the solitude of running that see in so many other people. Mainly what I'm feeling at the moment is that I'm doing doing something that I want to do and I'm doing it only for me. No one asked me, begged me or required me to do it.
Yesterday, I happened to see that someone had posted information about the marathon and that registration was 75% full. I just assumed that maybe, just maybe I can be committed to something, have a real goal, that I can see completed in about five months. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
It's amazing how people, things, opportunities can come along at just the right time and for amazing reasons when we don't even realize we need them. My thanks to MMJ and EHC for inspiration they have no idea that they gave me. thank you both.

Time for a New Name

"Start learning to love God by loving those you cannot love. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the more you forget yourself, and when you completely forget yourself, you find God."

I have spent a great deal of time lately thinking about God, the church, religion, people of God, etc., and I find myself more frustrated than ever at how it's all changing and becoming much less about God and much more about power and hate.

There are many things, maybe even people, in this world that I do not like. But I cannot think of one thing right now that I actually hate. A year ago, I could have given you a nice long list of things I hated. There are people whose actions I am not a fan of, several concepts or ideas that I don't like or don't agree with, but I really have somehow managed to lose the feeling of hate. Feeling hate never really did anything for me anyway. It never made me a better person, gave me more money or popularity, or gave me anything except a big headache.

I recently realized that it was costing me a fortune in my physical, mental and spiritual "bank" to hold on to anger, resentment and hostility. For once I'm not just talking about my marriage, family and home life! I was listening to the garbage of a lot of outside influences--other angry people, in-person or on tv, that were actually encouraging people to hate all the things that weren't just like them. It seemed like that was what we were supposed to be doing if we wanted to be "right". And it was killing me physically, mentally and spiritually. My aches and pains went far beyond what my body was feeling.

How did it come to be that the people who claim to be the most religious, the followers of Christ, the leaders of "the Church", are some of the most hate-filled, most angry people on the planet right now? Please tell me when, in all his 30 some odd years, did Jesus Christ EVER hate anybody? When did He EVER encite vicious, angry crowds or shout at the top of His lungs how right He was and wrong everyone else was? When did He ever stand up and tell people to act as He said but not as He acted? HE NEVER DID ANY OF THOSE THINGS! He loved people. He cared for people. He comforted people. He went so far as to love the people that everyone else hated. So why have the "people of God" taken it upon themselves to revise the principles that ARE the foundation of Christianity?

If being a Christian means acting in a way even remotely close to the way a majority of Christians are acting these days, then I don't want to be one. I want a new name. I want a name that actually reflects the teachings of Jesus and what he meant to the world. I want a name that says there's no hate, only love. I want a name that says every person on this planet is a child of God and every creature on this planet was made from the same God that made me. I want a name that doesn't scream our differences but embraces us all because of what each person has to offer. I want a name that softly says come together and talk and discuss and build up one another and combine energy to make changes to better every life, not just the lives of a few. I want a name that says pass on the love and thankfulness that you feel because people are hurting all around you and need to be lifted up too.

I want a name that says we all come from different places, we come with different ideas and we are all on our own path. We come at it from many directions but we all are searching for the same thing--LOVE.

I've officially decided that I don't care if the rest of the world thinks I'm "right". I am embracing the lives of those around me and those no one else wants to accept, whether they live down the street or on the other side of the world.

That's what is "right" to me.

Time for Change

For those few people closest to me, this is no surprise. I have spent the better part of the last year in a spiraling state of unhappiness. I have been down-right miserable with every aspect of my life--my marriage, my children, my home, my friendships and most importantly, myself and my place in the world.

I'm not really sure how it all started, but I finally reached the point that I was more than ready to run away from it all. My constant internal thought (and sometimes external statment) became "I just want to be anywhere but here." I'm not sure I even knew where "here" was, I just wanted to be as far away from anything familiar as I could get. The only thing I seemed able to do was focus on all of the negative things about my life and I never even saw the good things right in front of me. I would have told you that nothing good was happening to me, but I know that isn't true, I just couldn't see the good things because of my constant focus on the bad. The more that I focused on this negative life, the more bad stuff that kept coming my way.

We have spent a lot of time over the past few years lamenting the problems we've had with our house, which we moved into almost five years ago. It has been one totally unexpected disaster after another in this house and we have not-so-lovingly referred to it as " the money pit". You name it, we've replaced it. Look at an appliance, it has broken. I'm talking everything from thousands of dollars in pool repair to big dollar total bathroom remodel after the floor under the shower fell into my living room below it!

I have felt like a failure as a parent because our home was filled with anger and yelling and everyday was a battle with my oldest daughter and I felt like no matter what I did, I could not get the respect I felt like I deserved as the parent.
I began to fight against and even resent everything about my husband and marriage. Yes, I realize that might come as a shock to some, but I was feeling like everything was going wrong and he SHOULD be doing something to fix it. Both of us were in an aggressive, angry place and did a lot of blaming each other for why we were unhappy and our lives unfulfilled.

I just kept feeling that there must be more to my life than "this". "This", to me, was all those things that were holding me back and keeping me from doing/being something more, something greater than my current situation. Surely, God had something more in store for me, right? I just wanted to be me and to be known for something and be something that was me, something that made me special just for being me. I was sick to death of being "Barry's wife" or "the girl's mom". I resented every diaper I changed, every meal I cooked, every bed I made, every toilet I scrubbed, every time "had" to have sex with my husband. Everything in my life was a chore and everyday I came one step closer to leaving it all behind. How, you ask? Oh I don't know... hitch hike out of town with strangers? jump off the Mississippi River Bridge? just disappear one day? Take your pick; they all sounded like good ideas some days.

I faced an identity crisis, among other things, and decided that I have to figure out who I am and what I am and how this works with who I want to be. All I knew was that this current state of affairs was not working for me. I realized that if I want my life to change, then I'm the ONLY one that can do anything to make that happen. It just hit me one day and I was trying to blame someone else for my unhappiness. The great realization? I was giving up all of the power over my life to other people. Other people and outside circumstances were dictating how I felt about my life and how I was living the life that I had.

I brought all of this into my life ALL BY MYSELF. I forgot to be thankful for anything. It never crossed my mind to think about the good things I had and see that my good might actually out weigh my bad. I kept thinking about gloom and doom and how bad my life was and guess what? More bad things kept showing up in my life on a regular basis. I became buried in it and didn't see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Change is happening right now; and not only is it happening in me, but it is happening in those around me as well. There's no doubt that I am not the same person that I was for weeks ago, neither is anyone else living in this house. I think that that may be the greatest part of all. All of us have collectively taken a step back to evaluate where we are and where we want to be and I think we all recognized the dark place that we were in. Even my eight year old understands and is making changes in her own life.

I have not arrived...yet. But I am damn sure heading in the right direction. I know that if I want more joy to come into my life, I have to first be thankful for what I already have. No one can do that for me and that is something I know for sure.

My pot is simmering...

So many things to do and so little time to do it.

Ever get that feeling of paralysis when you are overwhelmed at the enormity of the task in front of you? Sometimes I see the the job as so rediculously large and insurmountable that rather than just jump in and chip away at it, I instead bury my head in the sand and just hope that when I open my eyes the mountain will have just disappeared. (To date, not one of these mountains has ever disappeared as a result of me hiding from it!)

It's that sick feeling of being overwhelmed but not having a clue where to begin to tackle it. Is it the overflowing baskets of laundry that should just get up and wash themselves instead of multiplying like rabbits? Is it the beautifully decorated Christmas trees that you promised you'd take down once you had a chance to get "just one good picture" (which I still don't have) of your children in front of it? (for the record, it doesn't really count as having your trees still up if you no longer turn the lights on, right??) Is it the pile of debt that continues to grow rather than shrink in spite of your best efforts to chip away at it or the overstuffed closets that so desparately need to be cleared out or the kitchen counters and laundry room shelves spilling over with a family's junk that can't seem to find a home or...?

With the above mentioned items being just a tiny snapshot of the long list of things currently on my "to do" list, I am stuck in that dreaded state of frozen, unproductive blahs. Rather than just walking into the closet and hanging up the pile of clothes I've managed pile up on the chair in there, instead, I quickly grab just the clothes that I need for the day and just as quickly close the door. On my way out I turn and look at the unmade bed and a huge room full of junk that needs my attention and then run out closing the door behind me. This pattern continues through every single room in my house. In case you haven't figured where I'm going with this, I've run out of places to hide.

I'm not yet a candidate for the tv show "Hoarders", but I could probably find some other reality show that would fit my current condition. It would probably involve something to do with denial or temporary insanity. "Out of sight, out of mind" is the current philosophy. "Mess? What mess?" You know it's bad when your few moments of "free" time are totally wasted sitting on the side of the bathtub playing word search games on your cell phone or spending an hour alone sitting in your car looking at catalogs from the mail (to avoid going into your house) or sitting at the kitchen counter with your computer messing around online just trying to make up things you can google.

Believe me, I have plenty of things to do. There are more things that need to be done inside this house than I feel I could possibly accomplish in even a month of working around the clock. Add in two kids, one being the busiest toddler I have EVER met, a workaholic husband, carpool, cooking, basic cleaning, blah blah blah, oh and MAYBE getting a chance for a shower a day and you have a perfect recipe for how NEVER to accomplish anything.

My pot of this dish is at a perfect simmer right now.

Even sitting down to write a little, which I absolutely love to do, has become one of those things I can't make myself do. I've had plenty to write about and have been trying to send myself emails from my phone with ideas to use, but it's so hard to just to do it.

I admire my friends who make it all look so easy. The house is clean, children are a joy rather than chore, dinner is made, career is booming, etc., but that is just not me. I don't know what it is. Maybe their spirit is in a good place, if that makes any sense. I feel a sense of upheaval and tension on the inside and have just decided that this is a part of my problem and my inability to create a sense of peacefulness on the outside.

I'm feeling really alone on this island that I know for a fact is heavily inhabited.