Mixing Past and Present

There are boxes in the main section of the loft. My office is full of books, journals, bits and pieces, the guest room has a bed sitting in it, waiting to be used.

Half my things never made it here, they were lost along the way and the movers are all blaming each other but I'm glad we no longer pay for the storage of them.

My whole life is here now.

Looking through all this stuff is a bit disorienting. My journals in particular, are scattershot, disorganized, to me now, they are clearly a sign of fear, even desperation. I tried so hard to establish a life in Canada that would be both "normal" in the context of my family background and healthy.

In reality, the two are irreconcilable.

I realize now that I am in the midst of what will likely be a fairly lengthy healing process and I am humbled, honored and more than a bit awed by Steven's decision to love and marry me despite all my many flaws and scars.

But slowly, I am healing.

When I look at all of this stuff scattered around me I sometimes wish the bulk of it could have all been left behind. It carried with it a palpable sense of sorrow, loneliness, bewilderment and a willingness to delude myself into thinking things could be okay under circumstances where they clearly were poised to collapse into disaster that is embarrassing to read.

So I address the task of organizing all those mementos of unhappiness into my happy life. There's value in some of them; it's nice to have a selection of winter coats. I'm glad to see some of my art again and some of the books are welcome but in the main, the material stuff of a life that never satisfied heart or soul in any meaningful or sustainable way is just like driftwood on the beach; it's interesting to look at but you don't need to bring it home.

Fear (without the loathing)

According to the moving company, my belongings will arrive tomorrow.

I should be very excited.

But you see, I grew up in a situation where any time anything good happened, anytime I got anything I wanted, anything at all, something, very swiftly, swooped in and took something even more important away.

It started with my Grandmother and carried on from there. My family seems to have lived that way too because they have encoded it into their idea of what it means to be alive.

My mother takes great care to remind me, every chance she gets, that things could go sour at any moment. She always has, and fear of her being right made that a self-fulfilling prophecy at least half the time. (At least, it did in the past.)

So today, the day before my things arrive and my whole life is finally in one place with the man I love more than any words or colors or light or air itself, my finally happy and whole life - I am scared.

I turned on the radio and there was a show about "mixed status families" and how, very often, the government pulls them apart and sends the immigrant partner back to their country of origin.

And I cried. I cried a whole lot  because that made me even more scared.

When I first wrote about Steven in this blog his sister found it and told him I was too serious about him. Then an old girlfriend who was still a friend of his found it and brought it up to him. I can't hold things back, in my writing, I never really wanted to. Being transparent is meaningful to me.

But because I was afraid it would hurt the relationship, I took that post down and more or less stopped writing here.

Tonight, it is slowly dawning on me, that fear is the worst reason to do anything.

Fear seldom helps.

And in this case, in my case, fear is not justified.

So for once, I am not giving this life, not this day, not this love, not any part of it - to fear. I am not going to buy into the idea that I must pay for every good thing in my life with something so awful that it beggars the imagination - the death of my Grandmother, my parents divorce, the many moves, far away as a helpless child from anyone who loved or cared for me, the adoption of my only son. I have paid and paid and paid. I have paid more for my life than most people ever endure. I am done paying.

Everyone deserves happiness. Everyone deserves a great love, a home, a marriage to make a family from, whatever that family might look like to each of us, we all deserve one.

And I am not going to be silenced by fear anymore.

I am here. I live here. And I am going to celebrate it, revel in it and love it every single day. I will take every opportunity to sing about it. Because that's what I do. That's who I am.

And I don't owe anyone a single thing for that.

Happily Ever After

This really needs to be written out. I don't see any way of getting past it without going through.

I am happy now.

Happy at last. Happy in my life. Comfortable. Free. Safe. Happy.

For the first time in my life, I am loved and wanted without perimeters, without conditions. I am married and happy and done with Victoria and Canada and all the terrible, sour things that held me down and made me miserable and you know what?

It is making me mean.

Far from having the freedom to forgive the people in Victoria who bullied me, the rotten family - don't even get me started on how destructive and horrible it was to grow up with them, the mediocre jobs, the lack of care and concern from nearly every person who was supposed to help. God, in the end, looking back, now that I'm happy - could there be a more bitter and miserable life? No. Not really. I was thwarted at every turn, usually by the people who were supposed to be helping me.

So I find myself asking the universe why someone who tried so hard for so long would have to work, struggle, scrape and suffer for half their life, literally, just to get to what most people would consider to be a state of normal.

I know you're supposed to forgive. Living well is the best revenge, being proven right is supposed to be sweet - all of that stuff but I spent my youth suffering. My life was wasted. My only son, given up for adoption in order to get him to safety. And when I finally found my happiness? When I found my husband and my life? It turned out to be in another country and so of course the "powers that be" are doing their damnedest to make that hard too.

I know I should be grateful and most days I am. After all, I have health and a sound mind, I was smart enough to know, all the time I was there, that something was deeply wrong. I was strong enough to try to fix it. There are many, many people who don't get this far.

How many people find their "happily ever after"? Not many. And how fucking sad is that?

Still. I hear about the successes of Victoria, people coming from there and their lives were easy, their hopes realized young. Friends of mine go and visit the place, (for reasons that completely escape my understanding) and they find it charming, beautiful, wild and lovely and you know what that does to me? It makes me hateful. I hate them for it.

Short of cutting everyone and everything that ever had anything to do with Victoria out of my life, I don't know how to handle this. It's making me a person I don't want to know. But how could a whole community allow a man to abuse his daughter and then blame her for it and carry that blame into her whole life? My father was popular. He was clever. He knew what he did and he told everyone about the "wild stories" I might tell them about him and how he abused me long before I even had any conscious memory of it. He set up a preemptive depth strike that still resonates.

If you were tortured somewhere and if your torturer found a way to get everyone there to believe it was you who was crazy or evil or something just fundementally bad, how would you deal with that?

Once you get out, get very far away and finally find your own, clean happiness on your own terms - I tell you, you just want the dead to stay dead.

It doesn't seem to me to be so much to ask.

I live 3055 miles from Victoria. I live in a whole different country. And yet the place finds ways to intrude into my life on a near daily basis.

I just want to erase it. Where do I have to go to be free of this? Why won't the dead stay dead?

Free Association On Not Feeling Loss

Here's what I remember: when the car drove away, I knelt on the couch and watched through the window, leaning on the high, cushioned back of the thing and I cried.
It was spring and the trees outside were covered with pale pink blossoms.

Those trees are gone now.
The cat I held in my arms as I sobbed, he's gone too.

My sister had the couch for a while - she's gone and the couch? Long gone too.

When the time cleared the dust away, he did it again. He was always doing it again, he did it every chance he got. My father left and left and left again.

The first time, I cried. I sobbed as though my heart would break, just as you'd expect.

The second time, I wept into my sleeve and got over it.

The sixth or seventh, actually, that time, I left but he pushed me - I rolled away in a train compartment in England, like something out of a Harry Potter movie, he stood on the platform and watched. He did not lift his hand to wave. His arms stayed at his side. I cried that time. I sobbed again but that time, I cried because I knew I'd never care again.

The last time, he wanted me to cry. He did everything he could to make it happen. It was autumn, we stood in my sister's driveway and he pulled out every stop, he used the way he loved my sister as leverage, he used his health, his age, our distance - then he kissed me. He kissed me for the last time and for the first time it was square on the lips. It was a wet kiss.

I got into my car. Not wanting to be cruel, I kept my hands at my side. I held my hand down to keep myself from wiping any trace of him off my mouth.

But when I turned the corner - I wiped it away.

And my eyes were dry.

Fare Well?

If you've been reading this blog, you've watched me go from being unreasonably involved with someone and trying not to talk about it. You've seen me find my way, meet my husband and now, settle into my new life in New England with this wonderful man.

Some people have come here to read this blog out of jealousy or a feeling of entitlement to the details of his life. I was offended by that but everything I've said here was true. Sometimes it was only true at the time, but true nonetheless.

I'm proud of most of it and at my ease with the rest. If you are a "mermaid" from Burma who assumed you had a romantic future with my husband, I'm sorry your dream didn't work out but I can tell you this; a better dream awaits you.

When I had to give up Austin, I assumed my life would be unhappy forever. Sounds dramatic and silly now but that thought, under those circumstances was still very real to me.

I do think it possible that some people get stuck in an unhappy life and never find their way out. I've seen it happen and I assumed it would happen to me. Through the benevolence of circumstance or the grace of the Creator, I found another way. I am grateful every day.

But I am also learning to be compassionate about those who stay rooted in misery. I know a few, although I hope I am wrong, I often suspect my mother and sister are two of those people. It's not clear to me, given the choices they've made in life, that getting out of that habit would be easy but I hope something changes to heal them. Souls cannot endure an unending stream of misery and misfortune without becoming permanently damaged. Maybe if we could all remember that, we'd be kinder to each other.

As a child, my mother was indifferent to me; as an adolescent, she was hostile; as an adult she is baffled as to why our relationship is so difficult. On an extended visit, I asserted my right to a full airing of our grievances (very "Festivus" of me) too forcefully and she resorted to violence. She threw dishes to the floor on one occasion and on another, threw things at me and flew at me, fists balled in rage.

Now she is blind and she suffers at the hands of my sister's neglect. While I cannot sit silently by and do nothing at all, neither do I feel compelled to rush to her side. She was cruel to me and now she bears the cost of that. I would say I wish it were otherwise but I am happy in my life now and while I hope her suffering is truncated and have taken steps to help, I can and will only go so far. I am kind but just as she left me without a protector, she is left.

If I had money, I would send it. If having her visit my home would help, I would try to arrange it. As it is, she loves my sister and her children and wishes only to be with them. All I can do is alert her support network in Victoria, as I know it to exist, and hope someone will visit her. She needs to sell her house and move into something bright and cheerful by herself but that would result in my sister having nowhere to go and so it will never happen. They are bolted together, the two of them. My sister, angry at her dependence on my mother and my mother, frightened to be alone.

Karma, when it really plays out, is difficult to observe. Worst of all when it effects someone you love on your own behalf. My friends all say my mother is finally getting her comeuppance and that the time will soon come for my sister to have hers but I don't think I believe in comeuppance. I would wish gentleness on everyone. Surely it's only through gentleness that any good and lasting change is ever accomplished. I would like to see my sister happily employed and housed in her own two bedroom apartment. I would like to see my niece with a place of her own. I would like to see my mother ensconced in a condo she could love. One where everything works well and where there are no rats or other vermin, one close to everything she needs, with a social support network that brings feelings of security and some pleasure with it. These are the things I wish for these people. They are small things, nothing so miraculous as what I've been blessed to be given this year but I think they are the things that will give them the most room to grow and the most cause for happiness.

I don't know but I think it takes something away from a "victim" when they have to witness the suffering of those who hurt them, especially when it's framed as "poetic justice" or "karma" for past misdeeds. It's true, I think, that only the devil could think up punishments, God, surely, must be a good and forgiving place to lay one's heart - "a safety", as I once heard an Inuit child put it.

Anyway - having felt the sting of having someone else use this blog used as a tool of "girlfriend intelligence" (however misguided) I feel pretty alienated from it and I wanted any readers to know I am carrying on the arc of this blog in another blog on Word Press called, New to North Adams. I'm reluctant to make any predictions about how this all will go but it seemed to me that without saying what needed to be said there was little to no hope of my every returning to write here.

Unless you are married to a man, you have no right to intrude on his relationships. If you have victimized someone, you lose the right of the normal expectations that accompany whatever relationship you poisoned that way.

Lord knows I love my mother and I respect her for what she's done for me and the efforts she has made to grow over her lifetime. I'm grateful that we've made our peace and I will always defend her dignity. I mourn for the wounds she suffered and wish her life had been easier. I'm sure there is even some love left stashed somewhere for my sister but after decades of unkindness, it is only natural that my feelings for them are somewhat weak. No matter what, having been betrayed by my own kindness so many times with them, I would be a fool to let it put my life at risk now. And regardless of what happens in Victoria, I will stay in New England with my husband. Also regardless of what ex-girlfriends or extended family may think, do or say, the debts of past relationships are irrelevant now. I release it all.

I may be back to write - it may dwindle away. Life is full of surprises. No matter which way it goes, I want you to know I have enjoyed writing to you and wish you a life full of comfort and joy. Most of all, I wish for you the kind of marriage that makes forming a true family possible - a solid and enduring love to make a safe and welcoming place in the world for your heart and soul. Having finally found that love in my own life - it seems anything but ordinary.

Home.

Some years ago, in my sophomore year of college, I took a class on myth. For one assignment, we were asked to write about a classical myth that had parallels in our own lives. At the time, I was still in the final stages of a serious, live-in relationship with the man in Victoria whom, I assumed, I would one day marry. I was dividing my time between Victoria, where he lived with my things, and Ottawa, where I rented a room and shared a house with a woman and her 10 year-old son and went to school. It was a pretty long commute. For that particular class assignment, I chose to write about Persephone. I wrote about how, when the seasons changed, I would return to the darkness of the Pacific Northwest and the rainforest, then - when they changed again, I would be free to come home to myself and my education. As the year turned, circumstance removed my from my home, plunged me into darkness and then, in due time, allowed me to return to my home again - but never forever. Of course, I knew Persephone was longing to return to the home where her mother lived and where her house and goods were stored. My mother, my family and my material possessions were all in Victoria. I knew her Persephone’s husband had abducted her and taken her to live far away from anything familiar but to me, so in that way, we were more a mirror than a parallel but for me, having to leave my independent life and go back to the life of material privilege, family, old friends and familiar places all rooted in that dark, wet, grey and green setting, was like having to return to the underworld. This was so because in Victoria, I was not respected for my intellect. I was not a writer but rather the eccentric partner of a man from the old boy network. I was an active volunteer at the local contemporary gallery, a singer in a chamber choir, a shopper, a patron of the nicer restaurants in town, my mother’s driver, my sister’s babysitter, my friend’s confident. I could walk along the ocean and drive my car up island to see the forests, but I could not be myself. I was a dilettante, not a whole person - I felt like I had my whole family and all their expectations, (which were mostly negative) strapped to my back. In my senior year of college, I left for school as usual but when the summer came, I looked at the horizon and said no. I never went back, I abandoned my belongings, said goodbye to the man and started over. The spell had been broken and, beginning a life I could lead myself, as myself, I was “home.” It didn’t matter that I had nothing to my name and nobody who had known me for more than a few years, half-time. It didn’t matter that I was poor and would need to struggle to make a living for the next ten years, (Even though, I admit, it was much worse than I anticipated, I expected it and chose the path deliberately.) What mattered was I was fully able to be my whole self and not the parcel of expectations and stereotypical roles doled out to me in my “home town.” Despite the fact that I grew up there, Victoria had always felt like a place to which I had been carried off against my will, abducted into the darkness of a long, rain forest winter with no snow and no sun, entirely without my consent. To some degree it was true, my family moved to Victoria when I was ten years old. We moved from the East, Fredericton and then Montreal, where it snows in winter and the sun reflects off the snow turning everything blue, white and gold and where it is hot in the summer, which rarely happens in Victoria. But the people were different in both places as well. Somber and soft spoken in the west, they were serene on the surface but chilly underneath. Compared to the outspoken warmth (for good or ill) in the east, it was alienating to be amongst them. I was never quiet enough, never discreet enough, never unruffled enough about anything to really fit in. People I knew, thinking they were helping me, applied a slow and steady pressure, trying to get me to be quieter, more acquiescent, more accepting of life as it was and less likely to make waves. They were crushing the life out of me. What I found in Ottawa was the edge of myself. Foolishly, I became attached to a man who had similar traits to those of Victorians and spent the next seven years working that out. In part, at the time, I had the words of a friend in Victoria ringing in my head. She told me, whatever I had done, whatever I felt I had done wrong or whomever I had hurt, it would take me an equal number of years of my life to get over it - to repay it. I went from one bad spouse to the other, the latter in the throes of a serious chronic disease, and cared for him until my penance was done. At the end of that time, I began living a life of my own. The money still wasn’t there but if I paid careful attention to the details, lived very frugally and made use of all my resources, I found I could make a modest living as a writer and travel for part of the year, every year. I allowed myself to like what I liked, to do what I wanted to do and just to breathe. It felt like someone had removed tight iron bands from around my body. Then there was Austin. I found a place I thought could be the home of my heart and began another Persephone cycle. Thank goodness for a bad lover. Had the man I thought I cared for in Austin, turned out to be true, I would still be living Persephone’s story. As it was, Austin was a lovely place where I was miserably unhappy in my personal life. It could have been worked out, like so many Canadians, I might have become a snowbird, spending half the year in Canada and half in Texas but I thought my heart was broken and spent the latter quarter of 2011 figuring out what I could do to mend it. My friends advised flirtation. All of them did. I immersed myself in Ottawa, determined to make the city work for me, and flirted online. I restricted myself to men from Ottawa or Austin (so I wouldn’t feel so heartbroken at the loss) but, life intervened, as it so often does, and I found myself talking to a man from Massachusetts. At first, I assumed I could control the situation. After all, it might be nice to have a short-term relationship with someone who was at least within driving distance. We exchanged hundreds of emails. We spent time on the phone, we planned a visit. It was pleasant and I felt fairly certain it would consolidate the life I had planned, as planned. I thought I could manage it under my own terms. I thought it would be a light affair, something fun while I was working things out. I looked forward to visits and letters and romantic weekends. I thought I could keep it casual. Four months later, I knew I needed to spend the rest of my life with this man, I agonized over what to do, thinking it unlikely that he felt the same way. Seven months later, in the town where he lives, we wed. Just a few weeks ago, I was looking out the window toward some of the hills in the Berkshires and thinking about how unfamiliar the place still feels on many levels. The weather is different. All of my things are still in storage. There are plenty of adjustments to be made. I looked at the sun coming over the mountains and tried to take it in as home. It didn’t really settle. I love our loft and now, this morning, when I look out the window at the cloud and the rain settling in for the day, I see the ordinariness that has become my home, I have been gone long enough now that anything else is unfamiliar. Home, for me, is rooted in the man sleeping in the bedroom, waiting for me to awaken him to another day. Home is his smile in the morning. It is our conversations in the car. Home is dinner cooked for both of us together. In the feeling of his arms around me, the scent of his shirts, the way he takes my hand right before we eat dinner every night and says something sweet - without fail. Home is the two of us, alone. My marriage has changed and deepened my definition of home. Home is where I am loved for myself and left as myself. He makes no effort to change me. Home is where he understands my needs and struggles without my saying so, it is our marriage bed, it is our kitchen, it is moving the furniture and shopping for a washer and dryer, it is the perfunctory phone call and people from the community invited over for tea. And I ask myself, “would I be as happy with him if we were in Victoria?” I cannot imagine I would, but that is only partly based on location. He and I would never choose to live on an island with no way off. He could not live the life demanded of him there any more than I could. Then again, it doesn’t have to be here. I would be with him anywhere he truly wanted to be. We would arrive, I would look around me and I would begin the process of making “home” because of course, as long as he is there, it would be home. It would be an adventure and welcome because it is the two of us together. It is always the two of us together, seeing the world as it turns. I am astonished at how deep the connection has become, I am grateful every day for this union of souls and more grateful for how interesting he is, how everything about him is deep and rich and new to me in so many ways and yet entirely familiar, exactly as it should be. He is everything I hoped for in a mate and those things I had forgotten to hope for but always wanted anyway? He is all of them too. Geography is dependent on him. The world is home, as long as he is in it.

Sea Change

Time has wrought it's wear on me and I have changed. Like most people, Steven thinks the phrase, "Sea Change" refers to a dramatic change. It doesn't. The phrase is drawn from a poem by Shakespeare, written as a song for Ariel in the Tempest, the relevant stanza goes like this: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell. See? He has not changed and yet he has. Where he was flesh and blood and bone, he is now made of treasures of the sea, coral, pearls - nothing faded, he is recognizable but he is now made of different stuff, valuable stuff, stuff wrought not by the man himself but by the sea. His body has become something different altogether and his soul? Who knows where that is, it is not the point. We look at others from the outside in. We see the value in them as people or we don't see. The thing is, nothing from the outside in, can be lost, only altered in perception or value or substance even - changed but not changed. Sometimes I feel as though I am living in a kind of afterlife. Stephanie-then resembles Stephanie-now. Lord knows she's built on the same scaffolding, the same foundation but she is not as she was. I am something new. I am something new that would be strange to those who knew me before. I look like a model of myself with silver hair instead of brown. I lapse into the same faults and foibles often enough but I am altered. Stephanie-then has been eaten away by a soft yet persistent tide and in her place is Stephanie-now. Made of the stuff of this place, no longer from the places that came before. I loved before, as I could love. My capacity for it was different than it is now. I wanted escape, wanted some ease and some beauty to take in and indulge myself with its wonders. Now, I want something else - connection, endurance, belonging. I want to know a person and a place completely. And I want to live in the midst of it, even when I find it ugly, alien or cold. I want to be clear, transparent, I want to be known and seen - no longer only an observer. And I am married. My husband's life is my own. He is, whether he likes it or not, the center of my world and I know he will remain in that place for the rest of my life. I have changed. Changed from angry, solitary, defensive and impulsive to a reflective, responsive, if strong willed, wife. I am Steven's wife. And I feel as though it is what I always yearned to be. (even when I didn't know he was there.) I have undergone a sea change. Single woman, daughter, maiden, friend and sometime lover to Wife. Anyone who has been there understands exactly what I mean. Meaning has come into my life and now, I am made of different stuff, pearls and coral, honey and amber, perfume and detergent - I am no longer only Stephanie, I am Steven's wife.

Reposted from just after my husband's first visit. (When we were first courting.)

It's late or it's early, take your pick. The neighbor decided to have a 4 am heart to heart on her balcony and woke me up. She's gone to sleep now and I'm still awake. So my thoughts turn to all the unresolved aspects of life on the table in front of me right now.

Basically all of it.

Work has been busy and people have been slow to pay, it makes my life hard. I've been thinking about conventional jobs more and more lately but maybe more to the point, thinking about how it would be nice to have all the pieces in the same place for a change.

My personal life and my work life is now almost all in the same time zone, having it within daily commuting distance would be a significant improvement. It hasn't been that way for the last four years.

I guess I'm living an increasingly typical conundrum. You meet someone online and things develop. I suppose it would be nice if you could contain that to one place, nice if you can keep the job in the same place as the beloved but life goes where it will and in my experience, since 1995 anyway, it has seldom settled that easily.

So this year, fresh on the heels of having my heart broken, I decided to take charge of that issue for myself and to at least make it clear that if I were open to starting something with a new man in my life he would have to be living in one of two places before he so much as talked to me. Those places were, Austin or Ottawa - that's it, that's all. No more stretching myself into another time zone for another job or another person, enough is enough. If you don't live where I live or at the very least, I decided, in the city I love enough to make an effort to get to for at least four months a year, don't talk to me. Just don't. And while I'm on the subject, no motorcycles and no smokers.

I should have been warned by the first two guys who contacted me, a guy with a motorcycle and one who was quitting smoking. Anyway - I didn't notice a trend and for whatever reason, it didn't work.

By the way, I did not willingly stop caring about the original Texan, in fact part of this was to force myself to stop thinking about him. He committed to another woman and cheated with a third, there was no way I could stay. He made it impossible to be with him but I thought I still loved him so I also made it clear that whatever might happen, would happen very slowly, it would not be likely to be a passionate union but rather the companionable type of affair two people have when they are dealing with life, have had their great big love and now just want to be sane and sensible, have a pleasant companion and keep everything in proportion.

A moderate, quiet, friendly dating relationship was what I was after. Seemed reasonable at the time. All of this is possible because, if you are feeling blue and think dating might be an answer, you can go to a site like OK Cupid and set up a profile that is absolutely specific in your needs, wants and expectations, right down to the most minute detail, including neighborhood, favorite color, and specific sexual tastes, if you're so inclined. My friends have done it, I decided to give it a try. Thought it might cheer me up. What they don't tell you is that if you are curious about the random matches their program throws your way and you open up the profile attached to them, it is possible for the person whose profile you peruse, just out of curiosity, to see that you looked at it and then look at yours in return. I was unaware of this aspect of the site and amused myself with looking at every really good match they threw my way regardless of location.

There are a lot of interesting people out there and looking is fun. Anyway, that turned out to be either a really good idea or a really bad one depending on your perspective.

One of my random matches, one I thought was interesting, one whose profile I had explored and then left without saying a word to him? Well, he saw me and he talked to me and everything changed from there. I dismissed him as soon as I realized he was from the states and not from Austin. Granted, he's within a day's drive, much closer to me than the Austin man ever was but not in my preferred environment, not in either one of them. But he was smart, funny, charming and really beguiling, there's no other word for it and whenever I spoke with him, I felt much better about everything in life afterwards, consistently better - happy even.

So here I am. It's 5:30 in the morning and I am lying awake when I really need to be asleep, thinking about whether or not I can apply for the perfect job in a a place I never even considered as an option because there is a perfect job for me there that just happened to open up last week and there is this man and in case you haven't already guessed it, my heart's center of gravity that way has quite unexpectedly shifted from Austin to the Berkshires.

I suppose this proves that anything is possible. And yes, he's been to visit me here, the chemistry is real and intense, more intense in person than remotely. I'm planning to visit him there and it's fair to say, if we haven't already fallen in love, we are well on our way.

How did it happen? I was careful, I thought I covered all possibilities, I thought my case was air tight and my intentions firm but life slips in. It doesn't matter how much you try to seal up all the cracks and openings, life gets through anyhow and as cliched as it is to say this, people are unique. I'm in Ottawa and still love Texas very much but two things matter more than Texas, meaningful work (which can be done anywhere, I'm learning that) and the right person with whom to share a life, they can only be found wherever they are.

Maybe that right person isn't where I expected to find them but it does feel to me, a little more each day that he is exactly who I always wanted him to be. He found me, he followed his feelings and he listened to me, to who I am not to an image of something he was trying to make up - I guess that makes more of a difference than I thought. And he didn't change himself to suit me, his experience, his beliefs, he knew they matched mine before he ever said a word. (I was pretty explicit and not surprisingly, exhaustive in the details of what I felt I needed in a relationship, what was important to me and furthermore, when there was any doubt, he asked.) I sleep better when he's around So it turns out my right person might have been someone I never expected living somewhere somewhere completely unknown, unexplored, unsuspected, I guess it's lucky for me he had his priorities straight even if mine were still a little jumbled. I'm happier when he's around. Now I just need to learn to go with the flow. More yoga please. 4/17/11

Added January 6, 2012:
I went to visit him on May 13, 2011 - never left.
We married on September 21, 2011.
Every day since has been happier than any day before.

This is how real love finds you, effortlessly, when you're not expecting it and so powerfully, you don't need to pull toward it. It pulls you.

moving day.

In the time between now and when I began this blog so much has changed, if I read it in a novel, I'm not sure I'd have believed it. Just goes to show you, anything can happen. I live in Massachusetts with my husband now. He's not the same man I thought I loved at this time last year. He's a better man in every way that counts. He tells me the truth and seems to be interested in understanding and supporting me more than using me for fun. There's no point going on and on about it, I've posted about him before and was busted for it by his sister and a former girlfriend. But I like to be candid here and since I've shut this blog up tight (you have to have asked me to read it if you're seeing this) I can repost the original post about him. I wrote the next post when I knew we were falling in love. Now that we're married, I no longer have to be ashamed for being presumptuous. I knew from very early on that Steven was "The One." I had hoped others were but where there was hope in the past, this was inevitable. It felt as though it had a life of its own. I am only a part of this love, a part of this marriage. I am not constructing it as I go, I'm not in control and finally, I've discovered, that is the difference between real love and plain old desire.

How to show restraint

Right now, right this very minute, I am fighting the impulse to gush publicly about my new husband. I want to tell everyone how fantastic he is, how smart, how kind, how surprising, how talented, how tasteful, how funny, how considerate, how sweet, how tender, how strong and how handsome he is - all the things that make me happier by the day.

 I find myself caught by surprise by the sight of his broad shoulders or a glimpse of his hand on my arm in bed and how it's made a hundred times better by seeing the wedding ring on his finger and remembering how it was something he wanted more than I did. I didn't care if we had rings or not but it mattered to him, his ring matters to him.

 It makes me pause and catch my breath to realize this wonderful man is, as much as this is true of anyone with anyone else, mine. He belongs with me - by choice. I am the luckiest woman in the world and the rash and crazy thing I did a few months back? Getting on that train a month early, on a day's notice, without any idea of how I'd manage the trip?

Smartest thing I ever, ever did.

By far, hands down, no question, the single smartest decision of my entire life.

If I have learned anything in my life it's this: FOLLOW YOUR HEART.

 Forget money, forget convention, forget common sense and do what your heart tells you to do, it's right.

 It's surprisingly hard to keep this stuff to myself. My husband is easily embarrassed by too much attention so he doesn't want to hear me trumpeting to anyone and everyone about how wonderful he is and how happy we are and let's face it, nobody's friends want to hear anyone going on about being crazy in love. At best, it's boring and at worst, it rubs salt into the wounds of those who aren't so happy in their love lives or their lives in general.

 It's also pretty interesting to see people react to this change in my life. I have a cousin who has, since she reached adulthood, been pretty horrible to me behind my back. Generally speaking, I've ignored it. She's made up crazy stories and generally done all she can to alienate me from my Mother's family. Not that alienating me from my mother's family required a lot of effort - I was already more than halfway there.

Anyway, the reasons for this are unimportant I suppose, water under the bridge - who cares? Actually, I'm not even sure I know but it is what it is. Apparently she has been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness - that can't be easy and I am grateful my life path hasn't taken me down that road.

 To my great surprise, one day on Facebook I came across a comment she made about my marriage. She commented to another Aunt that she had found out about my marriage and wondered if my mother knew. She then said "I guess I'm the cougar now." That was pretty insulting, especially since I've never pursued younger men, and I have turned all of them down based on age but for one big mistake - and that's long over.

(My husband, although you'd never know it, is ten years my senior - the only reason I have ever wished he was younger was when I realized the human lifespan is limited and women tend to live longer than men. Now that I've finally found him, the thought of a day without him is unbearable.)

Last night I had to comment on my cousin's actions, I couldn't help myself. It's one thing to be unkind about me behind my back but to take my mother's hard-won dignity, which is already in pretty short supply and fairly fragile - well, I couldn't stay silent about that.

 Marriage has changed me. It has changed me more than love ever did, maybe more than love ever could. It has enabled me to feel secure enough to be emotionally brave. It has taken the fear away. I'm stronger, happier, more secure. It's changed my life. Now if I could only figure out how to stop wanting to talk about it.

More Changes

It's surprising to me how much changes after marriage. Feeling more secure in one's relationship can't help but have a positive effect. I wake up happy every morning. Even if I've had a night full of nightmares, which sometimes still happens, (I'm making some pretty big adjustments after all) I'm happy to see his face, happy to know his affection is not up for negotiation, just basically happy. There are some other things though, things that surprise me and not always happily. Adjusting to a new kitchen, new methods of cooking and new supplies of food - I'm not much liking that at all. I just finished a dinner that was entirely unsatisfying. Makes me grumpy to think I spent all that time cooking and eating this stuff with no dessert to make up for how entirely uninspired and unpalatable (to me) it was. I ate it because it was fuel, nothing more, nothing less. I tried to cook pork in a way that would have rendered it delicious in Ottawa. I put it in the oven and slow-cooked it for nearly two hours. Slashed the fatty areas and threaded them with garlic, put it on a bed of mushrooms and onions, threw in some peppers and sweet potatoes and covered the whole thing with tomatoes, added some cider vinegar to cook things down and a little olive oil in case the pork wasn't fatty enough (which is often the case these days unless you buy a heritage breed) it should have all melted together and gotten delicious. It didn't. I don't know if it's because of the convection oven or just because whatever took me two hours in Ottawa takes four hours here but it was undercooked, the flavors did not blend and it was just plain - yuck. I used to be good at this. People think I'm still good at this and that's one of the worst parts; everything I make smells delicious and it is usually such a huge disappointment when I taste it - it's just frustrating and embarrassing too. How is it possible that I'm going through this stage? It's like I've never cooked before and that's just not so. My husband, Gd bless him, ate it anyway and said it was just fine. I ate it and ate the salad, made with bitter lettuce that I do not like and am now resentful because I've nourished myself with stuff that was a waste of the calories if you ask me and there's nothing to show for it and nothing to make up for it either. And it instantly gave me gas. This seems to be the case on a fairly regular basis. I am making my way through organic, local foodstuffs. I am very pleased to shop local. I am happy to be able to provide nourishing meals to my husband and save him some time in the process but if you'd asked me to trade every bite of tonight's substandard meal for one decent piece of chocolate cake? No contest. Now the rest of the bitter little salad sits at my elbow waiting to be consumed. I've had my quinoa, I've eaten my vegetables - what did I do to deserve this? Granted, I've lost weight and I feel better for eating healthy and I suppose I will eventually learn how to use all these things - gluten free this, whole grain everything, quinoa and millet (which, granted, I like when he makes it) but I am never going to like this bitter lettuce and right now - well, I'm just grumpy. I wonder if all brides go through this? Seems as though everything domestic that came so easily to me on my own needs to be reassessed and tailored to fit a new reality. I know it's all good but it's not always a pleasure. I love my new life but I do miss the pleasure I used to get from cooking and eating delicious food. I miss my identity as a good cook, I miss chocolate chip cookies (yes, made with white flour) and I miss knowing for sure that anything I put on the table is going to taste just as good as it smells.

The New Normal

I've closed this blog to anyone who isn't invited to read it. At first, I thought doing this would feel limiting. In fact, it has made me feel like writing more regularly. In the time since I last wrote, one of my boyfriend's former girlfriends, sought out this blog and used it to embarrass me. Truth is, I was forming a habit of saying too much. The way I saw it, online I am nobody - a random entity with a random name that would not arouse interest from anyone unless I specifically directed them here. The truth is, people are curious and will use whatever they find, whenever they find it if they feel wounded by circumstance or by someone else - anyway, it's just better not to have my life open to those who would do me harm. (and shockingly, they are out there. Wish I'd never learned that.) So, there's news and plenty of it. I've married a man in New England and so, I suppose, everything has changed. I wake up in the morning every day now with this new and precious aspect of my life firmly in place. I know, private or not, he doesn't want me to elaborate on our relationship in print but marriage is what it is and we have married. Maybe that's enough said, right there. So from here on, this blog is private. If I don't know you, you're not here and I am not a random cipher. That's going to take a bit of getting used to. For now, I think I'll go back to the bedroom and wake my new husband to start our day.

Ten Years After

Here we are, September 11, 2011. It's funny how we think not very much in our lives changes from day to day and yet when you look back over a decade, everything changes. Nothing is the same at all. Ten years ago I was living in Toronto. I was just starting mt second year of grad school and was still involved with Jesse, who still had his original kidney transplant. I was volunteering for the Toronto International Film Festival. I had never been to Texas, had never written a blog, never heard of Facebook and as far as I knew North Adams did not exist. I was on the verge of a lot of unhappiness but I didn't know that then. I was in an abusive relationship, that was becoming clear. We seem to think waking up is something we do suddenly and irrevocably. But it's not. Life seems to me to be a series of times when we are awake and times when we fall back into a deep and dangerous slumber. The lessons I learned from 9/11? Everything can change in a heartbeat - and it often does. I have a limited time on earth. Love should not be a chore. Leaving a place when things get difficult is about the worst thing you can do. Staying with a person after you know things have gone sour may be the only thing that is more destructive. I am tougher than I think. As I listen to the water in the flood channel behind the mill and watch the sky brighten, I can't help but think of all the people who have come and gone from my life and be grateful for those who are here and those who have passed through. I hope someday to be remembered fondly - I think that's about all you can ask.

Predictable horrors.

The LA Times published a piece this morning stating that terrorist organizations are now considering the surgical implantation of explosive devices into their agents in order to thwart the increasingly stringent security measures employed in American airports.

While I know, logically, that all terrorist bombers are, by definition, disposable people and that their intention is to destroy whatever they can and die in the process, it still creates a visceral disgust in me to hear that anyone would consider degrading human life to such a degree.

It's stomach turning.

Once the nausea passes though, you have to ask yourself what all of this means. In my lifetime I've watched the attitude of nations change from a sensible assumption that most people are relatively innocuous and those that aren't benefit by being treated with respect and kindness when they cross the border into a "civilized" nation to an attitude of absolute terror based on the assumption that most people are monsters just waiting to pounce and we should all be suspicious and terrified of each other at all times, in all ways and do whatever we can to be sure that we stamp hard on everyone we meet to be sure all the spine is squished right out of them just in case they might decide to act on what we assume is their natural, evil disposition.

Am I the only one who finds this discouraging?

Am I the only one who notices that it seems to be making things much, much worse?

The thing is, there are people, like me, who feel so wounded and offended by negative assumptions and false allegations that they will live up to those assumptions just to prove a point.

When I was a teenager, my father told everyone I was stupid. They believed it, I believed it and I acted on it. I was Queen Airhead, I was frivolous, mindless and devoid of ambition, then one day I woke up. I went away to school and came back to town loaded down with accolades and awards, nationally published, on the Dean's list, you name it.

It gave me nothing but pleasure to see how stupid people felt to have misjudged me as they did. Of course, I never bothered with them again, why would I? But it was nice to be right for that moment.

However, a terrorist is not a misjudged teenaged girl. When you put a terrorist in that position, they'll prove you right and die doing it - that article in today's LA Times proves that just as it proves one other critically important thing: the object of terrorism is to waste the time, resources and energy of your enemy on fear. They're succeeding.

Canada Day

Been a while since I've posted. Of course there are reasons, there are always reasons but it's Canada Day and it seems to me that even if I weren't revving up the creative engines again, the day would call for an entry.

Somewhere around 200 years ago, a bunch of Americans decided the independence thing wasn't going so well. They looked north and saw a vast open expanse of rocks and trees and snow they could reclaim for England and there, they could live as the English did with a class system and a King and the force of the British Empire behind them both economically and militarily. For a while there were struggles about it between the "sensible" Canadians who knew Democracy could never work and the upstart revolutionaries living out their nutso ideas of equality and civil rights in the south. Maybe some of them thought they'd take the south back. They were wrong about that but I hear they made a pretty good stab at it, even managing to burn down the Capitol and the White House - they were that pissed off.

If you don't believe me about that, look here or, if you'd like to hear about it in song, here

Really. Canadians did that - cause they weren't too big on the whole freedom thing. Still aren't.

Anyhow. Canada is my country and today is its day so - what to say about that?

We have lots of open space, lots of water and ice. If you want to experiment with mixed drinks, Canada seems like a pretty good place to do that.

We're polite but not actually friendly, we'd appreciate it if you'd keep the friendly stuff below the 49th parallel. As a group, we seem to have thought George Bush (both incarnations) was a pretty good idea since we've re-elected Robo-George three or four times now and in Canada that gives him as much power as the Queen in 1800. (he's about that weird too) What makes that safe is the fact that the population of Canada is about the same as Texas and with a population that size you can be completely out-of your-mind-Conservative and it doesn't change much in the scheme of things.

We make pretty good music. Arcade Fire and The New Pornographers are from Canada, so are Stars, Final Fantasy and, to be fair, Celine Dion and Justin Bieber (sorry about that, really.)

We produce terrible, inscrutable films that make people feel smart and superior (see Atom Egoyan) and endure six month winters and more cowboy hats than Texas, Colorado and Wyoming put together. We have chuck wagon races and Vancouver (which pretends the rest of the country does not exist) we also have creton (look it up - too gross to describe) and poutine, (similarly disgusting but mandatory) and tourtiere which is actually pretty good and makes salad much more desirable than usual.

Some of us have British accents, even after 6 generations or more. Really. We are stubborn and slow slow slow. Daily newspapers feel they need a two or three week lead, at least to produce a feature.

We don't like enthusiasm and we think the internet is moving way too fast.

So happy birthday Canada. Hope everyone there is enjoying the day. I'll raise a glass of sparkling water to the great white north and plan to see a baseball game and fireworks in small town America while I think about degrees of liberty and freedom from creton.

River

The river here is encased in concrete. At first I thought it was just the river near the mills but it's not. It's the whole thing all the way through town and into the next town. The result is, Adams and North Adams don't suffer from flooding. There's just no way the river can get out of the chute.

But it feels odd. It makes me feel like I want to take a sledgehammer and hammer it free.

Pity for deadly things - a common enough flaw and right now, certainly one I am at risk of adopting.

Stories to tell that can't be told. Always the hardest thing.

Morning

Still raining in Massachusetts. Looks like it might be another of those summers like the first time I visited when it just doesn't stop raining at all. Cold all the time too.

He asked me this morning, if I was homesick. Lord, how I hate questions like that. They never mean what they ask. I know I'm difficult, I wake up alert and he hasn't seen the half of it -

Sometimes I really do think I am just way too much of everything for anyone, ever.

Supper

Here I am in a small town in Massachusetts. Seems like it will never stop raining. Doesn't bother me as it would in Victoria or Ottawa, probably because I'm not alone.

There's been very little work done on family dynamics as they apply to the eldest daughter in a dysfunctional family. Many of us, it seems to me, end up alone. There's a certain amount of unspoken pressure to take on the role of family matriarch and carry the load.

It's a tradition in my family, one I've bucked and not entirely successfully.

Arriving here was a shock, now settling in for a while, I'm noticing things about myself I never noticed before; some of them pretty alarming.

I've been groomed to be alone and to be the adjunct member of a family circle, trained to help, to be the extra maternal figure who steps in with the kids but who has no real life of her own. Ok, I'm a writer, mostly, and I do have my own identity but that identity is a little hollowed out when I'm by myself and by myself is what I've been for a long time now. (with obvious and prolonged breaks to take on mostly sacrificial roles with men)

Now I'm here. Things are different. This man is self-sufficient and I have work to do so I get down to doing it but at the same time I find myself drawn to the kitchen to cook.

There's a chicken in the oven, rubbed with garlic and butter, stuffed with millet,onions and garlic, flavored with unfamiliar spices and as soon as the tastes started coming together, side dishes started suggesting themselves; mashed potatoes, of course because that's what one eats with roast chicken but there are apples in balsamic vinegar in the oven too - to echo the french idea of heaven and earth, there's a small, simple green salad in the offing - all it needs is a bottle of dry, white wine and you have an actual meal - one I would order in a restaurant. Way too much food and too elaborate for a Tuesday.

But I'm a different person here. I wake up at 5:30 and write for an hour or more before getting on with the day and there is this other person....

I hardly know what to make of it but one thing I do know - we're not in maiden Aunt territory anymore.

Privacy and Life

Where does one end and the other begin?

There is someone new in my life. He takes up a pretty big space in my thoughts. It's hard to write around him but he is much more private than I am and wishes to maintain it.

In the past that has meant I have not written. It cannot mean that anymore.

Being involved with a writer means, to a certain extent, living with some public edge. It's like a live/work space. Sure there are private areas but there is overlap. Fact is, I write about intimate, domestic things here and for the moment anyway, my intimate domestic situation has changed.

In Ottawa, I'm alone. I live in my little space, do my little work and carry on. It was getting to the point where it was a little crazy making. Here was this person, 6 hours away, I could talk to him, sure, but it's not the same as spending time together, seeing if you're compatible in day to day life.

So I went to him.

He's got his own stuff going on. But it's not the same as my stuff. Anyway, I need to be out of the closet about this - about him, cause at the moment, he's at the center of my life. I'm at his house and it will be that way for a month, more or less.

Chances are good, the next few entries will be about things I notice in resuming the day to day routine of a relationship.

This morning I told him he was "my mother's revenge." It's true. He reminds me, gently and kindly, to do all the things my mother reminds me to do. Put the iron pills where you'll remember to take them, where you'll see them every day, make lists, put the keys on a hook by the door - all that stuff. And because it's coming from him and not from my mother, I really can't roll my eyes and sigh and say, "whatever." I have to give it space and respect and nine times out of ten, he's right.

My mother already loves him and they've never even met.

Now if I could only figure out how to get enough sleep.

Morning

The sun woke up and so did I.

Getting my bearings in a new place means inviting light in, almost invariably, and this is no different. Here I am in a new place, trying to maintain someone else's privacy and, if anything, even more aware of the need and the value of being as true to myself and as honest on the page as possible.

After all, if I can't do it in this limited forum then what chance does my poetry have? It suffered so much for that while I was in another relationship - won't go there again.

It is just after 6:00 am. I've made a little spot in the wide, brick sill of one of these windows so I can sit and write and look out at the river, such as it is.

The river here has been lined in concrete, walls raised, 400 per cent over its natural walls, it is a wide, shallow basin, like a drain for the water of the river that really should be touching the soil. But it still does make that lovely sound.

It's interesting to me how two people can be so dissimilar and yet so complimentary. I'm very glad to be here, there's lots to do, lots that needs my doing it.

In all likelihood, I should leave it at that for now and go back to bed for a while which is what I'll do.