love poem

This was sent courtesy of my friend Tim, who has all the best poems. Beautiful, huh?


i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart)

i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)

i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

Anxiety

I have anxiety. I found a diagnosis once on the Internet -- I think it said situational panic anxiety. Anyway, anxiety SUCKS. It's sucky and awful. And incredibly common.

I think hormones and heredity are involved. I wish I had time to study it more.

Anyway, a LOT of women suffer from it. I'd bet the numbers, if we could get accurate ones, would be astonishing.

I am worried that mine is aging me from the inside out. My heart starts pounding, my mouth goes dry, and I feel this sense of total despair. Sometimes it is actual panic, and I can't exactly control my actions from there. If the anxiety was that someone was breaking into my car, there would be nothing stopping me from running out into the parking lot. (It's never anything like that--just needed a random example.) I'm too embarrassed to say what my anxiety tends to be about.

Therein lies the rub. It's EMBARRASSING. It's like erectile dysfunction. Genital cosmetic surgery. Halitosis or excessive armpit sweating. Inverted nipples. Fetishes.

We humans, especially women, are very persnickety when it comes to this image stuff. How I perceive myself, how others perceive me, how I wish to be perceived, how I dread being perceived, etc... I am smart, kind, self-deprecating, fun, easy-going, loving. That's my "how I wish to be perceived." How I perceive myself is a bit harsher. How I dread being perceived I can't even bring myself to type.

So, now 20 posts later or whatever, I have gotten back to the reasons for the title of this blog. I came up with the title on the spot, without thinking about it. Which is how all the greatest stuff comes to be, in my life anyway. So, because of my anxiety -- which is really running on high these days like an air conditioner in August -- I have to tell myself constantly to breathe. And when I do yoga, and really focus on breathing for an hour at a stretch, I feel so, so much better. I do not have anxiety when I'm doing yoga. And that is a lovely, lovely thing. You can't imagine. Or maybe you can.

Mom's Heartbreaking Metaphor Dream

My mother had a dream last night. My dad was still alive. She and he were driving and she had to go somewhere and he had to go somewhere different, so they decided to go separately. They stopped the car and she got out. She ended up crossing a highway meridian and going to the other side, where the traffic was going in the opposite direction. She started walking back along the highway and realized there were no cars ahead of her. The road was completely empty. She realized she'd made a mistake, but it was too late to do anything about it.

She told me and I cried.

hard boiled eggs and wet jeans with ashes

Whenever I eat hard-boiled eggs, which I often do, I end up nearly choking to death. Why? I use them as a fill-in food. At the moment, my top, fill-in foods are hard-boiled eggs, nuts (peanuts or tamari roasted almonds), Kathie's Kitchen seasoned pumpkin seeds, and mozzarella cheese sticks. My diet is made up primarily of fill-in foods because I tend not to eat meals. I eat too much and get too full when I eat meals. And today I am 42. Who wants to be fat and forty-two?

So these near-Heimlich-maneuver episodes are probably because I eat the eggs too fast, because I'm starving by the time I go get one. I just did it again about half an hour ago. It's like an eating disorder. I was in pain and mildly freaking out. I followed it with a cheese stick, which made matters worse, and I almost stood up and just impaled myself on the back of my office chair.

Change gears. I promised someone I would write about the ash scattering. It was a cloudy, almost stormy day. It did rain on our way back in on the boat. My son was astonishingly cuddly and devoted to me the whole trip. He'll never say anything to let you know, but he's got a pretty sensitive radar. He knew exactly what was going on inside of me.

I feel bad about one thing. I didn't hug my mom when she was sitting by herself crying. I was talking, laughing, holding it together with my relatives. I did get up and sit next to her after a while, but that was all I could do.

So we got to this special spot, named by his brothers, "Roy's rock." It's a rock formation that's deep down at the bottom of the Sound and apparently their dad, who I called Pop-pop, discovered it long ago as a great fishing spot. I went down below and got the special scattering urn, untied the twisty tie that cinched the plastic bag inside and, with my mom and my son holding my jacket from the back (choking me a little actually), so I wouldn't fall in, I leaned off the swim deck at the back of the boat and poured out the ashes of my dad's body. Roy's body. Everyone else threw in a single flower. That was a nice touch. Thanks, PBH. And so, as life goes, it wasn't exactly a movie-perfect scene.

The ashes kept getting caught in the wind and blowing back all over me, the waves were pretty high, and ended up crashing over my legs, soaking my jeans, and it took me a long time to get it all poured out and I finally, very unromantically, had to jerk and jiggle and eventually just pull out the damn plastic bag and shake it till it was empty.

I was crying the whole time, so my face was all wet, my jeans were all wet, my jacket was up around my neck from my son and mother's attempts to keep me from going overboard, and it was cold. When I was done, I closed up the pretty urn, and I hugged my mom, my aunt and uncle, cousin, other uncle, my son, and the friend who was captaining the boat. Most of us were crying.

Then we headed back in. My son had a birthday party, I had a wine dinner to get to, and life just kept on. I'm still breathing.

Today is my birthday and I miss him like crazy right now. It's so true, what people say and what you hear in song lyrics. I'd give anything to have him back just tonight, just to have him sitting next to me at my birthday dinner. Not him sick and in pain, but him smiling and laughing and healthy -- his nose sunburned from a day on his boat.

Breathe.

Scattering

On Saturday, we are taking my dad's boat out to his favorite spot and scattering his ashes. I have the ashes in my bedroom. The funeral home put them in a weird, black container and when I went to pick them up, I saw that it was going to be very awkward to try to do any kind of scattering. They told me theyhad a special, "scatter urn," that would be another couple hundred bucks. What a business that is. There I am, holding the remains of a man I loved to the end of the earth, trying to control myself so I didn't start blubbering. Not exactly in a position to say, "Do you have anything cheaper?" So I left his remains there again and they transferred the ashes into this new one.

So nowthat's on a beautiful, little table in my room, along with his blue baseball hat that says the name of his beloved boat on it, and also his reading glasses. It's my littleshrine to him. When we first put the urn in my room, my son and I both gave it a kiss.

I'm not looking forward to this boat ride. I don't want to be on his boat without him. I am even having a hard time with the idea of parting with his ashes. It's all hard, this stuff. So much harder than I would have guessed if you'd asked me when I was 25 what it would be like when I lost a parent.

But now, yoga. Just breathe, right?

Mother's Day 2007

The recap of my mother's day .... had hinted to my 6-year-old son that I would like breakfast in bed. Mentioned that D, who sleeps over on the nights when he doesn't have his kids, could help him with stuff that was too hard to reach or do. Of course, as I should have known, he would have nothing to do with that. So at 6am I heard stirrings and at 6:05am, there was my little man, bedside, with a plastic bowl full of pretzels and a plastic cup of pineapple juice.

I took the obligatory sip and crunch and then thanked the heavens above, the tooth fairy, Santa, and Oprah, because the sweet bundle of sleepy skin and pajamas crawled under the covers and fell asleep all cuddled up with me for another 45 minutes.

Then, D got up and made the coffee, and little guy brought my cup in to me. A pretty darn good Mother's Day morning, I have to say.

This is what my Mother's Day card said:

Dear Mommy,
Happy Mother' Day
Your wish is my kmand.
You're a part of my heart.
You're nice and kind.
Mom your beautiful
Mommy I love you.

It doesn't really get any better than that.

I was going to tell you what happened later in the day. Because I did eventually find myself crumpled in a ball on the kitchen step stool, sobbing my little heart out. My life is a balance. But now I'm going to skip that part.

And tell you just this: I took my mother to the spring Dogwood Festival nearby, it was a beautiful day, the trees were dripping with innocent lushness, and I bought her a pair of loud, lime-green flip-flops with giant fabric daisies glued on them. She smiled, and I know she was really glad to be with me on Mother's Day. Sometimes, it doesn't take much.

So we got through our first Mother's Day without my dad. I'm trying not to think about next month. My birthday is two days before Father's Day. Father's Day will not be so easy, I'm thinking. I miss him more than I can even come to terms with in any sort of adult way.

And now, the happy stuff ....

Newly discovered websites I love: zappos.com, pandora.com, wellsphere.com, recipezaar.com.

Bye.

Goodbyes to my wonderful dad

So maybe I'm not going to be a very prolific blogger.

But I lost my dad on April 25th, and it's been a pretty rough last month or so. Here's the tribute I wrote for him and had my friend Sarah read for me:

When you have a biological father and a stepfather, people sometimes refer to the biological one as your “real dad.” I used to use the phrase but at some point over the years, I stopped. It was when I realized that the guy who went on to do the “fathering” of me for more than 30 years of my life was one-of-a-kind, and that I was very much his daughter and very blessed to be. Roy was, without a doubt, my real dad.

He was the one who took me to the emergency room at 2 in the morning when my teenage self went skinny-dipping, diving into a pool and cracking my forehead open. And he was the one who knew to wait in that ER until 4 in the morning so that we could have a plastic surgeon do the repair job. He was the one who mailed me newspaper clippings about managing money, politics, and cell phones causing car accidents. He was the one who walked me down the aisle on my wedding day. He was with me at the vet when I had to put my 18-year-old cat to sleep. He was really good at being there. He was also really good at building fires and holding his breath under water.

I still have his voice on my answering machine. It’s from the night we found out his cancer had spread and that it was time to stop fighting it. I was home when he left the message but I couldn’t pick up the phone. I didn’t want him to have to listen to me crying. He’d had a rough enough day. So it’s a long message -- his gentle voice comforting me and letting me know that everything would be okay and that he loved me. On the day his doctor told him his life was about to end, he called to comfort me. But that won’t surprise any of you who knew him.

I’ve asked a few people recently, “Which do you think is better -- to know you’re going to die or to die suddenly?” I don’t really have an answer. Because it was heart-wrenching watching Roy suffer, but I did get time to let him know how much I loved him, and he got to say poignant and even joyful goodbyes to friends and family. He told me a few weeks ago that he was ready, and that he wasn’t scared. So I think I know what his answer would be to the question. He was well enough long enough to get things organized, so that it would be easier for my mom. And taking care of her and the people he loved was what he liked to do best of all.

He was the real thing, and if you’re here today, you probably know that. What I can tell you is yes, you have it right, he was the best.

I will close with some song lyrics I found. I’m hoping maybe he’s listening right now:

When it rains, it pours and opens doors
And floods the floors we thought would always keep us safe and dry.
And in the midst of sailing ships we sink our lips into the ones we love
That have to say goodbye.

And as I float along this ocean
I can feel you like a notion that I hope will never leave.
And when I feel there is no one that will ever know me
There you are to show me.

Cause when I look to the sky, something tells me you’re here with me
And you make everything all right.
And when I feel like I’m lost, something tells me you’re here with me
And I can always find my way when you are here.

Sarah did a really nice job reading ... and people loved that she did it for me. It sort of lent even more poignancy to the whole thing that my dear friend stood up and spoke for me when I couldn't speak. Because it was the kind of friendship so many of the folks there had with my dad. If he was your friend, he would do anything he could for you. Yesterday, I got a card from my friend Cath in Philadelphia. What she wrote is an incredible comfort to me and somehow says it all:

You and Roy have been on my mind since you first told me about his illness. It's still a shock to me that he could go when my memories of him are all of this big, strapping, sun-tanned, handsome and smiling man, so full of vitality and cheer. When I think of Roy I think of that little cottage in Nantucket where he gave us lessons on painting (which I still apply to this day) so we could white-wash our little summer abode. How many residences did Roy see you through over the years? My next memory is Roy leading us through the raw, newly-framed rooms when he oversaw the expansion of your house. You were his baby, alright. He would've done anything for you, it was obvious. When you told me the story of sleeping on a cot in his hospital room I was kind of glad he got to see how dear you were to him and that you would have done anything for him, too. I know you'll always miss him but I'm glad for you, as someone I love like a sister, that you had such a special dad-daughter relationship in your life. That's a treasure you'll always carry with you.


Thanks, Cath --- your words are the ones I needed to hear to get me to the next step in healing. I love you.

To end on a shallow and fun note, check out the photo below of me in my new Betsey Johnson dress, standing with none other than Betsey Johnson herself! She, by the way, is really nice and cool and not at all hoity-toity or aloof. P.S. The cute guy in the tux is my sweet man who helps make everything all right.