Lucid Living

I am going to have to make this blog as personal as I'm willing to get on the internet because thoughts and emotions are relentlessly popping out of me. Those thoughts and emotions are landing dead on arrival in the air with soundwaves making a certain funeral for them. To my dismay I come to the understanding that sometimes people are just tired of my repetitious complaints and critiques on issues that I am in no way an expert. I can scarcely blame them. How many times must I hammer my nail to people who are by nature mellow and why would I seek to corrupt that serenity? Possibly because I have rarely felt a mellow of my own and I'm seething in jealously. In also accessing my downfalls and potholes it has become obvious that I have an unrealistic standard about people. Here I am thinking that people should let people just live and be themselves, and in my next thought I worry about all the dangers people present, how hardly a soul can be trusted, and that at any moment I could lose a loved one to some heartbreaking circumstance. The latter part of the sentence is one of the top concerns I've had my whole life through.

As a child I worried I'd lose my mother and had vivid nightmares all the way through my teen years that she would be murdered. In those nightmares I'd have to avenge her death by slaying (in martial arts fashion) her killer. After my teen years those nightmares were replaced by daymares, but this time it was about my child being in harm's way. This probably came to fruition because of all that sad and sick 24 hour news I was watching that got my mind reeling in horror each time a little kid got kidnapped or went missing. In each face I saw on the news I saw the potential for that to happen to my own child as well. This fear ate at me and it still eats at me.

There was a 'me' before motherhood and there still is, but if there were no 'her' anymore...well then I just don't think I'd ever want to be 'me' again. There was an immediate connection to my girl as she grew herself strong and she would give me intense deja-voo that grew in vibrance as my belly grew, peeks into places I'd never been, houses that had people I'd never before seen...that sort of stuff. It would be so perplexing sometimes that I would want those flashes of imagery in my mind to go away. Sometimes I wondered if my baby was too good of a soul to have a young and dumb thing like me for a mother, if she was smarter than me already...if I was capable of keeping a strong-willed person like her safe.

Now my girl is bigger and we talk mom and girl-talk. Yesterday, I was having a day that should have resulted in feelings of accomplishment, but I let one nay-sayer get to me and I let that person's pessimism eat my self-confidence up. My child and I began to talk, and as usual she notices if I am 'off'. I told her that it is hard sometimes in life when you know you have great intentions and are doing your very best and it still isn't accepted. I said "I don't know about people, they are good and still I can't connect and get through. Sometimes people are hard. Do you have it hard with people too?" She said "Yes. I feel like an animal in a cage, but I want to be free. I don't think people like me." That is her truth, that she connects more and associates to animals more than people. She likes their untamed spirit, unconditional love without regard toward hair-styles, clothing, and being in the in-crowd.

We talked more and I tried to reassure her that people not only like her, but that they love her. "Oh how people love you baby. I love you so much that I shake with worry anytime I am not near you to protect you. And your whole family loves you, and you have some friends who like you so much. And there will be even more people who will love you in your life. And sadly, every person who lives probably has a few people that don't like them, and it hurts when people don't like us. It hurts too when we don't know why people don't like us. Most of the time we don't know why. But, you have to hope for the best for those who don't like you and then vow not to spend precious time in your life worrying about how to get them to like you and move on to new people. "

And with the advice I gave her came advice I should have had drilled into me since the day I was born. It was absolutely painful to be so sensitive that I would cry over sarcasm that was supposed to be meant in jest. It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned to take sarcasm and to even use sarcasm. I never liked it and still don't love it but just accepted that we live in sarcastic punch-line times. We have to learn to be a punch-line sometimes and not be so serious. I have done enough rotten things, senseless things, and idiotic things that I fully deserve to be the joke sometimes. But, I'm trying so hard and have gone against my own grain in the name of becoming a nicer and better person and it feels like I can never live down my past and that I can never live up to the notion of a better me.

I want to be liked, want to know what I've done to people to cause ill-feelings, want to make emotional restitutions, and want to be given a fair shake at being taken seriously. I don't want the sins of the mother to become the sins of her daughter, don't want my overblown fears and opinions to be her realities and her fate.

What people need to know about me is that I love my girl, my husband, my family, and that I love the world. It is true that I live in America, but I consider my true home to be Earth. My flag has the planet on it. So that means my circle of neighbors and brethren is expanded far past North America. It reaches into even 'enemy' territory too. I want good for all people and want everyone's kid's to be fed and protected and loved. It is important to me that we try to govern ourselves with love and remain open to learning one little or big new thing each day. People need to also know that I am prone to immature bouts of over-generalizations and rants when I am hurt about some new atrocity that has happened. I'm not exactly that person who maintains a journalistic perspective when finding out that yet another underdog was beaten down. I don't think I can find that chilly rationality on heartbreaking matters, and my reactions often times make me appear to be some vigilante of sorts...but we will leave that to "Dexter". People should know that I'm not much of a joy to be around these days because my naivette has been replaced with embittered tones of reality, but that once in awhile in the right light I can still laugh at a corny commercial and admit that the Olympics are interesting enough to keeo me watching women's curling even though I'm not a jock.

Basically we all have these components and it is a shockingly sugary feeling! All that time I had convinced myself that I was a no good, weird, misplaced, awkward, schmuckette...come to find out, that is fairly normal for most people. And that means that I don't have to make my anthem "I'm just a misfit" from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer anymore. It seemed to me that I would just have to go on and splurge into bizarreness, because why half-ass your own self-assumptions, just go all out! But, I don't need to wave the freak-flag, don't need the blue hair, the sad-artist portrait. I just need to be alive and I need to let my girl in on this new realization of oneness and sameness before she ostrizes herself from the world that I know will welcome her into it with the same busy buzzing that it welcomes everyone with.

Thank you sweet and kind fellow human being for the reading eyes and attentive mind. I appreciate this electronic connection..........:)