From Holiday Guilt and Presidential Powers to Full-out Gratitude

With the holiday spirit hanging in the air---the decorations lighting up the neighborhood nights, the Christmas music and good cheer heard in the stores, the parties lined up on the calendar---it feels like I’m living in an twilight zone. I swing from being genuinely happy in the ho-ho-ho season to feeling guilty about that. Who am I that I get to be light-hearted when so many people in Southern California are losing their homes and livelihoods to raging fires that are destroying thousands-upon-thousands of acres? Who am I that I get to be in my warm, well-lite home when 66% of the people in Puerto Rico are still without power since Hurricane Maria destroyed the island in September? 

FEMA is closing operations in our southern states but their workers aren’t getting a much needed break. They’re headed out to California and you can’t help but wonder how much longer our nation can afford to fund all the natural disasters we’re having back-to-back. If we lose our power grid here in the frozen north this winter, for example, will anyone be here to set up shelters for us? Yet our lawmakers are giving big tax breaks to billionaires thus raising our national debt but when it comes time to balance the budget it will be cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have in their crosshairs. They’ve actually spoke those words out loud and we’re supposed to say, “Oh, well,” and go back to our holiday cheer. If I drank I’d get one of those Virgin Wines Advent Calendar boxes. Open a door every day and pull out a bottle of bubbly.

I am getting whiplash trying to keep up with the changes the current administration is making. This week Trump set things in motion to relocate an embassy to Jerusalem against the advice of virtually every world leader, and he’s radically slashed the size of protected lands in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by 2 million acres---to the orgasmic delight of mining and oil exploration companies. And Utah is just the beginning. The administration has plans to shrink land in 24 national monuments including in Montana, California, Kentucky, a few states out east and the new marine monument in the Pacific Ocean. The smallest monument park, one in Mississippi that is dedicated to an early NAACP official who was assassinated by white supremacists in the 1960s is already under an acre in size. What possible justification could there be for slashing that national monument land in half other than it being dog whistle gesture to the guys who like to march around with Tiki torches?

Breathe, pace myself. Yes, time to change the topic. One of the commercial blogs I read from time to time had a topic this week titled A Powerful Reason to Give Gratitude During the Holidays and into the New Year. The bottom line, according to the article, is the holidays are often stressful so we need to double down on the act of giving gratitude throughout the day. “Gratitude stimulates your neurotransmitters, the hormones that bring energy and happiness into your living experience.” Or so they claim. Call me a cynic but sometimes I think the wine would work better. 

All kidding aside, I am grateful for the things the Sixty & Me blog article said I need to focus on: the people in my life, my talents and the events in my past that helped make me who I am. Although if I’m to be 100% honest here, I’m still working on being grateful for the latter. Being a widow helped make me who I am. Being my husband’s caregiver for so many years helped make me who I am. Watching my mom die due to a series of human errors helped make me who I am. These events may have made me a stronger person yadda, yadda, yadda but I was pretty happy with myself before I was tested with these challenges. So my gratitude in this area is not written in flowery cursive in a cloth-covered gratitude journey. If I wrote them down at all, I'd write them in pencil so I could erase them from time to time when I’m decidedly ungrateful and I’ve dedicated an hour to a pity party. 

What I am is immensely proud and grateful that I can still feel a full range of emotions, that I still have empathy and a sense of humanity that have not been crushed by Man or Nature. I am also grateful that Time Magazine chose the “Silence Breakers” that launched a global movement against sexual harassment as their ‘Person of the Year’ cover. I predicted it would Tarana Burke, the #MeToo Movement’s creator, and I got that and so much more. Woman Power is back and “the future belongs to those who are passionate and work hard.” Yes, I understand the audacity of quoting that line from Al Franken’s resignation speech in the context of the Time’s magazine cover. Life is messy. ©

A Widow’s First World Problems

It was raining on Friday when my house cleaner came for my monthly appointment. I’m to the point where I’m thinking it’s more trouble than it’s worth to have someone clean. The service charges me $27 an hour but the girls who actually do the cleaning only get paid $10 so there isn’t much incentive for them to work, should they want to take a long weekend off and lately I’m getting a different girl every month. Having a cleaning service was one luxury widowhood brought into my life that I really enjoyed at first. The girl who was assigned to me was a college kid studying to be a social worker and we had the best conversations while she worked but she’s moved on and all I’ve gotten since is a string of strangers. Can you believe I’m sitting there getting all bitchy, old person cranky about a first world problem? The strangers have done a passable job cleaning and I have no right to expect them to be able to carry on a decent conversation, too. But I do. Are humans ever truly happen with what we have? When we have luxuries not everyone can afford, most of us still want more. And that admission reminds me that all roads lead back to gratitude. When we don’t have gratitude, we become sourpusses. When we do have it we’re on the Zen Lane of life, seeking and often finding the fragile balance that keeps us happy.

I was so far from being Zen-like this past week when I was at my new monthly Write and Share MeetUp that I’m amazed I could even spell the word. At least I think I could. I didn’t try it at the time. Reading out loud freaked me out---again---and half way through the reading I realized I needed to slow down. I was making too many mistakes and I had to let go of the fear if I wanted to live to tell about it. I had picked a blog entry from my old caregiver days to share, one of my favorite humorous pieces that I’m thinking about putting in a book about living with language disorders. I started writing that book last year but quickly decided my widowhood was too fresh to be re-reading what I wrote about my life before Don died. Now, I think I can look back at that chapter of my life using an editor’s eye to hone my blog material into a story without me getting pulled into another round of grief.

When I finished reading to the group a conversation broke out about how people deal with stress. I knew my friends in the stroke community where I was blogging at the time I wrote the piece got my use of humor to convey stressed-out emotions but I wanted to find out if my writing style was strong enough to convey that to people who aren’t familiar with language disorders. The people in my writers group were my guinea pigs and they passed the test, they got me. If you want to see if you’d pass, click on this link to read: You’re in the Dog House Now!

Switching Topics: My new young neighbor guy is like a friendly puppy---energy in motion, feet too big for his skinny body and a perpetual grin on his face like he's been drinking goofy juice. But we might be having “an issue.” Last week a crew of young guys were like honey bees on a hive, swarming all over the hated two story deck in his back yard but in the process of taking it down and moving trucks and trailers back there one of them hit a 3’x3’ electrical junction box on the property line that services the whole the cul-de-sac. The tire tracks to the “crime” were as plain to see as Washington’s nose on Mount Rushmore. They also took out one of my irrigation thingamajigs. The next day I called the power company to report the junction box being off its cement foundation and within a half hour they came out with a boom truck to reset it. “That’s a dangerous situation,” one of the workers told me. He also said their “detective team” will study the photos he took and probably call my neighbor “to get his side of it. He may claim your lawn care service hit it.”

Oh, crap, that’s no way to start out a relationship with a brand new neighbor. (I had already decided to eat the cost of the service call from my irrigation company in the spirit of getting along.) It seems the electric company detectives, though, do their best to find someone to pin the bill on and I’m not going to be happy if it’s me since I’m the one who called it in. Another first world problem. Breathe, Jean, breathe. I have electricity every day. Regularly without interruption. I have enough money in the checking account to pay for a boom truck bill, should I begrudging have to pay it. And I have a new, young neighbor who has already borrowed a wrench which means he’s obligated to open my next new pickle jar. And those are all good things to write down in a gratitude journal. ©

Blogging from Widowhood Lane

Last week my view counter ticked up to and over 150,000. Not bad for three years and I really wanted to do some sort of commemorative post thanking people who return to read from time to time. I guess I didn’t put it high enough on my priority list to follow through. Or maybe I held back from doing so because of something I wrote at the 100,000 mark. Along with thanking frequent readers, I bemoaning the fact that I get so few comments and I was rewarded with a snippy comment suggesting that I must be a comment whore. I replied back was that if I was writing just for the comments I would have quit a long time ago. To date, I’ve chalked up 1,494 comments. Does that really sound like I’m writing just for the feedback? I rest my case. I am not a comment whore even though I treasure each and every one I get. Thanks for asking, Snippy Lady. 

Why do bloggers blog? I read somewhere the blogging is dying out in favor of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. I get that. I get that not everyone loves to write and at all those social media sources, short throw-away posts and comments are the accepted norm. I have accounts at all those places but I read far more than I post. Saying things in 120 characters is too darn hard for me at Twitter. Facebook I use mostly to keep up on what is going in Don’s and my family. Pinterest feeds right into the bulletin boards I was crazy about creating in my younger days but it bothers me that we’re telling cyberspace advertisers exactly what kinds of things we like. (As if Google doesn’t already know that.) And Instagram. Dear Instagram where I love the photos family posts and the concept that others can’t nab or share them, but I can’t seem to manage a cell phone picture without my thumb included so that leaves me out of the sharing process. No, I’ll stick to blogging where I hope/can pretend I have a connection with people who don’t care if the format is on its way to Horse-and-Buggy Land. If you are still reading this, thank you.

A far more interesting question, though, is why do people read personal blogs written by ordinary people, living ordinary lives? I can only speak for myself but I enjoy getting a window into how others feel about their day to day existence---the frustrations that get them down and things that make them feel joyful inside. I learn about myself from reading what others write, too. One of my favorite bloggers, for example, couldn’t be more different than I am when it comes to core values and life experiences but we are so spooky, scary alike in every other way that I just know we’d be great friends if we lived next door to one another. Without reading her blog, I never would have gotten beyond the labels we put on others to discover that, and that helps me when meeting new people in person. Reading personal blogs also makes me feel connected to a community when the isolation of going through life-crisis’s such Don’s disabilities and eventual death, then the whole widowhood “thing” could otherwise make me bat-poop crazy. We care about each other in cyberspace just as much as if we were talking over the back yard fence. At least that’s my view from here. Oops! My View From Here is the name of another one of my favorite blogs to read and I just plagiarized Donna’s catch phrase.

(Note: I wanted to say above, "...could make me bat-shit crazy..." but when I used the word 'sexual' in the title of a recent blog entry Bloggers sent me a notice that blogs with x-rated content will be turned private in the near-future. Oh, my, I thought, swearing content can’t be far behind on the no-no list if THAT post got tagged!)

A few people may already know this but I’m going to repeat it in this post because I’m old and that’s what old people do. Anyway, I started blogging a year after my husband’s stroke as sort of a gratitude journal and speech class diary. It was so hard back then to pull myself out of the darkness that goes with a life changing event like the massive stroke of someone you love. So I consciously made the decision that I couldn’t go to bed each night without first finding five good things to write down about my day. Before I knew it, I’d find myself saying during the day, “This should go in my journal” and that turned into seeing the funnier things that were happening in my world where I was a caregiver/wife to a wheelchair bound guy who worked very hard at building up his vocabulary. A vocabulary that turned out to be at its highest point only 25 unprompted words on a good day. When he died the bottom fell out of my world again and my blogs had to go with him.

Eleven days later, in January of 2012, this widowhood blog was born. Fast forward to now and here I am, knowing that the blog world has helped, does help and will help me again with whatever challenges life throws my way. It’s given me a place to spill my guts---my secrets, my desires, my fears, my disappointments and joys and my plans A, B and Cs. If you’ve been here often enough to see me put Band-Aids on my broken heart and rip them back off, thank you. If you’ve been here often enough to see me rub salt in my own wounds then wash it back out, thank you. If you’ve been here often enough to care if I ever put some real adventure into my widowhood days, as the blog title implies I should, a double thank you. ©