The Script Ended

Let stuff be weird

Two icons from my childhood died yesterday, both before their time. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Michael is almost exactly my age - only 4 months younger almost to the day. Wow, unbelievable. His global fame and reach made him seem in some ways much older. I never quite understood him, I was too rational. That glove, his changing skin color, his crotch grabbing and ever evolving nose, I just didn't get it. Where were the reasons? How did it make sense?

The answer is - it didn't - obviously. True creativity and genius are so often partnered with insanity and mental fragility. He came up with things that no one else could have imagined and there didn't have to be any reason why. That is really a rare and confusing kind of genius. The rest of us are just not equipped to get it.

My life has turned in directions that I never planned - sometimes I just do not get it. There aren't many good reasons to explain why things are the way that they are but  if I could find some, I know that I would feel much better.

Or maybe not.

That desire for the answers, the reason, is probably a vestige from my childhood when I could go to my mom in confusion and she always made it right, explained whatever the dilemma with perfect sense. Even if her explanation was that certain things are creepy because they are and so they are best avoided.

Creepy things, strange unsettling things have ever since made my stomach knot into sickness. I would do anything to run from it and make it stop, make it right. That necessity turned out to be an impossibly tall order. I couldn't make everything right, no matter how hard I tried or how fast I ran.

Letting go of that and allowing the sick stomach feeling to have its moment turns out to make it better, faster, all on its own. In fact, there seems to be less occasion to even warrant the sick feelings in me these days and ironically that is not because there are less problems with sick capacities. In fact, there are more.

There is a lesson for me here somewhere. So what if Michael Jackson wore one sequined glove. Or he grabbed his crotch in public....I allow him his weirdness, it doesn't scare me anymore and I don't need an explanation. Not everything has to make sense and sometimes out of that non-sense, comes unimaginable genius.

Later on - Charlie's Angels, I'm no longer in the mood for that one.

sick of party crashers!

When you read a reinvention story or other heart warming tale it all seems so well organized with the ending invariably up-lifting. Nobody tells you the secret that those in the story know but don't reveal - ---

that they didn't know that there would be an uplifting ending to the story while they were in the middle of it and that that "middle" was the only reality that they knew at the time. What was obviously a break-through moment in the story was only so in retrospect AND that the process of getting stronger and surviving takes an inordinately long time with little evidence of progress along the way.

The above is a pretty good description of what I have recently figured out.

I am in that middle mentioned above and I keep on telling myself that it IS the middle along the way to the end. Well, not the end end, that's just how I am describing scaling the last hurdle that I can see from where I stand today. I am also now wise enough to know that just when I scale this last visible hurdle, its pesky cousin hurdles will elbow their way into line right behind so in effect I will probably never finish jumping. But for now, I can't worry about those future unknown challenges, I am busy with the ones that I can see. Some of those are:

1. Finish my divorce. For someone so intent on running away to his next life as quickly as he could, my ex husband certainly is dragging his feet to finish what he started.

2. Clean up all the debris left behind from that husband's inelegant escape. Selling properties, avoiding foreclosures, paying debts, stopping the bleeding, giving up on my credit score............I am learning more than I ever wanted to know about all this stuff and believe me - it is ugly.

After these unappealing chores are completed I will be relieved.

I know that I have some things to enjoy in my new life and am looking forward to not having the mess from my past keep on crashing the party. I will feel that I have gotten through the middle and come out the other side.

Maybe I will have a good reinvention story to share.

Not only for "other" people

There are some things that you never expect to have to face - situations that are for "other people". Stuff that is distasteful yet common to the point of being run-of-the-mill.

Again - for "other people".

Having your boyfriend meet your husband (ex) is a good example.

Never in my wildest nightmares did I expect that I would have to introduce my boyfriend to my husband. My husband was supposed to be part of ME forever, not some guest at a school event. It's hard to describe how jarring this is to my sense of how things are supposed to be.

But it happened, it is part of my reality and if you had been a fly on the wall at our daughter's high school graduation last week in Paris you would never have known that you were witnessing the total up-ending of my vision of the world.

French boyfriend met former husband of 25 years and they did an admirable job of chatting away like buddies. Score one for me to have had at least the good sense to have picked men in my life who are socially gifted. Makes the cocktail circuit easier to navigate.

We even took pictures - French boyfriend lining up former happy family, beautiful youngest daughter between her two used to be adoring of each other parents, and telling us all to smile as he snapped away.

Who would have thought?

Well anyway, we all got through it and I know that our youngest daughter breathed a big sigh of relief that maybe her life in a newly broken family has seen the last of the big dramas.

All I have to say is Thank God for the French and their supremely good sense in serving champagne to ALL at a school event. It smooths over the rough spots.