Nothing to report

Nothing to report ... yet

Another year has spun by. The earth has rotated 366 times around its axis and revolved once around the sun. I am another year older but no closer to discovering whatever it is I am looking for. One of my kid’s friends posted a quote on facebook, “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from.” Hmmm. Advice for me?

Yet. As the school year ends and I have 7 months of glorious vacation ahead, I feel peace seeping, no surging, into my veins, displacing worry and anxiety that I didn’t even know I had, pushing it out through my very pores, freeing me of it, and leaving me blissfully relaxed and almost obscenely serene. I am very much looking forward to my next vacation. And I feel no shame at admitting this.

On the last afternoon of the term the older female teachers all play hooky. We meet up at the ringleader’s house to eat and drink together, splash in her pool, and tell outrageous stories. I lie in a zero gravity chair in the sun laughing more than I can remember doing in weeks. Life is perfect.

Also, all three of my boys are currently thriving. (What more could any mother ever want?) There have been molehills in front of one or all of them in past, molehills that frequently looked like mountains, and I’m sure that there will be more in the future, but at this very moment they are each gracefully metamorphosing into successful young adults; they each have great girlfriends, strong peer groups, and excellent jobs. Though different from each other they remain solid friends with one another, do things together, and, also, do things with me. I SUP and bike with my youngest, go out for wings and movies with my middle one, and sit and play board games all through rainy weekends with my oldest. Their girlfriends are always present and, though I have no idea what these lovely, beautiful, intelligent young women really think of me, they are all well enough brought up to include me in their activities with smiles on their faces. ‘All males are alien,’ I say to my friends, as an excuse of my somewhat distant relationships with my boys, though in fact, to me, all people are alien. A wee bit of me is glad that I don’t have girls for I fear I wouldn’t be a good role model to them. Having only male children allows me the freedom to be a bit more eccentric and to not have to worry quite as much about the responsibility of guiding by example. 

I haven’t decided what I am going to do with the next 7 months yet. I have a list of chores as long as my arm to complete first; get out of my lease, put my stuff in storage, apply for a passport, find a boat to join… but 7 months seems long enough that I feel no pressure to rush. I will muddle along, leave when I can, go where the winds take me. My only goals are to be on the road, or water, by September, and to meet a few new people, take a couple of photos, and write a blog entry or two by Christmas.

It is, as they say, all good.

And, hopefully, in a month or so, I will actually have something to report.

Goodbye Plants

Saying Goodbye to my Plants

I’m not good with people. I’m not sure if the reason is nurture or nature or a bit of both but the outcome is the same. I sometimes claim to be a functional autistic, somewhere on the spectrum at any rate, but perhaps the real answer is simpler than that, perhaps I’m just an asshole.

I don’t have a lot of friends (which makes the few friends I do have incredibly precious), my relationship with my whole family of origin is fucked up beyond hope of repair, and even my ties to my own kids seem, at times, terrifyingly tenuous.

One thing I’ve learnt in life is that you have to make choices. You can’t, especially if you are female, have it all. (Well, maybe some people can, but I don’t seem to be able to manage it.) When I was 21 I thought I could have it all; be a single Mom, raise 2 kids while simultaneously getting a PhD. That was my plan. (You’ll note that even then, at 21, I’d decided to have kids on my own because I knew, given how difficult I was, that no one would ever marry me.) (The universe, however, didn’t like my plan. It said, “No!”, and put me in a head-on collision on the trans-Canada highway. I ended up spending months in hospital and years getting further operations and, well, that’s a whole other story… but the outcome was that I figured out you couldn’t have it all. You had to make choices.) (I chose kids, btw, over a PhD.)

I’m better, it seems, with plants, than I am with people. My whole house is full of plants which represent lost relationships. I have an enormous spider plant that comes from a wee cutting my sister once gave me. I don’t think we’ve talked in over 2 decades, my sister and I, though she did yell at me when I had the gall to show up for our father’s funeral, which lets you know, among other things, how old the plant is. I also have two other spectacular plants, one a huge Christmas cactus, given to my by former friends, both from Deep, and, though I couldn’t manage to maintain my friendships with either of them, I still have the plants to remind me of what I lost. And I have a huge fairy castle cactus from my mother-in-law. Again, a plant given to me by someone who was very important in my life at one point. And, again, representing a relationship that fell apart. I even still have the first plant I bought as a newlywed, many moons ago. Yup, I can keep the plants alive.    

I’m just not good friend material. When I was living on Rutherford, and very lonely, there were a couple of women who lived nearby, who, at different times, each saw my plight, and each tried very very hard to befriend me. (Thank you both.) But I couldn’t do it. Though I recognized and appreciated their efforts, and would have loved to have become friends with either of them, I just couldn’t manage to do it.

My life, as I have said before, feels like swimming through thick dark molasses. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s just not easy. I know that no one’s life is easy, but I honestly believe that personal relationships are, for me, harder than for most. (My PhD, by the way, the one I didn’t do, was going to be in Sociology. I was going to research loneliness in our society, try to quantify it, collect personal stories, and maybe even look for solutions to help those most affected by it.)

But I’ve strayed off topic.

I feel that you have to make choices in life. I could be wrong but that’s what I believe. And, having chosen to live a vagabond lifestyle, teach one semester and then go off and crew the next, keeping my plants is just one chore too many. So I’m going to give them away. I tried to hide them in inconspicuous corners of my ex's house but he found them and brought them to me. They wouldn’t survive in storage and ferrying them all back and forth to friends or family each time I go off on vacation seems like too much effort. Some of them are, did I mention this, large. So I’m going to let them go.

And, maybe, in future, instead of keeping my plants alive, I’ll try to keep my relationships alive.