Family and Friends – Day #6 from the A-Z Challenge

FAMILY – parents, grandparents, siblings, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, and dear dear FRIENDS who just happen to have different parents.

In my mind, when I think of family, I tend to glorify days of old. I imagine people spreading out their table cloths, inviting family and friends for dinner, cooking giant meals, sitting and praying together, and then congregating on their huge wrap-around front porches, Grandpa on his rocking chair, cousin Billy strumming his six string, Grandma and all the females talking while cleaning up the messes, and little kids playing on the ground around the porch.

However, we didn't have a large front porch. All of our grandfathers died by the time I was six, and cousin Billy never played the guitar. I have completely romanticized my childhood. Except for the parts about the women cleaning up (while the men watched football or baseball or threw horseshoes in the back yard) and the kids running around (a common occurrence), the rest of it was pure fiction.

But in thinking about family and friends, I've realized that we often take family and friends for granted. Empty promises – "Let's get together soon," become filled with soccer practice, dentist appointments, work meetings, and a variety of other functions that pull people in every direction but toward the most meaningful situations they could experience.

One day we turn around and retirement swallows us whole. "What happened to my life?" we wonder. Where did it go?

It went to soccer practices, dentist appointments, work meetings, and a variety of other functions that prevented us from truly connecting with loved ones.

Family and friends deserve our love, our affection, our respect, and our attention. And it is up to us to recognize that we need them as much as they need us.

From this day forward I vow to reserve dates in my calendar for my Family and my Friends. I hope I never again hear myself saying, "Let's get together soon" without having a specific date in mind to follow through with our get-together.

I just recently got together with my mother, one of my daughters, and a dear, dear friend of mine. I rarely get to see Nancy, so the day was very special for me. That my mother and one of my daughters were there, too, made it all the more special.

Call your friends. Call your family. Make time to be together. Yesterday I was 19. Today I'm nearing 60. Take time before time takes you – or one of your loved one.

And that completes Day #6 from the A-Z Challenge. Brought to you by the letter, F.

Previous A-Z Challenge blogs:

Amazon Hates Me – Day #1 from the A-Z Challenge

Bored – Why? – Day #2 from the A-Z Challenge

Craziness – Day #3 from the A-Z Challenge

When Your Daughter Develops, DON'T DO THIS! – Day #4 from the A-Z Challenge

Ellen

My Heart is Flying to California

So rarely do I get to see my son (a U.S. Marine stationed near San Diego) and his family, that when I do, I get so excited at the prospect of seeing everybody that I can barely sleep. I was up practically the whole last night.

I'm too excited about the trip, I guess. I will be able to spend some time with my sister before I head north to Midway Airport, so I'm excited about that as well.

All of this comes after a much needed break, where my head is still throbbing after two weeks of providing 11-hour a day daycare with a body that is completely exhausted from hypervigilance associated with two little boys who fight for supremacy, one of whom cannot control himself from hitting everybody and everything in his path. I follow him around the house gathering all of the toys he flings around, repeating my requests to keep them in one room and admonishing him for flinging them around the babies. 

If I could contain him in one room, I would, but my attention has to be shared with four, and one time this week, five, other kids. When I tell everybody to clean up the mess made mostly by him, everybody pitches in and he jumps on the couch for a time-out, knowing in advance that he will refuse to help clean and that the ultimate consequence for that action is a time-out. He's not stupid. 

Fortunately, he accommodates me during "quiet time" but the rest of the time is so exhausting I can barely make it through the day.

So why couldn't I sleep last night? Who knows. It makes no sense. You would think that if you were exhausted, your body would recognize your need for sleep and accommodate you. Mine fights me. Gotta remember to bring the taxes I never had time to complete. Gotta pack. Gotta make sure I remember my Advil Migraine medicine. Gotta remember to pack some shoes. Don't forget to print out the online ticket for Southwest Airlines.

At one point, I thought to myself, this is ridiculous – just go write these things down. But they came to me one at a time, so I would jump out of bed, write down "taxes," go back to bed, jump up...you get the picture. I can't help but sabotage myself. Maybe the problem is that my heart is already in California and my body can't sleep without it.

So while I await 7:55 a.m. so I can print out my boarding pass, I am finishing my blog. Time to set the timer.

California, here I come!

Getting Over Depression

Every once in a while I succumb to my genetic birthright, depression. I hate it. Though I've been able to cope with it more lately because I finally understand that it does pass, in the past I experienced depression so deep I wondered if I would ever climb out of it. I was looking at life through eyes covered with yellow cellophane. 

Yesterday was my youngest daughter's 25th birthday. I expected that at my age, I would be writing for a living, and that I would be making money from it. So yesterday, when I realized that 25 years after giving birth to my youngest daughter I STILL was not making a living at writing, I got depressed.

I looked around at people like Cher and Dr. Phil and other successful people my age who are already retiring. I wanted to punch myself for not being successful. I climbed into bed and grabbed a pillow, fully intending to soak it with my tears, but nothing came out. I was angry that I couldn't even cry, and that was what pushed me to change my thinking.

I paced and I paced and I thought and I thought. I wanted to jump in the car and drive until I ran out of gas, then walk until I ran out of energy, and drop where I landed. I felt like a failure at everything I attempted, because I couldn't just stay home to write and research. 

Whenever I feel that shroud of depression covering me like a blanket of protection against all my imagined enemies, all of whom I realize are me, I slam myself with emotional fists, because I can't stand myself for not living up to my own expectations.

And it is in those moments that somebody is sent from somewhere (Heaven?) to save me from myself. I call that grace.

Grace, to me, is what happens to people when other people pray for them.

My mother was the first to call. My mother was the one who took me out of journalism class in high school, because she thought it was an unstable career choice, to throw me into something that would guarantee me a career – bookkeeping (I've never had a job utilizing that skill). 

I always blamed her for my inability to succeed with my writing, and I had a hard time getting over the fact that by the time I reached the age of 18, I was the one who was in control of my life.

I sometimes wonder, though, even now, how different my life might be if I had been allowed to continue in journalism. I try not to dwell on it, however, because in its place I became a mother, and I have never once regretted making that decision. 

So Mom talked to me about what it might take for me to get to that place where I would feel successful. And after a while, I began to feel better. I decided that going back to school might open doors to future success in writing.

And then my friend Denise called. And after talking to her, I felt even better. Before I knew it, I was completely over the depression and into the "do something about it phase," all in the space of three hours.

I've learned over the years that TWO THINGS can pull ANYBODY out of depression – LOVE and FAITH, even if, as it says in the Bible, faith is only as small as a mustard seed, which, by the way, is even smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. And it can come from family or friends. This time it came from both.