Driving My Self Home

What a wonderful morning.

On the outside, really, it’s a lot like any other morning. Raining, especially this week, dark.

But, on the inside…WOW! I feel pretty darn good.

I’m not sure how it happened. Of course, when these flashes (I like to call them that) happen, it’s always unbidden but usually borne out of a sense of being lost, confused and struggling with something inside of myself. Then *AHA* I have this flash of insight, this new perception. And, that’s what happened today.

I had just stopped for a coffee. I sometimes do this on the way home, if I feel like staying awake for a few more hours, and I was thinking about grief. My grief, and grief in general. I was wondering if I had dealt with my grief and if I had, why wasn’t I feeling better? When would the breakthrough come? When would I feel like myself again? Then it hit me: the idea that the expression of grief isn’t what cures it. It’s the expression of love that cures grief. It is the realization, the KNOWing that love is right there, right alongside sorrow. A simple shift in perception, a tilt of the head, is all that’s required to see it, to feel it. And all of a sudden, the world was a very different place. It was just waking up, snuggled under the covers of darkness but yawning and stretching, blinking it’s eyes and smiling. And in this different world, everything softened, parents woke up and hugged each other and, speaking softly and walking quietly, woke their children and hugged them too. The noise of life became muffled somehow, like when you wrap a scarf around your shoulders and it absorbs the shocks of life.

The traffic heading north over the Patullo Bridge was light this morning and I had this crazy notion that the world, and everything in it, was in love with itself and it felt so soft, warm and light. So light, in fact that I felt loosened. My body became loosened at the joints, the way I know now that a marionette would feel, if in fact it could feel.

Someone once told me that unexpressed grief gets stuck in the throat and so it is best to cry, out loud, when we are in pain. And wouldn’t you know it…I sang.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like…Crap! It’s Christmas!

Aaaah…it’s that time again. It’s Christmas time.

I like Christmas well enough. I liked it more as a kid, when my parents and relatives were Santa Claus, I helped my mother make run balls (when I became a teenager, more like “oops! Gee, I don’t know what happened there, my wrist…I…I…will all that rum make them taste bad?” …oy…my poor mother), and I enjoyed two weeks off of school. It’s a little different now, now that I’m Santa Claus and Barbie and Ken’s camper won’t do. Oh no. My son wants a laptop. My youngest daughter wants one too and my older daughter would be happy with just a Coach bag thank you very much. I myself would really dig a new lens for my camera. I wish I could give us all that. But I can’t, not even close. And this is why I have come to view Christmas like giving birth: a lot of pain, but just keep pushin’ and it’ll soon be over.

Of course, it wasn’t always like that. When my children were young, Christmas was magical and I looked forward to it. I baked and we listened to Christmas carols and we couldn’t even wait until Christmas morning to start opening gifts: the kids could open up one gift each on Christmas Eve while we sipped piping hot chocolate and listened to Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas”. This was something I did as a young girl. It was a family tradition and, back then at least, I wanted to pass that tradition down to my children, like a treasured family heirloom, something to build a life on.

Things are a lot different now. I’m divorced, for one thing, (the one good Christmas gift that keeps on giving) and I work at a job I don’t like a whole lot just to put food on the table and pay the bills. I work nights and I’m crabby most of the time and some days I don’t want to get out of bed. Christmas. Well, this year our tree is a fake palm with built-in lights with real candy canes as ornaments, and the only gifts I can give my kids are ones that can fit into a stocking. But you know, what? I’m enjoying THIS Christmas a lot more than previous ones. Definitely more than last year when Christmas dinner was left over Chinese food and there wasn’t a single Christmas bulb lit. The Christmas spirit showed up for a few minutes on Christmas day, took one look at what a sorry lot we were and split straight away!

I’m not a fan of Christmas anymore. I could easily spend Christmas in some tropical place where snow simply doesn’t exist. Although, I did meet a man in Canadian Tire last night, when I was buying the palm, and he said he and his new bride had recently returned from a two-year long honeymoon where they visited, I think he said 26 countries. He said at Christmas they felt homesick and so they decorated the palm tree outside their cabana with Christmas lights. That’s what I want: I want to feel homesick at Christmas and put small, twinkling lights on the palm tree outside my cabana because, you know what? I simply can’t stand the crap that is marketed to the consumers as “Christmas”. Yeah, while Grandma’s at the Canadian Tire store buying that last-minute gift for wee Sarah, her grown sons have arrived at her 5,000 square foot home, the one they grew up in, the one with the wrap-around porch, and they decorated the 5,000 foot tall pine in the front yard and the trim on the house and even the smaller trees in the yard, just for fun. Families are all sitting down together for turkey dinner, the yule log is burning in the fireplace, Bing Crosby is having his most glorious moment ever, the baby is healthy and pink, the gifts are wrapped in silver paper with a red bow, everyone is laughing and smiling, you just KNOW that room is warm with love, and probably with a bit of the bubbly as well but you know, no one actually GETS drunk. Nooo-ooo-oooo. In this manufactured Christmas, no one has a single problem. There are no alcoholic grandfathers, there are no molested daughters, there are more than enough presents to go around, there is more than enough of everything. There are no parents with murdered children, there are no babies waking up in dirty diapers and no children who will sit in front of a TV this Christmas because mommy and daddy pissed away the Christmas money on booze and aren’t even up yet. Even the turkey, the poor damn turkey who never hurt anyone in his whole life, hasn’t had his beak snipped off.

But who wants to think of that? Who wants to feel sad on Christmas Day by being reminded of what goes on in the real world? NOBODY. That is why we have the manufactured Christmas, the Christmas that exists in our dreams, where we have all that we want and our children are happy and they love each other. But make no mistake. Even the 1% have Christmases that include a drunk grandfather or a molested daughter. They just sleep on a more comfortable bed at night.

I really do wish all of you, each of you,  a safe and happy Christmas. Take good care of each other.

peace

Mobile Blues

I am having “one of those days”.

I came home this morning from work, thought I’d do a little house-cleaning. I bought a used sofa last week and it still hadn’t really found its place in the room so I was simply planning a rapid rearrangement, a quick nap, then dinner with my daughter.

So, I moved the computer. I know, I know, who is dumb enough to move their computer! I am. After I got all the speaker wires unplugged, then plugged in again in their new home ACROSS THE ROOM the bloody thing won’t turn on. The fan isn’t turning on. I discover this when I remove the side panel and see that nothing, NOthing is happening when I flick the power switch. It’s a dead fish, as cold as ice.

My computer guy isn’t open till noon so I was praying it would miraculously start before then and save me the trip and the bill.

As I am contemplating my choices and beating myself up for moving the damn thing at all, I receive a text message from Rogers Wireless, my cell phone service provider, telling me I need to make a payment of $307.00.

This pisses me off and I’ll tell you why. Rogers can’t explain this $300.00 except to say I went over my allowed daytime minutes. You see, my parents live in Winnipeg so I had My 5 Canada-Wide on my account. This is supposed to mean I have unlimited long distance across Canada. Well, according to Rogers, it means that, while I don’t pay any long-distance charges, the time I spend on that call is deducted from my allowed daytime minutes.

I call foul. That’s a gimmick. It’s a trap and it’s how they get ‘cha. The sales girl and I cannot find any common ground over this. I tell her that since I’ve been overcharged since Day 1 of my contract (I’ve paid well over $15,ooo in the 3 years I’ve had the phone) I feel the only fair thing to do is clear my balance and we can start fresh at 0. She will not budge. Nor will I. A break-up is imminent. I feel it, as sure as I’m feeling my temperature rise.

I’m so angry about feeling used by a mega-corporation that I tell her I want my contract cancelled. Those words hang in the air between us for a couple of moments, those break-up words. I am almost wishing I hadn’t said them, thinking, knowing I had gone out on a limb. I had uttered these words, I had drawn my line in the sand. I was terrified.

“Add it all up, look at how much money I’ve paid you since I opened this account. More money than anyone I know.”

“Donna, I’m not going to check.”

There it was. The reply. The awesome stone-cold reply.

“Then I want you to cancel my contract.” And there was the response. This thing, this living agreement, this dance of payer and payee was over. Final.

I am more upset than I ought to be. Rogers was an abusive partner, a cheating spouse. It laughed at me, mocked me, while I scraped together enough cash each month to satisfy its lusty, cavernous appetite. This was a dysfunctional relationship based on power and control, a sad, pathetic, and ultimately co-dependent portrait of consumerism.

As of January 1st, my contract will be cancelled.