Musings from an Outsider

It’s been such a long time since I last wrote that there are few people who will even read this. But I thought it might make sense to write anyway, because there are a few things I’d like to say.

First of all, I owe apologies to many people in my life. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have been more forthright in telling people how I felt. When people have hurt you, you don’t do anyone any favors by not telling them. I’ve hurt some people myself, I admit. However, stewing in your own juices doesn’t benefit anyone. Even when I have told some of the most important people in my life how I’ve felt, many times I didn’t seem to be clear enough when I tried to tell them "you’re hurting me." In the end, the one who suffered most was me. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt like an outsider.

Many of you know about the situation in which I find myself. The choices I made were mostly right under the circumstances, but looking back now a few of them I probably should have made differently. Many people who were supposed to love me failed me. They know who they are. Others have gone above and beyond the call of duty. They too know who they are.

The woman who wrote this blog doesn’t really exist anymore. She was a tortured, strung-out, sarcastic and unhealthy human being who thought she was trapped in her life with no way out. When the cast and crew of the movie of my life is stripped away, what I’m left with is only one person. That person is the one who always mattered most – the mom.

No matter what else happens in this life, there is one thing I’ve done mostly right in this world. I’ve been a good mom. Not the world’s greatest mom, but a good mom nonetheless. That is something that no one can take away from me. I am not perfect, I’ve stumbled along the way, but my children know how much I love them. And they are good kids because I didn’t fail them. I have always done everything I can to love and protect them. I may have failed at many other things in life. But one thing is for sure – I am my kids’ mom.

Taking a break for a spell. Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?

Becca

Discussion in the car

Extreme Makeover – Wendy Edition (hair, tan, drawing the line at surgery)

Fur, Play – what’s up with the monosyllabic names?

T-Pain, Chaka and I went for a ride today. We just had to get out of the house and reflect on why I passed the test with flying colors but blew the interview. The ironies abound, I know. I threw the coins after I found out and Yi reflected back to me that I needed to "center in truth." What? You know, for an ancient sage you sure can be vague. What was that supposed to mean? My spiritual advisor said that the answer lies within my heart, that I would "feel" it. I figured that the answer might be found where it always has been for me - while embarked upon a journey.

So I headed out toward Middleburg, which is quite possibly the most beautiful little town on earth. The rolling hills and horse farms are dotted with weeping willows and stone fences that allow you to take a peek into the world of Virginia horse country. It is a supreme landscape, perfect for a drive on an autumn day filled with sunshine. I bopped to T-Pain and thought about what I was missing. Perplexed, I switched to Chaka and listened through the entire CD while, for once, I actually truly listened to the lyrics.

Deep in my own thoughts, suddenly I looked over on the side of the road and saw a little girl. She was about seven years old, with long brown hair and wearing a flannel nightgown. Totally surprised to see her, I pulled over and invited her in. "What are you doing on the side of the road?" I asked her. "Waiting for you" she replied. "Waiting for me? How did you know I was coming?" I asked. "Because I called for you and you finally heard me." she said. "Why didn’t I hear you before?" I asked her, thinking of myself as someone with pretty keen senses. "You were making too much noise, Wendy. You couldn’t hear my cries when you left me here." "But why did I leave you? " I questioned, wondering how I could ever do such a thing. "Because you didn’t like me very much. You thought because Mom didn’t like us and Dad wasn’t involved that it meant that I wasn’t worth liking." That’s terrible, I thought. How could I leave a little girl like that? "So what’s different now?" I wondered, truly amazed at what was happening. "You’re finally ready to take care of me" she said. "You finally understand that nothing in your life will ever work out until you start loving me again. Until you face the truth about how losing me has cost you in life, you will never be able to be happy or find any peace." I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly my whole life made sense. She and I had been apart for far too long. And now I had finally found her.

Having driven for a long time, I decided it was time to head back toward the house, so we stopped along the way and I bought her an iced tea. Driving back, she looked at me with a questioning look on her face. "So where is the man we’re supposed to be with? It’s been lonely for me ever since you’ve been alone." I thought about that for a few minutes. "I guess he’s lost someone too. He must be out looking for his little boy." "Do you think he’ll find him soon? Because I just know that we belong with him."  "I do. He needs to take the time to find his little boy, just like I found you." She was quiet for a few minutes, reflecting on what I had said to her. "When he finds us, we’ll know him, won’t we?" she asked. "Yes, I think we’ll know as soon as we see him" I told her, filled with feelings of anticipation at the thought. "Hey, how did you get so smart?" I asked her, realizing that she was only seven years old. She smiled from ear to ear as she quietly said to me "You taught me."

There is debate among historians about the true planner and surveyor of Washington, DC. Some say it was L’Enfant, some say it was Banneker. Either way, as of yesterday I have decided that neither had a brain in his head if he called his so-called "work" anything other than asinine. Remember before when I said that one is never more furious than when one is cut off, yet again, by a diplomat in a huge, high dollar Mercedes? Well let it be proclaimed right now that the most maddening venture is not trying to navigate I-95, but rather it is trying to make any sort of rhyme or reason of the civil engineering of the nation’s capital.

Confronting the possibility of reliving my ordeal, I will dare to recount the efforts of yesterday. I left my home in South Riding at roughly 8:00am for an interview on K Street at 9:30am. Should have been plenty of time, right? I figured 20 minutes for Routes 50 and 28, 30 minutes for the Toll Road, and another 20 minutes or so for the GW Parkway. So an hour and ten should have had me there with about 20 minutes to spare. Ha ha ha. Oh you poor deluded woman. Debate surrounds Banneker as one of the first clockmakers too. What does that tell you? Of course, it wasn’t even close. Two hours and a full bladder later…..

The good news is that the actual interview was at 10:00am and I was to arrive early merely to fill out some cursory paperwork. Thankfully, the HR person in question hustled me along to my appointment tout de suite with no others being the wiser. After crossing no fewer than three bridges in my quest for employment, I prayed that there would be no other, more daunting bridges to cross going forward. You really are a poor, deluded woman, aren’t you? If Banneker possibly designed DC, and then became a clock maker, what do you think the odds are that your troubles have only begun? Jesus, that’s the story of my life.

After a fairly quick interview, I was turned back over to the kindly gentleman from the HR department, presumably to complete the aforementioned paperwork. "Do you have another two hours or so?" he asked me, with no laughing or joking apparent on his face whatsoever. You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me, I thought. Two hours? What the hell for? Do I have to mop the floor or deliver the mail or carry out some other task that will prove to you my worthiness for employment? Good God, what could possibly take two more hours? "There’s a test we’d like you to take." As if my mere commute was not test enough, I now was faced with being thrown into a room with nothing more than Elements of Style and a dictionary to complete a two-part written exam. I had to write a business letter and an advertising and outreach plan from scratch for a real organization in two hours? You people are insane.

At first, I stared at the ceiling in disbelief as I waited for a certain building block of home construction to complete its exit from my anatomy. I seriously wondered if the woman I had met with previously might not actually be one of those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the HR people her sycophantic followers. Finally I thought "you’ve come this far, you might as well give it a shot." There was another bridge to cross after all.

Amazingly, within the prescribed two hour window, I managed to complete the entire task. I still don’t know how I did it – I truly believe that the man above decided that I had had enough for one day and saw fit to have mercy on me and my sometimes non-linear thought processes.  Two pages of legal pad scribbling and a few missing eyebrow hairs later, I typed my last few words as the VP of HR walked in to tell me that my time was up. She grinned from ear to ear, just as a good body snatcher should. All I could think about was the long, protracted ride home. Good grief.

Last night, as I recounted my horrific tale to my sister and her friend over dinner, they could not help but laugh. "Oddmanout, how many people do you think actually stayed for the entire two hours and finished the test?" they asked. "I don’t know, wouldn’t everyone do that?" I answered. "Uh, the reason the VP of HR was grinning so much was probably because most other people feel like you did at first, except that they actually follow through on the urge to tell them they’re crazy and walk right out the door." "You really think so?" I asked. "Absolutely" they agreed. "Hardly anyone would actually stay that long, much less finish the test in two hours. It was probably a test to see how well you worked under pressure." Duh, I thought – of course! I was so wrapped up in the task itself that I didn’t even think about what the real intent for it might have been. After all, I’ve had my ups and downs in life, but one thing I am not is a quitter, and certainly not when under pressure.

I guess what I learned yesterday is that all tests are there for a reason, and that so far in life I think I’ve passed. But there’s one more thing I do want to know. Is the test over now?

Have you ever sat one day, unencumbered by the demands of daily life, and asked yourself "What would it take to make me happy?" Fortunately, I had one of these days recently. I was on a soul searching mission; determined to decide what it will take to make me happy. I decided to write an open letter to the world to share what I would like to have it give back to me (emphasis on the "give back" part). Here’s what I came up with:

1) I want to reclaim my career success. I want to write for a living again.

2) I want to be at peace with my life and how I’ve lived it so far.

3) I want to be successful in life – not measured by money, but because I’m doing what I love.

4) I want my kids to be incredibly happy, no matter what it takes.

5) I want to have true love in my life.

So far, it looks like I’ll be getting to number 1 in short order. Number 2 is well on it’s way. I started writing number 3 shortly after I moved back to Virginia. Number 4 is a different story, but I am hopeful that it will come true. Ah, but alas, that elusive number 5. Number 5 is what keeps me awake at night. Number 5 is something I thought I’d never experience in life. The truth is, I did experience number 5 and still feel the same way today. The problem is, many things stand between us. Without getting specific about the how and why, what I will do is let the object of my affection know how I really feel (not felt, but feel) about him. Even though I doubt that we will ever have a future together, I still feel the way I do because sometimes just a glimpse is enough. Sometimes you do get to have that one great love of your life – but you don’t get to have it for long. Just as in the movie "The Bridges of Madison County," you can spend your life being in love with someone you know you can never have. In my case, it was not an actual affair, but simply the feelings that two people feel. So with all of that said, here is what I’d like to say to him:

Thank you for showing me what true love really means.

Thank you for loving me for me and admiring me for who I am.

Thank you for making me feel like I deserved to be loved.

Thank you for erasing the pain that I felt for so long.

Thank you for giving me the only time in my life that I didn’t feel alone.

Thank you for being the catalyst for what is surely a better life.

Thank you for still being there in my thoughts and dreams.

Thank you for stopping me from telling you how I really felt about you that night. I knew that night that I couldn’t deny how I felt any more. You didn’t need to hear it – you already knew.

A soul’s connection is a connection that is never lost. My soul is connected to yours. It has been since the first day I saw you and it always will be until the day I die. If I never see you or hear your voice again, I will still die a happy woman. When the letter writing comes to an end, what I’m left with is that the number 5 on my list was my greatest satisfaction of all. Thankfully, all of the others may or may not come true, but the one that was most important has already been fulfilled. I have known true love. I have experienced the best that life has to offer. In the pursuit of liberty and happiness in life, I have already won.

When we were kids in school, music class was always a lesson in both music and history. Songs about slavery, hardship, and the many other facets of early Virginia life were chronicled in the folk, blues, bluegrass and ballads of the 1700s and 1800s. Once a week, we filed down the hallways of our elementary school to spend what seemed like hours learning and singing the songs of our forefathers. Somehow in singing the songs that were written and sung to free the spirits of those who sung them, we grew closer to not just understanding them, but feeling the myriad emotions that these people experienced. Life was not easy in the early Virginia settlements and plantations. Not easy at all.

One of the lessons that I gleaned early on from listening to and singing the tales of sorrow, escape, optimism and hope was that a person’s perception of the events of his life have much to do with the outcome. With the abolition of slavery, many of the slaves found that by singing and holding on to the hope of a better life, their message had been heard. I always wondered if the slave masters were affected as deeply as I was by the heartfelt and often angst-filled lyrics that were contained in their songs and ballads. After all, slaves were frequently given the surnames of their masters. Maybe that caused many masters to regard them as family, even if their status within the family was lower than the other members. Certainly many plantation owners silently left their estates to the people who had taken care of them and their land for so many years, just as many traditional families do.

As I travel the roads of the oldest state in the union, I revel in the beauty and majesty of the place where all of our dreams began. Four hundred years ago this year, people risked their lives and left Britain with nothing except maybe a satchel to escape persecution and find a better life. Those people decided that the tyranny of the king was too great, and that they and their families deserved to worship in peace. They gave up everything, sometimes even their own families, to escape to the promise of a new and better world. Their spirits could no longer be denied.

With the rich history of slavery and freedom that Virginia represents, I find myself suddenly understanding the ways of the world. A spirit cries out when it is tormented for too long. People cannot be denied their freedom forever. In the cycle of life, what is trapped will always eventually be freed. It is this concept of spirit and freedom that I embrace now that I am home. My spirit can no longer be denied.

And you’ll have to stay tuned for a little longer before I can clue you in.

Back in the days of punk rock popularity, I knew a girl named Dana. In the late seventies, Dupont Circle was a renowned punk rocker hangout where she could frequently be found. The area has been through many changes since, but if you were cool and a punker, it was definitely the place to be seen. Dana, like many of the kids I went to school with, went through the phase of wanting to be considered a rebel. She was also my best friend throughout seventh grade. We were an unusual pair, Dana and I, but I always did like people who were a little different from me. And I admired her strength and style.

This period was before the years of my mother’s antics, so things were rather normal at my house at the time. As we were getting to know each other, she would come over to my house to visit, and several times things would come up in conversation (that I practiced piano on a little upright in the basement, what my dad did for a living — things like that). Always being one to share, I told her quite a lot about my life. But she seemed to keep a lot of her personal life to herself. And I always wondered why.

To this day I don’t know exactly when things changed between us. For some reason, she started acting differently towards me. First it was just making smart remarks. After a while, she was bullying me with regularity. And boy she was relentless. So eighth grade was pretty much a washout for me, because being the little wimpy girl that I was (I know, hard to believe), I never told my parents and I didn’t really know how to handle it. But I had a way out.

At that time in Fairfax County, the area was growing so fast that they were constantly redrawing the borders for the school district. Lucky for me, this happened when I was in eighth grade. What it meant was that I could stay at Robinson, which I hated, or I could go to Fairfax instead, beginning in ninth grade. Tired of being confronted with the knife fights between students and the apathy with which the principals (yes, there were several) handled the out-of-control student population’s raging drug problems, I knew which way I was going. I had had enough of Dana from Dupont Circle. I wanted to go to school with kids who were actually happy and had a future. I was tired of being an outsider. Thankfully I got my wish.

Years later, it turned out that Dana and I met again. Having become a successful and popular kid with a much larger backbone, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked up one day in my 12th grade English class and saw Dana walking in the door. She walked in with hesitation, actually looking a little nervous through her defiant, punk rocker facade. And she purposely took the seat right next to me.

After I left Robinson, I found out why Dana was so hesitant to share the details of her life. It turned out that her mother was a hard-core alcoholic, who kept the shades drawn to keep her problem private. Her father was never home, and apparently it was speculated that he spent most of his time either on the road or out with his friends (and presumably a more sober female companion). Now that we were in the thick of my years of dealing with the "kids" and my mother’s and father’s problems, I realized that in an odd twist of fate, she and I ended up having a lot more in common as the years went on. I guess you could say that we ended up traveling parallel paths.

So now that she was going to school with me again, the bad memories came flooding back. I should strike back! part of me thought. Now’s my chance to get back at her for all the hell she caused me in eighth grade! It was much like in television shows where the protagonist is looking at an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. When it came down to deciding on whether to turn on her, I just couldn’t do it. All I could see when I looked at her was the pain that she must have already been through. Her upbringing was much more troubled than mine, and suddenly the big hearted side of me took over. As she sat there next to me, looking at me with a mixture of fear and hope, I knew what I had to do. I didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet from the Fairfax High welcoming committee, but I did fill her in on the cliques and watched over her for months afterward to make sure that she found her way. I guess that was the first time I realized that I was becoming a grownup.

It has been brought to my attention that there are some other blogs out there that seem to imitate mine in some form or fashion. Normally, I’d be terribly flattered, except that some of them seem to border on – no, actually are outright – distasteful. Call me what you will: an overgrown teenager, a dazed and confused mid-lifer, the spawn of the residents of Bellevue – but one thing I am NOT is racist or elitist. I mean, after all, this is just a blog. I am not trying to solve world hunger, eradicate political injustice or write the great American novel. I mean really folks, Garrison Keillor I ain’t. It’s just my world, honestly and truly. If it has turned out that thousands of people are entertained, I’m all the happier.

Anyone can string together shock-and-awe epiphanies or delve into the social not-so-norms and come up with what might constitute a blog entry. I’d like to think that the reason people have read my blog is because I’ve shared many facets of my life, which some might find interesting at best. To be honest, my arm was kind of twisted into starting this blog in the first place. Thanks to someone I worked with, I was convinced to start writing about what it is like to be transplanted into Fargo. I had always written in diaries and journals (which I’ve mentioned before), so I thought “what the heck?” The subject matter was intended initially to focus on the cultural and societal differences between growing up in an East Coast metro and ending up living in a little house on the prairie. What my blog became was far more involved than even I ever thought it would be. Modeled after the journals I kept for many years, it became a place to chronicle, and at times make sense of, the odd world of which I inevitably find myself a part. I thank that co-worker for convincing me to indulge in a little online therapy. After all, living in Fargo has taken away the madness of a metro, but it hasn’t changed the people I love and appreciate, flaws and all.

This may sound like some kind of farewell, but I don’t intend to stop writing at all. I just felt the need to say my piece about the great pretenders out there who substitute style for substance. Just as I am no Garrison Keillor or Proust, the ones out there who try to imitate the surface of what I have delved into here are just the perpetuators of the tabloid view.