I was a very compliant child.  Afraid not to do as I was told.  I had little concept of what it meant not to obey most especially when I was right under my mother’s nose.  Unlike one or two of my children, who had I even attempted such a method against their will or interest would have sat there, looking around, book on table, or possibly in their hand, not reading a word, no matter how much I prodded them to read.  No, I wasn’t like that I took the book she had for me, slumped into my chair, opened the cover with a quiet sigh, marked the time when I would be done, and began to read, counting each tedious minute as it ticked by.

A few days later I had library at school, and this was where my school librarian played a heavy role in my life, I don’t remember her name, or her face.  But what I do remember that she LOVED books and she smiled a lot.  I told her my unfortunate, annoying dilemma.  I remember her eyes twinkled from the broad smile on her face.  She told me, “I have just the book for you, follow me.”  We walked along the wall of books that were in my age range and stopped at the far end. Then she reached out and hitched her finger on the binding of a hard covered, cornflower colored book, about an inch thick.  Then she place it into my hands.  I looked at the cover, it had a picture of a cute robot on the front with a planet in the back ground.  “I think you’re going to enjoy that book Theresa, I loved it.”  “Okay,” I said with a shrug, “thank you,” then turned, went to the desk, checked it out, took it to class, and shoved into my desk.

Later that night I again examined the cover,  “The picture’s cute at least”,  I sighed rolled my eyes then opened to the first page.  But this time when my 20 minutes were up I didn’t stop.  I couldn’t.  I was unashamedly hooked.  I have no idea how much longer I read or what the title was that made me fall head over heels in love with reading but I can tell you it was about a robot from space and there were three in the series.  (Thus began my passion for series.)  From that day forward I went to library hungry for another book and looked to the same Librarian to guide me to another book.

All summer long I walked to the local library spent languishing time scanning the stacks and forming a deep pile int my arms.  Although my walk home was considerable I never let it detour me from bringing home every book that my heart fancied and I knew I could read in a week.   Once my eyes devoured that pile I returned to get another.   And from that day till now I have surrounded myself and my children with books.  All my children have cut their teeth on them both literally and figuratively and I’m happy to say some do love reading while some some find it tedious.  However even my soon to be 20 year old daughter, who is one who finds it tedious and why she does I’ll never understand, stills loves for me to read to her and if I could would have me read book after book while she listened with rapt attention.  If only there were time…

Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-who loves her first librarian and is thankful to her mother for making her sit at that dining room table for 20 minutes a day

With unstoppable intensity memories bombarded my mind.  Although I remember tremendous boredom being at my step-grandparents I don’t remember any negative memories.  Except when we left.  That’s when my parents would begin to bicker, even as we left the driveway.  Bickering that was a straight road to intense arguing.  My mother didn’t like going for our frequent Sunday afternoon visits.  My step-father’s parents smoked, a lot.  Drank beer.  To access. But not to access when we were there, unless there was a family party.  They played poker.  Holey decks of cards were unashamedly stacked on the counter or table and my step-grandmother often played solitaire or played/practiced with the cards at the kitchen table where they visited when we were there.  Moving them this way and then that, or fanned out in a perfect row, lifting the last, and nudging the rest so that they all flipped from front to back in perfect orchestration. 

One day when I was about 6 or 7 I was there, alone.  The one and only time I remember being there without my parents.  They were up the country road about a quarter of a mile at a site where my step-father had put a small, inexpensive, used, travel trailer on a piece of land he had purchased from his parents.  He needed a place to go, to get out of town where we lived.  Where my mother wanted them to live.  She had grown up in town and that’s where she liked it.  He had grown in the country and felt cramped, awkward, and out of place in our house, on its tiny plot.

My parents were busy clearing the land around the trailer and setting things up inside and I was totally bored.  So I asked if I might go and visit my step-grandparents (although I never referred to them as “step”).  This was when my grandmother taught me how to run a deck up my arm, nudge it and have them all flip from their backs to their faces.  She showed me repeatedly running them along here wrinkled arm and used her middle finger to nudge them with.  I watched enthralled.  Eager to learn.  No one had ever taught me such a thing.  My other grandmother, my mother’s mom taught me to clean dishes and the floors, how to crochet, and embroider but nothing nearly so spectacular as this.

Then she handed me the deck.  I took it filled with tremendous confidence that I could repeat this trick.  But it only took seconds to discover that just getting the deck to spread evenly up my small arm was a task.  But I persevered.  I remembered her warm smile and encouragement she shared by telling me it took her some time of practice to get it to work for her.  We laughed together that day.  And ate wafer cookies from a pack with a mixed variety of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, and she told me about the orange tree that stood proudly on her kitchen counter.  It had come from Joany, her daughter.  She had sent it to her all the way from California where she lived.  It had an orange about the size of an acorn and I thought it was the cutest little thing.  She told me how she loved it and wanted it to grow tall and strong so she could pick her own oranges.

This was the only time I remembered connecting with my grandmother on my step-father’s side.  The one and only.  My step-father’s trailer and the land it sat on was put up for sale and sold the next week.  I remember the arguments my parents had over it.  My mother hated it.  She didn’t want to go up there anyway into the country.  She wanted them to get their money back that they had put into it.  AND she didn’t want me up there around “those people“.

We continued with our visits on Sundays where my parents and baby brother visited with them at the kitchen table, I was rallied to the living room to watch TV or preferably outside to play.  Rarely invited to sit with the adults.

My step-grandparents died long, long ago but today wafer cookies are one of my total favorites.  They can compete equally with Oreo’s for my attention.   And the card trick?  Well today I couldn’t pick up a deck and just wing it out there with great perfection however back in the day of my youth I practiced it, out of the view of my mother, off and on for years till I got it right.  I think growing into longer arms helped 

Night, love ya,
Theresa Jane
-my step-grandparents had two pictures in their home…one was the famous scene of the outdoors, in the country, red barn… and this pictured below, it hung in their kitchen,  I found this picture on Invisible Mikey’s blog he wrote about the artist, interestingly enough, last week, however it didn’t have the same memory evoking effect as the salt and pepper shakers . . .  I always loved that picture…my mom hated it.

Finally Cal raced out carrying a water bottle and bearing a smile.  After a hello hug we set out.  Throughout the walk Cal’s head stayed largely turned up tracking the clear water bottle as he threw it as high as he could.  Then gauging its descent, he raced to catch it again and again.  I also watched as it soared, delighting with him at how high it went and for his every catch.  I kept waiting for that bubble filled bottle to miss his grip, smash against the sizzling black top, and spew water everywhere.  I also watched, with careful concern, for it’s downward arch and stepped, with agile quickness out of its way.

The path of our walked ambled from here to there as I sought the cooling shelter of  available trees casting long, early evening shadows and Cal followed without a break in his stride or the tilt of his head, as 8 year olds are so agily capable of doing.

As we were trodding up a steady incline, the type that makes you slow your pace and breath heavier due to its continous length, he stopped throwing his bottle and asked, “What was my first word?”
I answered, a bit sadly, “You know, I don’t remember.  I was pretty sick when you were that little and some things I just don’t recall.  Remember our talking about that?”
“Oh, yeah.”  And in his effort to really get his brain more fully wrapped around “my sickness” he said, “So you must have not felt well a lot.  Like been tired and stuff.”
“Yes, that and more.  I’m only here today because of Dr. John’s skill and healing techniques.”
“I’m happy about that,” he said, I wouldn’t have wanted you to die.”  Then he paused thoughtful and added, “I’m glad I have life,”  and looked up at me and smiled.

Those five words really got to me.  They caused a question to etch across the folds of my brain, “Have I ever been glad I had life?”  I don’t recall feeling that way ever honestly.  As a child I was doing all I could to survive and endure, that pretty much consumed me and I think that that way of living continued with me even until today.  The times I felt the freest, the most at peace was on the playground that stood next door to my grandmother’s.  There I spent hours of carefree play swinging so high with my friends we all feared we might loop back over the top bar, climbing monkey bars and daring myself to stand on the top arms outstretched like the boys, teter tautering with a freind or simply running up and down it on my own or sitting at its center keeping it perfectly balanced, and sliding down what I considered the world’s highest slide.  A metal structure with about 20 stairs that had little dull claws to grab and steady the soles of the children who climbed to its full height, it had a shiny, mirror like slide that at the peak of the noon day sun would burn through our thin cotton shorts making it only for the bravest and strongest to attempt going down.  Then, when the season was right, I daily swam long hours in the “Little Pool” the round blue concrete wonder that couldn’t have been more than 2-2 1/2 feet deep at its exact center.  The spot where Robert and I would grip the metal drainage grate beneath us in order to stay submerged and compete to see who could stay under the longest.

This was where I was the happiest.  This was where I spent as many hours as I could from early morning to early evening pausing only to get lunch and then a quick dinner.  This was where there was quiet.  Peace.  A measure of safety.

I thought of that time as I examined myself and the span of my life here on this planet, asking, ”Can I say that I’ve been glad I had life?  Did I at least during my time on the playground have this feeling?”  Honestly?  No.  My time on the playground was me simply loving my time there whether with friends or alone.  At that moment.  Thankful for the freedom.  The sun warming my hair and the cool of the evening shadows as they stretched across the lawn.  It was my place of escape, for solitude away from the troubles that lay at home.

Yesterday, from the mouth of one of the most pleasent 8 year olds I know, who also happens, thankfully to be my son, came one of the most thought provoking, life and thought altering statments for me.  And I think it was so jolting due to his tender age.  To hear someone so young utter such a statement is unavoidably noteable.

So today I make it my goal to reach for the simple contentment of having life.  Not to just “put in my time” doing what I can while I’m here for the service of others, or to make a difference, or even for the need and eranest desire to be the best mom I know to be, for my children, but for me.  For the sheer pleasure of being glad that… I have life. . .

Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-Cal’s water bottle survived 50 minutes into our walk then it smashed.  And when it did it, “made the coolest pattern” rendering it worth the loss of serving as a thrist quenching fluid for Cal.  Also Dan and Grace joined us for the last 15 minutes rendering my evening a delight with my three youngest before they, with great excitment and expectation, loaded into their sisters Blessing’s car to spend the night with her at her apartment.

In the last few weeks…and months since the time Zac’s health became an issue the demands on my time have increased a ton.  I have worked as much as I did when my kids were all little and I home schooled.  Except this work falls outside of the relhm of housewife/mother.  My life has been jamming overtime.  And it wasn’t simply due to Zac and his needs.  My work has shot through the roof and I am working 6-7 days a week and often for two families in one day. I can work 9-12 hours a day several days a week.  Some days starting at 6 a.m.  Then we are planning and creating some very unique, cutting edge things with our business so in spite of the work I do to generate money, I am at meetings many times a week and working for hours on the projects. In between I squeeze my kids, maybe a movie, and some walking. Like today I worked 9:30 am-8 pm and afterwards I went to my kids house and Grace and I walked for 50 minutes in her neighborhood and talked for another half hour standing outside, by my car, in the cool of the evening and the soft light of the street lamps, surrounded by the soothing sounds of night critters.

I love these moments with my kids.  The night, the stillness, the pleasure of being and sharing…quietly…

Tonight held a specialness that was meaningful to us both.  I was able to share something with Grace that I never knew she didn’t know….
When my kids were little bitties I started collecting books and building a library for them.  Books are my thing.  Always have been since I was in second or third grade.  I even worked in a library once upon a time, when I was in highschool, and I would help the college students find resources that they were blank on how to find. Whenever they came to the library it was me the sought out.

I started my children’s library so that books would be ready and at their finger tips.  I built a library filled with classic literature, fun children’s novels series, marvelous picture book/little children’s books, ya know Seuss, I Can Read, Eric Carle, Margret Wise Brown, H. A. Rey. . .   history books of various levels 2nd-highschool.  Series of books that were known for their accuracy and being a good historical novel read.  I had science books by topic, and art books, and great novels for kids that have stood the test of time as well as were being currently published and were simply wonderful.  The library I drew together has likely two thousand volumes and it moved with us three times.  Today it resides in the finished basement of their home and until tonight my daughter had no earthly idea of its history.  She was quite young by the time I finally completed it so she didn’t know that when her brother John was 5 I started the collection by buying, at an auction, a library from an elementary school that closed and we hauled 35 tall, white boxes of books home, that I weeding through to cull out the good picture books, children classics, and the science and history ones worth keeping… probably a hundred.  Then there were the years of library sales, garage sales, and the Berry Hill Book Store in Clinton, New York that houses an incredible store, inside an old barn, that is three stores high and I can’t even tell you how deep.  The best, most organized used book store I have ever been in anywhere, ever on the planet.  We went there frequently and always to their clearance sale in the very early summer where we competed with a line of people each carrying a box to fill with his $1 a book bargain days.  We were there John, Blessing and I each with a box.  Every time we filled one John hauled it to the check out, took it to the car, dumped it, and returned for us to fill again.

I was very careful and particular with my book choices because you can own a boat load of books but have very little of real value at the end of the day.  Oh, I let the kids have random books and they enjoyed them but when it came to the library that was another matter all together…that was for the books that have and would stand the test of time.  Others that would give super educational value with ease, wonder, and fun.  And today that library is still being used.  Something I was unaware of.  Grace tells me that I have a ton of the books that the elementary school has, the one she left in the fall to move on to middle school but Cal and Dan attend.  She can’t tell me how many times Cal is disappointed that he wanted to get a certain book out of the school library and it wasn’t there and she tells him, “We have that in the basement you know?”  Then she tells me how many times she was able to do full projects for school from those same books and how thankful she was for the ones that are “resource only” at school and she couldn’t take out but she could sit on her basement floor and do her project with the same book.  This touched my heart.  I didn’t know this, being that the divorce is going on 5 years I’ve missed a lot of this sort of end of the nitty gritty of their lives simply by not being there, in the house in the swirl of the daily.  And it really didn’t seem to stand out for her to tell me till tonight.  And when I found out the books that I lovingly gathered for my children, all those years ago, for their enrichment are indeed still being used when I thought it wasn’t caused tears to swell in my eyes. My labor of love continues to give…

I love books.  They seem to grow up out of the floor boards wherever I am. 

There is so much more I could write!  But the bed beckons.

Night for now…love ya,
Theresa Jane
–Soon I will be writing about what’s current with our business. I’m excited about sharing it and looking forward to when I can. Plus I’m excited to go from planning to doing.  Can’t hardly wait. We’ve done a lot of work that is finally coming together into the most wonderful way making the work all worth while.

Today I worked a good portion of the day stationed right here at the computer screen.  But Dan, Cal, Grace, and Zach were all here in my apartment watching Christmas movies and I will admit to peeking around the screen more than once to watch.

I kicked off from working around 4:20 when it became terribly apparent to me that the gifts I had ordered from Amazon, which had been ordered with 3 days to spare to be here in time for Christmas, for Zach weren’t going to show up.  Checked the tracking number and it was a no go.  Oh God….
“Come on Grace let’s go…”
We were out the door in minutes flat bombing up the highway heading for Coconuts to get the top two things he asked from me for Christmas, two movies: 1408 and The Mist.  EEEEKKKKKK.  They had to have them.  I called Blockbuster, Best Buy, Barnes and Nobel as I flew up that road.  NONE had a single copy.  As I entered the store I was praying like mad a that they would be sitting on their shelves…scan the store, find a sales girl, ask if she knew if they had them, “We should,” together we moved up the isle in their direction, as change was clanking into the drawer as the girls in the front cashed out their drawers, the girl stopped right, reached out her hand  whisked 1408 from the shelf, moved a few feet repeated the process and deposited them into my grateful hands.  I spyed a gift pack of 4 other Stephen King movies grabbed them, followed the girl to the front and we were cashed and leaving at 5:01.  PHEW.   Then we were bolting back down the highway heading for home.

When I returned it was dinner time: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, broccoli.  While they cooked I begin Christmas baking: Spritz cookies, and molassas popcorn balls.  Welllllll, I burned the molassas and the dough for the cookies won’t come out of the press nicely.  Why??  I don’t know.  I cleaned up the failed attempts, shelved the cookies press and dough till tomorrow, cleaned the kitchen, decided I needed to whip out a post before bed so here I am: 1:15 am and I am typing at top speed.

Before I end this I must share a quick story.  Dan and Caleb were wrapping Grace’s gifts for me and Caleb said in the warmest, sweetest tone, “I love wrapping Christmas gifts.”  Dan said, “Yeah me too.  Then I know what they got and I can torment them letting them know, I know, what they got.”  This he said with devilish glee.  Cal responded, “Well, I just really love to wrap Christmas gifts.”  He didn’t say it, but you sure could hear it that he didn’t want to be in the same catagory with Dan.

Isn’t it amazing how different we are from each other??  And yet how much the same…

MERRY CHRISTMAS,
Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-who will be continuing with the her series hopefully tomorrow…

Thoughts since the !BLAM!…

A great metaphor for the forgotten child.

!BLAM!ming my parents was one of the best things I’ve ever done.  I feel so different inside.  I’m experiencing transformation daily.  I let my parents know that I was a forgotten child in all their violence, drama, and destruction.  And I did it calmly.  No screaming, no yelling, no my parents yelling back…  I let them know in a controlled, clear adult manner that what they did effected me.  That I’ve never stood up and said.  I had always basically summarized: “You and dad were terrible.  You were out of control…”  This time I let them know what they did hurt.  How I felt.  How I was effected.  That I remember what they did to each other and me.  It was REAL.  It happened.  It destroyed me.  I’m tired of it not being acknowledge and them expecting me to just go on as if, to quote my mother, “We were just a family who had problems”.   Good God, it was more than that.

I grew up in that mess.  I was a child.  I had to find a way to survive.  Through my private sessions with my couch/therapist… I discovered that I never came out of survivor mode.  Possibly the best way to describe it would be to say, I functioned like a vet who suffers with post war trama: flashbacks/jumpy/edgy/suspicious/on alert/ready to protect and defend…

Not me. Just a great pic for here

I have lived on “survive mode” since I was a child.  It has only been until the last 7-8 months that I can say I am finally, really, really coming out of that state.  Out of the “training” I went through at home, when I grew up and my brain was forming.  The way I processed life, my psychological state of being, formed and letting that go and even seeing some of it was a very difficult thing to do.  A very tough row to hoe.  Those ways of being were what allowed me to survive what I lived through.

Letting go took two things: A committed couch who wouldn’t give me any way out and my unwavering commitment… leaving appointments with swollen red eyes or swearing a sailors stream of cus when it came to the session I just left, “what did that son of a bitch know about anything…”

Since leaving home I have searched for my healing.  Tried many things.  So I could live normally.  Feel normally.  Like other people.  It wasn’t until 6 years ago this January 2nd that I really found the source of my healing.  That’s when I found my life couch and he had a system (birthed from the book he had been writing: Red Book and Cotton) and through it I found the way out.  However it’s taken a lot of work and it wasn’t until the last 7-8 months that I can I say I have had the earth shattering break throughs that could allow me to say, “Now I’m really starting to live my own life.  I feel it.  I see it.  The lingering effects are falling off in chunks… finally.”

That’s not to say that through the years I haven’t seen major changes in my life, emotions, reactions, how I deal with life around me.  It’s just to say that all that work finally added up to the “Wow” I see and feel in me today.  And the !BLAM! rocketed me.

I know I’m not done.  I have more work to do.  And I will, “Sell all I have in search of the pearl of great value”…that being my wholeness.  I have to be whole.  I have to feel like a confident adult who has value and worth.  I have to be happy from the inside and not from what happens on the outside to “make” me happy…  So I’m not stopping…

Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-if you are clueless about what I’m talking about when it comes to what I did when I !BLAM!med…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3dcbzTwu7Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Christmas is coming
The geese are getting fat
won’t you put a penny in the old man’s hat?
If you haven’t got a penny
then a ha’penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’penny
Then God bless you.

She finished and I asked, “What’s a ha’penny?”

“It’s coin that’s half of a penny.  We don’t have them in our country.  They had them in England a long time ago,” she explained,
“Oh.”  I said.  “Would you sing it again?”  She did and I listened intently.  Then I tried repeating it.  She looked down at me and chuckled softly.  Noticing that I needed her to sing it again in order to really remember the words, she repeated it.  This time I did my best to sing along.  I remembered it more that time but needed one more round to have it down pat.  By then we were filing through the heavy glassed door, stomping snow from our boots on the black carpet, and walking onto the shiny, creaky wooden floors.  The entire time we shopped in the small department store, that vastly pales in comparison to any today, I sang it softly to myself.

This memory and song has stuck with me all these many years.  It is a song I have sung every Christmas since.  Before my children, I sang it to myself as the excitement of Christmas filled my heart.  Then when my children came, I taught it to each one.  They all laughed with delight and they all asked, “What’s a ha’penny?”  Today we can break out in chorus and all sing it over and over and laugh together warmly as we share a tradition that began so very long ago in a land far far away…

TODAY: my heart filled with the excitement of Christmas.  Today I intercepted Grace from boarding the bus as she departed school.  I stood, umbrella opened protecting me from the rain that went from very misty, to raining hard, to back to misty.  As I waited I twirled the handle so the umbrella spun round and round as I excitedly waited the swarm of children to exit the double doors.

Finally the mob began.  I positioned myself very quickly out of the way and turned a watchful eye so as to not miss my daughter.  But it turned out not to be hard, there she was, and then she saw me.  Excited she ran over to get under the cover of my umbrella.  We wrapped our arms around each other and walked off into the parking lot.  Squeezing close so we could both stay dry.

“Where we going?”  she asked.
To see “The Christmas Carol.”
“Oh, yea,” she bubbled squeezing me tighter.  “I really want to see that!”
“I know, that’s why we’re going,” I smiled broadly, pleased that she was so pleased.
And as we pulled out of the parking lot and drove out of sight we sang, “Christmas is coming the geese are getting fat…”

Night, Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-who had a most delightful time with my daughter, even though the large chocolate milkshake from Dairy Queen, that we smuggled into the theater spilled, inside my purse and got everything all icky.  After the movie we went shopping and this time we found many of the stray items from her siblings list that we hadn’t found yesterday.

I just discovered this video from YouTube.  There choice of words is slightly different.  But it will teach you the tune if you have no idea what it.  Fun! 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mchDHct4Hvs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Lying is insidious.  
Someone that begins to lie for certain reasons, in specific areas over time can’t contain it.  Without noticing it slowly creeps around and sends off shoots like vines on the side of a house.  Left untended, they’ll cover the house and destroy it.  That was me.

During the first 3 years of practicing raw honesty with John1 I felt like I was climbing a greased pole.  Fear, doubt, and jangled nerves were my companions trying to convince me that this level of honesty was leaving me too vulnerable and threatened to destroy me.  Time and again I feared the honesty would produce disgust, hate, doubt, John would never trust a word I said, and worse he would stop being my friend.

But in fact what I’ve discovered is the more honest I’ve been the more: love, compassion, understanding, and acceptance I’ve received, and John1 doesn’t hang up on me.

Honesty can hurt like hell,
but it builds, it produces life.
Now I’m a honesty practicing believer,
even if I can have my minor challenges here and there.
Everything takes practice.  Practice makes perfect.
The important thing is, I practice…

So why all this?  Well, I’m going to another level of honesty here in my blog…
Show you more of who I am.
As I have stated all along this is a journey: going “from housewife to film maker”.
Coming out of “housewife” has absolutely included, for me, coming out of lying.  The first lie I had to admit to?  “I’m happily married and my husbands loves and care for me.”  I had stated it for so long it become my gospel truth.  It was tough to even see it was a lie, let alone unhitch.  That one was painful.

Facing this lie was just the first in a long line of lies.  It freed up a lot.  It was a major start down the path of old rusty lies.  Unfortunately there had been the other lies, the new “creeping vine” lies… John1 hung up on both: old and new.

But enough of that for now, where I want to go is to this point: I’m concerned that as I write about my children today I may indirectly be propagating another lie: that I’m a super supreme mom without any kid issues.  Doing it all right.  Now what I write is real, honest, and true.  It’s not letter perfect but it’s pretty darn good.  However what you don’t see is that a big chunk of that “good” comes from my messing up with my first four.  And what I live with as a result.  Painfully learned lessons have produced the fruit the last four are enjoying with me now.  Again I’m not perfect by any means, but boy am I the new and improved model.  (But honestly I doubt they’ll reach adulthood without their complaints.  Parenting is riddled with it’s problems even in the best of circumstances.)

The relationship I shared with the first four had a lot of good.  We were tight.  But it had it’s problems.  I created issues that created rifts.  I created pain for them.  Since I was so opposite from my parents I had a very difficult time seeing the damage I had caused.  But it was there just like a car that’s been in an accident and repaired.   The car runs fine, it’s just that one door never quite shuts right anymore, and it’s getting worse . . .

That’s what tomorrow’s post will be about.  Me being honest when it comes to my first four children…
If you’re to have a complete picture of me, an honest picture, then I need to get real.  Get raw.  Get honest . . .

Night, Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-wondering why on earth since this has been a mini series I didn’t title them all the same and number them…

I could end here, but that would be disappointing.  But I HAVE to tell you something more meaningful.  It starts with this blog…

Becoming Jennie captured my attention straight out of the shoot:   The brutal honesty riveted me to her page.  I’ve been reading her for, what?  A couple weeks now.   It’s her honesty that amazes me.  It’s practically brutal.  She’s on the show Sex Rehab.  I’ve not watched it.  Time is an issue.  Then, well, I’d have to find the channel it’s on.  Those sort of things I put off.  But I did Google it last  night.  I watched clips from the show and was blow away by these people.  Honest to the bone.  Some just zipped the info out without a hitch.  Some were having a tough time.  But all wanted to be free.  And I think I’m remembering this right, all/most want to have a sincere relationship with one person.  But their addiction blocks them.  They destroy that for themselves.  Now I want to watch the show.  That means finding the channel…

After viewing them I sat back gob-stopped.   Marveling.  And inspired.  Why?  I’ve been practicing honesty for something like four years now with John1.  We’re both into awakening/healing/consciousness.  It’s our thing.  So we work together.  Read books and discuss them.  Watch movies, discuss them.  Dig into our issues.  Talk about them…

He’s like 20 miles ahead of me so he ultimately helps me more in some ways.  But we both benefit.  Well one day he came up with this new “thing” for us to strive for: absolute honesty with each other.  I’m talking the unveiled, all the time, sort of honesty.  Honesty that can hurt.  I saw the value and agreed…bush baby has this been tough to get to.  Harder for me than him.  Nothing like having a friend hold my feet to the fire!  There’s been tremendous growth.  But first I had to come to see how much I lied.  OUCH.  See, I have a loooonnnnnggggg history with lying…

That’s where I’ll pick up tomorrow.    I’ve always loved television mini-series…

Night, Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-who just looked at her clock and is startled, it’s 4:17 a.m.  eeeeekkkkkkk…

That’s my day from the black and white “entrepreneur business woman” end.  Not too exciting really.  Shrug.  Today what I think was worthy of ink to paper was this:

After work my eldest daughter whose name is Blessing, wasn’t feeling well at all.  I brought her some herbs, gave them to her with a glass of water, sat on the bed next to her, and rubbed her stomach for about 45 minutes.  Trying to sooth her past the pain and into sleep.  Her slender face was pale and winched with that drained look of exhaustion one has from dealing with a non-stop, crippling cramp that steals away even the ability to speak.

As I sat there in the silence of the soft, amber glow casting a small puddle of light into the room, all I could think was 19 years ago what I was now rubbing was called a “tummy”.  It was tiny and taunt and fit below my hand.   When she was sick I would scoop her up out of her crib, cradle her in the crook of my arm, and rub that tiny belly.  As she grew I eased her small body up from her twin bed onto me, sat on its edge, and rubbed her tummy.  Except now my hand didn’t cover nearly as much and her twin bed continuously seemed to shrink as her form covered more of it.

She’s 19 now and sleeps on a full size mattress.  Beautiful and grown.  Exuding the freshness and exuberance of a healthy adult, anxious to fully embrace the wonders that life holds for her as an adult.  I watch as she struggles to fully experience the weight of her independence.  Such a healthy thing.  A necessary thing.  Such an uncertain, wobbly time.  Wanting me at times and not at others.

But I’m proud to say that she’s doing a terrific job moving from her youth/teens on into her adulthood.  She’s sturdy, strong, and loving.  A hard worker and wise with her money.  For the last few months she’s been working her way towards her first apartment and if all goes according to plan, and it appears that is, she will be securing it and moving in in January.

So as I sat there in the quiet of the evening, on the well worn side of her bed reminiscing through time I couldn’t help but think…after January life is never going to be the same . . .

Night, love ya,
Theresa Jane
-It’s now 1:18 a.m. and I’m heading for bed.