growth – Stained Glass Butterfly

Stagnant

It seems like the older I get, the faster time is flying by. It would be dangerous to settle complacently into a corner and get too comfortable. Before I know it, days turn into months, then years, in the blink of an eye. If I don’t remain actively aware of it, what will ever change?

For better or worse, I have a shockingly stark example of what could happen if I never change.

When I first met my husband over 17 years ago, I was also unfortunately faced with his pestilent ex, Psycho. I attempted once — only once — to have a rational conversation with her about being civil for the sake of the kids. Her response was so execrable that it left no doubt that sense and sanity would never have a place in any interactions with her.

But people learn and change, right? Well, ideally, yes, they do. Seventeen years later, however, not one septic thought or action of Psycho’s has changed even the slightest. Still ragingly jealous. Still pathologically obsessed. Still no hesitation to gluttonously cannibalize the kids to placate her hollow ego. Same tirades, same games, same silly lies on repeat, stunted and stale and predictable.

Seventeen years have passed, one day at a time, and Psycho is content to be exactly the same as she was back then. No improvement, no learning, not one single step forward, and a mortifying lack of pride, class, or self-awareness to even be properly embarrassed by that.

It used to drive me crazy. Surely, someday, she must change, because how could anyone remain gratified with being nothing but trash with a pulse?

One major thing has changed, but on my part, not hers. I finally made myself accept that it wasn’t a temporary flaw or a momentary blunder of hers. It is exactly who she is at heart, and I don’t need to understand it. In fact, I prefer that I never do. It’s simply not worth the time or energy to ponder her countless shortcomings when she will remain precisely the same years from now, decades from now, at best garnering some charitable pity here and there, but never respect or admiration or genuine affection. The nothing she is today is the same nothing she will be the day she dries up and withers away.

What about me? I can’t believe it’s been over 17 years already since I met my husband. Psycho is the only scenery standing still. Everything and everyone else is racing by, changing on fast forward. The kids are no longer small. This spring will be the last high school graduation for us. The oldest child is now married. My husband and I, once just friends nervously getting to know each other, are also married, with our own home, building memories and making plans and looking forward to our future together, and I can’t imagine life without him at my side.

In the same time period, what has Psycho done? Well…nothing. She chose to root herself long ago in bitterness, jealousy, and hatred, and each passing year buries her even deeper in her self-dug crypt. Still wholly supported by her father’s handouts well into her 50s, still destroying every relationship she touches. She denies reality by self-servingly patting herself on the back, calling herself an independent woman, filtering her pictures with a heavier (and more obvious) hand with each passing year, and shoveling more and more absurd lies to whitewash her meaningless life instead of attempting any real growth or advancement.

Psycho wears the foulness of her inside in the lines, sags, and folds of her outside. There is no light, or kindness, or goodness to soften the harshness of her decline. It’s more than merely aging: it’s stagnancy, putrefying from the inside out. It’s the opposite of living.

Time is supposed to bring change. It’s part of life. The flipping of calendar pages should bring evolution, adaptation, development. Stagnancy is unhealthy and crippling, a sure sign that something is malfunctioning. It’s a brightly blazing check engine light, a red flag a mile wide.

It scares me to look back and realize how quickly time has slipped by already. It’s like watching the road streak by from a speeding car. The only guarantee is that it’s going to keep rushing by, whether I’m ready or not.

I still have some control over my destination. I know two things for sure: what I want to drive toward, and what I want to steer clear from.

I want to drive my life toward: love. Peace. Happiness. Honesty. Clarity. As close to my husband as I can get, making sure he never doubts how much I adore him and cherish him in my life. Contributing to the world around me, teaching as I learn, appreciating the beauty in the most simple things around me, and discovering more about myself and the world as I try new things.

I want to be sure that stagnancy stays far, far in the rearview mirror. I don’t understand being satisfied with a gangrenous soul or rotted psyche, but there is freedom in no longer attempting to understand. It’s not my burden to fathom anyone’s poor life choices.

I have far more important things to concentrate on, like fully and truly living my life, holding onto the light and love of each day, enjoying many more adventures with my husband, laughing as much as possible, helping whenever I can, feeling and savoring and experiencing every single thing that life has to offer me, and making sure I don’t miss the lesson or blessing between every beautiful sunrise and sunset of the rest of my days.

Manicure

It’s been several weeks since I have polished my nails. The impact of that statement may not hit you if you don’t know me terribly well. For as long as I can remember, since high school at least, I have been religious about keeping my nails nice, shaped, polished. Even after a weekend of yard work, digging, pulling weeds, tearing up my hands, I made sure to end my Sunday evening with filing, buffing, and polishing, removing all traces of manual labor and transforming my hands back to manicured and soft.

Ever since my mom died, I have been much more ho-hum about things like that. Even when the initial tidal wave of grief ebbed a bit, I was left with a sense of just not caring about some things that I used to care about quite a bit before.

I dropped some hobbies that I am passionate about. My jewelry-making tools collected dust for about a year before I picked them back up. Slowly, I have been rediscovering these activities.

Last night, I looked at the chipped polish on my toes, my rough cuticles, and my bare fingernails, and something finally snapped. What the hell? How could I stand my hands looking like this?

I almost always do my own nails because I have been doing them for so long that I have all the tools at home, and I rarely feel like my nails look any better after visiting a salon than when I do them myself. I pulled out my tools of the trade and got to work: massaging cuticle remover, gently rubbing a scrub into my hands, filing, buffing.

I have a new nail polish I bought a few weeks ago then left sitting on my dresser, waiting for its moment to shine. This was it! I gave my poor, neglected nails two coats, plus a shiny top coat, then relaxed and shopped online from my phone while my nails dried.

I found myself glancing at my hands a lot, and I told my husband, “I almost forgot what my hands look like when my nails are done.”

It was a relatively small gesture, just polishing my toes and fingers, but as far as mindset goes, it was a leap forward.

Grief, I have discovered, is an odd animal. A year and a few months later, I wouldn’t describe my feelings as depressed anymore, but most definitely still subdued. Dulled. Reflective. Still trying to figure out how to go about my days without being able to talk to, call, email, or visit my mom, and some days hit harder than others. Some days, to be honest, punch me in the gut, knock the wind out of me, and leave me breathless and lost.

A friend described depression to me as something that likes to slowly steal away anything that brings you happiness, and it will just keep doing it unless you actively fight it. I find myself thinking of that a lot. Yesterday I realized that I was letting it take something that seems so small and trivial — doing my nails — but something that has brought me happiness for so many years that it was like a signature, a trademark, that my nails are always dressed up.

So I fought it. It was an action that seemed so meaningless on the surface but represented so much more to me. I took the time to do something small for myself that I have neglected for quite some time. I decided I was worth that time, worth that effort, and that I wanted to take care of myself for just a little bit.

Today I can look at my strawberry pink/red nails and smile to myself. I know the significance, silly as it may seem. I am slowly chipping away at this fog that settled over me after my mom died. I am figuring out how to get back to things that used to make me happy, how to redefine and reframe them so they fit into the upside down, shaken-up world that is still scattered and fragmented without her.

Create It

Happiness isn’t going to stroll up to your front door and ring the doorbell. It isn’t going to send you an urgent meeting request. It isn’t going to wrap itself up in sparkly paper with a fancy bow and present itself to you with a fireworks show and dramatic music.

I have learned that we have more power over our own happiness than we are typically willing to admit. Keep searching for happiness in buying things, or seeking approval and validation from others, or comparing, and it will always elude you. Find ways to appreciate each day, to breathe and find peace, to grow as a person, and to give the gift of happiness to others…and suddenly, your own happiness is a lot easier to discover as well.

Apology

Several years ago, I got annoyed by a mess left by one of my stepsons. I yelled at him in front of the entire family. Later, when I calmed down, I had to admit that even though pointing out the mess was justified, the way I handled it was not. I could tell by the look on his face that it was humiliating to be reprimanded in front of his siblings and his dad.

I decided that if I yelled at him in front of an audience, then I owed him an apology in front of an audience. I called him to the living room, called for everyone else, then told him I shouldn’t have handled it the way I did, and I was sorry.

I have come to the same conclusion about some other things in my life lately. Finding fault with behavior is one thing. How I choose to express that is something else.

Any reader of my blog knows that I have made many comments, insults, put-downs, and slaps directed at my husband’s ex-wife. At the time, they were cathartic or even seemed amusing.

I’m not sure what suddenly changed. Maybe it’s one of those changes that has been slowly creeping over me, sinking in a little at a time, without me realizing it. Maybe it is just softening with age. Maybe my mom’s death has speeded up some maturity and introspection. But instead of patting myself on the back for those posts, I now cringe instead.

Objecting to behaviors is my right. I will never abdicate that. But expressing my anger and distaste by piling on taunts and jabs were not my finest moments. Cheap shots and low blows were also low taste.

So: I do apologize. I made the insults publicly, therefore I make the apology publicly.

I see the kids now, three of them full-blown adults, one following quickly behind, and the years rewind and fast foward, rolling by like a slideshow on full speed. The kids changed so much in all of this time. Why shouldn’t the adults?

It’s heartbreaking to really reflect on how much time has been spent battling, clawing, spitting, lashing. So much anger and hatred. It didn’t need to be this way at all. Doesn’t need to be now.

Apologies are worthless without changed behavior. Words are meaningless without action. And life is just too damn short for anger and hatred and bitterness.

None of us knows exactly how much time we have left. But we all know, with certainty, that one day, the curtain will close. What will we do with this time we have? What will we focus on?

I truly am sorry. I can’t rewind and erase things I have done or said. But I can do better in the time still stretched out before us.

Learn This

I have seen this quote over and over since my mom died, and it’s true: even after healing as best you can, a trauma like that permanently changes you. Nothing will be the same as it was, including you.

I can already tell some of the ways I am not going back together the way I was before. I have always had a low threshold for drama and stupidity, and now I have none at all. The stupid bullshit that my husband’s ex obsessively and incessantly drums up is even more absurd and patently ridiculous to me now. She refuses to move on, to grow, to improve, and the ones she has always hurt most are the kids. But good luck getting her to see that or to give a damn, because her entire universe revolves around my husband, me, our love together, others from her past who grew tired of her shit long ago, and trying to pretend she has something that she never will. It’s pathetic.

I have learned to let others know how I feel. I have taken comfort in knowing that one of the last things my mom was able to say was that she loves me. I was able to hold her hand beside her hospital bed and tell her, between tears, how much I love her. After that, watching my stalker cling to the most idiotic, moronic, and doltish nonsense is staggering. She chooses to never evolve, to remain a permanent failure and take pride in her obtuseness and weakness. It blows my mind that someone can be such a colossal nothing and not want to be anything better than what she is right now, what she’s been as long as I have known her.

What’s my point? Maybe I’m just blowing steam. I have spent so much time since my mom died, just thinking, reflecting, wanting desperately to learn something from all this pain, wanting to give meaning to this suffering. And then there’s my stalker, eternally flitting about like a hapless twit, patting herself on the back for the most childish and mindless nonsense, no attempt whatsoever to advance beyond infantile, trivial, and meaningless bullshit.

Dumbasses are a dime a dozen. People like my stalker have no worth, no ability to be anything but what they are. They lack ambition to improve themselves, so they fall back on playground insults, outlandish accusations, and preposterous lies, as if no one can tell that their words and actions are borne from jealousy, spite, and raging immaturity.

She will never change. People like her never do. She will be useless and miserable until the day she dies. I refuse to live that way. Every day is an opportunity to learn something new, to try something for the first time, be a better person. Stagnating and rotting in place is a waste of time and a waste of life. I refuse to be walking rot like her. Life is too short to piss it away. If I learn nothing else from all of this, at least let me learn that, and live it each day like I mean it.