Truth and consequences

So truth and vulnerability are on my mind today.

I am instinctively extremely honest. It pains me to be evasive and especially to lie to people. I am not good at it and don't want to be. However, I'm noticing recently that though lying to others yanks my internal chain and I can't help noticing, I've been very accomplished at lying to myself. This must stop. Now that I've noticed A)that I do it and B)that it sucks my life force straight out of me, I'm expectant that it will cease to be an insidious little habit.

The irony is that I started out lying to myself to protect myself- okay, who knows where I started really, but from where I can pick up the trail so far I can see that these little self delusions were pretty little and designed to keep me where I wanted to be. Seemingly inconsequential details about what I was or wasn't okay with in my life. Except that I didn't notice until now that each little bitty lie laid the groundwork for another little bitty lie. And they started to knit together into a picture of someone I wasn't and didn't want to be but had carelessly let on to others that I was. And I won't even get started on how to start to go back and unravel the mess! Yeesh! So many assumptions get built on false foundations this way that when the truth comes out it astonishes.

All those moments when I held my tongue for fear of looking overly critical or overly sensitive, all those times when I laughed along with others at jokes that didn't hold the remotest amount of humor for me, each time I listened to someone go on and on and told myself they cared that it was me listening, that they would have clammed up around someone else, that when they were done I'd get a turn, every time I pretended not to feel all those things we hate to feel. So much wasted time!
For all the clichés about "to thine own self be true" I think this time I'm getting it.

From here on out, Honest Penelope is the new sheriff in town.

Help keep me honest, okay?

San Juan Island Pictures

Here are our pictures from our trip to the San Juan Islands.

The maids Mex'n out

Well an opportunity for our maids has just fallen in our laps! A friend of ours who is a single mother is looking for a full-time maid/nanny for her daughter. We know it is a long term position and we know the house and the kid. The wage is the same, the hours are the same and she is looking to start someone almost immediately. She also would like to hire someone with a reference since she has had many many people in this position over the past 6 years that we've known her. So, we told the maids about it and let them know that regardless of this one of them will have to be let go in August no matter what.

Now, call me crazy but if I just heard I had a one and three chance of losing my job in two months but that there was a good job opening available if I wanted to take it now, I'd be on that phone to get an interview. But so far, no one has called our friend. Are they paralyzed by denial that this gig is ending? Or what? They can't have been too surprised, we're obviously slowing things down dramatically and there's barely enough to keep the three of them busy for half of their hours. anyway, I told them all again today that they'd better hup to and have an interview. I even told them they could take any time away from here to do it. Now I guess I'll just cross my fingers that they don't mex out on this and miss it.

Midnight musings

Urgh.

Not sleeping well the past couple nights. I think it's mostly because I've stayed up too late and gotten myself worked up over it. I hope that's all it is. I remember that I started sleeping pretty badly when I was pregnant with Wendy and it was all downhill from there.
I wonder when some whiz kid engineer at Microsoft is going to come up with a memory card for your brain. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to load all the stupid and brilliant things you think of at 3 am onto a flash card and then load it to your computer in the morning so you could sort through it all? The thoughts I have in the middle of the night are like dreams, half the time I don't remember any of it except that it was brilliant and it was there.
I also thought about this blogging business. The first time a friend of mine said they had a blog and would I like the password I felt flattered and appalled in equal measure. On one hand I relish the thought of getting someone's inside view of their own life and times. On the other it seemed a little creepy that anyone would make their diary public. But last night I recalled that as a teen I kept a journal and one friend of mine in particular always wanted to read it. She lived in another state so we didn't see each other often but when we did the first thing she always wanted to do was to pore through my journal. I let her read it even though I was of two minds. Part of me resented the intrusion on my privacy but part of me yearned for someone else to know my real thoughts. I did end up censoring myself to a certain extent, for better or worse I don't know. Looking back on my journals I can still tell where I've drawn the line.
In any case I'm here again, writing a journal, making it sort of public.

Another train of thought that went through last night was about the difference between the families we choose and the families we are born into. I've already opened this blog up to certain people, mainly women with whom I feel a bond though I know them only online but not in real life. My husband also has the link.

But I don't expect that I will ever choose to share this with my biological family. My mother stresses me out with her drama and her back and forth between mother-protector and needy dreamer child. My father doesn't irk me but I also think he would be bemused by a blog and not know how to receive it. My brother and I appear to be estranged. After a lifetime of making choices the other would not, it seems that he has built up years of resentment toward me and I, in equal measure, have built up years worth of disregard for him. I don't know if we will ever find our way back to some sense of respect for each other. I don't even know how much I care one way or the other. He has a busy life, I have a busy life. The choices we are making seem to have little common ground, our backgrounds are nominally the same and yet we might as well come from different families altogether. I was shocked to finally understand that the father my brother perceived growing up was not at all the same man that was my father. And to a great extent the same is true for our mother. So even though each parent loves us equally, it is like we're talking about a different set of people, and that diminishes our common ground that much more.

Anyway, I'm sure that most people at some point in time have thought about this kind of thing. It concerns me now because I want to know how best to make room in my chosen family for my baby daughter. She will never have exactly the same family as my first. My first has had a dog that she adored and who is gone. She has lost a sister already. She has lived a life as a privileged foreigner and speaks a second language as her own. Her parents have always been home, always have had the luxury of making their own schedule. This baby will not experience those things. She will have an altogether new life. Her family will not be constantly hosting strangers, her mother will do housework, her father may have to work away from home, she will not be the first child to stand, to crawl, to smile, to make her parents weep with love and thankfulness. She will not be expected, regardless of intentions to the contrary, to be a role model for her sister. And yet these two girls will be loved equally by these different parents. I guess that that is all I know for sure.

Halfway to 70 baby! Woohoo!

Happy birthday to me!

I'm a little at a loss for profound thoughts even though I should be old enough by now. Many of my past birthdays have been fraught with high and unmet expectations of great gifts and romantic surprises. This year I've either been more realistic or less insane. I guess that boils down to the same thing but I'm sitting here with nothing to unwrap except for a sweet card from dh and I don't feel neglected, forgotten. dismissed or angry. I am just happy to have a day off with dd and dh and little baby kicking around in my belly to remind me that she's doing fine. Prompted by my mother who always wants to make a big deal of birthdays I gave quite a lot of thought to what I wanted for my birthday but I can honestly say that this year I just want a happy peaceful family. There is no thing that I want or need, I just want this baby to stay healthy, I want dd to heal her emotional wounds brought on by the tragedies she's seen and any mis-parenting dh and I may have done and I want dh and I to continue to learn how to be gentle with each other and help each other to be comfortable in our world even though we each need different things.
So, I guess I do have some high hopes but this year I'm pretty sure they are not unrealistic and it feels really good to be 35.

A chink in the armor

Today was daughter's third visit with an art therapist and I was beginning to wonder if it was worth the time. She was being her usual good-natured happy self for the first 50 minutes. She loves trying all the different materials, sparkles, paints, pencils. But then the therapist asked me about the upcoming birth, our plans for inducing, whether I was feeling any symptoms of cholestasis. Almost as soon as we started to talk dd's demeanor changed dramatically. Suddenly she was frustrated, angry, whiny, needy. As sad as it makes me to see her feeling so upset I am thankful that the chink in her armor appeared at her therapist's, you know? I am not sure about the therapist's approach, she doesn't talk so much and I am definitely more into more back and forth. But art therapy is something I don't know much about and I don't know much about how to reach hurting kids either so here's to hoping that a little more time and this little opening will be the start of dd's road to healing.

Movin' on up

Since finding the words to describe my own discontent to myself I actually have felt less anxious about it. However, this morning when I walked into the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast I was hit with the usual sense of guilt and furtiveness as I saw that Lupe had already washed the knife I'd used to make daughter's lunch a half hour earlier. ~deep sigh~ I fled back to the office as quick as I could.

The big news of the day though is that dh and I have finally moved into a room that can truly be called our own. We have enough storage space in the closet for our things that hang to hang, enough drawers for things that fold to fold. There is room in the bathroom for our toiletries to be shelved without fear of falling into the unflushed toilet. The only drawback is that it is bright in the morning. The coziest place for our bed faces the clerestory windows (a type of window which I happen to hate) so this morning I was awake earlier than usual, not that there is anything wrong with that. And, though it is too soon to call it, dd slept in her own room across the patio all night long. And she was happy when she woke up.

Of course, if we follow the current plan we'll only be living in this room, in this house for about another 4-5 months. Although I am ready to move on, I am worried that dd will be traumatized by the arrival of her new sister and the departure from her childhood home in quick succession. We're not going very far but the change will feel drastic to her nonetheless. She'll be changing schools, saying goodbye to her maids (with whom she has no issues), she will no longer be the cute owners' daughter cooed over by a stream of friendly strangers. She won't realize it for a long time but her life is about to get normal.

So I'm reading books on parenting, taking her to an art therapist to try to clear away all her lingering sadness from 2006 Year of the Family Tragedy, talking to her as much as she'll allow about the upcoming changes and how she feels. I really wish I knew whether these things are going to help. I wish I had more confidence in the resilience of children. I wish I was more sure that I can shield her from any more tragedy. I wish it really felt like loving her was enough. Maybe that's how parental love is though, it never feels like enough, no matter what.

And finally that leaves me with what should I do with my birthday? I know it is up to me to make a plan and follow-through. I know that eventually I want to get some sort of necklace or maybe a ring with my three daughters' birthstones. I'm sure some would consider it hokey but I don't care. It just remains to be seen if this baby is born in August or September. But that line of thought will bring on another long post so I'll pause and get out of the office for a while.