The Back Burner

The Summerlands Receives Lord Athanor

2012-02-14T04:55:00.000-05:00

Several years ago when I began this blog, I told the story of finding my way to the Grove of the Unicorns in Atlanta, GA. While the motherhouse did not have space for me, I was taken in by a hived of coven, Grove of the Winged Scarabs.

We often celebrated rituals with the Grove of the Unicorn and other hived covens. In those days, Lady Galadriel was Queen witch with her husband Lord Athanor. When my world and my coven fell apart, they offered me space with the motherhouse. Too much water had passed and I was moving north and following my heart to Cameron. But their kindness touched my life profoundly. Their wisdom has shaped my life in ways I cannot even express.

In those days, I was known as Weaver and my Sister of the Heart (here called Fiber Geek) was Spinner. A few moments ago, Fiber Geek sent me word that Lord Athanor has crossed into the Summerlands to join the love of his wife, who crossed several years ago.

Lord A loved to brew mead. Check out his page and let's have a brew on his behalf.

His power of personality, joy of mead and wisdom shall be missed by many. Blessed be, Lord A. Thank you for touching my life.

Ga-Filk 2012

2012-01-09T19:52:00.002-05:00

Fourteen years ago I met Cameron at the first Georgia filk convention known as GaFilk. We gather the first weekend following the holidays for a relax-a-con to enjoy good company and good music. Filk, a misnomer in a program some fifty years ago, has become its own genre focusing on, but not limited to, parody, science fiction and fantasy.

Fiber Geek and Cat

We always open with champagne and signing. Party favors wait on every chair. Some even dress up!

This was the first time I could take off work both the Friday before and the Sunday after the filking weekend in order to not rush home, which created the opportunity to participate in the dead dog party. This year a number of professional bands hung around, allowing the synergy to become absolutely remarkable.

Elise Matthesen

Elise Mattheson was a delight. She not only is an amazing author, blogger, and poet, she also creates amazing jewelry. She gifted me with an original creation on the spot. I reciprocated with a pendant I had brought along and am interested in seeing what sort of creative inspiration it inspires.

Dragons are not unknown, either, as old friends come together...

New friends are made.

Auctioneer and performer,
Bill Sutton

As a way to raise money for interfilk, which is how we bring performers from all over the world to filk, we have an auction which gets...interesting.

Filk Wench

Pictured is one of the "wenches" who was wearing a flashing mohawk and matching flashing gloves...which got real interesting which she "hypnotized" herself into bidding against herself! LOL

Anythings goes during the auction, including bribery, back rubs and impossible promises! It's all in good fun!

Cat Faber, formerly of Echo's Children

Elise

Brenda Sutton of Three Wyrde Sisters

Pug and Shaya from Switzerland

Cat's elephants in attendance.

When I realized that Cat's elephants and joined us for the ecumenical filk Sunday morning, I of course and to bring mine as well. My elephants travel almost everywhere with us.

Elephants Gabe and Bronte.

Well, that was fun!

2012-01-05T18:04:00.001-05:00

Phone rings. I'm making food for our trip this weekend as the budget means eating in our room at the hotel. So against my better judgement, I answer, expecting Cameron to have called me back.

Debt Collector: "May I speak to [uber feminine name]?"

I'm sorry, she's not home right now.

Debt Collector: "Well, may I speak to her husband."

Loud snort from me, follow with, "You are talking to a gay couple. You should read the notes. You don't get paid this way!" Click.

That was fun...bet he pays more attention next time. I used to be a debt collector. He didn't read the comment line giving the partner, a woman, permission to speak to the person on the other end of the phone wanting money. Snort. Another target down. My work here is done.

Emptiness

2012-01-05T09:19:00.003-05:00

"[E]mptiness can never be eliminated, although the experience of it can be transformed."

Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness by Mary Epstein, M.D.

One of the core beliefs of Buddhism is the the belief that, to understand one's true nature, one must become empty. But from the Western perspective emptiness takes on a very different meaning. We equate emptiness, rather than space for renewal, refilling, or being, as a space that is damaged, distressed, pathological. We perceive emptiness as not real, not fulfilled, not enough. Inadequate.

Put that thought on the back burner.

So what happens if we stop trying to fill our emptiness. Rather than seeking, every moment of every day, we stop the television, the distraction, the drive for fulfillment? What if, for a moment, a breath, this instant, we stop pathologizing emptiness?

Put that thought on the other back burner.

I'm a therapist. Well, an intern, but I do therapy. By nature, substance abuse counseling brings a lot of Borderline Personality Disorders to my office. My clients have made a career of avoiding emptiness. Many have taken pills so that can be "high" or in a place of not feeling, of avoiding emptiness, of ignoring it. Of numbing it out. They fear it.

Epstein responds this way: "Emptiness appears first as the dark side of our attempts to create a separate and self-sufficient self. Any therapy that tries to explain it away, or cure it with a corrective emotional experience, is destined to produce frustration and disappointment. Only when we stop fighting with our personal emptiness can we begin to appreciate the transformation that is possible" (16).

Wow.

Let's put a personal pot on.

"When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way" (20).

My life is about to change. Radically. Don't exactly know when, but I do know how. When change comes, it will change everything. Where I work, where I live, how I spend my days. I'll still be a therapist, but I'll be in a different environment. I'll also be preparing the home Cameron and I dream of, 3,000 miles away, while he most likely works on his internship here. While we will spend every moment we can together, there will be a great deal of opportunity for alone time as well.

Let combine and stir the pot.

I've not had a lot of alone time in the last ten years or so. My time has been filled with school, work, financial stress. Now I want to look ahead, to that alone time, and approach it with reverence, awareness, and respect. I want to step into that emptiness and let it become my next place of healing.

One last quote from today's reading, because I identify with it: "As the Buddhist traditions always insist, if we look outside of ourselves for relief from our own predicament, we are sure to come up short. Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again" (27).

Visions of Body Dysmorphia

2011-12-31T21:35:00.000-05:00

I have come to believe that Body Dysmorphic Disorder plagues most of us. I'm too heavy/thin, short/tall, young/old. Polarized and not fitting the person staring back at in the mirror, we either don't want to look, or spend hours changing the physical self. Dysmorphia is fed by Seventh Avenue ads of beauty and impossibility. Indeed, Photoshop has created the impossibly perfect and now we expect reality to conform...just take a look at Youtube. Think about it, how many people actually feel comfortable in their own skins? Even those of us who recognize we are not defined by skins find it easier to like our spiritual selves than our physical selves.

I lost 55 pounds this year. But when I look in the mirror I see a still overweight, size 22 middle aged woman with the beginnings of smile creases and eye crinkles. I see a body marked by a difficult journey, limited by too many hours in an office job, grad school and doing therapy. And most of my friends echo my challenges with body image. Gender challenges, weight challenges, the wear and tear of arthritis, diabetes, fill in the blank.

Put that thought on on the back burner.

This is a quote from one of what is quickly becoming a favorite author, Susan Howatch. She explores spirituality in the Episcopal Church of England in a series of six books. I've read them out of order, having begun the with the last first. I'm currently reading GLAMOROUS POWERS. It's the story of a monk with a vision that leads him to leave his current calling for something undefined but promised by his psychic powers during a vision. About half way through the book, he attempts to explain what it is like to have a vision:

"All I know for certain is that I step out of time as we understand it where the past is always behind us and future is still to come."
"Miss Fielding said suddenly: "It must be like escaping a prison. Isn't it strange how unaware people are of being locked up in time?"
"You find an unconscious awareness of this in the widespread longing to be immortal. Yet isn't it equally strange, when one remembers that we're also locked up in space, that no one seems to long to be ubiquitous?"

As our character Father Darrow reminds us, we normally perceive ourselves as walking a time line from birth to death, moving inexorably in the direction of death from the moment life begins. Most "mogals" or "mundanes" see this as the inevitability of life.

But what if we really are light beings trapped in a temporary, corporeal existence for the purpose of growth. What if the only way for a light being to experience the rumble of cat's purr, the sensuality of their fur on fingertips, the devotion in their eyes is to come to Earth, the learner planet, clad in skins of water and bone.

Mayhaps our longing for immortality is the spirit's awareness of the flesh's impermanence and reminder that this stage, many times repeated, is still only temporary. And perhaps, just maybe, this powerful sense of dysmorphia is more than Seventh Avenue's lure. Maybe it is our soul deep awareness that we are something more than the flesh. And that no matter how physically perfect the body becomes, the matching of the corporeal to the spirits is, in the end, impossible.

Let's grab another burner.

That stated, do I believe we should struggle any less with these bodily "temples" to seek a more perfect union of flesh and spirit? My answer is that it depends.

Certainly our physical manifestations on this planet determine identity, how we are perceived, and how we define ourselves. Male. Female. Transgender. Androgynous. Each word comes with a judgement, a cultural value, and definition of self and other.

Moreover, I would never suggest my beloved partner, who is transgendered, should not seek to more clearly align the outer expression of self with the inner sense of identity. It determines which bathroom he/she uses. How others see our coupleness. Whether or not we or he is safe.

So bringing the pots together, the front burner and the back.

I don't believe that everyone has dysmorphia to the extent of a needful diagnosis and treatment. I do think the current focus created by media on the physical distracts light beings from our purpose on this planet. We are here to experience the purr, the fur, the doubt, the fear and the joy of living. We are here to engage our challenges and grow. Sometimes necessary changes leads to the loss of 55 pounds or the transition of gender. Sometimes the physical drives us so profoundly that until that pain is addressed, we cannot get on with our purpose.

Let's stir the pot.

Middle age has come as a rude awakening for me. Despite the roundness of my curves, I've always gotten by on a great complexion, an ability to flirt, an innate sexuality that made the men notice. I changed it all in the last ten years. A substantial weight gain, a shift in pheromones, a iron control over my sexuality has completely shifted how I relate to the world. Menopause has made the shift easier, light on the night sweats and bringing relief to no longer have 10-12 day periods.

Then my complexion shifted. I suddenly started breaking out. Badly. My skin wasn't just splotchy. I had those teenage zits that make people notice. I work in a substance abuse treatment center where such acne is associated with opiate abuse. People kept asking if I was okay. The morning a middle aged gentleman asked, out of deep and caring concern, what was wrong with my face, I realized my appearance was getting in the way of being able to do therapy. No matter the inner work of my journey and my struggle to be comfortable in the flesh, my physical appearance was interrupting the therapeutic process, leading to personal inquires in place of the professional. I find that to be unacceptable.

I turned to the internet. I viewed a teenage model's videos on makeup application. I spent $40 I didn't have at WalMart. For an hour I searched the aisles for the secrets of success. I finally had to admit I have middle age skin in need of real coverage, not that light kid stuff. And I need primer (am I painting a house?). I settled for Drew Barrymore meets Elen Degeneres in the Cover Girl aisle. To my disgust, it worked perfectly. Every single day, I do mean every day, I have had compliments on my appearance ranging from the polite "you look radiant/pretty/really good" to the crass "your makeup is flawless."

Grrrrr.... Just like when I lost 55 pounds and my hips no longer met both sides of my chair (yes, clients have admitted to noticing), I'm judged by appearance. And no matter how pretty the make up, I still don't see the physical matching what's in my head.

Leaving the pot to simmer.

In an ideal world, I suppose the answer is balance. But balance still doesn't allow my partner to go to the male bathroom or erase the pimples from my cheeks. Sigh.

This is where I remind myself it truly is the learning planet.

Sunday Casserole

2011-11-25T21:53:00.000-05:00

It's very strange for me to plan to serve a casserole for my in-laws every Sunday. It dominates the day to drive all the way to their home and serve a meal, and some part of me does so grudgingly because so many things wait at home to be done. My Mondays and Tuesdays are very long, leaving me exhausted the start of every week, so lining up another exhausting day can be overwhelming. And yet I find myself planning the meals with great delight. Funny how sharing food brings people together.

A favorite gay boy recently said to me, "Aging is not for the faint of heart." As I count my increasing gray hairs (few enough I can still count) and watch my knees wear with each passing year, I can't help but concur. Makes me incredibly aware of how fragile our parents grow. End of life issues creep in, one year at a time, and I know we have little time left.

So this week it's going to be Johnnie Marzetti and NILLA Tiramisu Cookie Balls. I actually wanted to make the tiramisu last week, but didn't have all the ingredients. So I made Oreo Balls instead, which are deadly sweet.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-16T10:24:00.003-05:00

I have to admit, this college professor sums up the movement for me. I work for Scrouge, who bought an island in the Bahamas last winter and spends several weeks there every so often. Meanwhile, I don't have health insurance but do have paid time off. I have three weeks a year, the same amount of time my boss spent in the Bahamas during the winter last year. Of course, he went back a few more times, but who is counting?

Sentimentally, I am with the movement. And it is those who stand up and object that change of the system. But I can't help wondering if the movement is actually the pawn of those who are orchestrating change for their own profit. I watch the grass roots protests springing up across the country. I watch the nonviolence and remember the '60s... Indeed, for the last several years I have been acutely aware that history cycles and that it was time for another generation of protests. When I heard about the beginning of the movement, I knew "this is it." But I watch the news, the financial markets, other similar protests in other countries, and I wonder.

A friend pointed out the other day that it's easy to infiltrate such a non-organized group and be the one arrested, the one in the media, the one people remember. And I wonder.

Nevertheless, I stand behind the ideals of the movement. I watch Scrooge drive his extended cab pick-up truck with satellite feed and I struggle to pay my bills, wish I had medical insurance, wrote the check for new glasses and resented not having vision insurance. Partner's benefits four paid for Cameron's last hip and I wonder how we'll pay for the other one now that he can barely walk...And I wonder.

Sunday Afternoons at Grandma's

2011-11-13T19:03:00.002-05:00

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana until we moved to Arkansas when I was ten. I remember two things the most from those years: the humidity and going to my Mammaw's. As a kid, I always sensed tremendous tension between the parental units and my grandparents, but had no clue as to the problem. I was of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I wanted to go, be free of my mother's craziness, to be in a place that smelled of yeast rolls and sugar cookies. On the other hand, my grandmother's silences, hard work, and distance from emotion created a difficult, unnerving environment. I was pretty sure she loved me, but I never seemed to live up her exacting standards. Poppaw was easy. He just loved me. The warm crinkles of his eyes stays with me to this day. As a teen, Mammaw's neighbor, of no relation but called Mammaw Haynes, explained that sometimes love is doing. Rhubarb pie, blackberry jelly, and strawberry jam meant love. Hmmm... I'm a compulsive over eater. Go figure.

These stones used to literally just be lay
out in the fields. Folks gathered them for
fences and the outside of houses.

We were expected for Sunday dinner every week. My grandfather bought the one room house when he married Mammaw. Year by year he added rooms, using Indiana limestone on the outside. Eventually my Mammaw had a three bedroom, two bathroom home with a formal dining room where the family gathered on Sundays. Because I often spilled jelly on the Sunday tablecloth, I had waxed paper under my plate. It was convenient to draw on with the blunt end of my fork while dinner plates were removed and rinsed, and desert was brought to the table.

A year or so before we moved, things changed. In later years I heard stories of my grandmother's meddling and intrusiveness. I'll never really know how much was Daddy's resistance to anyone having a say over my mother and me. Or how much was my mother's mental illness. Or how much was religion, when daddy took mother and me from the family Methodist church where I sat between my parents or grandparents on Sundays, to the austerity of the Church of Christ. I certainly enjoyed Mammaw's yeast rolls over the cafeteria food and conversation of those church people on Sunday afternoon. Indeed, that year or two before we moved to Arkansas were the only years I remember my parents being social. My mother went to the hospital once or twice for her "nervous stomach" but she was relatively stable and we as a family seemed normal to the outside world.

When we moved to Arkansas I mourned yeast rolls and rhubarb pie. I didn't miss the coldness and the undertones of the house. But I dreaded, when I went back two weeks in the summer, returning to Arkansas where things had gotten really crazy. I tried, desperately, to tell my grandparents how wrong things were. I gave up when I was instructed to stop talking bad about my mother. Now I suspect that my grandparents couldn't tolerate their own powerlessness.

Put those thoughts on back the burner.

For the last two Sundays, Cameron and I have been going to church and then taking food to her parents since her father broke his shoulder. I am a convenience freak, and would not normally get up early on a Sunday morning to prepare a casserole before church to carry it to a family member. Hell, I wouldn't normally have a family member to carry a casserole dish to. Let's be honest, the parental units are 700 miles away, as is the youngest son. The eldest son doesn't speak to me. So Cameron's family is the nearest family I have.

Put that on the back burner.

Last night Cameron and I attended dinner and the theatre as guest of his brother and sister-in-law. Every year we pick the show, and as a Christmas present they take us out. Last night we saw Foxfire, which is about family and one's land, and roots. It struck deeply for me. I have no roots. They were torn from the ground and shaken when I was ten, poisoned by mental illness and over thirty moves in my lifetime. My family is distant, divided, or deceased. Yet there I sat with my partner and adopted family, accept and loved.

Put it all together and stir the pot.

Family Reunion
Cameron is in the shorts, I'm in the yellow shirt

On our way home this evening, I realized how much I miss what might have, should have, or imperfectly was. Aunts, uncles and cousins that gathered at those Sunday dinners. Forth-of-July family reunions and wedding anniversaries. Cameron's family has graciously given those gifts back to me. Last summer we gathered -- check out the picture. Huge family gathering and the only person not entirely aware of our "gayness" was Cameron's dad, who chooses not to acknowledge it. Cam and I are conspicuously together on the left side.

So going to church today, taking the in-laws food, was a delightful echo of years gone by. The should have, could have, would have of the past coalesced into something imperfect but beautiful, treasured and delightful. I actually spent the week planning the menu: veggie pie, slow cooked chicken, Saltine Toffee and Crispy Salted Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookies.

I'm feeling daring. I think next week will be Sunday Sausage, Apple, and Cheese Strata and I want to try NILLA Tiramisu Cookie Balls.

Cat and Kittens

2011-11-10T17:42:00.003-05:00

This video is public on facebook. I watched it three times! LOL

Cat and Kittens

A Change of Perspective and a Journey through Time

2011-10-28T08:36:00.000-04:00

The view from my new desk

Amazing what a change in perspective can do. Of course, in my case, it took two months, being shoved into a dark office and the loss of a window to realize how oppressive a 4 ft x 10 ft office can be. Previously, I could not stand without my chair hitting the wall. I had a double door which clients referred to as the barn door. The connotations are not good.

To the left of my desk

The first class I took when I started this journey was Pastoral Therapy, so I thought of therapy as sacred from the very beginning. I often tell my client that we create sacred space together to experience their growth and change. So now I bring sacredness to this office, with several of Cameron's paintings. Above is a collage she created that expresses both pagan and Christian iconography. I love the drawing together of disparate and yet similar imagery. It's a powerful representation of both mine and Cameron's spiritual paths. Also pictured is a cross stitch Serenity Prayer. I created it for the boy's father, who handed it back when we divorced. It's dated 1983, the year before the I gave birth to my first son and married his father. I love the way it symbolically brings forward who I was and the beginnings of my path. I was 20 years old, about to divorce and remarry. Pregnant. Confused and filled with fear. I hadn't even found the 12-step programs yet, but I was drawn to the prayer. It hung in the boy's father's house above the television in the living room for four years, until we divorced, too. Mercy, I was a damaged child then. Much like my clients.

Entering my office:
my desk, cross stitch universe, and credentials

When you enter my office, this is what you see. It's a huge desk! I love it! Behind, on the walls, are my credentials and a cross stitch of the universe, completed in 1995. I was 32. Married for the fourth time. I had already been widowed, David buried in the military cemetery in Arlingtonville, Ga. I was in graduate school for the first time and dreaming of tenure and teaching English on the college level. I never dreamed I wouldn't graduate, but would use the theories I was learning as the theoretical foundation of Converse's marriage and family therapy program.

To the right of my desk; I have a window!!!!

And of course, my window! Someone else's client stepped in moments ago to congratulate me on my new office. He doesn't know me, has no idea of my sexual orientation, but said, "I'm so glad they let you out of the closet!"

As I write this, I added the second part of the title. All week I've been thinking of my office as a reflection of my journey. From Arkansas to South Carolina. From broken marriages to an eight year commitment that will last my lifetime. From loss and darkness, from feeling confined in a small space, to the largest office of the building. To a feeling of expansiveness and possibility. Certainly, we still dream of Portland. I feel my future clients calling me. But the journey just got a whole lot more pleasant.

Whew! The weekend after the trip

2011-10-22T23:02:00.001-04:00

Arriving home after lunch on Sunday, and then going right back to work on Monday, is a challenge. I go to Safe Homes/Rape Crisis Coalition on Mondays and Tuesdays after work, so I didn't arrive home until late on both days. By Wednesday, it was crash and burn. I got home, fell over in bed, and woke long enough to eat and go to bed. If I have ever hated waking for work at 3:30 in the morning, it's this week!

Monday was especially difficult because my head space was still in Arkansas. It was an extraordinary, transformative week. The joy and ease of staying with my son and his wife was amazing. While I had emotional flashback in preparing to see the parents, yet the visits went well and had their own beauty.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the week was missing my wife. But even that missing had an unexpected joy. I've known for many years the solidity of our relationship. I've long since yielded the fear and doubt and limits of relationships through the sheer constancy of Cameron's love. Indeed, Cameron has demonstrated unfailing love for me, bring profound healing to my life. We've not often been apart, and never for so many days. Arriving home was sweet. I had missed her terribly: )

So it's a quiet weekend. Home made pizza tonight, chicken wings and roasted potatoes last night. Now we lounge on the bed, watching the food channel. At one point we counted 17 cats on the bed. Nevertheless, it's a quiet, beautiful night and I am blessed.

One Final Guest Blog Post by Cameron...."Going to Arkansas..."

2011-10-16T03:38:00.001-04:00

Grace Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver and I have been talking off and on via cell phone and computer chat all week long during her trip to Arkansas. (of course, given the state of the cell phone connection, at least half of the conversations have been one of us screaming "CAN YOU HEAR ME?!?" while the other one was saying "You sound like you're sitting right next to me, clear as bell, are you there?" *sigh*) Any way, she has asked me to write out some thoughts about her trip in our discussions. After some thought, I decided, to make it a guest post for her on her own blog. I can link it to mine. And I have permission to tell parts of her story.

First of all, never ever forget this. Dreamweaver is brave. Brave and heroic! Every trip to Arkansas carries with it bittersweet pain, co-mingled with nightmare. She is only just beginning to build a body of memory that has joy and happiness associated with "going to Arkansas". The entire state is one great big PTSD trigger for her; returning to it is always an act of courage and faith.

She was born in Indiana and then uprooted as a child to Arkansas away from family, her church and all she had ever known by events beyond her control - she only learned some of the truths behind that event so long ago on this trip, in conversation with her father. Her mother has schizophrenia...there is no way to over estimate the collateral damage this illness can cause in a child's life when a parent has this illness. Her mother, (let it be pointed out, only because of the grip of the illness, its paranoia and the voices in her head), neglected, abused and communicated to her only daughter that she, Dreamweaver, was not wanted. Was not loved. That she should not have existed. Her mother withheld love and affection, often acting as if Dreamweaver did not exist, even to the point of withholding food. There was no stability in that house. Rules changed. Permission to do the smallest thing would be given and rescinded hours later, harsh punishment always followed. Dreamweaver learned to live without a hard and fast reality. Learned that rules were not to be trusted. Learned that nothing was ever safe. And as she grew up, Arkansas, with its deeply abusive conservatism and unspoken unreasonable societally constructed "rules" became hell on earth. No matter what she did, she could never get it right. No matter what she did, nothing ever made sense. There was no hard and fast ground to stand on, any where.

She fled Arkansas and her first short unwanted marriage (her mother literally forced Dreamweaver to marry the young man she was then dating, though Dreamweaver did not want to). She was then her late teens, with no concept of what a normal life was or how to function in the "real" world. And the real world, as it does so many of us, chewed her up and spit her out. She returned shattered and broken to Arkansas, remarried, had two sons. There is a lot of this story I am not telling, because its her story to tell...but I am going to focus on a certain part of the story, with her permission, in this post. Her second husband was a complicated problem. He was a good man as best he knew how to be. He was funny and he loved his sons....but he was also chronically depressed, an unambitious man who would only ever have a high school education and a low paying factory job in one factory his whole life, and his wit could and did turn sarcastic and cruel. He was so far out of his league being married to Dreamweaver, that I can sometimes muster up some pity for him.

Dreamweaver is stunningly intelligent, she wanted more than dirt ignorance and a lonely house, a community that rejected her, and a factory or cashier job in perpetuity. She struggled with her past. She had to commit her mother to institutionalized care during those years, because her father would not step up to the plate and deal with the situation. She struggled with rejection, never fitting in any where, in their church or community. She also struggled with the beginnings of chronic life long depression, and then further, with post-postpartum depression on top of that after the birth of her second son. She struggled to parent two small active children, with no skills, no help, no way to know how to be a parent; when all she had ever known of parenting herself was abuse and mistreatment, passed down through generations of dysfunctional families. She feared desperately her own temper, her own lack of understanding or knowledge, her isolation, and lack of parenting skills. She did her best, and all the while, her soon to be Ex husband, either could not or would not give her the support, the care, the kindness, the understanding she needed to survive and escape her past. He loved her...but he did not love her unconditionally, he could not connect the dots between her past hell and her present struggle. He judged and he cut her with his words, driving her further into depression and shame.

And lets be honest - Dreamweaver struggled with a temper, that was created by and complicated by PTSD triggers, and damaged attachment from her childhood. She had no way to self soothe, or to understand how the effects of her abusive childhood were shattering her ability to manage relationships. There is no way around the fact that she was not easy to live with...but she knew too, that something wasn't right. At one point, pleading for help, struggling with Post-partum depression on top of her already desperate situation, she called DSS on herself, terrified of her own behaviors and temper. DSS, got her a baby sitter for one afternoon, sent her to the mall for a few hours, and closed the case. Not, as you might guess, a lot of help there...

And of course, this marriage ended. And Dreamweaver gave the care and custody of her children to her Ex, terrified of and fleeing the possibility that she would pass on to them the damage done to her by her mother, and dysfunctional past. She struck out to make something of herself, to have a career and a life and to afford more for her children someday in the future, when things might someday be better.

She wanted college, and a world where education and a career made a difference. Today she holds a BA, an MA, an EDS, and is a liscenced therapist working in her field and seeking to build a private practice. She began back then by entering college in Indiana. Her marriage with Ex may have ended...but of course, when you have children together, like it or not, you must continue to co-parent. To be in a relationship with the person you have divorced. The Ex stayed in Arkansas, with the boys; Dreamweaver went to college, looking out and up. She earned her BA in English in Indiana, and during that time, she dated men, but never looked for more than friendship and fun. School was her main focus and passion. She traveled endless miles to see her sons, and beggared herself financially to bring them to her for visitation, all the while struggling with the endless guerrilla warfare of the Ex, who resented her and her involvement in her own sons lives. She would arrive in Arkansas, for her scheduled time with her sons, to find "plans" made that prevented her from being with them, or circumventing what she had planned to do with them. She dealt constantly with manipulation, and shortened visits, and spiteful behavior from her Ex, and legally she probably could have called him on it in the courts, if she had known how the system worked, how it was being played against her.

Her relationship with her parents remained strained at best, but she did see them, off and on, and so did the grandchildren, Dreamweaver's sons.During those years she remarried once again, and then was widowed, which was a shattering event unto itself. And now we come to something that happened that was to nearly destroy Dreamweaver. She was dating/friends with an Indian man - Indian as in India, the country, not the American indigenous people - who also knew the kids, and spent time with them when he could. Their relationship caused difficulties for them when they were in Arkansas - he was very dark skinned, and they were taunted with racists slurs and bigotry; at one point they were very nearly run off the road by another car for being an interracial couple. Dreamweaver considered him a friend more than a boyfriend, though they were dating. She kept the relationship very circumspect, especially when the children were visiting her. And then disaster struck...Indian had a car wreck. He was alone in the car, no one was with him; the kids who were up visiting, were with Dreamweaver, elsewhere.

And out of the blue, the next time she went to Arkansas to pick up her children at their school, she was presented with a restraining order denying her ability to see them, alleging endangerment by allowing them to be in the car with a man not she was not married to, and allegedly involving them in the wreck - which they were not! they were never anywhere near the wreck - and calling for her appearance in court to most likely lose her visitation rights. It was a cobbled up lie, complete fiction, and it was about to cost her her children. And underneath it boiled the societal prejudices against non-custodial mothers, and interracial dating. Horrified, she sought a lawyer and set out to endure the separation from her children, struggling to prepare for the court. In the end, the legal advice she was given was brutally simple...if you ever want to see your children again, even though none of this is your fault, and none of it really happened, you and Indian must get married. Its your only choice, your only hope,your only chance, she was told, because due to cultural prejudice and small town politics, you will not win this one. If you and he are legally married, then it becomes null and void. Stunned, heartsick and exhausted, Dreamweaver complied, marrying Indian, before the court date, even though she did not really want to. Every instinct she had warned her that this was not what she should do. And it was her only choice, or otherwise she would not see her sons again for over a decade. (this made Arkansas legal history btw; the laws were amended after what happened to her so that restraining orders could never again be served to a parent on school grounds, which is what happened to her when she went to pick up her sons on that horrible day.)

The courts case crumbled, and years later Ex apologized for the harm he had done by pushing the flawed and illegal case at the behest of an ambitious and hungry lawyer. (little did he know, for he knows nothing of what really happened after.) Her youngest son, the Enlightened One, shaken by the obvious lies, and by not seeing her for so long, requested to change custody to her care; he was too young to legally make the choice to go live with her...but her older son, The Marine, was old enough to petition the courts. And so they moved in with her, later, when she came to live in Atlanta with Indian.

But now, Dreamweaver was married to Indian. And her instinct that she really didn't want to marry him proved out to be fatally right. Indian turned out to be her darkest nightmare. Ex was a confused, narrow, judgmental man, a product of white patriarchal male Arkansas culture at its most bigoted narrowest, but he tried to love Dreamweaver - he just no more had the skills to be in a relationship then she did, at the time. He did and does love his sons... but Indian was an honest-to-god Sociopath, for real, with no conscience or morality to speak of. His intent from the beginning had been Dreamweaver's destruction, and once he married her, as carelessly cruel as a cat playing with an injured mouse, he set out to ruin her, and perhaps even end her life. And he nearly succeeded. Those years I will not tell - that is Dreamweaver's tale to tell, should she ever so desire to. And I am not sure this blog is the appropriate place to tell that part of her story. Those were her darkest years and they became a horror. Suffice to say, she survived...broken and wounded beyond telling, but survived. Taking the advice of an alarmed and determined therapist who told her, "if you don't get out, that man will kill you", she finally fled the relationship

And in the very end she went on to thrive, but those intervening years cost her dearly. Fleeing Indian, vulnerable and wounded, struggling alone in Atlanta with two children to now provide for, she stumbled into one final last bad relationship with yet one more cruel man. And that wound up costing her everything she had fought so hard to save - her home, her finances, her spiritual community. And part of what she lost in the end was her children after all. Shaken by the damage of the last man's manipulative evil, her now teenaged children fled back to Arkansas. The Enlightened One would not speak of what happened, though he told his mother "you were right" as he left. The Marine, bitter, deceived by the last man's machinations, and as judgmental as his own father, broke off his relationship with his mother altogether. It would be years before Dreamweaver would ever hear from either of her sons - and then only sporadically from The Enlightened One, despite his love for her. The Marine remains cut off from us, denying us the ability to see and know our grandchildren. Those years were agony for her. And Arkansas became the nightmare of her memories.

I want to add here, that I was there for part of this. I saw Indian from a distance. I knew Dreamweaver back then, and the man she was with in the final relationship. I saw his lies and manipulation and was even deceived myself by them for a short time. I saw it all come apart, and helped Dreamweaver move out of her condo when she lost it, into her best friends basement. I was ring side to the unraveling revelation of just how manipulative this man was, destroying not only Dreamweaver's life and hopes, but also a local church youth group as its youth minister (lying about credentials he did not have). When she needed a new start, I opened my home to her in another state, little knowing that our friendship would blossom into love and marriage. So, I can attest to the brutal truths of what Dreamweaver has survived.

Two years ago, the Enlightened One invited us to his wedding to Scientist, the incredibly beautiful and talented young woman he had met in college. And so, for the first time in 12 years, Dreamweaver returned to the land of her nightmares, back to Arkansas, for her son's wedding and to see her parents. That trip, two years ago, is told HERE in my blog, one of its earliest posts. It is worth reading to put this post and Dreamweaver's past 10 days in Arkansas in perspective. While we were there for that trip, we made a stunning alarming discovery that changed EVERYTHING Dreamweaver knew, or thought she knew about the events leading up to the restraining order and her marriage to Indian. We still don't talk about it much, but it changed the fabric of the landscape of her life forever, based on what her dad told her. I think we are verging on talking about it at last and exploring what it means.

So,two years ago, on that first trip back, we had been talking to her father about the past, touching very high level on that time, when she married Indian and the lawsuit against her. And he told us what REALLY happened. Shortly before Dreamweaver was presented with the restraining order on the school grounds that fateful day she went to pick up her kids, her sons were in Arkansas visiting with Dreamweaver's parents - their grandparents. The kids were suppose to stay overnight, and then Dreamweaver was to take them home to their father, the Ex. However, unbeknownst entirely to Dreamweaver, Ex called her father in high handed dungeon and demanded that the kids come home right then. Dreamweaver, aware of her precarious position as a non-custodial parent, would have taken the kids home, if she had gotten the call. It had happened before. However, her Father, who did not and does not like Ex, developed a nice case of stubborn male mulishness, and flatly and pointedly refused to allow Ex to get his kids before the appointed time. They fought about it, with Ex hanging up, furious and seeing red, determined to Do Something About This. And the next time Dreamweaver, all unknowing went to pick her sons up at school, she was confronted with that restraining order and the court case.

So....Ex's "Something" turned out to be seeking out a lawyer for advice, who saw - I presume - a shaky "legal" maneuver to deny Dreamweaver's custody rights, based on Indian's car wreck. We suddenly for the first time ever, knew why it happened. Realized that due to her father's insensitive, unilateral handling of a very tense situation, that Dreamweaver nearly lost her sons, her sanity was nearly destroyed, her life endangered, and the circumstances that led to her kids cutting her off were laid in train. And, her father, told the story to us with an oblivious disregard for the consequences of his actions - he knew that the marriage with Indian ended badly, if not the whole story, and yet there is no apology or sorrow for what his actions eventually cost Dreamweaver. Instead, all he seemed to see is that he got the better of Ex, in not letting the children go home. I find this disturbing, profoundly so. If something I had done had caused such devastating long range effects on someone's life, particularly someone I loved, I would be down on my knees in horror begging forgiveness! Instead all her father seems to be able to see is that he was "righteously right" and won the argument with Ex. And I doubt he will ever see it in any other light, given his general patriarchal sense of self entitlement.

It is almost incomprehensible to me that Dreamweaver survived these years at all. And they took their toll on her, in ways that still haunt her to this very day. But survive she did. And more then merely "survive". She is thriving! She went on, and over came the damages done to her psyche, learned how to love, how to be in relationship, how to function in ways she never dreamed of and had never experienced. This incredible, beautiful woman who is my best friend, my partner, my wife, has become so much more then the "sum of her parts", overcoming a life time of abuse that would have - should have killed her. She is loving, and strong, gentle and kind. And if she still has occasional bad moments, when memories, and fears trigger her old temper and PTSD rises up, she also masters those moments, trusting in love, and her own inner truths to over come them. She did what she set out to do...she broke the legacy of abuse and shattered attachments and did not pass them on to her sons. Enlightened One and Marine are both happily married, strong loving men who care deeply for their families, and if both of them carry some personal baggage from those years, still they did not endure what Dreamweaver endured - she stopped the legacy of abuse from passing down to yet another generation.

So going back to Arkansas for her is a heroic task. This trip was especially unnerving, as for the first time she returned alone, without my support and comfort by her side. Every time she returns, old horrors and memories struggle up from the past to ride her shoulder and try to darken her heart. And now, every time she returns, slowly but surely reconciling with her parents, enjoying the rich happy relationship of love, joy and laughter she is building with Enlightened One and Scientist, renewing old friendships, she is creating new memories. These new experiences are a journey towards a new future for her with her family, new hopes and new dreams. She dreams of being a grandmother in truth to Enlightened One and Scientist's children some day; she has already had one unbelievable dream come true she never expected to hear - her mother saying "I always wanted a daughter", speaking from beyond the illness that hid that all those years.

Arkansas will always be bitter sweet for her - difficult and charged with old horror. But I believe that someday, these new moments of love and hope will allow the sweet to begin to outweigh the bitter.

And I am honored to be in Dreamweaver's life, to be a part of her journey, to know and understand the message her life holds for us. And that message is that even though the past can never be forgotten, the affects of a life time of pain and sorrow do not have to rule our lives. That there is always hope. That change is always possible. And that now abide faith, hope and love - and that the greatest of these is love. Thank you Dreamweaver. I love you with all my heart!

Second Guest Post by Cameron - the Bridges in Chattanooga, Tenn.

2011-10-15T17:34:00.000-04:00

Dreamweaver just crossed over the new bridge in Chattanooga....there are 3 bridges here; the old suspension bridge in the fore ground, a foot bridge, and then the new bridge in the distance.

Walnut St. Foot bridge

The new bridge that Dreamweaver drove over.

She spoke with an individual who had driven an 18 wheeler over the old suspension bridge - it was so narrow, he said, that you sorta squinted and held your breath squeezing across it. She is not far from Atlanta now where she stops for the night, where Fiber Geek will be treating her to some rest, use of a hot shower, sushi and beer! Wish I could be there! But she'll be home tomorrow! Yay! She will have more of her own pictures to post then too, instead of pictures I could find.

Guest post by Cameron....

2011-10-15T14:33:00.000-04:00

Dreamweaver is on the way home,and coming through Nashville, Tenn! She said the skyline is beautiful, and the blue sky is brilliant...unable to stop to get pictures,though. So I found this to give an idea of where she is.

Nashville, Tennessee.

I really, really miss her and I will be glad when she gets home!!!!

Returning to SC

2011-10-15T06:11:00.000-04:00

I've awakened early today. My son and his wife still sleep, and I've slipped into the living room to spend a few minutes in reflection. In a few hours I will bid my son and his wife goodbye and begin the journey back to my "normal" life. As always, this journey has been tranqformative. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Debbie, who had been my best friend from seventh grade through high school. Our lives are radically different, so I was surprised to realize that they are running much more parallel these days.

She feels a call. She's taken early retirement and currently spends her days in preparation. She doesn't yet know exactly how her call will be shaped, but she has created space in her life for prayer and meditation. She seeks that which is yet unnamed, but I could see it in her. As I see it in myself. She may be a little ahead of me, but I have my own echoing of a call, which is actually far more formed. I returned to school and got my degree in answer to that call. Indeed, Cameron and I plan to move to the Portland, OR area, and I feel that call growing stronger. These days I imagine the beginnings of our call to the people who we will serve in our private practice and in our spiritual lives. They are also preparing for us to arrive. They just don't know it yet.

OK, I do know how goofy that all sounds. But we don't have the words in the English language for the thoughts I want to convey. Sigh. But as Debbie described the places she needed to be spiritually, I got it. I feel it too. I imagine the days when I sit on my porch and watch the water of the Sandy flow. I want to know it's moods, it's changes of season, it's temperament. I want to watch the shift of the snow on the mountain, sometimes seeing the snow reach my own porch. I want to listen to the wind as it whistles its changes. I want to linger in front of the fireplace, and sip hot chocolate. I want to create a space for healing, where people may come for spiritual direction, for therapy, for art. I can see the rooms and almost taste the air.

In the meantime, I have another year of my internship to finish. We have to wait the financial means to manifest. Cameron has to complete her practicum and graduate. So we have another year to prepare and to wait. And today, I drive from Arkansas to Atlanta. Tomorrow I will drive home, to wrap my arms around the person I love and miss. I'm ready.

Dry Counties

2011-10-14T11:43:00.001-04:00

I am really not much of a drinker, but just being in Arkansas makes me want a beer. Unfortunately, a beer is hard to come by. Much of Arkansas consists of dry counties. All of the counties I have been visiting this week have been dry. In fact, I haven't noticed a liquor store since I arrived!!

No wonder this state is poor. Look at all the liquor tax they loose!

Dinner with Parents

2011-10-13T19:36:00.001-04:00

Last night the Scientist's parents met us for dinner. Her parents are very kind, accepting folks. When they were planning my son and their daughter's wedding, they stood up for Cameron and me. Indeed, it was the last time my partner ever wore a dress. Out of respect, she wore a dress for my son's wedding. However uncomfortable she might have been in that dress, the courtesy of that dress eased the day for many. I was pleased to have the opportunity for a meal and a light visit. After the meal, we lingered, chit chatting for about an hour.

That dinner stands out in sharp relief compared to today with my own parents. My mother seemed to be rested and recovered from our longer visit two days ago. They were both quite obviously pleased to see me. We had a lovely catfish dinner, and as soon as the meal was done, they left. No chit chat, no lingering, just a meal and a few stories, and it was done.

I had tears in my eyes as I was leaving. It will be another year before I see my parents again.

I always wanted a Daughter

2011-10-12T10:44:00.000-04:00

I've written often of the challenges of being my mother's daughter. In my last post I briefly described growing my in Ar with a mentally ill mother. Understand, my mother spent most of her life in bed or at work. There was no middle ground. Escaping your daughter that way makes her feel terribly not wanted.

My mother's messages were very negative while I was growing up. When I was about 22, things changed. My mother's mental illness had worsened. Her voices had become extreme and she was living an alternate reality. Everyone could see her deterioration. Her few friends, my dad, the staff where she taught and, sadly, the students. One Tuesday morning I showed up at the high school, picked my mother up, and took her to the doctor. A few hours later she had a padded room. A few weeks after that she turned in her drivers license and teaching certificate. She applied for retirement and disability.

The transformation was remarkable. I'll never know what it took for her to get up every morning and face her voices and paranoia while she went through the motions of teaching. It must have been a living hell. Every summer she had to go before the school board to protect her job. They never had the grounds to fire her, but they knew there was a problem. Then she bore the shame of everyone knowing she went before the school board again. It's not paranoia when they are really out to get you.

My mother had been removed from a regular teaching program and was working with "special needs" students. Some were bored in regular classrooms and needed more challenges and she was good with them. The other end of the spectrum made her problems worse.

After the breakdown, it was as if the evil mother died, and a gentler, kinder woman took up residence. She's always happy when I call. She welcomes my infrequent visits. Sadly, my mother's extremely fragile these days. She tires quickly. The skin around her eyes is thin, papery. Her eyes don't have the clarity and focus my dad, seven years older, has. Dad thinks she has Alzheimer's. But yesterday she took me by surprise. I had commented on how tired she looked, and she acknowledged it, but said she didn't get to see me enough and it was worth the fatigue. And then she said, "I always wanted a daughter."

I don't know what happened to that woman who didn't want me. But I cried when my mom told me, for the first time in my life, I was wanted.

It Could Have been Me

2011-10-12T10:30:00.000-04:00

A few days before my tenth birthday my parents moved us to Arkansas. I was excited about the trip. I had very few friends in Indiana, was frequently bullied, and was already dysthymic (a fancy word for chronic, low level depression). Moving to Ar did not improve things, unfortunately. I continued to have no friends, be bullied, and feel depressed. My mother's mental health worsened and my dad was always at work, at school, preaching and staying with his congregation all Sunday, or studying and writing sermons.

Growing up in Ar was hard. I never stopped being perceived as "other". My accent, my clothes, my very being screamed "other" in a place where everyone's great-great grandparents grew up together. My mother's mental illness isolated us. Daddy preached 30 miles away, and stayed the day to save gas. My mother only attended with him a few times. Mostly she stayed in bed. Indeed, she spent the first year of living in Ar in bed and only climbed out when working became a financial imperative. My dad majored in bible studies and minored in psychology. For the first time, I have realized why. He was struggling to understand what was wrong with his own wife.

Growing up with an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic mother is tough. Attachment becomes disorganized as the person who is supposed to provide soothing skills cannot even read their own child correctly. My mother was especially rejecting as the voices in her head played out a script that rejected me, the proof of her sinful condition. The valedictorian of Bloomington high school got pregnant before she got married. My grandmother's angry accusing voice plays out in my mother's head every day. Sometimes it comes out of her mouth, then to me, now to my dad.

I grew up knowing I was inconvenient and unwanted by my mother. My dad obviously loved me, he married my mother when I was five and adopted me six months later. But his continual absence sent a different message. I didn't know until this weekend the strain my dad was under in the year before we moved. I didn't know that as a member of a police department someone had put a hit out on him. I was too young to have known he mowed the yard every Saturday with a service revolver tucked in his belt and his habit of constant surveillance was more than a normal cop response. My mother certainly didn't know what was happening, either. And she was in and out of hospitals those years with a "nervous stomach". I suspect she was experiencing paranoia and delusions, and hospitalized during the worst of it.

I got married at 18 to get out. I lived in a crazy house ruled by a mentally ill mother who wanted me safely married and out. A year later I left my husband, having asked for a divorce, to go to Atlanta to meet my biological father. I came back to Ar pregnant. Married again to give the baby a father and moved to another small town in Ar with my new husband. My depression worsened. I didn't know anyone. Everyone knew my husband was not the father of my baby. I tried to go to church. I tried to get help. I tried to make friends. I was just too different. Attending the women's bible studies on Tuesday morning, after dropping the baby at the church for babysitting, took me into other women's homes. They weren't living hand-to-mouth. They weren't struggling to know what to say or how to fit in. I felt like I was faking everything.

I had another son. A year later, depressed, terrified, knowing I was becoming my mother, I left the children with their father. We divorced. A few years later I started college, married another unstable man, became widowed. Finally, at 29, I went to graduate school and got out. Before graduate school I had my children from 5 on Friday till 5 on Sunday. I missed two visitations, ever. One, because I was living in Atlanta and was too ill to travel. The other time a blizzard hit while I was in Iowa visiting friends.

Education and leaving Ar were the two best decisions I ever made. A few years ago I tracked down my first husband. He never saw me. But I saw his tiny travel trailer parked in front of his parents' somewhat larger trailer. I saw the children's toys scattered in the hot Ar dirt at the front door. Enough toys for a boy and girl, growing up exactly like him. Divorced, maybe, living in front of his parent's home. Obviously still suffering from depression.

The boys' father lives in the same house his parents' first purchased when they got married. He's lived in that house since he turned 18, having assumed the house payments. It's the smallest house on the block. Three bedroom, 1 bathroom, dryer inconveniently located in a tiny closet off the living room, washer in the kitchen. He still works at the same factory, as a design draftsman and now as a supervisor, that he did at 18. He's been at the job and living in that house for 32 years. The house has somewhat improved with new carpet, new paint, new car in the drive. He's still depressed, too.

I look around, I know that could have been me. Making babies, depressed, trapped in Ar. Trapped in a world of dry counties (you cannot buy alcohol), strict church doctrine, and ignorant. As you can see, it's been a tough path, but it's turned out well at this point of my life. These last eight years have been amazing. Hard, challenging, but filled with love and transformation.

My youngest son did data entry two summers for that factory, before going to college. My oldest son went into the Marines after 9-11. Maybe their ability to break the mold, to shape their lives differently came from me. Maybe if I had been the mother who never went to college, who stayed depressed, who was trapped, I might have trapped them to. Hmm...that bears thinking about.

Monday Morning

2011-10-10T09:26:00.000-04:00

I'm still caught in that surreal space where the ordinary meets the impossible. To those who read these words, events like playing a board game with one's grown son and daughter-in-law must sound quite mundane. In my world, it's a miracle. Let alone going to a free movie or going to a pumpkin patch together. It's a world I once dreamed of, but gave up to live out of Arkansas, out of the children's father's home, out of ordinary time. These reflections make make me quite maudlin, but then, I'm entitled to be.

I wish I could really capture the essence of what I'm feeling while I'm here. Cameron and I talked a long time last night, and we agreed that the words just hint at the edges of what I'm trying to convey.

I come from a damaged world. Tomorrow I visit it again. My mother is paranoid schizophrenic. My adopted father is codependent. While I was growing up, he was mostly a beneficent, if absent, presence. Growing up with an undiagnosed mentally ill mother creates a damaged world. I lacked the skills most people took for granted. I was isolated, told to never talk about my family the way families hide substance abuse, was emotionally abused. Before daddy married mother when I was five, I was physically abused, but I have few memories of that time. In later years I was sexually abused. I lacked friends. I lacked ordinary coping skills. I lacked the ability to trust, to love, to be a friend.

I left the boys to live with their father when they were 4 and 1. I saw them every weekend, went to college, remarried, divorced, moved. Repeat. Repeat. These last eight years I have lived in SC are the longest I've ever lived anywhere.This three years I've been on my current job is the longest length of employment anywhere. These eight years I've been with Cameron is my longest lasting commitment. Needless to say, I changed a lot over the years. I fought hard for the skills most people take for granted. It's made me an excellent therapist.

But this week has given added clarity to how right that decision was to leave the children with their father. His stability was the greatest gift he could have given them. I watch my son and think, if I do nothing else right in my life, I've done something remarkable in bringing him into this world. And I've no doubt I've been a tremendous influence in his life. But my leaving those twenty-three years ago terminated the legacy of damage from me and my side of the family. He does not bear the wounds and damage of my past or my mother's.

Rites of Passage

2011-10-09T23:11:00.000-04:00

Ever notice that when you haven't seen someone in a long time, that their image remains constant. So when you see them again, you have to readjust your perceptions? Add to that another conundrum. I also have very few people in my life who have remained constant. Divorces, interstate moves, etc cause a lot of changes in friends. I've also been out of state from my family for a number of years. Two years ago I went to my parents for the first time in seven years. In fact, in the last twenty years I've only been home a half dozen times. So every time I've seen my parents, I have struck by how much they have aged. My dad had a mild stroke, which he did not tell me. So when I saw him two years ago, I spent half a day staring at him, trying to reconcile his face, the movement of muscles, age, and the daddy in my head.

Today I've confronted this conundrum from a different direction. My children. Most folks are a part of major rites of passage. Consequently, they have the opportunity to reconcile themselves to change and maturity. I unfortunately wasn't invited to either son's high school graduations (I suspect their father had something to do with it). In fact, after they moved at around 16, respectively, I didn't see either son until they got married. So they remained teenagers in my head until they got married, some five or more years later.

It's been two years since The Enlightened One and his wife the Scientist got married. Part of my focus that day split with the Marine and the grief over grandchildren who didn't know who I was. So I didn't really have time to process the changes, the aging, the difference.

Tonight my son and his wife invited me to attend a movie on campus. So we went over and watched Captain America, which I loved. But it struck me that the attendees were more than half my age, and that I was likely the oldest person in the room. Indeed, my son is turning 25 this year. He introduced me to a college student who had been in his student teaching class.

I've been wrestling lately already with the image in the mirror looking like my mother...so this has been a very strange realization. Age not in the perspective of others aging, but from the perspective of my own aging. Missing so much of the last ten years of my kids lives really has done a number on my perception of age. It's relative. I wasn't really getting close to 50 until I looked around that room tonight.

Mind, I don't mind the aging thing. I mind the parts of lives that I miss around me. Or not around me, but in my absence. I also mind my knees, but that's another topic altogether. So, in a round about way, as I sat in that room tonight, it became a rite of passage. A growing awareness of change. Of acceptance of where I am in life. It's a little bit disconcerting.

From Arkansas' Pumpkin Patch and Corn Maze

2011-10-09T18:01:00.000-04:00

Having slept extremely well, I spent a lazy morning enjoying orange sweet rolls and playing on my son The Enlightened One's computer. It amuses me to watch him doing homework while I play. Then his wife, the Scientist, suggested a trip to the pumpkin patch. We didn't walk the maze...good thing because I would never find my way out of it. But we did have a great time looking a pumpkins!

To see more:

Arkansas Oct 2011

Mississippi

2011-10-08T09:59:00.000-04:00

Posting from a cell phone is interesting. Plz excuse typos...so im sitting in a Mississippi rest area, where I have stopped hundreds of times for the kids or dog. funny how much changes yet the pattern remains the same. cameron could't make the trip so there are far too many spaces for reflection. But first, a nap.

From Atlanta to Memphis...Stepping Back in Time

2011-10-08T08:43:00.001-04:00

in another lifetime that ended abruptly about fifteen years ago i drove this round trip journey every other week. i used to joke about putting thirty thousand miles a year on my dog who rode shotgun. The journey is very different this time. It got much longer. i didn't start in Atlanta but in SC. When cross the Mississippi I won't be turning right and heading toward my nightmares. Those were put to rest a long time ago. Instead, Imll turn left and begin something new.

Defender: Baby Sister of the Heart

2011-09-28T12:42:00.000-04:00

I really hate it when I find someone important doesn't appear in my cast of characters. I could defend myself and say my baby-sister-of-the-heart just hadn't been outrageous enough to mention yet, and I only list someone when I talk about them. Certainly that doesn't mean I always talk good about folks, either.

But instead, I'm going to apologize, publicly, abjectly, and then tell the whole world about a really extraordinary woman whose been a part of my life about ten years or so.

Defender, so named for her fiery spirit that will take on any injustice with passion, has survived phenomenal odds to become a fantastic mother of three. She's about to marry (again, but that's a long story) the love of her life. Indeed, she's even asked my partner Cameron to officiate. I've watched her grow from a scrappy teen to a powerful woman who works hard, attends school, cares for her family, and still manages to be there for an entire group of survivors.

Defender, you are one of my heroes. Love you!!!

Cat Lady, Servant of the Lady Bastet

2011-09-24T09:16:00.003-04:00

Cameron told me I should have added that title to previous post....I should have listened. Indeed, Cameron has been telling me for weeks what dervishes the cats have become. Don't think I've ever had 6 kittens, approximately 6 months old, in the house at the same time. The house ain't safe. Literally. I really should have listened to Cameron.

Cameron's house sitting for a friend, so I woke alone this morning. Mercy, I miss that wonderful transgender human being. But I digress.

We've both been sick lately, and in a mad dash for the bathroom, I set the laptop aside with the cover up. Bad mistake. I'm not sure which cat jumped on the keyboard, began the music, panicked and unsheathed a claw to get away, but the result was spectacular.

To add insult to injury, a little later I rounded the kitchen corner as the toaster hit the ground. There stood Dante, attempting to look very innocent.

Our cats:

Dickens (Charles Dickens)
Tannis (god)
Iben
Legba (god)
Chole
Lucy (red headed mother of 5 kittens by Firedancer)
Xian (god)
Temptation
Bear (Bear Burgman)
Firedancer
Wee Bit whose tale is named Be-Wit
Marmalade (mother of Hermione by Firedancer)
Pippin (Lord of the Rings)
Browning (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he's the only survivor of 3)
Starshine (Favorite literary cat hero)
Lotus

The kittens:
Hermione (5 months)

The rest, age 6 months:
Dante (poet)
Rossetti (Christina Rssetti, poet)
Mya (Mya Angelou, poet)
Amergan (celtic god)
Audre (Audre Lord, poet)

That's some serious energy...

World Between Worlds

2011-09-22T19:05:00.000-04:00

I'm reading an amazing series, as I mentioned in an early entry, by Sterling. Reading of a world where the gods walk our lands, having cast out electronics and, consequently, many weapons, has brought me closer to my own pagan self. Grad school and working these last five years has made it difficult to circle, and we aren't part of a regular group. We have our own grove identity, occasionally cast circle for ourselves and a few friends, and have had a student or two, but it hasn't yet been time to walk that path further. Put that on the back burner.

When I began this blog, it was with the thought to provide a stable wiccan presence in the online community. Too much drama on the e-list I was on has led to long term silence from me. Most of my entries these days are actually terribly mundane...and the silence between entries has lengthened over the last year or two.

Knowing myself, reconnecting with my spirituality requires me to write. Anything. Because in time it always leads me back to the center, the heart of who and what I am. Lady Grace Dreamweaver, Priestess and Daughter of the Gods. That is my mantra, my every day prayer, my call for centering, and my honoring of my place in the universe. Put that on the back burner.

Today has been very mundane. I moved back into my office to face the plastered sheet rock which isn't drying well, due to the recent SC rain. I have a cold. It's one of those that you aren't really connected to the world, and if you can keep enough Robitussin in the system, you just kinda drift. Thoughts are tangential and elusive.

And Cameron is house sitting for the next few days. And my phone battery won't charge and the new phone won't be in until tomorrow. So I have few interruptions, although Cameron will stop by after class to make sure I'm okay (he's way more worried about this cold than I am, as I'm really too sick to care, and not sick enough to do anything about it but take Robitussin). Today I rescheduled all but a few clients so they would have less risk of infection and the boss let me leave at the close of dosing hours, two hours early.

Now lets take all these thoughts and stir the pot...

Being sick, and numb, can lead to some very metaphysical musings. I read the book, and I think of my own calling, and the balance which we've been struggling to maintain. And suddenly, just for a moment, there's the space here where the gods walk the world, where I know what I know, and in the midst of broken toys and a damaged house and 14 year old cars, I know. I am the daughter of the gods. I am a child of this universe. And I can call the blessings of the universe to me and accept them with gratitude and open arms and open hands. And I can share them with others, in therapy, on a blog, by walking this earth myself. Thou art god/dess...

Sometimes we just need potato soup made from scratch, homemade wheat bread, and a cold. Glad I did the cooking yesterday.

Blessed be.

Lady Grace Dreamweaver, servant of the goddesses Inanna and Kali

Further Along the Office Adventure

2011-09-21T06:50:00.002-04:00

Today there are zippers at the end of the hall on both sides of the payment window. The payment clerk is taking payments at the opposite end of the hall, near the only entrances to the clinic, at the dosing area. So how is it that zipper and darkened area with no overhead lights invites people to open the zipper in an attempt to go pay for their dose? Addictive behavior at its finest. I finally put up the signs no one else had.

Since the construction crew has taken over my office for a few days, I am borrowing the nurse's office in her abscence. It's a rather cold, sterile room overloaded with filing cabinets and the door doesn't open all the way. It doesn't have an office chair, so I've had to resort to one from the conference room. Not to good on the back and knees, but getting mine to this part of the building would be difficult, at best.The good news is that the computer is five years newer than mine and doesn't crash when I open the internet! And the overhead light works! LOL Although I wasn't quite expecting the constant interuptions by staff who come in to use the sink or the scales: )

Stilts and Zippers

2011-09-20T09:38:00.000-04:00

Yes, that's a man on stilts, mudding the wall. He'll do the same to paint it. My job is never dull...

If my boss will commit to it, this may become my new office.

And this is the zipper just outside my door while they work...Someone just poked his head through and said I have to get out of my office...shesh...

Pumpkin Pie and Driving

2011-09-20T06:26:00.000-04:00

I was dreaming at 3:30 this morning when the alarm went off. Usually I'm half awake when it goes off, and I get out of bed quickly. This morning I was caught in that dream state, tangled between the here and there. I was dreaming I was watching a middle aged couple and their son, like the perspective of the intrusive television eye, and she was kissing the neck of her partner. They had recently fallen in love, and were quite taken with each other. The teen in the room was rather appalled that grey headed people still had sensual, sexual energy. He was objecting to shows of affection when the alarm rudely intruded.

I've been read the Change series by S M Stirling. If you haven't read it, do so. It challenges my perceptions of the world in wild and uncomfortable ways. Yesterday I read a very pagan account of ritual, of the horned god channeled through the hero. I went to bed thinking of the turn of the wheel, the coming of fall, the shift in the world and the smell of the wind. I've also been thinking of my own shifting sexuality/sensuality. Being the partner of a transgendered person, being in recovery from rather serious PTSD, being a grad student and now graduate of a marriage and family program, has challenged in these ways and more.

I've missed my own sexuality as it took the back seat to study, exhaustion, working full time, attending school full time, and an overburdened caseload. I've worked hard to heal from mental/physical/sexual abuse. I disavowed my sexuality, reshaped it, and struggled to take it back. My identity as heterosexual woman transformed to identifying as lesbian. Then it transformed again, as my partner identified as transgendered. Funny, my spell check doesn't even recognize the word "transgendred" and yet it defines so much of who I am.

I digress. So what does that have to do with pumpkin pie and driving? 4:30 in the morning I drove to work, still in a world not quite made of this one. It's 60 something degrees and humid as I drive, window partly down and heat on my toes. I scanned the roadside for deer, but didn't see any this morning. I thought of the dream, of the book, and of my lover who is suffering a sinus thing that has left her coughing and exhausted. I wonder at the pronoun I just used, because while I use the feminine pronoun, I don't think of Cameron as female very often. But I don't think of her as totally male, either. Wish we had a transgendered pronoun. One that leaves space for becoming.

But I digress. As I grabbed my prepared breakfast and lunch from the frig (I have two days a week I eat all three meals away from home, returning only to sleep), I saw the pumpkin pie. On a whim, I cut a piece. The in-laws sent it home with Cameron last week and we forgot it. I've never been a big fan of pumpkin, and especially not pumpkin pie. But I associate it with fall, with harvest, with the Horned God of sacrifice and bounty. I tried to eat it mindfully, as I drove, tasting the pumpkin, the nutmeg, the cinnamon. It was surprisingly good. Perhaps my taste buds have grown and changed again, accepting tastes as pleasant that I used to simply tolerate. Perhaps my taste buds have become another symptom of the transformation of middle age, the moments before I become a crone, as I wait post-menopausal and changed at the gate of cronehood.

Something was different about my drive to work, and this quiet moment at work when no clients have yet tapped at the door. Something shifted in my metaphysical awareness. I usually mourn the loss of summer, of heat, of green. This year I find myself grudgingly embracing the fall, the cooler weather, the taste of pumpkin and the ambivalent love of things male. I stand here at this moment of becoming, recognizing that another transformation has presented itself, and wondering at the journey that's about to begin. Wonder where this one will go.

Monday Morning

2011-09-19T07:26:00.001-04:00

And back at work. Spent the first ten minutes this morning wiping down my desk from the wall board dust. Looks like I'll be doing the same for a few more days this week. Next is taping, patching, then wet sanding. Eventually they'll even paint. By then I'll be looking forward to my new office, immediately on the opposite side of this wall!

Check out the guy on stilts working just outside my office. It's not every day you see a guy on stilts in your office door.

I worked Saturday morning, and even though it is only a few hours, we all seem to agree that the lack of a psychological break makes us feel as though we didn't have a weekend. I'm definitely feeling it this morning.

I've started a new blog, which at the moment is entirely private. In time, I'll probably link it up. I keep recipes on my computer that I gather from cookbooks and all over the web. I finally decided it might be wise to put them on a blog, which will offer an excellent index when tagged correctly. But I also have worries of copyright issues, so I'll need to go back and make sure each credits its source. I also think it will be cool to take pictures as I try recipes, and my changes in ingredients, etc.

Each morning as I leave for work, I drive by the lake and pause in front of an empty lot so I can see the water. Each morning I say my prayer of requests and thanksgiving. This morning was no different than any other. The cloud cover masked the moon and darkened the water. Nevertheless, there was an indescribable moment of presence, a feel of the shift in the season, a movement and change. As I drove to work, I scanned the usual areas for deer. At 4:30 in the morning, I often see several groupings. I only saw one this morning. An older doe actually crossed the road in front of me. I've driven that road for eight years, and it was the first time one of them crossed in front of me. Usually they remain well off to the side.

Lovely Sunday Morning

2011-09-18T08:36:00.001-04:00

I imagine this as the first true cool, crisp fall Sunday morning that has occurred this year. I'm imagining because the waterbed is warm, my toes are warm, I'm blogging, researching mushrooms and recipes from the comfort of bed. I had to interrupt myself just for this quick post. There's a Sunday fall clarity to the light; the wheel has clearly shifted. We'll be setting our clocks back soon, as it was still mostly dark at seven this morning. I've already had my first diet Coke and two slices of homemade banana bread. My lover snores lightly at my right elbow, and Lotus, our aging grand dame Orange Cat, purrs over my shoulder. She purrs as loudly as any three of my other furbabies put together.

My familiar, Dickens, dozes at my elbow between the jostling of the computer and recipe book. I'm inspecting James Vilas' Crazy for Casseroles: 275 All-American Hot Dish Classics. Makes me terribly aware of our limited budget, and my limited exposure to the world. Hence my research of mushrooms. I just learned that those funny mushrooms, revealed in the kicked up leaves of autumn strolls of southern Indiana are morels mushrooms. We used to slice them thin and fry them in butter.

I'm dreaming today. I'm moving all my recipes to a blog so I can search/track them. So far I'm keeping them private because virtually every one is copied from somewhere. I'm not a foodie cook, yet, but I want to be. I dream of what I want my life to be five years from now, when my lover and I can see the Sandy River from our bed, as we wake on cool, crisp fall mornings. I found a marvelous blog post of the Portland Farmer Market. I want to shop regularly there. Lady, hear my prayer, as I manifest our future.

Had to work yesterday morning. For three years I've not answered the phones because the inbound line didn't ring my disk. They fixed it. Grrr...I'm amused by the way I've trained myself out of hearing phones. I answered a few times, but I really don't listen for them anymore. But I digress.

Cameron will wake soon...She's (well, my transgender partner, he) has promised me bacon and eggs. If I linger long enough, I'll have breakfast in bed. Think I'll ask for a cup of hot chocolate...

Grump -- Office

2011-09-16T07:38:00.002-04:00

Yes, that's plywood over the window
over my desk.

It used to be the office to have. The smallness, 4 x 10 feet, was overcome by the watching the sunrise through the east facing window. Then the owner decided construction is in order. I've now survived the removal of the brick from the opposite side of the wall, the addition of the roof to extend another 12 feet (why is he only adding 12 feet when the original plans called for 36?? We'll just have to do all of this again!). Hammering, sawing, electrical, studs added, roofing adding....it's been a noise filled nightmare from seven in the morning until we leave at a little after 12. Usually by ten I'm so numb from noise I can no longer function. I rarely have headaches but I am now getting them daily.

When I stand up, the chair
hits the wall.

Yesterday I booted my computer and the power circuit to my office and the conference room went out. The electrician forgot to tape a screw and it shorted. It was three hours before I had lights and a computer to use.

With the closure of the window, my office is very dark. One of my lamps had to be moved yesterday to the conference room as our intakes were sitting in the dark. I do have an overhead light, but can't use it. It's flickered since I got the office and when I asked for a repair, I was told the part would cost $50. The owner's response? "Give her another lamp." The jerk who opened up the fixture didn't bother to put it back together (took two years to get him to look). So, to add insult to injury, I not only have exposed plywood I also have dangling wires in my office. The walls are bare and my stuff has been carried to my trunk because the construction work warned they will hang sheet rock over the next few days. The process is messy and I was advised to move breakables. Can we say my office it depressing?

I'm a substance abuse counselor. My clients have to shout to be heard at times. I'll be really glad when the construction ends. To be honest, I had hoped and prayed I'd be able to resign before the process began, because I knew it would be a nightmare. Unfortunately, the gods seem to think I need to be here a little longer. Apparently the gods are easily amused.

Of Children and Grandchildren

2011-09-12T09:40:00.001-04:00

I have two sons in their mid twenties. Talking about my sons is such a mixed blessing. Things got really tangled in my younger years, and I made a lot of really bad choices when it came to my sons and partners. I shaped many years and most life decisions around sons I didn't raise more than part-time. Talking of the boys is bittersweet, breaths filled with regret and joy. The pain hasn't eased over the years. And now there's the absence of grandchildren added to the burden.

911 was yesterday. Every year this time I remember the last year I lived with my children. The dot coms had crashed and I was unemployed. That summer my eldest son moved back to Ar with his dad. I thought things were fine when I put him on the plane, but it was three years before he spoke to me again. My son enrolled for his senior year, 911 came, and he enlisted instead of going to college.

I didn't see my eldest son again after he flew to Ar until he got married. His drill sergeant, his soon-to-be wife, his mother-in-law, hounded him into calling. We had a seven day notice for a 16 hour cross country trip. We made it. We weren't allowed to sit on his side of the church, nor was I acknowledged as his mother. His step mother's name was on school records, military records, etc. She lit the unity candle with the bride's mother while I watched.

I finally held my granddaughter when she was 6 weeks old. The Marine was headed to Iraq and we spent two days in a hotel nearby so we could visit. (Of course, lesbians cannot stay in his home.) As we getting ready to leave, I held Beauty and couldn't stop the tears. I knew I'd never hold her again. I knew it.

The Marine didn't open mail from his wife while he was in Iraq, let alone from me. When he got home, he didn't want to see me. In fact, I didn't see him or the grandchildren again until my youngest son's wedding. I've never held my grandson. My granddaughter didn't know who I was.

I've written this and deleted it several times. The starkness of the story, the omitted details, the care I take when making something so painful so public strikes me as I reread. So many times I've wished I could spend an afternoon talking with my sons about those years, but neither is inclined to do so.

I'm at that stage in my life where I'm surrounded by people my age talking about grandchildren. Such a bittersweet topic. Some days I dodge the conversation. Other days I acknowledge I have grandchildren and then change the topic. I think the hardest part can be the inept way people don't hear the truth of the story. My eldest son doesn't speak to me. I don't see my grandchildren. They don't know who I am.

Instead of "that sucks" I get "blood is thicker than water" and other platitudes. And platitudes aren't true. I was adopted by my step-father and that is my daddy. My sperm doner was given several chances, and demonstrated how toxic he is. I know all about cutoffs, because I've cut him off completely. As my son has cut me off. No, I don't think I'm toxic. But my son does. I don't fit his conservative view of the world. I make things very messy and he doesn't want anything to do with it.

On the upside, not that I'm much in a mood for the upside in the midst of these darker emotions, The Enlightened One, my younger son, did see to it that Cameron and I were included in the wedding, that we had honored spaces in their lives, and we were acknowledged. I have no doubt that when the grandchildren come from him and his wife, they will know who we are.

I haven't spent a holiday or birthday with either of my sons since 2001. Indeed, I've only seen either of them a few times. Their rituals and routines are not with me, which I grieve. Nevertheless, I am headed to Ar to see my parents the first week of October and I will be staying at my youngest's son's home. Cameron is staying home to care for animals and attend class.

Poised for Change

2011-09-10T21:09:00.000-04:00

I sat in my front yard for a while this afternoon and watched the sunlight reflected on the lake. Brilliant flashes and sparkles of light danced on water and wind. A moment in time, remembered in a blog, my mind's eye, and then gone.

I turned 48 last week. While where was no existential crisis, I did reflect that I've reached yet another birthday without having yet attained many of my life goals. I still work on my licensure requirements, planning to finish December 2012. I'm still living on trailer subfloors and dreaming of home improvements. My partner and I continue to work our ways toward her transition when Cameron will be the name everyone knows her/him as. I continue to wait for the day when I tell Scrooge goodbye.

When I was in my late 30s, He Who Shall Be Nameless, did a numerology reading for me. It might be the only thing about me that he ever got really right. He told me that my 40s would be a time of incredible growth and change. He also told me that my 50s wouldn't bring about so much growth, but would bring my dreams and financial security. Bring it on! I'm so ready.

Hermione sleeping on the waterbed this afternoon.

And yet. As I type this, a tiny kitten lies on my chest, satisfied in her supreme entitlement. My partner, whom I spoiled with homemade soup and homemade wheat bread, is waiting for me in the next room. The utilities are on, we have two cars parked outside, and I have a job. More, I sat in my front yard today and watched light dance on water and thought of my godson, my sister of the heart, of my daughter of the heart, and of my lover and thought how grateful I am to have them in my life, and how much meaning their presence brings to my life.

Camron and I are waiting for the time to go to Portland. I watch our investment and pray it will bring the financial security we need to meet the next step of our calling. I dream of a homet here, a building next door for a studio and space to do therapy. I want to set up a non profit. Maybe put a "blessing" jar by the door. Would be cool for folks to drop a minimal payment in the jar on their way out. Or come to use the extra studio space for art therapy, and leave a small payment for space on their way out. We value what we pay for, especially where therapy is concerned, and $10 is plenty to meet the cost of the space....something to think about anyway.

Cameron, reading over my shoulder, tells me I just didn't have the right goals in my 30s. She says I should have been dreaming of marrying a transgender man, moving to Portland by way of South Carolina, and practicing making homemade bread. Well, I added some of that myself, but she'd say if she wasn't out walking the dog.

As the wheel turns, so does my life. We move into the dark of the year, the time of introspection, the time of accounting, the time before we begin to plan again. I want to rejoice in the harvest. I want to hear the voice of Oak King, to walk with him as be becomes the sacrifice of wheel. I want to align my life with wheel. Slow my pace, stay ready for change, but not so lost in the preparation that I miss the dance of the wind and the sound of his pipes.

Blessed be.

Dark Night of the Soul or A Walk Trough the Abyss

2011-08-15T14:31:00.002-04:00

We all have them. Long dark times when we can barely hang on. Times when loss compounds loss. Or when we are so beaten down by circumstances we can't raise our heads to the sunrise. I'm there. I've been there for a quite a while this year. I stood at a counter today, writing a check for a payday loan so I could drive an over priced rental car for another week and pray for miracles. When I wrote the wrong month on the date line, the clerk gently corrected me and requested a new check. I had been smiling a few minutes before. Suddenly, without reason or sense, tears poured and I ducked my head in shame while my partner attempted to cover my inexplicable behavior with social chitchat and to keep the clerk engaged. Hopelessness in wet courses on my cheeks, as I fed the corporate greed machine another promise.

And I've many of those hopeless promises dogging my stepping and binding me in this nonwage garnishment state. Cell phones are a wonderful thing. Mine has a function that lets me program debt collectors to go immediately to voice mail. Eight years ago I arrived in SC barely holding my own and staying one step in front of the collection agencies. Now I can't move out of state until I pay untold compound interest fees off those desperate credit card debts of my past. The first charge I ever made was for a pair of shoes. I was 29 and in college when I got the credit card offer. The sole of my tennis shoes was cracked all the way across and when I walked to school from my little school owned trailer, my feet stayed wet. Years and debt later, after every divorce, and there were several, left me even more in debt. I paid the $20,000 debt down to less than $5,000 several times until the next lay off caused me to loose control again. I've been widowed once. Add three divorces and four layoffs. I'm sure you can do the math.

And let's talk student loans. I was a noncustodial mom determined to spend Fri-Sa-Su with my children every weekend. I borrowed to stay in school and keep a home that would give the boys a place in my life. I joked that I borrowed against the future to keep my family together, and that instead of saving up for my family I would spend the rest of my life paying it off. It's no joke now. My interest payments exceed my income. I've sold my soul to the company store. I live more desperately, in worse circumstances than I did thirty years ago. Don't mind the soft spot on the floor in front of the shower. Don't mind the patches to the trailer on the outside the last time the county condemned it. Don't mind the 14 year old car I drive.

A year ago my partner and I started a roller coaster ride and bought a foreign currency that is about to reevaluate. I started educating myself on the middle east, on history, on finance. The more I learn, the more scary it gets. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do understand what happened when we through out unions, allowed business to be deregulated and sent our factories overseas. I do understand what happens with layoffs, loss of income and hopelessness. I make what I made working for IBM in 1997. Back then I lived in a modest condo and drove a 1997 Ford. I drove that Ford to the salvage yard two years ago and they gave me $89 for my trouble.

Today I came across a video that I'm still thinking about. I'm going to share it here. It's rather long, so take some time for it. I suspect those who find this blog and watch this video have already woken up and will recognize many of the truths. I have been reading about World Bank, the IMF, and the histories and nothing I have found that I judge credible contradicts what I find here.

A Long, Hard Summer

2011-07-30T19:13:00.001-04:00

It's not unusual for us to be totally broke, between student loans, and wondering how we are going to make it. July is the first time we've missed a mortgage payment. And we're going to miss two more before funds come in to catch us up. The landlord hasn't said anything yet, and we enclosed a note with last month's late payment indicating things had gotten tough. That mortgage payment kind of covers the rest of my life right now, too.

A few months ago the engine in my car seized, which required $2300 repair. My dad was kind enough to help financially, for only the second time in my adult life, and I caught a lot of rides over the three weeks required for the repair. Then the landlord of the mechanic hit my car and I spent last week in an insurance provided Jeep. It was a joy to drive, except it cost $78 in gas when I normally would have spent $25.

Cameron reading out loud to a captive audience.
In the background: Dickens
On the TV: Lugh, Tully and Xian
November 2010

My knee has also become increasingly problematic. Turns out driving the Jeep was a good thing. It had shown marked improvement that only a day of driving my car has undone. And the litany goes on. Insert violins and self pity here. And while I'm whining, I miss my Tully cat, damn it!

I've actually rolled with these fears, concerns and worries fairly well. The breaking point is work. I'm going to try to find a way that if my boss would accidentally find this site, I would not be out of work, and yet convey the challenge and frustration of my situation. I'll ask that comments also reflect the desperate need of my paycheck.

Our building was constructed about five years ago. We've desperately outgrown the space, and are expanding. Construction has created some rather, shall we say, unfortunate challenges. I get up about 3:45 to arrive at work at 5 a.m. The joy of my morning is watching the sunrise through my east facing window. My office, an afterthought of previous construction and poorly planned, is about 5 feet wide and 12 feet long. The narrowness of the office is negated by a window squarely over my desk. The sunlight warms my small space in an overly air conditioned environment (typically about 60 degrees in most offices, summer and winter). Friday I lost my window to construction. The space has become constricted, tight, claustrophobic. The overhead light does not work, and my request for repair has been denied (insert office politics and protect my job...no further comment here.) So coworkers found me a few more lamps. It's not working.

The view through my door isn't much better. All the windows are likewise blocked, as is the front entrance (adding 12 feet to the front of the building which will create a total of four offices). All daylight has been blocked, and the temporary wall increases the feeling of closeness. Everyone has been commenting on how bad it is. The construction noise as bricks are removed from the opposite side of my wall, etc, is about more than I can stand. So far I've endured mortar drills, concrete being poured, etc. All of this is literally on the opposite side of my wall. And it promises to get louder as they continue to remove bricks, etc.

We have about 850 clients that come to the clinic between every day and once every two weeks. The front hall, just outside my door and pictured here, has had quite an effect on them. Most people don't like change. Addicts particularly don't like change, and their reactive behavior to the current condition of the clinic has been notable. My own reaction isn't much better. I've lost all time sense, and have lost all connections to the outside world, the seasons, and the weather. I adored looking out my window. My office was extremely warm yesterday because the window also insulated. It'll take about six weeks to complete construction. I've requested a new office, and pray they listen. In the mean time, I feel like I'm loosing my mind.

Yes, I know that last statement sounds melodramatic. But therein also lies truth. It's been a hard, hard summer. Normally summer replenish my spirit and prepare me for the cold winter months and restricted lighting. I'm dysthemic, which means chronic depression. In other words, I'm naturally "the glass is half empty" kind of girl. As the daughter of a schizophrenic mother, I'm bred to see the world through treacherous lenses. In my mind, everything is always going to be as hard is it is, right now, forever. Unfortunately, history has often reinforced that lesson. Between finances, the deterioration of our home which we can't afford to repair, the shortage of grocery money, bill collectors and the like, things have been a struggle for a very long time. Most of the time I still manage to stay on top of it. Cameron is quite a blessing and positive person, which helps considerably.

June 6, 2011

It's funny. I've noticed time and again that when things get horribly, horribly difficult we are always blessed with a litter of kittens. With the nearing loss of Tully, the Lady Bastet once again blessed us. Some days, it's only their adoring looks and affection that keeps me on track.

In reflection, I think the office is the universe's affirmation that it's nearing time to leave my current job. I never wanted to work in addictions, anyway. But I needed a job and it was an opportunity in my field. I was lucky to find work when most of peers at school could not. I've hated the hours from the beginning, but it made grad school, the practicum and now the internship possible. As of this week, I've completed the hours required for licensure (I still have to see client and have supervision until Dec 2012, but the hours requirement can be the most difficult part to fulfill).

And here lies darkness, also lies hope. I am a child of the Goddess, and know well that fertile soil gives tiny sprouts the chance to grow. I believe a miracle is coming...I've invested in that miracle, nurtured it, waited for it, dreamed of it. I know that when it comes, our lives will change radically. But I thought my miracle was going to arrive months ago, and I hold on with weakening fingers.

Reflections and the Rainbow Bridge

2011-07-28T19:16:00.001-04:00

Tully, age 12 and Dante, age 6 weeks

Grief is an old friend. We've had many, many cats and a couple dozen are buried on our property. But the passing of Tully hits especially hard.

In the mid nineties I lived a very different life. I had just begun my Pagan path, and was not on speaking terms with the Christian God. I had crawled out of my fourth, and very abusive marriage. I had disowned my biological father due to his toxicity in my life. I had found yet one more knight in shining armor, who later proved to the most abusive of them all. I finally gained custody of my sons, and was desperately trying to keep them with me. For a couple of years things looked rosy. It was during those years that Tully came to be.

A few years later I lost my grove, my friends, my sons and all hope. It was one of the darkest times of my life. The knight in shining armor turned out to be a very dangerous sociopath and his extreme charm and manipulations had everyone believing his stories. After destroying my life, he went on to destroy even more lives. But that's an entry for another day. The cats were the only constant in my life. Their need for me, for affection, for care, for cat food, kept me going when I wanted nothing more than to give up.

With no where to go, I moved into The Fiber Geek's basement with my sixteen cats, including Tully and his littermate, Temptation. Later, the cats and I moved to North Carolina and eventually into the trailer I now share with Cameron. I think part of the reason I grieve Tully so deeply is because he represented a tie those days when my sons were with me, when my eldest son had not stopped talking to me, when the world was still filled with those possibilities of normalcy and family. Losing my cat is like loosing the hope I've carried all these years of a strong connection to my sons, to my grandchildren. The years move on, and the distance between us grows. And I've no power to change it.

Looking back, I saw the symptoms of Tully's illness. But my income is half of what it was in the nineties and cost of living has doubled. Vets and chemo are not an option. So we've loved Tully while we had him, and he was utterly devoted to us. We went to the vet a few weeks ago for antibiotics, and he gained weight. He's spent every moment he could in my lap at the computer or on the bed. I think he's known it was almost time, and he poured out his affection. He's always been affectionate, but these last few weeks even more so.

Yesterday he didn't find his way to my lap. He slept most of the day. Today he refused food. This evening, he crossed the rainbow bridge.

Tully has been a life lesson to this old, disillusioned witch. He was determinedly cheerful to the end. Indeed, he was the most joyful cat in the house. Only a couple of hours before he crossing, he was "smiling" with his customary cheer. He went swiftly and easily, and is buried beneath the pussy willow.

Son of Brom, son of Isis, I give the cat goddess Bastet thanks for your life and your joy in living. I miss you desperately. May you please find your way back to me with the turn of the wheel. So mote it be.

Tully Cat

2011-07-24T17:19:00.004-04:00

Grey cat: Tannis, in the middle, Marmelade,
Tabby: Tully, and Orange Cat: Rascal (2007)

It's Sunday afternoon and my cat is curled up in my lap asleep. He was asleep the day I found him, 12 years ago, curled up with his momma Isis and littermates, less than four hours old. I initially planned to have several of the kittens adopted out, but couldn't stand to let him go. My best friend, Fiber Geek, named him Tully for Tullamore Dew. It's our drink of choice during late night Filking.

I know the day he was conceived. I did not know, until then, that cat sex is a spectator sport! We had an evil bout of upper respiratory infections run through the house. A neighbor moved out of town, abandoning Isis on the doorstep. She and Brom were the only unfixed cats in the house. She went into heat, and neither cat could be taken to the vet for surgery until they were well. Initially, Brom was too young and inexperienced to know what to do. He definitely was not making the right approach. Firedancer the First solved his problem. With every cat in the house (12 back then) in a circle around Isis, crouched in position, my very neutered Firedancer stepped up, demonstrated how to pleasure a lady, and stepped back. I had no idea he has such knowledge, as he had been neutered very young. Brom watched with deep attention, and then took his turn. I counted the weeks. Four kittens. Three survived.

For the first three years of his life, we called him Tully of Little Brain. He just didn't seem too bright. He raced around like a maniac, got into things and fell off high places. He brought me joy and laughter during a very dark time in my life. He grew so fast he never knew where his feet were. He had me fooled. He had learned playing dumb got him extra treats and attention. More recent years revealed a very elegant, very intelligent cat. Never any problem, gentle and loving.

Two weeks ago Tully was diagnosed with end stage cancer. The vet said to take him home, love him, feed him anything he wants. My rail thin cat, who lost all his teeth a year ago to the cancer, has gained two pounds. Yesterday I found the swollen lymph node in his neck, an inch away from the cancer. We count his life now by breaths and purring.

Yesterday I had to run to the store for cat sand. The check out clerk inquired how many cats I have. When I replied 22, she asked, "Do you know all of their names and personalities?" How offended she might have been if I asked her children's names and personalities. I simply replied my sons are grown and gone, and of course I know the furchildren's names. Yet even as each is precious and unique, some do bond more tightly than others. Tully is very near my heart indeed.

When it's my time to cross into the Summerlands, I want to cross with the grace of my cat. I'm sure he knows he's dying, yet each day he is cheerful, enjoys laying in the morning sun, and devourers every bite of food I give him. Tully has always been an easy cat, happy to have attention, cautious with his claws, delighted in the moment whether it included cat nip, cat food or attention. He is a study of Mindfulness. My clients at the clinic and I could learn much from him. Soon he will cross the Rainbow Bridge, joining his poppa Brom and momma Isis.

May the Goddess Bastet keep you and hold you, and love you like I do, Tully. May she guide you gently to the Rainbow Bridge when it's time. Know my heart goes with you, and you will be welcomed back again with the turn of the wheel.

I love you, Tully Cat. I shall miss you more than I can say.

Chronic Pain

2011-07-18T08:15:00.001-04:00

I've worked as a substance abuse counselor for the last three years. We treat opiate addiction with methadone. I wasn't sure how I felt about that in the beginning, substituting one addiction for another, but seeing the remarkable transformations in the people around me has made me a believer.Needless to say, I cannot take opiates for pain without a prescription. Ibuprofen is loosing its effectiveness.

My partner struggles with chronic pain. Neither of us have insurance, so Cameron cannot yet have the much needed surgery that would transform her life. Recently, I injured my right knee. It's not healing. Did I mention no insurance? Chronic pain dogs my steps, rides my temper, waits in the shadows to goad the darkest parts of self.

Chronic pain has become yet another part of mind numbing poverty. You know, choosing between the electric bill and grocery money. Some days it is all I can do to roll out of bed and go to work. What good is a substance abuse counselor or therapist when I hurt too much to filter other people's stories?

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

2011-07-08T17:44:00.001-04:00

I first read Annie Dillard's book in the mid to late 80's as I stumbled my way into Paganism. I think of Dillard an a word artist because she paints with words across a broad canvas of science, introspection and reflection of the world around her. I dream of taking a year, or a lifetime, to live beside water and watch the passage of seasons on its surface. She's done it.

Growing up in Southern Indiana, the daughter of a schizophrenic mother driven by her psychosis, the woods were a refuge, a sanctuary. Hot humid summers lured me into the depths of shadow to walk the dried water fall, to follow the path to the creek, to wade in its shallow waters. Our home was filled with sharp edges, narrow spaces between trouble and anger. The only predictability was the unpredictability. My mother's retreat to her bedroom let me wander those acres of woods unsupervised. Our cats birthed their kittens in the fallen logs beneath towering oaks and maple. To find the source of those tiny "meeps" was a game.

Always there was the edge of the sacred and the profane. Tiny bundles of life become tiny lessons in death when the tomcats found the little boy kittens. I hated the neighbor's orange tomcat who culled our population. I hated my mother even more when we moved to Arkansas and abandoned all twenty cats and kittens. I've always wondered if any still survive in the woods or barns of those neighboring acres.

Eight years ago I found my way back to water, or almost. I can see it from my modest 30 year old mobile home, but I don't own the property with water access. That doesn't always stop me, though. I've found the paths of the South Carolina fishermen to the rocky shore of our modest lake. And I dream of something more.

Little Brown Feet

2011-06-29T20:07:00.000-04:00

So I'm sitting on the couch and look up to see a little brown foot hanging over the stairs, and I call out, "I see a little brown foot." My godson replies, "No, there are two little brown feet." Guard my heart, Goddess, I'm falling in love with a three-year-old. Bittersweet thought, that.

Four hours from home are two children that I've only seen a few times. They don't know I'm their grandmother. My heart breaks for the loss. I dream of the day my younger son has children, and I have the funds to see them on a regular basis.

Atlanta

2011-06-29T14:39:00.001-04:00

Yesterday The Fiber Geek called and told me her daughter has experienced trauma. She's in New Jersey on a job, and won't be flying back to Atlanta until really late Thursday. The sound of the concern in her voice was enough. I took three days off and I'm in Atlanta. I type this from the basement bedroom of her condo. Her daughter and Little Raven, age three, are upstairs taking a nap.

It's strange to occupy this space. It's time to revisit the past and heal old wounds. The new few days will be an interesting journey. I think I'll use the time to put some old things away that I've carried for many, many years.

It's strange walking around the house. So much has changed. But that's still my Disney plates on the walls. That's still Cameron's mural in the corner. This was the place I came when my life imploded. When neither son would speak to me. When I lost my home, my grove, my life as I knew it. When the world of technical writing and steady pay checks ended and all I could find for work was nannying for $20 an hour.

I read a book once called The Winnowed Woman. She talked about the same things happening, and her life was separated like the wheat from the chaff. It's been nine years since my life imploded. When I traded dreams for survival. When I had to accept I would never be a part of the boys' lives the way I wanted to. When I realized that I cannot choose a good man, and before I realized I could choose a good relationship with Cameron. When I learned that spirituality is breath, not a grove, not a priest and not a priestess. And that they, too, can be fooled by illusion. It was a time of bitterness, pain, and loss. I still grieve. Perhaps I always will.

And yet, like the Phoenix, I live. We have an extraordinarily modest home in desperate need of repair. But we have a home. And we, Cameron and I, share a miraculous relationship of joy, appreciation, depth. I have become a priestess, a therapist, a partner, and a better friend. Not such a bad outcome...

Where I am Now....

2011-06-28T18:15:00.000-04:00

I seem to be waiting...change creeps along, promising transformation. But life happens while we wait. I continue to work as a substance abuse counselor. I never stop marveling at the stories, the lies, the illusions and the surprises my client present on a daily basis.

I'm also working with Safe Homes Rape Crisis as a therapist. My hours of service pay for my supervision to complete my licensure requirements.

I miss blogging. I miss the words, the keyboard yielding thoughts, ideas, and moments of transformation. But exhaustion dogs my steps, and the most I seem to manage is pushing a mouse around Facebook games. Maybe this weekend, for a few moments, I can find my voice. My best friend called saying her daughter was experiencing life in high gear, and the results were not good. The Fiber Geek is New Jersey for a couple days more, so tomorrow I drive to Atlanta to spend some time with her adult daughter and grandson.

The next few days promise to be interesting.

My New Hero

2011-05-16T19:27:00.001-04:00

A New Me

2011-04-10T10:28:00.003-04:00

On January 1 this year I weighed 292 lbs. When I moved to SC from Atlanta, I weighed 189, so that was a substantial gain in only seven years. A lot of it came on when I was working as a debt collector. The worst time for binge eating was just before Cameron's hip surgery, when I would often stop at Bloom for fudge.

Because I didn't eat the whole thing at once, but over several days, I told myself it wasn't the same as binging. Truth was, I was consuming too many calories. And each bite prevented me from dealing with whatever emotion was in front of me.

About mid January, I decided things had to change. I couldn't afford to wait any longer. The heal plantar fasciitis had mostly healed. My knees hurt every day. It's time. I had dreamed of putting myself on NutraSystem, but financially, that wasn't option.

Mamaw always wrote on the back of pictures. On this one
she wrote: "Rosemary Modesitt. Sept 1985. Cindy had just
given Rosemary a Mary Kay facial." I would have been 22,
and she would have been about 66. She was a size 14.

This is where the journey gets a little weird. I channeled my grandmother instead. My grandmother was food for me. As a kid, when my mother slipped away in her schizophrenic craziness and wasn't feeding me enough, we went grandma's every day. I never went hungry at grandma's. She was a rather difficult woman to approach emotionally. But when I was about nine, Grandma Haynes, who lived next door, told me the secret. Mamaw showed her love with action. And love was food. She made all my favorite foods and made sure I never went hungry. She controlled portions and calories, while still making things YUM. If I wanted both kinds of pie, she cut portions into slivers and I got both.

Mamaw grew up during the depression. Her family were poor dirt farmers. I remember going the farm until I was about nine, and having to go out to the pump for water. I dreaded the outhouse. She managed to go live with an aunt when she graduated from high school. In exchange for caring for her aunt, she received enough money for tuition, and went to college where she majored in Home Economics. She taught HomeEc until she was 62 when she took early retirement.

So I've been shaping my cooking around what she would have done. I get a desert every day (2 chocolate chip cookies only have 180 calories!). A couple of days a week I have a New Castle (140 calories). We've taken a page from Montel William's book, and drink Green Drinks all day long. Funny how they slow caffeine withdrawal. I only had 4 sodas yesterday instead of six. May eventually be able to get off them all together!

I've started a private journal at livestrong.com so I can track calories taken in and calories burned, as well as fitness. I'm doing Richard Simmon's Sweatin' to the Oldies more days than not. And it's working. When I weighed at work this week on the digital scale, I was down to 276 lbs.

And I'm in the kitchen thinking of my Mamaw. I miss you Grandma Rose Mary. I know you'd be proud.

Conscious Men

2011-04-09T10:12:00.000-04:00

This is amazing. While women are more than intuition, inner wisdom and emotion, these qualities are very much a part of the sacred feminine. I feel honored to have viewed this video. Indeed, I wept as I viewed it.

Angry Teacher Raps About Getting Unjustly Fired

2011-03-29T13:40:00.001-04:00

I'm the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of teachers. We have 17 school teachers in my family, including my youngest son. I'm not a teacher because when I was in the 7th grade, my grandfather asked me not to teach. He had been threatened with a 2x4 in his shop the previous semester. My grandmother, a home-ec teacher, had a student brandish a knife at her the same semester. No teacher is paid enough. No teacher should ever get a pink slip because of a budget. Our children are too important.

Mindfulness

2011-02-24T19:40:00.001-05:00

I took over a mindfulness group that meets once a week at work shortly after beginning working in substance abuse treatment. While meditation is virtually impossible in our environment--most of my clients would simply fall asleep--I try to introduce some mindfulness technique to my clients. I relate the concept of being aware of triggers with mindfulness. I also work with them on how to recognize stress in their bodies and how to use that awareness to their advantage. It's gotten to be a fairly popular group (clients only show up once, unfortunately, when they are required to take a group in order to earn privileges).

So it's taken me two years to make time to really research mindfulness and think about applying it to my own life. I've used meditation in my life for a long time. Studying Wicca requires it. But I'm now learning to use it more fully. Tonight I decided to check out youtube to see what it might offer. I really like this guy and thought I would share. He does a good job of just getting a person reoriented to breath work and mindfulness.

Stepping Outside the Social Grid

2011-02-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

The Bali people's daily living takes shape around a system of ritual where Hinduism and agriculture meet. People in Bali depend upon an agrarian system to keep them fed. They work in rice paddies, and their survival depends upon each member of their society knowing exactly their role. Their rice growing society depends upon communal service: "Rice terraces require an unbelievable amount of shared labor, maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each Balinese village has a banjar--a united organization of citizens who administer, through consensus, the village's political and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali, the collective is absolutely more important than the individual, or nobody eats" (Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert).

Balinese people know exactly where they fit in the culture, from birth order to their place in the 13 rites of passages that mark their lives. The balance of their civilization depends upon conformity. So when you walk down the road and someone asks where you are going, you cannot reply "I'm just wandering" without distressing the inquirer. It is better to make up an answer than not offer a reply that fits their expectations. If someone inquires, "Are you married," it is better to reply "not yet" even if you are a lesbian, rabid feminist, 80-year-old nun.

On the one hand, what a comfort to always know exactly where you fit in your culture, your work, and your family. On the other hand, "different" disrupts their social grid to the point that they are distressed simply because you are not married. Or Hindu. Or fill-in-the-blank.On the other hand, what if you don't fit? What if your soul feels the urge to fly? Or to love someone of your own sex? What then?

And how different is that, truly, from our own culture? I live in South Carolina. I've lived in the Midwest or South for 37 years. I struggle for authenticity in my life, claiming it as a banner. Waiving it around as my hope for salvation in a land of Christian fundamentalists and Southern culture. Yet I work in a place where the only Southerner is the owner. We have employees from Boston, California, and South Africa. We see a client base that is also "other" because of addiction. I've considered changing jobs, but don't dare do so. I'm lesbian. Not a safe to be publicly gay working for the local school system. The Christian fundamentalists won't tolerate it.

Cameron and I dream of living in a place where we both can find authenticity. As Cameron progresses along her path, identifying more and more as male, we both know transitioning here simply won't work. She has too many links to the past, to family, to those who won't understand. And while I was truly encouraged at the measure of support that came to the demonstration last week at Converse College, I also know I can't call five of those folks by name. They aren't present in my daily life offering support and strength. Moreover, we've not found our nitch spiritually here, either.

Guess we've stepped so far out of our cultural, social grid that we're having to define who we are, not by societal exceptions, but by our own intuition. But there are still many places that's not acceptable. Many places that still depend upon a social grid to provide identity and direction.

Moments of Bliss...and Unconditional Love

2011-02-21T18:27:00.007-05:00

So I'm reading EAT PRAY LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert. I deliberately choose not to see the movie, at least until after I experience the book. Not that I have anything against Julia Roberts, but I doubt she can achieve what I need to experience. Yes, I love the book so far.

I've reached about the middle when she talks about people coming to the Ashram from all over the world for a week of silent medication. Now I don't know about you, but the flashes of silence I get in mediation are an incredible relief. My mind races, worries, constantly. My limbic system got wired for constant emergencies at my mother's knee. Literally. I would not say I'm good at silent meditation. I would say that I've been practicing for a very long time...since I started studying Wicca, actually. And I need a lot more practice. It does come easier in my late 40s than it did in my early thirties.

I've also done one short, silent meditation. I took a 24 hour period to go to The Snail's pace, in Saluda, NC the day before my third degree ceremony. It was awesome. I've been craving an opportunity to return and do it again, but have never found the right time. Funny how chosen silence brings out so much "stuff." I've had enforced silence, going up to four days at a time without speaking to another human being on a regular basis because my life had become so isolated. Nothing restful there. More like I was verging on insanity.

So I'm reading my book, the TV is off, I don't listen to a lot of music, and the only sound in the house is the crackle of the fire and the sound a fan (gotta have a fan if you want to burn a fire and have hot flashes). The author writes about the sacred bliss that comes when we claim our inner perfection, our inner sacredness. And I looked around my humble home, and thought about the anxiety of the earlier part of the day, and as I watched the fire, and the cats, I thought, "this is it." I am, in this moment, blessed. I wish I could keep this moment of certainty, of connection, of love when the cat pans need doing, and I get up at 3:30 in the morning to go to work, when anxiety rules my moments.

One little note of serendipity. As I made my way through the section where the author reconciled her losses in relationships, including her ex-husband and a boyfriend, I had my own moment today. I married a man when I turned 30 from India. While I had known him for five years, during which he pursued me relentlessly, I didn't know I had also married a psychopath...a dangerous story for another day. I got my own affirmation for good decisions today while reading about the reconciliations to the past. I received a notice that the condo my ex and I owned together was about to be auctioned off for unpaid taxes. I did some quick research and made a phone call or two. Turns out he's still a computer programmer, working for a company with world-wide name recognition. He's probably making $100,000 a year and hasn't paid an accumulated $3,000 tax debt. He kept our condo out of spite when we divorced because he knew he I wanted it. He's probably let it go to move himself and his Indian wife (arranged marriage) into his parent's condo across the street...and rather than pay the debt, characteristically let it go. He always said he didn't care about money. Actually, he did. But only for the power it gave him over others; he paid his parent's and brother's bills while letting his own go so that he could have power. Yep, I got the Universe's confirmation of good decisions on a day I needed to hear it...

I don't know about you, but keeping unconditional love for myself is hard. I certainly didn't have it this morning when I wailed about my shortcomings. I didn't have it for my wife when I got all impatient because she didn't "get it" the instant I thought she should. Or maybe I did. When the hurricane is gone, and we are left in comfortable silence, when we know our place in the universe and trust in the love we share with the people in our lives, and when my wife still loves me no matter what I twit I have been; maybe that is also sacred, blessed, and filled with grace.

Budget Cuts and Planned Parenthood

2011-02-20T10:27:00.001-05:00

Anyone else noticing the antics of our lawmakers and the contradictions of their actions?

The House of Representatives just voted to cut all screening, prevention and family planning funding from Planned Parenthood. Apparently our lawmakers believe that if they remove all funding from Planned Parenthood, they can prevent funding abortion.

Hello? Research? Proof?

In case our lawmakers aren't paying attention, people are not going to stop having sex. Unwanted pregnancies can be prevented with condoms and education. Rather than providing services to low-income persons who otherwise will have yet more children they cannot afford to raise, our lawmakers preach morality and refuse to provide services. Meanwhile, they drive nice cars, live in the burbs, and have health care coverage.

Moreover, the consequences are far more expensive than the prevention of unwanted, unintended pregnancies. According to Reuters, raising a child costs $291,570. This price does not include childbirth or college. So for the lack of a condom, our nation will assume the cost of education, medical and other needs. And if the child lacks attachment figures and other needs, thereby winding up in the legal system, the cost increases even more. A quick Google search suggests that housing an inmate in the legal system $20,108 per year or about $55 a day, not including building maintenance, staff, etc.

I've been through four layoffs in my lifetime. I'm familiar with the end of the year push to salvage this year's numbers to justify next year's existence, regardless of the consequences. It horrifies me that we run our country that way. We look so closely at the final bottom line number for this year that we refuse to read the fine print indicating consequences for the next year, the next ten years or the next generation.

To add fuel to my rant, this is one of those things from Facebook that I posted on my wall:

Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women

1) Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven't yet. Shocker.

2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."

3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that couldmake it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)

4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.

5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.

6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said.Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.

7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.

8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.

9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.

10) And if that wasn't enough, Republicans are pushing toeliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up).

Joy in the Day

2011-02-18T09:22:00.001-05:00

I want to live joyfully. I want to be present in the moment and joyful in its touch, sound, and taste. I want to treasure the roses on the table my lover gave me Monday because she loves me. I want to taste my fresh cranberry orange bread and celebrate that I made it today.

The Anatomy of Hate: White Supremest

2011-02-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

Last night I attended a viewing of "The Anatomy of Hate", aired at Converse College. When I heard that it would be aired and that the Westboro Baptist Church was coming, I had to go. I'm glad I did. But I have to admit that some of the images are haunting me today.

Meet one of the interviewees of the film. This is Billy Roper:

Billy Roper, head of Arkansas-based White Revolution, a racist organization that promotes cooperation between white supremacist groups, is devoted to unifying the disparate and fractious racist right. In fact, White Revolution's inception is due, in large part, to Roper's outreach efforts as an official with the neo-Nazi National Alliance (NA), where he first made a name for himself. His vision of a unified white power front conflicted with the NA leadership's conception of itself as an elite vanguard poised to carry out a "white revolution." Roper's views led to his dismissal from the NA in September 2002 and his founding of White Revolution a few days later. Roper used the skills and contacts he had cultivated as NA's Deputy Membership Coordinator to jumpstart White Revolution.

One of the most troubling images of the film was the greased pig chase. Now, I've never attended a greased pig chase, nor have any desire to do so. For me, it is a metaphor rather than a reality. Before I go any further, allow me to say that I did a little research and greased pig chases don't usually end in the death of the pig, unless the winner slaughters the pig after they go home. This was different.

During a summer white supremest festival, children were extremely excited about a greased pig chase. I was unprepared for the small pig, more like a piglet, to be so cute. He was released and really had no fear of humans. Children chasing him and pushing him around finally got him to run. Until the taunting children brought him down. Beat him down. Kicked him down. Viciously, brutally killing the small pig one blow, one kick at a time from small hands and feet. I hope you are horrified as I am. I hope you are even more horrified when I report a father encouraging his four-year-old son to kick the poor thing until it died. Then the father cut the belly and I couldn't look after I saw entrails spill out. A later image showed an older child holding up the gutted carcass.

Besides the animal rights issues, which we can all agree upon, I have another one. I grew up in Arkansas. My pardon to his son and his wife, but I'm telling you that folks from Arkansas can be mean. An Indian friend once told me it's because the displaced Indians cursed the soil. I have another theory. By the time settlers reached Arkansas, the fertile hills and valleys of Ohio, Kentucky and Louisiana were gone. It took hard scrabble settlers to settle hard scrabble land. I remember when parts of Ar got electricity in the '70s.

So this summer festival, held by white supremests encourages children to kill animals, devaluing life. Surely killing comes easy when a young child learns such valuelessness of life and is praised for callous cruelty. And in a world where white supremests disdain "other", killing other just got trained into the children as I watched.

Burnout, Vending and Reflection

2011-02-11T10:24:00.005-05:00

Cameron chatting with my coworker,
who was vending in the next booth.

As many of you may recall, last year was Designs by Dreamweaver's first year vending at festivals. We learned quickly that vending in downstate SC is a waste of time. People don't have the money to spend. We did a lot better in NC, and had thought we might just do a few festivals there this year.

However, we are a year older. I'm still recovering from last year's burnout. And I was very surprised to learn that the studio stays a little colder than I like for working polymer clay in the winter. I've barely been in there for last several months. Worse, Cameron's hip continues to deteriorate. Don't tell Cameron that I've told you, but I don't think she can make it a season toting a tent and setting up and tearing down a booth. Indeed, I'm not sure my knees will, either. While my coworker is making plans and inviting us to festivals, I am finding myself back peddling. While he was searching festivals, however, he found the following pictures from Chesnee, SC taken last May:

Yep, that's me. I actually like this picture. fairly flattering.

As a kid, my parents never took me anywhere and certainly not to a carnival. The little kid part of me delighted in the rides, the lights, and the smell of cotton candy. I don't honestly know how I managed to work eight hours, come home and work six more making pendants, and spend the whole weekend vending. I also had to flip my sleep schedule every weekend since I go to bed around 8 every night. It was crazy!

The carnival lights are one of the best things about vending.

So this year any festival attendance will be by pleasure rather than necessity. I'm glad we did it, but I don't have it in me to repeat the experience this year.

What the Hell am I Doing Here?

2011-02-10T19:32:00.000-05:00

So Cameron's car is in the shop and her hips won't let her drive a stick shift. So I offered to drive her to school tonight. It's about 40 minutes each way, so it didn't make since to drive home for only an hour before heading out again to pick her up (not to mention the gas money). I brought the computer with the idea of going to Panera Bread for the their wi-fi. I'm not sure if that was a good idea or not...

I set up just inside the front door. It's a bit breezy here, but the people watching is good. How is it that virtually all the people having supper at Panera Bread are skinny??? I've been sitting here for two hours and only seen one woman who is heavy as I am...of course, I'm newly sensitized to the extremity of my size having visited Ross' just before coming here. The good news is that I found an awesome pair of work pants (why is that plural if I bought one?) and the bad news is full length mirrors. 'Nuff said.

So I'm sitting here bravely resisting the call of sweets and treats. I won't even buy a drink because I'm convinced the chocolate will attack me. I talk myself around to a comfort zone when I see a huge influx of people dressed for church. Wait, it is Thursday night. Why??? Yep, I pegged it right. There's a bible study going on in the corner. They are passing a book and taking turns reading a paragraph each.

Well, alrighty then. Guess they have the right. So can I bring Starhawk's book and have a study group too?

This is the south. I'd probably be lynched before I made it to my car. I really gotta move.

Spiral Dance

2011-02-07T17:10:00.001-05:00

Fox News and the Middle East

2011-02-06T13:34:00.002-05:00

For quite some time I have joined much of the world in watching events in the Middle East. My oldest son did a tour in Iraq and I worried for his safety. I joined much of the world as Iraq held their first election. When Allawi won, I joined the world's confusion as Malaki jockied for power and delayed forming his government until he had a power base formed. Cameron and I watched the day the UN broadcast Iraq's release from Chapter 7 sanctions. We also witnessed the forming of their government (since they were speaking Arabic, we were really confused when Allawi got pissed and walked out with twenty other parliamentary members). But I digress from where I really wanted to go.

As the sudden civil unrest mounts in Egypt, Cameron and I have watched the news with great trepidation. It's not the underclass protesting conditions. Instead, it the educated, the professors, the white collar workers who can't find a job, who can't feed their families, who have no hope while their leader flies ice cream and yogurt in from France and has 80 billion in private holdings. but I digress...

I identify with the educated people in Iraq and Egypt who thought getting an education would provide them with a solid future. I bought into the same promises. I have a $250,000 student loan and the monthly payments are more than I bring home. Indeed, my wages of gone down substantially while the interest has added to that loan. I only make $28,800 and Scrooge hasn't given raises in two years. That's $8000 less than the job I moved to SC for. That's $14,000 less than I made as debt collector before the company closed (only needed a high school diploma for that job). And a fraction of the $64,000 I made as a technical writer in the '90s before the .com crash and the loss of that career. But I digress...

So this morning Cameron tells me that Fox News can't seem to use a correct map of the Middle East. Here's what they put on the news:

Hmmm...I thought Egypt was part of Northern Africa...And looks like they lost Iraq all together! LOL Here's a correct map:

Moral of the story: Maybe this over educated technical writer / substance abuse counselor should have gone to work at Fox news so they can use the right map.

Food and the World's Greatest Spaghetti Sauce

2011-02-05T21:55:00.001-05:00

Have I mentioned that I am compulsive overeater? No, really. Card carrying. Even attended 12 step meetings in my twenties when I still lived in Ar. I've struggled with my weight all of my life. Deprivation and abuse as a child can do that to a person. Enough said about that today, as that's not the point at all.

When I turned 40 I moved to SC (chasing Cameron, and caught her too!). I didn't know I was perimenapausal. In my late thirties I weighed 169 pounds, was a size 16 and quite satisfied with my weight. Changing metabolism, depression, sedimentary job and my weight went up. Did the Atkins thing for a while, got back to a size 18, and then became a debt collector. Have I mentioned I hated that job, although I was very good at it: "Hi, I'm calling on behalf of Dollar General and have your return check here in my office. We are scheduled to send it back through your account on Friday for $207.69 including the return check fee. Will your funds available or do you need me to wait until Monday?"

I topped out at 291 pounds. That's a lot of weight for someone who doesn't quiet make it to 5-04. Worse, being broke is not conducive to healthy eating. Fresh fruit and veggies are expensive. And stress and depression don't help.

Things have changed a little. I'm in a job I love, even if I do work for Scrooge (please have another lump of coal? Running the air conditioning when it's 20 degrees outside should be illegal). I've had a little discussion with my body about portions (half what it used to be...post menopausal women really don't need a lot of food...damn). Cameron's student loan came in, and I tackled our kitchen. Yes, there really was a can from 1999. And if people generously have brought us food on occasion, out of kindness upon seeing our empty cabinets or frig, I'm still not eating the gift of black eyed peas.

All out of date cans cleared from the shelves, I had room to organize. And then I changed how we eat. We've cut our portions. And I get one desert a day. Every day. No cravings, no deprivation, no guilt. And if I screw up, no starting over, I just keep going.

Today I weigh 277 pounds. I've still a long way to go, but it's happening. And food is going from my little secret to my public pleasure. So don't be surprised when my favorite recipes, some borrowed, some created, show up here.

So here's the most awesome Spaghetti Sauce Recipe I've ever made:

Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

In the crock pot, combine:

3 cans Hunts diced tomatoes with basil, garlic and oregano

2 cans tomato paste

1 20 ounce can crushed tomatoes

Brown sugar

mushrooms

In a skillet combine:

2 pounds hamburger

1 stalk celery diced

1 large onion diced

Fennel

Oregano

Basil

Thyme

Garlic

Drain the hamburger and combine with crock pot. Cook till dinner.

This makes tons...we ate lunch. And dinner. And I've a spaghetti casserole (top with mozzarella cheese and bake) for tomorrow. Cut those leftovers into servings and freeze for another day. A reasonable serving size, and little salad, and a desert (lemon bars today).

Oh, and the day I make deserts? Usually about once a week -- I get two! Rewards for sticking with it. LOL I also freeze any deserts not planned for the day. And they do not come out of the freezer until they are to be defrosted for the follow day. Oh, and I get to eat my desert first! Usually an hour or so before supper. Pretty cool, huh?

Authenticity and Menopause

2011-01-16T12:41:00.001-05:00

A dearly beloved friend said to me last night, "I'm at war with myself!" as she described her conflicting feelings and responsibilities. Like so many of us, she has reached that critical point of her life when her own needs are coming to the surface and overriding her previous programing of protecting home and hearth at all costs. Especially the cost of the female self.

We live in the south, where ignoring one's own needs for the benefit of others is positively a path to sainthood. Women who put themselves first, according to scripture and society, are headed to hell. Yet Northrup argues that sublimation of needs creates a kind of "debt account" which fills with the issues we ignore. Then perimenopause comes along and the authentic self, the part of self that wanted a career, needs to nurture relationships outside the home, the part of self that holds need, want and desire rises like the phoenix. And instead of embracing this opportunity of growth, women are told they are selfish...

Makes me want to scream! The good dr says, "This is likely to turn into a period of great emotional turmoil, as each woman struggles to make a new life, one that can accommodate her emerging self." Of course, that lovely statement doesn't account for the divorce, career or identity changes. It's commonly acknowledged in the lesbian community its a time when many women come out of the closet. Northrup herself went through a divorce. Northrup continues: "Externally and internally, this period is a mirror image of adolescence, a time when our bodies and brains were also going through major hormonal shifts that gave us the energy to attempt to individuate from our families and become the person we were meant to be. At menopause we pick up where we left off in adolescence. It is now time to the finish the job."

As my friend spoke, I was reminded of my own determination to gain authenticity in my life. I love that word: authenticity. It roles off my tongue as a taste, a desire, a need. I began my own journey toward authenticity, as many do, as a need unnamed. I just knew I could not continue in the life I had. I didn't know then that I was perimenopausal, a time Dr Christine Northup describes in her book WOMEN'S BODIES, WOMEN'S WISDOM, as the "mother of all wake-up calls." Northup argues that our periods create a cyclical opportunity to examine our lives and to be contact with ourselves instead of blocking out our needs altogether in order to please others, especially but not exclusively, husbands and children.

Northrup describes women's energies during her early years as being focused on caring for others. The hormones that drive the menstrual cycle "foster her instincts for nurturing, her devotion to cohesion, and harmony within her world. But for two or three days each month, just before or during our periods, there is a hormonal interlude when the veil between our conscious and unconscious selves is thinner and the voice of our souls beckons to us, subtly reminding us of our own passions, our own needs, which cannot and should not always be subsumed to the needs of those we love." Given that I had periods every 20 days, and my periods often last ten days, I always felt I was at the mercy of my own body. I also wasn't feeling this 12 times a year but 18...and I can say that this conflicting war road my adult years straight into the hell of my own making. I tried to be married, I tried to raise children, I was angry, depressed, betrayed by my inability to fit the world my family and society demanded I occupy.

Blessedly, I hit the perimenopausal years early. I didn't know it at the time, but when I followed Cameron into South Carolina, I was well into perimenopause. By forty-five I was in full menopause. And yes, I absolutely believe that I think differently, view the world differently and judge the world differently as a result. As Northrup says, "We go from an alternating current of inner wisdom to a direct current that remains on all the time after meneopause is complete. During perimenopause, our brains make the change from one way of being to the other." We are biologically driven, she says, to withdraw from the outside world for a time and revisit the past. It's the time when I reentered therapy. Instead of mothering others, I began mothering myself.

So I watch my friend, who is at war with herself, without judgement. She struggles with the ethics of her needs and desires, and I see the bigger picture of her becoming. She walks a sacred path on a sacred journey of becoming. I am privileged to share her journey, and recognize her pain as it reflects my own freshly healed wounds. Blessed be, Earth Child, as you find your way.

The Cure for Burnout

2011-01-11T20:15:00.000-05:00

Two or three snow days can go a long way to cure burnout. I won't profess to be entirely healed, it'll take a job change to make that happen, but my weary spirits have taken great joy in this unexpected holiday.

Cameron and I have been blessed to not loose power, to have enough funds to buy a cord of wood, and to have a fireplace. She's finished reading one book to me and begun another. I've tromped in snow, taken a few pictures and reveled in the peace.

Tomorrow we'll finish digging out my car. I'll back it out and turn it to face the road for my journey to work on Thursday. But tonight I have a roaring fire and cheesecake. Life is good.

Seven Inches ... and Counting

2011-01-11T11:16:00.002-05:00

Snow, that is. Come on! I'm a lesbian.

Cameron and I watched the weather channel most of the day yesterday, debating about work. She'd get convinced I couldn't make it and I'd make a case for why I had to. Scrooge waited too long to be able to close today. Remember, I'm a substance abuse counselor and we do methadone maintenance. Methadone has a half life, meaning half of what you took yesterday will be in your system today. And half of half of the day before and so forth. So our clients can miss a dose and be fine. Maybe two if they take care of themselves and don't overdo. Had we been closed both Monday and Tuesday, folks who didn't know would be in withdrawal.

I was excited, like a kid before Christmas, and couldn't sleep last night. About 2:30 this morning I got my wish with enough snow to call and leave a message on my manager's voice mail saying the roads at my house were impassable. Since I leave for work at 4 am, that 2:30 isn't long before I would have been headed out anyway.

I've been amused by Weather Channel's focus on Atlanta and Charlotte. They really missed an excellent opportunity. They should have been in Greenville, SC.

I actually began this entry yesterday, but the internet did not cooperate. Since then, Cameron has posted wonderful pictures. So I'm referring you there!

Reflections and Snow

2011-01-08T11:45:00.000-05:00

I work one Saturday out of every 4 or 5. Everyone dreads those Saturdays, even though we're only there a couple of hours. This Saturday was particularly challenging because Cameron and I stayed up late last night. Cameron's Dad had told her that there was a new projector system at the Planetarium, and it sounded like fun because last night's show was to be about astronauts. Lack of money, work, school, practicum and such have seriously deprived us of a social life these last four years. It was only $5, so we went. It was awesome! I had forgotten, however, how steep the school bus steps can be. Wow. But once I survived the school bus shuttle, the experience was impressive. I never experienced that kind of show before. Cameron's tummy, due to her lack of inner ear bones, didn't do so well with the Mars roller coaster. Or maybe that was a good excuse for a milk shake on the way home.

So I slept in till 4 am because Saturdays at work are casual. With the potential for the worst winter storm in 20 years to roll through Sunday and Monday, all the clients were concerned about getting their medication and safety. Unfortunately, Scrooge had to make a judgement call yesterday, when we could contact clients who were't in the clinic, to warn them to pick up today. He decided he'd be open Monday and closed Tuesday. With the winter weather predictions rolling in, I called clients to warn them to be at the clinic when it opens Monday. However, the weather predictions suggest most of won't make to the clinic on Monday, no matter how early.

I brought Cameron a croissant and we had breakfast before she headed to school for the day. Her class will likewise have to make some decisions as they scheduled for Monday and Tuesday night. Jan term classes only last a month, so they don't have much opportunity to make time up.

When she left, I headed to the post office. A lovely woman bought a Celtic necklace off my Etsy site. Who ever heard of not opening the post office window until 10? But it did give the opportunity to visit with some lovely ladies who likewise were stuck waiting. One was from New York and described several storms with 5-10 feet of snow. Her best story was when her husband was determined to get out and make it the corner grocery. She asked him to bring back something sweet. He bought donuts, but the fight through the snow left them in crumbles. She laughed and said they were delicious eaten with a spoon.

Necklace mailed, I came home to take a nap. That is, until I heard the updated weather report. I promptly headed to the storage building to search for fire starter, logs, etc. Found the camp stove. Paranoia? Maybe. But four years ago we went without power for 9 days. The weather channel is warning of possible loss of power with the snow and freezing rain. We're usually one of the last to be restored because we so far from town. Maybe I can talk Cameron into buying some wood on the way home.

The Next Step

2011-01-07T08:25:00.001-05:00

When I stepped upon my Pagan Path in the early 90's, I had no idea where it would lead. My first glimpse of Paganism was actually in the 80's, when RaeLynn, a beautiful dyke I still think of fondly and much regret, had several powerful gifts. She called herself a witch, and at the time I didn't have the vocabulary to inquire about her training or former community. We were in grad school at Southern Illinois at Carbondale. I still had dreams of becoming an English professor. She was getting a terminal degree in Creative Writing (try finding a job that will support; sigh). One late evening we went to the local state park, hiking to the top of ridge. In a private nook I played lookout (with many glances over my shoulder as she was a beautiful woman), as she took her shirt off and blessed herself in the streaming moonlight. She was beautiful.

Several years later I found my way to the metaphysical bookstore that hosted my first circle (click here for the back story). I became Weaver, later Grace, and finally Grace DreamWeaver. My path to my third degree coincided with taking Pastoral Therapy as I began my journal as a student in Marriage and Family Therapy. Now I work as a substance abuse counselor, have graduated, am a Marriage and Family Therapy Intern (LMFT-I isn't as grand as it might be when you print 50+ case notes every month to be filed, in addition to assorted Dr orders, etc and sign it to everyone...it takes more time! LOL). It takes two years and 1500 clinical hours to become a full fledged therapist, including 150 hours of supervision. Today will make 40 hours of that count and yesterday was my first day of supervision.

With the right supervisor, I love supervision. I had four different supervisors in the program and one who was not useful. I dodged the not useful one as an intern by switching my service to Safe Homes/Rape Crisis Coalition and offering service for supervision. The supervisor is in still in process herself of completing the requirements to be a full fledged supervisor. She's also a former professor; I don't know which one of us is more excited to have formed the professional relationship: )

While I am totally jazzed about where I will be volunteering my time, it has also hit me like a ton of bricks. The shift of plan to Safe Homes only happened over the last month, so I didn't really process what that would mean to my doing therapy. Yesterday, I got the wake up call. My supervisor and I role played an intake so I could see how she does it. Intakes vary by clinic, and while ask about sexual, physical and emotional abuse, it's a little different at Safe Homes. And it really impacted me -- all I could think was "Oh man! What was I thinking?!" I'm listening to a therapist preparing for court. I hear another on the phone doing an intake and talking about restraining orders. We talk about being mandated reporters and role play info that would require a report. Oh boy...

I went home thinking, "What have I gotten myself into?" The first a report I made on a client; a co-therapist called based on the information provided by a child. I lost my client, of course. The other time I reported was a neighbor/trailer park manager who was allowing drug dealers to take over the neighborhood and pimping her teen/adolescent daughters out for food and drugs. No matter how badly the call needs to be made, it's always hard.

Now, I won't be seeing the crisis clients at the shelter. I will be seeing clients who request therapy or are referred to therapy by DSS or SADAC. Most will be working through issues when they were kids or in a prior relationship. Nevertheless, the clients and their potential stories really hit me hard. I guess it got real. In a way, my reaction is kind of silly. Rarely do my clients at work not have these same histories. Abuse can lead to substance abuse to cope with the past. Nevertheless, Cameron and I spent some time last night processing this next step in my career and in my calling.

New Iraqi government seen as setback for women

2011-01-02T13:16:00.001-05:00

I have come to believe that a nation's future may be predicted by the involvement of their women in government. As I continue to follow the middle eastern news and the rebirth of the Iraqi nation, I am struck by the patriarchal nature of the new government, which to me suggests a militaristic nation that hold our economic futures in their hands every time we go to the to the gas pump.

Stoning in Iraq was widely imposed in the years following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Although Iran's judiciary still regularly issues stoning sentences, they are often converted to other punishments. The last known stoning was carried out in 2007, although the government rarely confirms or comments on stonings. Nevertheless, since 2006 Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has faced the possibility of stoning. She was taken from prison late Saturday to meet with journalists in another bid by Iran to highlight her purported confession of helping her lover kill her husband. As her name plays across the Yahoo headlines today, I struggle discerning what is truth from propaganda in her case. My renewed alarm at her story brings the following news article even more concern. Taken from the Miami Harold:

BY SHASHANK BENGALI AND SAHAR ISSA

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

BAGHDAD -- When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki introduced what he called a national partnership government two weeks ago, he included allies and adversaries, Arabs and Kurds, Shiite Muslims and Sunnis. One group, however, was woefully underrepresented.

Only one woman was named to al-Maliki's 42-member cabinet, sparking an outcry in a country that once was a beacon for women's rights in the Arab world and adding to an ongoing struggle over the identity of the new Iraq.

Whether this fledgling nation becomes a liberal democracy or an Islamist-led patriarchy might well be judged by the place it affords its women. Nearly eight years after American-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, Iraq's record is decidedly mixed.

Al-Maliki's last cabinet included four women, and since 2005 the Iraqi constitution has set aside one-quarter of legislative seats for females. Of 325 lawmakers elected in March, 82 were women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

Yet analysts said their political contributions so far have been limited, and activists and female lawmakers seized on their exclusion from the new cabinet as a sign of women's continued struggle to find a place in Iraqi public life.

"It's a mockery," said Hanaa Edwar, a founder of the Iraqi al-Amal Association, a leading women's rights group. "Especially when you take into consideration that this is a retreat from the previous cabinet ... it's really a slap in the face for all of us."

The lone woman in the cabinet, Bushra Hussein, was named a minister of state, a relatively low position without a portfolio or budget. Another female lawmaker, Vyan Dakheel, told McClatchy Newspapers that she was offered the post of minister of state for women's affairs but turned it down because that ministry was "just a show ... without real power to serve women"; it's now being filled temporarily by a man.

After al-Maliki announced his lineup, Alaa Talabani, a female lawmaker from the northern Kurdistan region, delivered a rousing condemnation of the selection process to a packed legislative chamber.

"The Iraqi women feel today, more than any other day, that democracy in Iraq has been slaughtered by discrimination, just as it was slaughtered by sectarianism before," Talabani said, her voice quaking with emotion.

Al-Maliki returned to the lectern somewhat red-faced and said, "I had hoped that this cabinet would have more women than the last." He demanded that party leaders propose female candidates for the handful of vacancies remaining in the cabinet.

The U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, Jim Jeffrey, said of the one-sided list: "It surprised us."

Yet many believe that nominating women to cabinet posts - which control the all-powerful government ministries and their massive budgets - simply hadn't occurred to the male-dominated ranks of party leaders.

For decades, Iraq led the region in promoting women's rights, beginning in 1959 with the passage of an extremely progressive civil liberties law and the appointment of the first female minister in the Arab world. Even Saddam was a friend to women in the 1970s and 1980s, passing strong legislation against sexual harassment and bringing huge numbers of women into the workforce as part of a drive to industrialize Iraq.

Now, however, Iraqi women are finding their hard-won freedoms limited by a society increasingly governed by religious conservatives. Many Iraqis say that politicians at the local and provincial levels, whether they hail from Islamist parties or merely take cues from them, are putting pressure on women to circumscribe their public role.

In Wasit, a mostly Shiite Muslim province southeast of Baghdad, women hold nine of 28 seats on the provincial council. Earlier this year, one was in a car accident and had to be carried to safety by her bodyguards, an incident that could have been construed as indecent.

Afterward, the female council members asked to employ a male member of each of their families to serve as a "mahram," or chaperone, when they traveled on public business "to avoid embarrassment," said Zaineb Raheem Abeed, a council member.

"She was pulled, pushed, lifted and dragged by men who do not have any relation to her," Abeed said of the lawmaker in the accident. "This is very embarrassing and not acceptable in our society, as you know."

Last month in Baghdad, a headmaster of a boys-only high school told parents that the school was struggling to field teachers for Arabic, math and biology classes because of pressures from the Baghdad provincial council, which is dominated by members of al-Maliki's Shiite Islamist Dawa party. The headmaster, whose name is being withheld to spare him from recriminations, said that council officials were opposed to women being alone in classrooms with teenage boys.

"Some of our most successful teachers are women," the headmaster told a parent-teacher meeting. "If they have no objection teaching boys of this age group, I don't see why they should be discouraged."

A member of the Baghdad council, Mohammed al-Rubeiy, said that while such policies weren't explicit, "there are high-ranking people who are pushing in that direction."

"If Iraq were to move on the same trajectory that it's currently on ... then, yes, it is moving toward a situation in which freedoms will become more limited," Rubeiy said.

"But Iraqi society by its very nature has both people like Hanaa Edwar and Islamists. And it is my belief that Iraq will never be ruled completely by Islamists."

The tension between the two sides bubbled over last month in Kadhmiyah, a section of northern Baghdad, where local Islamist leaders erected a provocative display outside a major Shiite shrine. It shows four mannequins wearing the hijab, the traditional Muslim head covering for women, while behind four mannequins with uncovered heads are laced with burns, shackled in chains and have red strands lapping at their feet to simulate a fiery afterlife.

The message to women is clear: Dress modestly, or burn in hell.

"It's a reminder that there is a heavenly reward for those who are committed to the instructions of the Quran," the Muslim holy book, said Hazim al-Araji, the head of the social committee for the hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political organization, which helped sponsor the display. "And there is a punishment for those who don't."

Almost immediately, a rival campaign sponsored by secularists erected signs urging Iraqis not to impose the hijab, some carrying the message: "Baghdad Won't Become Kandahar," a reference to the capital of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"They want to fight and punish Islam with their ideas, which are far from the beliefs of Iraq and the Iraqis," Araji said. "What they are selling will never find a market here."

Edwar, whose organization opposed the hijab campaign, said that Sadrists and their allies "want to put the whole Iraqi state under the cover of religion." It's part of a larger fight over the future of Iraq, she said, but for now she's focused on lobbying political leaders to nominate women for the cabinet vacancies.

"This is a unique opportunity for us," Edwar said. "If we don't use it we will lose a lot of our achievements."

Too Funny! Snowball Fight

2011-01-01T12:43:00.000-05:00

Maturity and trickery works every time!

One Little Word: Dream

2010-12-31T20:16:00.000-05:00

I love this concept! Check out Ali Edward's blog and this wonderful project. I found my word filled with possibility for the year ahead. Mine is dream.

I began grad school with a dream. I wanted work with purpose ... I wanted to answer a calling. I made a good decision and I see all the pieces coming together to form this dream. I graduated with straight A's. I passed my licensure exam the first try with the highest score among my peers who took the same test at the same time. I have a job in my field.

But I'm dreaming of the next step. Cameron and I have a possibility of financial stability this year. For me, it would be the first time in my life I would not have to worry about paying the electric bill, buying cat food, or buying people food. My dream, however, goes deeper.

I want to leave my current employment to work at Safe Homes/Rape Crisis Coalition. My current position as a substance abuse counselor has taught me much, but doesn't pay what my peers are making. It also is limiting. We do Methadone Maintenance for opiate addiction -- a controversial program in South Carolina. I am tired of the local police department calling us drug pushers. I am also tired of doing therapy in 5 - 15 minute sound bites. It's not really therapy; it's case management. And above all else, I'm called to be a therapist, not a case manager.

So I am dreaming. I am dreaming, manifesting a dream. I want to complete my internship at Safe Homes. Beyond that, Cameron and I want to move...to work in a practice where we can offer slidingscale fees and meet the needs of our pagan/lgbtq community.

On a personal level, I dream of life where I have time to sleep more than six hours a night. I dream of taking art classes. I dream of developing my polymer. I dream of dancing, playing, walking in nature.

Certainly my dream has begun. I'm delighted to share that I won a contest today! What a delightful affirmation of my dream. Be sure to check out the Intuitive Goddess. I'm honored to have won. And I adored her thoughts on Grace, which is the first part of my name here. The name Grace, for me, was a lesson in humility when I was told by my priestess that I might not take the name of Dreamweaver until I achieved my third degree. She suggested the name Grace at the time because it was a life lesson I was working on. For me, Grace and Dreamweaver have become the core of who I am as Priestess, Gay Woman, Feminist, and Therapist.

Revamping an Image: Iraq's Emergence from UN Chapter 7 Sanctions and the GOI

2010-12-31T08:45:00.004-05:00

For the last six months I have watched, with great fascination and growing horror, the emergence of Iraq from chaos to forming a government. This once prosperous nation, 55% female, once had women politicians, chemists, computer programmers and university students. With the damage inflicted by war came a world that offered these women only a veil and a life lived largely indoors. I've read of a woman who heard her company was reopening. She reports that women many no longer safely go to the market alone, let alone to work. So her brother and father accompanied her to her former place of employment where she found herself no longer welcome and unemployed. They could not assure her safety so longer employed women. Nor would they allow this computer programmer to work from home. Her story seems fairly characteristic of what I've been reading. But these are not the stories of the headlines.

As the new government of Iraq has formed, I've read headlines and articles with great interest. One of my most frequented sources may be found here: http://translate.google.com/translate?client=tmpg&hl=ar&u=http://www.al-iraqnews.net/new/&langpair=ar|en. Very few women are a part of their newly formed parliament. And headlines regarding the Women's Ministry being headed by a man were quickly shoved aside for other headlines.

Interestingly, they published an average of about five articles a day about bombings, like the police officer who survived five attacks before three suicide bombers finally got to him. His story has been buried, like his broken body beneath the rubble of the soccer stadium that was converted to a police bunker, and I cannot find anything else about the incident. I grieve for the widow and four children whose stories have been silenced. Or other acts of terrorism throughout the country. Now the headlines, only three days later, have changed. Yesterday the ambassador of the Czech suggested, in the articles I read on multiple sites, that the Iraqi needed to take action to protect their image as acts of terrorism had greatly decreased. WTF???? So today a new article appears in the Iraqi news, entitled "The Low Number of Deaths in Iraq Prove that the Security Forces are Best Place to Fight Terrorism." Hmmmm... Don't think I'm buying this oasis in the desert. Today's headlines boast of captures of a weapons cache south of Baquba and the failure of two members of the Dawa Party, Diwaniya for a failed assassination. Or this just posted:

arrest 5 suspects in al-Bakr

. Meanwhile, the Chez ambassador says is quoted as saying [sic]: The Shuba that embassy “organizes from time to time, art exhibitions and cultural activities in the garden of the embassy called by the diplomats, foreigners and members of the diplomatic staff in Baghdad,” she that “this may impose some constraints and limits the presence of a wider audience for such cultural activities, which requires at its discretion extend farther by expanding the exchange of visits by cultural delegations between both countries, friendly countries." How is it that she cannot see that restricting the arts to an elitist few who are in positions of power and have lots of guns for protection, actually means that there is a serious problem?! I predict that future headlines will be similar as Iraq revamps its image (it is rumored that the news sites are owned by members of the government).

Very few Americans seem to be noticing this country's emergence beyond noting our soldiers returning home. Yet now seems a vital time to be mindful of change as it will affect every trip to the gas station and possibly more in the years to come. Iraq promises to be the leading producer of oil, outrunning Saudi Arabia if they can manage to keep the Kurds and the Shiites on board. Internal bickering and civil war has always kept that region turned inward. Unity may at last be coming, however, against their Western neighbors, as promised by their acceptance in the Federation of GCC Chambers of Commerce. Americans will eventually notice, however, at the gas pumps. As Iraq nears reevaluating their currency, possibly as high or higher than prewar rates, the price of oil rises. Their budget written last summer was written with the expectation of $72 a barrel. Current prices are around $91; sufficient to meet the shortfall in the budget to be approved in January for 2011. It's predicted the $150 a gallon of the seventies will be commonplace within five years.

I'll leave you with the quote from the Iraqi news website:

Our agency is keen (INA) to put our visitors at the core event of the Iraqi daily, as it seeks a balanced coverage of events at all levels. Political, cultural, economic, sporting, social and round the clock, as well as everything that will put our people the true picture of the reality of Iraq .. We greet you and begin stayed for the day Thursday, 30/12/2010 With God's help.

Pro Life is NOT Pro Woman

2010-12-30T11:16:00.003-05:00

I've been reading THE W EFFECT: BUSH'S WAR ON WOMEN." While the book was published in 2004, nothing has changed. We are still withdrawing from Iraq. We are still at war in Afghanistan. Women still can't own their bodies, but are discouraged from seeking abortions they deem necessary. Federal funds still push abstinence over common sense and condoms (yeah, you can stop 16 year olds from having sex). AIDs is still proliferating and killing because we refuse condoms to third world countries. And I was reminded a moment ago, as I checked my email, as to how dangerous it is becoming for women:

Soon-to-be speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner recently told an extreme anti-choice group that he "wanted to be the most pro-life speaker ever." And next week, 92 new anti-choice politicians will be sworn into the 112th Congress. We must be prepared for the avalanche of anti-choice legislation that we will face in Washington, D.C.

Quote taken from: "New Leaders In The House Say Life Is Their Choice," Deacon John's Space, December 15, 2010

Quote from Virginia Woolf

2010-12-30T11:04:00.002-05:00

In her 1938 treatise Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf argued that as a woman, she had no reason to be patriotic:
"If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our'country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting...to procure benefits which I have not shared...in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

On Faith: Washington Post's Question on Religion

2010-12-29T09:48:00.002-05:00

“As voted by the Religion Newswriters Association’s members, among the year’s most consequential religion newsmakers were Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Pope Benedict XVI, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and the U.S. bishops. How would you have ranked them? Has their influence been harmful or constructive? What issue or person do you expect to have the biggest impact in the year to come?”

First the positive...I like the choice of Feisal Abdul Rauf. He condemned the attacks of 9/11 which inspired my own son's enlistment and current service in the Marines. He has worked hard to create peace and understanding between the Muslim world and the West. I doubt many Westerners, however, even know who he is. Moreover, I admire a man who speaks the truth. It's hard for an American to hear that we might be responsible for the some of the unrest in the world, "because we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA." Tough to own responsibility. But look at our role in Iraq or Afghanistan which are obviously more politically motivated than humanitarian and I see his point.

Now my objections...

Are you kidding me??? We are naming conservative, hostile people as leaders in the faith community? What happened to the separation of church and state in this country anyway? Seems to me that GLBT issues and paganism are prime examples of other people's religious views legislating morality. Indeed, many of our founding fathers were actually what's now known as Unitarian Universalist. How many of these people have attended their Sunday morning services? Religion doesn't even necessarily appear to be a part of their service. Communication, discussion and respect is.

Pope Benedict XVI might do a lot of things right. But until we stop legislating morality and denying the world the choice and education to use birth control, people will continue to die of things like AIDS. Until the Pope and the Catholic Church promote birth control, I cannot see them as a positive influence. At the heart of the issue, for this feminist witch, is the need for women to have control over their own bodies. Otherwise, patriarchy controls them. And don't even get me started on the number of people in other countries we have harmed because we teach abstinence rather than common sense. Certainly handing out condoms may not suit many fundamentalists, but the cost to humanity needs to be evaluated.

Now, we all understand that the Pope has made insensitive and critical comments about Paganism and indigenous faiths...but Glenn Beck believes Pagans don't deserve the same protection under the Constitution as Christians. I have to wonder what he would say about someone like myself who walks a duel path of paganism/Christianity. I get half my rights? Beck incites the world rather than bringing it insight. Having looked over his books and listened to him on cable, his negativistic views are over the top.

Sarah Palin scares the bejesus out of me. She has a knack for surrounding herself with folks who know how to make her look good. Now she is going to have a TV reality show. What a lovely way to get oneself elected to office. Now everyone will feel as if they "know" her and trust her because they saw it on TV. Most of those viewers won't be troubled to look beneath the story to the core; to question, to investigate. Instead, entertainment will become fact. And yes, this means of marketing would scare the bejesus out of me regardless of who was being portrayed in a "reality" show and wants to run for office.

Now my joy...

U.S. Bishops: well, if that includes Gene Robinson, the first openly gay, non-celibate priest to be ordained a bishop in a major Christian denomination, I'm all about it. He has made it possible for Cameron and I to hold our heads up and attend church. He has made it possible for our priests to support us. While it may well cause a split in the Episcopalian Church, his courage has inspired me. And I'm saddened he has decided to retire in 2013 because of the strain on him and his family due to the worldwide backlash he has faced. Episcopalians again showed their support for same-sex relationships last year by authorizing bishops to bless same-sex unions and by consecrating a lesbian, Assistant Bishop Mary Glasspool of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, since the SC dioces does not support homosexual unions, my own relationship with Cameron cannot be blessed in our own dioces.

Happy Birthday, Enlightened One!

2010-12-28T19:53:00.001-05:00

Today is my youngest son's birthday. My relationship with my sons is a troubling thing. I love them both deeply, but I was never the mother I wanted to be for them. Too many marriages, too many divorces, too many layoffs, to much mental illness is the men I choose to share my life with. The damage shows in my relationship with my eldest son, who hasn't spoken to me since his brother got married two years ago. I've never held my grandson and my granddaughter doesn't know who I am. He says it is because I'm gay. But he's known Cameron many, many years and loves her dearly. I know he's internalized those years of damage. So Christmas, birthdays, etc are extremely problematic.

Nevertheless, the youngest son, whom I call The Enlightened One, is joy in my life. He has married a woman who loves him as he deserves to be loved. Below is the email I sent him this evening:

24 years ago I was eager to have another baby. While my first son was absolutely beautiful, I looked forward to getting pregnant again. They say morning sickness is worst with the first child, so I figured I would be happily married, pregnant and joyful...

Well, I knew within two weeks of conception that I was pregnant. Within a month, I was morning sick. No, I was day and night sick. I averaged being sick 12 times a day...my eldest child, age almost three, learned to empty my bucket...

I'm a type A personality, always going, always doing, worrying, restless. Drives Hannah crazy. But for nine months of my life I learned to lay on a couch and not experience emotion. Any emotion. If I was happy, I threw up, If I was sad, I threw up. If I smiled at Sesame Street, I threw up. The result? Zen A***...

The day of your birth, your dad and I went to see Brenda to get our hair done. Your dad still had enough hair for a curly perm! LOL The chemicals got me. I had actually not thrown up for two weeks. So I spent the afternoon laying on Brenda's bed behind the shop praying to survive the smell.

I called the Dr when we got home. He said I was trying to go into labor and told me to lay down. Kenny Roger's The Gambler was coming on TV that night and i wanted to see it. When the contractions started, I called the Dr. I informed him I would meet him at the emergency room after the movie. I sent your dad to take a shower (he thought I had lost my mind) because he wouldn't have another chance for awhile. He shaved while I got one.

Sure enough, movie ended and we headed to the hospital. I watched a little more TV, things got a little painful, we turned off the TV, I said a few choice comments to your dad, and you were born a few hours later.

You have never stopped being the blessing to my life that you were the moment they laid you on my stomach. Your dad had been waffling on your name (I chose Marcus' so I figured it was his turn), and he said A*** N***.

I love you son.

Reflections and Snow

2010-12-28T19:10:00.001-05:00

Cypress was our first Christmas tree, purchased
six years ago. She was about 18 inches tall.
She now towers at about twenty feet.

Just before Christmas, the clutch went out on my car. Now I knew the damn thing was going out and had been sending up daily prayers for months that it would hold until my income tax refund came in. So the very morning the speed trap got me at 4:30 in the morning on a deserted highway, I was stopped, and then I couldn't get the car over 45 the rest of the way to work. And once I made it home, AAA had to tow it to the shop. That speeding ticket and fine certainly have added insult to injury! My first ticket ever!

So I sent an email to the son who is still talking to me and told him that his present would be late. Not that he or his wife mind in the least. And Cameron and I agreed that one more Christmas would be without presents. Since she moved in six years ago, we've not really exchanged presents. I really object to Christmas occurring at the end of December. Why didn't they schedule it after taxes come back? Or the beginning of the semester when we have student loans?

Christmas Eve is always reserved for Cameron's parents. They've both made it to their eighth decade and are a delight. Every year they give us both the same kinds of gifts and the same number of gifts. This year we received really, really warm winter coats (have I mentioned that the heat is out in Cameron's car and we have had record cold temperatures?).

Then we went to the Christmas Eve service at out church. Check out Cameron's blog for a much more eloquent account than I can give. I hugged Mother Linda's neck and thanked her for not giving up on us. I think the last service we attended was Christmas Eve last year. Yet I found gift cards for a grocery store in the area waiting in our mailbox last week from the church. Exactly what we needed!

I've been incredibly depressed this fall. Done with school, utter exhaustion has sapped me of drive, energy, creativity... Of course, my millionaire boss refusing pay raises and threatening to sell the clinic to a group that will deny us a raise for another year doesn't help. I owe about $250,000 in student loans to collect pee and not be able to afford my electric bill. No, I'm not bitter...

So sitting in sacred space, listening to the music, seeing the candles was a balm to my soul. And we reconnected with other goddess worshipers that we met at Goddess Fest two-three years ago! Who would have thought? And South Carolina saw its first snow on Christmas since the 1960's. Don't laugh if you open my freezer. Cameron stuck a snow ball in there!

So now I trudge toward another New Year, hoping the fruits of my labor will be more abundant in this coming year. Our grove has accepted our first student. My transgender, lesbian identified wife adores me...and change is coming. I believe this year will be transformative!

Burn Out: Crispy Critter

2010-12-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

I thought that once classes ended, I would return to a normal schedule and rejoin the world of the living. I had looked forward to writing in my blog more, as well as many more important activities. I had underestimated the effect of four years of graduate school, the practicum, and working from 5am - 1pm five days a week, with occasional Saturday mornings thrown in. I've actually been getting up at 3:45 for more than two years for this job. A few years prior to this job, I worked as a fast food restaurant manager also getting up at the same hours to drive 45 minutes to work. The years have taken their toll.

Of course, rather than taking a vacation this year, we started Designs by Dreamweaver. I used every vacation day driving to festivals, setting up and selling. I used every minute possible in between festivals creating more jewelry. I estimate I sold over 500 pendants this summer, in addition to about 100 other items. Given that the pendants are made of polymer clay and labor intensive, that's a lot of work for $8 each.

So here I am, graduated from our Marriage and Family Therapy program, a licensed intern, and awaiting change. Cameron and I are expecting huge changes in our lives soon. My plan? I've secured a volunteer position at Rape Crisis/Safe Homes in our town where I'll do 5 hours of therapy a week in exchange for supervision. If I increase that to 15, it would be sufficient to meet licensure requirements. So if our investment pays off adequately, I dream of working there as a volunteer for a couple of years...with more dreams to be discussed later once Cameron graduates.

In the meantime, I am a crispy critter. I did not realize how burned out I was until I realized that the exhaustion should have lifted with the end of festivals -- and hasn't. Of course, work is also extremely stressful. Holidays intensify addictions. I've also been chronically sick, with every cold my clients bring me and the return of my dysthemia. And our boss sold the clinic -- if the sale goes through. Without the payoff of this investment, it'll be a long time until I get time for a vacation. I'm due to gain two weeks Feb 2. That's when the new owners are supposed to take over -- I'll earn 4.8 hours paid time off per pay period with the sale. So much for the vacation!

So with all that I am, I am sending a call to the universe that our dream might be realized, that Cameron and I might have the financial means to fulfill our callings. I vow to sleep, rest, and serve until I am wholly healed, mind, body and spirit.

Blessed be.

As the long hot summer draws to the end...and the wheel turns

2010-09-12T18:51:00.000-04:00

Wow! What a year it has been. I knew my life would change when I began the practicum for Marriage and Family Therapy and accepted the promotion at work to Substance Abuse Counselor the same week. I didn't know that I would scarcely have time to breath, that I would counsel my first transgender client, that I would love and play and work this hard. And in the midst of it all, we started our small business Designs by Dreamweaver. We attended about a dozen festivals, sold almost everything we made, and still had to have a little help to make ends meet. Nevertheless, I'm preparing for the licensure exam at the end of the month, followed by our last festival. I feel like I have been tempered by fire.

Hopefully, once the licensure exam is completed, I'll have time this winter for more reflection, journaling and introspection. And reading everyone else's thoughts, too.

Blessed be.

Summer Festivals...on the road with Designs by Dreamweaver

2010-08-25T19:58:00.006-04:00

It had been my intention to create a blog entry following each festival, but graduation, applying for taking the board exams, and all of life's little crisis have gotten in the way. So I'll do my best to share a few pictures and comments on our experiences. For folks crazy enough to think about vending, these entries will at least give you a feel for what you should expect. I'll probably enlist Cameron's story telling as well. But since she's now fully immersed in sanding and buffing pendants, it seems only appropriate to give her the space to write as well!

We had a fabulous time at the Fabulous Forth in Columbus, NC. Perhaps the greatest grace, besides excellent sales and a lot of fun, was the fact that our art was truly appreciated. Folks there valued the work that goes into creating pendants for our table. It was a wonderfully organized festival - they had trash cans down the middle of the street at regular intervals with boxes for recycling; the only event we've seen that did that. They had virtually no litter at the end of the event!

We did have the privilege of being stuck with a tent on the right hosted by a local Baptist church, and on the left were the Shriners with their fancy little cars. I say "stuck", because the Baptists were blowing up helium balloons for the kids, so on the right we had these sound effects - *FWEEEEEEP* with an occasional *BLAM* when a balloon popped. On the left, the Shriners were letting the kids honk the horns on their show cars - *AHHH-OOOOOOGAH!* So all day long it was *FWEEEEEP-AH-HOOOOOOGAH*, *FWEEEEEP-AH-HOOOOOOGAH*,*FWEEEEEP-AH-HOOOOOOGAH*, with the occasional *BLAM* thrown in. Cameron developed a nasty twitch and may require therapy... The weather was excellent, as it was still early in the season, and not too hot - also we were into the edge of the North Carolina mountains and the elevation also meant it was cooler.

We each bought watermelon for the other on the sly and had a great laugh over that! One sale we remember in particular was to a lovely older woman dressed elegantly in a pink outfit. She spotted one of Dreamweaver's polymer clay necklace creations (priced at $45.00) and it was a perfect match for her beautiful attire. She stood there awhile and tried to talk herself out of the purchase, but she had clearly fallen in love with it at first sight, and it truly fit her as though it had been specifically designed for her. She of course, bought it and went off very happy!

We also saw a magnificent parrot riding around on a man's shoulder that preened at all the attention it gathered. Another wonderful encounter was a group of very talented young people who were in a local theater troupe who were all wearing shirts advertising their latest production - "Aida". When we talked to them about it, it turns out that this was the Elton John/Tim Rice version of the opera (Cameron has seen Verdi's version). We were invited to come see their show later in the week, but our schedules made it impossible, alas! These kids pounced on Dreamweaver's earing selection and about bought it out, which was great fun! The Fabulous Fourth ended with - what else? - a fabulous firework display which was glorious! Then, very late at night, we packed up and drove home, happy and exhausted.

Our next event, however, was - um - challenging. We went to the Gaffney SC Peach Festival, a few weeks later with high expectations. Its the largest Peach festival in the state, with festival locations all over the town for 2 days. We were signed up for both Friday and Saturday and discovered that a crucial alteration was to have extreme effect on us. The past years, the Peach Festival had the arts and crafts section located indoors in a building. This year, for some reason, they had moved the Arts and crafts section outside. This proved to be unfortunate.

We arrived to find chaos already there ahead of us, as there had been a mistake in measuring out the 10x10 booth areas. They were hastily rearranging vendor locations to fit and we wound up around a far bend, in the sun, just past the shade trees...darn it! Oh well. We got the tent up, and Cameron ran an errand for extra drinks and lunch supplies, while Dreamweaver set up the tables. When Cameron returned,sales were brisk and things were looking good....until Cameron peered around the back of the tent and saw THE CLOUD.

Hastily, she informed Dreamweaver that we had better batten down the hatches because a bad storm was coming. However, all Dreamweaver could see was a bright sunny day out the front of the tent, so she assured Cameron that it would be OK to continue a little longer. After a couple of repetitions of this, Cameron finally asked Dreamweaver to look around back, because The Cloud was now a green-black wall of thunder and lightening taking up most of the sky behind us, where upon Dreamweaver's eyes bugged out and we began dropping the tent flaps and pulling in the merchandise! We almost didn't make it!

The howling maelstrom struck moments later and we tell you folks, given that there was some cloud rotation, 60 mile per hour winds, hail and continues lightening, thunder and a solid wall of water out there, it was as close as we EVER want to come to sitting out a tornado in a tent! We had discovered moments before that the zipper on the front tent flaps had broken, so Cameron valiantly grabbed the two front flaps and held them together, and was swiftly soaked through from head to toe. Dreamweaver was inside the tent hanging on to the frame, that despite being pegged firmly into the ground, kept lifting off. Without Dreamweaver hanging on for all she was worth, the tent would have flipped.

At one point a large crash heralded the large double tent two spaces down from us being hurled across the road, smashing and scattering merchandise everywhere - several other vendors suffered the same fate. But the worst was yet to come...the water began to rise. With appalling lack of foresight, the festival planers had placed us in a field with no drainage...and we were at the low point. Helplessly, we watched the water flow into the tent and steadily rise until we were standing in a foot of water that would not drain away! So there stood Dreamweaver, knee deep in water, clinging to the shaking tent frame, and she finally yelled at the raging storm "You can't have it, its MY tent!!!" Several vendors sheltering desperately under another tent near by heard her and broke up in sympathetic laughter.

The storm finally past, but the flood did not. Cameron hiked down to the entry gate to find help and discovered that the woman in charge of the festival had run home briefly on an unavoidable errand, and was not there. She arrived moments later, horrified at the damage and havoc, for there had been no storm when she had left. Upon hearing of our plight, she immediately followed Cameron back over and froze in appalled shock at our tent and area which was now mired in a foot deep lake of muddy water.

She immediately let us choose another spot across the road on higher ground and sent down four enthusiastic strong teenagers to help us move across the way. We are very grateful for the assistance we were so promptly given! (Cameron had a traumatic moment when it was discovered we were once again next to the Shriners! AH-OOOOOGAH!) We got everything moved, locked it down and went home (we were only a little over an hour from where we lived) and changed out of our soaking wet clothing - Cameron literally looked like she had been submerged - showered, got a warm meal in our bellies and came back.

In our absence, another storm rolled through, but our tent weathered it all right, thank God! At this point, there were no customers, as they had fled the storms, and it was growing dark. We have a generator - many thanks to Cameron's electrical engineer of a brother who procured it for us! - so we had lights set up to vend at night. However, that was when we spotted our second serious draw back. The huge field we were set up in had the rides, the music stage and the barbecue area all at one end....and the arts and crafts at the far end away from everything.

Separated as we were from the rest of the event, there was no pedestrian traffic flow our way, and no lighting, so our end of the field was dark. We had lighting - but we were isolated and did not have another customer that night.

The next morning we returned and discovered a new problem...there had been conflicting times given for the opening and closing of the festival. The vendors had been told one time frame, but the public had been told another - if we had known the officially listed times were 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM, only four hours - we would probably not have anted up to go to this event. So we sat there with virtually no customers yet again for 2 - 3 hours, before the crowd finally began to trickle by.

At this point, thouragly alarmed by non-existent sales, we began running our sales pitch with a vengeance, It paid off to some extent. We made the (rather higher) cost of the festival plus expenses back, with some small profit. Most of the other vendors were not as fortunate...one woman only made $80.00 dollars combined total for the two days of the festival, which as she was from Tennessee, was a severe loss.

Most vendors there either took a loss, or barely broke even...we were very lucky! At this point, unless we hear that the Peach Festival has moved the Arts and Crafts back into an indoor venue, we will not be returning to this festival!

And then this last weekend, we were in Little Mountain SC for the Reunion Festival and it was fantastic! We had fairly good sales, we met many wonderful new friends, both other vendors and customers, heard great music, and even got some beer - Cameron immediately became the designated driver, but we truly didn't drink that much...and in that heat, it sweated out again immediately anyway!

On the Road with Designs by Dreamweaver: Newry and Trenton

2010-06-23T08:36:00.000-04:00

My small business venture is a huge success despite the challenges! The latest challenge occurred two weeks ago, just before we went to a festival, when I realized that the finish I had been using was not trustworthy. I had researched and learned that Varathane and Future floor polish were good on polymer pendants. The only Varathane in the area came by the gallon at $40, but Minwax had a similar product that was $10 for a small amount. I've been using it on all my pendants and beads. Then I learned the hard way that it doesn't work, despite the recommendations on the internet. So I pulled everything on the table (if anyone reading this has a problem, please contact me!!!). I had two weeks to get enough product on the table to go to festival. Shesh. So I concentrated on pendants, creating about 50 and sanding another 25 before using my new Varanthane. I pulled all necklaces with polymer beads, and only had about four replacements on the table -- but those sell better at Etsy (even when I deliver in person -- the sales number on the site is deceptive).

I'm pleased to say we visited Newry, SC two weeks for their mill festival. An unincorporated township, they are in Wikipedia but not my GPS! No gas station, nor Wal-mart, but they do have a post office and a population of 52 in the 2000 census. We met a lot of art lovers, however, who truly appreciated our work, and sold five of my handcrafted polymer pendants. They also seemed to appreciate the murano style glass and danglingly earrings from Peru (a real boon since they had only arrived the day before - the lady at the table next to me was selling the same thing for more than twice what I asked).

We didn't even have time to take pictures, so this picture of the mill, where they offered tours, is courtesy of Wikipedia. The mill has been sold to a development company who plans to invest $11 million to convert it to apartments. We were set up on the main street and the kind people in the house behind us provided me with electricity for my fan. We were impressed with both the music and the hospitality, and plan to attend next year's festival as well.

Last weekend we got up at 3:45 to drive to Trenton, SC, returning home at 3 the following morning (why didn't we do this when we were in our twenties?). We had a terrific time, located near the bandstand, enjoying local talent. We were entertained by an Elvis impersonator, fabulous local musical talent and dance.

We had a great reception, once again finding that low prices got us quite a few customers. It's tough watching my pendants, which I spend a great deal of time designing, creating, sanding through three grits, buffing and polishing selling for $5.

But they do sell! They still don't sell as quickly as the glass, but I'm working on the process and think as the glass becomes a passing fad, their popularity will increase.

I've also employed the resident artist in more than running the buffing wheel. When we were at Newry, a lovely lady I'll call Miss Betty described her family's life around the mill. Five generations they lived in Newry and worked at the mill. She was looking for a humming bird for her sister for Christmas. When I got home, I put her to work painting. Imagine a mural artist with a tiny pendant! LOL She said she needed a smaller brush!

I liked the results so much, I asked for a few more and sold three at work. These are priced between $15 and $22.

I'm not satisfied with the pictures of the pendants I created, so I'll post them next time.

Sold! Black and Gold Murano Star Necklace

2010-06-05T13:56:00.000-04:00

Because every necklace has a story...

I was busily typing notes for a wonderful woman with whom I often barter services. In the midst of the job, she reenters the room and says, "I love the star necklace on your website. If it does not sell, I'd love to barter for it!" At that point, her wonderful partner cries out "Sold!" And orders my employer to leave the room. "I just got paid, and what I do I owe you?" Smart like a fox, I ask, "Do you want matching earrings, too?" The picture is the happy result.

On the Road with Dreamweaver and other Musings

2010-05-23T16:16:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I've written in this blog. To catch up, on fast forward, Cameron and I have both graduated. Cameron's applying to grad school school, but is temporarily in a holding pattern. I am officially done, but graduation isn't until August. Since student loads have paid mortgage and lot rent for three and a half years, and we didn't expect the lag time for Cameron's acceptance into grad school, we've been suddenly thrust into overdrive.

So in addition to working full time and finishing grad school, I've been devoting every spare moment to jewelry making. I work 5 am to 1 pm, Monday through Friday with occasional three hour stints early Saturday mornings. So I would get off work after trying to work in homework where I could, and rush home to the studio. The result has been amazing. I've done great work, if I do say so myself, and have had a wonderful time at various venues showing off. I created wonderful puzzle piece necklaces, inspired by a dream, and thought they would be perfect for Murrell's Inlet. But since I'm so far behind blogging, I'll start with the Myrtle Beach trip several weeks ago.

Immediately following Cameron's extremely successful senior show (he sold a fabulous painting for $1,000!), we went to the Blessing of the Inlet at Murrell's Inlet in the Myrtle Beach area. We had a wonderful time there, learned a lot, and met terrific people. We had been very excited about this opportunity to vend. Last winter, Cameron found the ad in a local paper looking for artists/craftsmen. The first rule was that all items had to be hand crafted by the exhibitor. No reselling of items, representing someone else's work, no kits, etc. Since I not only design jewelry but create much of it from polymer clay, I was certain I would be successful. I submitted a portfolio and was accepted. When we arrived I was surprised by the number of jewelry vendors, since the application stated people would be turned down if too many representatives of any one type of item applied. Nevertheless, I liked the vendors surrounding us, especially Carol from Connecticut who vends gorgeous dichrolic glass.

Shortly after the festival began, I sent Cameron out to case the competition. He came back rather alarmed at the breach of the clearly specified rules. Cameron stated that a group of four had ten tables and three tents in the center of entrance. As soon as patrons approached, they saw this booth of Murano style glass pendants. No decoration to the tents. Just poster board prices, ribbons, and glass. Cameron even walked up and asked which of them was the artist an the lady just kind of sputtered. Another woman overhead, and walked over bold as brass, proclaiming, "Both of us." Since I have a couple of identical pieces beaded into necklaces on my table, we all know she lied.

My neighbor Carol didn't sell a thing all day. She said she's vended for 22 years and never had that experience before. I sold three necklaces, only earning the cost of the festival (add camping for two days and gas money and I lost $200). Turns out, the pendant people had been in my very spot last year and were the only ones to have a successful day. (Carol and several others were new to the festival, like me). The hosts are aware, but tolerate the fiction in order to fill vending spaces. Carol told me that up until 5-10 years ago, vending was extremely lucrative. If you spent $30 for a spot, you averaged $300 in profit. As costs have increased, standards have decreased. Rules are ignored to fill spaces as older vendors stop vending. Newer folks making smaller profits and sometimes break the rules to be able to come out ahead.

Certainly, many festival do enforce their rules. But smaller ones, maybe not. The more I talk with other vendors, the more I hear about declining income, desperation, and necessity. I knew I to get a new plan...more on that in the next blog. Despite our bitter disappointment, we still had a lot of fun. The day was beautiful, the smell of salt water enticing. We had a steady breeze and later I used a napkin to wipe my face -- it came awake entirely blackened! Silt was everywhere. The music on stage was also off key all day. A comment form passed to the vendors became my opportunity to clearly explain why I wold not be back. But we stayed cheerful, had a wonderful fish dinner at the local eatery, and spent the next morning sitting on the beach.

The following day we headed to Brookgreen Gardens, a treat we have discussed for years. As an English Major with a minor in Art History, I discovered a little known sculptor by the name of Paul Manship. I wrote several papers on his work having seen it in the Dixon Art Gallery in Memphis, TN. Many years ago I told Cameron about him, and he was enchanted. I shared by museum book of his work, and he was stunned. He had seen several of Manship's work, those marked location unknown, in Brookgreen!

There are no words for the wonder of the experience of Brookgreen Gardens. We arrived at the height of the spring flowers. The walk around the gardens, the heady scent of spring blooms, and the wonder of the art soothed our much wounded souls. I hadn't sold a single puzzle piece necklace, although I must have head a hundred compliments on them, and was bitterly disappointed. As I stood beneath Manship's sundial, I cried in wonder. It had stood at the gates of the 1939 World's Fair and was considered to be the world's largest sundial.

Then we found the piece from the cover of the gallery book I had shared with Cameron, and I gaped. Diana about to turn the pursuing man into a stag. The detail was staggering. The enameled eyes Manship was famous for still glisten at the viewer with hidden knowledge. Every moment of the trip suddenly was worth that moment of standing in the hot sun, gazing at the works of a man who had inspired by my love of art history.

Symposium Blues

2010-03-25T06:14:00.003-04:00

Two years ago Cameron and I attended the Bodies of Knowledge Symposium hosted at USC Upstate. It was a transformative experience for both of us. We met new friends who have become very dear over the subsequent two years. We shared a meal at the same table as Helen Boyd, the author of MY HUSBAND, BETTY and SHE’S NOT THE MAN I MARRIED. (She’s the only person who has ever noted the matching rings Cameron and I wear.) Cameron and I had just begun exploring gender and her transgendered diagnosis. Unfortunately, we could not attend last year. The organizer had mentioned it would be more of an opportunity for students to present papers and she wasn’t arranging it on such a high level while finishing her quest for tenure. As a result of such a positive first experience, I had high hopes for this symposium, especially considering the guest speaker, Bear Bergman, author of BUTCH IS A NOUN and THE NEAREST EXIT MAY BE BEHIND YOU.

I was deeply disappointed. Perhaps because music has become so interwoven in Queer/GLBT issues, a transman rap performer was invited, which was excellent. The DJ and constant bombardment of ‘90s music was not so excellent. In fact, for my hearing impaired wife, it was torturous. Her hearing aids do not discern conversation from music under such circumstances, which reduced her to smiling and feeling rather foolish. I was not doing much better as I fail to hear the space between the words in loud music and end up hearing a blur of loud sound that I cannot parse. A couple of requests for reduced volume were entirely ignored.

An incident occuring there was incredibly jarring for me. I came to realize that transmen were accorded great respect and perceived of as sexy and hot. The transwoman present got a very cool reception and the constant bombardment of the same question, “No, really, what is your name?”

Bear writes of the problem in THE NEAREST EXIT MAY BE BEHIND YOU. Apparently heteronormative folks have no qualms in asking very personal, very intimate questions of transpeople, expecting answers simply because they curious. Indeed, Heteronormative people seem to project an attitude of entitlement to answers, and an expectation that the transperson should be happy to comply, even though they would never answer such intimate questions themselves. Moreover, there seems to be an innate drive to “peak under the napkin” to see what genitalia the person “really” has and a drive to know their “real” name. The heteronormative paradigm simply does not have space for difference or other.

So I pose this question. Suppose I put on a plaid shirt and baggy jeans, leaving my purse at home and put my wallet in my back pocket. And suppose I had neatly printed “George” on my name tag. I wonder what might have happened? I’m not a slender twenty something with long black hair to belie the masculine dress and presentation. I would simply be one more transperson whose body will never conform to societal expectations of the gender role I would be assuming. And because I’m older, obviously female in body build, would that room full of people insisted on reading my name tag as “Georgia” instead?

Go Team!

2010-03-23T10:54:00.001-04:00

The challenge: Capture the team spirit that my daughter embodies. Please create a tiger paw necklace using orange, purple and white. My sixteen-year-old daughter loves the design and wear anything thematic.

The answer: rich purple glass beads and seed beads compliment this custom polymer clay pendant and matching purple, orange and white beads. Finished with an extension chain and a tiny star.

My Friend's Son

2010-03-08T16:51:00.004-05:00

Because every necklace has a story...

I adore commission work. It didn't take long for friends, family and coworkers to begin buying necklaces for their loved ones, for secret Santa, or for themselves. But this story probably touches me the deepest.

I have a friend who made hard but wise decisions many years ago. Despite the pain in her heart, she has been separated from her son for a great many years. Now an adult, they recently established contact. Viewing his picture on Facebook, she saw that he wears "guy jewelry" and commissioned this piece. She envision black and silver, giving me creative license to interpret it my way.

This is the result.

Stained Glass Murano Heart

2010-03-08T16:38:00.004-05:00

Because every necklace has a story…

Many years ago, I minored in Art History. I loved studying the Gothic period with its marvelous cathedrals and stained glass windows. When I happened upon this heart, echoes of that rich glass letting in the light of heaven compelled me to obtain it. Now I invite you to share that rich spiritual light that fills the heart.

Swirls of gold and silver foil compliment the swirls of red and purple in this stunning necklace. I have added Swarovski crystals and lampwork beads, as well as other elegant glass beads to compliment this heart. The silver seed beads create an illusion of a silver chain without the weight and will never tarnish.

Necklace is 20 inches long and the heart with bale is approximately 1 5/8 inches.

Featured at: Designs by Dreamweaver: Hand Beaded Art

Because Every Necklace Has a Story ...

2010-02-22T11:57:00.000-05:00

It's also great to here the stories of what compel people to buy my art. Mel from MI tells me that she has a sister in Easley, SC. When she saw my abalone shell post to Etsy, she purchased in within five minutes of posting. Living near Greenville, the location caught her attention. She says she loves her purchase.

Getting folks to look may be one the greatest challenges I face. People constantly tell me that they love my work, requesting a necklace for themselves or a loved one. Most come back asking for several more. A friend even asked if I would create a dog necklace for her beloved pet. What a delightful challenge!

A work friend, Criss, bought a T-Shirt necklace for her daughter's birthday this weekend after she admired Criss' necklace over the holidays. Criss recounted the phone call word for word this morning. How delightful to hear something so small brought so much joy!

My "adopted" daughter, the daughter of my sister-of-my-heart, got her income tax refund this weekend and promptly bought four necklaces she's been keeping an eye on. Then she requested another, "more mannish" creation, for a friend jealous of her new Celtic Cross necklace.

And yes, every necklace is unique. I never made exactly the same thing twice. What's the fun in that?

And yes, the gorgeous necklaces featured here were listed on Etsy this weekend!

Words Hold Power: Gay vs Homosexual

2010-02-15T09:17:00.000-05:00

I've never liked the word homosexual, and have never used it to describe myself. Gay or lesbian suit me just fine. Gay rights. That sounds good. Homosexual rights sounds like a psychotic feature out of the DSM. Apparently a lot of people agree with me. I just found this interesting article on the Care2 website.

Thor

2010-02-13T18:53:00.001-05:00

I lost Thor several months ago, but I found this glorious picture of him and had to post it! I miss you, beautiful fur child.

Why a Directed Independent Study on Gender Variance?

2010-02-11T08:51:00.004-05:00

The following is from a Reflection Paper due today. I thought it might be worthwhile to post it here as well. One section is abbreviated because it was drawn from a prior blog entry.

This directed independent study is intended for development of the personal self, the self as a therapist, and for professional growth. These reflection papers will be an exploration on a personal level and will contain emotional reactions to my trans issues in my personal life, in the therapy room and in my reading. This beginning reflection paper will be an especially personal reflection of what brought me to be interested in gender variance.

I have a love/hate relationship with gender variance. On the one hand, the GLBTQ community has assumed a common banner in order to give a diverse group of minority people voice. We have become united in being defined as “other”; that is, other than meeting the heterosexual norm. Politically, assuming a common umbrella has become necessary in a society that allows the majority to define the rights of the minority.

On the other hand, I took many years moving from the self defined label of “heterosexual” and I am still making terms with what someone else's choices can do to my self identity. I married four times. I had two children. While my first experience with a woman occurred when I was seventeen, and I had a two year affair with a woman when I was thirty, I just called those relationships part of my “wild” side and did not think in terms of bisexual or lesbian. Indeed, bisexuality seemed exotic or simply forbidden in a world of literal interpretation of the bible, and I had a fascination of things I thought to be naughty that my parents and my church called sinful.

It wasn’t until my late teens that I had the conscious awareness that there might be anything beyond heterosexuality. I certainly never questioned if I was gay. Driven by extreme hormones and a desperate need to escape my mother’s home, I married at eighteen. I certainly did not know any women who were lesbians, not even in high school. In my thirties, when I went to grad school and met my first openly lesbian woman. I never questioned if I was gay, even then, because I was also married but in an open relationship.

I was forty when the hormones subsided and menopause came early. I sincerely believe my ability to process without a every three week estrogen cycle changed everything. I came out as bisexual but was with a woman. It took me a long time to work through issues such as if I defined myself as gay, did it disavow my previous roles of mother and wife. Then I was with Cameron, who was extremely uncomfortable with the bisexual label, as are many people in our community. Since I am in a long term committed, monogamous relationship with a woman, I chose to identify as lesbian. I have also reached a place in my personal journey that if anything happened to my partner, I would never seek male companionship or sex again. That is not where my desire lies. Then a friend said to me that identifying as lesbian is as political as it is personal. So I explored what being lesbian means. I read blogs, books, and journals. I explored poetry and researched theory, history and fiction. I questioned, I argued, I got angry. I eventually also made peace with my label and my inner self. I tell this story to set the stage for what happened next.

I came to school at Converse to answer my calling. That first summer I took the diagnostics class and acquired a copy of the DSM-IV-TR. The afternoon it arrived, Cameron and I drove across town as I thumbed through exotic diagnoses. I was relieved not to find gay, lesbian or homosexual in those pages. But we did stumble upon transgender. Intrigued, I read the diagnostic criteria, surprised how much fits my partner. Shaken, we read it again. Eventually we took it to our therapist, who confirmed the diagnosis.

The world shifted focus. My new hard earned self definition could change, not because I did, but because the woman I loved could transition. Regardless of how I viewed myself, others would inevitably apply the label heterosexual to me again, and I didn’t want it. That was three years ago.I have subsequently learned many partners feel the same way when they find out their loved ones are transgendered.

I have found that facing our fears often makes them smaller. I reached out to an online community for the family members of those who are transgendered. I took the sex therapy class last summer and, when faced with the reality of my fears, froze. I couldn’t say anything to the transwoman. I talked to my therapist. I blogged. I met people like Alissa and Luke, who reminded me that we are all just people. Their kindness and generous spirits offered healing and reality. Then I attended a conference in January and met Alexander James Adams, and gained a great deal of peace with this issue (see previous blog).

I’m currently a therapist to a transwoman, which is the reason I choose to continue at WestGate an extra semester. He identifies as male currently. He tells me that he’ll shift is name and pronouns when he looks in the mirror “and sees her.” I already see her just beneath the skin, in mannerisms and gestures, in attitude and identification. These next four months are my final semester at Converse. I want to become the therapist that people like my client seeks. I want to continue my own personal journey as well.

Serendipity

2010-02-02T05:48:00.001-05:00

I've sold hundreds of necklaces to friends or patrons, at festivals and flea markets. Yet I never cease to be delighted when someone purchases my work. Last night I was listing necklaces to Etsy, which is a new venue for me.

I finished loading this necklace and went on to the next, a lovely pink and green heart. This shell piece was found in an inexpensive jewelry shop just before the holiday. It was strung on hideous black and white size eight seed beads and the zebra pattern overwhelmed this lovely shell. Enchanted by the shell, I restrung the necklace. I didn't like the dull beads I had chosen and restrung it again with these wonderful luster finished black seed beads and two tone crackle glass. While the necklace is strikingly different from the rest of my stock, I was pleased with the results. Pricing it at a reasonable rate, I posted it and moved on.

Five minutes later, I finished posting the pink and green heart. Wait. That can't be right. I know I just posted the shell--where is it? Cameron, on the other side of the room, said to check the sold tab. Nonsense. It just posted. Nothing has sold yet. I don't have enough items. On a whim, I checked. SOLD!

Blessings to the wonderful woman from Michigan who has proven to me that perseverance pays off. She is a blessing today.

Ever Wondered What a Hundred Pounds of Beads Looks Like?

2010-01-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

A hundred pounds of beads, purchased from Firemountain Gems, arrived yesterday. I ordered more than 200 items, which earned me a huge discount.Cost? $507.81 including $5 for shipping and $2.50 for handling. I've shopped all around the internet as well as local stores, spending about the last six weeks planning this order. I only ordered things I could get cheapest at this source and placed the largest order I've ever done. It was worth it. I probably got items at about 20% of retail cost. I only bought beads because I have found that the findings (clasps and other metal parts) are cheaper when I bid at Ebay.

When the boxes arrived at my UPS store, where all of my mail is delivered for security reasons, they were a little nonplussed. They asked Cameron to wait until after 5 to pick it up when the strapping teenager would arrive with dolly. With a winter storm rolling in, I didn't have that long. So I headed over, assuming that I could break the boxes down at the store into the smaller boxes in my back seat, and carry the beads out that way.

The order was packed in two boxes, sized 15x10x7. Each box weighed approximately 50 pounds. I'm very proud to say that I was able to lug them to my backseat without a problem. Of course, I couldn't stand to wait any longer and opened them to peak at my order. Oh my, I was impressed.

Arriving home at the same time the winter storm rolled in, I quickly carried my treasure to our studio and began unpacking. And unpacking. And unpacking. Did I mention the discount was based on number of items ordered? And the biggest discount requires 200 items? Or that I spent all my money on beads and haven't yet purchased sufficient organizers?

Eight hour later, Cameron teased me that I couldn't sleep on top of the beads like a dragon does its hoard, given that I'm a princess and the pea kind of girl, and I went off to bed. But I had sorted the majority of the beads!

Which also introduced a new problem. I still have a dozen or so necklaces to post at Etsy. Originally created for the flea market audience, they were scaled down in bead types and priced low. Now I look at these simple necklaces and balked. I can't put the pitiful things on Etsy! They aren't up to my new standards. Not elaborate enough. Not rich and interesting. Sigh. Now I have more beading to redo!

Studio Pictures: Barefoot Arts and Designs by Dreamweaver

2010-01-28T08:00:00.002-05:00

Our home is small, but we've managed to dedicate a studio to the two industries. Cameron is currently at work on a commission piece (just in time to pay the electric bill, thank goodness). So paint and beads jostle for space until we can drop the wall between the studio and the library. With her south facing window, Cameron's studio was perfect to take photos of jewelry this week.

I typically take one weekend a month to make polymer clay beads. I had to work at the treatment center last weekend, which really cut into the process. Nevertheless, I made dozens.

Yesterday was wonderful for another reason, as well. An acquaintance came over to get some tutoring in Art Appreciation. I had a new butterfly necklace I was about to post to Etsy. The acquaintance took one look and asked how much, buying it on the spot!

I've also posted new items to Etsy.Be sure to check them out!