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This post is for this girl — I am still the same person and feel the same way.

I know I can’t think my sadness away, but I spent the day garden-building and trying to ask ‘God and the angels’ to show me what I can learn from it.

I miss the man I love (who prefers another’s company) and I miss my children and all my siblings more as the holidays arrive than usual.  I HATE ‘the holidays’.

One of the ‘helpful’ insights today was knowing that I am not alone in how I feel, and ‘things could always be worse’.

Far from happy thoughts — either of THOSE two.

Not that I did actually arrive at any happy thoughts today — but I did end up (perhaps mixing up my holidays) thinking about Jesus on the cross and how alone He was there — but for his Father and the angels.

Then I thought about how easy it might be for humans to forget about God when they are happy with one another — well, I don’t fit THAT picture!

Tomorrow on Thanksgiving I am going to a friend’s house to help her in the kitchen — be with people — eat good food.  My friend feeds anyone in the community who wishes to come every Thanksgiving.

I went last year, and ‘hiding’ in the kitchen suit me.  Serving food to others suit me.  Being quiet suit me.  Watching and listening to others (as if they belonged to a different species than I do) suit me.  I am not sure that I have ever truly felt any more a part of a group than I did in the picture of my father and his three favored children on the big Alaskan rock.

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At 59 knowing that I can’t CHANGE how I feel pisses me off more than anything else.  I no longer have the false desire to try, either.  I am soul tired.

People say, “Everyone feels alone in a crowd sometimes.”  I believe it takes a special kind of severely traumatic and abusive infant-childhood for anyone to REALLY even begin to have a glimmer of a clue what ‘feeling alone’ really feels like.

Then I thought some more about Christ on the cross.  I thought some more about my horrible, horrible childhood and the ‘special hell’ my mother reserved for me (as my oldest brother put it once).  I thought about how NO INFANT or CHILD ever deserves the treatment that some of us had any more than Jesus deserved what happened to Him during His time on this earth.

This thought cheered me up a TINY bit.

Maybe it is because I feel so sad and soul weary that I cannot find any way at all to fight to ‘get better than this’ any more.  I can’t run around and ‘try this’ and ‘try that’ and ‘run here’ and ‘run there’ like I used to.  I can’t distract myself any more.  I can’t fool myself any more.  I can’t pretend any more.

I was, most importantly, able to be different for the 35 years of my life that I had a child under 18 in my care to raise.  My ‘caregiving system’ was able to combine with my attachment to my children to get me down the road without having to have to FEEL the depths of my sadness.

I know now that the sadness has always been at my center since my insanely abusive mother built it into me from the time I was born.  I am so proud of myself that I was able to let my children GO, to let them fly, to let them create for themselves their OWN life.  I certainly wish they didn’t live — all three of them — in Fargo, North Dakota!

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Another train of my thoughts today (again) followed the course of my wandering lost life that seemed to most importantly enable all three of the very special people my children are to be born.  Yet I also NEVER felt that the life I lived along the way was mine, meant for me, belonged to me.  Maybe it is ONLY to the future that the meaning of my own life will come true — in my children, in their lives, the people they encounter and affect — and in the next generations.

If my body processed experience and stored my memories in a safe and securely attached fashion (autobiographical memory) I know I would feel different and be different today.  My dissociational patterns means that all of my memories feel remote to me and NOT a part of ME.  That is so WRONG — and so directly connected as a consequence of my having to build a body-brain in the midst of such terrible and continuing trauma.

I don’t believe my memories comfort me in the way that they do more ‘ordinary’ people — and they never have.

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I think knowing and feeling all of this is directly connected to the most fortunate opportunity I have to work outside with the soil to build a garden.

I laid a big piece of the drip irrigation in the back yard yesterday, and today I planted there.  In went poppy seeds, larkspur seeds, pansy seeds — all waiting now for winter rains to nourish them — and for spring.

I planted a lilac today and I planted an apple tree.  (I moved a rose bush to a happier place for it with morning light so I could better improve the spot for the apple tree.)

I am digging out an area by the back turquoise wood fence as I imagine perhaps — just perhaps — I can tear down the remains of the old shed on my back fence and use that lumber to build a chicken coop.

I use the adobe from that digging to fill in a long planter along the tall yellow metal fence.

I have an adobe bench back there I can sit on in the sun and watch the apple tree grow now.  If I can build a chicken coop I could sit there and watch my chickens.  I would LOVE to be able to do that — though I don’t have transportation to get to a feed store to buy them feed — even if I can afford to buy it — and can find three chickens.

And maybe a little rabbit.  I could sit like I did when I was a child with my warm fuzzy so-gentle rabbit on my lap — pat it and get to know its spirit.

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Someday I hope somebody comes to visit me.  I find down here in southeastern Arizona that people do not go to one another’s house to be with one another like they do up north.  I couldn’t handle the ‘stimulation-noise’ of too many people — or the ‘wrong’ people.  But SOMEONE?

My daughter will bring my grandson down about the 4th to the 8th of this January.  That will be — well — fantastically wonderful!  Then they will go and then I will miss them…….

Meanwhile……….  Perhaps the angels like it if I talk to them.

(Oh — and yesterday I laid the drip over the large compost pile filled with delicious garbage and the thousand worms my sister sent me from Seattle!  I moved the buried tomb that contained all my mother’s writings into the big compost — and guess what?  For the first time in the four years I’ve lived on this property I saw centipedes — nested within my mother’s papers.  HOW GROSS!  I hate centipedes!  Very unsettling, but somehow didn’t surprise me — certainly not after my recent posts about eliminating the hideous oleanders!  The wonderful composting worms can have those papers now — and I KNOW they will make me wonderful garden soil out of them by spring!)

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