What I Saw

From shame to pride I came to a different level of dealing last weekend and I have struggled with sharing this post all week because I really get afraid to let people in.  One of my favorite hobbies is this blog and I want it to be a positive outlet for me, not somewhere that I sit and complain about anything, but I also feel it is important to let the people who love me and read my hobby to know me because if you think everything is good then I am fooling you.  On one hand everything is good because I have a positive outlook and a wonderful blessed life on the other I am a human who has issues like everybody else and the tug to share this is too strong, silly or not, complaining or not, moving this hobby where I don't want it to go because i am afraid or not.  Here it is.

Today has been a lucky day.  After many months of in and out of slight depression and beating myself up as an aftershock at thirty nine years old being told I would never be a mother, I saw myself differently.  I was at home this Saturday by myself and in the midst of redecorating our mantel, which has looked the same since the Christmas decorations were taken down the year before last, and listening to an old country radio station out of Springfield I had found on the AM stations when I heard someone coming up the front steps of our house.  I was in the living room already and I turned and flung open the door thinking it was Shaun and that maybe I had been too preoccupied to hear his truck drive up.  I had a true and large refreshing smile on my face as I had been surprised that he was home early.  When the door opened I saw a boy about twelve years old, and his mother was walking up the yard, turning out to be our neighbors from across the street and down a couple of houses.  They came wanting to buy some top soil from our pile behind the trailer at the front of our property.  I was still happy to see them and by this point slightly laughing at myself for suspecting it was Shaun and hadn’t looked first nor had I let the guest even knock therefore surprising him as well.  She wanted to leave her number for the dirt and I turned in the door way to grab a pen and paper.  As I did I imagined what I looked like at that point to my guests.  My scarf wisping around behind me as I turned, and music playing in the background and I apologized for the mess on the floor, as if following the artist interrupted from a sculpture and I thought… this is who I am.  I am this woman, this thirty nine year old woman.  I am proud of her.  She is interesting, not a cliché.  She is artistic.  She can be whoever she wants to be and not what she ever expected she would be.  Nothing like I ever imagined my life would become but better.  She reminds me, at this moment, of the character Ariel in the movie Grumpy Old Men.  She talks to her plants, is artistic, crafty, classy and has a taste of her own and never disappointed in the hand that has been dealt her.  I have grieved for the life I know I will not have but for once I am excited about the woman I have the opportunity to be.  I don’t have to hold back or dream or prepare to “be” anymore.  I am her.  It is all here I just have to grow in to it.  Fuck being sad and disappointed. 

Do you really know who you are?  Not just who you are married to or whose mother or sister you are.  Do you know you?  Do you know who you are to others and what kind of person they think you are?  It is beautiful and for once a wonderful thing to realize and how quickly it came in when I opened the door in my long jeans, green boots, black long-sleeved tee and black and white wispy scarf draped down my back with my hair straightened and pulled back out of my face.  I saw what I looked like to myself through their eyes and I saw me, in my world.  Today I was lucky, I saw who I am and through my disappointments to who I will be, an Ariel, and I like her.  I am the one who needs to understand this, to know who I am, to inspire myself who needs to be happy and comfortable in this spotted skin that I live in.