Until We Meet Again

 "You and I will meet again, When we're least expecting it, One day in some far off place, I will recognize your face, I won't say goodbye my friend, For you and I will meet again." — Tom Petty

I must have been about 9 years old the first time I heard that intro, the harmonica. It changed me. I don't mean to sound cheesy but it really did. I had grown up listening to country music. I was convinced I would one day marry Garth Brooks, ignore the massive age difference and the fact that he was already married, because I certainly did. I was a 9 year old girl with a crush and a plan. As usual my life was chaotic and full of dysfunction. I like to track my age in divorce years, my mom was on husband number 2 at this point. We were living in California but had to make these excruciatingly long trips across the country to Arkansas for visitation with my father's family. This time my biological father came to pick us up with one of his friends. I just remember being in the back of a car, maybe it was a van, I can't remember. What I can remember with perfect clarity is listening to the radio, frowning because of life and also because I was being forced to listen to rock instead of country music. Then that song came on and that haunting harmonica joined in and I just remember sitting their in amazement.

The following Christmas I got a walk-man and Tom Petty's Greatest Hits on cassette. I listened to it obsessively. I got lost in it during the day and fell asleep to it at night. I stopped listening to country music. I took down my expired Garth Brooks calendar from my wall and started putting up posters of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Tom Petty was like my gateway drug into classic rock. These days I rarely listen to music, especially the radio. I only listen to classic rock and occasionally country gold. I've heard all the songs so many times though that, even though I love them and know them all by heart, I have to be in the mood to hear them. Maybe because I associate so many of the albums and songs with moments in my life that I've tried to move past. I spent so much time hiding behind my headphones, listening to Tom Petty, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and CCR. I think it probably helped me survive childhood and maintain most of my sanity through all of the dysfunction.

In middle and high school, husband #2 and #3 years, I would rush home from school and turn on the tv, switching back and forth between VH1 and MTV trying to catch Nirvana and Tom Petty music videos. Remember when they still played those? It may have even contributed to by strangeness, watching the Last Dance with Mary Jane video over and over. I just wanted to grow up and find someone who loved me enough to steal my corpse and take it for one last rendezvous. Just kidding. Also, I wasn't allowed to watch VH1 or MTV so I'm going to go ahead and apologize for being such an unruly child. Blame Tom Petty, he started it all.

In my 20s (still #3 but not for much longer *spoiler*), Ryan and I started going to concerts a lot. We got to a point where we would buy tickets to concerts on eBay and travel to nearby states to see the bands we wanted to see. We saw The (New) Doors, The Rolling Stones (pretty sure they're all vampires and immortal), The Black Crowes several times, Dwight Yoakam (childhood dream fulfilled but I'm still waiting to see Dolly Parton, universe if you take her before I get to see her..... so help me....) and Tom Petty. Tom Petty was incredible, hands down the best concert that I have ever and will ever see. He was such a natural on the stage, so calm, kind, polite and grateful. He was one of a kind.

Thank you Tom Petty.

Compassion

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late." 
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

 I am a nurturer and a people pleaser. I suffer from anxiety and I have an impressive collection of phobias. I  often take on more than I can handle for someone with no qualifications. I once considered becoming a nurse until my fear of bodily fluids, needles and illness stopped me. Last February, my Grandmother's cancer returned for the third time, the same Cancer that had already stolen part of her jaw and most of her tongue. I love my Grandmother and knew I wanted to be by her side during the recovery process. I hoped my fears would not cause me to run away from this great-hearted gesture.
Granny is the glue that holds our family together. It shocked me to see my grandmother in such a vulnerable state post-surgery. The first night in the hospital, I pulled the recliner close to her bed and fell asleep. She awoke at 2 am coughing and choking. I attempted to suction mucous from her mouth while she gasped for air like she was suffocating. My eyes pleaded with her to tell me what I should do but she couldn't, so I ran. I ran down the cold hall in my bare feet toward the nurse's station, shouting for help. The nurse ran into Granny's room and removed the inner cannula from her tracheotomy which allowed her to suction massive clots of mucous out of Granny's throat. Noticing that Granny was still struggling to breathe, the nurse pulled the entire trach tube out of her trachea and continued to suction. Finally able to catch her breath, everything her body had been through that day flooded into her and Granny began to sob.
The days were easier, she had trouble with mucous clogging her tracheotomy; however, I quickly learned how to clear it. The day shift nurses were kind and affectionate. With night came the coughing fits; followed by panic attacks and nurses who seemed agitated and annoyed with us.  I am passive but that week I found my voice. I berated nurses who were rough with Granny and I hugged nurses who made her laugh. I walked the halls looking for baby shampoo so I could wash the blood out of her wig. I helped her use the restroom and I sucked mucous out of her airway. The doctor came in on our last day, before discharge,  to swap Granny's trach tube and asked me to help. "No thanks," I replied. The doctor insisted by placing the tube into my hand and guiding it over to Granny's throat. She instructed me to push the tube until I felt a pull and then gently twist the device until it falls into place. "No, I can't do that," I said. "It's very easy," she replied. I considered running away until I saw confidence and reassurance in Granny's eyes. I slid the tube into her trachea until I felt the pull, gently twisted until the tube fell into place, allowing my Grandmother to breathe.
This experience taught me that I am capable of doing hard things and overcoming my fears. Nobility, to me, is putting aside your own needs and fears for someone else and there are no qualifications needed to show kindness or compassion.

A Letter to my Friends

 "Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see." –Mark Twain

Dear Friend,

I know this election has done something strange to the emotional atmosphere of our country and the world. I feel it too. I feel like we're more divided than we've been in a very long time. Longer than you or I have even been alive to see. People are jumping on one side of the fence or the other, we're even pushing people to one side or another if they refuse to choose. It's not fair and it's certainly not doing anything to help settle this tension that we all feel.

Maybe we voted for the same person, maybe we didn't. Maybe you've been celebrating or maybe you're in mourning. When it comes down to it though, I don't care which side of the fence you are on as long as you are there with a passion to make the world better. I hear you when you say that you voted for someone who promised to bring jobs back to our country because the factory that laid you off moved to Mexico. I hear you when you say that you are afraid that you will no longer have health care. I know you're afraid that your guns will be taken from you, leaving you vulnerable and unable to protect your home and family the best way you know how. Not everyone who owns a gun plans to use it to intentionally harm or control another human being. I know you're afraid that your rights over your own body will be taken from you, I know that doesn't make you a baby killer, it makes you a human, a human who wants to control the one thing we are able to control and that's our bodies. I am right there with you, I tell my kids that they are the only person who is in charge of their own body, that they have the right to say yes or no to anything that has to do with their own body. Stop already with the "baby killer" labels. I know women who have chosen to have abortions but I don't know anyone who has wanted to murder a baby. The only body that you can control is your own. Stop trying to control everyone else. You'll be much happier and less stressed when you let go of that. I know it's easier said than done, I'm practicing this too. You don't have to agree with every one's choices but everyone should have a right to choose how they live their life.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have all the answers. I don't even have some of the answers. I'm just as confused and afraid as you. I don't like change. I don't like not being in control or knowing what is going to happen next. I hate feeling helpless. What I do know is that hate isn't the answer. Holding other people back from living happy and healthy lives is not the answer. Trying to control other people is not the answer. Kindness is the answer. Compassion, understanding, love, peacefully protests to feel seen and heard, debating issues that you are passionate about as long as you're open to listening to the other side and learning as much as you teach. I am a parent, I've had to learn that no matter what you think, you are never in control of another human being. I know that leading by example can work. No one is perfect, no one. I don't expect perfection and I hope you love me even though I am so freaking flawed. I'm trying though. Trying to be the best me that I can be. Trying to keep an open mind and heart.

I need your help, and because we're friends I know that you will want to help me. Let's stop throwing the people we know into categories. Help me remember that people are complicated and diverse and no one person will ever fit into one single category. Help me remember that we live in a free country where everyone is entitled to their own opinions and beliefs and how beautiful that is. Remind me that just because your cousin's wife's friend is a basket weaving, X voting, nature loving, bug hating, occasional religious interpretive dancer who worships koala bears, that they are just like me, a flawed human who's trying their best to make it through this crazy life. If I start to judge a book by its cover remind me to either put it back on the shelf and forget about it or pull it out and read it because we live in a free world and I can choose which books I want to read and which ones I don't. Please tell me I'm being judgmental and insensitive if I start to criticize some one's choices and beliefs. Tell me I am wrong to worry about what everyone else is doing and that I need to focus more on what I am doing. Put me in my place if I start trying to push my own beliefs on someone else. And for the love of the USA please do not let me bully someone for looking different, dressing different, speaking different, believing something I don't and eating more or less cake than me. But if you have cake, you better share because I will be mad at you if you don't.

Just like you, I've reached a place in my life where I'm tired of conflict that doesn't bring a positive change. I'm exhausted by all the cruel words and accusations people are throwing around. I've also reached a place where I can't tolerate people who can't try to see the positive side of things, people who bully and hurt other people because they are hurting. I'm tired of hate and judgment. One of my heroes, Anne Lamott, has said "Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic.... but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned." Talk to me about it, I love a good story. Let's walk through this together instead of on opposite sides of the street. Let's talk more about the books we are reading and the tv shows we are binge watching and less about religion and politics.