Tribute to a Former Mother-in-Law

Estred with my infant daughter

The funeral is today.

I am sad but not grieved.  I feel more nostalgic for the passing of an era in my life.  She lived long enough to see the passing of both her parents, her sister, her husband, her brother-in law, sister-in-law and her youngest son.  She also lived long enough to see the birth of four grandchildren and to be able to attend the marriage of my daughter two years ago. She did not live long enough to see the birth of her first great-grandson.  My daughter will bring a son into this world come March.  Cue the Circle of Life music.

This woman taught me many things.  She was the one that taught me to cook, vegetable garden, preserve food and in many ways what a family should look like.  We all lived on the coast in the Northwest of California, each weekend the collective family would head to the cabin inland.  They had a small orchard and a huge vegetable garden.  Grandma, aunt, uncle, in-laws, and my husband and I would convene here.  They were Swedish stock and we broke for coffee morning and afternoon.  We had lunch and cocktails before dinner.  We spent hours on the deck shelling peas from the garden and preserving and freezing in the hot kitchen.  In August we stood under the cover of the carport and packed crate after crate of peaches the men would bring to us from the orchard.  They sold the good peaches, we canned the culls.

The cabin is now gone as is the last member of that time and place.  All things change but a large part of me is nostalgic for that time in the garden, at the tables of the packing shed and on the deck with the women of the family shelling peas and gossiping.

She will always have a special place in my heart.  

Letters to Juliet

Em and I went to the movies yesterday.   One of those spontaneous mother/daughter moments.  She wanted to see Letters to Juliet and I, trying to live more on the edge (hey, it wasn't on my calendar), agreed to go. "Letters" is definitely in the running for the ultimate chick flick.  It stars Vanessa Redgrave in her search for a lost love.  Her lost love, as I saw in the credits was Franco Nero.  Whoa......wait a moment....wasn't he the Italian actor that played Lancelot opposite her Guinevere in Camelot back in 1969?  Didn't they have an affair back then?  Well, now that you mention it - they most certainly did and a son.  Life sort of got in the way and it turns out that they met again years later and actually married in 1996.  Letters to Juliet is very romantic, a search for true love and enough estrogen floating on the screen to curl the toes of any straight man (according to Em).  And according to Vanessa and Franco a telling of their own real love story.

I would like to believe in true love, but I want to believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus as well.  I'm just not convinced it isn't a myth or fantasy which is why we have movies about it.  But then I was married to a man who told me "The only reason to be with an older woman is they have a vagina, what men really want is a younger woman but they are too much trouble"  Being 50 at the time there was no way I could pretend I was a younger woman.  Hmmmmm.......I appeared to be married to man who considered me a vaginal convenience store.  Time to close up shop.

I can't help but notice that true love only happens in Italy or with Italian men, e.g. Letter to Juliet, Under a Tuscan Sun.  I may just have to pay Italy a visit, if nothing else the landscape is drop dead gorgeous and the food looks divine.

The Value of Dependency in Relationships

The continuing letter and the vlaue of dependency. I think dependency got a bad rap with the plethora of books on co-dependency. Any one attribute is neither all bad or all good. When it becomes overdone a character strength tips into a weakness. So....on towards the value of dependency in relationships as I characterized it in a letter 20 years ago.

There must be a dependency that allows the partners to know they are important to the wellbeing of the other. Not the kind of dependency characterized by clinging. But the kind of dependency that allows the one to go to the other because it is the safest place to be when there is hurt. This is also a sense of safety, of coming home in the other. It is not that one could not function wthout the other, but the going is made easier by the presence of the other.

Tomorrow, the value of imagination or romance in a relationship.

Spelunking the Past

I have had some time on my hands of late, and have been going through boxes from storage. I have always been a journal keeper. But I have also been a keeper of correspondence, which I sometimes think is the more interesting memory walk. Apparently, I also am a great keeper of copies of letters I have written to others. I ran across a letter I typed to a friend regarding the nature of marriage and relationships. I wrote it almost 20 years ago. I find what I wrote then to be just as true today in my opinion. It is too long to quote in it's entirety here so I will break it up over the next couple of days.



A letter to a friend:



...There are always three entities not two in a relationship, the man, the woman, AND the relationship (This letter was a response to a discussion of an article about heterosexual dating).



...Security, dependency, imagination, compassion and a commitment to not only each other but to the relationship. There are acts that might benefit the other but would be unhealthy for the long term survival of the relationship......



There must be an underlying sense of security that the other is there for you. An underlying TRUSTWORTHINESS. Lies and deceptions will destroy the base on which everything else depends. The partners need to KNOW they are secure in the love of the other and that they won't be betrayed. Each must hold the well being of the other and the relationship in the forefront of their actions and behaviors. Oh yes, there will be unintentional hurts and misunderstandings, but if the foundation of trust is there than the hurts will heal. It is when trust is eroded that the hurts stay open and raw.



Tomorrow - the value of dependency.