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.  

Why yes, I am Happily Single

I have been mildly amused of late with the sidebar adds on my yahoo mail account.   We all know that there is no privacy and ads are tailored to your lifestyle and interests.  Trust me they track everything which is why I am always getting horse and fiber (not the stuff to you eat) Ads.  But these Ad people aren't all that accurate and often offer the darndest things.  Somewhere they picked up on the fact that I was divorced and therefore single, which is correct, but after that it was all down hill.  Apparently no one should be single, and they had Ads to help fix that.

For the longest time I got these sidebar ads for dating men.  These men were all various ages and a real cutie was some guy out of Las Vegas, but after a year this fellow apparently still didn't have a date which is why he kept showing up in a sidebar Ad trying to get my interest.  Frankly if this poor fellow couldn't get a date after spending everyday as a sidebar Ad on my computer and every other computer, well.....would I really want to date him - I don't think so.  Since I wasn't interested in Mr. Las Vegas the Ad people decided to try something different.  So then I was getting 50+ Christian men looking for real woman to take care of - No games.  All right, that is really sweet, but where did they get the idea I was looking for a Christian man to coddle me.  I'm not Christian and while I have a great deal of respect for many aspects of the Christian religion it just has never resonated with me and I wasn't raised in that faith. So...no clicky clicky on that sidebar ad for me.

The Ad people went back to the drawing board.  Drop the Christian theme and just see if we can tempt her with some 50+ hunky guys.  Yawn......Thanks guys, but I was married for some 25 years.  While I thinks it is great for many and there are certainly aspects of a good marriage I do miss - I really am happily single at this time in my life.   But apparently being single is something that needs to be fixed and since I wasn't clicking on pictures of sexy men maybe I would prefer to date a 50+ hot woman.  I was startled and mildly amused when my sidebar Ad suddenly changed to great looking 50+ women about a week and a half ago.  Well, I do admit it got my attention, but not because I was interested in dating a 50+ woman.  Yesterday, I actually got an Ad that said "date great men here or women".  Curiouser and curiouser,  what will they suggest next?

Yes, I have been mildly amused lately, but then perhaps I am easily amused.   I think it is very thoughtful that the Ad people want to alleviate my perceived loneliness, but I'm doing just fine thank you and should I decide to start dating again I'll let you know.

A Rose By Any Other Name

I was gently taken to task several weeks ago by a friend who had been avoiding my blog because of the title.  She was afraid that it would be all anger and sarcasm which was something she didn't really want invited into her life.  She gently suggested that maybe it was time in my journey to perhaps change the name of my blog, because she found my title and content so energetically counter-intuitive.  Basically she felt I was a nice person with a not very nice name for my musings and it gave the wrong impression.  On one level she is correct, the current blog title might be better served by being changed to Dilettante At Large or something similar.

Her comments sent me to the dictionary to look up the meaning of "nice".  Agreeable, pleasing, accommodating (ok, this last one is a personal definition).  The title of the blog came during a difficult time of divorce, breast cancer and death of the father of my children and a bunch of other nasty things that caused a couple of friends to offer to do a black cloud exorcism for me.  I had moved through life trying to be agreeable, pleasing and accommodating, it just wasn't working.  I was tired of being nice and doing what others wanted or trying to live to someone else's desires.  Call it boundaries or setting limits (as a retired therapist I hate terms like boundaries and issues but that is a different story), but I think it is about having the confidence and the courage to say "no" or "no thank you".  I seemed to be really good about helping others define themselves and establish a life they wanted but no so good at helping myself do the same thing.  I'm not looking to pick a fight, but I am tired of colluding with others in my personal life regarding fictions of behavior, responsibility, and actions.  I think too often women have been taught to keep quiet, go along, be nice, accommodate.  We are rewarded for these appeasement behaviors and called nasty names when we say "no thank you or I don't think I agree with that",  bitch and ball breaker come to mind. 

I'm reminded of the Emperor has no clothes tale.  This idjit is parading down the street starkers and everyone is admiring his clothes except for the little boy that says "Look, the Emperor has no clothes."  Now I'm sure every woman in the crowd knew he didn't have any clothes on because woman are genetically designed with a clothes/shopping gene which notices these kinds of things, but they were to nice to say anything or didn't want to be called bad names for speaking up.  But the little boy, being a man in training, doesn't have to watch his mouth and probably grew up to be a gay male fashion designer since he actually noticed the emperor wasn't wearing anything.

 I am a huge fan of civility and wonder where its gone these days and I don't like the cult of rudeness that has grown up in social media and conversations, however, this doesn't mean I don't have voice and a backbone, and sometimes I'm tired of being nice - "Dude your naked!"

A Woman is just a Ride

I read recently an article in Glamour from the new “Jake” on the block, and it suddenly occurred to me as I read him describe going out with a new woman wondering if he slept with her, how she would feel, sound, look, etc. that he could just as well as been describing a car. And then a cacophony of images, articles, comments from male friends began roaring around me. Men see women as tools, as something to own, ride, show off, use and trade in when a new model is made available. Look at the example pulled off the net:

…that the way a man treats the people who service him out in public, whether it's a waitress or a cab driver, can indicate how he may later treat the woman he marries.

No kidding!! Because he just married his own personal wait staff. How many times have you heard from a woman in regard to her spouse, he only has one job around the house and I make sure he does it (yes, I heard this comment just this week). Of course, they both have full time jobs, but I don’t hear men saying my wife only has one job around the house and I make sure she does it. How many articles have you seen about “How to tell if your man is cheating”, “How to keep your man from cheating”, “The 10 signs of a man that may cheat”. I don’t ever remember seeing articles with “How to keep your woman from cheating”. Generally speaking if a man hasn’t cheated it is because he is too lazy, the opportunity hasn’t presented itself, or he has done the math and decided that his regular ride is going to find out and his personal convenience store is going to close. The Greeks wrote a whole play about the women getting sick of the men throwing big sticks at each other and said: “Throw another freaking stick dude and no nookie for you” Bam! War ended, no more big sticks being chucked during the day, just little sticks in the night.

Men think they are in a deep relationship if they have a full stomach, have gotten a little in the last 12-24 hours and they have a remote, game stick, or console in hand. I floated that idea to a male friend that laughed and said it was actually pretty true. I asked another male friend, “So Pat, let me see if I understand this correctly. Men just want the most amount of bang in a relationship for the least amount of actual involvement”. Yep, that pretty well covers it was his reply. Oh my….and I like men, but I am definitely learning that you cannot expect them to be what they aren’t.

We are things for them, it isn’t personal and we women keep thinking it is. A recent article decoded this phrase for women: “When he says “I love you” after sex, it really means “I loved having sex”. My guess that “I love you” coming from any man translates as: “You do enough things for me that I would be an idiot to not let you keep on taking care of me.” This is not to say we can’t enjoy what they do have to offer, just don’t assume that you actually mean anything to them – you are their own personal wait staff and convenience store and they are happy to shop somewhere new at a moment’s notice. Dogs generally have more loyalty.


I used to be such a romantic – oh well…..