Happily Married

Happily married? An oxymoron in my world. My family background is filled with marriages that ranged from just okay to horrific. And everything in between.

My oldest paternal uncle drank to excess. It was a family disease. His wife solved the problem by keeping up with him. I am told their daughter cut them out of her life after one visit with them. Cleaning under the bed after her parents went home, daughter Betty found countless empty booze bottles. High marks for the integrity of not trying to cover up their problem?

Orlo and Aline produced four children and had long lives. Beyond the drinking, I heard of few other issues. The marriage seemed stable enough. But my mother shared Aline’s confidence that she spent the entire first year of their marriage “crying over the sink while doing the dishes.” Ergo, the compromise. Since Aline couldn’t beat him, it appeared, she joined him.

Within the family, I heard countless stories about regular and casual beatings of my female ancestors by their husbands. It was partly a familial characteristic but also a cultural one. Punishing one’s wife “to keep her in line” or “straighten her out” was seen in some bizarre way as a husband’s “duty.” Talk about a free pass. Go patriarchy.

Other marriages I heard of in my family were more benign and at least congenial. There were healthy working partnerships here and there. My father’s brothers made good marriages that could be called true partnerships. But inevitably, there were issues. My Uncle Doug died suddenly at just 49 years old. His wife Pat remained a widow for the rest of her life.

My own parent’s marriage fell in the horrific category. There wasn’t much to cheer about except maybe the black humor that came out of it. The marriage was riddled – as was my childhood – with pills and pain and violence and infidelity and histrionics. That marriage came to a decisive end with Mom’s suicide attempt at 42.

Having crawled out of the gutter of addiction and mental illness, Mom eventually found work at a city newspaper. Dad had moved to Newfoundland to find a paying job after the dissolution of his marriage and businesses in New Brunswick. On a visit back to New Brunswick to see his kids, he visited Mom in the newsroom.

A colleague of Mom’s gushed on meeting him: “Oh Mr. Brewer, I can’t tell you how happy we are to have your wife here with us.” (The labels die hard in New Brunswick, with intervening legalities like divorce a mere nuisance.) Without skipping a beat, Dad replied: “Madam, I can’t tell you how happy I am that my wife is here with you.”

To say I had skewed notions of what a marriage was or could be as I entered adulthood would be something of an understatement. A steady boyfriend in my late teens gave me a sweet anniversary card during our relationship in which he wrote: “Let’s make this the first in a long string of anniversaries.” I froze. I could not conjure a mental picture of what that life might even have looked like.

So, of course, I sabotaged the relationship and, in my mind’s eye, “released” him to find a steadier and more suitable life partner. Something stuck though. I never stopped regretting the loss of that relationship.

My first marriage on paper was an unmitigated disaster. I entered it for all the wrong reasons having succumbed to all sorts of social and familial pressures which had nothing to do with what I wanted or needed. In a way, the marriage was as much a victim of my immaturity as his life generally was of his own.

Then I met Hank. Later in life. On the internet. A half a continent away. From a different generation. Ballsed that one up pretty well, too the first time around. But the love didn’t die. We reconnected again three years after to broke up.

I wake up in a state of awe and gratitude every day. I am happily married. There’s that oxymoron again. My husband is like the manifestation of a dream I had a long time ago. Lots. of compatibilities in spite of different nationalities, different generations, and wildly different family backgrounds. On top of the list is our sense of humor.

As I have read it is supposed to be, those differences are strengths in our marriage. We are as much friends to one another as we ever were lovers. We are companions as well as each other’s critics and cheerleaders. He spends a lot of time rolling his eyes at me as I come up with yet another cockamamie plan or idea. I spend a lot of time feeling like the little kid who sulkily defers to the inherent wisdom of his age and experience.

I sometimes wonder what Mom would think. She never remarried after she and Dad divorced. Indeed, I raised my kids alone and stayed single for decades we often muse that god decided s/he was sick of seeing me and Hank flailing around in our respective lives and steered us toward each other.

Though no one can predict how much time we’ll have together, I prefer to focus on what we have today and every day: a happy marriage. Not without issues but full of love and fun and satisfaction.

Don’t know what I would tell Mom if she were still here today. Maybe, whodda thunkit?

Broken Birds

It is commonly believed – somewhere – that a fertile young woman inclined to get herself in the family way will seek out the strongest, healthiest mate she can find as a father to her children.

The reasons are two-fold. A strong healthy male might be expected to produce the strongest and healthiest babies. A strong healthy male might also be expected to be a good provider.

I’m the first to admit that these are wildly, out-of-fashion assumptions, and options in the baby-making realm these days are just as wildly variant. Many young women plan to not only have but raise and take care of their babies all by themselves, thank you very much.

But abused children as adults do not necessarily seek out what is good for them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I saw this manifest in my mother operating as an adult from her own abusive background (though she would rather eat nails than admit that it was.)

My mother was repeatedly drawn to the birds with broken wings. She invariably sought out others as abused and oblivious to its impact upon them as she had been. Our childhood was filled with an assortment of ne’er-do-wells and problem drinkers and people “not quite right” whom she could and would take under her wing.

She aspired and identified with the local “intelligentsia,” who willingly came to her countless parties and drank copious quantities of free booze. The professors. The lawyers and judges. Occasionally doctors, but her conversational boundaries with them were reached pretty quickly. Doctors were usually much too starchy and grounded in reality for her liking. She much preferred philosophers.

Mom married a bird with very broken wings indeed. His childhood of physical and emotional abuse showed up in adulthood as sex and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and an inferiority complex the size of Greenland.

In retrospect, she would say about her attraction to him, “I was going to love him so much he would heal and get better.” And of course, he never did. Not with her. What she didn’t say is that water seeks its own level.

People change themselves if they are going to change at all. They may be motivated by someone else but the work of “changing” is theirs and theirs alone. And the “savior complex” my mother had was never completely altruistic.

There was something reminiscent of trying to remove a splinter in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. Mom came to see – after years of enduring my father’s abuse and her unceasing pain – that her assumptions about her marriage were painfully naive.

But she never really fully let it go and moved on. She liked having been married to a lawyer. It meant a lot to a small-town country-raised girl. I used to say that their divorce was only on paper.

And after the parents’ divorce, Mom continued attracting broken birds to her circle. The “recovering” alcoholics. The “between real jobs” handymen. The sketchy English professor who was “down on his financial luck.” She was inordinately proud of helping them. If they could be helped.

To me, they seemed like a rogue’s gallery of lesser men of even less fortune who were happy to prey upon my mother’s vanities and vulnerabilities. Children often see things differently than their parents.

So, in kind, I picked a broken bird. Our shared history of parental alcoholism was a bonding issue. But dysfunctional backstories do not set a firm foundation for a lasting marriage. My own views were so crippled and skewed that on our wedding day – carrying our first child – I blithely mused: “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

Life and the children I would bring into this world drove the message of my own naivete home in waves of dull pain for all of the following years to date. I still have to carefully bridge conversations where my daughter bemoans the “fine line” she has had to walk her whole life between her father’s world and mine. “Mom screwed up,” is all I can muster by way of comfort.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. But in choosing a father for my children, I did what I had been taught to do. “Pick a broken bird and make him better.” Poppycock, of course. I can only say that my children were the catalyst for my own embarkation on a healing path.

As my children wrestle with their own issues emergent from a dysfunctional background, I hope that owning up to my own mistakes will give them better emotional grounding and source material than I had to work with.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned about life is that hope springs eternal. Indeed it is often said of “second marriages” that they are a triumph of hope over experience.

With the all too human “compulsion to repeat” from those of us who emerged from dysfunctional families, it is one of those quiet blessings for which I often express thanks and gratitude.

Meandering Around the Mall

I was 18 years old when I got my first writing job at a newspaper. Full disclosure, my mother was one of the co-owners. And she was the newsroom equivalent of chief cook and bottle washer.

Mom and a similarly disgruntled journalist friend who met at the Telgraph-Journal in Saint John, NB were sick of the bland and myopic editorial point of view espoused by The Northern Light in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. To read its competitor and dominant local news source The Northern Light was to be assaulted with consistently positive stories about the city’s overseers with zero political or social analysis and scant actual news content.

The rest of the provincial newspapers were owned or influenced by the powerful and famous/infamous K.C. Irving and his family.

The complaint was the Irving corporation’s interference in its’ newsrooms and its’ journalism. Offensive or unseemly stories about Irving’s business practices or government entities or friends of the Irvings were largely ignored and swept under the rug. Bumpy rug.

My mother and Sharon Miller cooked up a plan and were determined to put a stop to it. The paper was published weekly and included a section in French. The paper was composed on old typesetters in those days long before computers became widespread, printed, trimmed, and attached with wax to the broadsheet page template.

My first assignment was to produce copy for the Meandering Around the Mall column in its regular weekly slot. I hied myself to the Bathurst Mall to meet and chat with people. If I knew them, the more the better. But often the interviews were along the lines of, “What brings you to the mall today?” “And is that your granddaughter with you?” “And oh, it’s her birthday?” “Which one?” “And is she having a party?”

From this meaty exchange, I would dutifully jot down both grandma and granddaughter’s names, record her age (the granddaughter’s, of course, not the grandma’s), and weave this information into flowing and supple prose. Of course, I had to talk to a few people or the column would have been very thin indeed.

Three to four people were usually enough to give me adequate column inches. Interspersed this with upcoming deals or events or special guests coming to the Mall. It must have been paid advertising but I never saw it as that.

But looking back, it was pure New Brunswick. People are curious about other people. Most people back then loved to see their names and the names of their loved ones in print. In any section but the obituaries. Depending on the relative.

A fond memory I had was the frantic activity around “putting the paper” to bed. We had a deadline at the printer in another city three hours away. And sometimes the typesetter would pile into the company van and head down the road with our precious cargo. The formatted newspaper original laid in a broadsheet-size box.

The printing press worked us into the schedule among the dailies it produced. We’d wait at the printer all night. I still remember sleeping on a pile of mailbags in the press room. The next morning, the published paper was loaded into the van. We trundled back to Bathurst, turned the van over to the distributor, and the newspapers were dropped at their appointed destinations all over the New Brunswick North Shore.

Meandering Around the Mall was an extremely modest forerunner to Facebook, which has taken the model to unimaginable heights. But it does hearken back to much simpler days when – essentially – stalking and chatting people up looking for personal information wasn’t a slightly sketchy or maybe even a criminal act.

I had some wonderful adventures at The Bathurst Tribune but my newsroom tenure didn’t last long. I started there in the spring and by early August, I had been admitted to university. My life was about to change dramatically.

The Bathurst Tribune didn’t last long either. It survived until finances and local hostility from the powers that were in charge at the time killed it off. Just under two years in all.

In retrospect, the Quixotic journalism effort seems faintly quaint and very twentieth-century. But there was a sense of being involved in a meaningful upstart project designed to disperse “hard” news that the population might otherwise never hear about.

Meandering Around the Mall was clearly not that. But it was a charming “slice of life” that elevated locals to mild levels of recognition when that sort of thing mattered.

I wrote “hard news” stories, too about politicians speaking in town or union meetings or car accidents and their outcomes. But for some reason, it was that odd little weekly column that sticks in my memory.

To this day, I can still have a lively, if fleeting, conversation by engaging a proud grandma with her granddaughter at a shopping venue. Some things never change.

Body Love

As I sometimes do, when another author’s message speaks to me, I feel compelled to share it.
Such is the case with this musing on what our bodies really need by blogger Hollie Holden (hollieholden.me).

I, for one, can relate to her message.

******************************************

”Today I asked my body what she needed,

Which is a big deal

Considering my journey of

Not Really Asking That Much.

I thought she might need more water.

Or protein.

Or greens.

Or yoga.

Or supplements.

Or movement.

But as I stood in the shower

Reflecting on her stretch marks,

Her roundness where I would like flatness,

Her softness where I would like firmness,

All those conditioned wishes

That form a bundle of

Never-Quite-Right-Ness,

She whispered very gently:

Could you just love me like this?”

-Hollie Holden https://www.hollieholden.me/

Art by Yulia Ustinova

Conditional Atheist

Thank you for this poem, John Roedel. Beautiful words of a fierce and gentle anarchist. I share his perspective. Guess I am a conditional atheist, too.

“I’m a conditional atheist

God does not exist for me on

the tip of a sharpened sword

or on the lips of a sermonizing

hate evangelist who is foaming at the mouth

or in the licking flames of a torch held

by a marching bigot

or in any dogma that have been soaked in the ancient poison of guilt and self-shame

the divine doesn’t

exist for me anywhere

where wounds are being

caused in its name

I don’t know about

how any of this works

but I’ve never found

much of God in the towering

hierarchy of unchecked power

the Great Mystery isn’t a cracking whip

or a flag or an internet manifesto

or a pointed finger or a political party

or a dividing line or a box of ammo

or a corvette driven by a tv preacher

or a specific gender or a book bonfire

Creation is more of a florist

than she is a fundamentalist

the Weaver of Life is more interested

in stitching us together into a quilt

than how to separate us into metal bins

to come into relationship

with Unending Love shouldn’t

require us to loathe ourselves

~ it should be the exact opposite

to know ourselves

is to know God

to love ourselves

is to love God

my love,

I believe that the divine

is just about everywhere

~ except in the slow-poison

sands of fear and control

where so many have built temples

for us to worship inside

~ in those places

I am an atheist

but everywhere else

there is so much

fertile soil

where we can let the sunflowers

of empathy grow wildly in

the spaces between us

and I’ve heard

that if we remain still

and listen so very closely

these evangelizing sunflowers

will whisper to each of us

a secret we once knew while we

were cooking in the cosmic womb:

“We are all loved equally.”

(photo: Mike Murrah)

~ john roedel

So Was Picasso

I am the black sheep in my family. I have pushed back against the dysfunction in our family since childhood. I asked for my needs to be met. I was ignored or ridiculed. I asked for safety. I was thrust repeatedly into harm’s way by my parents’ ignorance and obliviousness. I sought relief from my pain. I was labeled histrionic and, most frequently, “dramatic.”

To protect my mother, the near and extended family clustered around her belief system as if it was gospel, and she the patron saint of non-conformity. “We weren’t dysfunctional,” the chorus would crow in unison. “We are special.”

Our academic and business achievements and worldwide travel thinly covered the truth of a family awash in pain and self-loathing and mutual disrespect. Our family was the living epitome of cognitive dissonance. We acted one way – successful and self-confident, especially in the public arena – and felt completely other in the tight-knit family system. Scared and broken little girls each and every one of us.

Tight-knit we were. To reinforce the themes of superiority and hide the abject vulnerability of each member of the system, no one outside our circle was permitted to get very close. Unless, like us, they were broken and needy and in awe of my mother. then they were granted full admittance to the so-called inner circle and gratefully did my mother’s bidding.

Sinead O’Connor died this week. I had mixed feelings. The musicianship of this Irish wildcat was unmatchable. But her very public pain and defiance against her own dysfunctional and abusive childhood alienated her from a large part of society.

The very public act of tearing in half a picture of the Pope that had hung in her wretched mother’s bedroom was widely misinterpreted. Many of us seeking answers to our upbringings know the misunderstanding that can come when sharing our private pain publicly. It is frequently misunderstood and rejected.

Especially when it treads on other people’s sacred cows and belief systems. Note how long it took the world to take sexual abuse in the Catholic church seriously. I know for a fact many Catholics do not believe beloved priests are capable of such heinous acts.

These song lyrics were recently shared in the wake of Sinead’s death. A tribute song Kris Kristofferson write for her when she was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan concert in 1992.

Abused adult children desperate for answers and relief from their pain may see themselves in these lyrics. God bless Sinead O’Connor. She sure wasn’t wrong in her belief that child abuse is the fount and mother of immeasurable untold evils in this world. Would that she had an easier ride on this planet. She certainly will now. RIP.

Sister Sinead, Kris Kristofferson (2009)

“I’m singing this song for my sister Sinead

Concerning the god-awful mess that she made

When she told them her truth just as hard as she could

Her message profoundly was misunderstood

There’s humans entrusted with guarding our gold

And humans in charge of the saving of souls

And humans responded all over the world

Condemning that bald-headed brave little girl

And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t

But so was Picasso and so were the saints

And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains

She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame

It’s askin’ for trouble to stick out your neck

In terms of a target a big silhouette

But some candles flicker and some candles fade

And some burn as true as my sister Sinead

And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t

But so was Picasso and so were the saints

And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains

She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame.”

Oxpecker Haven

My good friend Dale Estey and I decry the fact that – as we’ve grown older – we’ve come to realize there really is “nothing new under the sun.” There are few stories or facts so amazing or unique or unpleasant that we haven’t heard of them before – in some variation.

It’s a truism nailed in Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9

It is true there is little – fantastic or horrific – that shocks or surprises me now. Folks be crazy. So many stories or objects feel like attempted recreations of familiar and well-worn themes. Stories follow well-worn paths to eventual resolution. Products ebb and flow in supermarkets and box stores. There is a certain sameness to them all, in spite of the come-ons promising “new and improved.”

My husband is an artist. For his doctor friend Dr. Marc Blasser, Hank painted a portrait of a rhino in situ on the plains of Africa. The rhinoceros is a special symbol for Marc. (His email handle is “King Rhino” for heaven’s sake. He is clearly committed.)

So when my husband delivered the painting some years back, Marc admired the finished product but, upon closer inspection, stared quizzically at the painting and asked: “Where are my oxpeckers?”

When my husband told me this story, I was a little taken aback. Oxpeckers? Seriously? Well, yes. They are a real thing. See all those little guys on the back of that hippo below? That’s them.

I knew vaguely of a symbiotic relationship that existed among African wildlife with some kind of birds. I did not know – until this recent conversation – what they were called.

Large African animals of many varieties – rhinos, hippopotami, giraffes, gazelle, water buffalo, et. al. – have an implicit deal with the oxpeckers. The large animals tolerate what might otherwise be the incessant and annoying presence of the birds.

The oxpeckers peck away at will on the lumbering beasts to rid their skin of pests, such as lice and ticks, and a variety of other savory and tasty bugs. In return for this favor, the animals do not kill the oxpeckers outright with a swat of their massive tails (like giraffes might do) or eradicate them en masse by suddenly submerging them under water without warning, (as in the case of hippopotami). That would be biting the bill that feeds off them.

It is a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship between beast and bird that you might be able to identify with if you’ve ever been covered with unwanted masses of lice or ticks. Personally, I have not.

Inspired by this story and the delightful and unusual moniker of these birds, I set out to integrate them into our life on a more permanent basis. We are in a new house and needed to set up a new internet domain. Oxpeckers Haven, I thought. Perfect.

There won’t be another domain name in the neighborhood to match it and it will likely cause the same sort of delighted comment that I had. Maybe a laugh or two, I mused.

Oxpecker. I admit I did not initially recognize the potentially obscene connotation. As it turned out, oxpeckers would not pass the internet service provider’s censors. Then I thought about it. Oh right. Well, it wasn’t as if I tried to call the domain name “bull’s penis” or somesuch. Maybe that would have made it through. I guess the offense was the suggestion of vulgarity.

I was doomed by the authority of the ignorant and presumptuous ISP censor. I was forced to concede that ours would not be the new internet home of Oxpeckers Haven. We chose a more banal, if personally meaningful to my husband, domain name: PanAmRTW. That may well be the subject of a blog post up the road.

Pity the poor oxpeckers. I sadly came to realize why I would never have learned about oxpeckers in geography class at the conservative and prudish school system where I received my elementary education.

Which, in the humble opinion of this lowly scribe, is bullpuckey.

150 Years Ago

I often wonder what our ancestors would think if they miraculously came to life and wandered into our modern life. Culture shock in extremis, most likely.

How we fill our days is motivated by need. We all have to keep body and soul together. How we do that is 180 degrees away from the ways our ancestors worked and lived.

My people on both sides were working class and mostly rural. Some made it to the “big city” to find work. But when the population of your “city” is a fraction of 1873 New Brunswick Canada’s entire population which was made up of 35,000 souls, well … that’s tiny.

My great-grandfather Lemuel Parker Brower was a machinist. His job was taking care of the town clock in Fredericton’s City Hall. See it up top there in the picture below. Lemuel Brower was taking care of it daily around 150 years ago. The clock functions pretty much the same way today as it did back then.

Lemuel and his wife Julia had twelve children together. They were not French Catholic where large families were the norm. But they both came from the countryside and Lemuel was of Dutch descent. The Dutch farmers had passels of kids to help run the farms. As did many other European descendants.

Later I saw the apartment building in Fredericton where Lemuel and Julia raised those twelve kids. Think of a modern two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than that. The urgency to launch those kids into their own lives once they were of age was not only an economic but a space imperative.

Their eldest – my grandfather Orlo Lemuel – found work in the Hartt Boot and Shoe factory. He worked there all of his life until he finally retired well into old age. That option has also changed dramatically in our modern era.

People hopscotch from job to job today like kids in a schoolyard playing the old hop, skip, and jump game. The idea of loyalty to a company and vice versa is a long-dead value that went the way of the dodo bird with the introduction of the microchip. Where steady, meticulous, quality work was the agreed-upon social standard for work products in days gone by, now it is speed and profit.

I am reminded of Bill Gates’ strategy when he started Microsoft. Gazillions of buggy Microsoft Office products were released and sold worldwide deliberately for sound business reasons. Create a dependence on “our” product and get to the market first. We’ll fix any problems later.

And so it is the norm now that we see version after version and upgrade after upgrade of our commonly-used tech products and software. iPhone is on Version 14. I swear Version 13 came out six months ago. Whether the changes are significant enough to justify the cost of upgrading is an individual choice.

Often the changes are as insignificant as a few more pixels in the phone’s camera or a marginal increase in the size of the screen. I’ll stick with my trusty old iPhone 11 until it no longer serves the functions I use it for.

Need expands to fill the space allotted. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 little kids in a two-bedroom apartment in the “big city,” they made it work. Astonishingly.

In rural New Brunswick, Canada, where small family farms were the norm, it took some time for the notion of smaller families to take hold. It would take the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and World War One and the Great Depression to alter society significantly enough to pare down the expectation of how many kids a family should have.

I think of my grandparents Lemuel and Julia often. They made do and raised a solid family who went on to do solid working-class work for most of their lives. Their lives were not flashy nor vital in the grand scheme of things but they were important: to their community and to their family.

One hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t a single piece of bling amongst their possessions nor had a single article been written that mentioned their existence. Until now.

Proviso

I write about overcoming a difficult childhood and healing from it. I credit many self-help books I encountered along the way. They often had the right message for me at the right time.

I have also written that I write – I believe – from a place of privilege. Healing is a luxury not everyone can afford.

Let me explain. Most who are drawn to the healing path have come to it because life, as they are living it, has become unbearable. Most important, they believe there is a better way of doing things. That there is a better way out there for them to be.

I don’t shy away from the source of my perspective on healing and dysfunctional families. I was raised in a classic. And like most dysfunctional families, they didn’t get that they were doing anything “wrong.” In fact, they would have been horrified to learn that they had.

That awareness kept me plugged into a family I should have walked away from with love much, much earlier. They meant well.

So in the backdrop of people’s lives are a host of agendas and subtexts. Their belief in the vows of marriage keeps them in an abusive or unsatisfying marriage. Many continue to preen and seek approval from parents who are not worthy of the label, regardless of their biological role in your birth. We are also loaded with a host of other beliefs and constraints that are loaded on us from birth onward.

“Daddy doesn’t mean to hurt me.” “My husband really loves me but he has an anger problem. It’s not his fault.” “I’ll become a doctor even though I want to be a pilot to keep the parents and extended family happy.”

Self-negation is insidious like that. Whenever we deny what really matters to us to “go along” “fit in” or “be loved,” a microscopic portion of us erodes. Sometimes whole chunks fly out of our being. Some people live their whole lives like this. Bland and colorless and safe.

As a result, they never get a clear picture of who they are or what matters to them. They roll along in life – neither satisfied nor dissatisfied – until their lives are over.

So-called seekers know better and want better. It is the wife who – in spite of her low self-esteem – knows she shouldn’t be beaten and called down. It is the adult child who painfully realizes that though Daddy might not have meant to hurt them, his continued toxic behavior is doing just that. If he will not acknowledge this behavior and take steps to change, you must walk away to protect yourself.

The lucky ones who seek a healing path do not have an easier life. In fact, pursuing the healing path can lead to a whole host of upheavals and painful estrangements, and changes you didn’t expect.

And a commitment to healing and self-growth can only come about in an environment of safety where basic needs are met. In spite of the stereotypes about the writers and artists living in poverty while cranking out great works of fiction and philosophy, at minimum, they must have shelter, clothing, and enough food to keep them reasonably healthy.

My proviso is that. Attempting to heal while you are in the middle of something can be futile. You may have to accept that whatever you are doing today just to survive is the best you can do. In fact, it is mandatory.

With luck and time and the right environment, you may wake up one day in a place where you can commit to living life to its fullest. As with most things, it is a process. One day you may finally feel the urge to jot down and share the learning you picked up along the path of your healing journey.

Basically, you get to unpack and settle in. Speaking personally, it is an outcome that almost makes all of the pain and struggle worth it. Almost.

Perchance to Dream

The vital importance of sleep is often underrated. My friend chiropractor Rabia Barkins is writing a whole book about sleep and sleep disorders. She has so much material, she is already thinking about a second volume. She endured sleep disruptions for some time and knows the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation.

I am not well-conversant with what goes on in the brain during sleep but what I do know makes sense. Sleep is R & R for your brain cells, as well as the rest of your body. With all the work it does for you during the day, and the garbage it picked up, sleep is akin to a four-to-eight-hour detox.

In an oxygen therapy program I did last year, the staff talked about “clearing out the senescent cells” your brain has accumulated over your life. As I understand it, senescent cells have stopped growing and just hang around cluttering up your brain and decreasing your overall brain performance.

So our oxygen therapy program sounded a little like clearing out an attic. Like your brain is a place that you keep throwing stuff up into year after year as a matter of living. What accumulates there gets dusty and starts to break down. Like we all do.

That is my layperson’s interpretation of senescent cells. Like any good decluttering, getting rid of them makes good sense.

Most of the time I love dreaming (nightmares excluded) and again know very little about what takes place during REM sleep. But it is this phase that is supposed to do a deep dive into whatever issues you are wrestling with.

I don’t put a lot of faith in believing that my dreams really sort out major life issues. It sometimes seems quite the opposite. They often make me more confused, if entertained. So if you look at dreams as some sort of arcane theater that none of us understands very well, then you can become more of an observer of your own dreams. Don’t ask me how that is possible. I just know I have done it from time to time.

I love the sheer lunacy of some dreams. Often they seem a lot like Alice in Wonderland without the Red Queen and a far less organized storyline. Dreams are so random. Stories about people I know or would like to know predominated for a time.

When she was still here, I frequently dreamt of Princess Diana and how she and I had become best buddies. I think I related to her vulnerability and disrupted childhood. The similarities ended there.

But they were great dreams. Lots of garden parties on bright sunny days on big estate grounds and delicious little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Vistas all around of lovely well-dressed people gossiping and socializing as only the Royals and their society might do. Diana would occasionally ask me for fashion advice which I would occasionally give her. This absurd memory still makes me chuckle.

It is noteworthy that those sorts of dreams occurred most frequently when my life circumstances were such that I was the last possible person on Earth to be invited to a Royal gathering. Pure escapism.

But as a television reporter, I had a genuine interaction with Prince Andrew. It was on a Royal tour he was making of Canada at one of those chi-chi garden parties on the lieutenant governor’s estate. I got a full-on view of the kowtowing and pandering around him, especially the media.

As history would have it, I am very lucky I didn’t get to know him one whit better than I did. Ew. Saved by destiny and his utter disinterest in a commoner news reporter from one of the Commonwealth’s “provinces”.

So whatever else I may dream about tonight, it likely won’t be the struggling Windsor family and their issues’ issues. They’re still working to find their feet it would appear. The harsh light of media and incessant exposure has taken considerable bloom off the Royal rose.

Tonight, I will head to sleep with another famous Brit in my head. “To sleep, perchance to dream”. Unlike Hamlet’s fear of what may plague him after he slips into unconsciousness, I rather enjoy my dreams.

I know piteously little about the mechanics or intricacies of sleep. I just know I like it and I need it. Off to find out what my brain intends to share with me tonight.

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