Unresolved

Have you ever woken up from a dream that wasn’t particularly bad but unresolved? You were looking for something, or someone, you were lost yourself… It happens a lot for me. This morning it took me a minute to feel alright about waking up. To not have to go back to sleep to fix something or keep looking for something or to find my way back from somewhere that was all only happening in my imagination, in-between twighlight and dawn. It made me think. This unresolved feeling of needing closure seems to be a topic in my life. An earthquake that wiped out our little giftshop, My book still waiting to be edited, that I finished a year ago, a job that ended, with raving reviews but due to budget cuts would not be there for me again this year…  And now…. me reinventing me once again.

As I look back at my life I see the pattern. I moved quite a bit as a kid. Never feeling as if I belonged anywhere. Making friends was never hard for me until I got a little older. Maybe it was because I didn’t trust that we’d be anywhere too long. Sometimes I was in  two schools in one year. Being the new kid was never easy. And then later as I grew up, the guys I chose were never really good for me. The first guy I was really serious with was abusive pretty early on, he even gave me an out after a pretty bad fight that came out of the blue, blindsiding me, not even sure what it had been about. Telling me he was who he was and that I was too nice to date him, but I hung on for dear life, a few years later he asked me to marry him, and in my head I imagined something so different than what it turned out to be. For a long time, I thought that I could change things and make it happen the way that I imagined. I wanted to live in one place so that our kids could live in one place and never have to move the way I did. But I also imagined love being different than it was for us. Sadly, he came from his own unresolved childhood issues and poof thus began my pattern of severed, unresolved, life changing events.

My divorce with my first husband (another one of my guys never good for me choices) was probably one of my biggest unresolved parts of my life. I sometimes wish that I could dream about it more so that I could go back in my mind and try to fix things, or at least get closure. Sadly, he is dead. I can’t ever say the things I wish I’d said or change the things I wish I could change. I hung on with all my heart that time, for as long as I could, until I just couldn’t anymore. He was a good man. He gave me great kids. He was a hard worker. But he was a text book alcoholic with a gene that I think must have been carried from his dad’s side of the family because his sister died a decade or so earlier from the same thing. Living too hard. They had addictive personalities that I am blessed to say all of their children have seemed to break free of. But it is still a scar I bury deep inside of me as something so unresolved.

My husband now, is one of the good choices I made after all of the lessons learned. Almost 25 years! Something in my life has stuck! I love him. He thinks I am beautiful. Did I say I love him?  I still think he is handsome. He used to sing me a Garth Brooks song that had a line in it…. “We fight just so we can make up!” I used to tell him that we’d never fight and I really believed it. Well that didn’t happen. We’ve had a few fights! It’s funny because my parents never really fought when I was growing up. I don’t think that it is a good thing for kids to grow up with their parents fighting all the time, but in turn, I don’t think it’s good for you to grow up thinking that you shouldn’t ever disagree. Because THAT is a hard act to follow and when you do disagree, that kind of thinking makes you feel like a failure.

This weekend I saw the movie The Glass Castle. Though not really anything like my life. Cuz in theory, my dad “did” build that “Glass Castle” and in the end, I finally got to stay in the same Jr. High and High School from start to finish. But there were pieces of me in that movie that I could relate to. From my childhood and throughout my adult life. And it all still feels so unresolved sometimes. But it made me realize one thing. We ALL have our unresolved stuff. As I have gotten to know friends and have been privy to their “stuff” in their lives. NO ONE is truly without the unresolved stuff. I mean, you can watch a reality show and all those people with money and fame, they all have it… The politicians (from both parties,) our Pastors, our Doctors, our good friends, we all have that unresolved stuff from our past and in our daily life and we are all working on it. Sometimes thinking no one knows. But I have come to the conclusion that we need to give each other a break. Because, we have all come from our own stuff and will be working on it until we don’t have to anymore. And by the way, that won’t be here. We will always be working on it here.