Crap or fertilizer?

Another holiday season, another chance to confront the relative(ly) un-Norman Rockwellness of my family.

And here I was, thinking this would be a pretty dandy holiday, since I don't have to visit any next-of-kin in jail.

That's probably about as high as my expectations should get. Hoping for more is just a ticket to the blues.

Earlier this week, I read something a failed stockbroker named Bill Wilson wrote 48 years ago. Bill knew a thing or two about the blues and disappointment, failure and dead dreams.

"Though I still find it difficult to accept today's pain and anxiety
with any great degree of serenity -- as those more advanced in the
spiritual life seem able to do -- I can give thanks for present pain
nevertheless.

I find the willingness to do this by contemplating the lessons
learned from past suffering -- lessons which have led to the
blessings I now enjoy."

So yes, I am sad today, basting in a bitter sauce of self-pity. Despite my prayers, unsolicited advice, and shining good example, I can't make someone I love stop destroying his life.

He, like I do, suffers from a disease of body, spirit and mind that left untreated causes the sufferer to violate all his values and destroy everything he/she loves.

This downward spiral does not take holidays off, either. If anything, holidays escalate the going downhillness.

I am watching someone else very dear to me struggle and suffer the consequences of very bad decisions. Decisions remarkably like ones I myself made, and suffered for, two decades ago.

It occurs to me the only difference between crap and fertilizer is what grows out of it.

A few holidays ago, I was estranged from my son and had no idea where he was, alive or dead. So I decided to give money I would've spent on his presents to a recovery program for teenage addicts.

Last year, instead of presents for ourselves, we asked for donations to a residence for people on very limited incomes who would otherwise be homeless. A place he lived, briefly, and that was an island of stability and goodness in a sea of chaos.

Being unable to waste money on stuff for someone who wouldn't really appreciate it, created an opportunity to start a new tradition of giving to those less fortunate.

And it reminded me that unselfish giving makes me happy.

If I don't get too hung up on who gets the gift, but focus more on the fact that I am able to give to someone who needs things I generally take for granted, then I am much happier.

No, life is not turning out the way I'd hoped. For me, that is good news, because my life turned out better than anything I could have hoped.

My failure to live the life I dreamed of gave me a life beyond my wildest dreams.

Maybe my loved ones' failures will become their greatest blessings one day.

I can only hope.

Nothing to offer

I think one of the hardest lessons I learned was the slow, humbling realization that my parents had something to offer.

Oh, I'd been happy to take much they gave me. The piano lessons, braces on my teeth, the ballet classes, my first car. And French horn, god love them, they let me learn to play the French horn and rented an instrument far too extravagant for a single-income family on a state employee's salary to buy outright. They paid for private French horn lessons, too. Maybe their greatest sacrifice was simply living in a one-story ranch-style house with a 6th grader learning to play a French horn.

THAT is sacrifice.

I took all this stuff and a lot more. But, the idea that they had wisdom, experience, maybe even advice to offer? No, thanks. No way I wanted to be like them. Nothing like them.

The bittersweet truth that karma brings back around, like the endless wheel of life itself, is that, of course, I am like them. My pattern was cut from their material. I got my dad's monkey knuckles, my wrinkled hands like an albino chimp's, just like his. I got my mother's overbite and prematurely gray hair.

It finally dawned on me that my folks might be worth listening to, occasionally, in very small doses, for a couple of reasons.

One is that I'm watching friends agonizing through the slow-motion marathon of grief as Alzheimer's disease devours their parents.

Another is that I now see my grown kids getting battered and bumped around by life. Sometimes through no fault of their own. More often the consequences, unavoidable as gravity, of dumb decisions or bad choices.

The same dumb decisions and bad choices I made decades ago. Not exact carbon copies of my mistakes, but close enough cousins that I could've warned you when I saw them coming. Only heartache waits for you behind that door. Keep moving.

That guy who harbors a deep, bitter resentment against his mom? Not good marriage material.

The insane obsession that this time, it will be different, and now you can drink like a gentleman. You've learned to control it and it won't control you? That idea has to be smashed for people with our allergy. The allergy you inherited from me.

All these painful lessons, and the happiness, serenity and joy that resulted from learning to make different choices. Could I have arrived here faster, sooner, if I'd been willing to learn from my elders? Could I spare my dear ones any tears or make their road any less harrowing?

No, I can't. Because I have nothing to offer them.

Mean Girls

When I was in high school, I was on our drill team, the Lanier Vikettes (our mascot was the Viking, so naturally, we were Vikettes).

It was a Big. Damn. Deal. in my school. Our football team was pathetic, so the highlight of football games was half time and baby, we were it.

Our instructor, Ms. King, was a pivotal figure in many girls' lives. Imagine Sue Silvester with a big infusion of Southern drawl and religion. She called the drill team girls her "kids." Many adored her. She wore white sneakers with those little footie socks with the colored pompoms on the heels.

When I was a sophomore, we traveled to California to win the national championship. Seriously, this part of drill team was cool. We did incredible routines on full-size ladders, we tap danced--imagine 70-some-odd girls primly marching out to the middle of a Texas football field, each girl carrying a 3-foot square of painted plywood we placed on the turf so that we could tap dance...we did a chair routine with the standard high kicking and so on, that ended in a crescendo of our chorus lines standing one foot on the chair back, one foot on the chair seat, arms locked, tipping the chairs over in perfect unison. Ta-Da!

There was only one problem with this.

Vikettes were mean girls.

They were a clique, and there were cliques within cliques. The insiders and the outsiders. The favorites and the non-favorites. Ms. King had her favorites, and then there were the rest of us.

I suppose all of high school is like this. And, all of adult life, too. But, Vikettes, you see, we were supposed to be some kind of role model. Examples. You could get kicked out for smoking. Cigarettes. There was a lot of high-minded moralizing about "making this world a better place" in Vikettes.

So, as much as I liked the tap dancing and the clambering up on 6-foot ladders to dangle off of them, gracefully, mind you, I never fit in. I could not find even an outsiders clique to fit into.

It was very lonely.

One day, before a dress rehearsal, we were all changing clothes behind the big curtain on the school gym stage. There was one girl, one of the "insiders," the special group that Ms. King liked best of all, and this girl was one of the quieter, shyer members of the elites. I can still see her now, big brown eyes, very pale skin, dark hair with bangs. She was a skinny girl except for her very large breasts and she was self-conscious about them. One of her pack, one of her "friends" snatched her bra away from her and started hooting and pointing. She was making a big scene and cracking jokes, while holding her "friend's" bra just out of reach.

As the poor skinny girl tried to cover her outsized chest with one arm and flail out with the other hand, trying to grab at her bra and hide herself at the same time, her tormentor found this hilarious. And the rest of her pack did too.

Tears were running down the humiliated girl's face. The "popular girls" found this just uproariously funny.

I was horrified. I felt ashamed of myself for not stepping in to stop it. Nope, I just gawked, like I do at car wrecks. I watched in dumb, sick paralysis at this vicious attack on a sensitive person's tender self-image.

I went to Ms. King and snitched on these girls, reporting the incident with all the moral outrage and indignation a 15-year-old can muster.

And you know what I got? A lecture. On being judgmental. I was told that I did not know what other people were dealing with and I could not judge if I did not walk in their shoes.

Now, it's true that my real motivation might just have been to tarnish some of the shine of these favorite girls, rather than a desire to right a wrong and defend the victim. Maybe I really was hoping that Ms. King would favor me, defender of all that is right and true. She would recognize MY effort to "make this world a better place," and I could bask in the sunshine of her approval, instead of those mean, undeserving girls.

That didn't happen.

Not long after this, we had try-outs for Vikette officers. The election favored a popular girl who forgot her own routine and stood in the middle of the gym, kind of pantomiming "oopsie, silly me!" while her music played on...well, that was really the last straw for me. It's one thing to have pretty teacher's pets who are vicious and ugly on the inside. It's another to have a national championship-caliber drill team electing officers who cannot even remember their own dance routines.

I quit Vikettes. My mother was devastated. There was more than a little bit of living vicariously through the glory of the daughter in drill team.

I had the weird distinction of being the only girl in my high school who had ever quit Vikettes who was not pregnant. I felt people watching me for a while, wondering when the bump would start to show.

But I wasn't pregnant. I was just over it.

And, as a result, I got to do so many other fun things. Act in plays with the drama club. Edit the school's literary magazine. Sing in varsity choir and write for the yearbook.

Leaving Vikettes allowed me to release my inner nerd, and it was a very good thing.

Oh, and the girl standing next to me in this photo of our Vikette's initiation was my one-time best bud, Vicky. Vicky, who was very sweet and not even a little bit mean, didn't finish her tenure in Vikettes, either. She committed some minor infraction and was deemed unfit to exemplify the sterling character expected of Vikettes, so she was booted. I stopped being her friend after that.

Why?

Because I was a mean girl.