the most powerful thing

Mowed the "back 40" again today. Spring has brought wild roses and honeysuckle and hibiscus to full bloom, blackberry vines everywhere, orange day lilies line the road to the mailbox, and strange little yellow flowers peep up among the wind-blew-them-in grasses. Good thing there are no neighbors close-by to see me out there in the still cool morning hours, manicuring around the larkspur and thrift I didn't plant but enjoy so much. They'd think me nuts. Guess I am a little. All this time living alone. Twenty years of penance. Father Behan says I'm harder on myself than God ever would be.

Discovered alcohol was neither the problem nor the solution. And just for today suicide is not a viable alternative. But I'm convinced the scars on my body healed a lot quicker than the scars on my heart. I guess it had a lot to do with living alone and learning to like it.

I never told the children how much I hated it when they left to do their own thing, one taking an apartment, the other joining the Army. I know, they couldn't live with me all their lives, but I felt so abandoned. Everybody I'd ever loved had left me, one way or another, and I didn't like it one bit. I hated living alone. My self-pity grew by leaps and bounds. That's when the drinking really started kicking in. The only comfort I had was with cable TV and a bottle at the end of each working day. I didn't go to bed at night, just passed out in the papa-san chair in the living room, coming to in time to brush my teeth and dress and get to work next morning.

So what do you do when you can’t figure out what else to do? You give it over. Sitting in the bathtub one night, water grown so cold I no longer felt it, I cried out for God to please do something, anything, just please take me out of the pain. And what a change God wrought! With that one sentence, my entire life changed!

I learned to love my life, understanding that I couldn't really love anybody else if I couldn't love myself. Mom had said, in one of our weekly calls, that she didn't see how I could live alone, why didn’t I get married again, yada yada yada. Enjoyed solitude was totally beyond her ken. Rather than embrace hers, she hated it, knowing only that years of living alone had not been her choice. Although she had no one to answer to, she never recognized the joy of doing what you want when you want.

Today, for me, it's all about choices. If I want to eat asparagus cold from the can for dinner, that's my choice. If I want to sit in the sun with a cup of hours-old coffee, that's my choice. If I want to play computer games or write in my cyber-journal, that's my choice. And if I want to be alone, that, too, is my choice. If I don't want to dress, well, then, okay, that's that. Some days I look like something the cats dragged up and the dogs won't eat, but there's nobody here to say it should be otherwise. I bought a sapphire and diamond wedding band a couple of years ago, and wear it proudly. I told Barbara, "I want to be married to myself, find out who I am, without catering to somebody else's whims." I was determined that neither Mom nor anyone else would railroad me into another marriage. Once was quite enough, thank you very much. Alone is not necessarily lonely. Sometimes it’s a blessing. The most powerful thing on earth for me, today, is not rockets, or tornados, or even love - - it’s the right to choose.