...there are squirrels in my head...

Because nothing can change this joy.

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“I think it would be nice to totally redo the Christmas tree,” my husband mentioned as we drove back from one of his family’s many holiday gatherings. “I’d like it to have ornaments that are new, and that are just about us.@

It was sweet.

And I kinda wanted to scream.

Since the crumbling of my first marriage, and the lack of space for a full sized tree in my varied living situations, I’d been buying ornaments for my FutureTree. Some women have a hope chest. Some women dream of the names of their children-to-come. Me? I had two bins of autumnal décor that I was hoping very much to finally open and share with Dustin, my soul mate, the love of my life…and he had just voiced a desire for something that had nothing to do with my FutureTree dream.

So I did what any rational adult would do in this situation.

…I waited for him to go to work, and I set up his gloriously huge Christmas tree all by myself.

The job of tree set-up has generally fallen to me for most of my adult life, but I’d forgotten how heavy a non-tabletop-tree can be. I ended up pushing its storage bin up the basement stairs with one hand while clinging to the railing with the other to prevent both me and the bin from falling backwards, sorted the branches by their colour stickers, and …realized I had no idea how to get the lights on the trunk of the tree to light up.

After an hour of fighting with lights, I chose to just light the layers of branches. One of our household cats leapt into the middle of the tree to supervise from within as I returned to the basement to retrieve my FutureTree ornaments.

People talk about their holiday traditions – visits with family, singing carols to strangers – but this solitary act of decorating a tree? This is my tradition. Invariably, the other people in my life don’t have time, don’t want to be bothered, and so, generally speaking, I’d find myself alone in a room, setting up a not-quite-adult tree and adorning it with bits of my childhood. Wooden ornaments my mother painted 40 years ago, left behind in the divorce, and that my father tried to throw away…skeletons and bats, gifts from friends…a cornhusk doll given to me when my first poem was published…they all made their memory-filled ways to the branches of my small tree, to be taken down..oh, eventually. “If I’m putting it up? I get to decide when it comes down,” I announced one year when questioned about why there was still a Christmas tree in the living room in March.

I looked at FutureTreeNoMore, at the glorious size of it.

I pulled out the first box of ornaments. The sales tag on it was from 2007. The next one read 2008, and so on. Boxes of grandiose hooks I’d almost forgotten buying, bearing glass beads and composed of silver swoops of wire, connected the black and orange spheres to the tree’s branches.

And I cried.

I thought about the frantically lonely child in her room, mourning her parents’ divorce and clinging to the past by putting those wooden ornaments on a tiny trash picked tree that she’d set up in her bedroom. I thought about the years when I didn’t bother with a tree at all because I was renting a room in a friend’s house and isn’t Christmas about people more than it is about a fake bit of woodland, anyway?

I thought about my coworkers back in Pittsburgh and how we had successfully orchestrated putting up a non-sanctioned Christmas tree outside our office last year, about how much joy there had been in that bit of ninja decorating.

I looked at FutureTreeNoLonger, and all of these tiny glass promises I’d been making to myself for so many years.

I sniffled and hung another glass piece of candy corn on the tree. Looked at the clock. Realized I was out of time.

By the time Dustin walked through the door, all of the boxes and bins had been put away. I took him by the hand and guided him into the living room, ready to apologize for what I’d done.

A smile lit up his face. “I had no idea you could even lift that thing up the stairs! It’s lovely! I love it.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“Honey! No! I wanted to do it, I just…it’s a lot of work. How long did that take you? It usually takes me most of the day.”

I let that thought sink in, the realization that he was saying his tradition was also to do this alone.

“95% of the things you see have never been used before,” I told him. “It’s almost like buying new...”

“Perfect! That’s perfect. Thank you.”

I hugged him again…and tried to be gracious when he ducked under the tree and figured out how to get the trunk lights to work in less than thirty seconds.

As we’ve been moving through our first December together as a married couple, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I don’t have a lot of happy holiday memories, or examples of, “This is how my family celebrated the season.” In 2013, I had some powerful ‘a-HA!’ moments of understanding more of the ways my fractured childhood created my fractured adult self, and how much I need to unlearn old coping skills because they don’t help me anymore. I spent so many holidays feeling alone, unconnected to the people around me, setting up private Christmas trees, wishing I knew how to do it better.

I think I’m finally figuring out how to do that. And it definitely means sharing the tree duties next year.

Happy holidays, y’all.

"It may seem as if others can add to, or take from, what you have and who you are, Dusti, yet at the end of every day, what you have and who you are is entirely a function of your thoughts, beliefs, and expectations.

Ungawa,
The Universe"

Anger is almost always a sign, Dusti, that you've been quiet for too long.

Speak up, buttercup -
The Universe

In unrelated news, joy is almost always a sign, Dusti, that I've heard you.

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Wednesday morning, Bones saw that Cedar Point was offering 300 free tickets to the park to those willing to be there at 7AM for a shoot for The Travel Channel.  Participants were told they'd be asked to ride MaxAir a bunch of times, maybe be on camera talking about the ride, definitely be on camera during the ride.

The park is about 4 hours from where we live, but we decided to go for it...even though it meant getting up at 3AM.  Which eventually meant actually leaving closer to 3:30AM. We weren't sure we were going to get there in time but...la!  We made it, all three of us wearing Doctor Who t-shirts (geeks represent!) with only a few minutes to spare!

And said, "I know what that means, so I'm following the rules."

And inside that rose..

..a ring made by ayalanta. Sunstone!!

And a proposal.

And a yes.

Honest to goodness never thought I'd want to marry again.

Honest to goodness deleted his phone number more than once over the course of our friendship, being pretty sure we weren't friends...nor should we be.

I was wrong. So wrong.

And I love him more than language can express.

...And I'm looking forward to changing my name.

Holy poop I'm engaged!!

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Things I Have Learned Over the Last Few Weeks:

* Your terror of the dentist is not unique. At all. At all.

* Electric toothbrushes are weird and - if you have tendencies towards hypochondria - using one feels like you are taking a sandblaster to your mouth.

* Waterpicks are chaotic evil. They will spit their tips at you, spin the tip around and aim for your nose or your mirror or anything except your teeth, and be altogether far more difficult to control than you'd think.

Because they're also sentient.

Water that is either too hot or too cold will not be a good time.

Go in wearing eye protection and a hair tie..I keep thinking, personally, oh, THIS time I can keep my hair out of the way.. and by the end of those two minutes or so, I've hosed down my hair, eye, nose, and mirror, and I look like I've been mugged by the waterpick.

...Good times.

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So there's this thing I see floating around my Facebook feed today that declares if you're a pet owner, you're a parent - yay, happy Mother's Day to you!

I guess that's a natural progression from the common thought that your pets are your fur-children. But here's my guilty confession:

I don't see my pets as being my kids.

I have loved all of them..even the eternally ungrateful Tokay gecko, Duck. I have cared for them, I have felt responsible for them, I have striven to take care of them to the very best of my ability. I've joked about trying to get food stamps because I've been a single mom raising Lurk all on my own..and hell, I was poor enough a few years back that if I could have claimed him to be my son? I just may have leaped down that particular rabbit hole.

But the truth is, Lurk is not my child.

I had a stepdaughter.
I've been pregnant.

Neither of those things gave me a permanent membership card in the Mother's Day club. And mostly? Mostly, I'm ok with that.

I'm not saying I'm mad at anyone that has said, "You have a pet so you're a mom." I get the sentiment.

I'm saying that, for me, having a pet isn't even in the sane ballpark as having a human child in my life.

I will never look at Lurk and think, oh god, if I say the wrong thing I can scar him emotionally for life. I am careful around him because he has always been more feral than not; but I don't apply the lessons of my childhood to his every day.

And it's true - I have huge powerful (and sometimes loud) opinions on pet care and pet ownership, as well as on what one should and shouldn't do to a child, and some of those opinions are similar - they should both be happy/loved/safe/wanted.

But I'm also pretty damned likely to walk past a baby and pick up a puppy. I'm not sure that's an instinct that would ever make me a candidate for Mother of the Year. It's also not gonna change at this stage of my life. And it doesn't make me a mom. The things that have? Those are things that, by and large, don't 'count.' I've had enough time to get used to that. I don't need a pitying look and a token 'happy Mother's Day' from anyone at this point.

And I think that's what my point is here. To wish me Hallmark Holiday Wishes because I have a cat feels unnecessary to me. If you want to say it because I still love Arielle..I appreciate that. If you want to say it because I tend to mother those around me..well, that hasn't happened for probably over 2 decades, but again, that would be nice.

Or read Jenny's post about the Hallmark Holiday for a bit more insight into my muddled thoughts:
http://thebloggess.com/2013/05/happy-whatever/

Lurk is many things - my sanity, at times, my comfort, my grounding. He's not my child. And I'm really ok about that.

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For a very long time, I read Runes. This taught my brain to look for patterns in things, and this week I've run into a lot of frustration that had, at each aggravating heart, a common theme:

I don't have a problem with such-and-such, so I don't see why you do.

In one instance, this sentiment was expressed by saying, "We do the same work as that group does but we don't have to document what we do because we rarely ever have to do anything involved enough to need documenting. If we do, we expect to be told each time how to do it."

In another example, the issue came up as, "I don't see the world as being dangerous to me and I'm angry that there's a discussion going on about how some people don't feel safe."

(..I am of course paraphrasing like OMGWHOA.)

Here's the deal:

My vision of the world - my experience of it - is not yours. It might be similar. But it's not the same. There are studies that show no two people see colours the exact same way. We've probably all heard that there are huge issues with eye witness testimonies not matching what has actually happened. So it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that hey, guess what? My world vision is different from yours.

So in general, saying. "Wow, I haven't had that experience, so yours is invalid," isn't a good idea...unless you're courting the Dramamonster. Or you're wanting to pick a fight.

(This point gets jumbled when the issue in question is an issue of someone's reputation. I've been in that muck in varied ways - I think most people have - and in that case, speak your Truth. State what your experience had been. And if the basis for the discussion is Truth, there need not be Drama.)

(Or maybe that's just my naive world-experience talking..) :)

Anyway. My point is that if someone is talking about something frustrating or scary or painful, listen to what's being said. Don't dismiss it. There are difficult aspects of this amazing world we've all co-created, and just because you've never seen that particular bit of ew, it's not a good idea to dismiss it.

Happens all the time, of course. There was no Holocaust. Racism doesn't exist. Women are wrong to walk through their lives being afraid of men. Saying, "Nope, haven't seen it, isn't real, shut up!" doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make the ew go away. And it doesn't create a world where someone will believe you should that become a necessity in your life.

From the smallest denial to the largest, every time someone says, "Nope, I don't see it so its not real," our world is diminished. Just a little.

So listen. And talk. And listen some more. If every one of us does that, there need be no drama.

Now go be awesome to each other. <3

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I'm posting from my phone, so I don't have access to my usual disclaimer. But! DFT is the brain child of popfiend; all ideas posted above are my thinky thoughts; YMMV should always be applied to my DFT posts; and discussion is great, so let's have a party in the comments! :)

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• Snow is a food group.

• It's perfectly appropriate to dance when you're reunited with your loved ones.

• Belly rubs are awesome.

• Stop to smell EVERYTHING.

• There is always time to visit with the neighbors and catch up on their news.

• Beds are meant for sharing.

• Bacon is awesome.

• Ignore expectations about who you should and shouldn't like. Cats can be a dog's best friend.

• Never turn away the opportunity to go swimming.

• If you ask nicely, treats will appear.

• It's important to be with your pack...no matter how hard it might be to get to them.

<3

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