Idaho Falls: It's Been a Year Now

When Rob and I first began dancing with the idea of meeting in person, we were still just friends. He and Cheryl were trying to organize a Bago in Manitoba for July and I made up my mind to attend, so we could meet. Well, that quickly went from meeting at the Bago to his picking me up at the airport to my flying to Edmonton first and driving out to Manitoba with him. I guess we should have known at that point we were already more than friends.

Once the cat, who was already out of the bag and sitting there watching us expectantly, was formally acknowledged we began planning our March trip that eventually became Devils Den. But even knowing we would be seeing each other then did not stop us from plotting an earlier meeting. And then came Idaho Falls. Rob and Shelley had met a couple at the cancer clinic in Mexico who lived just outside of Idaho Falls. Tee has breast cancer and Rob wanted to visit her as she wasn’t doing well. He was also taking her some things of Shelley’s, and could I manage to fly out to spend the weekend with him there?

My best friend, Vicki, wouldn’t even let me use Katy as an excuse not to go. She barely took a breath before agreeing to assume responsibility for my child for the weekend and with that - I was on my way.

I remember posting about my upcoming trip on the board, as so many people did and still do. I remember all the cautionary advice and pooh-poohing of the notion that Rob and I could have gotten to know each other via email, IM and the phone. I remember specifically that I didn’t ask for any advice and I didn’t take any that was given. I was beyond polling the board. But, I was still nervous. How could I not be? There is much one can learn about another person via their words - in any form, but there is a tangibleness about physical presence that goes beyond knowing on an intellectual level. I actually felt as though I was missing him in that concrete way even before that night in the airport when I saw him and rushed into his arms.

We’d speculated quite a bit about those first moments and each scenario became a bit more intimate. Our first kiss in those first moments was interrupted by my mother. She called Rob on his cell phone and wanted to know if I had arrived yet. It was a bit like having your one of your folks walk in on you as a teenager making out or something. It didn’t break the mood though and we smooched away the waiting for luggage to the point where a TSA officer broke us up to inquire if the last bags standing were in fact ours.

Rob likes to joke now that the woman he sometimes can’t get to stop talking barely strung more than a couple of sentences together that first weekend. But I was just drinking him in with all my senses to a point where I was overwhelmed.

A year later and we are sitting in our robes at the dining room table, me blogging and him scouring the net for a used car for Jordan and Katy in the living room chattering away with her imaginary friends while watching cartoons. All that is sandwiched in between then and now is our history together. History. Wow. You dream about being swept away. And love. Intimacy. Never does it occur to you that there comes a point where the newness is the comfy familiar and you are sharing an existence with touchstones, high and low points, and a future to chart together.

Happy Anniversary my Sasquatch lover. I love you, always.

Being an Expert

Of all the experiences in the world that a person might covet for his/her resume being looked to as an expert on anything widowed is probably not one many would want. But, in the last few weeks I have begun to realize that I do know a lot of things about widowhood that other people - fresh or isolated in their grief - could use. Not benefit from mind you because I think you benefit or not from advice or resources or whatever depending on something inside you (it’s what you do with the time as it passes as Alicia reminded me the other day).

I had already decided to include a blog roll of all those blogs being written by widowed people I either know through the YWBB or their blog or learned of through blog links I found at various blogs. I have included it on my new WordPress site along with the links to a few message sites for the widowed. And I decided to do this for two reasons. First having to do with a woman I met at hospice group named Julie. She is just a year out this last weekend, having lost her husband in a car accident. She has two children in the expressive arts program with Katy though they are older. The first time I met her I was struck by the anger inside, but this last time I was able to talk with her at some length and realized that like me, she is just terribly isolated. She hasn’t anyone to share her feelings with who will understand what they are and where they come from. The second reason was an email I received yesterday from a fellow blogger at NaBloMo who had started reading me and found the link to my first blog at Spaces and requested access to it as it is no longer open to the public. When I denied it, she sent me an email explaining that her request was in order to help a good friend who’d lost her husband a year ago and had asked her if she knew of any blogs written by widows because she was feeling alone.

Feeling alone. The over-riding theme of being widowed young.

I wrote the woman back to give her the link to my new space, and some information about the widow bloggers I read and the sites I have/do visit. I didn’t allow her access to the Spaces site. That site is closed permanently and only I have access. When I first started writing here, I provided and active link to it but the animosity and curiosity at the YWBB surrounding Rob and I brought too many people here and to the Spaces site. It made me uncomfortable. My first blog is raw and confused and very in the moment. I never self-edited and used it more to think my way through things as they arose. While some people might relate, others could easily take things way out of the original context (because I often didn’t share that) and not realize that much more of what I was going through was actually being written on the YWBB through my posts (though oddly - out of 1600+ posts I only started about twenty and after the first anniversary of Will’s death I mainly posted to share concrete experiences with people and offer advice in the guise of what I learned and what I would do. When I did share my own thoughts - it only caused trouble, so I rarely did.). My posts at YWBB are gone. It’s a good thing too. Although I often got PM’s from people thanking me for things I posted (one woman overseas told me she cut and pasted my “Annie-isms” in a folder because she found them so useful), I don’t think much of what I wrote was original or profound or even helpful but on an individual scale.

So, for anyone who is reading to discover the hidden meaning in widowhood or the possibility of finding Zen within the experience, or anything else, I offer you The Widow Blogs. There are as many approaches to traversing grief as there are snowflakes. I have found many women, and a few men, out there who have much to share and say - and more eloquently than I.

WordPress, Cell Phone Novels and Me (again)

Okay, so because I haven’t joined nearly enough blog sites (MSN-Spaces, dot.mac, LiveJournal, Blogger, Blogher, NaBloMo) or have blogs enough, I went to WordPress the other day and started a whole new account and am rebuilding this site essentially at WordPress. A really neat function allowed me to transfer all the stuff at Blogger (which are the same posts as here) to WordPress. I called the site Anniegirl1138 which was my “handle” at the YWBB. In my first post there I explained the story behind the name too. While most people at the widow board tend to create monikers based on their loss, my name was all about me. What an selfish little thang I am, eh? But I saw being there as being about me anyway. Not Will. I was there to see if I was normal (found out that normal is a bit more relative than I had believed it to be) and to rant (as I had no outlet for it in my real time) and I wanted to find people who were coping, internalizing and moving on - which is what I was more than ready to do. Rob was teasing me a bit this morning about naming my site for myself as he is grappling with what to call his on site. I named this site Second Edition because it was the second blog after my Widowed:The Blog at MSN-Spaces, literal name and boring, but I like the idea of my blog being christened with my online persona.

WordPress is a bit more complicated and I am still playing with the free features before I upgrade (which I think I will have to do to get the cool stuff) but I think it will eventually be my permanent - and only - online home. I want to continue this blog there and also have a page for my writing and a page of resources for widowed people - just cause I want to help and I haven’t much of an outlet for that right now.

Cell phone novels are a big Japanese thing right now. I went to look at a couple of blog articles on them and wondered if I could do something like that myself. It made me wonder too if I could, or should, put some of my own fiction online. I used to write fanfic in the long ago. It was fun to get feedback and have an audience that was so immediate. It reminded me of when I was a sophomore in high school and I was writing a soap opera satire that all my friends (and even kids who weren’t my friends) were asking to read it. I couldn’t write fast enough. I love writing for people. How did I lose that? Why did I forget that? Oh, yeah - I was told I wasn’t quite good enough when I tried to go back and get into the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa. Now if that happened I would chalk it up to a problem with the source but then I was twenty-seven and very insecure.

Rob and I have talked more about the Texas move and my working and my writing. I am being silly to worry about what feminist society thinks about my role. Shouldn’t my role be whatever I choose for it to be? I choose to be a writer who does the stay at home stuff. Men are practically applauded for that but women are selling themselves short and up shit creek at the same time. As Rob has pointed out on many an occasion, who decided that career and all its material accouterments were the be and end all? If everyone let fear of failure or loss of status or society’s aversion to living a scaled -down material life get in the way of the pursuit of one’s true talents, interests and dreams what a real shit-hole this life would be.

Speak Too Soon. Invite the Jinx.

I spoke of giving up blogging in my last post because I wonder what good it is doing me any more and what I could possibly have left to say that might interest anyone. It’s not as though I, or my life, is all that interesting. But just when I thought I didn’t need the cathartic outlet that is my blog at its essence, my sister-in-law shows up at our home - four days later than she originally planned and with intentions of staying for a week. Did I mention she dragged - literally - her seventeen and thirteen year old children with her? No? Well, she did.

I like Shannon. I do. She can carry on quite the conversation and is very polite (aka Canadian), but she is in her seventh year of widowhood and stuck beyond even the most generous standards of grieving. Many of our conversations have centered around grief even when they started out about something else. Being problem solvers, both Rob and I have countered her at every turn with solutions to her fixed position - which she claims to not be happy with by the way - but for every solution, she remains attached to the problem like velcro. It’s exhausting in a way that reminds me of my time on the widow board.

Today, I escaped to the gym and then after lunch (did I mention they sleep til lunch?) I absconded with Katy to the library and to shop for groceries. In my absence, she decided to drag the teens to the mega-mall that is about a 45 minute drive from here. Upon my return with my raccoon-eyed child (teens make noise that intrigues and keeps five year olds up way past bedtime), Rob assures me that we will never have company over the holidays ever again and while I am being mollified, his sister calls to let him know her car has died. The night she arrived, she told us that the vehicle had been leaking anti-freeze for some time but she just took care of this by constantly refilling it. So, the anti-freeze was gone and the car wouldn’t start. Rob bundled up and went to fetch them and tow the car back. It was 8:30 by the time we had supper. Katy was beyond tired and nephew and niece were still wearing the stunned looks that I imagine overtook them when they realized that coercing their mom to take them home before the weekend wasn’t in the cards anymore.

My sister-in-law has taken to her bed. Our guest bed. I haven’t seen her at all. Rob says she does this.

It was easy to deal with widows who refused to help themselves when they were on the other side of the ethernet. I hit the ignore button. Now I have one in my basement. God help me.

Reading posts at the YWBB

I still read the widow board sometimes. Thankfully the time I spend there is less and less. I just don’t have the time really and frankly, when I do read it either depresses or infuriates me.

Two things of late that I have noticed there that are eating at me for some reason. The first is the tendency of older board members to condone mean-spirited behavior from some of the members while scolding new members for objecting when they are the victims of this behavior. The prevailing attitude of the powers that are at the YWBB has always been that grief is the great “get out of jail free-card” and that a widowed person in particular can say or do just about any awful thing the want because it is part of the “grief work” and “leaning into the pain” as opposed, I guess, to dealing with reality and behaving like a normal person in spite of the fact that life has dealt you some painfully bad cards. In my opinion, based on what I have read, people who let themselves by driven by their grief are the people who never seem to regain a solid footing in the world.

There is one person in particular who uses the board’s private message system to send what amounts to hate mail to other, usually newer, members of the board. It is Internet bullying of the adult variety and it is tolerated and even condoned at the YWBB. Rob got a message from this person that implied hateful things about him and his late wife. He posted it along with his feelings that the PM’s (private messages) should not be a forum for expressing disapproval or offering advice to people who were nothing more than strangers to you. He was sounded chastised by the older members who felt that PM’s should also stay private even if the message was a harassing one. It is this kind of things that allows abusers to get away with victimizing people, but many at the YWBB are so blind to anyone’s needs but their own - they can’t see that. This person is harassing another woman right now who is bravely taking it public and is, naturally, being made the villain for doing so. Isn’t that always the case? Victims being re-victimized when they speak out? I feel badly for her, but not badly enough to register to defend her. I am not interested in being that kind of good samaritan anymore. It does sadden me a little to see people I know and like supporting the harasser though. I don’t think she deserves it. Sometimes I get the feeling that she may not even be who she claims to be and that much of what she writes is creative rather than factual.

The second thing that bothers me is an anonymous poster who claims to be recently remarried and her new husband, a widower, has cheated on her already. I don’t know why this bothers me so much. Perhaps because there were many marriages in and around the time Rob and I married and I knew some of the people’s stories and it saddens me to think that any of these couples could be experiencing such trouble already. Partly too because I wonder if anyone wonders if that is me posting. Rob wondered that too when he pointed the post out to me. It doesn’t matter what anyone at the YWBB thinks. But for a handful, they are strangers. It is just a sad post though Rob doesn’t have the same impression. He thinks there is something fishy about it. I guess it doesn’t matter and it is another sign that I need to curtail even the little bit of surfing I do there. If I am not posting, which I can’t as I am not registered, there is no reason to read.

Time, Timing and the Healing of All Wounds

There are essentially two camps of thinking when it comes to re-partnering or finding love again after being widowed. The first camp is loud and belligerent in its conviction, believes that time must pass and grief work must be done and that all parties involved must be consulted beforehand. I don’t belong to that camp. I find them to be irritating and sheople-like. But then again, I don’t believe that time heals wounds or that such a thing as grief-work even exists (it sounds suspiciously like those “camps” that Dr. Phil holds, tapes and uses as filler when he can’t come up with real topics to discuss). I am also a firm believer in not allowing friends and family, who are merely appendages to your life really, to have say over the general direction my life. In-laws will get over you. Parents and siblings have lives of their own that should occupy them more. And children grow up and go out into the world to live lives that they won’t allow you to input to, so why do you owe them input into yours when they are essentially not mature enough, or self-less enough, to give meaningful input? The second camp, my camp, believes that love will come along again if you are open to the idea and living your life minus the drama of single twenty-somethings who read Cosmo for the man-snaring dress and sex tips and visit their tarot readers monthly to see if their bar-hopping is going to pan out. And the grief part? The idea, prevalent among first campers, that if you wallow in it hard enough and long enough it will diminish to a corner of your psyche where you can wall it off and pull it out only on anniversaries is the most simplistic thing I think I have ever heard. Grief is. And it continues to be. Forever. It diminishes, if you want to use that term, as you begin to reclaim your life and rebuild it. Nothing short of that works. Could that be the “grief-work” everyone talks about? Perhaps. But what does love have to do with it?

When I was single, and I was for forever and a day, it seemed to me that the more time I spent pondering my single state the more single I remained. It was only when I was busy living and moving forward that the opportunities to fall in love and have that love returned presented themselves. The same held true after my first husband died. And what love has to do with grieving is that it is made easier by being able to share the load with someone who cares about you in a more intimate manner than your children or your mother-in-law can. This is true of most everything in life.

I am not going to pretend that I didn’t think about falling in love and marrying again early. In fact I thought about it even before Will died. Ours was a Terry Schiavo-ish situation with him first suffering from a rapidly progressive dementia until within little more than a year, he couldn’t communicate or understand at all. At that point, I spent well over an additional year on my own before he died though the man I had married was long since gone. Though I can intellectually understand those with terminal situations who refused to contemplate the future before their spouses died. I don’t get that kind of denial personally. So, when I read things other widows have written about time lines and respect for one’s late spouse or the need to make your children the epicenter of your life until they are grown or “working” the misery as reasons to not date or begin relationships, I chalk this up to the fact that some people aren’t me.

There was a recent flare-up on the widow board caused by a poster’s plea for others to not casually toss about absolutes when replying to other people’s queries. I watched the thread for a day or so because I knew it would dissolve into the age-old debate between the daters and the not-daters. Everything widow eventually breaks down along those lines when the subject is moving on. A woman I have little patience with leapt upon this topic, as she always does, to criticize and shame those people who haven’t followed her example of simply living for her children and waiting for the day that she no longer misses her husband. I have always felt there was a story behind that and to my surprise, those who usually support her vitriol, openly or through their silence, chastised her to the point where she admitted that she was the hypocrite I suspected her to be, an early dater. Her relationship however didn’t work out and she is essentially carrying a torch for this man still. Not at all unlike what happens to the single and divorced in the world. We are not as unlike them as we like to think in this respect anyway. So much for the idea that waiting is the given though, and those who begin to feel again and act on those feelings are horrible people and bad examples.

Rob finds the finger-waggers as irritating as I do. Not because he worries about what people think. He doesn’t. But because it is disrespectful and presumptive of others to claim knowledge of his heart and mind simply because they share his widowed state. As he is fond of pointing out, widowhood does not make saints out of assholes generally, nor does it give any special ability to guide or give counsel to people who had social issues or issues at all to begin with. So, I resisted the urge to re-register and comment. Easily as it turns out but I couldn’t let it go enough not to blog on the topic because, personally, I feel that the vast majority of the bereaved are back out into the world sooner rather than later and it is those who cling to their grief via arbitrary timelines and “rules” and absolutes who are the ones who really need help. The rest of us are doing all right without them.

Making New Friends

On the drive to school yesterday my daughter asked me if I had made any new friends yet. This isn’t the first time she has asked me about this. Making friends is a big deal in her five year old world, and she assures me that she has made many new friends since moving here. Friends at school. At dance. With the children of people Rob and I know. And she considers herself a great friend of our next door neighbor, Charlotte. Katy can spend hours following Charlotte around as she does yard work and other outdoor chores. Of course this got me thinking, once again, about me and the friends thing. I just have never been one to make friends easily. Even when I can manage to be outgoing, I am an acquired taste it seems. Since coming here to live, I haven’t given the whole friends thing much thought. I have been more focused on activities I like and finding groups and venues that allow me to pursue them. I wonder sometimes if this will eventually lead me to friendships, but I don’t dwell on it. Still, it worries my daughter or she wouldn’t bring it up.

The majority of friends I have made since leaving college for the adult world have been made in the workplace. The trouble with job friends is that they are relative to that job. When you leave for another workplace, you leave behind those friendships. A few have survived. Meg and I met twenty years ago now and we are still good friends. Her girls are like nieces to me and if I were to have an older sister, it would be Meg. I met Sandi at Goodrell in the mid-nineties but it wasn’t until we worked together on the 8th grade team that we became friends. We keep in touch by email now, and she read this blog (Hi Sandi!), but with as a full time teacher with a husband and three little ones she is a very busy woman. Judi taught next door to me at my last teaching assignment. She is still there and we too communicate now through email. And then of course there are those I met via the Internet. My mommy friends who I post with still after nearly seven years and though I have seen pictures of them and their families, I haven’t met a single one in person yet. There is Liz on the soap board too. I don’t watch the soap anymore but I continue to keep up with her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I have met a few people through the Widows’ board. Rob, of course. But also Cheryl, who came to our wedding and we keep in touch with on Facebook. Marsha in Illinois whose blog I read. Fi and Sarah here in Canada. Fi found me through my blog and we are friends on Facebook too. Sally too is a widow friend and fellow blogger who I hope to catch up with in person one day.

Is it odd to have so many friends that I don’t interact with in the flesh? It would seem odd to my daughter. I guess it would seem odd to many others too. Without a job I am left to meet potential friends as I may. The gym is not proving to be a fertile ground for friendship, nor is the swim class I attend twice a week. I go to workout. Like reading or writing, I get in a zone and disappear. The writing groups I have joined are still possibilities. I met some really great women in the group I belonged to back in Des Moines, but I haven’t been attending the groups here long enough to know for sure yet.

I should worry more about this, I know. One of the worst side-effects losing my first husband was that I lost many of the social contacts and friends I made while we were married. Aside from my best friend, Vicki, everyone else fell by the wayside. Not that I dwell on this much, but if something were to happen to Rob, there would really be no one here for me. Most everyone I know, I know through him and if you have ever been widowed (and I imagine the same holds true for divorce) you know that your spouse’s friends are really and truly just that. His friends. At the moment though, I am usually so busy that I don’t really notice, and I guess it helps too that I have always been able to be alone. That’s not true of everyone.

I am not going to worry about it. Friends come along, like love, when you are just living your life and making the most of every minute.

Real Writers don't Blog

A columnist in the Daily Mail and Globe (Christie Blatchford), which is the Canadian equivalent of USA-Today minus the excess pictures and celebrity suck up section, wrote her Saturday piece about bloggers. Her disdain for the genre and the poor writing. She holds the common opinion among those of us who can write that writing is not for everyone. I agree. Writing is a gift that some of us are born with and develop over the course of our lives, but it isn't something that just anyone can do. It's like singing or dancing or painting. It's an art. Having said that, I don't think being a person of average writing skill should preclude anyone from writing and seeing that writing published somewhere. There are people who sing and dance and paint who haven't much skill either but sometimes that's not the point. We all deserve an artistic outlet regardless of whether we are truly talented. What someone might call a hobby is someone else's great soul fulfilling passion.

I think what puzzled this columnist the most is why anyone would put what she considers to be no more than a diary up on the web for public display. The simple answer is that writers, good, average or really awful, want to be published. The only medium to which people have a fairly democratic access is on the Internet. To someone who writes for a living, and to whom the finished product is a matter of a paycheck, it would probably seem odd as well that anyone could write for free or without benefit of copyright. However, to someone who just wants to write and would be happy of any audience, blogging or Facebook or just an online community can be a welcome opportunity.

Another point of contention the writer had was with the concept of online communities and the idea that you can have relationships with "virtual" people. Like most who have never truly experienced this, she falls back on the snotty superiority of the fact that she not only prefers REAL friends, she actually has them too. While it is true that there are many people for whom online communities are their only social outlets, it's not true for all people. The majority of those I have met via message boards have families, friends and rich REAL lives. They came to the different boards during times in their lives when they hadn't anyone in their lives they could connect with for various reasons. One group of women I have been messaging with for over six years now came to be when we met on a site called BabyCenter. We were all "older" women trying to conceive and most of us didn't have peers are our age to relate to when it came to trying to get pregnant in your late thirties or early forties. As we one by one became mothers, we moved our group to a private message board and continued to share our lives with each other because by this time we were friends who had move to talk about than just ovulation charts and birth stories. Two of us became widows in the time we have known each other. There have been location and job changes. New babies to celebrate. Some of us know each other offline and those of us who travel quite a bit meet up from time to time when things can be arranged. I wouldn't consider any of us freaks or even freakish.

I met my husband Rob through an online community for younger widowed people. We started off as email pals much in the same vein as the old pen-pals of yore. Another member of the same community is a friend to the point that she attended our wedding, and there are several others we keep in contact with via email and their blogs. The community itself has produced a viable offline network of events and countless friendships and romances (some that also have led to marriage) have blossomed because of this. I think it is easy to look down on or even make fun of online social networks but it would be a mistake to think that everyone engaged in this rather recent means of meeting people is just for the desperate. My husband's two twenty-something daughters have met some various nice people via Facebook and we use the site as a way to keep in touch with them and with extended family and far off friends. In a world where we are so far from the "neighborhoods" we grew up in and Grandma doesn't live just a few blocks over anymore, it's a good way to stay connected.