Today Holidailies asks about things I once thought I’d do that I now know I’ll never ever do.
At first I thought, “Write a best-selling novel.” Then I realized that was defeatist. I’m only 58. I can’t rule that out yet. So I’ll go with the practical: Have kids.
Yes, Ms. Zero Population Growth over here once thought she’d have kids. This was when I was a kid, myself, playing house with dolls. In high school I began to doubt that I wanted kids. One of my sisters returned home to my parents’ house when she was in her mid-20s, divorced with two young kids in tow, and I got to babysit them that summer while she worked. Oh, they were fine and as well-behaved as you could expect a four-year-old and a seven-year-old to be. But ya know? I just wasn’t feeling it. Some teenage girls love kids—their mother did when she was in high school—but I didn’t have either the patience or maturity to deal with fights, crying, or trying to entertain them. Basically, I shut them up with ice cream.
Then I supposed I’d get married and have kids one day with my college sweetheart. Thank gawd that didn’t work out because while we were dating his mother married a guy who was tied to the Gambino family. As an Italian-American in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut tri-state area, I wasn’t dating a Jewish boy only to fall in as a Mob wife. See also, although he had a nice start in life—prep school, transfered out of my alma mater to an Ivy League school after his sophomore year, went to law school, became an assistant district attorney down South—he blew it. Big time. Last I Googled him, he got disbarred because he got caught up in one of those awful scams where crooks sell older people fake insurance policies costing hundreds of dollars and worth nothing, and he ended up doing some time for it. Dodged a bullet there, boy howdy.
Anyway, in college I thought that if I was going to have a family, it might have been with him because I loved him, he was very devoted and faithful—almost doting—we had fun, his future was super bright, the kids would have wanted for nothing, and the icing was that the kids would have picked up some good tickets to the genetic lottery because the guy was also a model and had been a nationally ranked tennis player before he got injured, right before we met. I think even my Roman Catholic parents were past freaking out that he was Jewish because he looked so good on paper. Heck, at my childhood bestie’s wedding shower, my broad circle of Italian elders even said, “Wait, he wants to be a lawyer? Forget finding an Italian doctor. Go with the Jewish lawyer. He’ll treat you better.”
Gawd, growing up on Long Island was a riot.
Anyway, my college sweetheart did something bone-headed and made a big life decision, like drop it on me that he had been accepted to law school in California when I didn’t even know he had applied there. He just assumed I’d go out there with him. Well, kids, as I established with you a few entries ago, I don’t go anywhere just because a man says so, and as I wasn’t about to move there, I broke up with him. (And he ended up not going to law school there after all. He went to law school in—say it with me—D.C.)
After that, at the ripe old age of 22, I realized I didn’t want kids. Told every guy I dated after that the same thing. Some believed me and we parted ways, others thought they could convince me otherwise but they couldn’t. Even my ex-husband, who swore up and down he didn’t want them, decided two years into the marriage he might want them after all, and that was a major reason I divorced him. Yes, I divorced rather than have kids. That’s how much I didn’t want them.
It’s funny, no one in my family believed I didn’t want them, either, except my mother, who told me not to get married unless I did. (I should have listened!) The rest of them—my sisters, my father, my other relatives—were all “oh, when you meet the right guy, you’ll want them.”
“The right guy won’t want them either.”
“You’re young. You’ll change your mind.”
exasperated sigh
One day when I was in my mid-20s, my father really got on my last nerve with it. I was home visiting and he gave me the ol’ “When are you going to find a guy and have babies?”
“I’m going out to the bar tonight. It can be arranged.”
He looked at my mother, who I’m pretty sure was trying not to burst out laughing. “You believe this? Where did we go wrong?”
“What ‘go wrong?'” she said. “You have four grandkids from two of the other ones [two of my three sisters] so far. Two boys and two girls. What more do you want? Get off her back.”
“A WOMAN IS NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT A HUSBAND AND CHILDREN.”
“Oh, blow it out your ass.”
How I miss that woman.
Anyway, at 42 endometriosis got the better of me, I had all the plumbing taken out, celebrated with some gorgeous, expensive, high-threadcount white sheets, and here I am at 58, kid-free, no regrets.
And now for today’s ornament, one of the new deer.
Today’s Holidailies prompt requests advice for surviving the holiday season.
My best advice is to learn how to say “no.” So much of holiday stress comes from overcommitting. Yes, I’ll make the cookies. Yes, I’ll make something for the office pot luck. Yes, I’ll put up all the decorations. Yes, I’ll attend this…and that…and the other. Yes, I will put up with Auntie Mabel’s and Uncle George’s political/racist/sexist/homophobic rants and go to their house for the sake of keeping peace.
There’s no law saying you have to do all of that. There’s no law saying you have to sacrifice your own enjoyment of the season by running yourself ragged and spending time with people you find ghastly.
On that last point, the last time I spent Christmas Day with anyone other than myself (and Inigo, when he was alive), it was with an ex-boyfriend’s family. Several members of his family irritated me and seemed to get off on trying to be offensive and push people’s buttons. For example, one of the cousins and I don’t eat meat. Their way of expressing their opinion about that was to wave turkey legs in our faces on Thanksgiving. Real juvenile stuff.
On this particular Christmas, in 2013, Barack Obama was in his second term as President and some people in that family didn’t like him, including my ex’s father. Someone in my ex’s family—probably his mother or someone else who was on my Facebook at the time and saw me celebrate something Obama did—VERY IDIOTICALLY told him I had voted for Obama. Now, see, for the first few years of the relationship, I actually liked my ex-boyfriend’s father: Like his son, he told funny stories about the jail where they both worked. He had a dry wit and interesting hobbies, and he and his wife loved to collect all kinds of antiques and collectibles that they picked up at estate sales and painstakingly organized throughout their home and in the basement.
Unfortunately, once he found out I voted for Obama, every time I saw the guy, it was “your boy did this” and “your boy did that.” I had managed to tune him out for a while, either ignoring his digs or saying things like “I’m so liberal, I believe you’re entitled to your opinion.” Then slowly but surely, the hate started to come out. It was always there, to hear my ex-boyfriend tell it, but now his father and other people in that family felt neither compunction nor allegience to good manners and it became pretty apparent that there were a lot of racists and homophobes among them. Not all, as some of the cousins were pretty cool, and more than one confessed to finding the bigots annoying. They appeared to be in the minority howver, and of course the bigots would have shouted them down or even targeted them if they said anything.
And this Christmas the bigots were in rare form, especially my ex’s mother’s brother and my ex’s father. They stopped shy of using the N-word outright, but they didn’t have to say it. It was there in their undertone. Unfortunately, my ex and I were seated between them so I was hearing it in stereo. Better yet, my ex had told me he voted for Obama both times, yet his family didn’t know. (Looking back on it, and the general lack of integrity he revealed to me over the last couple of years of the relationship, he might have been lying to me. I’ll never know.) So there I was, 47 years old, kneeing my 37-year-old boyfriend under the table to try to get him to tell his family to lay off. Finally I said, “Yeah, well, your son voted for him, too,” which got me both a bug-eyed glare from my ex and kneed under the table myself. So I kneed my ex even harder, like, “Then tell them to shut the hell UP!”
No balls, that guy. It was his mother who put a hand up and said, “TOM” and he reined it in.
Until everyone else went home but my ex, my ex’s brother, my ex’s brother’s girlfriend of a couple of months, and me. Then O Holy Night, what diatribes we were subjected to. I don’t even want to share what he said here. It was beyond vicious. It was also malicious and aggressive toward the brother’s new girlfriend. She was a vet tech and this guy told a story of how my ex-boyfriend’s pet gerbil had some kind of growth over his eye, so he put it in a shoebox, took it out to the backyard, and shot up the shoebox. The poor thing wasn’t dead when he opened the box, which he described in detail, so then he shot at it directly. Why on EARTH would someone tell that story in front of a newcomer he KNEW was a vet tech? Not only was I incredulous at the whole nasty display of cruelty, myself, when I searched her face, I saw there were tears in her eyes. Needless to say, she broke up with my ex’s brother shortly after that.
If I had only been dating my ex for a couple of months, I’d have been out of there, too. I already had seven years in, though, and my ex lived far enough away from his parents that they couldn’t just drop in and ruin a date night.
I did, however, refuse to see them again after that. About a month later, they invited my ex and me over for dinner after my ex and I had a dental appointment near their house. I had told my ex repeatedly that I wasn’t up for going, both because I tend to feel sore and don’t want to eat after dental appointmens, and because, frankly, I didn’t feel comfortable around them if his father was going to behave that way. My ex relayed none of this to them (see? no balls). Then he was nearly an hour late picking me up for the appointment, whereupon he told me we WERE going to his parents’ house afterward. As I was already weary of his various and sundry other crappy behaviors and in that place where a woman thinks “if I’m going to be alone in a relationship, I’d rather just be alone,” and come on, if you know me at all, you’d know that I will not be coerced, forced, or otherwise dragged anywhere because a man says so, I don’t care WHO he is, that was the end of that relationship.
Looking back on it now, and having spent the last six years writing about mental health and neurological conditions, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that my ex’s father’s behavior had to do with his health. He had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and both the condition and the medications for it can be disinhibiting. My ex’s parents may have been feeling bad about the whole thing and were trying to make it up to me, too, as apparently they picked up some of my father’s artwork to gift to me. I didn’t know that at the time, though. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be subjected to another string of epithets and invective.
And if that’s what you might be facing this holiday season, you don’t need to subject yourself to it, either. Protect your peace, even if it means hurting a few feelings.
No snowflake tonight. I didn’t finish it last night. But here’s my fortune from tonight’s takeout. After reliving all of the nonsense above in the telling, I’ll take it.
Finally had a chance to sit down and do my birthday tarot reading today, and it’s a doozy. Out of a possible 13 cards, seven of them are Swords. Best part is, before I did the spread, I put all of the cards on the table in a heap and swirled them around with both hands to mix them up. I was originally going to use the Tarot of the Owls, as it’s quite a darling deck, but Crows have been on my mind a lot lately, so I decided to use the Crow Tarot. A few Crows have been coming to the tree outside my window and cawing if they don’t see me in the living room. If they do see me, they land right on the window ledge or on the balcony railing and peer in at me like the Mockingbirds do in the spring and summer, as though to say “I understand there are peanuts available here?” There’s also a Downy Woodpecker couple on the grounds and every time one of them pecks one of the trees, the staccato bursts set the Crows off.
Here’s the spread (click to embiggen):
Sorry if it looks a little washed out. I did this after the sun set, not realizing how shiny the cards were and how much glare there would be from my overhead lights. They’re a little more vibrant than the picture would suggest, but overall the colors are very warm, almost like they have a slight sepia cast. They would have faded into my dining table, so I used an old green towel. Probably should have used white. My bad!
Me: Ace of Swords. Dynamic raw energy, power that breaks through barriers, a wealth of new ideas, a gift for problem-solving, and an overall quick-mindedness. This card is tremendously positive and overrules negative Minor Arcana cards around it much like the Sun card overrules any negative Major Arcana cards around it—and thank goodness for that, as you’ll see in a moment.
My take: Well, okay. If you say so. Unlike many women, I do not hide my intelligence. It’s not something to boast about, but it’s not something to hide, the way patriarchy brainwashes us to. It just is. If anything, sometimes my quick-mindedness gets me into trouble, as I have a tendency to see patterns emerging before those around me do and when I try to head problems off at the pass, it gets me branded as an iconoclast on a good day, a trouble-maker on a bad. But ya know, I’m almost never wrong about stuff like that, and usually I end up having to bite my tongue to keep from saying “I told you so.” It is what it is.
1. The previous year in summary: Five of Swords. Problems with other people, especially managers, and being victimized in a system stacked against you and used by someone to harm you. This card generally means you’ve lost the battle, but that you can emerge from it with self-respect and may yet win the war. Basically, its message is that you’ve been through it, and it’s up to you if you want to stick around and rebuild or walk away to undertake a new adventure.
My take: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! (deep breath) HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! If you know, you know. Suffice to say I have never been so glad to see someone’s office vacated in my LIFE. I generally strive to rise above pettiness at work, but the Friday before this person’s replacement came in, I went over to the empty office, removed the outgoing person’s name from the nameplate in front of the door, ripped it to shreds, and tossed it into the kitchen garbage. That felt GREAT.
2. What you have learned from the past year: Ten of Swords, reversed. I call this the Yeah, He Dead card, because there is a certain unmistakable finality to being stabbed in the back with ten swords. On the flipside, the bad situation is now over, and you can let go of it. Try not to let past betrayals and mistrust keep you from living life.
My take: Ya think? Again, if you know, you know. I did learn that someone I expected to be objective lacked the courage to be. This person should have played the long game but didn’t, and now looks oblivious as all the bad behaviors of the person who left have come to light not through me, but through other people. Like, “Yeah, that person was always a problem. We thought you knew.” Once again, I find myself thinking, “I told you so.”
3. What you aspire to in the next 12 months: Five of Wands, reversed. This card signifies deception and misinformation, usually as presented to you, so it’s about learning who to trust, to verify what you hear, and to consider the source of what you’ve been told. It can be about avoiding conflict even if doing so harms you, because sometimes conflict leads to something positive or productive. When in doubt, keep your own counsel.
My take: I don’t know that I aspire to that as much as it’s a process I’ve had to integrate into various aspects of my life.
4. What empowers you in reaching your aspirations: Three of Cups, reversed. Upright, this card is about friendship and good times. Reversed it can suggest either betrayal or changes among your friends that make you uncomfortable, or feeling disconnected from those you love and that you should make an effort to spend quality time with them.
My take: I see this as a continuance of the card before it. In that light, it’s a message to be selective in who I “let in” and keep company with. Also, I do need to spend more time with the people I care about, always a challenge for an introvert with eleventy billion one-person hobbies and interests (reading, writing, bird-watching, coloring, working out, binge-watching, casual gaming, and staring out windows daydreaming).
5. What may stand in the way of reaching your aspirations: Two of Pentacles. Twos are always about decisions, and Pentacles are about your abundance and material comforts. It can mean a need to balance daily responsibilities with your goals and aspirations, and finding a way to balance between work and personal life.
My take: I can see that. My birthday gift to myself was to stop working on my days off. I’m not supposed to be doing that for my heart’s sake, anyway. My cardiologist (and primary care physician, and various and sundry other clinicians) have all told me to keep my work hours reasonable and remember that what I do, I can do for anyone, from anywhere, at any time. Which is true. I suppose I could file stories from Tahiti.
6. Your relationships and emotions in the coming year: Eight of Swords, reversed. This card always brings to mind the saying “don’t be your own worst enemy.” It represents a feeling of being trapped, but the way out is easier than it seems. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, this card has a woman who is blind-folded but only loosely bound. All she needs to do is use some strength and she can break some bindings, remove her blindfold, and walk away, because the swords do not fully surround her. In this deck, the Crow also cannot see, and she’s tangled in a ribbon that is pinned to the ground by one of the swords. But if she just lifts her head, the ribbon will fall away from her eyes and she’ll be able to figure out how to untangle herself. Then all she needs to do is lift off and fly away.
My take: Yeah, I know. Things are only as hard as I make them, and that includes getting out of stifling situations and managing my emotions when it comes to other people. I need to get back to my lessons in Stoicism and Buddhism, which converge on the notion that attachment is the root of suffering.
7. Your career outlook and finances: Page of Wands, reversed. A project that is stuck and can’t get off the ground. You might have lost interest in it, or it no longer seems worth the effort of seeing it through.
My take: I see this as knowing when to stop throwing good money or effort after bad. Sometimes it’s best to cut your losses and move on. That would ultimately mean taking the lesson of the previous card and detaching myself from what I feel is hemming me in.
8. Your health and well-being: Queen of Swords, reversed. Beware of people who don’t realize how unreasonable their demands are, and watch out for a manipulative, cunning woman who behaves like a tyrant. Avoid stress brought on by such people.
My take: Here’s where it gets freaky, because last year I had this card in the same place, but in the upright position. It was all about drawing boundaries and using intellect to solve problems. But I VERY STUPIDLY never learn, do I?
9. Your spiritual energy and inner fulfilment: Two of Swords. More decisions, only this time it could mean “crossing swords” with someone else and standing your ground. Only you know whether it’s worth the fight. Also, if you’re feeling stuck, think about where the fear of change is coming from.
My take: Oh, lawd, I’m battle-weary. I don’t want to have to decide whether standing my ground is worth the fight. I want people to stop testing me and presenting me with conflict in the first place.
10. What you need to focus on in the year ahead: Ten of Cups, reversed. Take time to create harmonious relationships with those around you, and make an effort to spend quality time with those you love. That is part of your emotional and social abundance and will be both enjoyable and worth the effort.
My take: Freakiness, Round Two, because I had this card in the same position last year, but upright. As far as it being reversed this year, I concur. Good people are always both a joy to be around and worth the effort of seeing.
11. What will be your most important lesson in the coming year: Seven of Swords. Someone may be trying to deceive you or get away with doing something unethical, like this Crow absconding with three of the swords. Trust your gut. You may have to use your remaining resources to outwit them and beat them at their own game.
My take: Gee, are we seeing a pattern here? Adversaries, rivals, and sketchy people all around. So how am I supposed to try to find a way to not let mistrust of people get in the way of enjoying life?
12. Overall, where you are headed in the next 12 months: Seven of Cups. Choices, choices, choices. Evaluate the pros and cons of each, and go with what is practical and doable. Don’t rush to a decision, and base your choice on what’s realistic. However, if you’re starting something new, the possibilities are endless, so in that sense, anything is possible and it’s okay to look to the clouds and dream a bit.
My take: I get this card a lot. I won’t say it’s stalking me, but I get it in a quarter to a third of my readings, regardless of the deck I use. Sometimes I react to it like, “Well, what is life if not a series of choices we make? Even if we choose not to choose, that is still a choice that will affect us.” But being that this reading was so very heavy not only on Swords, but on Swords that have to do with assessing other people, I wonder if I will have to use my head to choose between individuals or groups of people, or if other people will be a deciding factor in my choices. I can’t imagine who, as my friends are all fine and not in conflict with one another. I can spend time with different people and groups and it’s not really choosing one over the other. They’re not mutually exclusive.
I don’t date, so it’s not like I’ll be confronted with having to choose between men.
Headhunters do reach out to me fairly often, but I’ve always chosen my own interests and financial needs over wasting anyone’s time, and I’m at a point in my career where “it’s the people” no longer applies. Although I would never work for an organization whose mission I didn’t support, I’m 58, so it’s about filthy lucre and maximizing my retirement at this point. So many recruiters come to me with positions that have lower salaries “but the people are great.” Yeah. No. Greenbacks or go home.
Final thoughts: I can’t say I was thrilled with this reading. Overall it seems really negative to me, with too much caution and mention of conflict. However, one thing really struck me, aside from the disproportionate number of Sword cards: There was not one card from the Major Arcana. So all of this denotes minor events, temporary situations, and people who either come and go or are not close to me. There were only two Court cards, as well, so for all the talk of making decisions and watching out for shady individuals, I don’t see where those decisions will have to be about anyone of great significance in my life. This all may be telling me to pay attention to subtleties when dealing with people just to make my own life a smidge simpler or easier.
Considering this past trip around the sun started with a heart attack, which was followed by a need to set boundaries and protect myself, which was followed by the biggest pile of steaming bullshit I’ve ever encountered in my entire 36-year career, maybe a year with no major events is a good thing.
And now for today’s candy, Milk Duds. Because really? Not ONE card from the Major Arcana?
zenzalei 