jodiet.com Blog

OUT OF THE BLUE

Here you are again
Ever so fleeting
But ever so here.
At peaceful moments
You arrive from nowhere
Or somewhere deep within.

My hands tense on
The steering wheel;
I feel light headed
As if holding my breath,
Waiting as I did
Those years ago.

I take comfort in knowing
It is only that moment;
Only a moment
And it will be over;
As brief as the time
You shared my life.

In a moment
I will pull into
The parking lot;
My children will race
To the doors
Of their school.

I will move on,
Move forward with my life;
Move on as I did
Those years ago-
Living, learning, growing
And loving.

But a part of me will stay
In that moment,
That fleeting paralyzed
Moment
When you revisit
From somewhere
Out of the blue.

THE STORM

The bull rested between
Stiff brown weeds;
Death long ago devoured
His body, leaving
His shell to rot
And the flies to feast
And make their home.

We stood as one
On top of the hill
In the abandoned pasture;
Abandoned but for
He who failed escape
With the herd.

Clouds marched toward us
From the west;
Thunder beating
And lightening clashing
Like giant symbols.
We watched the parade
Of early May storm
And waited with the dead,

Not speaking or moving;
Our breaths peaceful
In contrast to the pace
Down by the farmer’s creek
Not fifteen minutes before.

White mist appeared
On the horizon;
Mesmerizing frosted day,
Inching closer and closer,
Overtaking the river
Then cozy river cabins
Where families huddled
In corners or watched
Cautiously from their
Picture window framed
Living rooms or
Beneath their tin-covered
Porches.

Blanketed the school,
The playground
And the old orchard
On the edge of town
Like a curtain of
Frosting gracefully engulfing
Freshly fried doughnuts
At the local doughnut shop.
Veiled the dairy farm
And burgeoning
Fields of corn and soybeans.

Finally detecting defiant
Intruders to its siege,
It hastened its march.
Our eyes met,
Seemed to pause
For a moment as
If waiting for us to run
Away panicked
Or surrender our souls.

As if waiting
For assurance at the
Last moment we would leap
From its path like the
Hoodlums who arrogantly
Defy the drivers’
Of our local roads,
Refusing to free the path,
Daring them but scattering
When it is clear the driver’s
Will is more fierce.

Warring of wills
Between it’s ocean mass
And we two who
Were not afraid of the risk
Of conquer by the storm
Of nature, beast, or love;
We knew which would flinch first
To win power and control.

Relief came to the
Rotting bull corpse.
As the flies fled
To take cover
As rain drops thudded
Upon the stiffening hide
Like muffled beats on a drum.

The waterlogged curtain
First devoured our toes
Then our noses and
Finally our hands
Entangled behind our backs.
It could not scare us;
Could not motivate a
Run, a scream, a cry
Or any hint of defeat.

Exhausting its fury,
The parade continued
Its impassioned march
Never pausing
Except that fleeting
Moment we stood
Face to face.

To visualize the calendar year, my mind envisions a squished clock—like someone stepped on it at the 12:00 position—where the hour hand travels backwards. As we enter the fall season, the hour hand on my elongated clock is approaching the 3:00 position. Thanksgiving will be between 2 and 1 with Christmas occurring just before midnight, then shortly after the year will start over and we go around again. I am not sure why I think of the year in this way but I always have. I guess sometime as a child I connected the clock and year with the passing of time, the 12 five-minute units on a clock with the 12 months in the year, and adopted the clock as my demonstrative aid for the passing of the years.

It is amazing to me how children’s minds work; the simple logic that leads to if not a correct, a well thought out, conclusion. My son has been particularly known for these types of revelations. My husband, LeRoy, often used the phrase, “under no circumstances”; one day my son asked, “Why do you always say ‘under no circus dances’?” Similarly, my husband used to say, so-and-so had the mind of a sieve whenever someone was confused or didn’t understand something so one day my son told my husband, “You remind of me of Sid,” which is the name of my brother’s dog. Eating lunch at a fast food restaurant one day, my son noticed my husband’s eye brows sort of dipped in the middle like a shallow inverted bell curve; he told my husband, “I know why your eyebrows look like that.” Of course, we couldn’t resist asking why, to which my son explained, “It’s because when you get frustrated, you go like this” and he rubbed his eyebrows with his index finger and thumb. His thinking was my husband had rubbed his eyebrows off in those spots.

One day when my son was 3 ½, he and my daughter were coloring at the kitchen table. He purposely dropped some crayons on the floor and when LeRoy came in from outside, he told my son to pick up the crayons. My son held his right elbow and said “I can’t”. LeRoy asked “Why not?” so my son said “I can’t. My arm’s broke” still holding his arm. My son had heard LeRoy ask he and his sister so many times “why can’t you do this or that, is your arm broke?” that my son decided to use it against him.

These types of revelations have not stopped as my son has aged. A couple of year ago when my son was 5, we were sitting at the gas station waiting for LeRoy to finish pumping gas into our van. My son was whining that he had to relieve himself. I joked with him, “Just squeeze your cheeks together.” I heard a distorted, “It’s not working” and looked back to see him squeezing his face cheeks. Another bathroom gas station moment occurred just last summer in South Dakota. We were pulling up to the pump and LeRoy mentioned he had to relieve himself, #2. My son asked, “Have you been talking to Shane?” (our neighbor from across the street). Confused by what our neighbor had to do with taking a crap, we asked my son what in the world he was talking about. Apparently Shane enlightened my son to “#2” and my son thought he’d invented the saying. We laughed hysterically at this and my frustrated son said, “It’s not like everyone knows what #2 is!!!” So I calmly told him, “Yes, pretty much everyone DOES know what #2 is”.

I don’t know why so many of these kid-isms are related to the bathroom, but not all of them originated with my son. Within the last several months, my daughter complained “why doesn’t it work when I do it?” after her brother had her pull his finger to release his gas. She didn’t realize you have to have the bomb on the ready when you invite someone to pull the finger.

If I thought long enough, I could probably fill a book with all of the kid-isms I’ve heard through the years from my brother’s naming of the erotic pet store a/k/a exotic pet store to my niece’s thinking she wasn’t going to live with her parents anymore when I took her out of town for the weekend to a friend at work whose son thinks he is being “cream-ated” when his mom applies lotion to his dry skin. Hearing what comes out of their mouths and figuring out how their minds work has to be one of the greatest joys of having children around. There’s always something to laugh at!!

My blog entry last week may have seemed bland and unoriginal. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to post at that time. While eating some vegetables with dip for lunch, I read in the newspaper my friend and colleague had died the prior Saturday. She was only 45 years old and died less than two years after being diagnosed with colon cancer. This occurrence naturally led me to evaluate my life even more than usual. It got me thinking about the answer to the question: If I only had ten years left to live, is there anything I would choose to do differently today? And if I would choose to do something differently today if I was going to die in ten years, shouldn’t I be doing it differently anyway? But would quitting my paycheck job to concentrate on a full time writing career be stupid and/or irresponsible? Would waiting until I get my kids off to college to start a full time writing career be more sensible? But after waiting those ten years, will it be too late?

There is no easy answer, of course. In today’s economy, I think I should just be grateful I have a good paying job. Though it provides less and less personal satisfaction, I don’t hate it. Sometimes, I think I should just suck it up and accept the American Monday through Friday life—spending every waking minute pining for Friday evening, drudging through my life getting only an 80/20 cost-benefit or annual working-nonworking day ratio. Putting in 80 cents and getting only 20 cents seems like a bad investment to me. The thought of accepting that without at least striving to attain even a 50/50 ratio depresses me and I’m not sure how long I’d be able keep my head above the quick sand of depression I suspect would be sucking me in. But almost equally depressing would be not having enough money to provide for my kids.

My biggest obstacle is the unknown. Knowing I’d be around another forty years, another five years or somewhere in between would answer the question of what to do with my professional life. Similarly, the answer would be much clearer if I knew I’d be able to make an adequate living writing or if I knew I’d never get a single piece published. For me, money has never been more important than quality of life. It is a matter of balance. What price do I put on quality of life? How much loss of quality of life would I be willing to tolerate for how much income? It is both a direct and indirect correlation because a certain level of income is necessary to achieve a certain quality of life. Part of my quality of life comes from being able to take vacations and do things with my family. To have those opportunities requires a certain amount of money, a level I’m not sure I could achieve with a full time writing career. But is it worth spending so much of my waking hours doing something I don’t enjoy, that’s not fulfilling, and not commiserate with my skills and abilities for a week or two away?

I’ve been accused in the past of being idealistic. I believe my life is a product of the choices I make. I’ve always believed I could be anything I wanted to be and I could achieve any goal I chose if I worked hard enough and made the right choices to get there. I believe the success of my life will be measured by always spending my time doing the things I enjoy and that are personally satisfying. The thought of not being idealistic in this way makes me ask: What’s the point? If I give up the dream of being a writer and live those 80 days for the sake of those 20, would I be able to still LIVE or would I eventually wither away, dying inside? A solution for many aspiring writers I know is to write part-time while keeping their paycheck jobs which I’ve done for the past nearly 15 months. I work 30 hours/week most of the time at my paycheck job and then write whenever I can steal the time outside of that. I’ve made progress; I finished a young adult novel, am currently collecting rejection letters, and have maintained a weekly blog for nearly 6 months. Maybe I’m just not patient enough—but then again there’s no reason to think I have the luxury of patience. It gets harder and harder to push myself away from my writing at 7:45 a.m. every morning to get ready to go to my paycheck job. It gets harder and harder to file away what could be successful writing projects because I’m not sure I’ll ever have the time to get to them. And it gets harder to force myself to concentrate on my paycheck task when my manuscript or current idea is screaming at me to work on it. But as I get older and subsequently, more grown up, it gets harder to give up the sure thing—or at least as sure as things can get.

There are so many questions and not enough answers. I’m not sure what I’ll decide to do, when or if I’ll even decide at all. The only thing I really know is I’ll never have any answer if I stop asking myself the questions. I don’t want to give up my idealism or the dream of something more satisfying and meaningful. To me, to give up that would equate to giving up living. I’ve lost too many to not know the value of living.

Most love stories end with the “happily ever after” after the “I do”s and the rice. “Happily ever after” is where my love story began thirteen years ago. What happened before is back-story; how the characters got to the place in their lives where the story begins. Back-story is sometimes delivered in the prologue of a novel and sometimes it is spooned more subtly through the telling of the story. The end is where my love story will end and I am nowhere near wanting the story to end. And if the end of the story does not occur in conjunction with my life, I will be glad to have read it but I won’t be too anxious to read a similar story again.

My back-story is not free of conflict and drama. Many times I felt like slamming the book shut and moving on but I kept reading. My husband, LeRoy, and I met in college. I was nineteen years old beginning my second semester as a freshman at Iowa State University. He was twenty-two beginning his first semester at Iowa State as a transfer student into the Agronomy major. I was still grieving the lost of my first “real” love and reeling from a train wreck of a fling I had likely been steaming toward for several years. He had recently had a similar experience in his love life when his girlfriend of five months left for college and forgot to tell him she was breaking up with him.

LeRoy met me approximately three weeks before I noticed him when I was playing volleyball at the Rec Center with his dorm-mates. We were friends for several weeks before he asked me out on our first date the Thursday before spring break, 1993. Our first date was relaxed and easy; he was funny and decent looking with a blondish curly mullet. Over spring break, I decided to pursue a relationship with LeRoy and divert my attention from the couple of guys I thought might be interested in me and the one guy I had been peripherally dating. I devised a strategy of going to the Rec Center then stopping by LeRoy’s room to visit afterward but my plan was thwarted when I found a message from him on my answering machine when I got back to school. He invited me to play pool at the Memorial Union. I immediately noticed he got a hair cut during spring break and his appearance nearly took my breath away. He went from decent looking to very good looking in that instant.

Our relationship, like so many, was wonderful the first few months. We got along well and had fun. It was relaxed, easy and without the anxiety that so often plagued my past dating endeavors (is he going to call? Should I call him?, etc.). The summer apart was extremely difficult for me and I somewhat resented how easy it seemed to be for him. Over the next year and a half, we discussed how things would be if we broke up several times but we never did. I really don’t know why. We must have still enjoyed each other’s company at least occasionally between my crying jags and his anger with his physics and algebra classes or we would have broken up. Things got better spring semester, 1994, when physics and algebra were behind LeRoy but I was in the middle of a clinical depression I didn’t realize or seek treatment for until the fall of my junior year. The beast in my head liked to play tricks on me by telling my I was worthless, LeRoy didn’t love me, life was hopeless and it wouldn’t get any better. This is another blog topic but essentially I had everything I had wanted and worked toward—going to college, great boyfriend—but I still was not happy and it was devastating. I finally summoned the courage to go to counseling because I knew if I didn’t get myself together, I would lose LeRoy and no one better for me was likely to come along.

Our relationship got much better after my counseling though suppressing my beast was a struggle and as anyone who’s ever been seriously depressed will tell you, it is something you fight every day as depression is one of those things you don’t cure but manage. LeRoy and I still had several conversations about having doubts about our relationship and fearing we were too dependent upon each other. I think the crux of all of our pre-marriage conflict was this feeling that we WERE good for each other and SHOULD be together but neither of us were ready to make that commitment and it scared us because once we got engaged late August, 1995, it was like the proverbial weight was lifted and we never had another discussion about breaking up and having doubts.

Our story began on September 7, 1996 in the Catholic Church in Livermore, Iowa. It was a relaxed and fun ceremony with my mom, aunt and sister-in-law as my attendants, recorded music, and me coughing through the ceremony due to allergies or an upper respiratory infection which I never did figure out. I never got cold feet. I knew that LeRoy was the best husband choice for me.

It is true marriage is hard. Most all of our marital conflict stems from work, specifically his job that keeps him away from home until late at night several weeks during the year. I used to nag LeRoy a lot about work. First it was he wasn’t spending enough time with me then it was he was missing out on his children’s growing up. I had a kind of crisis when my cousin committed suicide in March, 2002 and my step-dad died suddenly of a heart attack just after Christmas that same year. I went through a period of time where I felt like LeRoy had not been there for me emotionally and I often saw him as the nanny I was sleeping with. I felt something was fundamentally missing in my marriage.

When I finally told LeRoy about the problems I was having with my feelings about my marriage, he agreed to work on it and we began working through Dr. Phil’s relationship rescue weekly. Once his spring work started, we stopped doing Dr. Phil due to lack of time but something in me changed that actually improved our marriage. I stopped trying to control that aspect of him and our marriage. I decided that I had explained to him that one day he might wake up and realize everything he’s missed being away from our children’s lives so much or one day he might wake up and find all he has left is his job so it was now up to him. I decided to go about my own life with the kids, make plans and do the things I want to do with them with the attitude of if he can come great but it was fine if he couldn’t. As a result, I stopped resenting him for all of the things I was missing. After getting a refresher in the brevity of life and how vicariously it teeters between having it and not, I decided to enjoy whatever time I had with LeRoy as much as I could and not waste the little times we had together on negativity.

Once those decisions were made and were fully absorbed by my mind, everything got much easier. The ironic thing was that as soon as I stopped nagging LeRoy about work, he started to make more of an effort to be home more and to attend our kids’ events more. He put his foot down at work about not working Sundays. As I mentioned in my father’s day blog post back in June, LeRoy and our marriage are not perfect. Though he sometimes passively aggressively resents he does more outwardly tangible housework than me, he is reminded of what I do when he runs out of toilet paper and finds a brand new mega-pack in the closet or is working a couple of hours away and I have to pick up a sick kid from school.

I love our life together. We’ve made it through the baby, toddler and pre-school years and are dreading the teen years for obvious reasons but looking forward to not having to pay a baby-sitter if we want to go out for Saturday date-night. We rarely fight (though he probably has a very swollen tongue due to biting it); we laugh a lot and have fun a lot. I still think he is the best husband I could ever have or want. And I still believe I chose to start reading this story not because I wanted to something to read, was bored, or thought it was about time I did, but because HE was the main character. I didn’t just get married; I got married to HIM.