Good Times

Just looking at my former posts....funny how I can sound so "together' and be so NOT. Took me a while to find that period...it helps when your fingers are on the right "home" keys. In tonight's marathon (or is it "last night" now?), I spent the first half of the night listening to and downloading on a new mp3 player, music from my high school years. When someone tells you , "Enjoy this time....it will be the best years of your life" - you should really listen. And if that becomes true of your high school years...well that's just sad. ...to have your whole life as a denouement is.....sad.

I was thinking about those years as I listened to the music...The music was HAPPY...driving beats, sounding like freedom and optimism...because we were ALL going to be a smashing success you know. Especially me. And that feeling became weaker and more uncertain as every month passed in my 18th year and onward. The rest of my friends went on to "make it big"....Doctors...degrees from Harvard and Yale and Princeton...Lawyers, college professors. Every one of them.
I took a different track. I became.......................psychotic at times....and sick with schizophrenia.

I did have two other good times in my life. The first was after the birth of our daughter...My husband was never home, trying to get a new business off the ground... so it was just me taking care of that little screaming bundle. She had terrible colic. But I really think that this helped to bond us because I was the only one who could comfort her. And I was the only one she would allow to hold her. We had moved to a side by side duplex/townhouse near the Hudson River in upstate NY when the baby was just one week old (yeah...don't ask me how I survived that!).

My days and nights fell into a rhythm that comforted me as much as it did my daughter. Nights we paced the floor , me holding her in with her belly on my forearm and her head in my hand...It was her favorite position. Finally we would drop in the wee hours of the morning, exhausted on the couch or my bed....the baby on my tummy and sleep for a few brief hours. Mornings was bathing ,feeding and dressing. Then we would bundle up if needed and I put her in her carriage and we would walk....ALL OVER the neighborhood and down along the river banks....Usually with her raising such a ruckus that I would have to take her home...as even the neighbors commented on her amazing lungs!

And then...I leaned forward on the couch and felt it...the pain that was so familiar...The pain of a disc blowing. (I'd had major back surgery at the age of 27...and I was now 30). It turned out that two discs were shot...most likely due to a really difficult birthing of my little one. So it was again off to have surgery...My daughter was 4 months old...and that was the end of my nice time. The surgery went bad. I would be in the hospital for close to 4 months and come home wearing a brace on my leg....and in unrelenting indescribably pain...which would last----the rest of my life.

I had another (brief) time of happiness. I had just worked my way out of a wheelchair after being in it for two years due to damage to my muscles from steroids for asthma. And at the end of that season of being homebound (my daughter was now in 5th grade I believe), I began once more to draw and paint...having been away from it for a number of years. And after my slow recovery I was to join the Arts Commission in that town and had a solo show of my work and spent the next two years or more, traveling to paint and draw and to show and sell my work. I was quite successful at it...although, looking at that work now, I don't see why...There are only a few worth keeping. But people liked them. And I was happy.

not now.
I'm not happy now.

Then I had the worst psychotic episode of my life that lasted for three or four years. The end of that time was a year ago.
And nothing has been the same since.

...so if you are and you are in a "Good Place"...enjoy it for all it's worth....