I hate Sunday mornings, because Maria goes off to work all day, and I won’t see her until later tonight. I also understand that’s a good and healthy thing for her to do, and she enjoys it. It’s important, I know, for us to have parts of our lives that our separate. We both need to know we still have our own lives. Still, I always go into a bit of a funk when she sails off in the dark.
I am going to Quaker Meeting in Easton, this morning. Hope they will allow me to photograph the Meeting Room, it is such a powerful space. I am working today on forgiving my mother. She damaged me greatly, gave me much, loved me much. I want to forgive myself too. I think at some point you have to look back at your life – my family, daughter, divorce, various dimensions of craziness and disconnection – and just say, let it go.
I have to forgive them. I have to forgive me. And move on with my rich and full life, and live it. Put my lips to the world. And just live. And tell my stories. And send my signals to the world.
Frieda’s eyes convey as much emotion and love as any dog I’ve known, they reveal her great heart and strong spirit and fierce loyalty. Frieda would lay down her life for Maria, in a flash. I can see it. Yet she seems to always be reaching out for love, to be the dog she might have been had she not been so abandoned. And the dog she is becoming, her good and loving nature spreading like a blossom and showing itself more and more each day.
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Today is an important day for me. A day of meditation. Of renewal and nourishment. The first day of my life in which I am centering on my self. When I began publishing on this blog, I lived almost completely in a cloud of fear, confusion, anger and loneliness. I was disconnected from my life, my family. I did not know where I was in life. I have given control of my life over to others, many of whom were angry and exploitive people. I was terrified of the simple details of life.
I did not understand love or what it was. I have come a ways since then,and today I will celebrate that. In particular, I will be quiet and learn to be peaceful. I will go to Quaker Meeting today. And journal here several times. And hopefully take some photographs, which is to me, healing. I am devoting this day to memories of my Mother, a brilliant, driven, tormented and unhappy person who lived her life in frustration, fear and anger. At the end of her life, in her last few years I was unable to bring myself to see her, and I was not able to say goodbye to her before she died on a bathroom floor, alone.
I did not say goodbye. I did not attend her funeral. I just could not. I regret that deeply. I know she loved me and I loved her. She loved me dearly, gave me the gift of story-telling and the confidence to tell my stories, even as she was so angry and self-destructive to herself, her family and her children. I almost did not survive her. She had wondrous gifts, some of which she passed on to me.
I have forgiven her, and now, I want to work on forgiving me. And I acknowledge my great love of her. Soon I will go to her grave – which I have never seen – and say a proper goodbye. And hopefully, weep for the sad ghosts of time and memory. And talk to her through time. And ring them bells for the few who are left behind to judge the many who are gone. That is what today is about for me.
The love of a dog is often misinterpreted, I think. We want to believe that dogs think the way we think, because that is what we do. I think it’s more complex than that. A dog’s love for people is an ancient thing. They have served, guided and protected us beyond memory. More and more, I am growing into the notion of dogs as spirits, that enter our lives at a given point and time and then leave us to move on with our lives.
Maria was the dog she needed when she got her, a barrier against the world, a source of safety and comfort and love. Now, she has evolved, the dog Maria needs now, a dog who enters a household with another human, and three other dogs and finds a way to live comfortably and peaceably with them. Because it is not like human love, it is pure, powerful. I don’t want my dogs to be like me. I think it’s the differences that make me love them.
