Red, White and Blue — and Yell-Oh!

Posted on July 4, 2023 by cattalespress under a spiritual life, Affirmations, American Dream, Angels on Earth, Courage, death of a child, disciplined non-conformist., Do Not Be Afraid, Dreams, Embrace Change, Faith, Faith Muscle, Faith-O-Meter, Family, Fellowship, Fourth Dimension, Good over evil, Gratitude, grief, grief relief, Grieving, Growing Up, Healing of Memories, heartbreak, hope, humor, illness, inner voice, inspiration, inspirational messages, joy, Letting Go, Living through death, Living through personal crisis, Long-Term Coping Strategies, Loss of a Child, Lost youth, Meeting your needs, Military, Natural above Normal, NEVER EVER GIVE UP!, NEVER GIVE UP!, one day at a time, Parent's Death, Positive Change, Positive thinking, positive words of encouragement, Problem Solving, Relationships, Safe Space, seasons, Self-Care, self-value, Serendipity, Serene-diptious Moments, Simple Pleasures of Life, Sing a new song, Soul Food, special occasions, spirit-filled life, spiritual, spiritual inspirational thoughts, spiritual transformation, Struggles, The God Channel, To thine own self be true, transparency, Unconditional Love, Unsung Heroes, Veterans, Vulnerability, zen

A Fourth of July Tribute

“Yell-oh! Yell-oh!” My mom’s heavily accented voice exclaimed every time she spotted a yellow flower or garment.

I distinctly remember that when she accompanied our family, regardless of how preoccupied we were with our daily tasks, such as running errands, her outburst would cause us to pause in our tracks, focus on, for example, yellow roses and transcend ourselves in order to appreciate their beauty.

My mom sounded like a yellow canary chirping in perfect rhythm, “Yell-oh! Yell-oh!” After about three minutes, we reluctantly interrupted her captivated state and peeled her away in order to resume our daily activities.

I became reminiscent of these halcyon times when yellow wildflowers caught me off guard as I was walking at the end of my friend Michelle’s cul-de-sac. All at once, my mom’s voice reverberated through the sky in tandem with a radiant sun.

_{End of my friend Michelle’s cul-de-sac}

Ironically, despite planting numerous perennial flower seeds last year, only a single variety of the daisy blossomed. The color? Yellow — a vibrant shade of Yell-OH!

My mom not only had a penchant for all things yellow, but actually, all things, down to a modest piece of bread that the 98-pound woman stashed in her fake leather purse. And, most times, before consuming it, she’d kiss the crust in gratitude.

As I have previously written about, my mother was a proud American and WWII survivor who endured forced labor under the Nazis during her youth. Prior to her passing in 2015, she exhibited profound gratitude for each moment of the day. Many Americans, myself included, may require reminders of the things to be grateful about. I believe that for most American immigrants, gratitude starts the minute a pair of feet hit free soil.

The Fourth of July is a time to celebrate America’s independence and all that it stands for. It’s a day filled with parades, fireworks, and most importantly, the colors that represent this great nation —red, white and blue. But for me, there’s one more color that holds a special place in my heart — yellow — yell-oh!

You see, my mom, was not only one of the most grateful persons I’ve every known, but also one of the most patriotic people. (Don’t these two qualities go hand in hand?) Additionally, she was a proud mother of two veterans who courageously served in active duty during the Vietnam War.

To her, each day held the same revelry as the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Flag Day and every other holiday on the American calendar. She would joyfully declare, “Every day is Sunday!”

She also enthusiastically expressed her appreciation for America by exclaiming: “God Bless America!” to everyone she encountered — from store clerks to librarians, you name it.

Don’t think though that America handed her an easy life on a silver platter. She and my dad experienced discrimination and were exploited by many individuals. Every Monday, for instance, a bulldog of a neighbor would plop an enormous pile of dirty laundry (excluding any yellow clothes!) on our porch, causing my mom to groan from the weight when lifting the basket. Throughout the week, Mom tirelessly ironed and starched each garment while juggling her other responsibilities, a skill she acquired firsthand from the Nazis’ emphasis on producing flawless results. The same neighbor would retrieve the laundered articles on Friday or Saturday, while simultaneously expressing dissatisfaction with my mother’s work. Consequently, she would begrudgingly offer my mother meager compensation consisting of only a few coins or occasionally one dollar.

On Sundays, my parents never failed to attend church. I can vividly imagine my mother prostrating herself on the ground in prayer, grateful for the opportunity to worship her personal understanding of God without fear of being subjected to violence or even death. On her way out, Mom never failed to contribute half of her earnings into the charitable receptacle of the church.

“It’s for the poor people. God Bless America,” she’d whisper to me after we left church.

In the final decade of her life, my mother grieved the passing of her eldest son, Mike, as a result of illness; nonetheless, she retained an unwavering appreciation for her freedom to mourn openly and, in fact, helped others who suffered comparable loses.

When one considers the experiences of enduring war, division, hatred and brutality or suffering from inadequate footwear during blizzard-like weather conditions, minor discomforts faced by those in the middle- and, certainly, upper-class, such as a power outage for the day, pale in comparison.

Regardless of the hardships she endured in America, my mother never lost her faith in America even during its darkest moments. Her attention remained fixed on the selfless acts of our nation’s forefathers and their successors, including her own sons, in upholding our liberty and autonomy.

When I find my self amid personal struggles, I am grateful for her legacy that rarely fails to empower me. Fortunately, during summer months, her positive spirit is especially evident as I stroll along the path towards my house and behold the sunny faces of flowers beaming at me. Meanwhile, a melodious tune chirps within my mind, singing out “Yell-oh! Yell-oh!”

As we celebrate the holiday today, let us remember those who have gone before us and the traditions they held dear. Let us honor their memory and carry on their legacy, whether we wear red, white, blue or even yellow — Yell-oh! —because we are FREE to do so! Happy Fourth of July!

No Going Back

Posted on October 19, 2021 by cattalespress under alcoholism, American Dream, Angels on Earth, Birthdays, Courage, Crisis, Death, death of a child, Denial, Divorce, Do Not Be Afraid, Dreams, Faith, Faith Muscle, Faith-O-Meter, Family, Good over evil, grief, Grieving, Growing Up, Healing of Memories, heartbreak, hope, Living through death, Living through personal crisis, Loss of a Child, Mental Health, Mental Health, NEVER EVER GIVE UP!, Out of Order Death, Relationships, seasons, sorrow, Struggles, Suicide, Suicide Loss Survivors, Swamp of the soul, Total Control, trauma, Turmoil, Unconditional Love, Vulnerability

When I was pregnant nearly 29 years ago with my first child, I did not appear visibly pregnant. My belly was not pronounced. I never heard any of the following comments: “How many months are you? When’s the due date? How nice!”

Mid-way through my pregnancy with my son, my now ex-husband and I were on a standing-room-only crowded bus in Washington D.C. and no one offered his or her seat to me as I fumed silently, worried if the added exertion would effect my pregnancy.

My son did not take up any space in my womb, and as I now realize, he did not take up much space in the world he was not planning to stay in for too long. The end of his story was symbolized in the total of four pairs of pants that my daughter and I retrieved from his meager belongings when we traveled to his final place of residence in Kentucky.

Who knows if I did suffer the consequences of not receiving any special attention or care while I was pregnant. All I know is that Marshall was born a preemie. Strangely, the doctors never came to an agreement on his actual due date. What we did know was that he was either one, two or three months early.

As I’ve written before, he was not only born a preemie, but also with a congenital heart defect, having to undergo two surgeries, the last one an open heart surgery before his first-year birthday. I won’t go into the details of the birth itself, but I was in the hospital, lying flat on my back for six days before he was born. After the ordeal, somehow one inch of his umbilical cord accompanied me home! I stashed it in my bedroom drawer and through the years I occasionally uncovered it to marvel at life’s divine handiwork.

One more month from today marks my son’s demise two years ago when I returned his umbilical cord as well as gave him the ashes of his beloved cat Cliff. They both were shut tight inside his coffin along with some of his life’s other mementos.

As fall marches along, memories drop like acorns and thump on my head, redirecting me from the day. When I first fell in love with literature at 16, I loved the character of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman because he was old and worn down from an unfulfilled life. It brought me great comfort and relief to know that leaves on a page confined his pain in a closed book. For me, I had uncovered my quest for the American Dream through Mr. Loman who lost faith in his American Dream, because that is when I decided to become a writer like Arthur Miller, sideswiping life’s hardships and, instead, capturing the anguish by using a pen and allowing the pen to dribble its tears. In other words, at 16, my sole objective was to become the master of my own universe.

In writing, this process works. In real life, thinking I have control over my life hurts, especially as it concerns my son. Taking me by surprise from day one as a preemie, my son never stopped surprising me with years of challenges and unexpected events. Through the years, as I worked on feature articles for travel and bridal markets and other feel-good subjects, and in my spare time on fictional stories, I glossed over the raw realities of real life and, instead, I wore my rose-colored glasses and viewed every situation like a cherry-on-top silly Hallmark movie scene. The first inkling of how horribly wrong things could actually be was when I started uncovering layers of a liar’s cake, frosted thick, that my now ex-husband started to create in 2010. I thought I got wise after that, but not wise enough. Nineteen years later on that awful November day at 1:51 p.m. two years ago, one month from now, I received the telephone call that left me bearing unspeakable pain and profound grief.

From that day forward, I realized my life full of dreams and aspirations and faith in good over evil stopped. Nothing I ever wanted would come to fruition, because I had lost one of the main characters, and you cannot fill a blank screen when the projector has died.

Everything I imagined never worked out. Instead of learning about successes, accomplishments, mental wellness and other how-to-control-your-life strategies, and themes that are directly opposite the Willy Loman stories, I wish I learned about the importance of being brave and facing the ugly side of life early on. I wish I learned that The Little Engine That Could sometimes Couldn’t. I wish I had learned and passed the lessons on to my children and helped them understand the cruel, cold realities of life will never disappear, much like the impact of mental health issues. I wish more people in life were brave and could teach us how to do it. I wish so many things.

In the “old days” I found my tribe in support groups. Now, fortunately, I find my tribe in a handful of supportive people in real life and in my blogging community. I have also gone full circle, finding another tribe in the characters I read in literature.

For instance, one of the main characters (Rill Foss/May Weathers Crandall) in Before We Were Yours by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Wingate hits the ball out of the park conveying how I feel about the consequence of expectations through Rill in the scene below that illustrates how the character finally reunites with her long-lost father and life that she has longed for ever since it was stolen from her. Wingate writes:

He gets up and heads for the door, grabbing his empty whiskey bottle on the way. A minute later, I hear him rowing off in the skiff.

I listen until he’s gone, and in the quiet that’s left after, I feel like the world is coming down around me. When I was at Mrs. Murphy’s and then the Seviers’ house, I thought if I could just get back to the Arcadia, that’d fix everything. I thought it’d fix me, but now I see I was fooling myself, just to keep on going, one day to the next.

Truth is, instead of fixing everything, the Arcadia made everything real. Camellia’s gone. Lark and Gabion are far away. Queenie’s buried in a pauper’s grave, and Briny’s heart went there with her. He’s lost his mind to whiskey, and he doesn’t want to come back.

Not even for me. Not even for Fern. We’re not enough.

My heart squeezes again.

Everything I wanted my life to be, it won’t be now. The path that brought me here is flooded over. There’s no going back.

Unlike old roofs, circumstances cannot be fixed no matter how much we are fixated on fixing them. There’s no going back. Going forward for me isn’t an option anymore. Moving along, learning to live my life under the category of pain management, scouting out the brave ones in life, that is the only way of faith I can bank on.

PS: HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my beautiful daughter this week who will turn 27 on the 21st. She is my everything and so much more! ❤️

Entering the Gates of 🌤️Heaven

Posted on August 10, 2021 by cattalespress under a spiritual life, Dealing with special occasions, Death, death of a child, disciplined non-conformist., Divorce, Dreams, Embrace Change, Faith, Faith Muscle, Faith-O-Meter, Family, Fourth Dimension, Friendships, Good over evil, Gratitude, grief, Grieving, Growing Up, Healing of Memories, heartbreak, hope, inspiration, inspirational messages, Living through death, Living through personal crisis, Loss of a Child, Lost youth, marriage, Meeting your needs, Mental Health, Mental Health, NEVER EVER GIVE UP!, one day at a time, Out of Order Death, Pandemic, Pipe Dreams, Positive Change, positive words of encouragement, Problem Solving, Relationships, Resurrection, Romance, scripture, seasons, Self-Care, self-value, Serendipity, Serene-diptious Moments, Sibling Death, Sing a new song, sorrow, Soul Food, special occasions, spirit-filled life, Struggles, Suicide, Suicide Loss Survivors, Therapy, trauma, Vulnerability

While checking into the Hilton in Long Island, New York, this past weekend with my daughter to attend her former college roommate’s wedding celebration, across the lobby, we witnessed a platonic embrace between a man and a woman that stopped us in our tracks and, for a few seconds, so did our world.

Nineteen years ago, shortly after my brother Mike died suddenly from a stroke, someone gave me a wallet-sized, inspirational card with an illustration of a beaming Jesus hugging a young woman. On the card it said, “Entering the Gates of Heaven.”

Whether you are a Christian or not, the image represents the essence of universal love. In real life, if you are fortunate to experience the magnitude of this type of love, it would equate to living a thousand lifetimes onboard a peace train of which the grandest theme is acceptance and harmony so powerful, it reaches and washes out your deepest, darkest, ugliest, most shameful crevices and allows the sunshine to warm, caress and heal every wound, scar and trauma.

Watching this young couple across the way at the hotel, I saw the young man’s face in the face of Jesus pictured on the prayer card, along with the woman’s windblown hair whose silhouette also resembled the image on it.

The woman could barely catch a breath in between her tearful cries, because of the emotional exhilaration, and it felt like the hotel walls would pop open from the joy. For a moment, superimposed on the man was my now deceased son and on the woman was my daughter. Obviously, I don’t know what my daughter’s take on the sight was, but what I saw was a reunion between the living and the dead unfold on a white marble floor of a Hilton hotel.

After the dramatic embrace, it turned out that my daughter knew both of the people, and, in fact, they were all part of the bridal party. The man had just flown in from Los Angeles, California, and the woman had flown in from Richmond, Virginia. The two people, who had embraced, once shared a semester abroad, along with the bride, in Germany. The reunion between them was a telltale sign of how a connection grows through the passage of time and memories shared, painted in easy, carefree, lofty and heavy highlights.

This is how the wedding weekend began. It was a postponed wedding due to COVID-19. A wedding I dreaded attending, knowing the pain points it would touch. Fortunately, I was prepared; warned by a dear friend about the “Mother and the Groom” wedding song. My defense tool was advice from another dear friend Michelle: In essence, I was there to be happier for the bride and groom than sadder for myself. The advice worked! (Thank you, Michelle!)

The wedding began with love between friends reuniting and then moved to a couple sealing their vow of love. One of the readings at the church was from Corinthians 13, 4-7, a favorite among ceremonies and, in fact, one of the readings at my wedding over 30 years ago, a now dissolved marriage. The famous last line states, Love Never Fails.

The way I interpret the passage is that love failed in our family, because many falsehoods prevented it from forming a pure, genuine love and, ultimately, our unit failed. I’m okay with that for today, because if I do not work in truth, there is no hope for love.

Anyway, the wedding crowd was composed mostly of young, brilliant adults who are changing the world in positive ways. During the reception, I never dreamed I would dance without guilt, but I did! I saw it as long overdue exercise, and it worked. I was, however, overpowered by some flashbacks sitting at the table during the reception, remembering how at the last wedding I attended in 2018, my son kept me glued to my cellphone for a good part of the wedding, despairing about his agonizing love life. The last wedding he ever attended was when he was seven. Deep in my pained gut, I knew he would never have an opportunity as an adult to attend a wedding function, which included his own. By the end of that night, half the male bridal party was commiserating with him outside on the patio on my cell phone. I laughed at the situation, feeling we were all working in the solution mode and on that night, it was true.

At this past weekend’s wedding as the night rolled on, when the traditional wedding songs began, I darted into the restroom until they ended. I can participate in life, but also allow for human limitations by guarding myself.

Looking back, the weekend moved along smoothly, a few hiccups, but no hacking or fevers. I’m left meditating and pondering upon genuine, unconditional love and different types of love. When I first married my husband, in my heart of hearts I believed it would last forever. I believed we would retire, rent an RV and take a year to drive to Alaska, adopting as many old, unwanted shelter poodles as we could along the way. In his own words, he wanted the same ending, but midway through the book, I turned the page, and he disappeared. Though he verbalized what he thought I wanted to hear, he failed to verbalize the truth and allow me to accept it and risk my not responding with unconditional love. In this manner, love failed. Fake love always fails.

From that point, the three of us that were left behind tried to survive best as we could. I will always harbor a tremendous amount of guilt today knowing and realizing the mistakes I made as a mother. One thing I always put my faith into, though, was the greatest thing that mattered to me: seeing both my children grow up as happy, thriving adults. I had faith with fabrication. My son held back nothing from me. Incapable of meeting him on his level, because I believed that the solution that worked for me would work for him, I spoke to him as if he were my twin. It was only a matter of time, when everything backfired and my dream shattered in half, with only one-half remaining, my daughter. I never thought I could be more grateful to have her. She is brilliant and compassionate, much like my son was and also gregarious, positive and confident – in that respect, a total opposite of my son. I am over-the-top grateful these days for her existence.

Now, for damn sure there won’t be any earth-stopping reunions in this life between my daughter and her brother or me and my son. I might dance for the sake of exercise, but not for the sake of pure joy. Those days are done and useless to think about like disposed tattered socks.

Fortunately, I have the mental capacity to still love a little and feel a big happy heart for others while throwing off the pitiful feelings for myself. In this way, I did receive a surprise bonus during our wedding weekend. The groom – quiet, introverted, kind, a good listener, considerate and compassionate – reminded me so much of my son. His image comforted me to the point of giving me such a sense of fulfillment that it felt like a spiritual reunion akin to a group hug teeming with lace, glitter and a gown’s trail long enough to almost reach heaven.