The First Snow

This evening I was rushing around doing my many preparations for Thanksgiving. I was cranky as I moved through each task, conquering things one by one. My daughter has been quite ill with the latest bug and so was no help, and my youngest was determined to aggravate me as much as possible, complete with locking me out of the house in bare feet.

The sweet potatoes were done, the pie baked, the living room rugs steamed and the laundry pretty much caught up. As I stood in the kitchen chopping things for the stuffing, my personal favorite, I looked out on the deck. There were snowflakes falling quietly in the early darkness of winter. With it came a peace that spread over the house, a feeling that everything would be ok. Things started to fall into place after that and I looked out like a child in wonder at the first snow of the season. I realized what precious time I had as I cooked, talking to my son about this and that, sharing some time together in the warmth of the kitchen.

It’s amazing just when I needed it so badly, that the quiet whispers of the snow found me and with each beautiful snowflake carried all that I needed to hear. I think tonight, when the house is quiet, I might pull a chair out onto the deck and wrapped in warm blankets, sit quietly if just for a moment, under this beautiful sky.

A Road Once Traveled

Its funny how things come up letting you know you haven’t quite worked through things as well as you thought. Yesterday as I read through blogs on my community site, there was yet another post from a member highlighting personal and sensitive information about her son’s girlfriend. I told myself to walk away, as I knew the post would upset me as the previous ones had. As it turns out I didn’t walk away but responded as calmly as I could.

We can’t change others, nor can we control what they post. I kept telling myself that yesterday as I read her continued saga. It seems her son and his girlfriend of four months found out they were pregnant. Both are very young, twenty and twenty two, and the girlfriend has chosen not to continue the pregnancy. The son fueled by his mother, who wants to be a grandmother, decided he wanted this baby. That’s a lovely thought but this is a boy too immature to stand by the girlfriend in her time of need. He told his mother he didn’t know if he could love her anymore, and he took this private, sensitive information spreading it to every family member he could think of. His mother stood behind him in all of this, and in fact, pushed him to guilt this girl and makes a bad situation even more difficult for her. While I knew there was nothing I could do, I found myself unable to sit quietly by and watch her splatter the blog with something that should not have been her business in the first place. She was not happy with my comments though they were not even close to what I wanted to say. She felt I was personalizing it and she was right.

Fifteen years ago I walked the road this girl is on and it was a terrible journey, one that almost swallowed me. This is something I have never shared with another soul on this earth save two. One was the girl who drove me to the clinic and the other was the father. I still remember the clinic, the room, the people in that room and every detail of the experience. I had no support of any kind and when I came home, the father, who was a grown man, called me to see if it was done. When I told him it was done his response was “great!” He then chose to ignore me for the remainder of the weekend, leaving me alone to deal with the emotions of the situation.

As I read the details of this girl and know what she faces, it brought it all back to me. While I should probably step away from that blog, I feel I have to be there for her, at least in a far off way. This part of my past has faded to a little place deep inside of me. It’s something that will never be completely gone from my heart, but for the first time I’m able to talk about it outside the pages of a private journal and that’s another step forward on my journey.