Running Away To Return

Hey there!

You have most probably noticed already, that, for some time, I have pretty much neglected this and other places of communication with my tribe. I went really deep down after intense times.

And words fail me to express, how much I appreciate you still being here waiting for me to return.

And I'm doing so with another guest post, this time - by Suzannah Kolbeck, as I couldn't express better, what was and is happening in my life, although I am older and my ex-husband hasn't died.

Even the title of her post fits perfectly, don't you think? :)

So, here is the first part of Suzannah's post:

The women in my family are stubborn.

All of us.

Me, too.

We blame it on the men and the children in our lives, but we are stubborn, headstrong and willful. These traits can be gussied up as determined and persistent, but sometimes it's just a plain old PITA to be around us.

How do I know this? A) I am a woman in my family, and B) we are spending a week with my mother and grandmother in Pennsylvania. Everyone has a "system" in this house, and when they collide, things happen. Like planets smashing into each other, or like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and started the Ice Age. That bad, sometimes.

I have realized that one of the best ways to get people to like you (if you're into that sort of thing) is to let them teach you something, let them be the expert. Then they feel heard and smart and listened to.

You can't fake this, though, unless you are working with someone who is really not very smart or particularly worthy of being listened to (which brings up another trait of the women in my family: judgmental. But I digress.).

But since we know everything (the women in my family), it is hard to accomplish this whole business of being liked. Which is cool until you find yourself down a husband in your early 40s, living in a state that you despise with very little desire to do much of anything.

And it's still cool until you realize that many of the things you thought you knew about yourself were wrong, and all of the smart things you poured into your brain in your 40+ years on the planet couldn't quite prepare you for the loss.

And then you had to admit you were wrong about a TON of stuff, sometimes in a very public way, and then you had to go ahead and take a very deep accounting of all the ways you screwed up in your relationship with no way to make amends for it.

Stay tuned for the second part of Suzannah's post and visit her blog in the mean time.