Everything That Glitters

Sometimes you just want to run away. Be someone else, just for a little while. Forget everything and collect yourself and put your dreams all back in the basket that is your heart. When I feel that way and then look this song up it brings me to a good, healthy cry. I could never physically leave my kids.  Often, I wonder why my mom chose to leave me. I believe she had a life other than the one we appeared to have. I'll always believe that. One morning, she dropped me off at her sister's house and just never came back. She was 28. I was 7, and it was a hot August night when her sister broke the news to me. Grandpa and Grandma came to pick me up. I wanted to know so much as I leaned back against my Grandma and looked up at the dark Heavens. Was she up there somewhere? I cannot even imagine the pain my grandmother felt from then on. I slept with my Aunt Betsy that night, too.    She told me the story of Billy Goat's Gruff and I could hear the pain in her voice as she did. I was broken from that day forward. I have always had questions. Nobody has ever bothered to detail out to me the truth. It's as if I have a jigsaw puzzle and none of the pieces fit perfectly, not really. You try and try, and they just don't make sense together. It could very well be that I just have never been very good at puzzles...and this is the biggest puzzle I have yet to encounter in my entire four decades.  The pieces still fail to fit together.  So, this song is for her. A showy high life doesn't make a happy life. For everything you win, there is something lost. We are none of us ever exempt from our own tangled webs. Silken, but messy and unforgiving. Left with our hearts in our hands, held out for the world to see our pain, we wait for that perfect mending but it never comes. We become set in our ways, prisoners of our own compulsions, forever overcompensating. Left outside feeling guilty for nothing and for everything all at the same damned, confusing time.

​Oh well. Life is funny like that, I suppose. It is what it is, and it all happens for a reason and a timing we have no earthly control over. I miss my mother so, so much and looking back at my life I just cringe at all my mistakes and my flaws and then in the next breath I am so very grateful to be able to wake up to a new day tomorrow. A chance to make things right again. I know that she would have wanted that for me