Gray/Grey Skies

It's a quiet Sunday morning and looking out my window I can see the cloudy overcast sky. I am skipping church (please forgive me Lord) and there is a silence to the morning that is both peaceful and indulgent. Being a single mom with a very uninvolved ex is weird... I'm not often alone. Since I shoulder all the responsibility for the house and kids I find myself constantly on the run, being some place, doing something and so these quiet times are few and far between. At the same time though, with all the movement and responsibility, I am alone... I am lonely... up there, in my head. Moments like now those two states converge, alone and lonely, and it's an odd feeling... sometimes I think I should just go back to bed, sometimes I think I should get busy and distract myself, and then sometimes I think I should just confront it... feel it and follow it through. I'm going to have moments like this a few more times over the next five weeks or so... was this a bad time to draw out the time in between therapy sessions I wonder?

I think often of a line from the tv show Designing Women - remember the show? It was the episode where Charlene was giving birth and there was a woman in the hospital dying - she'd lived 100 years and it was her time and she was ready, and all the characters (well, minus Charlene) were gathered around her bed as she recounted her long life... imparting advice to them as they listened through love and tears and Miss Minnie quotes her pappa as she says, "We ain't what we should be, we ain't what we gonna be, but at least we ain't what we was." I try to remember that line when I feel like this... I'm not what I was, not where I was, and even if I were to be given the opportunity to go back to what I did have, I wouldn't, I couldn't, because I'm so much a better person now than before... I don't have what I want, don't have, God willing, what I will have, but at least now, at this moment in my life, I have what is real and authentic, even if I only have myself - and perhaps one day I can share that with someone else... without fear... someone who will do the same.

My artist friend has said to me more than once lately, "Don't settle Belle." But that's scary really - ya know? Don't settle... because not settling implies that you may have to give up, do without, manage alone... and that is exactly the one thing I struggle with the most. I don't want to settle - I truly don't. I've already done that... experienced it, fought it, tried to give into it, finally let it go. It's not about "holding out for a hero" or finding someone to fix it... it's about sharing and connecting in ways that aren't easily explained or understood. It's not about checking off a laundry list of things to do or say or offer... it's just a state of being I think, giving and taking and being ok with that... one thing I do know, one thing I'm most certain of, if/when I am blessed enough to find it I won't take it for granted.

The rain has begun. It's time to get busy... belly dancing begins in two hours - our last class! And so... off I go... this song has been stuck in my head... I love the chorus sampled from Imogen Heap:

Mmmm whatcha say, Mmm that you only meant well?
Well of course you did
Mmmm whatcha say, Mmmm that it's all for the best?
Of course it is
Mmmm whatcha say, Mmm that you only meant well?
Well of course you did
Mmmm whatcha say,
Wha- wha- wha- wha- what did she say

Seems the perfect thing to say under certain circumstances...