Atkins Diet be damned!  I’m immersing myself in a diet of carbs and champagne!

I am glad I put a funny photo up today since I am now feeling teary and emotional after reading everyone’s comments from yesterday’s post.  It is in my nature to always try to reach farther, dig deeper and try harder when I am struggling, but I sometimes feel like this just gets me into trouble.  The last two posts I have written have been kind of nerve-wracking because I am exposing so much and being so honest.  I have read other people’s blog entries in which they are sharing a part of themselves with abandon and not everyone responds with kindness.  I appreciate the compassion I have been given this week by so many people, and because of this I continue to feel secure on this path of acceptance, gratitude and, yes, confusion.  It is still there, but it has become smaller.  There are some things I will never understand.  So what?  Do I really need to give these unanswered questions so much power?

The truth is that I feel supremely blessed to be in the tribe that I’m in.  For me, whether the people I share my life with are my "real" family or my chosen family is probably not particularly relevant.  They are people in my life, people I am connected to for all kinds of different reasons.  The truth is that I have learned something from all of them over the years, and even if it is a situation where I look at someone else and say, "That is what I do not want to be", that is a good lesson to learn.  It does not come from a place of judgement or criticism, but of trying to figure out the kind of person I want to be, the best way to live a life I feel proud of.

I am hardly perfect (HA!  I laugh hysterically at the notion!), but in certain quiet moments I find myself humming the tune from "The Sound of Music" with the lyrics, "…but somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good." Life is never static.  I look at my life so far – with its 33 different homes, moving multiple times a year sometimes, a twisty career path, upheavals and change, change, change, and I wonder why the hell I’m not an absolute pro at going with the flow.  I wonder why I still get caught up in fretting about the details, resisting change and wishing for my life to settle down or have more familial structure, whatever that means.  This is simply not my life.  Most of the time I handle things pretty well, but there are plenty of times when I would give anything to be able to take a pill that would give me all the delicate grace and aplomb I desire in challenging situtations.  But there is no such pill, so I have had plenty of moments where I fell flat on my face and acted quite ungracefully.  Everytime this has happened I have looked up and found a hand ready to pull me up and open arms ready to give me a hug, and that is when I hum that tune.  I’m so terribly flawed, but I still have so much love in my life, so what did I do in my childhood?  It must have been something really good.