“It’s a Little Much”

Ahhhhhh… too much has happened recently. Let me just say… all of that unsaid stuff has either healed me more or made me that much closer to stepping off the unseen edge.

I’m hoping it’s the former and a sign of healing.

So… uh, what’s “it”?

“It” is lately being really into things which are a little too much.

Like… this shirt:

It’s a little much, says my husband.

But I LOVE it.

It’s like half Jersey Shore and half Russian mafia.

I’m also suddenly wearing gigantic hoop earrings which further complete the look.

I didn’t even wear earrings a year ago.

Also, I recently replaced our outdoor white winter lights with GREEN lights:

so it now looks like a leprechaun exploded on the front of our house.

Our neighbor last night told me that I couldn’t get lost walking home… “Just follow the green.” And I looked up and it was harshly true.

So, yes, the lights are a bit much. But a punk child friend who is of course in a band told me today that she LOVES the green and begged me not to take it down.

So I think I’ll add pink lights.

Also, these are also my nails right now.

Yes, also a bit much.

So what is it, healing in Technicolor?Midlife crisis #7? Really just not giving a shit?

A month ago, I went home. And I haven’t really gone home in a long time. I stayed with my aunt and my cousin – the mentally ill brother of my beloved cousin Nicky who died from brain cancer – and my alive cousin who didn’t die and who also doesn’t take his meds asked me if I’d be his sister.

Nicky had asked me to watch out for his brother before he died and of course I was oh yes absolutely anything for you but I didn’t mean it.

My cousin is giant and he scared me for a time and he always beat up Nicky when we were kids.

But suddenly my heart opened and I found myself sitting at my aunt’s kitchen island last Christmas, eating some salmon egg thing she made in 10 seconds with my cousin and… I felt “home” for the first time in over 30 years.

Like home home…as if my mom never died or never get sick and just kept living and she would have been just like my aunt.

That was unexpected.

And my aunt and I drove around and socialized with her fancy and fun friends and drank white wine.

And my cousin or “giant brother whose politics I don’t at all agree with” and I made a big bonfire in her backyard and we laughed and listened to music and watched the fire and drank wine.

It was like connecting my childhood self to my present self in a way that hadn’t felt possible.

That same weekend I reconnected with my childhood friends for a wine walk.

That was also a bit much, emotionally and also visually.

Because this wine walk also had an outer space theme.

Of course.

So my aunt was excited for me as I dressed for this and loaned me dangly star earrings and this super cute black strategically worn jacket because I was going as a black hole.

Of course.

And… well, I haven’t had a woman older than me be excited about me going out… ever. My mom was sick by the time I was a teenager.

But she would have been excited like that.

My mom wasn’t Mom when I first tried on my wedding dress I had bought off eBay and my mother-in-law and her bitchy neighbor genuinely DID NOT NOTICE ME COME OUT OF THE BATHROOM IN A WEDDING DRESS.

So… to see an adult woman excited for my night out… it was disproportionately rather a big deal.

I then went out with my grade school friends in my hometown for a wine walk to stores which were unrecognizable as they were new to me while walking in crowds of aliens and space creatures.

And then I went to a funeral before I left home because that’s what home now means to me.

Loss and wine.

My childhood friend told me she hadn’t seen me in decades but she had to go to my mom’s funeral.

(Inside voice: “You were at my mom’s funeral?”)

But I was so traumatized at that stage Bozo the Clown could have attended and hugged me and said meaningful things to and I would not have retained it.

So for the first time, or perhaps the second time, I said with my outside voice that her attending my mom’s funeral meant the world.

Because it did.

So the 5 days there were a little much but it was also really good in some way I couldn’t calculate.

And recently a friend from Madison came and stayed with us and unearthed these old friends from Madison who apparently live in Milwaukee and… that was surreal. We sat in my Halloween room and drank beer and listened to music on our back deck under our white lights and argued about music.

So that also felt like connecting a past part of me to my present self.

SO maybe I’m a more coherent, whole self, and this whole self simply prefers things to be A LITTLE MUCH.

Or maybe I’m just appropriately evolving with the world.

And there was another funeral last weekend as some of us don’t and can’t keep going around and around with the earth.

This leads me to ask… have you stopped to consider how crazy the news is now? And how you have to stop to think about it as the crazy is so normal now?

For example:

But we’ve definitely made a turn somewhere. Beyond the wars, natural disasters, violence and horrors people commit, there is CRAZY news.

It’s all a little much.

I think this as I work long hours as we try to help the kids of Milwaukee

and I feel that, while it’s all a little much, we have to be too much too because…

And instead of laying down and giving up…

We just have to dig deep and be too much too.

In other news, June Carter Cash the traumatized cemetery dog is now mimicking Baezy’s protection stance so she sits next me and looks tough.

Evolution is necessary if we want to survive.

Or, if we don’t have the gas to evolve, just don’t evolve and go live in the woods.

Or at least that’s my plan.

Because it takes a lot of energy to be too much and sometimes you just can’t get the ladder out and climb up in the rain to drape pink lights over your front yard birch tree to complement the green lights.

Because it takes a lot of energy to do such things, even if you feel compelled.

So… woods or ladders in the rain, we all have to figure out what we need to do to survive in a way that feels appropriate to us.

With wine.

🖤