Vacation Day 6: I Don’t Wanna Go Home!

Morning

I am going to call the cabin's owner today and see if I can extend my vacation a day. I don’t want to go home. And it was such a bear to haul everything up; I may as well enjoy it one more day. I love this place. I love the silence. No sirens. No cars. No exhaust. No chemtrails. No other people’s energy. I could really get used to this. I don’t miss the internet. All I have is the radio and my books. That is enough. I am beyond content and at peace.

Even the pets are feeling more at home.

I love waking up to the sun streaming in the windows.

I love the sound of the river.

I love watching the chipmunks down the sunflower seeds, and I love how my kitty watches ‘em too.

I love how relaxed Loverboy is as he lounges on our bed and stares out the sliding glass doors.

I want to live in a place like this.

Later: Loverboy gets his ‘city’ fix

Loverboy and I returned about 45 minutes ago from an excursion to Grand Marais. A typical tourist town, but it was what Loverboy needed. He couldn’t walk half a block without getting cooed over and petted. People were coming out of souvenir shops to ask about him. My dog is an extrovert – he gets his energy from others. He found a lovely bit of shaded lawn to lie on in the middle of town. He rested there for a quite awhile, it was his first bit of lawn in five days. He was allowed into a junk-crafts shop where he got treats from the owners, and we visited WTIP where he got even more treats and pets.

I made him walk on the Army Corps of Engineers structure that extends along the shoreline and follows rocky outcroppings. This he was not so thrilled about. I think he has pretty much had enough of nature.

We also stopped along a beach on the way up, where we met a family and their darling Olde English Bulldogge.  Loverboy was not so thrilled about her.

I overhead someone share the price of a studio apartment on the lake: $149 a night! Yikes! I would love to stay on the Lake, but $149 a night is wildly expensive.

I am tired and probably need a good nap. Tomorrow, I do nothing in preparation for my return home.

Dreaming is free

Something has been eating at me the entire vacation and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I guess it’s the loneliness. Though, I wanted to be alone. It’s just that I don’t really have a family and when I see families together, it makes the aloneness that much more poignant.

I’ve never had a family. Not a real one. Not one I felt at home with. I always felt like the odd one out. Like some alien dropped me there by accident. And it was such a mess, and I cannot think of any happy childhood memories. Wait. There is one: I would wait up for my brother and sister to come home from their jobs at the local restaurant. They were teenagers then, I was 6 or 7. I would stay up ‘til 3:30 a.m. and then we would sing each other the Lawrence Welk song, “Goodnight, sleep tight and pleasant dreams to you…here’s a wish and prayer that all your dreams come true…and now ‘til we meet again, adios, au revoir, aufweidersehn. Good night!”

I got to do whatever I wanted because no one was paying attention. But I disciplined myself because I knew if I didn’t, I would always be stuck in that awful little town.

It hurts sometimes to see families having a good time together, I feel like I’ve missed out on so much and I’ve had to try so hard to even carry on and find joy.

Once my Mom dies, there will be no one at all. I sometimes wonder if I have a different father because I don’t look at all like my brother and sister.  And I never, ever connected with anyone in my extended family, although I guess I was a favorite of my mom’s father – but he was dead by the time I reached 4.  My Mom loved going back to her mother’s place in Canada, she had a sense of roots, no matter how screwy they were, she was close to her brother, crazy, raging alcoholic that he was. Her sister, too, raging alcoholic that she was.  I have no roots and I have no sense of belonging except with my cat and dog.

My upbringing, or lack of it, has made it impossible for me to build relationships, especially with men, and if I try, they’re usually narcissists/addicts or a nasty combination of both. Women are all about male companionship and it gets weary to be someone to amuse them until the get their boyfriend, or being used to achieve those ends. So I choose the company of my pets. But it has left me feeling adrift in this world.

The lone daisy growing out of rocks is a metaphor for my life.

I wish I had a sense of family and love. I wish I didn’t have to walk this path alone. I wish I had someone to share this with who really cared about me. I wish I was lovable.

I see what I see, I know what I know, per Ann Wilson Schaef’s excellent book, When Society Becomes an Addict. Our society has evolved into one big addiction, whether it’s addiction to money, sex, relationships, work, or drugs. And when you live in an addictive household, everyone knows that everything is a lie, so you have to find the truth within the lie. And people who grow up in addiction, and it’s the rare person who doesn’t, find it very challenging to even know the truth of themselves. For instance, typically, when something upsets me, it takes me 48 hours to process it until I understand what it is in particular I found upsetting and the nature of that upset. All I know is I feel bad. This is typical for children of addiction.

That said, if I was lovable, it would be easier for me to connect with people and I would have my own family and deeper friendships. As it is, I see what I see.

Yet, somehow, I manage. Yet somehow, I do attain for myself opportunities to experience and enjoy life.

I had a good cry which I needed, my ear was aching and it’s not anymore. Crying releases toxins. All I can do is the best I can with the rest of my life. That means first and foremost, losing weight. Because I see what I see and I know what I know. Once I lose weight, the other pieces of what I desire will fall into place more easily.

This is how I want my life to look this time next year:

·         I am 55 pounds lighter.

·         I have a wonderful, loving, smart, capable, financially stable life partner who really, really adores me, Loverboy and Kitty.

·         I have $1,500 more a month disposable income.

·         I have close friends who love me. I have a real sense of family.

·         I get to stay for two weeks, or more, in a beautiful chateau on Lake Superior that accepts both Kitties and Doggies.

Dreaming is free said Blondie.

Later still: To stay or not to stay

Kitty is looking out the window, enthralled with the chipmunks who, in the last three hours, have managed to make away with two pounds of sunflower seeds. Loverboy is snoozing at the edge of the bed. I am grateful for this place. Still deciding whether I want to stay an extra day.  I don’t know if I want to pay the extra $60.

Even later: A visitor

Loverboy just went into a barking frenzy, then I spied a little masked face peaking its head over my deck: a raccoon. I brought in the birdseed.  I don’t mind chipmunks, but raccoons are an entirely different story and I don’t want them tangling with Loverboy or Kitty. I think the raccoon still had good eating considering I left about a half a bag on the deck.