The Little Man Turns 4

My little man turns 4 tomorrow.   He proves not only that time flies, but that my heart can walk outside of my body.  He changed my life the moment we decided we were going to try to have a baby, and he is still changing it in the most beautiful way possible. 

Happy birthday, Chayce – we love you very much!

Photos from Saturday:

No Looking Back

I am almost 32 and my closest friends are the ones that I’ve known from 23 years ago when I was in 5^th grade, 18 years ago when I was in high school, 15 years ago when I was in college, and a handful from 11 years ago when we moved here in Canada from the Philippines.  I’m not saying I didn’t make new friends along the way, or that I am not open to creating new friendships, but there’s something about old friends that’s just so much sweeter than new ones.  I’ve always been a believer that “friends are family you choose for yourself” and it saddens me to think that I’ve had to chop down that “family tree” once.  It’s even sadder that I’ve had to do it in my mid-20s, when people were supposed to have let go of the kind of mentality similar to that of a high school cheerleader that bullies the nerd, or that of the popular girls clawing at each other’s throats on their quest to be even more popular.  However, no matter how heartbreaking it is to sever ties with someone who has held your hair away from your face while you puke your guts out after a night of drinking and karaoke, or held your hand while you were crying over a fight with your boyfriend, you just have to do it.  When the person who told you that you were going to be the godmother of her next child becomes the person who told your closest friends that you said something awful about them when in reality, she was the one who said the ugly words, it’s time to take the axe out and chop her out of your life.  As hackers of life Marc and Angel said, “Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.”

I know that time heals wounds, yaddi, yadda, yadda, but I wish they’d also said that those wounds become scars.  Some of them fade over time; when you can barely notice them anymore, you kind of forget where, when and how they happened, or who caused them in the first place.  They would be the kind of experience that you know you’ve gone through, but can’t remember the specifics, because they’re not significant.  On the other hand, some of those scars are ugly and continue to be painful reminders, making you feel like there’s always something missing, just like atrophic scars leave the skin looking like there’s a hole on it.  These are the kind of scars that hold you back.

The person who caused this ugly scar is no longer a part of my life.  I forgave her not because she’s worthy of being forgiven, but because I deserve (and need) peace of mind.  I read somewhere that the Aramaic word for “forgive” literally translates to “untie,” and that’s exactly what I did.  It wasn’t easy, though, because she was not a stranger.  She wasn’t just a random passerby in my life; our sharing went from clothes to dreams, conversations from trivial to profound, and acceptance from taste in music to the kind of person we were at our worst.  Or so I thought.  Moving on from the unpleasant experience was like pulling teeth.  After the initial shock of her betrayal wore off, hurt gave way to anger.  I wanted to tell everyone what she did because her lies put me in such a bad spot with people that I care about.  I didn’t want the people she lied to mistaking my silence for guilt, so for a while, I told the story of how I was badly hurt and disgustingly wronged.  I realized later on that I wasn’t doing myself, or the people around me, any favor.  Rehashing the events was only holding me back from moving on, so I took a deep breath – several hundred deep breaths as a matter of fact – and released.    

I’ve reflected over the problem for a time before I maneuvered my car into a different road.  I got lost several times; I made the mistake of refocusing on the depressive part of the incident rather than looking at the big picture and how it strengthened me, and berated myself over my inability to get over it quickly.  I learned how to be kinder to myself, though.  I started to understand that how I felt toward her does not affect her.  At all.  She’s gone on with her life as if she didn’t try to turn my friends against me without giving it another thought.  I had to do the same. 

It’s been over 5 years.  I see her around, and it’s amazing how her presence no longer brings the mild discomfort of wanting to strangle some(body)thing.  The words we’ve exchanged so far have not gone beyond what one might talk to a new acquaintance about.  She once tried to bring up what happened, but her apology seemed to me as if she was saying, “sorry you found out I lied” instead of “sorry I lied.”  I’m sure she finds no joy in harming others, but she scares me.  As much as I hate to admit it, there’s still something in her that activates my “tummy voices.” 

I look back into it, and while I still can’t fathom how something like that could happen to two people who used to seem like they were going to be friends until their children have children, it no longer affects me.  The scar is still here.  I see it during times when I find myself wanting to pull back from the people that I consider true friends because of this fear that something like that would happen again, and I see it when paranoia creeps in and I feel like the people I’m supposed to trust are still talking behind my back about what happened, and are treating me based on the lies they’ve heard from that ex-friend.  But I quickly recover, and those feelings of doubt never get to govern my actions. 

The blessings that I silently send her way have evolved from empty and contrived to non-sarcastic, genuine ones.  I no longer wish for the “good Lord to take her away,” but wish her all the best.  The positivity I give off is returned to me several times over, and it makes life better. 

A lot better.

Ending Procrastination...Later

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions mainly because the things that I promise to do on so many firsts of January get broken by the 10th at the latest.  I won’t beat myself up over past resolutions that stopped at the fun I had listing them down, but I know that certain life changes are in order.  Since I can’t go back to my beginnings – those days when I was pretty sure I was going to change for the better – that were screwed up by my superb ability to procrastinate, I’m just going to try to create a new ending.  I think fresh starts are overrated.  T.S. Eliot said, “What we call the beginning is often the end.  And to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from.” 

So here’s to ending procrastination. 

I’m going to have to end the habit of following “I must do this” with “but it doesn’t have to be now.”  Yes, there’s a lot to be done, but not too much to not have time to accomplish it all.  In order for me to stop feeling like I’m drowning in a sea of things to do, I must stop thriving on deadline-induced panics. 

I need to stop overwhelming myself by setting unrealistic goals.  It would be awesome to write down “clean the house” on my list of to-dos and cross it out once it’s done, but the truth is, if you run a home day care and your own four-year old is with you 24/7, that item will perpetually be number one on your list.  Because I want to cross that out at some point in THIS lifetime, and I want to get rid of this general feeling of irritation when I see something I should’ve done yesterday but didn’t because my subconscious automatically listed off reasons it would be better done “tomorrow,” I am learning to break down the chores, and list them off in the most practical way possible.  It’s all about baby steps.  I can’t just “donate Chayce’s old toys” when I can’t even see the floor of his room, or tell whether the orange lump inside Mr. Potato Head is dried up Play-Doh or an extremely old Cheetos puff.  I need to first separate the toys he actually plays with from the ones he thought he would play with forever at the time he was convincing me to buy it, but forgot all about it exactly 2 hours after.  Similarly, I can’t just “lose 50 lbs in X months” without first realizing that I need to stop taking my body for granted.  Before I commit myself to an everyday workout routine, I need to take Coca-Cola and chocolates off my list of basic food groups.  Trying to lose a dress size (or two) while still consuming an awful large amount of processed food produced from the seed of the tropical cacao tree chased down by carbonated soft drink is like taking 3 steps back and gaining 5 lbs for each step forward. 

Procrastination is also the reason why this blog has been neglected.  I made a promise before to write every single day no matter how trivial and mundane my day was.  Andy Warhol didn’t care that his entry for March 11, 1978 is “I had a lot of dates but decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.”  I said to myself that I could do that and write about how I decided to pluck my eyebrows after I looked in the mirror and thought for a second that I saw Frida Kahlo looking back at me.   Of course Andy Warhol more than made up for that boring entry by having the rest of his diary laden with names like Liz Taylor and Muhammad Ali, while I have nothing else.  So instead of feeling like a failure, I’ve broken down the writing “chore” and vowed to just write every Monday, hence, the name change. 

So here I am again in another attempt to stop procrastinating and start writing regularly.  I know it takes great willpower, but I’m starting small.   As I’ve said, it’s all about baby steps.  ‘til next week!