Saturday, September 12, 2015

How Deep is Your Naivete?

I am glad that my job keeps me so busy.  I am glad that my kids are old enough that I don't HAVE to cook for them, do their laundry, dress them, supervise them (for the most part)...and I can work so much because of that.

I need to keep my mind occupied.  When it is not, things in my life swirl around in my head like a kaleidoscope picture...the parts moving around and when it stops you get a different view.  And that is when the 'fun' begins.  I sometimes gain a better understanding of the parts...or just get a new 'aha' moment...or just a realization sets in.

I had some down time yesterday.  My case load was a bit light this week.  I worked 2-12 hour days on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Thursday I just had to send out enrollment verifications for some students, assign some to prinicipals, and fill in my spreadsheet for the school data gatherers.  Friday, I did not have much of anything to do until about 2:30 when she assigned me my next case load...and, boy, did she dump a pile on me!  That just means I am going to be VERY busy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

But the down time I had yesterday...left time for the pieces parts of my entire life to shift around and give me some realization.  Or maybe it was just give what I already kinda knew a bold face type with an underline.  

I grew up in a way that was so very perfect.  Well, not perfect, but pretty great.  My parents spoke intelligently without the use of profanity.  We lived in a quiet, well kept, neighborhood with plenty of kids to play with.  I was able to ride my bike around the neighborhood and there was an ice cream/mini golf place just a short bike ride away from home.  There was a corner convenience store (before they called them 'convenience store') with a meat counter (the guy that owned the place was a butcher) and a candy counter.   Mom would give us kids a nickel sometimes and we would think we were RICH.  We would high tail it to the candy counter and buy Bazooka bubble gum, or nickel nips, or wax lips, or twizzlers, etc.

Our church, that we attended every Sunday, was a few houses down the road.  I was shirt tail relation to most of the people that went there (one of my shirt tail cousins is now a pretty well known children's chapter book author...his stories based off of his life growing up on a farm in a small town).

When I was a teenager, my friends and I would ride our bikes down to the beach and stay for the day...after we finished our chores.  We lived in a town that was on the shore of Lake Erie.  It was great.  We would take our allowances and stop at the Red Barn for cokes and fries.  When we got driver's licenses, we would gather at the Dairy Queen or the Public Dock for frisbee and under age drinking...something that I didn't do...honestly, I didn't.

My parents worked hard and our house was one of the prettier ones in town.  They didn't have a lot of money but they could stretch a quarter.  They managed to save enough to buy a really nice motorhome.  Every couple of years, they would pack all of us in it and off we would go.  One summer we were gone for 3 weeks.  We traveled up to Mt. Rushmore, through Yellowstone Park, down the coast of California, stopped to visit with my Aunt Wilma and Uncle Starr (both died from cancer less than a decade later), toured through San Francisco, stopped at the Grand Canyon, Virginia City, Las Vegas, and a few other places before making it back to our little Ohio town.

Most of our trips were to Florida...the Keys, Miami, Orlando, etc.  My dad's parents were down there from November to April and my mom had a sister that lived there.  We would always take a day to park on the beach at Daytona.  You can't do that anymore, from what I understand.  It was GREAT!

I guess where I am going with this is to give you all some idea what my life was like.  Pretty drama-less and happy.

Then I met Evil Spawn.  His life was anything but drama-less and happy.  Being married to me the only drama he had was the drama he created.  And he is still creating it.

I have realized that I do not and will not understand how anyone would always drift towards having that kind of a mess of drama in their life.  But he seems to and had I known that that is a real 'thing' that people do, then I would not have married him.

I was, and to a certain point still am, naive.

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