Tuesday: Red Headed Step Child

The Gathering

I really did not know how to respond when I received my invitation to join my father’s children for a reunion halfway across the country. It is hard to say my brothers and sister because these were children my father had before he married my mother.

It is not that they are not nice people, I just don’t really know them very well. My father was close to sixty when he married my mother. It is funny when I was a child he seemed so old and now I am older than he was when I was born. My mother and father had both lost their spouses and were left with children to raise. He had ten and she had three. So this marriage brought my mother into a household where she was the outsider and sometimes to some of my siblings the evil step mother. After two years, my mother became pregnant with me. Both my mother and father were shocked by the realization that another child was going to expand this already large family.

By the time I was eleven and my father died, all of my 13 half-brothers and half-sisters had grown and left home. Mother and I were left with each other as most of them were busy raising their own families. All of my parent’s children were kind enough to me but there was little we had in common. In many ways they were as unknown to me as a casual friend from church that was 10 or 20 years older than me so you can understand my concern about going to this gathering of strangers. What would we talk about? What would we have in common? Other than genetics I didn’t have a clue about who they really were except for stories told to me by my mother and those were not always the most pleasant of stories.

Imagine my shock when I arrived at the airport in Oklahoma and joined the only surviving children of my father only to be met by my brother John and his chauffeur driving a Rolls Royce. Well the times they had changed from when I was growing up where after Dad died Mom and I survived on her small salary of 15 dollars a week as a housekeeper or live-in nurse. As we arrived at my brother’s house he was the one with the housekeeper now. It is a funny thing, but I almost could relate more to the housekeeper instead of these strangers who carried the blood line as I.

I know that my brother John had arranged this gathering because he and the other two were reaching a time when death was growing closer just because of their age. It was strange to be the baby again in the midst of this group who seemed very close to each other with shared memories that I knew little about. As a my inner child peeked out from inside my sixty-year old body, I must admit I had fun but I knew this gathering was not a closeness but a realization of my alienation that I had felt all of my life.

As I look back at this moment in time, I realize that as a small child I loved to perform because all these grown ups that were my brothers and sisters would applaud and smile when I was clever and funny. I came to crave that attention and need the approval that was often fleeting. As I write this a great sadness fills my heart as I realize I was just part of a show put on so they could do their closure on their lives. I remember how Mother and I were always considered not really part of their family. I realized that while I was called sister that I was not really part of the “real” family. There is a saying here in the south about not fitting quite fitting in. When someone just isn’t part of the group or the family, he or she is described as: “The red-headed step child.” Maybe I will dye my hair today so I more reflect how I feel. Wonder how I would look as a red head rather than a blonde?

Monday: Trash or Treasure

The Gingerbread House

I don’t know why but there is something inherently sad to me about thinking about gingerbread houses. I don’t know if it is because the look god-awful tacky or I can’t imagine putting that much work into something that should be delicious but gets so dirty that it is basically inedible.

I think maybe it is because that my mother had a gingerbread house that someone had made for her and each year she would get out this box where she preserved her little decorated house with plastic wrap and place it on her TV in a place of pride to celebrate the holiday season. After a few years the icing really was smashed and the gumdrops looked like they had fallen from the sky in an attack of the sugar plum faeries and just went splat. I don’t know what crazy relative made this house for her but Mom saved it.

But Mom saved everything. She would wash off aluminum foil and dry it and use it again. She would wash out zip-lock bags and turn them upside down on a bottle and save them to use again. She would wash out plastic tubs that were filled with everything from butter to cottage cheese to sour cream and carefully clean the lids and let them dry so she would be able to use them again. Clothes that were to worn to wear were cut up and used as dust rags. She had a ball made of rubber bands that she had carefully constructed over the years. She did not buy paper towels but dutifully scrubbed and cleaned with old rags that were bleached to a thinness that made them as soft as a baby’s blanket. My Mom didn’t believe in a disposable world but that gingerbread house definitely should have been tossed in the trash or gone to compost heap. Oh, Mom never threw out food either. It was either reheated to mush, frozen and saved for a hungry day or put on the compost heap.

In many ways I admire the world that my mother was trying to save. A world that did not waste and throw away whether it was a piece of tin foil or a person. Maybe we need to rethink our world of throw away everything from plates where we serve our food or a shoe that has a run down heal that you can’t even find someone to repair.

Mom used to say: A woman can throw out more with a teaspoon than a man can bring in with a shovel. In many ways I think she was so correct, we do not destroy our world, our planet, our finances with the big stuff. We do it as we nickle and dime ourselves into poverty and insecurity.

Well I guess I better go put that soup that was left over from supper in those plastic butter tubs and put them in the freezer. They will be delicious when the winter snows keep me from sending Mark out to the grocery.

You think I should put Mom’s Gingerbread House out on the compost pile?

Thursday: Family Recipe

Preparing a roast in the appropriate way has always been a family tradition passed down from my grandmother.




I remember Sunday dinners with roast beef, potatoes, carrots and onions as a regular feature on the menu. Mom would always serve delicious green beans cooked with a ham hock and home made biscuits. Usually jam was there that she had preserved during the harvest season. Salads could very but often it would be green jello with chopped up apples and celery served with a dollop of mayonnaise. We did not usually have desert because that special treat was saved for Sunday evening where everyone would gather together after church to fix something neat like fudge or peanut butter and potato candy.




I really never thought much about Sunday dinner but always looked forward to it. So I carried on the tradition from my childhood to my new family.



Our first Sunday dinner, I took the roast and prepared it to go into the baking dish. I carefully cut off both ends and placed the roast in the pan with the end tucked neatly one on each side just as my mother had done. I peeled the potatoes and scraped the carrots and neatly placed them in an array of bright color with onions diced and sprinkled for flavor. Add a couple of cups of water, sprinkle on some salt and pepper and in the oven to bake.



My new husband asked me: Why do you cut the ends off the roast? I said, I don't know. That is the way you cook a roast. It is the way my mother always did it and that is the way her mother always did it. It is the way you cook a roast.



A few weeks later he and I went to Mom's for Sunday dinner. Of course, she served roast beef. Not one to be silent, my husband asked her: Why do you cut the ends off the roast? She said, I don't know. That is the way you cook a roast. It is the way my mother always did it and that is the way her mother always did it. It is the way you cook a roast.



At Thanksgiving, Grandmother joined the family for dinner. My husband asked her how she cooked a roast. She explained and he said: Why do you cut the ends off the roast? She said, I don't know. That is the way you cook a roast. It is the way my mother always did it and that is the way her mother always did it. It is the way you cook a roast.



Now my husband is a Virgo and a very logical person and he knew that there either was a good reason for cooking a roast this way but for the life of him he could not figure it out. Could it be that placing the ends on the sides kept the temperature more even? Could it be that by cutting off the ends and leaving the exposed ends one got a cleaner heat? None of that was logical. And if something doesn't sound logical to him, he works that question like a dog working a bone.



After about six months of marriage, we planned a trip to go see my great grandmother who lived in a retirement village in Florida. My husband was excited to visit this woman and see if he could find the answer to his puzzle. As we sat down to Sunday dinner with Ya Ya, He commented on how her roast was the best he had ever tasted. He asked her finally, why do you cut the ends off the roast. She just sat back and broke out laughing. She laughed so hard tears were trickling down her face.



Well, she said, when my dear departed David and I first got married we were pretty poor. And when we could afford to buy a roast for Sunday dinner, it was a real treat. However, I couldn't afford to buy a roasting pan so I had to cut off the ends and tuck them on the side to fit in a square cake pan. I got in the habit of doing it. And I just kept doing it.



The moral to this story is that every family has a recipe to remember happy times. Sometimes it is as simple as a ritual to cook a roast or choosing what sides to serve at a special dinner. Family recipes are comfort food that often cannot be explained except in the feelings that we have when we have them.





Myriam Maytorena, M.Ed.
http://myriamsmuse.blogspot.com/
http://manifestreality.com/
http://asknow.com/
You are the Miracle.
“It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.” - C.W. Leadbeater

Wednesday: Mourning Moon Sanctuary

There is a place where I go where no one can find me. When the world is tossing life around like an autumn leave on a rising wind, I can discover my sanctuary.



Demons and dragons are more than fantasy. They are the thoughts that float through dreams and memories calling me to forget that I am safe and all is all right at least in that little speck of the universe that I call my sanctuary.



The sound of the wind howling at the full moon outside my window reminds me that winter is upon me. Not the season of the year but the season of my life. Yet I am snug, warm and protected cocooned from cold realization that I am closer to the end of my journey than the beginning. I am warmed in my sanctuary.



The crows caw and mock me from the naked trees undressed and laid bare for the winter snows to create a blanket under which one day I will sleep. Maybe I will remember springs and summers of my vitality. Maybe I will remember the tempests through which I have passed safely in my sanctuary.



A candle flickers against a window pane that protects me from the dark outside my reverie. A wavering light that dances in the winds that would seep in beneath the locked window and I know that even though my sanctuary keeps me safe that soon that light will no longer shine and I like the dark moon on a winters night will slip silently out of my cloistered safety.



How cold that mourning moon that is laying rest to that which is as I become only what one safely loved in my sanctuary.

Tuesday: Love becomes new again

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

In our relationships we have a tendency to recycle our relationships. We may change bodies as the object of our affection, but basically we choose all the traits that we thought drove us crazy.

All that pulls us to a person and pushes us away from a person are installed as little electronic buttons in our head so we may say this is just too much for me, I am out of here. And we end a relationship, whether a love relationship or a friendship, and then we go on to another.

But if we look at all our past and present relationships we will see that we are often unconsciously just changing partners to do the same dance over and over and over again.

Many of us get caught up with the magic of the romance and chase after a dream only to find that once it has been manifest, what we have actually created is another act to the same drama that we call life.

We throw away people and replace them with new people only to throw away people and replace them with new people. Rather than being so constantly searching for the ideal lover, friend, job and so forth, it is time to discover what expectations we are recycling and throw out the ones that are setting us up to live a life of discontent and turmoil.

Perhaps if we were to discover our own hidden agendas to not be happy we could maintain comforting stable relationships that enhance our lives.

Here are some tips to help recycle love and happiness in the relationship that you are currently in:

1. Think back to when you first met this person or took this job or developed this friendship - what did you really find attractive? Focus on that and bring it back to life.

2. Think back to your childhood and remember before someone noticed your behavior and either rewarded you or punished you, what gave you pure joy. This is your delight seeking inner child. Get rid of the need to have this inner self punished or rewarded in your relationships and just do what makes you feel good. You will be amazed how improved your relationships will be when you come from this place of joy.

3. Do you expect one person to fulfill every need in your life? Guess what, this is impossible. Instead of constantly looking for one person to be your everything, expand your circle of friends and discover the joy that diversity brings you in meeting your needs.

4. Create a happiness journal. At least once a week and perhaps once a day, write down something that made you happy. It might be hard some days but if you search you will find that the opportunity for happiness is always around you and it is not always involving your friend/lover du jour.

5. Once you have discovered what thoughts, actions and behaviors by your friend/lover makes you crazy instead of responding ignore it. Behaviors that are ignored tend to disappear or extinguish themselves. This might take time but it is amazing how avoidance of conflict can improve your attitude concerning other people. Just changing your reactions will help you throw away the things and actions in your life that are crazy making.

6. Recognize that the desire to control is based in fear. You may fear losing someone or something and then you try to control that person or event. It is impossible to control another person. When you accept that control comes from fear you will be released into a more relaxed state of acceptance and won't have to keep looking for the person who is perfect that you can control.

So instead of throwing away a perfectly good relationship or job, it is time to throw away some negative ideas and expectations and recycle the good ones back into your life.

If you need help, sorting these issues through talk to one of our professional relationship advisors.



Myriam Maytorena, M.Ed.
http://myriamsmuse.blogspot.com/
http://manifestreality.com/
http://asknow.com/
You are the Miracle.
“It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.” - C.W. Leadbeater

Monday: Musings and meanderings of my mind.

The world I create in writing compensates for what the realworld does not give me.
--Gloria Anzaldua

One only needs compensation when one feels that one has been slighted or somehow has less. I don't consider that to be my reality.

My reality is filled with an amazing array of possibilities. I am only limited by what I can choose to perceive or by my own actions.

Writing has never been an escape for me but an adventure. As our dear William wrote, and I paraphrase, I do not sit down to write with any other audience in my mind other than me.

To me writing is a game, a journey, sometimes a healing, a venting place, a growing place, and always takes me to a sacred space. How can the me that is manifest in my writing be anyway removed from my total reality. It is a part of the greater whole of my reality but often it is the sum of the many facets of my reality and therefore maybe my world of writing becomes greater than that which others perceive.

However, it is within the mind that we color and create our perceptions. In that way I am no different than any other human. I dramatize. I criticize. I romanticize. I traumatize. And sometimes I lies about the idylity of my reality.

This the joy of my life with my mind where the writer in me communicates sometimes effectively, sometimes pedantically, but always with a sense of pleasure and intensity. The smallest exercise can become an orgasmic blow-out of my mind. I guess the consensus reality does not give me that but perhaps sometimes I give this gift to the whole.

Like the world, my mind is filled with infinite possibilities.






Myriam Maytorena, M.Ed.
http://myriamsmuse.blogspot.com
http://manifestreality.com
http://asknow.com
You are the Miracle.
“It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.” - C.W. Leadbeater

Wednesday: A Christmas Story

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire... Jack Frost nipping at your nose..

This is an old chestnut.

The family gathers around the Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of the son of God.

The kids are all tucked into bed while visions of sugar plums dance through their head.

And what to amazement do I hear? My computer calling me:

You've got mail.

Rut Roh! It is a notice from my credit card company. I have went over my limit and I am late to boot. That play station I bought has cost me 60 more dollars than I thought.

I think I need a drink, Christmas is starting to stink.

Quick as a flash I go to the web and access my bank account and almost drop dead.

The check that I wrote to buy that big meal has bounced and then another one to Walmart to buy that big tree has bounced twice. Oh woe is me.

My goose is cooked as I scan the page. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. $30.00 a bounce.

Sadly I turn from my dearest friend and isp and wander back to the living room and turn on the TV.

My cable is out because of that bouncy t bounce.

Ah Christmas is here and people of all faiths can take one day to worship Jesus and to say:

Thanks God for the good credit you just took from me.

A snifter of Cognac I warm in my hand as visions of poverty dance through my head. And Pa with his beer and me with my good friend Jim Beam raise our glasses and say Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Friday: Hunting: Clear and Present Danger

Have you ever been the prey and not the hunter?

There is something rather strange to feel the adrenalin that starts pumping when you are within the view of one who's intentions are not the most honorable.

The more visible one becomes to the world, the more the odds are that some nutzoid is going to be out to get a piece of you one way or another. Sometimes it is just innocent obsession but other times it is a sicko ready to create havoc and, perhaps, even injury or death.

That realization hit me this week as I realized that I was getting stalking e-mails. Do you have any idea how easy it is to track down anyone on the Internet? Well, let me tell you it is easier than you think. The more visible one is in being a writer or other creative in the world of the Internet, the easier it is for one to be victim of cyber-stalking. And living in the Bible Belt of the South, I could just see one of those fanatics reading the passage one should not suffer a witch to live and boy it would be the burning times again.

Most of my life I have been fairly carefree and fear free but reality has a way of changing our perspective 180 degrees in less than the flash of an eye.

I wondered if Avis my pit bull was enough of a protector or did I need more.

As I discussed this with my husband, he brought out a snub nose 33 (think that is the number) this cute little black gun that looks like something Sam Spade might have used in his detective work. Actually it was the service revolver of the grandfather of my husband's brother-in-law. He explained to me how he could get some ammunition loaded that would create less of a kick back and showed me how it was actually a double action and how I could cock it and it would be easier to pull the trigger but with a little more pressure I could just pull the trigger and shoot.

Now this is not the first time that Mark has made the attempt to teach me how to be well-armed and defended against the madness of the world. I remember years ago he bought me a Lady Smith and Wesson revolver. It was really lovely with a pearl handle. He took me out back to the creek to teach me how to shoot. I took aim at the other side of the river bank and ended up almost killing the neighbor's Jack Russel Terriers. Needless to say at that time Mark decided to put a lock on the gun so I would not hurt anyone.

But last night as he bought into my paranoia out came another gun. In fact, it is lying beside my bed right now but fortunately not loaded. His plans were to mount it under my desk so that I had easy access in case any of the weird creatures that do not approve of my spirituality or what I do, decide to create a clear and present danger.

This morning over breakfast, he said to me: Do you really think it is a good idea that you have a loaded gun in your office? I said well as long as there are not any yappy dogs around it might be OK. He shook his head and said to me ... well just make sure they have crossed the threshold before you shoot them and if you can't do that call me before you call the police so we can drag them into the office before we call.

You know I can kind of relate to how the deer are feeling right now up on Tinker Mountain which I can see just outside of my window. Wonder if any of these yahoos are hunting for long pork?

Thursday: Cosmic Dancer

Cosmic Dancer
Dancing on the edge of the future
A primitive rhythm.
A rhythm so old, so forgotten.
It moves like a new song from the East.
A cosmic dance that has no ending. No Beginning.
Only a returning.
Risen from the ashes of the enslaved Goddess,
A deadened body awakens,
Resurrected by the love of men and women.
Collectively.
Separately.
We rediscover love of self.
We rediscover love of each other.
An energy lying seemingly dead for eons,
Awakens for the dance.
A dance not of destruction
But of recreation.
Gathering together the torn and bleeding body of a planet
Ready for healing.
The healing of the cosmic dance.
A dance that does not follow,
But leads to the edge of the future,
And returns to the promise of the past...
Before the Goddess slept
in the ashes of a cold and deadened moon.
The Goddess in each person remembers.
Collectively.
Separately.
We dance the dance.
Rising from the earth
Soaring past the moon.
Eclipsing the sun.
Drawing the forces of life
to the dance.
The cosmic dance.
Recreating the edge of the future.

Wednesday: Light up the Empire State Building

When ever I think of the Empire State Building, I flash to the movie Sleepless in Seattle. A couple sit having a romantic dinner on Valentine's Day. The Empire State Building is in silhouette behind them and a huge heart is in illuminated by red lights. Romance.


I love romance. I love candle-lit romantic dinners with soft jazz playing in the background. I love receiving flowers and little presents that say I love you. And I most definitely love "chick flicks" that honor the concept of love overcoming obstacles as two soul mates finally are brought together to live happily ever after.


I guess the major troubles in life are created when we take romance out of life and are caught into the mundane issues of maintaining a life that is safe and secure. I have nothing against safety and security and in fact know that if we do not have these things we would be fighting just to survive. There is no romance in survival. However, why is it that in living happily ever after Cinderella goes back to being a scullery maid and waiting on Prince Charming and washing endless dishes, cooking endless meals, sweeping and dusting surfaces that just get dirty again, and in the meantime going out to bring home the bacon so she can fry it up in a pan only to begin again in the morning after less sleep than she had when she ran home from ball when the clock struck twelve and she lost her glass slipper.


From the time our hormones start to create the urge to procreate till the day we take our last breath, we are driven to desire romance. Yet with such a strong drive which is the fancy clothes that we put on passion and lust, why do we let it smolder like an ember on a cold hearth.


Those who are supposedly wise suggest that as we settle into our lives we should give up on the desires of youth and accept that being content is enough. That doesn't sound very wise to me. I mean I have often bought into that piece of aging dogma but I can tell you it is not as much fun as I feel in my heart that life should be.


So today, I will put on some romantic music - perhaps listen to My Funny Valentine, light a candle and remember the romantic interludes in my life when content was the last thing in the world that I ever desired. In fact, I may go rent every chick flick at Blockbuster and have a fantasy night. Maybe before I make it to rent those movies, my husband will show up with flowers and tell me that I am beautiful. It could happen. That is what is truly wonderful about romance it brings hope that anything can happen especially the excitement of love the second time around.


Pardon me a minute, that was the phone ringing....




It was my husband, he just called to say he loved me. I guess romance is not dead.