Too Late, Baby?

Omi.  It's a diminutive form of a German word for grandmother.  That's funny, you see, because to us she loomed large.  Our Omi was stocky and headstrong and orderly and insistent, only selectively sentimental and with little time for nonsense.  The framed cross-stitch on her wall said it for her:  "Cleanliness Adorns the Kitchen."  

She loved us a lot, but didn't tolerate us much.  There were certain ways one should behave and, once told, that was that.  We were welcome to visit, as long as we sat and listened. 

Don't slam the door.  No elbows on the table.  If you have so much energy that you need to run around, I'll be happy to show you the lawnmower or get you working pulling weeds or painting a fence. 

That was our Omi.  Alles in Ordnung....everything in order....even you.

She loved us.  She adored our Opa.  Later on, "I had the best husband in the world" would lead her mantra.  When he died rather suddenly she found solace in her orderly world, but from then on something was missing.

Always a bit of a prude, our Omi looked disapprovingly on any public displays of affection.  "Nah!" she would say.  But one day, long after our Opa died, she surprised us: seeing a young girl sitting in her boyfriend's lap, our Omi said, "If he were here today, I would do that."

Love conquers all--our stubborn habits, our ingrained ideosyncracies, our greatest inhibitions.  Love opens the door to a life of no regrets.

Hopefully, for you, it's not too late.

Enough is Enough

He can't help it, really.  After all, there was a time when he was all alone and on his own--scavenging, starving.  There wasn't enough.

But now his brain is stuck in that place, a place that screams "shortage." He spends most of his time reacting to the screams.  He's never far from the potential for satiety, the refill, the handout.  He's an addict.

I've thought about ways that I might help him overcome his insecurity and my own feelings of pain and frustration at his fathomless fear--I've thought about some kind of therapeutic intervention, some new gestalt. But there is no reason here. There is no reason to doubt that there will be a next meal, a safe harbor, a home....and there is no reason to overcome the doubt.  It is survival.

To some degree, we are all survivors of trauma, and victims of our own ensuing insecurities.  We may not hover around our food dish like Thomas the cat (who in the years since we took him in hasn't missed a meal or snack, has grown big as a turkey and rightfully earned the title "Fat Boy"), but we do hover.  We hover around that which will address, however temporarily, our shortages and shortcomings: the holes in our souls.  Food or clothes or shopping or politics or religion--the lofty and the lowly--we all seek to satisfy that which will never be satisfied.  It works for a while, whatever it is, until it doesn't work and we're back, hovering, hoping, longing.

Until we find the reason.