MUSINGS

**Disclaimer:  This started out a nice li'l blog about life decisions and whatnot.  Then my fingers started typing and I let it happen.  Enter at your own risk. So here we are.  Another rainy Southern September.  School is in full swing for The Girl and me.  I've got studio classes and she's kicking ass and taking names in her honors courses and trying to maintain a social life.  Things are trucking on with ease. No.  No crash, no "BUT"....things are going as well as they can in a troubled market.  I'm grateful that the Honey is resourceful and works as much and as hard as he does every week.  Having to work for yourself is not easy by any stretch but he makes the best of it.  The oil field tanked early this year and it's made things harder than we are accustomed to but it's nothing we can't handle.  I made the comment to her father a month or so ago that he had a lot of faith in our situation and the man I married. ...

What would you think if someone asked you to protect their child over yours? I'm going to let that sink in for a moment. Now the word "child" is relative in this particular instance.  I don't necessarily mean child, as in small one, but child as in the offspring of another.  An adult is still someone's child, even at 30. A little further into the question:  What if the things the other person's child did directly affected yours?  This person is fully aware of their own actions and believes him/her self to be totally in the right.  The parent could be asking for mercy due to their own personal issues and are somewhat unaware of their child's behavior.  The kind of parent who believes their child will simply change their ways based on a call and a little fussing.  Would you still take this parents request into consideration? Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances that prevent a person from doing what they should.  Family illnesses, tra...

I have so much flying around in my brainpan these days.  This holiday season is going to be a very strange one.  There are family separations that I don't understand, and some that I do.  I lost my father this past month and my stepson, the Boy, lost his maternal grandfather earlier this year.  Those gaps will be very hard to fill.  There are so many more things going on that I just can't wrap my head around.  Death, that makes sense.  There's a level of ignorance happening around me that I can't abide and it's caused riffs that don't make sense to me. I was a reluctant mother.  That is not something I've exactly hidden.  I also took the necessary steps to make sure I never had anymore children regardless of what doctors, family members, and friends told me about it.  I know what happens when a woman follows gender roles or wants a baby to get a paycheck from some unsuspecting sap.  I was never going to follow those patterns, the ...

I went home to the woods this past weekend to attend my nephews high school graduation.  Honey came with me and got to see for real the kind of community I came from.  I can only assume he liked it. While I was home my mother put something into perspective for me that hadn't crossed my mind before.  You see, I'm aware that I come from a poorer area, I'm aware that being raised in the country has created a pattern of thought very different from those who live where I live now.  I very often preach gratitude and appreciation.  I am quick to tell someone they don't appreciate what they have, you think someone is always going to be there for you.  I simply assumed it was backwoods Southern raisin'.  Then she said this:  "You and your sister grew up with the understanding that your father was about to die at any moment."  See, for us, there was no safety net.  After his first two heart attacks in the early 80's the rest of his, and our, lif...