About a month ago, BlisteringSheep and BlazingEwe told us about a radio broadcast they’d listened to and I wanted to listen to it. It had been on NPR, so I knew how to find it. I did, and went through the necessary steps to download the podcast. Then I discovered that I can subscribe to their podcast. WOW! This means that I just open up my iTunes window regularly and, poof!, they download some new stuff. I am now discovering that this is also true at Allelon and other wonderful places as well. I am so far behind the curve that it’s a wonder I don’t still believe the world is flat. I know that is a place where I could find a lot of information and do some multi-tasking is by listening to podcasts.

Here’s my problem though. I don’t have an iPod. I live in a house filled with iPods, but I don’t have one. I used to have one. I loved my iPod. It was the original U2 Special Edition iPod that came out in late 2004. Shiny on the back with the boys autographs engraved on it. Matte black and red on the front. Sleek. Proud. Special. And it came with all of their music. And it was mine. For the first time in my whole life I didn’t have to share my music with anyone else, or cringe when I listened to the same song over and over and over again, or … well … anything really. It was mine. But because I’ve always shared my music, I shared this as well. Shared too well, apparently, because it disappeared. I think it stayed at my CLB2 that last day we were there. That’s the last time I remember having it, I’d used it for music that morning and given it to the sound guys. In the flurry of clean up at the end of the morning, I would often forget those details … but we were always set to return. We’d always see each other again, you know? But then … we didn’t. And likely never will.

I didn’t discover that my black beauty was missing for months. I was too sad, too angry, too hurt to listen to music for a very, very long time after we left. I still don’t listen to music very often. Now I listen to the LightChildren’s music, or LightHusband’s music. On the rare days I want to listen to music, so I find it on the dish … and listen to the radio on our television. But I want to listen to those podcasts while I’m sewing, or sorting, or whatever. So I claimed the one iPod that won’t fit into the car jack this morning. Told the kids, “I need this.” They really didn’t squawk too much. They are very good kids.

Then I sat here with my computer on my lap and the iTouch in my hand and cried.

It’s time to move on, and stop looking back. Stop wondering what might have been. Stop wishing for the love and the community that broke so badly. I understand some of the pieces of what happened. Some of them I will never understand. It’s time to let those go.

I was surprised by the grief that poured out at the thought of finally putting my old iPod to rest. It’s gone. Really gone. For some reason, and in an odd way, it’s come to symbolize putting those friendships and that part of my life to rest for good and all. I’ve known this for some time now, but I’m fumbling with the how.

An old friend stopped by about a month ago for a brief chat. As we caught up with all of our respective goings on, he asked LightHusband and I, “So have you made a lot of new friends with all the hockey parents?” and in my mind I came to a full stop. No one else noticed, of course. But the question washed over me like wave in November, numbing with cold and I froze. The answer that tumbled into a wreck behind my teeth was, “Well, no … I can’t make friends now. I have no earthly idea how to trust anyone. I don’t know when that will ever happen again.” Fortunately, LightHusband had a more socially acceptable answer and conversation continued on without my contribution. But I’ve been sitting with that ever since and watching myself walk around mistrustful, angry, broken, wary … of people. This is/was not my normal functional state. I am not comfortable like this. For 40+ years my automatic assumption was to trust others implicitly and that has been completely shattered.

I want my trust back. I want hope. While I grieve what did not happen and what can never happen in my former community, there is also a sense in which I am grieving the idea that it might never happen. Or that I will never be able to participate in it because I will be too afraid of the pain. I will have lost that sense of fearlessness which is a necessary component for entering into it.

So, I have yet to re-program that iTouch. It’s sitting next to me on the sofa. Shiny and black. It’s speaking to me of the possibilities inside. I also know that there are opportunities available on the web to purchase a replacement for my beloved U2 Special Edition iPod and I’ve found them. But it seems that there are a few paths I need to walk down first. When I’ve done that, then I’ll be ready to have my own iPod again.

I’ve been lurking and occasionally (sp?) commenting at Emerging Women lately. The blog title probably speaks for itself. I went out and began searching down the blogs of some of the women who post there because I’ve come to enjoy and value their perspectives and wanted to see their homes. I found this paragraph at the first home I visited:

When people want someting of me that I do not want to give, I react. React with aversion and anxiety; words like, “flight,” “get out of my inner sanctum” and more visceral feelings difficult to name rise up, and I fight the old crap within me that hinders me from calmly setting boundaries without feeling awry and dismayed, gruilty or angry for having to set them at all. I instinctively push people away when I feel they want something from me that I am not comfortable sharing or giving, when I feel their emotions, desires or needs intrude on my psychological space. Peace is disrupted and I am furious; how could so-and-so dare disrupt my peace with their feelings or perceived needs that conflict with my feelings and perceived needs? I become more angry over the disrupton of peace than whatever substantive issue triggered my internal dissonance in the first place. And then the self-hatred for being so easily thrown off course, for not being enlightened or spiritual enough to be what I intellectually understand.

I read that passage two or three times before my breathing slowed down. How on earth could this woman who I have never met and who does not even know my name have written so clearly about me? Well, the reasonable answer is that she is writing about herself. But somehow she is also writing about me.

The LightHusband’s parents are visiting. Very often these visits are fraught with tension and ill-will. This visit has been quite pleasant thus far … filled with laughter and camaraderie. Perhaps it is because I no longer care what they think of me that I am now free to think of them.

In any case, with their visit comes additional television viewing. We rarely watch television. Mostly in the evening after the LightChildren have gone to bed. We watch during the day on very rare occasions … when someone in the house is too sick to do anything else. Or when GrandpaLightHusband is visiting. He loves to watch tv. Correction. He loves to walk into a room. Turn on the television. Watch it for a few seconds. Then leave the room … with the television still on. He may or may not return to the room. So when they visit the television is on … all. the. time. He also likes to watch sports. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you may have come to some conclusions about me. I’ll bet it will come as little surprise to anyone that sports is quite low on my list of television watching priorities. I especially do not care to watch it or have it on in the house at very loud decibels. This is usually a trial for me. I very quickly reach a place of sensory overload when there are a lot of people in the house and a lot of noise. So … yeah.

This morning GrandpaLightHusband came in from their RV and promptly … turned on the television.  Well, Sunday morning programming is not so terrible.  We watched CBS’s Sunday Morning program.  They gave us the trifecta of funerals; President Ford’s, James Brown’s and Sadaam Hussein’s.  There was a portion of the program devoted to all the famous people who died in 2006.  I could hear echos of the morbid scene from “The Holy Grail” …. “Bring out your dead… bring out your dead ….” There are many different perspectives to give a year just finished.  This seemed odd to me.

Apparently it was fitting to LightGirl.  We went walking in the Battlefield with the grandparents and a friend.  Later on as I was putting dinner together she came in and said, “Well, 2006 wasn’t a really great year, was it Mom?”  I asked her why she felt that way.  She responded, “It was the year Will died.”  My first response (which I never got to make) was that it was also the year that he was born too.  But GrandmaLightHusband wanted to know who he was and why he was so important to LightGirl.  So we explained his story to her.  She responded by telling us a story of a little boy in her church who is 11 with hypo-plastic left heart, “and he’s doing quite well.”  And suddenly I was so overcome with rage, I felt my knees buckle.  I felt myself step outside of me and observe what was happening.  I knew better than to speak, so I just nodded and listened.  I wasn’t angry with my mother-in-law.  I’m still not sure why or who I was angry with.

I’m just so god-damn sick of useless, pointless death.

Seen on the newsstand as I walked into a drugstore. Then I realized that the piped in music was the chorus to “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.” The lyrics I heard (“joy to the world, all the boys and girls, singin’ joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me) as I read the headline:

Soldier from Sharon Killed in Baghdad Blast

and looked at the photo of a bright young man cut down before he began a half a world away.

I’ve never understood this war and I’ve looked at it from many sides now. But the one thing that makes my bones angry, that leaves me with the taste of mara in my mouth is that there are not enough bumperstickers in the world to support our troops. It is not support when their bodies come home in secrecy. It is not support when we cannot get a proper accounting of who has been injured, who has died, and who will never be the same again.

Magnets are cheap. Grieving is hard. But that’s one way to support our troops and their families. I wonder when we’ll get around to doing that? Or will we just keep whistling “joy to the world” in the dark?