All that is gold

" 'All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.  From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king."

It has been a long time since I have had the courage or the discipline to sit and write in this blog.  As usual, when I am in enough pain I become willing to do what needs to be done.  And today, I need to write.  I probably need to write every day if I were honest.  I need to be vulnerable in the hopes that whomever might read this someday can be sympathetic, non-judgmental, and most importantly I hope that it will help them if they are feeling the same.

Here I am at a new juncture.  We have just sold our house in Demarest and are moving full time to Florida.  Well, I am moving full time to Florida.  My poor husband will do a lot of travelling in order to live with me but keep his bosses happy.  

I just feel lost.  Growing up with brothers and all male cousins, I believed that I was raised by wolves and that I could stand up to anything or anyone.  I was just as strong as any man in the room and I could fight back.  Even better, I could multi-task and juggle 6 balls in the air at one time.   I was the middle child.  The fixer.  I was great at solving problems and getting things done.

I have fought this change tooth and nail.  But as my friend Susan says, "if you feel like you are constantly swimming against the current - you are probably not headed in the right direction". I never thought that we would leave that house, but every reason that I came up with for why we had to stay would somehow be removed.  As this year has gone on, my illness has progressed and I just cannot live in the cold no matter how much I wanted to stay there.  

Grant hired a guy to look at our palm trees here in Florida and he said "You know - people think that they pick the house but the house picks them.  It picks the people that can give it what it needs."  Our little yellow house in Demarest needs a little boy to grow up in it and that is what it is getting.

I never thought I would leave my little boy, Eddie, in an apartment in NYC and move so far from him.   I never thought I would sit in a job that does not bring me joy.  I never thought my health would change our lives so drastically.  I no longer feel like I am a strong and capable woman in any part of my life.  I worry that I am a burden or will become one.  There are so many things that I did not know would happen.  This was not my plan, damn it.  If it was my plan it would have a fabulous and happy ending.  Everything would get resolved.  Everyone would live happily ever after.  

So now that I have said all of that, I will look back at my 54 years and tell you what I do know to be true.  At every point that I thought was the darkest, when I believed that the outcome of a situation or a relationship was not what it was supposed to be, it turned out that the universe was making room for something better.  Something that I could not have possibly imagined.  None of the things that have happened in the past were 'my plan'.  

A new path is beckoning and I do not know where it will lead.  The trick is to believe that the future is friendly, and to take a step forward....sometimes the thing that is gold does not glitter and just because I am wandering does not mean that I am lost....