On: The People from Our Pasts

I've been thinking a lot about my past. Maybe it's because children always make you reflect on life. Maybe it's because, I often wonder how I got to this place. How I made it to the person I am today. 

It would be a joke to think I'm here today solely on my own merits. 

I'm here, the person I am in the place I'm in, not only because, of who I am inside, but because, of the people who touched my life in the past. 

There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, possibly even thousands of people who have changed the course of my life, just by happenstance. However, I rarely think of them.

 Every once in a while, when major changes happen in my life, I find myself thinking about a girl I used to know. 

We'd grown up in the same town, went to the same high school, and participated in the same activities, but we weren't truly friends until after the thrill of graduation, and the realization that the friends we'd made in school weren't friends who could go the distance. 

After my first marriage deteriorated and I found out I was pregnant, she's the person who drove through the night with me from the bright lights of California to the towering trees and cloudy skies of Washington, to escape the unhealthy situation I'd found myself in. 

Two months later, she held my hand as my body fought to save a baby that didn't have a chance, and I lost my son to a medical mistake. 

She is the person who grabbed me by the heart and forced me to start living life again, when all I felt capable of doing was hiding in the dark and crying. 

 There are hundreds of photos of us together. Moments of our lives captured, frozen in time forever. I have them in a box in the closet. I can pull out a photo and remember the exact moment it was taken. A pretty neat trick considering most of the photos were taken while alcohol was flowing freely, and we weren't feeling any pain. 

During those times, my only plan was to live life without true emotion. To have fun, to smile, to have a good time, but to never dig too deeply into my heart, because that is where the darkness would overcome me. I drank to have fun, I drank to be fun, and I drank to hold off the memories of dreams I'd only begun to have. 

Our party days had to come to an end sometime, and that happened when I eventually opened my heart enough to let it heal. I got married to the Marine, moved to Hawaii, and life slowly began again. 

We maintained our friendship through several moves--from Hawaii to Virginia, but when I finally moved back to the same coast, back this time to California, things changed. 

She had her third child, a son, and I wasn't there for the birth. I hadn't been the first person to hear about the pregnancy, and I found out about the birth weeks after the fact. 

We never had a falling out, never had a blowup of any kind. We just got caught up with our own lives. I wish things could be different, but they're not. Life goes on, and some people aren't supposed to be there forever. Some people have a specific job to do, and once it is done, they move on. 

When I think of her, there is a tinge of sadness for the memories of long ago, but there is mostly happiness. 

Happiness, because of the life I have now. The choices she helped me make. The adventures we had that led me to where I was supposed to be. 

I only hope, I helped her as much as she helped me. 

R.S.

Do you have someone from your past that you think fondly of? I'd love to hear the story.

The Finish Line: Boy Wonder Arrives

It was a typical sunny day in the desert, and the weather man promised excessive heat for the next four days. I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and like every other day of the past nine months my stomach dictated what I wanted to eat. That’s what brought me to the base’s Starbucks at 1107. Before I’d reached the door I could taste the delicious brownie I had my heart set on.

Then my water broke.

In front of six Marines who barely looked old enough to shave.

If things happened the way Hollywood portrayed them, those Marines would have had a story to tell their buddies when they got back to work. Luckily for me, when my water broke, nature took its course and the water was more of a trickle than a gush.

Knowing what was important, I still got my brownie.

The drive to the hospital took six minutes--an eternity when every bump and stop caused a fresh gush of fluid to escape. When my sister and I secured a coveted ‘expectant mother’ parking spot we hustled, or in my case, waddled with a sense of urgency, to the labor and delivery floor.

Labor and delivery at the base hospital is a lot like any other place in the military. A lot of hurry up and wait. Once I was secured into a room and strapped into an uncomfortable bed with monitors and IVs, the real fun started. 

By fun, I mean the lying around waiting for the contractions to actually start doing something.

Five hours after I arrived, the doctor pushed Pitocin into my IV, in an attempt to move my labor along. Every hour a nurse came in and upped the amount of the drug dripping into my body, and every hour was the same. A lot of waiting without change. 

It wasn’t until nine hours and half a season of Veronica Mars later, something finally happened. My contractions stopped playing nice and sent a pain through my body so intense the world went black. It felt like something had broken. The Marine later told me it was probably his wrist cracking when I put him in a wrist lock.

I rode the pain of each contraction, silently for the next hour. Veronica Mars was still playing on the television, but I couldn’t focus on what was happening. I no longer cared whether she was with Logan or some other guy. With each contraction, the pain escalated. By the time I was ready to give up on the idea of a pain medication free birth, the doctor informed me I was too far along. My son would arrive within the next two hours.

For those of you who have never experienced child birth, two hours is an interminable amount of time. It might as well be nine months. I didn’t want to contemplate another two hours of my insides being torn apart by Edward Scissorhands or my own personal torturer--Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street.  

As it turns out, Boy Wonder wasn’t interested in hanging out that long either.

 Thirty minutes later I demanded, to the room at large, to get the doctor, because the baby was coming. I’m not sure who went for the doctor, or hit the call button, because at that moment I was hoping to go numb from the waist down. Blacking out would have been okay too.

Within moments the room was packed like a frat house on a Friday night after finals. Aside from my three person morale team that included the Marine, my sister, and my dear friend (and work husband), Corpsman K, there was a fleet of medical personnel: A doctor, a nurse, and three Navy Corpsmen. The perfect beginning to a joke.

It was a regular party, and I was the girl on the table.

I pushed for thirty minutes, and during that time I realized some very important things.

 I’m stronger than I gave myself credit for.

 It is possible to silence an entire delivery room with a single look directed at Corpsman K when he made a comment about his arms being sore from fanning me off with a clipboard.

The song Ring of Fire has a whole new meaning to me now.

At 2215 on June 6, 2013 Boy Wonder came into the world. Six hours shy of nine years to the day his brother was born an angel. On the anniversary of D-Day. To the sound of Taps playing across the base.

For the third time in my life, I experienced love at first sight.  

On First Jobs

Today my niece takes the next step in becoming a productive member of society.

She begins her first job.

It got me thinking about my first job, and the long line of employment opportunities that came after it.

I've had...well, let's be honest... a lot.

From my first job the summer of my junior year, to finding myself as a writer, I've done just about everything. Honestly, I had a hard time sticking to any job for longer than a couple of months. I'd get bored, annoyed with the stupidity of my coworkers, or I'd find something better.

There was always something better.

My longest job lasted two years, and I was twenty-three. I was a tech-department and cell phone representative for Circuit City--before it went belly up. I stuck with the job for two reasons. One: I needed the money to pay bills, and Two: I felt like I owed them. Not because they were an amazing company to work for, but because when I was at my lowest, the management and my coworkers, had my back.

When I got married, and my husband and I got transferred to Hawaii, I continued my day job. At least until it came time for his first deployment, and I wanted to actually see him before he left to a war zone for seven months. Who knew that large corporations didn't care about things like that?

Art is subjective, and art school was expensive. 

I've worked as a telemarketer, a pizza maker, a soldier, a pageant princess, a substitute teacher for special needs, a dating service counselor, a make-up artist, a model, and my personal 'favorite'--a housekeeper for a small, low class, hotel chain.

I spent five years as a professional photographer, providing tangible memories of weddings, graduations, births, and military reunions-- only to realize my passion for photography was outmatched by my need to not be a portrait photographer. I loved the art of photography, not the cookie cutter, conveyor belt version most of the population expects. After more and more military wives with their new cameras opened up shop as photographers, I threw in the tripod for the focus of photography as art.

I'll never make it rich that way, and I'm okay with that.

After the birth of my daughter I realized something in my life was missing. Not family, or the love of a good man; I had those. I was missing a part of me I hadn't seen since I was eighteen.

The writer.

I was first published in junior high at the ripe old age of thirteen. Nothing spectacular, just a few dark, angst filled poems about the usual teenage drama--though my prose might have been just a tiny bit darker than average. Once I graduated and got away from the hallowed halls of purgatory, I tried to write my first novel.

It was a colossal vat of failure.

Not because it was rejected by publishers, but because I never finished it. I had the story idea, but not enough know how or understanding to complete it.

I found it recently, and it wasn't half bad.

After the demise of my potential writing career I put the dream away for over a decade until one amazing bundle of joy brought that spark back.

You know what? I learned a lot about books in a decade.

I've written three novels in the last year and a half. One needs extensive work before I'll be willing for it to see the light of day, and two of them are going through editing. Whether or not they get picked up via a traditional publisher or I decide to self publish, I know one day, not too far in the future they'll be available for others to enjoy.

It took a while, but I've finally found something I can stick with, and I'm sure, someday, my niece will find her calling too. Until then, I'm proud of her for taking the first step in figuring it out.

Congrats, T-Dawg, you're an adult now.

R.S.