TODAY IS A DAY OF CONFUSION

I cannot stop shaking my head. I truly

do not understand. Recently my beautiful

Muse Family conducted a voting poll. The vote was for "Lin To Remain Lin."

I think this came about because I write long, sometimes, excessively long e-mails.

My son runs the other way

if he gets a letter in the mail from me because he knows it is going to take him a good half hour to read my ramblings. He started running when he as a teenager. He'll be 37 in April. Yeah, he's been ducking me for a long time.

My daughter teases me that I do not know how to write anything not a

mini-novel. And she's right. I have this habit of beginning a note with a specific subject in mind, but as I am writing, other thoughts,

nuggets of information, tripping

down memory lane take over and off I go. I somehow always manage to come back to the main topic and

tie it up, but

pages and pages and pages later.

So my

long-winded letter writing and the

voting to keep me being me, came out of that.

That is one area that has me confused. There is another. Many have said that I am

the core of the

Muse family...and that I REALLY don't get.

Lea and

Litsa, they are the core. I am just the avid cheer...not leader, but













rally person.













I am so blessed to be at Muse and share it with my deeply loved Daughter.

For so long we hid out of fear...not a pleasant way to live, but you get used to it...especially when you have no choice.

A few times, after

the reconstructive surgeries gave me back enough

normalcy to

face the world, I tried to cultivate friendships with the mothers of my children's friends. 

Sex

was the very last thing on my mind. I seriously doubted back then I'd ever let another man near me...the surgeries only fixed so much.

A whip does do a LOT of damage. 

I wanted friendships

with the wives, unfortunately even through my

forties I was being mistaken for my twenty something year old and my 

son's girlfriend. This gave the dads of my children's friends

ideas, and scared the mothers enough they didn't just ban me, they

banned my children.

So for me,

hiding also meant giving my children an opportunity to have

friends that wouldn't be forced out of their lives because of Mom. 

I buried myself in

college, work, and

loving my beautiful

gifts from God. I hid.

I let no one in. Didn't dare. My children were far more important than hoping to develop friendships. 





When Kat was in her very early twenties, she was engaged to a man in

Texas, and three months before their

wedding was to take place, she

flew out. For the first time in my life, I was

alone. My son had moved out long before this, and now it was just our cat, a cantankerous half 

Siamese and me. 

Sea Mist, named because of her coloring, allowed me to come and go with a disdainful flick of her head, and it was a strange time. So what did I do with my new found solitariness? I'd go to work,

teaching, stop at the grocery store for a TV dinner...



honey mustard chicken...come home, step into a shower, don

a flowing caftan...my days of wearing the skimpy clothes my ex demanded I wear, were LONG over, eat, 

grade papers, make certain I had everything I'd need to teach the next day...(I made most of my teaching materials from scratch.)...then curl up with a book until I'd pass out. 

I still hid. You develop a veneer to survive the kinds of things I had to endure during my marriage...they call it

 disassociation. It's a valuable defense mechanism against the emotional fracturing years of abuse can wreck...but once you've developed it, it is really hard to delete it from your memory.


For reasons that are not mine to tell, my daughter's marriage never took place, and she returned.


We have shared our lives together ever since. She has been the only person I have allowed inside, and I am the only person she has allowed inside...

until we came to Muse.








When Lea did not rescind

my contract on April 1st, four days after proffering it, something inside me

cracked, just a little. In the days that followed that crack, like a crack in your

windshield, spread out. Litsa  joined Lea in helping that crack continue to spread.

Ginger, Heather, Jim, Nancy,

Karen McG,

Kevin,









Kay Dee, Larion, Brad, Roseanne, Chastity,

Chrystalla,



Christine L. and Chris S., Mike A. and his lovely wife, Cynthia,  Barbara E. and Barbara B., L.K., Viviane, Sara D..Jo P., Rosalie S., Arlene W., Charlie, Rhobin, Sue P., Marsha, Janie, Rebecca, Erika, Suzanne D., Krista D., Lisabet, Arlene...I know there are more and ask your forgiveness for my mind's stubbornness.

You all opened every last vestige of that

cocoon of solitude and acceptance. You gave Kat and I what we hadn't dared ever hope to have...family.

I had no choice but to cut us off from all contact with everyone...for their own safety and ours. We truly were, alone, until Lea

pinged

my shields and the rest of you followed her on in.

Today there are more...allegedly newbies to the

Muse family, but they have quickly stepped into the core of family that have embraced Kat and me...

Karen C.,

Rochelle, Jerry R., Kay M., Randall. and I thank and love every one of you.




You have given Kat and me more than you will ever know...but we are so NOT

the core of anything...

Lea is.

Lea,

Litsa,

and Dee, our amazing editors, and many more of our cherished friends.

Yesterday Was Valenitine's Day...

...and Kat and I were blessed with many expressions of

love and appreciation from our fellow Muse Authors, Editors, Publisher, and intrepidly brilliant Marketing Director.

It came after a period of intense confusion and dismay that I wrote about here, in a previous post.
http://linsownspeculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/loyalty-and-love-both-begin-with-l.html?zx=14dcc7ee86f9db74

I have, as I write this, an e-mail waiting for me from one of the people responsible for that confusion and dismay. I am not sure I want to open it...I don't want to deal with the vitriol this person feels so intensely within his soul...and yet...I am not nor have I been for a very long time, a coward.

Above this time-bomb e-mail was another e-mail waiting for me from a man who is a NY Times best selling author that saved my life just by writing his first book.

What a miracle it is to me that he now considers me a friend, and cherishes that friendship.

I sent him a e-card yesterday, with a personal voice note...that he had not found at first, until I asked him about it...here's what I asked...

I am so glad you liked the card...what did you think of my voice? You did hear it, didn't you? At the bottom of the card is a button to play it if you haven't already heard it.

It is well hidden...any of you that received e-cards from me yesterday, check to see if I sent you a personal voice note too. I didn't with everyone...I would have had to start scheduling them two days before Valentine's Day instead of just working on scheduling them all on Sunday.

ACTUALLY, if you got a card on Sunday, the odds are it HAS the voice note.

But back to my friend...I just received his e-mail response to the above...here's what he said...

Hi, Lin,

I'm so glad you called my attention to your voice message, I missed it the first time, didn't scroll down quite far enough, I can see.  What a sweet voice you have!  Indeed like a little girl--no, a little angel!  Everything about you is commensurately sweet!  And all your comments about the rage and madness in the world now, what recently happened to that poor Congress lady in AZ, I could not agree more strongly.  The pervasive climate of hate--certainly it contributes.  You're dead-on right, and don't let anyone tell you differently, my little angel Valentine.

All my heart to you and Kat,

Glenn

I LOVE that man.

His first book, THE LAST DAY saved me when I was fighting cancer...again...and had reached the lowest point in the battle, the one where you just don't want to face another day, and when you surface from the unconsciousness and escape of sleep, seeing another sunrise makes your body weep from the center of your nuclei outward. There is no place that does not grieve that you still live.

I found THE LAST DAY at my library. I cannot tell you what made me grab it, but grab it I did.

From page one, I felt something inside me lightening, peace settling in where despair and emptiness lived.

I won't lie and say I did not have many more hours, days, weeks of gruelling treatments to endure, but

THE LAST DAY helped me see there was a light at the end of my desperate tunnel.

I owe this man my life, and now he brings peace into my heart and soul again.

I did a cover blog for THE LAST DAY and hope any of you reading this that haven't stopped by will honor me and all this man means to me, to please do so now.

I also want to alert you all that his next book,

THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL will be coming out in July and I WILL be doing a cover blog for that too...and bragging about him up a storm.

There are special people in this world who are placed here to help remind the rest of us how special we are,

Glenn Kleier is such a person, and I thank God he saved my life and became a dear friend too.

I love you, Glenn and I love your wife for her makign it possible for you to give us your words of such wisdom and compassion. You have in me a groupie.

LOYALTY AND LOVE BOTH BEGIN WITH "L"

Do you think it is a coincidence that these two words, "loyalty" and "love" begin with the same letter?

I find myself pondering the significance of these two today because they were both violated and right out of left field. I honestly did not see it coming.

I understand feeling intense anger at those who have wronged you, but I don't understand how that gives you carte blanche to do the same to another.

I am hurting down into the very nuclei of my cell structure because I set someone up to face a wall of pure allegedly righteous vitriol.

She was asking for help, and I placed her before a runaway train.

The anger this person who feels his rage, his cruelty, his demeaning actions are justified confuses me. The person he claims his real anger is aimed at has cost us, me and mine, more deeply than anything he endured, yet I could find compassion for the one who asked for the one thing she had every right to expect...being treated with honor not with acid and lack of civility.

I had heard, long ago, rumors about this acidic person. I had heard he was a trouble maker and full of himself, but when he came over and joined us, he acted like he was truly a part of this haven.

He caused someone dear to me to feel she was under attack...and the thing is, she was.

WHY?

Two wrongs do not make a right. Treating her to such abuse does NOT balance the spreadsheet. It does not make what happened to him right...it only makes him guilty of paying the unfairness forward...and making me an unwitting part of it.

No one has the right to demean another and stomp on their right to be treated with justice, compassion and understanding. She did NOTHING wrong. NOTHING.

I am so profoundly sorry for being the one to put her in front of this runaway train. She deserved better...from him...from the entire group...but from me as well.

Loyalty and Love...My ultimate decisions come down to those two "l" words.

I am unwaveringly loyal to those I love, and that list, here in this world, is easily enumerated.

1.) Kat, my most beautiful daughter.
2.) Lea, my amazing Publisher.
3.) Litsa, our amazing Marketing Director
4.) Delilah, our cover art goddess.
5.) My Entire Muse Family.

Anyone else...you hurt a member of those that I love and the answer is simple...I will not remain a part of something, no matter how good the founding purpose is, that could do something so unconscionable as was done to my Muse Sister, no matter who else she is forced to deal with in her despair. The other publisher didn't need the loop to hurt her, that publisher was doing enough all by herself.

One day when you face that final justice, the vitriol that was spewed with such misdirected rancor will have to be atoned for.

For me...I walk away and say no more.

AGING GUTS ARE NOT PRETTY!

I want to start by thanking myself

for deciding the time had come to make my position clear about the dubious joys of watching one of today’s most prominent commercials.

Please don’t misunderstand, I am the first one to run to the drug store eager to take advantage of anything that smacks of “relief”, but saying you give relief and actually PROFFERING it are two entirely different entities.

Whoever came up with those Dulcolax commercials, the ones with that cartoon woman stretched out like some modern day

Cleopatra upon her chaise lounge purring in absolute contentment because Dulcolax has made her bathroom sojourn COMFORTABLE deserves to be tied to the business end of a cow, or have a rear passage examination performed by a beefy man named GUNTHER using

a jackhammer for his probe!

I promised God as I wept upon the procelain throne, if He could sprinkle COMFORT DUST throughout the endless miles of my

Intestinal Tract I would sing "THE LORD'S PRAYER" in my unfortunately off-key voice. I'd get down on bended knee and

HOWL with remorse for all my past transgressions. In other words...I pledged my soul for the comfort that cartoon woman wallows in.

If it is something you HAVE to do, it shouldn’t be so excruciatingly painful!!!

But alas, the only thing ANY of that stuff gives me reminds me of the cramps I used to get before “mental-pause” introduced

hot flashes and the hormonal equivalent of

dry rot into my life…except…

Unless my memory is badly muted by

advancing senility, these cramps are 1000% more intense than those of my misspent

female cycles.

Oh probiotics when are you going to take me away?