Dad, I love you and I am so grateful for your wisdom, even as it comes from the other side! So I have been a little overwhelmed with everything lately. Okay, a lot overwhelmed. Feeling like I am being pulled in too many directions, and spread too thin. Collapsing into bed last night, exhausted, and berating myself for not getting enough accomplished, I threw up a hail Mary prayer through tears:
"I need to find balance... there are things I have to do, need to do, and want to do. I don't have energy for any of them it seems. I need to find *my* groove. Not the one I had in married life, not the one I had in West Jordan... I need to find one for here. In this place... Please, help me?!"
The tears came for a few minutes, when it seemed the answers came as a light in the darkness around me. I heard the words my dad had said to SO many times before. The ones he always said with affection towards my mom.... "You need your 'things' about you..."
For those confused, here is the back story. It comes from the Jon Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in the 1952 classic, The Quiet Man. If you have never seen it, ladies and gents... you should! Wayne plays an American boxers coming to Ireland. He sees a beautiful fiery redhead. They become married, and the getting to know each other part becomes most of the movie. She wants her dowry, and her brother will not part with it... and she declares:
"I'll wear your ring. I'll cook, and I'll wash, and I'll keep the land, but that is all!... Until you have my dowry, you haven't got any bit of me -- me, myself! I'll still be dreamin' amongst the things that are my own, as if I had never met you. There's 300 years of happy dreamin' in those things of mine, and... I want them. I want my dream."
This is the 15th move in 17 years. And this is not the first time i have looked to find my groove...and every time I remember my dad talking to me over the phone whether I lived across the country, or hugging me when I lived close, he would always remind me to unpack my 'things' first...
My things are part of me, my heritage, my life and are valuable tools for visual reminders of the lessons I have learned. They give me strength, they remind me who I am. There I things I posses that are a reminder of hard things I have gone through and give me pep talks to continue moving forward.
That is my goal today. To put up the things I have around me. To make this rental house my home. So I can have a refuge from life's storms that will surely come!
#thequietman #oldmovieshavelovelessons #iamstrongbecauseiamHisdaughter #thepowerofapresentfather #mymomwaslucky #icandohardthings
