Roses Are Red

In each of our lives, we have turning points. Those moments when something happens, or maybe doesn’t happen, where the direction and view we have of our lives shifts and finds a new focus, for better or for worse. One of those moments happened for me on a Valentine’s Day about 10 years ago when I received a dozen long stemmed red roses…that were not meant for me.

When you are single and have no significant other in your life, Valentine’s Day is one of the WORST holidays around. It seems to be a day whose sole purpose to exist is to remind those who have no one of their own to love just how much they are missing out on. You see ads and commercials and movies all around you with happy couples, holding hands and just being oh so much in love with each other. That’s all great and warm and fuzzy when you have someone to share those special moments with, but when you don’t…..it sucks! I spent many a lonely Valentine’s Day just that way and what just made it all that much worse for me was that I was a hopeless romantic. I bought into all that romantic stuff lock, stock and barrel. I ate it up as if it were chocolate covered cherries dipped in ice cream and covered in sprinkles and cream. My already vivid and overactive imagination would often wonder if there was someone else out there somewhere who felt as I did and that somehow, someway, we would find each other and live happily ever after. Yep…..I think I watched Sleepless in Seattle just one time too many.  

This particular Valentine’s Day that I am talking about right now started out just like every other one for me…..boyfriendless. My parents would always get me a card and a box of candy for Valentine’s Day and I always appreciated it greatly, but that was about all I could ever expect to receive for the day. But on this Valentine’s Day, something unexpected happened. About 3 in the afternoon our doorbell rang. When I answered the door, it was a delivery boy holding a large box filled with a dozen long stemmed red roses! For one brief second…just one brief moment…I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that maybe….just MAYBE…somehow these roses were meant for me. Perhaps somehow my one true love from some far off kingdom had found me, after looking for me for so many years, and discovered that perhaps he should have thought to first look for me in Brooklyn as opposed to Camelot or Sherwood Forest as he MUST have been doing all of the years up until then (hey, even Prince Charming can goof sometimes). But once my moment of fantastical bliss was complete, reality took over and I knew those roses were not intended for me. They were for my next door neighbor who wasn’t home at the time. The delivery boy asked me if I would mind accepting them for her. When I brought them inside, I just looked at them, admiring their beauty. I held the box in my arms as if I was a newly crowned Miss America. I closed my eyes and breathed in their sweet perfume. For those few moments, I had experienced what so many others would get to experience on their Valentine’s Day. I had received a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day. But I didn’t indulge in my fantasy for too long and allowed reality to enter my mind and swiftly clear away the traces of the bliss that remained. I closed the box, put them down, and started to cry. That single moment felt like a massive culmination of all of the sadness, loneliness and hopelessness that I had felt every year on this day. That had to rate as one of the lowest points of my life. It was that moment that made me realize that I needed to do SOMETHING to change things for myself…..which took some time and hard work for me to do.

A year or so later, I met the man who would become my boyfriend for close to five years (we broke up 4 years ago). The first time we met, he brought me a bouquet of flowers…which included a single red rose. It was the first rose that was ever given to me…..and I still have it. I would have loved to kept it suspended in a bell jar forever like in the Disney movie “Beauty and the Beast” but instead I dried it and have it safely tucked away in a small Rubbermaid container (not quite the bell jar, but it was the best I could do).  Money was tight for us in the beginning but one year on Christmas Eve after he had gotten a good paying job, he brought me home a dozen long stemmed red roses…..and this time they were really for ME and were mine to keep. I am fortunate to have received roses from him after that as well as from my boyfriend now, too, and I save the petals from all of them in a pretty glass jar. I waited a very VERY long time to receive roses from someone special….so I don’t take ANY of them for granted.

With that, I would like to simply say this…..

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

With some hope and patience,

Some wishes REALLY CAN come true!

A Letter to Myself at Sixteen

Dear Me at 16,

I’m glad I have this chance to write this for you because there is so much I want to tell you about your future. I remember how much you wondered about your future when you were a teenager. I remember how lonely and hopeless you felt because you thought things would never change for you. I remember how much you hated what you saw in the mirror everyday. I remember how although you always held on to the hope that one day things would be different for yourself, you also resided yourself to the fact that things would always be as they were for you then and you just tried your best to accept it. Well I have something to tell you……you were wrong.

I know right now at 16 your fondest wish is to be beautiful and to have it that for once….just ONCE….it would be YOU to turn the guys heads and not just the girls around you. I know you feel like you’re nothing right now, like your invisible to the world, but guess what….you’re really not. You make yourself invisible because you don’t want the world to see you as you see yourself. But some people care and will care more than you realize, if you just give them the chance to get close to you. Not everyone around you is going to hurt you. Okay, some will, I wont lie to you about that. But for every thoughtless jerk in the world, there is someone who has a warm, kind and compassionate heart who will sincerely care about you. Be brave and put yourself out there once in awhile. Yes, you will get hurt sometimes doing this, but what you get in return from the good people will make it all worth it. But in those times when you do get hurt by life and from some of the people in it, try to remember that all of those hurts and all of that pain in the end will help you to become the person you are meant to be. You will remember those times and how you felt and it will help you to empathize with others who are experiencing pain and make you want to try and help them in any way that you can ….just as you wished someone would have done for you. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger and you WILL be stronger from it all and have a more loving heart because of it, too.  Surprisingly, it will all be worth it in the end.

And believe it or not yes…one day…you will look into the mirror and like what you see. What, you don’t believe me? Now why would I lie to you? I know it’s hard but you just gotta trust me on this one. One day, as if your fairy godmother waved her magic wand over you, you will bloom. Some rosebuds need more time than others, more love and care, to be brave enough to allow the beauty that they hold deep inside of their petals to be seen by the whole world., but just be patient with yourself. One day you will realize that it hurts more to remain hidden inside of your rosebud than it will be to risk it all and allow yourself to bloom. And once you do….words wont be able to describe how you feel! You will take every compliment you receive and embrace it as if it was one of the greatest treasures on Earth because you and I both know to you….it is. Yes, sometimes what seems to be impossible actually is possible. So have faith, don’t ever give up hope and whatever you do, don’t listen to or pay any mind to the naysayers of this world who put you down and who don’t appreciate all the love and gifts you have to offer. In the end they don’t matter, so don’t give them the power to make you feel bad about yourself in anyway.

Now after knowing what your future has in store for you, I want you to remember something very important. For as much as you want to be pretty…in the end….it’s NOT what is important. As you wait for your time in the sun, you need to continue to work on what is TRULY important. Keep working hard in school and studying because developing your mind and intelligence is important and so is developing your personality. You see, everyone’s looks fade over time and in the end if that is all you depended on and all you had to offer the world, you will be sadly left. What beauty lies on the inside is TRULY what’s most important. Also, always keep your heart and mind open. Offer kindness to people for no other reason than because it’s the right thing to do and it’s what you would want others to do for you. Always put out into this world what you would hope to get back from it and you will never go wrong. In the end…..just be the kind of person you would want to know and be around yourself.

Beyond this, you don’t need to know right now. A peek into the future is fine but to stare at it is impolite. Be happy with what I have told you and just remember to hang in there….it all does get better.

Love,

Me at 38…..yeah, I can’t believe it either!  {{SIGH}}

As Winter Approaches

The last of the leaves has fallen off the trees and the air gets a bit crisper all the time....at least lately...... after a rather warm Autumn for us here in NY. But this particular morning as I looked out my bedroom window, the sky was particularly blue and was enhanced by the clouds, although the sun made it's presence known and announced that it wasn't going to let the clouds have their fun all day. 

Autumn at it's best

This is one of my first new photos taken with my new camera. This leaf was high up in the tree top but my zoom brought it THAT close to me. To say I was thrilled with the shot is an understatement :) 

The Road Not Taken

Recently, my boyfriend and I visited upstate NY for a day trip. We left about 8AM in the morning and didn’t hit the road for the return trip home until around 10:30 PM that night.  Around midnight, we were just approaching the tri-boro bridge, which would have meant we were only about another 30-45 minutes away from home. The drive up and back until that point was thankfully drama free but right then, just as we started to approach the bridge, traffic started backing up BADLY and suddenly a police car, fire truck and an ambulance cut through the barrage of cars that were piling up quickly and made their way towards what was causing the back up ahead. We knew it had to be a pretty bad accident. Of course, we felt bad for whoever was involved in the accident but we also felt bad for us, because the police were redirecting everyone in that lane…the lane we needed to be in to get home… to the far off right lane instead, causing us to take an unexpected turn and causing us to get totally lost.

With no access to the internet (I’m lucky I have a cell phone these days, never mind internet service on it) no map (when you only take the subway into Manhattan you usually don’t keep a road map to drive there very handy) and no one that I would want to bother at midnight on a Saturday night just so I could ask some directions…we were in some serious trouble. With no where for us to pull off to the side of the road and try figure things out, we just had to keep driving, and get further and further lost. I started to get really scared and then started to pray. Thankfully it wasn’t too much longer before I recognized a familiar exit we were starting to approach… the Battery Tunnel….but before we reached it, we came across some policemen who had pulled someone over (I think it was a drunk driver) and asked them for directions. With their help and directions, we finally arrived home safely…after 2:00 in the morning! We were tired, stressed and weary, but thankfully we were now HOME!

I like to believe that life throws lessons at us when it feels we need to learn something and I felt that this was, indeed, one of those moments. Like I always say, if I have to go through something crappy, I would like to at least try and take SOMETHING positive from the experience. I also like to learn quickly from the exceptionally crappy experiences so I don’t have to re-learn from them again at some point in the future. So with that said, here is what I learned from taking the road that should NOT have been taken.

When life throws us a curve, you can do several things with it.

1. Panic

2. Go “Woe is me”, have yourself a great big ol’ pity party, and just wallow in your “Boo-hoo’s” and “Why me’s.”

3. Just stay calm, go with the flow, ride the wave and see where you wind up.

The experience also showed me that just ONE wrong decision, choosing left instead of right, can throw you off course and off the path that you are meant to be on in the blink of an eye. If this happens, you have two choices. Realize what happened quickly and make every effort to recover from your error, make things right, and get back on the right path again. Or you can choose to do nothing, stay on the path you know is wrong, and wind up lost and unaware of where you are going for a very long time, taking you further and further away from where you belong.

Sometimes the road that is not taken can be just as important as the road that is. Sometimes the lessons of “what could have been” can stay with us and effect us even more than the results of “what actually was” can.  Remember, the next time you come upon a fork in the road of life, choose wisely, because you just might not realize what you could be losing by choosing the wrong path until it’s too late, and some paths you just can’t simply turn around on and return to what you left behind so easily.

The road not taken….not just a direction to travel in, but also a way of looking at life itself.

Copyright October 5, 2011

All rights reserved.  Do not

use without permission.

Pictures courtesy of Google Images.

Walt Disney Hated His Mother......Or Did He?

When it comes to most Disney animated movies, has anyone else ever noticed the disturbing trend that the mother figures are either portrayed in a negative fashion or are DEAD? I have noticed this for awhile now and it seems to have ALWAYS been like this and still is today. To start, let’s go through some of the early classics:

Cinderella – Mother dead, evil stepmother

Snow White – Ditto

Sleeping Beauty – Ditto

Bambi – Mother shot dead by hunter

Dumbo – Mother chained up and taken away saying she was crazy

Pinocchio – Father, but no mother

Who doesn’t tear up a bit when see Bambi running through the forest as you hear the shotgun blast or when Dumbo's mother is locked up but she can still offer her little Dumbo some kind motherly love and and affection in her own way.

Now, the trend continues with some of the newer classics:

Beauty and the Beast – No mother even mentioned

The Little Mermaid – Ditto

Pocahontas – Ditto

Aladdin – Jasmine, ditto, and Aladdin is an orphan

Mulan – Grandmother, but no mother

Finding Nemo – Mother and “siblings” eaten

There are a few exceptions as well. In some cases, the fathers are JUST as easy of a target:

The Lion King – Father killed

Toy Story 1-3 – No father ever mentioned

The Jungle Book – Mogley is orphaned and raised by jungle animals

Tarzan – Ditto

Lilo and Stitch – Orphaned

Yup, even Mufasa didn't make it.

Pretty messed up when you think about it, isn’t it? I should mention that Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians feature both parents, human and animal, alive and well, but they truly are in the minority.

Several comments that were left on this blog when I posted it on another site led me to further investigate what Walt Disney's relationship with his mother was really like and I was quite surprised with what I found out.

For his parents, Flora and Elias Disney’s, golden wedding anniversary, Walt bought them a new house in Toluca Lake, CA. They loved the house but the furnance wasn’t very good and Walt’s mother complained about the fumes from it. So Walt had some of his studio workers (although there are stories that Walt did it himself but it could never be proved) replace the old furnace with a new gas furnace. On the night of November 26, 1938, Elias found Flora passed out on the bathroom floor and soon passed out himself trying to help her. The next morning, their maid arrived at the home and found the both of them. Flora was already dead but Elias and the maid recovered in the hospital. Police attributed the tragedy to a faulty connection in the gas furnace which had been on all night.  And Walt was never able to get over it.

So Walt didn’t HATE his mother…..he blamed himself for her death. Is it any wonder Walt had mother issues?


Here is a picture of Walt with his mother, Flora.

Copyright August 10, 2011

All rights reserved.  Do not

use without permission.

Pictures courtesy of Google Images.

And So I Wait

AND SO I WAIT

It seems I have spent most of my life waiting. Waiting for someone. Waiting for something. Waiting for a sign. Waiting for an opportunity. Waiting for approval. Waiting for love. I suppose we all have, to some extent. We spend an average of 3-5 years of our lives just waiting, in the doctor’s office, in the line in stores, etc. But I have realized something. If you wait too long for things, your life starts to pass you by. Life is a precious gift and so is time, neither of which should be wasted, so I ask myself then why have I, throughout my life, allowed myself to waste precious time just waiting? Good things might come to those

who wait….but shouldn’t there be some kind of limit to just how much waiting you have to do?

When I was a kid I waited for simple things, like for Christmas, for my favorite TV show to come on, for the one night a week that I could stay up late, for my birthday to come so I could get that Barbie doll that I wanted so badly,  for summer vacation to come, and I waited for the circus to come to town (even though I hate clowns). In the innocence of childhood we wait for such basic and sweet things and because our concept of time at that age is that it is never ending, we feel like these waiting periods are eternities when in actuality they might just be a few hours or days. But as we grow up we start to embrace the true concept of just what time is and it’s value, and how it can easily just slip past us if we let it.

As I grew into a teenager and a young adult, I still found myself waiting but this time it was for bigger things. I was an overweight, ugly duckling of a teenager and a young adult. This was a very sad and lonely time for me, a hopeless time for me, if you want to put it that way. A time that I spent waiting. Waiting to have someone notice me. Waiting (and hoping) someone would take a look at what was lying just beneath the surface of my appearance. Waiting for the day to come that I might not hurt as much inside as I did.  Waiting for the day that I didn’t hate what I saw everytime I looked in the mirror. Waiting for the day that maybe I would be cut a break and I would be given the chance for my outside to reflect what was inside of my heart and soul. Waiting for the loneliness to end. Waiting for a life that I only daydreamed about and wondering if it would ever happen. Then one day, my waiting paid off. As time often does, it wove it’s tapestry ever so slowly and carefully and then FINALLY my waiting was over, at least as far as my appearance went. But with most things, there came a catch with it……more waiting of a different kind this time.

Now my waiting took on yet ANOTHER dimension. Now I waited for someone to ask me out. I waited for someone to call me. I waited for someone to notice me for more than not just how I looked like on the outside but for how I was on the inside, too, (now there was a twist). I waited (and wished) for someone to tell me I was beautiful. I waited (and wished) for someone to tell me that they loved me. I waited (and wished) for someone….. to just want me. Well eventually my waiting actually paid off for this as well, and I finally had someone to call my own. Now was the time for a relationship, or relationships, to enter my life from these years on forward……but they were to bring me yet more waiting.

Now I wait for appreciation and recognition of the love, care and thoughtfulness that I give freely and willingly. I wait to hear that someone could not imagine a life without me by their side as their partner forever. I wait to perhaps be deemed “worthy” one day for someone to want to make a lifetime commitment to me to ensure this happens. I wait for someone to want to hold my hand through the sunset of our years together and promise to never let it, or me, go. I wait for a future that I have absolutely no clue of what I’m in store for.

And so I just wait…..and wait…..and wait. But you know something?

SCREW THIS!

Through all these years of what seems like endless waiting I have AT LAST realized something. The only one who wont make me wait for any of these things anymore is one person and one person only…..ME. I am the only one that I know I can depend on 100%.  Love for myself is a love I can rely on, one that I have neglected for FAR too long, one that is always appreciated and reciprocated, and one that wont make me wait.  This is a VERY new concept for me and one that I think will take some time for me to try and get used to but you know what? I think I’m worth it. I’ve grown tired and weary from all of the waiting.

And so now I will wait…for my life and my own happiness……no more.

Copyright August 05, 2011

All rights reserved.  Do not

use without permission.

Pictures courtesy of Google Images.