I had the chance to spend the day with Paris today, a day when I felt strong and healthy, and able to take good care of him. I believe being with him gave me the energy I needed to jump start myself into the business of living. It was a very good day overall and I felt very happy living it. It is a toss of the dice, I guess, when you are ill. One day you feel sick, another day you feel well. Maybe that is how life is, and you have to take the proverbial good with the bad.
I made a mess of things earlier, and I had to put in an emergency S.O.S. mea culpa phone call to one of my most trusted doctors for advice regarding how to make it right again. She did and I did. I set it right, I mean. Thank goodness I was able to. Thank goodness my mistake was not un-doable, or unforgivable, or finally bad, or evil. My mother’s mistakes are like that and I do not wish to be like her. Shockingly, I am perhaps just a little bit suggestive of her. I have been her pathetic victim after all, however, I can never be her second. I simply could never stoop so low on the ladder of humanity. She, still living at an advanced age, no longer has any humanity left. It was spent many decades ago on child abuse times three. She was given three children by God to destroy, after all.
I have spent the last several months being too ill to care for my remaining beloved borzoi, Paris, and my precious cat, Sasha. I have been totally dependent on the benevolence of my boyfriend’s infinite kindness, love and generosity of spirit. Today, I was able to pick up where I left off in early January. I accomplished a great deal and felt very good about having done so.
Perhaps I am too harsh a critic of myself in my illness and I am really doing just fine. Perhaps the harsh criticisms I lash at myself are really the internalization of my mother’s own judgments but in my own words. I am reliving all of her punishments every day, I suspect that is true. She haunts me with words that echo throughout the crevices of my psyche as if I were hearing them for the first time. Imagine my shock and horror when I heard them being spoken virtually verbatim in the fine film made of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize wining play, “August – Osage County”. It was enacted to perfection between Meryl Streep, a dying, bitter mother and Julia Roberts, her eldest daughter, the intelligent, headstrong one, you know, her child most like me. It was my biography somebody else, a stranger, made into a play, and then a movie. It was accurate, down to the daughter’s physical attack upon her mother at a significant family dinner – yes, I did that, too. I had to be restrained. Perhaps it was Christmas Eve 1998 or 1999, I can no longer recall which year, only that it started my first sickness, it lasted a very long time, and like my current illness had the potential to kill me. I am still not very good at being well, or being a good mother to my only son to whom I am an enormous embarrassment, and certainly no good at all to Loren Tiino. I am so much better at love and life with my Blyss borzoi.
However, all this pain subsequently lead to something good, wonderful and very beautiful. It lead to the passion that drove me to create Blyss Kennels, a kennel begun with my beautiful, much loved English Labrador, Ebony. Then, through her, we, my then husband Bob and I, mysteriously had the opportunity to purchase a borzoi to show. He was our Casanova, and with him, we took a leap of faith to live boldly and said “Yes” to life. It was a step in the right direction. The direction away from the past.