fulllife

Well, well… being a Today Blogger for just 2 days and already I need a vacation….

Seriously, we booked this week of vacation long time ago, so starting tomorrow (Saturday) I will enjoy a bit of sunshine and Spanish atmosphere… and my husband! Quality time!

Since I don’t know what the internet options are over there, it could be that I will be out of touch for the next week. Not good for a blog that’s just been set up, but hey, I live my life to the full, remember? I’ll try not to get sun burnt and see you all later… Meantime, enjoy yourselves!

Last night my stepson (29) came over since he was ‘in the neighbourhood’. He is a sweet, sweet man, as far as you can say that about a man. I am really fond of him. Two months ago his girlfriend left him after being together for an odd 8 years. He was devastated at first, didn’t fully comprehend the reasons behind her departure…

Since he is also a very sensitive mean - with depressions, just like me - we were worried about how he would cope with things. I mean, as an outsider you can say that life will get better after a while, but hell, that’s not what a heartbroken (step)son needs to hear, right?

Fortunately he and his ex-girlfriends are still on speaking terms, which I think is a great help to get over a loss like that. We saw him recuperating bit by bit, and he seems rather fine these days. Except for… the lonely house, the lonely moments, the lonely days, feeling lonely. We talked about that yesterday over a glass of wine. I am an expert in living alone, being alone, I did not meet my husband till 10 years ago and before that I had some relationships, but never serious enough to set up house together. So you don’t have to tell me about loneliness…

I told him that as a single man of woman you have to Make Your Own Day. Everybody is busy busy busy these days, and if you are sitting around waiting to be rescued from your loneliness, you’d better not hold your breath… He smiled and answered that he has great friends who do every now and then give him a call to join them in this or that. He plays soccer and has a great team of friends for years, all young men, some married, some a young father… And yes, he had noticed that to have a pleasant time you yourself must make the effort to organize that. When he told me he was not ”waiting on the sofa”, I felt so relieved. He had grown so much in so little time! Amazing… I shared this feeling with him, and he was just sitting there, just like his father can do, quietly, with that little smile that tells me he is quite contented. Not happy yet, but that will come around again. I am so sure of that, but are not going to tell him. He’ll find out…

I was never meant to be born…

Don’t  get me wrong, my parents wanted me very much. So much, that they did everything possible to make me get born….

I have an older sister and brother. After my brother’s birth, my mother got pregnant twice, and twice miscarried. That’s sad, very sad. Then she got pregnant of me, and again she was about to lose her baby. I’d say: let go of it, if you are going to miscarry again, this baby is not meant to be born, right? But no… science had invented a medicine that could stop the miscarriage, so that the pregnancy could be carried to the full… My mother, very catholic and very much into having a family, concurred in having that medicine adminstered to her, by injections. The threath of a miscarriage went by, and my mother was able to give birth to a baby girl, me, Elisabeth. Those of you who are of my age may have heard of that medication, and also of the consequences for baby girls of that medication. We are the so called DES-daughters http://www.desaction.org/desdaughters.htm and we never knew we were until well into the eighties, when the dangers of this DES medication were exposed. My mother was in tears when she heard the news, phoning me to beg for forgiveness, but what could I do? In her day and age the medication seemed allright, her specialist prescribed it, so who was I to condemn her for taking it?

I did get cervical cancer in the early nineties, when I was almost 40 years old, but again, whose fault is that? Certainly not my mother’s, who was in despair when having a third miscarriage… Nobody blew the whistle on a medicine that was so shortly on the market, of which nobody knew the consequences… We all heard of the Softenon baby’s; well, here’s a DES baby for you: never meant to be born, but alive and kicking, with a bad health and lots of problems around that health, but with a strong will to survive!

In retrospect it all looks so easy…

Pick up the pieces and get on with what you were doing. That’s the story of my life, and I always lived by that motto. Especially when there is no one to blame, really. Get on with it. Don’t look back. Enjoy your life and put it on the bill of experience, as the father of a long time ago friend used to say. Oooh, that bill of experience… I just wish someone else would pick up the tab for a change… But hey, ‘you’re a big girl now, so you pay your dues’, and STOP looking back, for Pete’s sake!

Last Saturday I turned 57. A hell of an age for someone who wasn’t meant to be born - physically. I’ll get back to that later on. A hell of an age for someone who spent her first odd year in hospital, while her parents were preparing themselves to losing their baby girl. A hell of an age indeed, but then, I am a hell of a fighter. So don’t be surprised if you find I fight a lot. Not with people in general, mind you, but mostly with myself, doctors, wiseguys and -girls, and last but not least my parents. Actually, I am a quite peace loving woman, but once you enter my private little garden, so nicely fenced and taken care of, you have to deal with me. A friend of mine once said: “If those eyes (mine) could kill, we’d have a lot of funerals”. Not true, by the way, I save that look for only a few people, so he was exaggerating enormously.

Most people I know admire my boldness. I don’t know if that is an admirable asset, but I can’t be any other way. So this blog might be a bit bold to you every once in a while, and if that’s the case, you just skip that particular post, okay? Simple. I like simple…