One Day at a Time

The prompt for this week’s 100 Words is “… being clear is essential to …” Here is my entry:

I remember what it felt like. When I was deep in the throes of my addiction, I often felt disassociated from my own life. I had the sense that there was another life that I should be living, just out of reach, just beyond my sightline.

I would get glimpses of it sometimes. Brief, sweet glimpses of a life with meaning, Then it would be gone and the shreds of it would haunt my days as a human doing, not a human being. That was the life I should be living. And sobriety, being clear, is essential to experience it.

The Legacy of Invisibility

This week’s 100 word challenge is LEGACY. This is my entry:

I watch him. I watch him struggle as he faces each new challenge. Having no experience himself, he needs to carefully construct his own idea of how to be a loving father.

Patient with you as a toddler, even more so when you reached your teens, you will never understand how afraid he was to be the parent he never had. But I can see. Sometimes, when he worries that he is too strong, or too weak, I can see the boy he used to be. Seven years old, waiting on the sidewalk for the father who never came back.

Dance, Dance, Evolution….

My eldest son got married a few weeks ago. It was an incredible day – magic in so many ways. We held the wedding at our farm and it turns out that it is way more work than just writing a cheque to the golf course down road. Live and learn.

One thing that was very difficult in the execution of the wedding was the transitions; moving people from their cars to the front yard for the ceremony, moving between the ceremony and reception tent, sitting down to dinner, starting the dancing, etc. When it was time for the band to take it’s first break, we switched to the dance music that I had racked up on my iPod. To get the ball rolling, I grabbed my husband and we started to dance.

Shall we dance?

Now here’s the thing. We can really dance. Both my husband and I are pretty good dancers – always have been. And Oh, How We Danced…On the Night…That We Met…(that’s a song kids). We met in the afternoon and he invited me to an ‘oh so cool’ club opening in downtown Toronto. Turned out, I was the only white chick in the place. It wasn’t scary enough being out with a guy I had just met – I was also way out of my league in the cool department in a very hip, downtown crowd. Until he asked me to dance.

That’s what I’m talking about!

You see – we danced the same way. The very first time we danced, it looked we had been dancing together for a long time. We felt the music in the same way, our timing was the same, we moved really well together. And don’t think we both didn’t realize it meant something. I told my mother that night that I had met the man I was going to marry – and I was right.
So after 27 years, we have gotten even more in sync with our dancing – it actually helps that we are both sober and don’t tend to go spinning off, banging into unsuspecting fellow dancers. But there’s a problem with dancing well. We look like we rehearsed it. And nobody would come on the floor with us when we were dancing! And this was a crowd that danced their asses off all night!

Everybody Dance! or maybe not…

We called to people and gestured for them to join us on the dance floor.  Nobody did. People just watched us. Some clapped for heaven’s sake! One friend of my son’s even tweeted about it. Good Lord! The photographer even spoke about it on her blog: http://blog.navynhum.com/2012/07/michelle-elton-country-wedding-in-king-city.html

Afterwards, my husband’s partner asked where we had taken lessons. Please let the record show: We have never taken dance lessons. We didn’t rehearse for this event. In fact, my husband didn’t even know what songs I was going to download for the band breaks.
We just dance well together. Always have. My son says when he watches us dance he can tell what we must have been like when we were young. I love dancing with my husband – I remember what it was like to be young as well. Burns my ass somewhat that he looks almost exactly the same as he did nearly 30 years ago but what the hell.  Lucky me.