Author: pegnear

Hello Beautiful.

pegnear

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My life is a lie.

There. The words are right there, ready to jump off the page and slap me in the face. I know as I begin this journey that it won’t be pretty…it will ramble backward and forward. It will be incoherent and it will be filled with lies, not on purpose but because I will try to trick you as I have tricked and lied to myself. It will be concise, purposeful and painful. It will be a contradiction and a reconciliation. It will be boring, sad, exciting and joyful. But most of all it will be the truth…my truth as I see it, as I have lived it and as I come to terms with it. So here we go…better grab a coffee or a drink…this is going to take awhile.

Oprah, Tony Robbins, Joel Osteen, hell, even some of my Facebook friends all tell me I am worthy. Worthy of what, I wonder? A good life? Happiness? Good health? Wealth? A guilt free existence? A parent’s love? Ahhhhhhhh, there we have it! The proverbial ‘blame your Mother syndrome’. I haven’t really. Blamed my Mother I mean. Well, not consciously (first lie, but we’ll get into that later).

So here I am, sixty one years old, trying to make sense of it all. Find your purpose. That’s what all the gurus tell me. Once you discover your purpose, all aspects of your life will fall into place…in an orderly fashion, in tune and perfect harmony with the universe. I’d call bullshit, but I’m afraid to. What if they’re right? Part of me believes it…has tried to live it, but somewhere the doubt needles me. It taunts me, like a damn chicken looking for worms….peck, peck, peck. Wearing me down until the positive persona I have worked so hard at for the benefit of the world begins to crack. So I retreat, making excuses for anything and everything so I can continue to hide from the world, and my mirror. I look in the mirror but I don’t SEE what looks back at me. Too frightening. Too unnerving. What if I don’t like what I see? I have spent too many years telling myself how much I like myself to risk it.

Sounds like I’m a Negative Nellie, right? I’m not really. I’m a positive person that just has to work at it…not because it’s difficult, just because I am surrounded by negativity. I cut myself off because I don’t want to get sucked into the negative vortex that is the world today.

I have wondered many times, especially over the past fifteen years or so if I have some undiagnosed mental or emotional condition. Bi-polar?  Clinically depressed? Psychotic? Neurotic? All of the above? Of course I’ll never know because I would never admit to any of the symptoms. It would make me weak, and I am not weak. I am strong. I am woman. Hear me roar….with rage sometimes.

This journey of self exploration will be okay as long as I don’t look in the mirror. That’s where the liar lives. She doesn’t lie to anyone else…abhors it as a matter of fact. But she lies to me. There is no self doubt in the face I see …

‘This is gonna hurt’, she says with a smirk. ‘Hang on.’

Never Turn Down a Lesson

pegnear

In 1975, when my father died at the age of fifty, I watched my 43 year old mother struggle with the mundane things we all take for granted.

On her behalf, I took Dad’s  big, gas guzzling, standard shift GMC Jimmy and traded it in for a small more manageable automatic car for her. I helped her fill out an application for her very first credit card with a limit of $500. She had worked outside the home over the years, but had no credit….nothing in her name.

The tipping point for me came when I heard she, yet again, had to call my brother-in-law to come and change a fuse for her. She knew where the fuse box was but not how to tell if one was burnt out, or how to change one. A simple feat, really, but one she had never been shown, nor had any interest in learning. (By the way, fuses were used prior to circuit breakers and were small screw in glass knob type things.)

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It was then I suppose, unconsciously, that I made up my mind that if I could learn to do something new …even something I might not need to know today…I would take the opportunity. I was 23, and the practical lessons I have learned astound me when I think of it.

The lessons weren’t always intentional, on my part, or my teacher’s. Some worked out better than others, and some were dismal failures. The worst that comes to mind was knitting. My neighbour and I both were expecting at the same time. I already had a baby, this was her first.  Janet, who was younger than me, knit and made beautiful things. I decided to ask her to teach me. I picked out a beautiful coral coloured wool , certain I was having a girl, and a pattern for a baby sweater, bonnet and booties.

I was four months into my pregnancy when I had my first lesson and cast on those first stitches. My daughter was four and a half when she got that sweater and bonnet for her doll at Christmas. I never did make the booties!

Most of the lessons were more from helping, researching, and watching , than actually being taught.

Today I can build decks, small buildings, wallpaper, paint, do basic plumbing, shingle a roof, side a house, read a balance sheet, run a business successfully, make the best cheesecake this side of New York, give a decent haircut, hook-up a hundred pound propane tank, pull start a snow machine, drive a manual vehicle up to five tons, fire a shotgun with great accuracy, filet a fish, change a flat tire, train a dog, paddle a canoe, fly a small plane, start a fire with flint, give a manicure like a pro, make a spreadsheet program look easy, and change a diaper on a new born babe.

If you are afforded the opportunity to learn, jump at it. It may never come again.

It is my belief that no day is a day wasted, but a day where you can close your eyes knowing you have learned something new…even if it’s just a new word…is a treasure.

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English as Another Language

pegnear

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I before E, except after C.

We all were taught that simple rule in school as a basic principal of spelling. Well that only works if your foreign neighbour named Keith isn’t too weird.

How in the world did English become the universal language of commerce and trade, when even we anglophones have difficulty learning our mother tongue?

The rules for plurality are even more confusing. Add an S: horse to horses; goose to gooses….ahhhh, ok, well not that one. Mouse to mouses….hmmm, nope that isn’t correct. Flock to flocks. No, wait; that turns a noun into a verb. Flock already is plural. Oh my head!!!

Okay, well we know that pony becomes ponies….change the Y to IE and add and S. So movy…oops! That’s not a word….it’s movie in the singular form.

So it stands to reason that fish would be fishs, but noooooooo, we forgot the E. E? Yes, E. FishEs.

It suddenly dawns on me that while I love literature and am part of the Canadian grammar police squad, I now know why I didn’t choose teaching, specifically, teaching English, as a career.

Of course if you really want to confuse a person learning the English language (a child in kindergarten, or an adult with a different first language), let’s discuss homonyms. I can’t really think of a time when none of the words being taught, whether or not they were in their original form, were not confusing. (Double negative, I know) Unless of course the nun tying the knot on the kite string was worried about the weather there.

Don’t even get me started on punctuation. And please, please, if you don’t get anything else from today’s blog, remember that a colon and a colan, although similar in shape, are very, very different things.