What You Won't Do For Love

             

   The telephone chimed.  I scurried to reach my bedroom before it stopped ringing.  On the other end of the line was the familiar lyrical voice of my daughter.  Though she is nearly twenty-seven years of age, she sounds more like a character from Pixar’s Toy Story than a grown woman.

 “Mommy, did you know that the man that sings What You Won’t Do for Love is white?”  I could barely stifle the roar of laughter welling up from my belly! “Yes dear, Bobby Caldwell is white.” Her excited tone lingered through the rest of the conversation.  “He has so much soul.”  She giggled.  I deliberated, “Hmmm, a lot of soul. “  Too bad some people are devoid of soul.  My meaning of the word was a bit dissimilar to the denotation that labels Rhythm and Blues artists.

I speak specifically to women.  However, I apply this question to the male counterparts as well.  How many people have encountered someone that did not present themselves to have a conscience?  I took a break from spreading the sheet on my pillow top mattress, sat down, and further ruminated on the words that Bobby Caldwell crooned thirty-five years ago, “In my world, only you make me do for love what I would not do.”  How many darned times have I done things for love that I ordinarily would not have done? Geez!

I ask, how many dinners were purchased and/or prepared?  How many times was laundry done, houses cleaned and other people’s kids transported?  The outcome resulted in being dissed and dismissed by the person you loved, with the words, “I am over it! Too bad you aren't” 

I speak not only of so-called romantic relationships, I speak of relationships with people who have grinned in your face, ate in your kitchen and listened to your secrets.  What exactly would most of us do for love, what we would not do if we truly loved ourselves?  Are we truly socialized to love ourselves without being selfish and hedonistic? Or are we so codependent and needy that we become blind to who some people really are? Remember the group Guy? It's just a fantasy.  Image in a magazine!

What does a person do for love when they don’t know how to create boundaries that could potentially strangle the life out of them? I am curious to know, just how many of us have allowed ourselves to be so enamored by another individual that we lost focus our own being?  The interesting twist in that story is that the person that we enveloped our lives with ended up disappointing and injuring our souls to the core.

                What does one do for love that they ordinarily would not do?   I invite the enlightenment.

Changing the Face of the Season

I managed, by the grace of God to get through one of the most difficult months of the year for me, November.  Yesterday marked the eighth year since I said goodbye to my youngest son.  I recall that day being the darkest I have ever experienced.  I don’t recall what my emotions were during his four hour long home going service, but I do recall the final moment as they lowered my baby into the ground and I stood there paralyzed with grief. My first inclination was to jump in behind the dark cooper colored box that held one of the most precious people in my life.

Thank God for December!  Now can we get past this commercialized mess we have come to call the holiday season already?  We go into debt for one day, to buy toys for kids that they will either break, or lose by December 30^th!  Afterward we don’t speak to the people that we grin at and tell lies to until next year.  Yes, I said it!  I am a bit ticked, as people seem to neglect what this season is about. 

I think about all of the parents who are grieving because they no longer have their babies, and Christmas is not this grand thing that the television commercials portray.  I think of a friend of mine who lost her son last year, just before Christmas.  I texted her on Thanksgiving Day to ask how she was doing.  She’d spent the day in bed.  It seems that some people, even some who understand the pain of losing a child don’t get her depression.  I get it.  This woman buried her baby two days after Christmas!  Her situation got the cogs in my little brain working.

I have to change the face of the next holiday season!   I am going to make sure that I can remember my baby by defining what he was about.  He was a sweet and easy child to rear.  That indicates compassion.  He was intelligent beyond his years, which indicates business savvy, and he was wiser than older people I know.  I have to change not only the face of the holidays for myself, but for others who have suffered horrible loses during the holiday season.

According to USA Today and Psychology Today, it is a myth the suicides increase during the holiday season.  Okay, who is arguing?  What I know firsthand is that holidays, birthdays and anniversaries are particularly difficult when one has lost a child to homicide or suicide.  This is not to suggest that it is not hard losing loved ones to illness, but a child being murdered represents a different type of loss.  Believe me, I almost lost two  sons in one day!!

I will continue my research of people who have lost their children and the affects over a period of years.  I consistently experience certain silent critiques because I am brave enough to explore and reveal my pain though it has been years since El’s transition.  Why are we so phony in this society?  Another question for another day.  I digress, I must change how people are able to handle the holidays by showing them the compassion, intelligence and wisdom that my baby boy had. 

There is a lot of work to be done, and a lot of love to share with those who feel as hopeless as I have felt for years after my son’s demise.  At times grief lingers because I have a remaining son that suffers.  There remains a far-reaching residual effect that murder has had on families.  For this reason, I must make sure that my son’s dreams are fulfilled in a positive way.

To hell with what naysayers think about me…Everything I do from this point is about helping someone who cannot get up by themselves to heal. That is what El would want.   Son, I am on it!