Sometimes saying goodbye can be one of the hardest things to do. Of course much of this difficulty lies in the nature of the goodbye and its timing. If your life has included moving a lot, from city to city or maybe even between countries, then you've experienced a wide range of different kinds of goodbyes; to your friends and classmates, and co-workers. These always seem difficult at the time but generally you move on and begin new relationships wherever you end up.
Moving through life stages creates opportunities for goodbyes of different natures. One of the big ones, of course, is when your children grow up and move out. This is greeted by parents in different ways. We all have this as an expectation, that our kids will grow up and move out. In spite of this being the norm, many of us find ourselves surprisingly unprepared for this when it actually happens.
Homes that have had kids grow up in them seem terribly empty when those kids are gone. The sights, sounds and even smells have all been altered, even if only slightly. If you take a home (and by home I don't mean house) and change the way it smells, looks and sounds then it is not the same home anymore, simple as that. It is not as good as it used to be.
I think mothers likely have the most difficult time adjusting when this happens. Mothers have the most investment in their kids and their kids well-being. Both parents can look at their children and say to themselves therein lies a little bit of me. It is only the mother, though, that can say you started in me, grew in me and I will protect you with the same ferocity I would protect myself!
And then the person they have sworn to protect...moves! They sometimes move to where they no longer can be watched over and kept from harm. Realistically, mothers know their children are fully capable of fending for themselves. Being able to fend for yourself does not take into account a whole wide variety of things that can, and do, go wrong. All of those things are things mothers know about all too well. And when a kid is no longer there and perhaps cannot even be reached in a hurry (and is still a part of you needing protection) there arises the conflict.
So how do you actually say goodbye? I guess that depends on whether you're talking about the word or the act.
You can avoid the word. When parting with someone, simply do not say goodbye. Substitute the word goodbye for the words I love you. The two of you well know what is happening but neither of you use the actual word. Almost as if one of you was only headed to a different room in the house. There--you've avoided a goodbye.
The act of goodbye, of course, cannot be avoided or made any less difficult even though you fully understand its reason and are intellectually (though perhaps not quite as emotionally) in agreement.
Perhaps a good thing to remember is that every goodbye was preceded by a hello. This hello may have been 25 years ago when your child was born. It may have been a week ago when you met them at the airport or they showed up in your driveway. Those were the good things that made the goodbye possible. What's the next thing scheduled to happen? A hello! A happy event! And what made that hello possible? The goodbye that, at some point, preceded it.
Yeah, you're right, we're talking the circle of life here, aren't we?
So if goodbyes are hard, there is something fundamentally good going on. You will feel more pain, likely, than your child does and this is the way it's supposed to be. And if you are the kind of person who finds goodbyes difficult, then you are likely the kind of person who someone will have a hard time saying goodbye to, as well. It means you're a loving person and loving people are missed when they're gone.
Above all, remember that it does get better! You know this, deep down inside, put some trust in it.
So, until we speak again, I love you!
Well, I've discovered that sex does, indeed, sell! Now if only I had something to sell...!
In my most recent blog, entitled "Sex", I picked that title and combined it with a semi-erotic picture of a couple embracing. The result was that in less than 24 hours that blog surpassed the viewership of any blog I've written, to date! I have been blogging for slightly over a year now and none of my blogs have accumulated, over that whole time period, the same number of views this blog did in slightly less than a day.
I find this pretty astounding and not really surprising, at the same time.
I was pretty certain when I set up the posting this way that it would garner more attention than others. Sex is pretty universally interesting to people, as opposed to me just rambling on about things to do with, well....mainly just me, I guess. I guessed that this blog would end up with more views than any of the others, I just didn't think it would happen in less than 24 hours.
So the stats were interesting but, like a lot of stats, don't tell the whole story. All I'm really able to find out is how many individual times a blog is viewed. That could then be ten people viewing a blog one time each or it could be one person viewing the same blog ten times. And, of course, it doesn't tell me who viewed the blog and then actually read it! Hard to say how many people got into it, realized that they'd been tricked (sorta) and immediately left. Or those who ended up there by accident (it does happen).
To the right of blog entries, there's a list of my seven most popular blogs, in terms of "views", "Sex" will, for quite awhile I imagine, be right near the top of that list. Possibly, people might might even realize there's a whole bunch of blogs listed and might be tempted to see what other things my quirky brain's come up with over the past year and in the time to come.
So I guess we'll see. I don't imagine people were too upset over being part of my little experiment, I tried to give them at least a little something of interest to while away a few minutes...
Okay...gotcha!! Just performing a social experiment wherein I pick a provocative blog title and couple it with an even more provocative photo and just see how many more page views I get than with any other blog I've done! FYI, you were visitor 2,493!.....just kidding......
Well, now that I have your attention, I suppose I could subject you to just about any kind of a blog I want! Although I imagine that if I did that then you could simply exit out and not likely ever return....so I won't.
Hmmmm....sex. Where do I begin....?
Sex is wonderful! Sex is horrible! Sex is uplifting, degrading, fulfilling, lonely, joyous, maddening, satisfying, frustrating, mystifying, bitter, and sizzling!
It is so many different things to so many different people, sometimes all at once. It definitely permeates society as no other aspect of our lives can. It even sells stuff! It never seems to be running too far below the mainstream thought process; you could be sitting there paying bills, cutting the grass, filling up your car, or writing a report and at some point, when you've used up whatever brain processes you needed to do that actual job, your brain reverts to sex.
I guess it's just our way of making sure we procreate--sex needs to be running behind the scenes at all times.
Of course, a lot of the time sex isn't running behind the scenes at all, it's right out there in the forefront, monopolizing things. These are the interesting times, these are the times when we sacrifice our normal inhibitions and lay ourselves bare in every way possible. This is when you forgo normal modes of communication and simply rely on bodies responding to bodies. Not that no words are spoken; the words of sex are sometimes as important as the physical aspects of it. Sometimes the words are rough, sometimes they are whispered, sometimes playful, sometimes urgent. The words occasionally walk a fine line and, if chosen, should be chosen carefully. The wrong word can alter a mood so suddenly that sometimes you're better off just keeping your mouth shut and going with it.
As an adolescent, it didn't matter to me whether I had tons of money, whether my marks were good, whether I had a good job or did well at sports. All I wanted to do was have sex for the first time and this really did seem to be the most important thing I could aspire to.
Of course, at some point this did happen and it was awesome. It was all I could talk about forever as it had confirmed me as a man. Then, suddenly, it wasn't nearly as end-of-the-world important as it used to be and some of those other things took on higher priority. Don't get me wrong, though, sex was still mighty important!
Some of you are probably wondering why the hell this old guy is even talking about sex, let alone writing a whole blog about it. Well, of course, it really was a trap wasn't it? And the best part of the trap was that someone old enough to be your dad is now talking to you about sex! Which, you're thinking, is all wrong because you already know everything there is to know, right?
Well, one of the things you need to know is that as far as sex is concerned, there isn't much new under the sun (or the covers) and anything you think you've discovered for the first time is almost certainly something that's been around for an eternity, at least in one variation or another. So please don't assume your parents stopped having sex when they had their last kid. And, while you're at it, please assume that some of the sex they were having was creative, sensual, protracted and exhausting.
So now I need to figure out how to set another trap....
