Shoelaces for Josie

When you’re alone, you’re just one person. You only have to buy food for one, gas for one, electricity for one. You get the whole bed, and you can twist and flop around any which way you want. It doesn’t matter if the dishes sit for a day or if you spend the night at the bar. You can run around the house naked, wear heels while cooking breakfast and sing off key as loudly as you want.

But – when you’re alone, you’re just one person. You make decisions alone. You go to the movies alone. You go to church alone. You eat alone, drive alone and sleep alone. There’s no one to talk to, no one to call when your car breaks down, no one to hold your hand when the going gets rough. When you’re alone, you are just one.

There’s no one to get in a fight with, but there’s no one to make up with either. There’s no one to take the remote away from you, but there’s no one to curl up with on movie night either. There’s no one underfoot, but there’s no one to unfairly blame either.

Alone is safe. It’s a barricade against all the nasty parts of the outside world. But alone is terrifying when it becomes unsafe. It’s a barricade against all the wonderful parts of the outside world.

Sometimes, being with someone is hard. I know. I was there. Sometimes, being alone is hard. I know. I am here.

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time – about 25 years to be exact. “Daddy issues” as our society so flippantly calls them have played a large role in my life as they have in so many peoples’ lives. Things that were said and done. Things that weren’t said and weren’t done. I needed more and, at the same time, I wanted less – I needed support, but I wanted the freedom to be me.

Details…details aren’t necessary. And if they are, well, they just aren’t. The thing about daddy issues is that we tend to use them as an excuse. I’ve done it myself in the past two decades. Blaming some of the situations and shortcomings of my life on my poor relationship with my dad. Pulling the “daddy issues” card out when I needed a crutch, when I needed to have a scapegoat, when I was recalling childhood memories.

I haven’t made any particular effort to connect with my dad since I left for college seven years ago. I’ve been financially independent for each of those seven years, and with every mile that physically stretched between us, two miles of emotional distance was erected. We didn’t have a base. We didn’t have a foundation to build on. There was too much water under the bridge.

But the past year and a half, I’ve been doing some tall thinking about my “daddy issues”. For so long, I’ve just blown it off. I’ve whined and grumped around about how I have a shaky relationship with my father, and I would point to the years of my childhood when all the water was flowing under the bridge. And there is water under the bridge. The trail it left behind is hard to miss, but…that’s the past.

And this is the present. He is an adult, and he is my father. But I am an adult too. I have an equal responsibility to work on our relationship just as much as he does. Maybe when we’re kids, the parents have to shoulder the responsbility more heavily as the adult. But now that I’m an adult too? I have an equal responsibility to make an effort.

The truth is, I was a difficult kid to raise. I could, ocassionally, about once every hour, be attitudinal and a touch ornery. It’s also true that things and decisions and conversations could have been handled differently. But they weren’t. You can’t go back and send the water back up the stream.

We don’t get do-overs. We get do-right-nows. And maybe that’s why I wrapped my arms around him that morning, squeezed tight and said, “It was good to be here for Christmas, Dad.”

It has been a long day. Days when I don’t have something to do or some place to be seem to drag an eternity anymore. I think I’m supposed to look forward to these days of freedom; I don’t. And yet all week I pin my sights on Friday so I can have two days off. Please, can someone explain the sense in that? I sure can’t.

I suppose the answer is a simple one, really. Find something to do. And I have, in a way. I walk. I take the kid and we walk. My Sunday average is now up to 7-10 miles. But even at 10 miles, that’s only three hours. It’s not enough. Either I need to do more walking or I need to find something else to do to pass these free days I have.

Maybe I’ll start an underwater basket weaving club. Or join the association of scuba divers who can’t swim. I could volunteer at the food shelter. I don’t even know if we have a food shelter here. If we do, it probably isn’t open on Sundays. I feel like if I’m not going to be happy in the way I’m utilizing my free time, I should donate that free time to something good and useful. Like underwater basket weaving and food shelters.

But I don’t know how to weave a basket underwater. Scuba diving isn’t very popular around my landlocked home. And, like I said, I don’t even know if we have a food shelter. So, I’m sitting here with all the lights off. Smelling like a burnt sock, sipping, swallering and bellering.

To complicate matters, you only need to move one tree in order to get to where you’re headed. But one tree offers one way of doing things and the other tree offers another way of doing things. How do you decide which tree to move?

The one with less branches? The one that’s shorter but more fat?

This analogy isn’t making any sense to me either…so pretend like you’re driving down the road and there’s a giant Trojan horse…

Because of the significant increase in the number of miles I’m covering, I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade the running shoes. They’ve put in five years of good service, and it’s time to retire them to the stinky shoe bin. So I was doing some research online about how to choose the correct running shoe as I start The.Perfect.Shoe hunt. *I’ve decided The.Perfect.Shoe is necessary for three reasons: 1) My legs are pissed off at me for the severe beatings I gave them for six years. They are now demanding I take care of them. The nerve. 2) Every day I get older, I realize I’m not younger. It would be so cool to still have knees at 60. 3) I am a woman.*

And my research online said it’s important to know if you have flat feet, normal feet or high-arched feet. The best way to tell? Yep, a wet foot test. You take your wet foot, slap it on a piece of paper and then look at the imprint. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It took me 10 minutes to find a piece of paper that wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog or my eight bank statements I haven’t opened. Actually I looked for five minutes and got frustrated. Then, with my brilliant brain, thought that substituting a shirt would be the same difference as a piece of paper. Wrong. The imprint looked like I had hobbit feet. I wasn’t willing to accept that, so I looked another five minutes before I finally found yellow tablet paper.

So I brought my yellow paper down the hall to the bathroom, and as I leaned over to set my pieces of paper on the floor, my just-washed hair dripped all over them. I flipped my head back to keep my precious pieces of paper as dry as possible, lost my balance, tripped over my mud boots and nearly fell to me bum.

The bottom of the shower was still wet, but since I’d never taken a wet foot test before, I wasn’t sure just how wet my foot needed to be. I had one shot; I didn’t have any more paper. So I thought I’d best make sure my foot was wet all over. Just in case that’s what it needed to be. I flipped the shower on to a trickle, poised on one leg and stuck my right foot into the stream before promptly losing my balance. Balance that I regained by lunging for the shower faucet that I happened to be hanging onto, effectively turning the trickle of water into a wooshing torrent that drenched my whole leg.

With a foot that most certainly was adequately moisturized, I hopped and dripped my way across the bathroom floor to the paper and plopped it down square. I lifted my foot, hopped back to the shower and poked my left foot in for the same treatment. After picking it up from the second sheet of yellow paper, I peered sharply down. I shifted around. I squatted next to my imprints and finally picked them up and held the papers up to the light.

For crap’s sake. You couldn’t tell where the wet imprint stopped and the dry part began! It kind of – well – maybe…there? Like, a little, just at that part, possibly down around here…