tamarjacobson

I think about this blog a lot. Daily. When I am out walking, or driving alone in my car. I wonder when I first started writing it, and reflect on how so many subjects of my life, thought processes, or the course of my emotional development have featured here in this public forum. Indeed, the sub-title of this blog is "my diagnosis of me," and I have certainly been on a self-exploration journey with it.

My blog has been my companion through some very painful emotional times these past four years. It has served as a connection to the outside world when I felt abandoned and alone. Indeed, here on this blog I was able to work through and confront some key psychological barriers that were really opened up for me with Bob-the-therapist back in my Buffalo days.

This ever-so-personal, while also extremely public, format helped me improve my writing skills, enabling me to complete a second book, and an edited collection of essays.

In short, this blog has supported my personal, social, and professional growth in ways that I could never have imagined. I am ever grateful for it. Now, however, I feel I have reached a cross roads of some kind. At the very least I think I have to find a different purpose for this blog – perhaps even a name or site change – if I am to continue at all. For, if I want social Internet connection, or to keep friends and family updated about my life, Facebook has become a perfectly satisfactory venue for that! Personal ruminations of one kind or another are suitable for my private journal writing, and in any case, I have been thinking about writing a memoir at some stage.

Turning sixty has had a major impact on me. I feel emotionally opened, grounded in a different reality, and at the same time, free to be all I can be. For example, one of the things I have been thinking about since I turned sixty is that I do not seem to need as much emotional support or acknowledgment as I did when I was younger. It is almost as if I am finally able to give up my old longing for parents. Indeed, I am able to parent myself! I have allowed myself to become an adult. So many of those ancient, unrealistic, and adolescent or childish expectations I had of significant people in my life have dissolved and gone away. I seem able to meet others in an emotionally mutual space, where I feel equal and more confident in who I am.

Perhaps I could name my new blog (if I decide to continue blogging) something to do with being in my sixties. 

Hm … more to think about!

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Went away … and – More hats …

Quote of the day:

Everything is miraculous. It is a miracle that one doesn't melt in one's bath. Pablo Picasso (From CCIE)

These past few days, while sitting on the beach, I have been reading Olive Kitteridge. Parts of it have moved me deeply. Especially the last page. In fact, after reading the ending, I plunged myself into the sea and wept. I could not help but identify with so many of the characters, even Olive herself:

What young people didn't know, she thought … that lumpy, aged and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly … No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it … But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union … (Page 270).

And, Elizabeth Strout about early morning …

… he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret … (Page 3)

Well, I surely have been having fun this past week. Lying in the sun, reading, walking, biking swimming, eating fish of all shapes and sizes, breakfasts out and about, cotton candy, and enjoying talks with friends, watching the ocean as the sun sets.

[Before … (last year in Cape May) After … (this year in OC, NJ)]

While walking on the beach in Ocean City, I remembered a photograph that Marion took of me while walking on the beach in Cape May last year, and us both making a pledge not to drag all our weight into our sixties. Looking at the photograph on the right, taken by a kind passer-by at Ocean City recently, I realize I have almost accomplished that goal. However, it is not just the weight on my body, I have lost – it is the heaviness in my soul. I have shed so much more than weight – it seems as if this past year, I have allowed much of my shame, guilt and anger to fall away with each pound of flesh!

Indeed, this year, I feel lighter, happier, and healthier in every way – full of energy and hope, and so much joy, and, dare I say it? – Inner peace. I think that going back to work next week is probably going to be all right!

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: A letter to my child (One of my personal, most favorite posts … still enormously relevant today, perhaps even more so – one year later)

As thanks for completing the evaluation survey … we received this today …

And remember this?

Quote of the day:

[Thanks to my colleague, J.B. for the "Pot-Shot" above]

Found this at normblog, and I am thinking, "Gee, my own Mama has many years ahead!"

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/16977198001?isVid=1&publisherID=245991542

When I was young, routines and chores used to drag me down, bore, irritate me, and make me anxious. I wanted more, something different, and most especially, I did not want to be ordinary. Since I turned 60, I find routines and chores to be soothing and calming. Indeed, I cherish them. They have a consistent, comforting rhythm to them, from cleaning the cat litter, to laundry, or watering plants, or even something as mundane as preparing fresh grapefruit or daily oatmeal and my fresh berry breakfast. As I hum along with my daily routines and chores, I feel grateful for them, and at peace. I find pleasure in the small stuff – the day-to-day – ordinary moments of living. I think I might have learned this from Ada … or is it because a year ago I realized that I did not have uterine cancer after all …?

I used to love writing early in the morning. It seemed like I had so much to say. Years of pent up emotions, thoughts, or ideas to express and analyze. Words flowed out of me like tumbling rivers, churning, whirling, and bubbling along. Anger and angst were my companions for awhile. I allowed myself to open my emotional doors, and up they rose, swelling to bursting, forcing me to confront them even with all their glorious agony. A wall of shame and pain blocking the way to peace and pleasure, happiness and love. 

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." Groucho Marx

Out beyond ideas of right and wrong there is a field. I'll meet you there. Rumi

Time wastes too fast: every letter and trace tells me with what rapidity my life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day. Never to return – more everything presses on – and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it are preludes to that eternal separation, which we are shortly to make. [From: Time Wastes Too Fast, by Maira Kalman]

And, finally … The day awaits a beloved sister's arrival …

Go to your desk on Monday morning and think of some event that's unusually vivid in your memory … any event will do as long as you still remember it vividly. Call that memory back and write it up … On Tuesday morning, do it again. Tuesday's memory doesn't need to be related to Monday's memory … (William Zinsser, Writing about Your Life, Page 164)

I remember one of my first early childhood conferences. I had been in the United States just over a year or so, when I attended the NAEYC conference in Atlanta. I traveled with my, now, good friend Marion. At the time she was the Assistant Director of the ECRC at the University at Buffalo. As a lowly preschool teacher, and accompanied by my teenage son, I had come to America from Israel, to change my life by returning to school for a higher education. I was described as a non-traditional student, which meant being older than typical students, with more life experience – many of us with children of our own – some, like me, divorced and wanting to change the course of our lives – wanting another chance to shift professions, start anew. I was full of hope, expectation and excitement at having the opportunity to study in a large, reputable university. Indeed, I could not believe my good fortune at being accepted! In addition, I was shocked that I was capable of writing papers that were deserving of high grades, and, at times, even accolades. It was as if I had won some sort of life lottery. And so, I applied to present at a National conference and off we went to Atlanta. There, I joined tens of thousands of early childhood educators from all walks of life, ages, colors, shapes, and sizes.I attended sessions in jam-packed rooms. At one such session in which Marion and I participated, there was a panel of experts sitting up on a stage, each one sharing a different piece of research, point of view, and debating about this and that. The level of dialogue and discussion amongst the panelists was intellectually stimulating for me, opening up my mind to ideas I had never considered before, as well as reinforcing and confirming others I had thought about alone in my classroom as a preschool teacher in Israel. My eyes were shining, cheeks flushed with excitement at the prospect of all our future opportunities as doctoral students. I leaned over to Marion and said, "Someday that will be us, Mar."

You know you've made it when LK *chooses* to attend your presentation, participates in it and comes up afterwards to say it was great! I could have died and gone to heaven right there and there! No need to carry on … my job is done!
My friend, Marion replies (almost immediately) coincidentally reminding me:
"Someday that will be us Mar" ….and it was for my sweet friend … Oh sweetie what an unbelievable experience. I tell you this 60 stuff is sweet.

Quote of the day