Leonde Delmare's Open Salon Blog

Inheritance

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:12:30 -0500

This is it. You can't change it. It's your legacy. It's ugly. You want a different story. You want to rewrite it. You want to make it better. You don't have a choice. This is it.

You have to face your life. Your childhood or lack of childhood. You have to hurt so much that even a whole bottle of wine won't wash your sins away. You have sunk into a horizontal line that you keep trying to turn upright. Bash me down. Bash me down. Bash me down.

My mother is dead. Once upon a time there was a beautiful mother who still carried her happiness as an afterthought. Here it is with everything that isn't here. You can't make it better even if you read that phonetics book like a pro. I can see the hurdles and I am trying to read between the lines but I'm only four.

Four no more. Four and forty four and more. I love you mommy. You had to die. You are free from a prison body crushed by the heaviness of your pain.

This is what suffering is all about. How dare you fly in the ether while I am left t0 drown in wine. Only Bukowski made alcohol beautiful. You left me as if I was satisfied to stay with Madame Alexander. Those boxes that promised joy and little women. I'm not so little.

I expand. I'm messy. I'm human. My cheeks have no rose. My lips are not pink and silent. My dress is not perfect and starched.

I suck in this world. I have no box to call home. You died crippled beyond recognition from the woman demanding vowels in beautiful terror. You died in an agony of limbs severed.

I searched for saints. Someone to save me. Someone to save you. Here I am now alone. Only a smelly old dog keeps vigil with me. The dog and wine are my companions on Christmas eve. My first Christmas without you in this world.

I blamed you when I should have been blaming myself. You tried to tell me with all your faults. I wanted you to be strong for me. I wanted you to be strong for yourself.

No one knows what the woman suffers swept under the rug. I need to crawl away. I need to make noise. I need to be loud. I am the only voice left to sing the song of you and me.

Abuse, Death and Freedom

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 15:10:21 -0400

The last two years have knocked me down and rubbed my face in the dirt. Don't feel sorry for me. I tried to get myself to my feet several times but these attempts were futile. Don't pity me. I have cried enough. I have imagined impaling myself on sharp objects to stop the pain.

Of everything, my mother's decline and death were the biggest blows. Even now, I find myself mourning my mother's life more than her death. I want to pick up the phone and talk with her. If I open myself to all possibilities, the dead speak and come in dreams and waking.

Death of family members let us know that genetics are more than remote scientific terms. Genetics impact us personally and intimately. My hands and voice are my mother's legacy and what no one can deny or take from me.

When a person in the family dies, surviving family members can be at their worst while serving guilt and falling back to worn out family positions. I was too emotionally weak to travel to my mother's funeral, alone. I did not want to assume the outworn position of whipping post.

I have abdicated my position in the family. My brother has been dead for 25 years and my mother is dead now. The two family members that remain prefer me on the bottom of the family tree. I leave them to fight over empty dominance between themselves. All I leave is nothing I ever had to lose.

For the first time in my life, I am free. My mother's death brought me a rare freedom. In some ways, I have drawn closer to my mother in death. She stares down at me smiling from her unblinking faces of youth. I look up at these photos - the photo of her and her sister as teenagers, the photo of her as a very young girl that reminds me of my face, the photo of her as a beautiful young woman.

All these photos of my mother were taken before she met my father. I wonder what her life would have been like if she had chosen different paths. Would she have chosen a kind and loving man instead? I don't seem to care that I wouldn't exist in these alternate paths that might have lead to a better life for my mother.

At the hands of my father, my mother surrendered her life and sacrificed her children for a love her husband was incapable of giving but worse, she chose a path that led her to surrender and sacrifice all into the hands of an abusive and controlling man. I will not go far in describing this path that is a deep, scarred crevice. I fear never being able to climb out of the crevice if I explore the depths too frequently.

My mother's last decline and ultimate death pulled me back into that crevice and I have been spending the last two years clawing my way back to solid ground. Certain thoughts pull me to the crevice edge again.

The last years of my mother's life were unbearable suffering with prolonged hospital and nursing home stays. For almost a year, while my mother was in these medical facilities, my father put on such a great loving act toward my mother that even I was fooled. I would call my mother and she would tell me how well my father treated her and we would agree that he must really love her after all. To this repeated phone call conversation, my mother's refrain would be: "I just wish he had showed me love sooner."

My mother's repeated refrain and lament would make me feel honest pain inside. I thought my father had finally had a wake up call. I too wished he had woken up sooner. My father could sustain this act for everyone witnessing his feigned devotion to my mother until my mother had to come home. Medicare had run out and although my father is a wealthy man, he could not handle my mother being home again, and what she cost him in time and money.

He controlled what my mother ate, how she was cared for, and worse, he withheld her pain medication. In the first week she was home with no pain medication, my mother told me that if this is the way life was going to be for her, she didn't want to live.

Both the visiting wound care nurse and the live-in care provider tried to reason and plead with my father. I tried to reason and plead with my father but my father was in control and he had my mother home to control and abuse again. At my mother's weakest, in her most vulnerable state, and while she was in excruciating pain, my father controlled and abused her until he finally tortured her to death.

My mother's mental and physical torture at the hands of my father lasted for 6 months until her death. No one could touch or stop him. The State of Florida's family services only came out to my parents' home once. The visiting nurse said that family services saw my mother's lavish surroundings and dismissed and minimized the reports. After my mother's death, the visiting nurse said that my father believed he was above the law.

The only way my mother finally escaped my father was through death. She freed herself and she freed me. I love my mother and I know she loves me. I forgive her. I hope she forgives me.

Sarah Palin's Golly Gee Path

Sat, 4 Jun 2011 12:06:30 -0400

Sarah Palin is on the magical history tour of the USA. She's on a mission and path, but is it the right one? What do you think of this gosh golly gee quote by Sarah Palin:

"If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress." -- Sarah Palin

10 Things about You and me

Tue, 31 May 2011 08:05:28 -0400

As someone who has been interested in marketing, media and culture since I was very young and through careful observation in an independent lifetime cultural anthropological study, I have learned much about my fellow humans and I have been guilty of these traits myself since I am human:

An increasing self-absorption that can become mutually exclusive of the other.

An attention span that lasts a minute if you are lucky, or you have discovered an entertaining hook that could make the person's attention span last even longer than a minute.

Unless you are in front of the person doing whatever you do, you are in limbo or at least hanging in a closet.

People most prefer to talk about themselves - this is the death of the sales person and I have to keep my own talk in check in most human interactions but especially when looking out for the best interests of clients. I can do this so well that often my clients never think of me as having a life separate from their needs.

People can't deal with real life and death and prefer to, and seek out escapes.

People believe things and hold on doggedly to those beliefs despite repeated evidence to the contrary.

People measure themselves by other people and what other people have instead of examining where they themselves are and where they want to go independent of others.

People need others to think just like they do for validation without feeling a need to consider and respect differences in thought or other perspectives.

People lack patience because patience is not valued but instant gratification is expected like quick fix pills.

People try to change or control other people despite the fact that the only person they can change or control is themselves.

When marketing and selling, I try to use these observations in the most genuine way possible while still keeping other's best interests in mind. I want that person to truly want what they are buying, not because someone else has it but whatever they are buying has been something they have truly and independently wanted in life.

Miss Gulch Lost in the Shuffle

Mon, 9 May 2011 06:05:52 -0400

_{Wizard of Oz (1939)}

Miss Gulch has been lost in the shuffle of the smack down of Trump amidst the birth certificate production that will not lower gas and heating oil prices, trillions in debt or the unemployment rate. Miss Gulch did not get invited to the royal wedding and no wonder. She's an old witch with a bad, outdated hat and I bet she goes to church every Sunday instead of just for royal weddings. If nothing else, she needs to be shot for being a Christian.

Why was bin Laden the only one shot in the head when Miss Gulch would have made a much better target? Osama has gotten way more press time dead and buried at sea than he has since 9/11. People were singing the ding dong witch song for Osama but not for Miss Gulch.

Why aren't people singing about Miss Gulch or wondering about what happened to Miss Gulch since the big EF4 tornado passed through Alabama where Miss Gulch now resides after escaping that young, beautiful Dorothy girl who killed the bad witch. Poor Miss Gulch is the perfect hated figure for a target. She is not married yet she is way past marrying age. She is an ugly, old spinster who doesn't have the decency to use botox or even attempt to wear something more fashionable and she still rides a bike instead of driving a car.

If she had a new GM car, maybe she could get some more attention. Back at the end of last April, the president went and visited the tornado devastated area in Alabama and said,

“I’ve never seen devastation like this,” Pausing amid rubble on 25th Avenue in Alberta, a somber president pledged “maximum federal help” to the victims. “We are going to do everything we can.”

Somewhere along the way, with all the excitement over bin Laden, Trump, royal weddings, birth certificates, and our own grappling with reality and delusion, we have forgotten Miss Gulch - but is it any wonder? If nothing else, she lives in the south. Who cares about white, bible thumping people in the south anyway? They are the reason for all our problems. We hate these people, don't we?

We can ignore them for weeks. No one will notice. The best part is that these people are isolated in a rural area with no provisions, services or way of communicating with the outside world. We may not hear from them for months or years. Maybe we can sweep all that rubble under our great American rug. Yeah, sure, our rug is getting kind of lumpy and bumpy but if we pretend those people aren't there and give them no media attention, are they really there suffering amidst the rubble waiting for help? And who should care about ugly, old white spinsters with no fashion sense that live in rural America? Miss Gulch is better off dead.