I am in Nepal where a sign reads:

N = never

E = end

P = peace

A = and

L = love

the grandest of all desires which I understand will not be satisfied in my lifetime. Why am I in Nepal?  I tell myself I need to assuage my appetite for love in the larger world of nature.

Being American and 68, I signed up for a weeks trek in the Annapurna section of the Himalayan mountains, hoping to beset my fear of “can I do this?” My spirit pulls me forward, upward, downward, for 6-7 hours per day, a bit less than 20 pounds carried on my back; small Nepalese porters carrying our tents, sleeping bags, down jackets and food gear, 60 pounds plus. I am incredulous of their strength.

Unconsciously, my trip just happened to include October 6th, the date of my daddy’s death in 1977. Though an adopted daughter, he’s the one who loved me as if I was his own DNA. He treasured nature’s beauty, passed on to me.

Dad was German, gained American citizenship, fought against Hitler in the US Army. But I digress and suppress when I needed to say ‘I love you’ to him, I can’t. We can’t. Fear stood in our way like a locked glass door only seen through. Love was verbally expressed only in our frequent cards and letters during nursing school and my early marriage. And, as a child, with chocolates in heart-shaped boxes on Valentine’s Day.

I feel him in the mountains (tears) and in the moon of Nepal. In a closer look into the eye of an elephant and in the fierce face of a one-horned rhino in Chitwan National Park. And, into the familiar eyes of 6 Germans met at this same park, October 6th, anniversary of his death, with whom I share meals for 2 days, 4 of us riding on an elephant.

I’ve trekked with 8 Aussies, strangers initially, and connected especially with Helena. We are the only ones who hug goodbye when their group leaves me, the only American. I think to my self, ‘I love you’ but the words do not form, like an ocean breaker never reaching the shore.

When I arrive home, my kitty, Radiance, cannot stay away from me, crying for petting which my tired body cannot refuse. I have been away for 2 weeks and I understand he needs reassurance that ‘I love you.’ Although he is an outdoor cat, and is usually independent, he sleeps next to my neck the first night, and continues to be on my lap as much as possible the second day, nudging my hand to stroke him. If only I could have touched my dear dad this way.

I feel daddy’s spirit converging with me by saying ‘I love you’ to my children everyday as they grew up…and listening for ‘I love yous’ in return now that they have birthed me grandchildren. This appetite I doubt will ever cease.

FIRST LOVE

First thought is of my daddy, who chose to love me when I am not his biologically and he loved me equally well to my two sibs who are his naturally.

Second thought is my first husband, also actually my first boyfriend of any substance.

Third thought is my first child, daughter Erin, so perfectly loving from hairless head to the tip of her toes with nails so delicate they gently bend.

Fourth thought is Gregory, my first soul mate, even though being my fourth husband.

Fifth thought is this years birthday, first hug spontaneously given, long and firm as a boa constrictor with only the intent to love: by my first granddaughter, Denali, now 21.  After I served brunch to 9 family members and my first true best friend, Gayle, Denali came up to me in the kitchen, wrapped her arms solidly around my body with the spirit of my daddy come back from the dead; he couldn’t, and I wouldn’t, allow affection, due to our fears.

Today is my birthday, the 30th, (day of august that is), and I am at the International Primal Convention, at the mornings women’s circle, where authenticity of feelings is first place. I am wearing the dress that my second daughter, Megan, bought me for my birthday, after I tried it on at Mama Goose’s, a second hand store for children (new to have a small rack for women) where I am buying clothes for my youngest granddaughters Riley and Emily. The dress is white with huge, and I mean HUGe red cherries on it, the size of grapefruits. I tell others when they compliment my dress, ‘I am the cherry on top’, today!

When I speak to these 16 women, I tell them how greatfull I am for our primal family where I can be truly vulnerable, feeling safely accepted for expressions of my feelings: whether anger, fear or sadness. Although my own two daughters, now 43 and 40, are accepting of my tears; they are not ready to freely share theirs…as does Karuna, being 42, who dances with me at the Friday night Cabaret, a spontaneous, never rehearsed, dance to the song: The Best of my Love by the Emotions. I tell Karuna that she can be my third daughter. She agrees.

Lastly, I say, “I love you all, and most of all I love myself.”

I am stunned that those words flew out of my mouth! I have never said ‘most of all I love myself!’ Inwardly or outwardly.

In the center of the women’s circle, there is a table where we place a significant item that belongs to each of us. I had placed my divorced-fourth-husband wedding ring there. It is too beautifull to be hidden in a drawer. Many years after divorcing, I also wear my first and second husband’s wedding rings…I can’t find the third-husband wedding band.

Maybe fifteen minutes into my drive home, I notice that my left ring finger is bare. The diamond and rainbow stones are missing. I refuse to return. I have birthday plans back home. I tell myself I don’t need to be attached to things as I, for the first time love myself in the most free way known up to this 68th birthday. I sense the ring will come back to me.

Found, like me, telling others, “I am married to mySELF,” when someone sees the assumed wedding ring on my left hand and asks, “Are you married?”

Found, like the love of mySELF as a baby (love lost while growing up) being profoundly returned on this birthday.

After 3 hours of driving, I am near home when I come upon a HUGe turtle cracked open in the middle of the road. I am dismayed and park my car on the side of the road. I must remove the turtle before it is smashed again. I gently touch it’s neck with my finger, and am surprised that its mouth opens, that it is still alive, even as its intestines are exposed on the pavement.

Across the road is a man on his mower. I borrow his shovel. When I push this magnificent creature, he snaps at me. I say out loud, “You don’t deserve to be hurt like this, so I am giving you some dignity in your death.” As he lays in the grass, tears pour down my face like they do now. I say “I am so sorry! May you know that someone loves you as you rest in peace.” It is what I would have liked to have said to my father, my daddy, when he was alive.

Addendum: I was about ten years old when my daddy stopped our car on Judd Falls Road in Ithaca, NY to safely usher a turtle across the road. (tears)

Being the oldest of three children I did not have to wear hand-me-downs…but with some of the clothes my mother bought me I was not happy. On the other hand (body), she sewed me a pretty light blue checked gingham dress vaguely remembered. And it was not until I was in my fifties that I truly valued the dark brown sweater she knitted me while I was in high school. Our relationship had been darkly contentious unlike my relationship with my two daughters.

Yes, my oldest daughter, Erin, and I had our moments, but she had been planned, wanted, unlike my mother not wanting or planning me. Still, I have been surprised when Erin wanted to wear my clothes as she grew to be as tall as me, while more beautiful than me. Her high school graduation 8×10 framed photo still stands on my living room table (along with her younger sister Megan’s and stepdaughter Sara’s), where she chose to wear my purple (tears) gauzy top accented by my silver loop earrings. Not for a lack of clothes in her own closet either.

My granddaughter Denali, has followed in her mother’s clothes-steps as she grew older, asking to not only wear but to keep my T-shirts, one of which she chooses to wear to the extended family Thanksgiving get together in 2012.  Hand-me-ups; I smile! She also wears and now owns my shorts, sundresses, etc. and this summer (tears)  she buys me a moo-moo while traveling in Kenya, as well as one for herself, only in a different color.

Why is it that tears push into my vision as I type? Am I the girl who never dreamed to wear my mother’s clothes? Am I the girl under the moo-moo, crying in the hope I am close to finding her? Is it the closeness that she lost with her mother? Her tears know of the lost love now felt on my back as I try to slip on the plenty-tall and plenty-wide moo-moo, but the hole for my head is too small.

My mother planned the vacations. My dad made them fun – even writing a letter several years later describing one. I saved it and now can I find it? like my memories?

So, I ask my younger daughter Megan what was her favorite family vacation while growing up. “The trip across the USA.” (We camped and hiked for a month in twenty plus national parks.) I was hoping she would say that. She adds that the two weeks in the summer spent with her older sister Erin, and her dad (we were divorced) in Maine were fun, as were our summer trips to Ocean City’s beach. Before my two daughters were born, it was their dad who initiated a similar cross country trip that sparked my love affair with the National Parks.

My two youngest granddaughters both agree that Disney World was their best vacation so far, now being 10 and 12. (I plan to take them camping soon.) Denali is my oldest granddaughter, who is as stunning as her favorite family vacation, the trip with me when she was 16, to Glacier and Banff National Parks. I am surprised when she immediately says this trip was more beautiful than our trip last year with her mother, Erin, and I, to Denali National Park in Alaska. I am convinced that Denali is my dad’s spirit reincarnated, because of the special love-bond we share (tears.)

When I call my sister, Constance, her answer is Hither Hills State Park, situated on the ocean near Montauk Point, Long Island, a 6 hour drive each summer for a week’s camping in a large family tent, lulled to sleep by the waves. I like that our memories are not necessarily the same…she remembering it is the one week out of the year where there is no fighting between our parents or between us three siblings. She sees our mom and dad holding hands walking down the beach in twilight: affection not seen at home. Mom cooks and dad grills delicious meals while I wonder why I remember readily sweeping the tent.

For me, I like to be seen sitting on daddy’s lap at the annual Cornell University’s Stadiums fireworks…or walking often with him to the reservoir across the street from our home where a gorge creates waterfalls, where I occasionally swim naked as an adult, an act that took years in the making to overcome a religiously indoctrinated shame of the body. Denali walked with me there to Potter’s Falls this past week, just she and I, and I again feel (tears) my dad’s presence in childhood nature in her presence.

Today I am reading Miracles Happen, by Brian Weiss, MD, a leader in the field of past-life therapy: “We  are so tentative with love. We stop, we hesitate, we rationalize, we become afraid, we walk away. But love is not tentative with us. It keeps coming back, trying again, setting up new opportunities. Love is persistent. ”

“Love never dies. We hear its songs whenever we stop to listen. We smell our beloveds’ scents even after they have passed on. (tears) We see their messengers: the birds and animals, the sky, and other signs. We FEEL their touch.”

“We sense their presence,” (crying) as I do with Denali’s: easy hazel eye contact, liking to wear my clothes, firm long hugs, her constant “I love yous,”  which daddy and I could not say face to face, only in letters and cards.

(SORRY…that April and May essays just got  posted...a computer glitch as they were written in those months)

One of my earliest memories is of the neighbor’s house burning down as I lay in my bed at age 5. My parents trying to calm down the teenage son, and maybe the mother too. The father died in the fire looking for his daughter who was safe. The flames still flash across my mind when I wonder if I left my stove burner on.

Around this same age I am at my dad’s work-place picnic, when a four-legged stove buckled one leg, spilling boiling coffee down my butt and leg. When the wind blew through the car window while dad drove us to the Emergency Room, all I can remember saying is, “Shut the window, my bottom feels on fire.”

Growing up in a strict born again religious family, I attended church services weekly, hearing of the fire and brimstone I would endure in hell if I didn’t accept Jesus as my savior. My heart smothered its child like loving embers due to the fear that sadly, my second daughter, Megan, also endured at a christian camp; her outstanding memory being of the terror she felt seeing a movie where the flames of hell burnt into her memory. Like a painful tattoo. Luckily, me and my daughters have left this dogma and our fire of love is burning more brightly.

Being a brownie (yum) and girl scout, I was privileged to attend camp for a week during the summer where we learned to build a fire with pine needles and dry twigs gathered near the shore of Cayuga Lake. At night, a big campfire warmed us while singing songs like Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, and roasting marshmallows squeezed between graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate bars.

What a contrast to the FIREBALLS, so hard and hot I felt I had to spit them out, their red outsides painting my fingers until placed back in my mouth, waiting for the sweet insides to soothe my tongue…what a metaphor for life! as are the fireflies I chased so that I could place them on my ring finger, hoping someday it’d be a diamond from prince charming. Each summer I still ask fireflies to land on me, while aware of feeling the warmth of my spontaneous smile.

As a freshman in high school I auditioned for the concert choir and was inducted earlier than most. A year later, I was ‘fired’, the conductor saying my voice was too immature, nor strong enough. As a junior I was welcomed back as a gratified alto.

All these memories fade into the background when I feel the fire of self-loving orgasms in my sixties, reminding me of two microscopic cells uniting – a match – creating my two beautiful daughters – a love brighter than any bomb fires.

Daniel is just one of my clients that tells me something like: “I slept with Maureen last night, so unexpected;”  I break in to say, “You mean you had sex with her?” It is not the first time I have corrected him, or many other clients. And, yes, sometimes my friends; I just happen to hear about sexual encounters more often in my psychotherapy practice.

Often, I hear on TV, ‘I slept with so and so.’ Or read books by modern authors, such as Eve Ensler, (author of The Vagina Monologues), who wrote in her recent memoir, In The Body of the World: “I could not say that the men I ended up living with or sleeping with were more important loves.”  Why is it so dangerous to say the word SEX in a culture ready with sexual jokes, sexy clothes, nude scenes and sex education?

I have actually slept with men without having sex, and I don’t mean my husbands or boyfriends…I mean men friends or acquaintances I chose not to have sex with yet we slept in the same bed. Safely. Even with a man I had just met at a running race.

Being brought up in a very strict religious home where sex was not talked about, made it difficult at first to feel relaxed talking about sex with my clients which is a must. That is if you wish to treat the whole person. Why –  I won’t let my clients get away with using the euphemism of ‘I slept with.’   And why, I took the risk to say something very dangerous, for me that is, in my sister’s Sunday School class. She is a born again christian which is a belief I have left behind, gathering up a spiritual practice that connects me to everyone with love.

When I visit my sister in Florida once a year, she wishes me to go to church with her, and so I do despite my dislike of the preaching that there is only one way to god.  I want to please her. This year is my third visit to her Sunday School class, so there is some familiarity that counters a bit of my fear to speak up.

I carefully shape my words: “I was a ‘born again christian’ for many years. I need to share my experience of how the church has hurt me, not meaning to offend you. The teaching of a child that he/she is going to hell if they do not believe in jesus as their savior is not loving because it is out of fear that I chose to believe. And, as I John 4:18 states, ‘There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.’ Also, the guilt I have carried for not caring for others enough is not my kind of love that I now feel for others, where I give out of genuine caring, not out of guilt. Thanks for listening.”

I was surprised to hear one young woman affirm that the church has done such hurt, yet she still believes that Jesus is ‘the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the father but by me.’

Surprised again, when after the class broke up, a man dressed in a purple shirt came to me saying: “Thank you for what you shared.” I wish I could remember why he thought that. I must have been in shock.

“How do you know what is right and wrong?” I ask my two granddaughters, Riley 11 and Emily 9.

“People have different opinions. Also, nobody thinks the same thing,” says Emily in her confident tone.

“When you’re doing something wrong, you feel guilty but when doing something right you feel good,” older sister Riley adds.

“Nothing is right and nothing is wrong…you arn’t perfect all the time,” says Emily with a knowing smile about herself.

“Sometimes you don’t relize your doing something wrong or right until after,” replies Riley. These are the exact words (and spelling) they wrote in my journal so I could write (right?) this essay and not be wrong about what they said.

“There are times I have felt guilty when I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” I say, responding to Riley’s opinion. “When I was young I felt guilty for dancing behind my mother’s back, as she forbade her children to participate in such worldly activities, even movies and card playing with a poker deck.”

Riley’s wise brown eyes and Emily’s gray-blue eyes looked into my light blue eyes with silent understanding.

Is it wrong to say more?

Their wisdom feels so sweet. You can stop reading now if you think it is right for you.

My heart wants to share my visit to be with my ex-husband Gregory yesterday, who has struggled with alcoholism and smoking for many years, and why I had to leave him in 1998. I consider him my soul mate, maybe because during our rocky time together I met my own soul  by grieving my childhood pain that our intimate partners trigger in all of us…yet my three previous marriages had not so clearly or deeply. Being a psychotherapist, I was able to connect to a place in my heart that I had shut away and was not aware that had existed.

Gregory had quadruple bypass surgery 7 weeks ago and is 97 days sober, so he was present with me in ways he could never be while drinking. With his elderly parents present for the two-hour visit, I shared photos of my family as well as the national park post card scrapbook I had made with Riley and Emily a few days before. Each had made their own scrapbook from the many post cards I had collected from two cross-country trips with my two daughters, hiking and camping in nearly 40 national parks, including one trip traveling cross-country with Gregory. He especially appreciated the scrapbook, being the sensitive man I loved and married. Some family members had warned me not to marry him and some disliked him.

When we parted yesterday, we held each other tightly, me crying as I said, “I love you

Gregory and always will; I am so sorry we could not make it together.” He saying, “I love

you because of the tears you gave me.” That can only be right!

        Do I remember Grammy’s ice box frig? I do remember her white enamel tub wringer-washing machine, holding a metal slanted scrub board slanted against a black rubber hose flowing dirty water into the sink. How things have changed since the 1950s – when milk and bread were delivered to our neighborhood country homes once or twice a week in Ithaca, NY. And, a large black C printed on a square of cardboard – placed in our window to show the truck driver when to pick up clothes needing to be dry cleaned. Such personal services without a delivery charge.

My present charge slips Perry’s Death by Chocolate ice cream into my mouth – eaten nightly throughout the past 15 years (except while on vacations). The cost is $4.49 per half gallon until it goes on sale for 2-3 months at Wegman’s – dipping to $2.99, filling my white freezer over-the-top-refrigerator with 6 or more half gallons. My housemates, friends or family cannot believe I am able to stop with 1 small bowl in the evening when there is a deluge of ice cream available. But then, why do I freeze 7 over ripe blackened bananas saved in the side pocket of my freezer for a dozen years? Will I ever make smoothies again after 4 years of not?

My dad called himself “the garbage can,” eating an entire apple, except the stem (if there was one attached.) So, it is melted into my being not to waste, to my daughter’s distaste, eating food weeks old. Sometimes with mold (removed).

But on the outside of my refrigerator another story is told; entirely decorated with photos of family and friends, even several past boyfriends months, years old. And, just today in my office I was told by a client seeing my high school photo, “You’re well preserved.”