My office is two blocks from Pizza Aroma, owned by Mauricio, who left his home country, El Salvador, to find freedom from war and poverty. I haven’t experienced poverty really, although I was on Medicaid and food stamps for a year when my two daughters were very young and my husband a graduate student.

Until eight years ago, I wouldn’t go out for lunch in order to save money; better spent on traveling or my family. When my psychotherapy business grew despite the 2008 recession, so did my friendship with Mauricio, occasionally enjoying a slice of one of his gourmet pizzas. Imagine a salad pizza: spinach, artichokes, black olives, onions, red peppers, adorned with sprinkled parmesan cheese in balsamic dressing.

I’ve lost count as to how many years I have lunched 3-4 times a week at Pizza Aroma, smiling in return to Mauricio’s black-mustached smile; his delight in slicing fresh cut garlic on my requested Sicilian, or avocados on my black-bean slice.

I like the feeling of giving back to an immigrant who not only creates great pizza slices but also gives America a slice of delicious diversity.

     My mother took good physical care of her three children, myself being the oldest. Yet,

why was I the one she dealt out steaming criticism. I thought maybe it was because I had

a mind of my own; by defending my father, or questioning her one way to god.

One day after school when I was 16, the reason became clear as crystal.  My mother

stands near the window of my sister-shared bedroom; I stand over the vacuum cleaner

near the doorway once again defending my father. “He’s not your father!” she yells.

Shock quaked my world into a spiral of deadly confusion. For many years I had no

memory of what I did next.

After becoming a mother of 2 daughters, I asked my mother how I came to be. She

had met an attractive soldier at a Red Cross dance. Sometime later he invited her to his

place and mickeyed her drink, only realizing this a couple months later when she felt theshock of being pregnant. Apparently, while unconscious, he “had had his way with her” -been raped, although she couldn’t use that word while telling me.

When mom told William Hairston that she was carrying his child, he rejected any

involvement. Luckily, WWII had recently ended; but certainly not the war inside her.

While sailing home from Germany to America, she cared for patients on the ship

Huddleston, and fell in love with Michel S. Colbert. She wrote on a card, now in my

possession, “Forever Yours, Ellen.”

Back then, shame was poured onto women pregnant out of wedlock. Being five

months along, mom asked a doctor to abort me. He refused. (thank god)  Soon after, she and her new love drove 3 hours to Tarrytown, NY where an adoption agency might give me away. (thank goodness that didn’t happen)

At the last minute, my ‘adoptive’ dad signed my birth certificate as my father.

PS. Luckily, my dad saved me by showering me with love equal to that given to his 2

biological children born after me.  I am forever grateful!

I lived in the same house from age 3 until I was 16; across the road from tall pine trees buffeting Ithaca’s reservoir, where my dad and I and my two sibs hiked frequently. We also played in the fields behind our house. I easily fall into the scene where dad built a small waterwheel, spinning in the grassy stream feeding a small pond, where I collected black caps big as my thumb, with which my mom would bake blackberry pie. Yum!

Moving from that ‘home’ is one of the rare moments I remember crying. At my house. I cried on several occasions however when in the ‘house of the lord’, especially when the invitation to accept Jesus as your lord and savior or to dedicate your life to christ was given. The minister of the Bethel Grove Bible church would hold his bible high in the air – emphasizing to us the great sinners we were. I can hear Just as I am being played on the piano or organ – see my tears falling, as did I, into the grasp of a dogma that filled me with self-doubt and eventually led me to a deep inner knowing: this religion can’t be true.

It wasn’t until 1984, (like being an adult in Huxley’s Brave New World) that I had the courage to embrace my childhood inner knowing; to fully trust my feelings and not my parent’s religion. Many many tears escaped as I clutched onto my truer JUST AS I AM: trusting the innocent child, who is born in the spirit of LOVE, with staring wide open eyes of no fear. How hard it is as a child to embrace that divinity, when the need for parental approval is overwhelming as an ocean tide!

My mother was strict: no going to the theater, movies, dancing or swimming on Sundays. I memorized thousands of bible verses in order to attend a free week of Miracle Camp for several summers, where boys and girls were not permitted to swim together. Leaving my church community was painful because of their rejection. Yet, I was rewarded with the freedom of no longer being damned to the eternal lake of fire.

As I delved into my sorrow and sadness and soul – I soared into the dancer JUST AS I AM. Still, the guilt lingered until sobbing one day in a psychotherapy session, I connected to a past life as a professional ballerina in Paris in the 1800s. My guilt melted faster than a child’s snowman in springtime. Ever since, I’ve continued to dance 3-4 nights per week.

Presently, I am helping my friend Karen unload the 37’x 20′ ballroom in her 200 year old Federal house where 20 plus years of accumulated unused furniture, odds and ends, and clothes have resided. It’s the only room that has not been renovated. I feel excited each week to clean up and out a carload of stuff driven to the Salvation Army, Significant Elements (recycling of old things) and to Mimi’s Attic (consignment selling). It’s like returning life to someone through CPR (Clearly Property Restoration).

Karen has agreed to help actualize my dream of using this ballroom for my 2016 birthday celebration after insulating, dry walling, wallpapering and sanding has been accomplished. As of January 2016, just the two of us have emptied 3/4 of the ballroom and have until August to revitalize (with the help of two men) this beautifully high arched  room of an ancestral house –  revitalized JUST AS I AM. I’m remembering now how when I asked my mother who was gravely disappointed when I left the ‘house of the lord’, what she thought was my most positive attribute, she said: “your vitality.”

I was a wallflower in high school, because I was self-conscious of being flat-chested like a wall. Of course, a boy in junior high calling out in the hallway as students changed classes, “Hey pancake!” didn’t do me any good. I’m sure I blushed, slouched my shoulders, and wondered why kids need to be mean. So, I stuffed Kleenex into my bra, until I found padded bras.

Being skinny didn’t help either. I didn’t have dates or boyfriends like my younger sister. My crushes were kept in my heart – until I met the Beach boys (twins whose last name was Beach:) at the Bethel Grove Bible church where my family attended 2-3 times per week. My sister and I went on a double date with them once.

When we changed to the Tabernacle Baptist church, I met Chuck who would become my first real boyfriend in our senior year; then he broke up with me our freshman year at Cornell University. I can still see me walking around Beebe Lake all alone keeping my tears to myself. Later, we became engaged and welcomed two beautiful daughters.

As most high schoolers do, you dream of a long happy marriage, not four, like what my karma has displayed. Yet, I’m so ‘great-full’ for all of them! Interestingly, I chose my high school junior theme to be UTOPIA, looking for ideal love? which might be like going back to my 15th year high school reunion where MJ, one of the girls high school heart throbs said to me, “You’re so beautiful; where were you in high school? You’re the most beautiful now!” Was I beginning to reflect self-love?

WOW! I was stunned, like when my daughters were in high school, their dad now in a gay relationship, and singing “The Impossible Dream” in the Elmira High School musical where he was a music teacher. I was a Marriage and Family Therapist by this time, and began sobbing while hearing their father sing., aware enough to vow to myself that I’d never again be ashamed of crying in public. Even to sob there. As I walked into the foyer after the performance, a man-stranger walked up to me and said, “You’re stunning!” despite my reddened eyes. Maybe a truer self-love was showing through?

So opposite of my experience of holding back my tears, feeling embarrassed, as I tried to speak with my high school math teacher about an ‘unfair’ grade.

By the early nineties, I had EVOLved into dreaming of teaching a HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP SKILLS course at Ithaca High School where I and both of my daughters have graduated. I, like Martin Luther King, Jr. have a dream to bring justice and love to ALL beings without the use of violence, like the bullying that takes place in our schools and streets and in our homes that has caused many teens to commit suicide.

For over 20 years I have met with the superintendents, teachers, and students who agree it’s a good idea, students particularly wish for it, yet our high school administration is still afraid to have this course offered even though electives like oceanography are.

My heart still cries…like I did with a client this past week, when a father brings in his 6 month old son to his therapy session. At the end of the session I was saying how baby Grayson  just looks into our eyes and does not turn (shy) away…there’s no fear of looking into my soul, for there is no fear with “perfect” love…and there in the silence of Grayson and I looking into each other’s eyes without wavering I began to cry.

Seeing the image of my dad swimming the side stroke is the first thing that comes to mind and I wonder why. We are at Robert Treman State Park where a waterfall flows into a natural deep swimming pool. It is where I learned how to swim. I see myself practicing with my hands pushing the ground while saying, “Watch me!” to my parents, “See me swimming?”

During the summer, my mother prepared a picnic basket of sandwiches and fruit and cookies, my favorite being chocolate chip with walnuts, the kind I buy each day at the local Wegmans, on my way to work. I’m leaving for there now.

It’s later now as I write imagining my father driving our one car to work, while my mom chooses to shuttle her three children onto the Bethel Grove Community bus that drove us each summer Monday morning to Robert Treman’s swimming hole. It’s funny to remember how we had to wait an hour after our lunch to return to swimming for the fear of cramping, which was thought back then might cause us to drown. Actually, it’s not so funny and I think to myself how so many times we laugh at seriously sad or fearful things. I’m sure I was swimming in tears growing up but learned early on, like most everyone, not to show them. Still, seeing myself boarding the bus at the end of our day licking a Sugar Daddy makes me smile. Walking ahead of my mother, as she would say, “a mile.”

My mind floats to swimming in my mother’s amniotic fluid where I was unwanted because I am a child of rape. She was five months pregnant so the doctor would not grant her an abortion…thank god!! (the DOU, Design Of the Universe I’m wont to say) When my parents drove to Tarrytown, NY to give me up for adoption, my father asked my mother to keep me and he signed my birth certificate when I was born. I felt that he loved me just as much as my brother and sister who were born after me. (a “side stroke” of luck?)

Unlike my mother’s initial fear to keep me, she volunteered as a registered nurse during WWII in Europe and met my dad as a patient on their return to America on the ship Huddleston. When I asked her why she would risk her life to go to war, she said, “Somebody needs to take care of the soldiers,” as tears glistened in her gray-blue eyes.

When mom died in 2002, I cried like a baby as I spoke at her memorial service about the deep hurt of her not loving me for 50 years and how it had been transformed into hearing, “I love you,”  a few months before her death. I had learned to wash away my anger and was able to cry with my mother.  My memorial eulogy ended with the image of her diving off Robert Treman’s (tears now) high diving board at age 65…like a swan…so gracefully, did she leave our earth plane life together, something I still attempt each summer to get over my fear to spring dive off that board…so far I can only jump with Love.

I was lucky enough to have a daddy that built a tall metal swing set beside our house for his three children…I guess no manufactured smaller ones would do. He, being a radio astronomer at Cornell University, worked on radio telescopes delivered in huge cartons made of plywood, and I can still see one being transported onto the abandoned railroad tracks in our backyard. We called the carton our Clubhouse, where we had friends come for sleepovers, and I practiced kissing with girlfriends. Preparing for kissing boyfriends.

Behind the Clubhouse is a field where a small pond grows cattails, tadpoles, and is bordered by blackberry bushes that produced thumb-size blackcaps as we called them. I loved eating them fresh as I gathered some for my mother to bake one of her fabulous flaky pastry pies. There were wild strawberries in the fields too, sweeter than the strawberries we grew in our garden; daddy allowing a small patch for me to plant.     Daddy played badminton with me after supper too, and sometimes set up his telescope for us to look at the stars in that backyard of my youth.

We played hide and seek, tried to catch fireflies, one landing on my fourth ring finger so I could pretend I was engaged. Someday. Of course I climbed trees being the “tomboy” I was.

Today, I am still that “tomgirl” as I look out the window into my backyard as I type this essay. Remembering as clear as the blue sky, daddy carving out the blades of a small water wheel which the trickling stream out of that pond caused to circle as my sister and I looked on with wonder. And, I’m still surprised that I’m crying now, after years of his passing on, after years of crying about losing him and my childhood wonder due greatly to my mother’s religious fears of hell.

I was born and raised in Ithaca, NY. As a young adult, I left for ten years and returned in 1974, appreciating my home town at least ten times more. It’s now fall 2015 when I notice someone has painted “question everything” on a Ithaca Commons building, in the backyard of my office.

I have a backlog of tears that water my soul like the rain watering the flowering mums outside my window. Yards and yards of love to recover for my wondrous child now a parent and grandmother, who never questions that her daddy loved her as best as any man could.

When I was a girl, my mother called me bossy: “Francis the Talking Mule.”  I must have learned to be bossy from her as she was the one who “wore the pants in our house” as far as I could see and feel. Especially when I was 16 and she lost it by yelling at me, “He’s not your father!” Though this was the first time I had been told this truth she convinced my dad not to talk to me about it. She told me as an adult that she thought: “She’ll get over it!”

Well, my mother’s thought bossed my head around, making me afraid as an adult to ever talk to my dad about why he was not my biological father; I’d thought he was until that fateful day. My mother was mad that I often defended my dad whom I felt loved me! I knew loved me! He even wrote to me in nursing school asking why I had held back my affection from him (since I was sixteen)…yet he was afraid to ask me in person, as was I. Over the years, my fears have transformed  into tears of loss.

Mom was the strict one of our fundamental christian family….making even dancing not okay. In elementary school dancing the Virginia reel or the jitterbug didn’t seem to be a problem but when I entered junior high, I would dance slow with a boy and then return home feeling guilty. According to my mother, I was tempting the devil and  becoming “worldly.”  Of course sex was not really explicitly spoken about except that you do not have sex until you are married. Though I knew people make love, I had no idea there was such a thing as masturbation until I was married at 22.

Anyway, I couldn’t continue to dance with the guilty feeling bossing me around in my head until I began to loosen the grip of my mother’s religious beliefs that had impaled me. I became a hypocrite (according to my mother) in my twenties when I began to dance the hustle during the week and then participate in a more liberal Living Hope church on Sundays.

At age 38 I finally jumped out of the chains of religion, after birthing two beautiful daughters,  divorcing my coming out gay husband whom I had married as a Virgin, and becoming a Marriage and Family Therapist. With boyfriends, I began stretching my sexual wings and feeling free. Mostly.

In my fifties, I was dancing 4-5 nights a week and hearing a bossy voice saying, “You should be serving others more; not having so much fun for yourself.” After having become a primal therapist in addition to an MFT…I knew I had to have a session to rid myself of a burdensome guilt! By this time, I had healed a good deal of my childhood pain by becoming a surfboard of rage into my ocean of tears. In this particular session, I was transported into another lifetime: images of being a ballerina on stage, sensing I was in Paris, having lost my career from a broken ankle.

I cried out, “I AM A DANCER!” Since that sobbing session, my guilt is gone, and I dance with the boss of freedom, to be me!

     After living 13 years in a rented renovated chicken coop, I have moved twice in 2015, the latest being august 15th, when my daughter Erin and my granddaughter Denali  helped along with man-friends and family-men for which I am very greatfull. The sofa is a queen-size pull-out bed which means it is extra heavy, needing at least 4 people to carry. Being in the last year of my sixties, I am greatfull that I can carry many boxes and furniture, while ruling out the sofa. Almost. I did lend a small brief hand.

The following weekend my daughter Megan traveled with her daughters, Riley and Emily from Boston for their yearly visit to our home town of Ithaca, NY. My granddaughters (13 and 11) immediately claim the sofa bed, and there is no talking them out of it. Megan claims my double bed, and is not willing to sleep with her mother. So, being the camper I am, I am relegated to the carpeted floor in my sleeping bag, quite amazed that they are all very comfortable with this arrangement.

Then, I think to myself…isn’t it wonderful that they SEE me as this young spring chicken, peacefully living without a rooster. Yet, in my sleeping bag I can dream of one.

Smelling bacon frying meant the beginning of another day, while being awakened by daddy’s soft voice saying “Good Morning” as he switched the light on in the bedroom I shared with my sister, as well as lightening my heart. Mom would be making eggs and toast, setting out orange juice and coffee. It was the routine of my growing up years.

I can’t remember what I made for breakfast in nursing school but the two previous years of college was cafeteria style. I do remember frying bacon for lunch to make BLTs, often hearing the other nursing students say, “Diane’s having BLTs again!” Maybe I just missed breakfast bacon?

Marrying the weekend after receiving my bachelor’s degree in nursing meant that I would ‘make’ my husband and I cereal and orange juice before heading off to our 7am shift. It’s so blurry now as to what kind of cereal…does it matter?

My daughter, Megan would ask for Cece, her name for cereal in the mornings, leaving making either eggs with bacon or pancakes, or french toast on the weekends, my older daughter Erin’s favorite. Still eating together. Remembering the smell of maple syrup.

Now that my daughters have family’s of their own, and I am past four marriages, being single for ten years, I’ve rallied around Ithaca Bakery bagels toasted with butter, many times adding homemade jams made by my German aunt Resi, and cousin Gabrielle. Eaten only after my cup of orange juice, the first thing I drink when I walk out of bed, being the only routine that has continued since childhood.

In Copenhagen airport this past month (July 2015), where I spent the night, a banana and bottle of OJ were bought as I’m awoken by the store gate opening and passengers on the move at 6am. I’m overwhelmed by the many stores in this airport and wish I wasn’t drawn to shop for clothes at this hour. But I do, at H&M, an American store with a European label where I can feel at home?

After a couple decades of toasting bagels made at the local bakery, after being frozen in my freezer by the dozen, I have graduated this past year to bagels still warm from Wegman’s grocery store. Almost daily, I pick up the tissue paper and touch the various kinds to find the warmest. (Or ask) Wegman’s makes bagels all morning long. I relish every bite, the warm yeast scent of the sesame, or multigrain, or honey wheat, my favorites. I wait ’til I’m hungry before I drive to work by way of Wegman’s to find that special bagel and to fill my travel mug halfway with hazelnut coffee adding 2% milk and 2 brown sugars, which I have just this past year begun to drink. (coffee is recently recommended as healthy)

As I walk to my moped in the parking lot, I look up at the clouds and say to myself, “It’s wonderful to be alive: to taste, to smell (lost my ability for 10 years after experiencing a fractured skull), to feel the warm softness, as I remember my father’s tender voice, “Time for breakfast!”

When I tell others that I have been married four times, I usually hear, “Will you marry again? or is there someone in the future?” I smile as I respond, “I’m open to a fifth marriage on the spiritual level, not necessarily legal for I have learned a truer love is not a commitment on paper.”

I left my fourth husband in 1998; for the first time I truly felt I was being my SELF. I no longer depended on a man to make me feel happy and secure. I could trust that I am . I have been single ever since except for one year (2004-5) when I lived with my boyfriend Steve. Of course I was triggered into tears of my childhood hurt, as we all are in intimate relationships so I continue to learn what truer love is.

Being single does not keep me away from such growth opportunities, as my family, friends, and clients continue to trigger me as well. Thankfully, no longer into anger, (what an unexpected gift) always into tears which I am so greatfull for like the heavens raining down into my beautiful flowers. I didn’t wish this essay to be a lesson to be told, but I can’t help but write what I AM, a lover of tears. Replacing fears.

At my best friend’s, Gayle’s memorial for her daddy yesterday, another one of her friends, Clare, told me a story, as I had just said that I wouldn’t sing Amazing Grace as indicated in the program during the line “who saved a wretch like me.” Webster’s dictionary’s definition is “a base, despicable, or vile person.”

How can anyone look at a baby and think or believe we are born a wretch?

Anyway, there was another song on the program, “How Great Thou Art,” that is Gayle’s favorite, and I like as well from my growing up church days, that prompted Clare’s  memory of her seven year old student asking to sing: “How Great We Is!”

Like being single… fancy as a breeze, loving as I please!