Aint No Sunshine

This little bird is named Kuku! I absolutely adored making her and couldn't wait to stuff her. She is several different colors of red and orange and her stars are lime green with orange french knot centers. I am going to make her lots of friends and hopefully someone will buy her and a friend so that she is not ever lonely.

I guess you can tell from my posts and my work that I am very happy lately. Being able to work so much is definitely the best thing in the world. Having a soundtrack is lots of fun too and having wonderful friends and loved ones and seeing(or Facebooking) them often is another reason why. But I think the difference is finding happiness between the ears. Finding the ability to love yourself no matter what is going on in your life, laughter, dancing, and a little bit of crazy really are the best medicine. I think if people just tried to make themselves happy and gave themselves permission to be happy it would be the greatest gift to themselves, their loved ones and the world.

I spent most of my life trying to be normal and trying to hide the inner chaos that was in my head, my heart, and my home. I was really only comfortable around the people I loved and out of my home although no one probably knew it. I was always smiling and happy out in public but my despair and uneasiness with my differences probably kept me in some sort of a virtual coffin most of my life.

A coffin is the most metaphorical description I can give it. Death surrounded me as a child, dead brother, dead birds, dead mice, dead pets, deadened hearts. Although now if a child and her family had that particular circumstance therapy would have been a given, but it was the 60's and mental health was something that was talked about behind closed doors never to see the light of day.

Living with all that death meant that I never had a normal childhood except at my friends houses where death never really came to call. Also if you look at all that death, you see depression and neglect. That too opens up a new can of worms, because except for your friends kids are basically quite cruel. You can't really blame them though because what does a 10 year old snotty boy know anyway. He knows not of death and sadness and grief.

So that childhood kind of led me to be very guarded about the differences between myself and other people. Smile and they will like you, don't cry because they will laugh at you and then you spend your whole life inappropriately laughing and crying at all the wrong times and you get so used to being guarded that it takes an awful lot to figure out who you are. And then you meander through more death and more grief and you end up at menopause which is the time when you open the metaphorical window and say I'm sad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore.

I deserve to be happy! That is where I am today. I listen to music, I dance around my house, I embroider all the time and I laugh, and laugh, and laugh. And I am honest about who I am and why I'm not normal. And you know what you realize when you finally figure out that there is a reason to not be normal, you realize nobody is normal. Nobody has a charmed life not even that snotty 10 year old boy. Everyone has their crosses to bear, everyone has a reason why they aren't like everybody else. Life gives us a bowl of cherry pits and we have to find a way to let something grow in there. And we don't talk about it, perhaps we dredge up our sorrows when angry or totally distraught but god forbid people have pity for us(and yes sorry to say that makes us pitiful without a reason). We only have a limited time on this earth and it's time to start planting cherries.

If my story hits a chord(and I find that when I read these far too personal blog posts of other people I realize I am not alone) put on a tune, dance around your house, sing at the top of your lungs I'm sad and I'm not gonna take it anymore and LIVE! I deserve to be happy. It may freak your friends and family out and may make other people wonder what the hell happened to her/him but in the end even that doesn't matter and they adjust(I can swear to that, everyone loves to laugh).

Todays song in my head when I woke up was Ain't No Sunshine(when shes gone) by Bill Withers. And today there is very little sunshine but there is a nice sunny little Kuku that says hello. Blessings to all.