Yikes!

I've miscounted my cousins! I gave my Aunt Karen a kid she didn't ask for or give birth to. Sorry about that, I could have sworn there was one more kid in that branch of the tree! Well, nuts. No wonder I wasn't sure if it was a boy or a girl. Well, there are a shitload of us...I'm glad that I don't have to worry about buying Christmas presents for all of the grandchildren my grandmother had. I guess that's why we got 2 bucks for Christmas.

I had to mention that right away so I didn't look like the worst cousin in the world...and so that my aunt didn't star looking around for a missing rugrat.

What I wanted to talk about this morning was a comment that I got:

"...I should trust my inner voice. It's never failed me in the past, yet I still find myself questioning it somehow. A woman's intuition is stronger than we give it credit for sometimes..."

Yes, it truly is. I don't mean to sound cliche when I say to trust your feelings...I mean it quite literally. We learn so much as we go through life and when we do, the things we learn come out in different ways. One way is that nagging voice that speaks to us and tells us that something we're doing isn't quite right.

I used to go around asking friends for validation when I felt like someone slighted me in one way or another. Then, I finally learned that I didn't need to ask for anyone else's opinion...I just needed to trust my own. I think that we all feel the need to confirm our own feelings from time to time and then we go to our friends and sound things off of them. But, if we need to figure out how to navigate our own way through life, we can usually just do what we already know is right.

Did you ever find yourself saying something like this, "My spouse made me feel stupid last night...do you think I was right to feel that way?" Well, you FELT that way...so you didn't need to ask the question. If someone made you feel badly...then they made you feel badly! You already know how bad you feel...why do you need to ask for someone else's permission to be angry about that? So you don't need to ask anyone else what you should do, you just go to the person who made you feel like that and tell them how they made you feel. They deserve a chance to make it up to you and to learn from what they did. And you deserve to be made better.

I hate to talk about "feelings" like that because it seems so Morris Albert...but the fact is that your feelings are something that you entrust to another person when you're in a relationship and they need to know how to take good care of them. So, you should really try letting people know how you feel.

I went into work last night and I worked on the oncology unit. I had one lady who was not going to be around for very long. She was very sick and had lost her hair. She was on a morphine drip and she held onto to that button all night long, trying to get some relief from the pain. She was so pathetic yet she was so lucky that I actually felt a bit envious of her. Her husband sat by her bedside the entire time, just carressing her face and petting her bald head. He called her what Rick used to call me, "Honeybuns." Corny, yes. But she had a husband who adored her and did all that he could to make her feel better. He sat there so helplessly, just watching his wife suffer and I sat there watching her die and I was envious of her! She has something that I don't have and I felt badly that I felt like that...but that's how I felt. And, like I always say, feelings aren't good or bad, they just are.

I have to work on that and I will. I don't need to envy a dying lady...I can go out and find someone who would love me like that. I thought that I already had.

Meg