The Treehouse

A curse and a blessing.

Every year around Thanksgiving and the following holidays I am reminded that I do not think and feel like others. For example, I am not grateful. Per se.This does not mean I am a brat, a bitch, and an ungrateful beast. I just do not know what being grateful means and what it should feel like. And maybe some of you can explain it to me in better terms than what I have heard in the past.

So, I am struggling to come up with what I should say when somebody asks me what I am grateful for. I can tell you what I like. I can tell you what makes me happy. And I love coming home to my husband. I often say “thank you” to him when he does something I asked him to do. For example, yesterday a snow storm was about to hit Southeast Michigan and we still had all the leaves in the flowerbeds and on the grass and the garage still was full of his mother’s stuff (we had sold her house and stored many things in the garage) and our cars did not fit in. So, we rolled up our sleeves and cleared out the garage and also raked leaves. We finished by parking two vehicles in a garage just as the snow started coming down. I was happy, content and felt accomplished. Is this gratefulness? I hugged my husband and pointed out what a great team we are, because we work really, really well together when we are in a time crunch and put our minds to something.

Last week I ran a turkey trot with my daughter. This was probably my slowest time ever on a very, very cold morning. And yet, I had forgotten how much I enjoy running races. Even morning ones. I had not run any real races in a long time. This summer, I only managed to race a 1miler. Which did not really count and I did not really warm up to enjoy the run. This turkey trot was enjoyable.

I am not a religious person and often feel left out. Like not being part of an inner circle when people talk about going to church. I have been to church many times in my life attending masses in many different religious leanings. Myself, I grew up Lutheran. My father is catholic. And my first husband was jewish. Yet, since I was 15 I have been very, very uncomfortable with some of the christian prayers and church ceremonies. I do not like how they all talk as if everything in the Bible is literally true and how they talk like God is a man living in the sky somewhere. Yet, this is what I grew up to believe originally myself. When I was 14, I was confirmed. Like any other kid in my village. And like the good student I was, I excelled in bible class. Anything to get good grades, right? With my confirmation I expected a lot. Not even sure what I expected. But the one thing that I really cared about was the Bible verse we would get assigned with the confirmation. The pastor would handpick a saying for you. And many kids said how much they felt appreciated and heard when they heard their verse spoken during the confirmation ceremony. And so I waited.

“But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” Joshua 24:15.

“This saying is a declaration of faith and commitment to God, spoken by the Israelite leader Joshua as he urged the people to choose who they would serve. The phrase signifies a personal and family-wide dedication to following God.” So the google AI claims.

It felt like a gut punch to me. I was so disappointed. This verse meant nothing to me. I experienced it as an insult. There was not a word in there that was significant to me and what I wanted from life. My confirmation essentially was the first step towards atheism for me. It signified an immediate break from what I believed my fate would be.

That moment, I realized that God did not care about me. At all. That the pastor during bible class did not see anything in me. That I was a nobody.

As someone who grew up with emotionally unavailable parents, parents who were too immature to teach me emotional stability and if at all saw life in a very narcissistic self centered way, the one escape I had hope for (church and religion) closed of to me on my confirmation. God only cared about himself, just like my parents did. I was to serve him. I did not matter. Yay me.

This might have been a child like reaction. After all I was 14. But I can still feel the disappointment like it was yesterday. I needed love. Because that is not what my parents gave me, so I needed it from someone else. And it was not God.

Last week, I got sunburned hanging up Christmas lights. Yes, in Michigan. It felt like a curse. The redhead curse. The front of my house always catches the sun and can get quite warm even on cold days just because of the sun. I spent 3h untangling the lights. Why did I buy these ultra long light chains that tangle so easily. 3h and when I finally got to a point of acceptable untangledness and fiddled the chains over the bushes, the lights were broken.

Yes, I tested them before. They broke during the untangling.

Luckily, I had a second light string that I used instead. But it felt like a curse. Never hang up lights in November I swore to myself. It is not meant to be.

This morning, I woke up to snow. Happily relieved that we managed to park the cars in the garage. Hard work paid off. I heard the neighbor kids playing outside. In my backyard. They have permission to play in my treehouse. I saw about 10 kids in the woods behind my house with the tree house being the snow fortress armed with snow balls. It looked like fun.

Sometimes I would like to go back in time and play in the snow again. As a kid.

It is November and it looks like the snow is here to stay for at least two weeks. Winter is already here. For someone like me who loves fall, it is kind of sad to see my favorite season start so late and then the same year end so early. We had roughly 80 to 90 degrees here up to mid October and now the first snow hit mid November. That is way too short. I love long fall walks and this year I feel robbed of them.

Winter is great too if not for all that snow. I am not the best driver and never really got used to the near Canadian / Michigan winters. I mean who needs that much snow? This April I drove all the way up to Houghton on the upper peninsula just to find… snow. It was April 26th to be exact and it looked still like winter there.

Next weekend, you can find me in Millinocket, Maine. I checked the weather forecast and it will be cold. I am attempting to run a half marathon that I did not at all train for. I just cannot find either time and motivation and… I am always tired in the afternoons and mornings. I know it is primarily hormonal. The reverse-puberty. Moodiness and tiredness are just one sign that you as a woman are in perimenopause. The years before the actual menopause hits. Hormones are a bitch.

So yeah. This is today’s post. The Sunday after Thanksgiving. Kids playing outside at the Treehouse like they used to throwing snow balls. No adults telling them not to.

It is not that bad of time of the year. Sunburns in winter and all.