Finding normal

Is this what normal feels like?

After a highly dysfunctional lifetime with my family and two difficult marriages, I suddenly find myself in normal… I don’t know what to do with that.

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the Filmmaker to turn into some raging, crazy, angry person, for my life to just blow up in my face, because that’s what I’ve been taught.

I haven’t been taught to accept normal.

And normal feels pretty damn good right now.

Normal in that I have two jobs that I enjoy, particularly teaching fine art to children at Mission Renaissance. Love this job. Love it, love it, love it. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher and now I’ve been a teacher for almost five years. Wow. Five years. The other pay-the-rent job is kinda dull but at least I can work at home in my pajamas.

Normal is getting myself back into directing, something I love more than I can express and something I lost for a while. But I’m back now, working on projects I love with people I love.

Normal is looking forward to going back to school in a few weeks and tackling more classes towards my art degree. Despite turning 50 in less than four months, I feel 25 again and really want to get my degree.

The hardest normal for me to accept is my relationship with the Filmmaker. And even that is finding its own normal.

Falling asleep wrapped up with him is a really lovely normal. Waking up to him the same way is almost pretty fantastic.

Spending time at his place, working on my stuff in one room while he’s working on his stuff in another room, is a wonderful normal. To belong there, to be comfortable, to be accepted into his life is a beautiful normal. Makes me less crazy when I have to go home because I know I’ll be back, I know that this isn’t the last time I’ll walk through those doors, sit on that couch, be with him. That’s a huge step towards normal for me.

My favorite normal is just sitting on the couch with him, whether it’s watching Jon Stewart or curled up next to him, listening to him play the ukulele and singing along, or just sitting together, hands intertwined, the casual intimacy between us while we quietly talk about what we’ve been doing, what we’re going to be doing. That comfort, that settled feeling, that sense of normal.

And it might be ridiculous to those of you who have had normal all your life but for someone like me, who hasn’t, normal is disorienting, is disjointed, is cause for alarm. Because my normal doesn’t feel like this. My normal is fucked up and screwed up and hurtful and painful and wrong.

But slowly, with help from my two amazing sidekick best friends, I’m learning to accept normal and I’m learning that I can let go of my expectations of disaster and pain and awful. That normal is normal and is what I should expect. And this blissful normal is what I should expect for the rest of my life.

So here’s to normal, here’s to simple, here’s to uncomplicated. Long may it reign.

Of course, then what would I have to write about? ☺