What seems like a lifetime go, in a galaxy far away, in the little town of Owatonna; all I wanted to do was to get back to my ordinary world, regular life, where things, generally were OK. What seemed (and was) a horrible ton of things happened to me in a rather short period of time. I felt like I barely made it through, and if I think of it all at once, there’s still pain there. So much pain, sometimes, that I hesitate to write about it. But I believe that writing heals, and I think that enough time has passed that I can write about it.
When we go through really, really difficult things, in some ways it truly is the making of us. So, things were pretty OK most of the time I was married, but then my then husband more or less just quit coming home to Owatonna; then one day, what seemed out of the blue, a “dancer” from Deja Vu nightclub called me to tell me that my husband loved her, not me. I can smile now at this; this young girl, calling to set me right on this point. It seemed that she wanted my life, my big house in Owatonna with a garden and little bikes and trikes in the driveway. My enchanted, married, stay-at-home mom life. I had all this and a husband with an exciting job as a stagehand, who toured the world with Prince. And well, look at what a great husband he was!
Of course, when I told my husband, he dropped her and found a more covert friend. This was the beginning of the end of my marriage. Then when all that was done, and I was divorced, I became engaged to a man in Alaska, fortunately that didn’t work, but at the time it was one more heartache when my heart was already bruised. It was also around this time that something very wrong was happening with my youngest daughter Megan.While on a vacation in Wisconsin, she had a headache so bad, all she could do was lie on the bathroom floor and cry. Then, theses headaches, migraines, began to happen more and more often. I took her to specialist after specialist, and no one knew what was wrong. The best I could do was take her to the emergency room for a shot of pain medication. She was 7. It would be nearly 10 years later, and years of her being suicidal that we found that she has hypothyroid disease.
Then, my oldest daughter Kathleen, at age 14, became pregnant, she was just beginning her freshman year in high school. My middle daughter Erin, was often left out in the hectic day to day life of caring for one daughter who was unexplainably often very ill, and a pregnant and then young mom teen. After my divorce, when I no longer had the luxury of staying at home, I had to work a full-time job, and then come home and care for children aged infant to teen. At a temp job, before I landed a full-time job, I met a man that I dated for a while.
A pretty nice, regular guy, who at one point, shared the Duran Duran song, Ordinary World with me. It’s a beautiful song that has stuck with me ever since. Mark told me that the song reminded him of my life. The song, and the fact that this kind man could see my longing for life to just be OK again, consoled me. I was not alone in my just wanting life to be ordinary. I think I can share this now, because, well, my life is pretty OK now. Kathleen and her sons are doing fine, she’s a college instructor and more than that a sweet daughter and a kind mom. Erin is also a mom, with a three year old and a kind fiance. She put herself through the U of M, studying psychology. And Megan, well, she is doing well now on thyroid medication, recovering nearly 10 lost years of her life. She is a jazz vocal student, with more and more interests in life appearing all the time. I made my way back to the very beautiful and amazing ordinary. The song is a beautiful backdrop that wraps around my mind.
