Ayn's Multiple World

This was a day that had some tough spells

Good morning. This is me and it’s almost 7 am. We just took our medicine so things should be ok in a little bit. We’re a little late. I’ve been up since about 4 am.

We looked at Facebook, MP.com, and email and wrote a few letters. It always seems like there is so much to be thinking of.

Well, ok now it is that much later … It’s just after 8 am. I admit that I went back to Facebook to catch a few more posts. I’m being just absolutely amazed at how much our world seems to have opened up in the last few days in reacquainting ourselves with long lost friends and a relative or two. Well, sometimes it’s just that the friends feel like family, because they were so beloved.

Really, I feel much honored to be who I in knowledge of these people. I suppose that most people feel the same about their friends and old acquaintances after having been long separated, but this does not lessen the fact that there are a lot of warm fuzzy feelings to share and some memories to explore. I think it’s also fascinating to see those you knew are so happy in their current lives, most often are with a life partner and are doing very exciting things with their lives, work and/or education. It makes me think of the miracle that presents itself as life in that we all connect in one manner or another – just some fantastic feelings.

I’m pledging here not to go into the stories of peoples’ lives that we are touching bases with, but my mind is a little warbled in trying to hold it all together in our thoughts.

Maybe we’re going to need going back into the regular part of our story-telling to get back in touch with feelings and thoughts that are more grounded.

Hmm, ok … so where did we last leave off. I think we mentioned something about fishyman being off for an overnight with the guys. He’s going to Newton Lake which is south of here and is reporting to be about 60 degrees today. Rich has come up with a new idea that he’s going to wait until it’s warmer for me to go out with him. I think that it is his way of assuring that I don’t get overwhelmed with it the first few times out. Then too … the guys are putting a lot of demands on their time with him. They are like a lot of little kids planning to meet out in back of the garage for some wild game playing. They’re just so cute!

We had a bit of a mushy night last night which is like our own pre-deployment planning. WooHOO!!! Before that we watched some comedy shows with Sweetie. We haven’t done that before so it was kinda fun, but not so productive. Well, with the exception someone always seems to be getting massaged in the process. That’s my guy!

We had had Chinese for dinner which Rich picked up on one of his errands. He’d gotten back the boat which was having the trolling motor adjusted. We spent most of the day together, but only to some degree. Most of his time was spent sitting on the boat in front getting it ready for his time out on the water. I looked out the window several times and again we felt that stirring if looking at a little boy with a wonderful new toy. I think he was readying his poles and lures and making sure all was just right.

On the other hand we pretty much got into a little obsessive stuff with MP.com.

Basically, we’d been taken up with the many new connections of people between MP.com and Facebook. Later I counted, but in one particular thread where most of these new Facebook connections are coming from, there were 23 different people posting from less than one week to another. This is also to suggest that many had posted more than once.

I felt this was a tremendous amount of information that was getting away from me, so we thought to put it in some order.

I’d read a few other peoples and that they were having the same thought organizational problems as we were in keeping people straight and in not forgetting anyone. I had heard methods of putting information on Word or Excel, but our method of madness fell into our love of OneNote.

It didn’t take too much to initialize the set-up, but it took most of the day to get everything just the way we wanted it. One of the women had done a great service in going back over several posts and put together a list of names of people who had been writing and their Marine’s first name. This really helped in inspiring the ideas we fell into and in getting the quite proverbial ball rolling.

We opened a new notebook for MP.com and we listed out in the section tabs the different message threads. The one I concentrated on yesterday was the one on Cliques. It doesn’t really feel like a clique in that people are really going out of their way to make sure that everyone feels welcomed. Along the page headings to the right we wrote the name of the person posting – all women this time and we wrote down the rank and name of their sons.

The next part was to start with the most current posts and work backward by copy and pasting their messages to the right page. We took out a little of the unrelated formatting to make sure everything was as condensed as we saw fit. This took a little bit of time and effort. As mentioned previously some people only had a few posts, but some had posts that were multiplied and more complicated in that they had reviewed many peoples’ names and added personal messages to each.

I thought all along that this would be one of my goals – to be able to comprehend the whole of where any one person was at in his messages and to incorporate that in a more comprehensive response. I felt like all these women were important in their own right and I wanted to get down the nuance of each which was too difficult over the spread of information as listed on the message board.

It’s difficult to jump in, but that’s what anyone new has to do … I could see other women also feeling somewhat daunted by the task of figuring things out. There are already about 66 pages of information on this particular thread started by a woman named Paula back in August last year. So far about 1650 messages have been left on this thread and it’s been viewed about 20,300 times. Believe me … the amount of posting on MP.com is phenomenal … this is just one thread over 108 pages of topics and about 25 threads per page. AND, this is just one section under Marine Parents … there are hundreds of other sections.

Can you imagine then the confusion in trying to post and understand any one thing or group of people? Yes, you could just see my obsessive-compulsive drives kicking in.

After I’d gone back and copy/pasted the most current posts – that being again less than one week’s worth, but just as far back as our first post on this thread – we then decided we’d need yet a more concise plan of attack.

OneNote is really cool in that it has a search feature so if I wanted to know how Alice was doing, I would only need to put in her name and then it would highlight each of the 13 pages where the name was used. Literally, OneNote highlights each page and within each page it highlights every Alice word mentioned on that page so finding references to her are very easy.

It’s also got a nice feature called, “View list.” This is really good for quick summarizing. It has several filters such as date, section, or title and directions A-Z or Z-A, so that for example under date filter it lists yesterday when entries were made all pages related to Alice with brief explanations of how the reference was used in sentence format … for example – here let me show you a picture, it will be easier to understand.



Ok, yes, we are nerdy enough that everyone’s name is in alphabetical order and the moderators are given asterisks.

We had to decide how to best reference information though and although this view tells us who and what everyone is saying about or to Alice, we were more concerned at this moment with information that was being given by any particular individual.

In a sense what were we learning from them as to their own concerns? We figured this would keep us better prepared not to be indulging in gossip.

This next picture by the way is an example of something that a person might post using us as an example for the sake of confidentiality.



After we’d collected hundreds of posts such as the above, we did the really painstaking work that followed our next thought patterns. We figured to hold it together we would need to summarize where each person had been as to new information being given. This next picture shows that format again using a summary of our own thoughts as an example.



Can you than sorta see what we were doing - except we did this for all 23 women that had posted. This meant that we had collected a lot of information. Why? Well we did mention our compulsiveness right? The hard part was that after we’d done this we started responding back to people in our own summary form of summaries.

Well sure that had to get done too, right? Why take in all this information if you weren’t going to give something back to the people you’d been learning about. This ended up being something like this last picture.



You might need to click on it if you were to read it in larger pring, but in general we had found ourselves doing this, but we got stuck after processing this stuff all day in that we were realizing our post was going to be too long to be most likely comfortable to post by the moderators. We still haven’t gotten over this problem, but might try to post today and break it up over several posts. I’m not sure if this is really hiding the fact that we’re long-winded, nor does it explain why we feel it is important to be responding to each individually. We know that others do this sort of stuff, though I’m also sure in typical Ann-fashion that we’ve gone past regular sensibilities. It’s just we are such a fanatic for details.

I think now in reading over my material back to the other women that nothing I say is critical, but would go its own direction in conveying how much I care for these women. There are too many to know in any in-depth manner, but it is surprising how much they put into and invest in these on-line relationships like I do. To find that someone is really listening … well that becomes my way of gifting back. I want to be able to feel each and to respond properly regardless of the obvious challenges presented. I feel real strong about this – again in typical Ann format all brevity put aside.

It’s like what makes us us!

Hmm, supposing we’ll still go back to this, but am fearful for the grief I’m going to get from the moderators. It’s the only way I know how to share our love for these other patient Marine Moms. Ok, shhh … it will be ok, let’s try to take it off topic here for a bit, ok? Everything will be ok. Promise!

Hmm, it’s about 9:30 am now and we’ve just finished rereading what we wrote this morning. I think it seems readable. I didn’t know if we’d lost anyone in the details, but the pictures I think help explain pretty well what’s been done or is in the wind.

If you were interested in our multiple systems Kelsie is the one most responsible for this kind of thinking – that which shows what was happening yesterday. I wish we could get over the feeling if it is or is not going to be ok. I guess the only way is going to be trying to post and then see what happens. I’m pretty sure it will be the longest post in MP.com history. Oh Lordy, what am I doing here!??

Ok, Pswhoo. All that is over. It is now about 12:45 pm on Sunday and we’ve finished the long post to the Cliques group. We sent it as one piece as it didn’t look quite as long without the page marks … I think it war four pages though. I think moderators are slow over the weekend as to approving things. I have to settle in with its going to be ok.

We’re in a real iffy place in our head, because for one we’re on our own, but secondly because all we think about is Thom and Thom has placed himself out of contact with us. I’m pretty sure he’s leaving tomorrow if he has to be in Japan on Tuesday. Maybe I’m wrong and he’s already leaving, I don’t know. Chances are though he’s home today and most likely at a going away party with his Dad.

I’m trying to have my heart not broken, but it feels pretty clunky right now. I’ve had these kind of tears before … the kind that screams from your lungs, what the hell did I do wrong? I had found later after Thom made his first call to see me several weeks ago that Maury had pushed him to contacting me. Thom wouldn’t be pushed if he didn’t want to be, but just the same he’d received assistance before where now Maury’s in another space. He’s going through so much with his marriage.

I’m pretty sure that the boys have been connected over the long weekend and are either at one of their houses, or at their fathers. I’ve tried every day to contact Thom, but he does not call back. I tried today too.

I might have to be getting used to the part where most likely he’s going to leave without saying goodbye. I don’t understand … even if I can finagle my mind to knowing that he’s going through a lot and the goodbyes may be hard, I still have to deal with my own feelings of hurt. Maybe at least get a grip on the crying.

Hmm, we’re back … we kind of fell apart for a bit and then we fell asleep for about 1 ½ hours. I think having emotions is very tiring. I don’t want to say that we’re feeling sorry for ourselves we were just feeling sad and hurt. Given the situation it had probably made sense.

We’re not tearful now, but then certainly by the next day possibly it might happen again, but maybe not. Somewhere in our mind, we’ve decided to take the day off tomorrow. I think the only thing that might have been problematic is that their would have been a choir and signing practice. Most likely then it will only be a singing one. It’ll just have to be ok.

We didn’t get a hold of Thom, but we talked to Maury. Thom played cards with a group last night, and most likely it included Maury, Joe, Alex, Bob and their Dad.

Those are the normal suspects. Maury said to the best of his knowledge that today Thom was going to stay home with Alexis. She’s usually the one to bring him to the airport, so I would suppose that is going to happen.

Maury said Thom’s leaving tomorrow morning and should arrive in Japan sometime Tuesday and that it might take him 1-3 weeks before he contacts the family from Japan. He will be figuring out the communication from there, but most likely before he leaves he will lose usage of his phone and hopefully while their gain usage of Ventrila. The boys and Alexis all have that, but it is personal between them and their generation.

I don’t know what Thom plans to do with his mother connection. In my falling out earlier, I found myself asking if I was being ignored, where do I go when I’m invisible. It feels really crushing. If the boys have a need, then I am there, but if they don’t have needs, I’m no longer of great value? I don’t that line of thought is likely taking me down in the wrong direction.

I know the boys love me and that I am not doing anything to cause Thom to be upset with me. Maybe he if anything has pulled back because he’s afraid I will be overly emotional? But then, I only ask for the hello and goodbye hug, and I usually don’t cry or make a scene. I know from listening to others that sometimes when it is difficult to say goodbye to someone you love, you pull away. Maybe it’s something like that or maybe the great need for love from the marriage.

I know I get in trouble when I think disrespectful thoughts of myself. It’s hard to have disrespectful thoughts of one’s kids, because they mean so much to you and a parent will know that they have hard things to learn as they go through life. You don’t want to burden them with your problems even if the problem seems to be coming from loneliness between you and them. I know I raised the boys to be independent, but there’s no denying that right now I’m feeling dependent on him. I wish he could have said goodbye. It’s going to be three long years. It’s a long time.

I wish that they would be faster at posting at MP.com. I would like to feel closer to having that support. The site has Live support enabled right now, but I would not know what to say to someone directly. I’m not crying right now and when I am crying I feel to vulnerable to put this amount of bad feelings on a parent volunteer.

In just that short of time the chat feature was disabled. It’s 4:30 pm now and there’s no one minding the store. It seems like there was one post added a couple of moments ago, so maybe someone is making posts now from entries throughout the day … It seems the last one before that was made about 11:30 am. I know they rely on volunteers, so you really can’t complain, but it makes for a long weekend.

I think there is going to be a chat session on line tonight and they are usually from 8 pm to 10 pm. I’m going to try making that and it was part of the decision to stay home tomorrow. I wanted to be at liberty not to worry about bedtimes and I wanted give space for tears and depression if that is what is going to happen. Who knows – maybe I’ve gone through the worst of, but without Rich being here as a back-up, I know I have to give myself more time to get over the humps.

I’m already feeling a sense of loneliness as if Thom were already gone. I know that Thom isn’t in my day to day life, so one would wonder where all these feelings are coming from. I haven’t figured out the connections between children and parents, mostly because I didn’t have the good parental relationships with my folks to understand being close at all. Maybe it is this unfamiliarity that I’ve brought to my own family. Maybe I’ve not done something or another that was supposed to happen?

I was thinking it be nice to talk with someone … I don’t know if Pat would be around, she might be nice to talk to or, maybe I should push it back a bit and talk to CS. I know the conversation would be off-centered from Thom because she’s going through some new problems of her own, but maybe that would be helpful to get me past my doldrums.

The other alternatives would be to either keep writing or to respond to Facebook, or to go back to MP.com and work through the communication from another thread. That would probably be pretty sedating, but I’m not sure if I have it in me.

Ok ... by now we're into the next morning, but wanted to leave this marker in place so that I could find it easier to move on - with a clear track. K?

posted by Ann Marie @ 3/16/2009 12:01:00 PM Comments: 0