Denise Domning's Blog, page 28

The Dance of Dysfunction

After my recent post on what went wrong with my marriage, a friend called and confronted me.  She felt I’d been disingenuous and given myself a break in the responsibility category.  She asked point blank what I’d done to contribute to the breakup of my marriage.  She meant other than growing up and violating the unspoken yet agreed-upon terms of the union.

What she wanted to know was who I’d been in the last years of my marriage.

This is actually a good question for me to answer.  If I ever want to be in a relationship again (something that feels very doubtful at the moment), I need to identify what went wrong on my part.  Fortunately for me, about 6 years ago on my mission to “fix” Ed and our marriage, we attended an Imago Therapy weekend.

I would recommend Imago to any couple interested in better understanding the dynamics of their relationship.  It was truly eye-opening.  Once the sessions were over, I understood that I had married Ed in a subconscious attempt to heal my relationship with my mother.

Unfortunately, I had married Ed in a subconscious attempt to heal my relationship with my mother.

I meant to repeat that, mostly because there is now, and was then, no hope of healing my relationship with my mother.  Thus, there could be no hope of healing my relationship with Ed, who had married me in an attempt to heal his relationship with his mother.  Oh lordy, how the Wheel of Life spins!

So, there we were, trapped together, both of us harboring hurt from our childhood and both of us still playing out the same survival patterns that we’d developed and plied to ill-effect during our early years.  For my part, my childhood resulted in me developing incredible patience and the ability to accommodate all sorts of “slings and arrows” –I’m quoting Shakespeare but this is such a Medieval expression. Did you know that on the battlefield the slingers were the deadliest of men?  Just as David did to Goliath, these eagle-eyed men could send their stone out of the sling at 60+ miles/hour to mortal effect.–while I waited to be accepted for who I was (warts and all) and valued for what I had to offer.

So, what did I do with Ed?  I waited without complaint, because that was my survival skill as a child.  I accommodated, another survival skill, saying “yes” when I should have said “hey, wait a minute!”  My most deadly survival skill is optimism.  One of my sisters and I were talking about this the other day.  She has the same trait.  If we have one good day, then we believe we’ve turned the corner.  Life is going to be good from now on.  Everything is back on course and will never again deviate.  Of course, that’s not how it works, but when you’ve spent a lifetime believing that crumbs are a feast, every morsel becomes a fabulous meal.

The end of my marriage began in 2011 when Ed quit his job and I became the breadwinner.  (Thank you, Amazon.com.)  Of course, in the pattern of my childhood, this should have been my moment of triumph.  At last, I’m valuable, and worthy of respect and acceptance.  But in the pattern of his childhood, I’d just become in every way his mother, who is a powerful, accomplished and successful businesswoman.

What a dance of dysfunction!  So there I am, waiting for him to do for me as I had done for him, and offer the respect and consideration due the one bringing home the bacon. Well duh!  Of course that didn’t happen.  How could it with both of us playing out our unmet childhood needs?

But I wasn’t a child any more.  More and more often, the words “hey, wait a minute!” were coming out of my mouth.  When that didn’t work, I started resenting him when–reality check–I had created this monster. Still, I clung to the relationship.  Every good day as a sign that things were on the upswing.  Unfortunately, Ed dithers.  With Ed, one minute life is great, the next it’s manure.  One day he loved me and pronounced himself committed to our relationship, the next he had a foot out the door.  But no matter his mood, there wasn’t a single day when he offered me the respect I thought I deserved, the respect I hadn’t articulated that I needed from him but simply expected him to offer.

Even recognizing how I was contributing to what was happening couldn’t keep me from finally getting angry.  I’m not nice when I’m angry.  I’m not patient and I’m not accommodating.  I say things like, “You need to leave and never come back” and mean it.  And once I’m done with someone, I’m done.  I’d rather die than look back, much less GO back, and I never regret it.  Not for one minute.

Life is good and the future looks fine from where I sit this morning.

 

Mayonnaise

For my first recipe I’m publishing the one concoction I use most of all: Mayonnaise.  If you have a food processor, this recipe is so simple and so easy that you’ll wonder why you ever bought mayonnaise.  This will make about a cup and a quarter of tasty spread and if you keep it in a covered glass jar in the refrigerator it will last for several weeks…although it never lasts that long around here.

There are a few quirks to this.  If you use conventional supermarket eggs, you may find you need 2 eggs. Whatever nasty stuff they feed the chickens in those factory farms seems to lower the egg’s thickening ability.   The higher quality the egg, the deeper the color.  If you use one of my free-range pastured eggs, the resulting mayonnaise will almost be orange.  Also, you cannot use Canola Oil.  For whatever reason, Canola Oil just doesn’t seem to thicken. (GMO, hmm?)  The oil I like best is Sunflower as it adds no taste of its own.  If you love Olive Oil, feel free to use it but know it will add a distinct olive taste to the mayonnaise.

One free-range organic egg
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp prepared mustard (choose your flavor)
1/2 tbsp either fresh lemon juice or apple cider vinegar
1 cup Sunflower Oil

Using the steel processing blade, place the egg, salt, mustard and acid (lemon juice or vinegar) into the bowl of your food processor.  Add about 1/4 cup of the oil.  Pulse several times to mix the ingredients.  Then, with the food processor running, slowly drizzle in the remaining oil.  The slower you drizzle, the thicker the resulting mayonnaise.

 

Mammal Emotions

So here’s little Georgie, our mother-less calf, reluctantly adopted by Elsie when she realized that all the other cows were dead.  I watched him today as Hannah was coming into the world, wondering if Elsie would drive him away or ignore him once she had her own “child”.  Silly me.

Yes, Elsie did gently nudge him aside at first while she worked diligently on cleaning her baby, then getting Hannah up and walking.  George did what he usually does when he’s one his own–pillage the barn because he’s figured out how to open the barn door, chase the cat up the tree and consider if it’s possible for him to climb as well.  Annoy the chickens because he can.  Then he drifted back to Elsie in Al’s and Elana’s field.  By now, Elsie had delivered her afterbirth–this was about the most “textbook” a delivery as I could have imagined–and Hannah had started bounded on her stiff little legs.

As she saw George, she got up and tottered over to him.  George carefully lowered his nose to touch hers.  Then, as I watched, he gently pressed his forehead to hers and rubbed it against hers.  It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, full of love and acceptance and genuine caring.  Without a word he said, “Hey little sister, welcome to the world and I’m glad you’re part of my herd.”

Welcome Hannah!

At 1:30 this afternoon Elsie gave birth to a heifer, Hannah.  The new arrival is tiny (for a cow–not more than 40 pounds) and adorable, and already up and eating.  Welcome little girl!  I have more pictures coming later.

The Wee Hours

Why, oh why, am I typing at 4:00 AM?  Blame it on Bear, or rather Moosie.

Bear when he first arrived. Even on his first day he knew his job was to protect the porch.

At 1:45 AM I was startled from my well-deserved slumber by Bear barking.  Now, it’s not unusual for Bear to bark in the middle of the night.  He’s protecting my porch.  You know, that porch is the most important thing on this farm.  It’s where he eats, sleeps and cuddles with Adventure Boy, my orange tabby barn cat.

The thing to know about Bear is that he’s a coward.  A 115 pound coward.  Livestock guardian, indeed.  He’s got a deal worked out with Moosie.  Bear identifies the threat, then looks at Moosie and says, “Get ’em, little guy.  I’ve got your back.”

Well tonight at 1:46 AM I realized that this wasn’t Bear’s usual “Believe what I sound like, not what I am” bark.  This was different.  He sounded, I don’t know, strange.  He was barking in short bursts, not his usual long strings.

I tried to ignore it, but with mountain lions, bobcats, fox, coyote and who knows what other predator at my fence now that Elsie’s within days of delivering, I just couldn’t go back to sleep.  So, at 2:00 AM I got up, donned my sweater and my headlamp (note to self: get a new one.  This one’s elastic is so worn out that it slips down my forehead constantly) and my sloggers–shoes that are made like boots; I love those things!–and started walking the property.

It’s always interesting walking at night.  First, on a clear night like tonight was, the Milky Way looks like a milky way, a distinct streak of milky light in the sky.  Second, I like seeing the spiders.  I have jewel-toned spiders all over the place around here but the headlamp makes them sparkle like, well, jewels. The emerald ones are the best.  And, third, I never know what I’m going to end up falling over and sitting next to.  One night a bull frog and I ended up eye-to-eye.

So I walk the whole middle pasture, Bear at my side, waiting for Moosie to show up.  There’s no Moosie. How can that be?  The area the dogs patrol is completely fenced. That’s scary because Moosie has no fear.  He’d take after a pack of coyotes just for the thrill of chasing them, and the hope of catching one.  He doesn’t know that coyotes bait dogs, luring them into the chase only to have the pack ambush them.

Then I walk the road, looking for a break in the fence.  There’s no break.  Where is Moosie?  I’m calling and whistling (I’m sure the neighbors are thrilled by this), but no Moosie. Bear is with me the whole way.  Every few minutes he’d give me a look that I’m pretty sure meant: “You really don’t expect me to work all night by myself, do you?  You know, if we can’t find him, I’m happy to sleep with you instead.”

Just as I give up and make my tired way back into the house, here comes my not-so-large dog, tail wagging, ears down.  Oh yeah.  He knows he wasn’t supposed to be off the property.  We went over this last year.  He took off to the North and spent an afternoon leashed to the porch. The next outing was a venture to the East.  He spent an afternoon leashed to the porch.  He tried South and got the same result.  At last he tried West.  As I dragged him across the porch to fix his leash to the metal railing, I could see it in his eyes.  “I get it. I’m not supposed to leave.  I need to stay home.”

I didn’t work on him climbing into the ditch and swimming under the bridge.  Ah well, today is another day.  Another really long day.

Sic et Non

That’s Latin for “Yes and No”.  That’s how I feel about being 60.

In the YES category are:

I don’t care what people think about me, because I like me.  If they don’t like what I’m doing, then it sucks to be them.
I actually like the way I look, wrinkles and all.  My face and the gray in my hair says “life well lived”
I’m in the best shape of my life. I pretty much weigh what I did when I graduated from high school and I can carry a 50 pound bale of hay as far as I need to.  I can even run up the driveway without breaking a sweat or even panting.
I speak with authority because, damn it, I’m 60.  I know stuff about life that a 20 year old doesn’t.
So far, my body is working just the way it should and my blood pressure is the envy of a 30 year old.

In the NO category are:

I’m 60.  That’s 10 years away from being 70.  Holy smokes, how did I ever get to be so old?  And why, if I am this old, don’t I feel old?  Geez, I hope I never “feel old”, and the years never catch up to me.

 

 

She must have eaten a bee!

Look how swollen her head is!
Duck Billed Turkey?

It was a weird weekend…!  It started with me finding this turkey hen.  She’s one of the 3 moms with the newest babies (unlike chickens, turkeys mother in groups).  I caught a glance then looked again, and couldn’t believe what I saw.  It was a duck-billed dinosaur!

At first, I thought maybe she’d swallowed something too large for her and it was caught in her throat.  I caught after a good amount of darting and dodging (one of the reasons I’m in such good shape is that I do a lot of those mini sprints these days, chasing down birds) and felt her throat.  The swelling squished.  Definitely not a “thing”.  The skin on her head was simply swollen.  Apparently, whatever bit her wasn’t too poisonous as she acts normal enough.  But I feel so sorry for her!  Three days later the swelling is finally going down, thank heavens!

SNAKE!

Then came Sunday.  Cleaning day!  All the food dishes, waterers and other implements get cleaned and the coops get scraped out.  Well, I started scraping the back turkey coop only to uncover this:

A King snake had tried to come up through the hardware cloth on the bottom of the cook and gotten stuck halfway. I admit it…I screamed when I uncovered her.  Not out of fear, though.  I was just surprised.

Well, I couldn’t leave her there.  She eats mice and rats and other things that eat my chicken food.  So off I went to fetch the wire snips and a pair of gloves.  The gloves were absolutely necessary.  I knew she’d bite me while I worked.  She might not be poisonous, but snake bites hurt.  I got bit by a boa constrictor once…but that’s another story.  It took a few minutes but I got her cut free, then put her outside the coop where the turkeys couldn’t see her.  They happily eat snakes and she wasn’t that big. Off she went, hopefully breathing a sigh of relief.

Georgie

This is Brighty’s calf Georgie giving Tom a hard time. At the end a few of Tom’s babies appear with their moms.

Dead Turkey…not.

dead turkey…not!They do this to me all the time.  I walk out and there’s a bird, sprawled lifelessly on the dirt.  That is, until I get close.  With a squawk they rise from the “dead” and take off running.

A Milestone!

It happened.  At long last, my commercial kitchen is approved for use.  Only for jams and jellies at the moment, but after 3 years of agonizing struggle…IT’S DONE!  Jalapeno Jelly, here I come!

It’s official! I’m up and running.

Okay, not really.  Now I need to talk to the Planning and Zoning department about using the kitchen as a commissary kitchen–a kitchen for hire.  Fingers crossed.  Oh and I also need to get the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality on board  so if someone wants to make something that uses a lot of water…

Still I’m celebrating today!  And no I’m not drinking all that wine in the picture.  The wine cabinet is no more.  I’ve been saving this stuff to make vinegar.