Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

~ excerpt from Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

Last week my husband came home with Blizzard’s long-awaited Starcraft II nestled under his arm. It’s a video game. He hadn’t mentioned any plan to buy it and as he walked by, as he loaded it up, as I heard the roar of Blizzard’s famous opening cinematic movies coming from his office, a queer almost forgotten feeling in the pit of my stomach slowly materialized into nostalgia. I remembered this. I’ve been here before. But there was quite a different flavour mixed in. What was that?

As I fumbled trying to identify it as bitter or sweet, it was easy to remember it’s origins. It had been years – nearly ten actually – since I’d seen my husband sit down and do the thing he has loved best all his life: sitting at a computer to play a video game.

Don’t get me wrong. He adores his Xbox 360, dabbles with the Wii, obsesses over which games are on sale and what his gamer score is on the iPod, but that particular image of him and his PC game, a game in which no wife or children are involved, had been absent from our lives for a very long time.

Gaming had almost nothing to do with my life prior to getting married. I mean, my kid brother would get me to help him solve puzzles in the 11th Hour when he was stuck and I was known to play a mean game of Tetris when bored. But I happened to fall head over heels for a gamer who was more man than any tight pair of wranglers I’d ever seen.

And I love my geek. But for a long time, I felt like a widow as he played his games. He’d be at it for hours. We did lots of other stuff together, but there was something about the nature of this  hobby that because I didn’t understand it lead me to being jealous of the time he spent with them.

He did his best to find games we could play together. There was Worms and You Don’t Know Jack, a trivia game with a smart alleck host, that we sat at the computer together to play. But the immersive games were lost on me. He was in the middle of Ultima Online when we got married, tried Everquest briefly – thankfully it was never his crack – played through the original Warcraft games and expansions. And who could forget the first Diablo or Wolfenstein? Honestly, I thought it was a waste of time.

I read while he played and kept my opinions to myself. I wonder if he thought my hobby was a waste of time. ha!

Can’t be though because what I read was his library: Star Wars novels, Tolkien, Lawhead, the Chronicles of Narnia and Robert Jordan. I read almost everything he had and begged for more. What a sneaky man. By introducing me to fantasy books – something else that had been absent from my life prior to him – he was simultaneously sowing the seeds of my conversion. I loved fantasy in book despite myself and my perhaps less than hidden disdain for fantasy in video games. Fantasy opened up my imagination, showed me I had choices in life and gave my romantic sentimentality a sense of playfulness that was desperately needed to balance my serious side.

And he never stopped trying to find more games I would like and that we could play together. (Still hasn’t actually.) Once he had moded our very first xbox and loaded it with emulators, we were… wait, wait, sorry I’ll say that all again in English for ya. He took his original xbox, sautered some memory chip onto it that voided its warranty and scared the hell out of me but allowed him to load software on the xbox. That software would “emulate,” meaning run old computer systems and their games that had been hacked by other people. In other words, we had a Commodore 64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and others INSIDE the xbox, and we could play the old games on the xbox.

So on this rogue system, we played even more Worms and found Tetris Attack. A  forerunner of Bejeweled – you know that game, right? – that was familiar to me because of the name Tetris, it really wasn’t a tetris game. You are getting rid of blocks, not dropping them. Nevertheless, it was a hit at our house, and we became hardcore. Competitions began as soon as the two babies were tucked in for the night and continued furiously into the wee hours of the morning. I dreamt of those brightly colored blocks with crazy faces. My strategy I plotted in REM.

Matches were won and lost. There was definite competition. I couldn’t beat him until I’d played enough on any given night to get into a groove. That’s when my fingers became magic and the hours melted away… together.

Little did I know, but we had established our beat. And it was fertile ground to sow in some Diablo II. He suggested, and I, on a Yoshi high, agreed. Nothing in our life has been the same since.

There was an enormous learning curve moving from a game controller to playing a game with a keyboard and a mouse, but once I stopped the swearing and sighing and being too stubborn to ask for help, I loved the game. I loved it so much that I never wanted to stop. And he loved that I loved it. My butt didn’t leave the computer chair for hours.

Without high speed Internet without malls in the middle of nowhere and our biggest luxury being that we owned two computers in the first place, we clobbered demons, crawled dungeons and had way too much fun slaughtering cows. We ended up playing through Diablo II countless times with several characters on several different difficulty levels. It was my first experience pretending I was someone else, someone made of pixels, and that’s when Kalanna was born. I used Tolkien’s elvish dictionary at the back of The Silmarillion to make up the name and alias that would give me the freedom to try many new things in the years to come.

It was then too that I discovered my everlasting love of breaking barrels. There could be treasure inside! And a girl can never have too many mana potions. Smash, boom, bang! Who cares if we’re about to get eaten by a horde of angry Bonebreakers, I see a barrel and it’s MINE!

Diablo II was so much fun, a story to dive into, frustrations to take out by dealing out fireballs and extremely empowering too. It may seem a giant leap to switch from a discussion of video games to women issues, but for me the two are linked.

Letting myself simply enjoy my time, moving outside of the stereotyped women who lived and breathed (down my neck) all around me was huge. Huge! And my acceptance from that moment forward of the gaming culture in my home instantly made me a different kind of woman. Someone, when I look back, that I’m so proud to have become.

From there it was an easy move into Halo and Baldur’s Gate and, when we got high speed internet, World of Warcraft. I’ll never forget my first sleepless night. Stayed awake till four in the morning or something crazy to finish Star Wars: Republic Commando, the first game I played beginning to end by myself. I had arrived.

As time has gone on, I find my favorite games are still ones that I play with my husband. The recent exception was Dragon Age: Origins in which I didn’t know how to react or feel when I started… sorry when my character started flirting with another character of the male persuasion. His name was Alistair. It was kind of too real for me. Awkward romance aside, Dragon Age let me be the hero in 3D, in a story I controlled where I could glory in the well-chosen path and put up with the consequences when my steps weren’t so well-placed. But the lines of right and wrong were really blurry. You could be whoever you wanted to be – a personality of myriad nuances – and still end up in the same spot at the end no matter what. The game accepted you for who you were. Frankly this made me nervous and uncomfortable. I wanted to be the hero who did it right. Same way I play life. But the game just wanted you to do it your way. Same as life really is.

Puzzle Quest was also awesome, being a similar game as Tetris Attack and taking me back to those days, only it involves some more serious strategy. Mages always need a plan to keep their cloth covered bottoms from being scorched.

Anywho, I’ve wholly embraced the culture of gaming now. My kids play. We play. We all play Rock Band together  We’ve moved onto to board games and our rec room basement is now such a crazy perfect layout for the tv/xbox, board game area and then the computer station from which I hope to one day be tearing through and taking names in the upcoming Diablo III and The Old Republic.

I play as much as I can. I just began Puzzle Quest II which is massively even better than the first and hope to start the duo of Mass Effect games as they are sci-fi versions of Dragon Age by the same company and huge hits and why aren’t I playing them right now?! Because I have too many pots on the fire. Creativity explodes in my head on a daily basis, and I follow where it wills. One day it sends me to my sewing machine, another to the keyboard to talk to you fine folk, sometimes to the kitchen or the garden. Gaming comes in last place in the summer, but first in winter.

So when the husband brought home Starcraft II, what was that unavowed feeling? It was four of them, actually. It was me remembering the days of widowhood, then crazy jealousy that it wasn’t the kind of game I enjoy therefore not a game we could play together, mixed with supreme vicarious giddiness for how much fun he was going to have, and lastly remorse that I had ever made him feel bad for being who he is. Somehow, him walking in the door with that game brought us full circle. We’ve arrived. I’m a gaming gamer’s wife. Because it’s been the most fun ever. +5 to family game time.

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

I always thought it was easy to forgive, would have said that I was a forgiving person. Had I been bold enough to admit it, I would have confessed to looking down on those who had a hard time letting go of grudges. You can hear the “until” coming, right?

What was done to me was truly unthinkable. And yet the details aren’t important for this discussion. It is sufficient to say that I was betrayed and hurt beyond what I thought was possible. The impossible became incarnate for me. But that’s not for today or a general audience. The point is that forgiveness became an issue and a big problem for me. I’m wondering if it is for you. Can you, should you, forgive over something so huge? Does the nature or importance of forgiveness change with the size of the sin and its impact?

I’ve taught my kids to respond with “I forgive you” when someone apologizes to them. “It’s ok” is not acceptable because it fails to acknowledge that the person has acted or spoken poorly which demeans the victim’s feelings nor does it offer the perpetrator the chance to experience  humility and the reception of authentic love. I feel very strongly about this and remind myself and them constantly.

And yet immediately following the incident, my adamant answer was a 180 from that principle. No, I would not forgive. And not only that, I would try out words. Words I’d never used before. Tasting them, these horrible hateful concoctions of unspeakable meanness felt powerful. I felt strong, for a moment. And when the fear and anxiety and sadness crept up too close that I might begin to feel them, I would repeat these words, lines, judgments and my power would return. Perhaps the scariest part was that when I searched my heart, I meant them.

Suddenly I was a very different person. I was proud of myself for having taken a stand and for the enthusiasm my heart felt toward it. Drawing a line in the sand that others were not allowed across made me rethink what is and is not possible in my life. I thought anger and hate were the key ingredients.

From personal experience, the effects of holding on to anger and hate are these:

1. Emotional instability especially outbursts of tears at Hallmark commercials and comparable ilk

2. Anger in the wrong places at the wrong people

3. Stunted relationships due to mistrust with family and friends you continue to care about

4. Weariness and eventual collapse from the physical strain

5. A constant overarching feeling of being stuck in that incident that hurt so terribly, being a repeating record player of sorrow

It’s not pretty.

For the sake of my family, kids and mostly myself, I had to re-examine forgiveness. It took, however, professional help.

Is forgiveness letting go of the anger or hurt feelings? Can it all be in the head, a place with more sense and less to lose than our heart? Will carrying the belief in what is right eventually salve over the inflamed tissue and make it ready to love again?

I had so many questions. She listened and provided reading materials, a very good, concise in 9 steps how and why forgiveness is the healthier choice.

Oddly enough – but probably not a coincidence – I was reading Cutting for Stone at the time, a book about families, wounds and forgiveness, and found the quote above to be a huge breakthrough. My omission was withholding forgiveness.

I also dove into Marianne Williamson’s A Woman’s Worth to have a swim around and rekindle my passion for life and femininity. She repeats herself frequently and is more poignant at the beginning than the end and has some pie in the sky notions, but  the overall feel-good quality she preaches was a balm to my wounds. Funny how negativity goes straight to the heart, but affirmation takes substantially longer and requires more repetition.

In the end, I feel like I’ve found the meaning of freedom. I am getting happier with myself as myself every day. I know now that personal power is something entirely different than anger. I know that I can defend my boundaries simply for the sake of myself. Forgiveness is not necessarily about re-establishing relationships and letting people continue to hurt you. I can forgive but stay on my side of the line. Mostly, that pain is not worth holding back all the miracles that await me today and for as long as I live.

Maybe you have that cold hard rock in your heart like I did. I understand. I hope my little story helps you. Just know that it’s a process, but you deserve better. Much much better.

Long have I admired the blog of an old friend from the Ottawa Valley. Her place is called Twig and Toadstool. What a magical place it is!

If you love nature and being creative, have little ones to entertain or just need something to do with your hands, look no further. Maureen and Shanti are creative geniuses, and they’ll dazzle you day after day, just when you think they had to have exhausted their idea bank.

I am the kind of mom that can be very hands-on with my children but then I need some major quiet time. Since I just finished reading Cutting for Stone and had that right amount of solitude, today was a day for busy hands and feet. The perfect day to make this vase that I saw on Twig and Toadstool and wanted to make ever since!

We took a walk on the nearby hiking trails, climbed a big hill with several dead trees, debated the right and wrong qualities of a stick and tried not to be too grumpy. A thunderstorm is on it’s way and the humidity is out of control today, hence the grumpiness.

Once we got back home, the deck was the best place to work as dirt and stick fragments were flying pretty fast. In the instructions, Shanti suggests holding the sticks on with three rubber bands, but we actually used more and then removed them. It kept the sticks a bit more stable for the kids, especially as they were starting. We did leave three rubber bands on in the final product, just doubled the bottom one up, so our end product only has two rows of raffia instead of three.

There are not really a ton of flowers blooming in our garden right now, but thankfully we had a few obliging echinachea. The white tall phlox is just about to burst, so next week we’ll have a gorgeous white display. Anywho, we are so pleased with the results, and a good time was had by all, despite the humility. What say you?!

My son wasn’t too into the butterflies and instead has dubbed his a Pokemon candle holder and that’s just fine with me.

Thanks for the inspiration, Twig and Toadstool!

on a red bookshelf nightstand
a few nights before we were to move into a home with central air
i woke in a humidity daze
and noticed my husband’s pocketknife
resting peacefully beside his USB drive