Nothing going on at the moment, but I expect chaos any time now.  Actually, I always expect chaos, having walked into it, tried to jump over it, had it drop on me like a meteorite from hell, most of my life.  Yes, I am wounded.  My childhood left me shredded and just wanting to know what love was, since it was decidedly absent in my otherwise Betty Crocker/Emily Post home life.  Thus began the years, decades, actually, of flailing about, redesigning myself with every new leap into the ooey gooey mess of pseudo-love.  Let's see.  I went from preppy Mademoiselle college student to baby wife in the jungle of LA with her first godawful employment at the phone company, in Watts, to battered woman/baby divorcee sleeping with anything that would stand still long enough (my Sex in the City phase), to young pseudo-intellectual wife married to much older pseudo-intellectual cold fish (and dead battery), to young single mother PWP princess (that's Parents Without Partners, otherwise known as a good excuse to screw other losers) bed-hopping around suburbia while working for the local Devil Wears Prada boss clone, to marriage with a Republican three piece suit where I was mom to three of his, one of mine, and one of ours, ranging in age from 14 to 0, and I worked, too, to booze-sodden three time loser, to sidekick of NRA RVing blue collar guy with season NFL tickets, to sitting in jail on Christmas (surprise!) because of drunken escapade, to new recovery, to wounded relationship with another sort-of-recovered old fart, to bohemian west county wild woman living on the edge of the world becoming an artist, to retired single woman returning to college, schlepping around campus in hoody and All-Stars mufti, to my current status of older than dirt gal in the little yellow house, working at being a professional artist and taking care of two sweet little dogs.  Phew!  Of course, none of this would have been necessary if my folks weren't my folks, and had let me be who I was supposed to be in the first place.  It all began because I was female.  Not okay.  And they gave me a masculine name, one that got me Be a Pilot brochures instead of Be a Stewardess.  One that got me enrolled in boy's gym in high school, that seething cauldron of embarrassment that was almost unbearable without being totally humiliated.  One that almost got me drafted!  Mother named her dogs Samantha, Amy, and Sarah.  Go figure.  So, here I am, scarred by life.  And, if you looked at it from the outside, it all looked idyllic.  We had a swimming pool when I was a kid.  I was not born into an Untouchable caste in New Delhi, or the DC ghetto.  I am not even black.  But I learned in a therapy group (lots and lots and lots of therapy here), pain is pain.  Recently, my father died.  Not a terrifically big deal - he was 91 and frail.  And it ripped off the scabs and sent me spiralling into the wounds.  Again.  And I am 68 freaking years old!  It never ends, this healing.  I do know, however, if one never touches the wound, one never knows where one is wounded, and one never heals.  At least I'm working on it.  Every freaking day.