If someone were to tell me as a child that my mother had serious problems, at the time I would not have believed anyone. My mother was the master manipulator, she took intimate, and valuable character forming information and used it to gain advantage at whatever moment it became prudent.....for her. What ended up helping me ultimately, and even now as I have my own small family was the time that people randomly took to take me fishing, camping, sports, and interest. As a few certain angels in my childhood quietly, and unjudgingly introduced hobbies, and interests to me from their simple and non-prying angle new worlds opened up that later would be come the world that would teach me sympathy, empathy, consequences, fairness, and many other life skills. These skills were not really skills, they were more fragments, and tastes of better options, and or oasis's that were a places to go to, even now. I am troubled still by confusion, anger, guilt, and many other hardcore B/W decisions that a child of an N parent are forced to make sooner, but mostly later as the knowledge and courage are gained.
I love the migration of the salmon and steelhead in the pacific northwest. I love knowing how to trout fish in so many different places with the so many different skills and baits to use depending on all of the circumstances. I love the personal challenge and integrity involved in sports, in my case now golf, I love a pure drive and a winding putt that sometimes luckily winds its way to the hole and drops.
I am glad that these arbitrary angels taught to me what they loved, it helped me love what they loved, love them, and now it helps me to try to stay on the slippery median of the tumultuous N world with my mother now, my family now as it relates, and my knowing that there is something better out there, I just have to find it. I certainly dont have even one fifth of the answers that I need, but when I land a salmon with my kids all of those questions kind of get reset to be answered another day, or perhaps never. I do know something, that my mother is a testament of misery, and instablility that is a constant reminder that my precious children need protection from that N world so help me God.
