The Fixer...

Him: "Why did you buy those flowers?  They're not looking so good."

Me: "Because I am the fixer of the broken.  I can heal them."

Sixteen years ago when I bought this house I was a single mother of two toddlers working part time at the Post Office.  Money was beyond tight some weeks, others were not as bad. But there was never a week with enough to indulge on myself. Ever. Diapers needed to be bought, mouths needed to be fed, every penny needed to be watched.  But one day, while delivering mail to the local garden center I noticed a scraggly bush, way in the back, with a 75% off tag.  It was wonky, stood a bit sideways, and had hardly any leaves. $20 and it was mine. I was the hoarder of all things broken, fixer of all things, plants and people alike.

Which has always been my problem, really.  The broken people always find me, they come to be healed, use up everything I have, and walk away.   Oldest had a date this weekend with a girl he met through Tinder. They spent the day together down at the waterfront, walking off their overpriced, sugar-coma inducing, monster milkshakes with a five mile walk along the massive rock jetty out into the Atlantic Ocean. It left a lot of time for real conversation.  Somehow the conversation turned to past relationships, in which he told her he was the "healer of the broken".  She said she was too. It's an odd thing to have in common, but let's face it, two healers together are far better than the alternatives. In that moment, I think I saw more clearly than ever, that he is just like me.  So I asked him the question that I have been struggling with for weeks,  "Where do the the ones that everyone turns to to make things better go? Where to the healers go when they are broken?"

"Therapy" he says.

I am different.  I get that.  I see solutions that no one else sees, have an internal drive that is incomprehensible to most, and can be strong in nearly every area of my life.  I am, without embarrassment, one of the strongest people I know. And the truth is, I do go to therapy, or here, when I am broken. Because in real life, no matter how many memes or quotes I post on the book of faces, or how many tiny comments I make, it is rarely picked up on by those around me.  It flies completely under the radar because she is strong, and she can handle everything.

And while I have long lost the desire to fix broken people, they still find me. They know where I live. Occasionally they get in with a proverbial key forgotten under the mat, and I find myself furious with my decision to let them stay regardless of how short lived it is.  I don't answer the phone for most of them anymore. Their texts are left unanswered. I try to explain this to the Husband and he tries his best to validate it, but inevitably takes a left turn into fixing, saying to turn it off, stop listening to the voices in my head, This or that is not on me. As if it were that easy. Youngest is broken. Partly his own doing, partly just the course of nature. He wants to be grown, independent, but still needs a parent. And in acknowledging this, he specifically doesn't want me, which is the hardest pill to swallow. We have always been connected in a Jedi mind melding sort of way. We play off each others chaos and calm, feeding off the energy of those around us. I do what I've always done, model what he needs, work with what I'm given, fly by the seat of my pants, always there for him, and he does not want it. I can not fix him. I can not heal him. And yet, I can not quit him.

The desire to care for things is just in me.  To take the old abandoned 100 year old steamer trunk and make it beautiful again.  To grow the wonky 75% off bush into a stunner of the backyard....

or the half dead, burnt leaves of whatever....

into a centerpiece of red, pink, and yellow begonias to be amazed by all summer long. 

It's an inherent in me as my blue eyes and chunky thighs, it's just part of who I am.

I am the fixer of all things broken.