When we discovered that I love to garden and I have
a very green thumb, he bought me the compost bins I wanted and a greenhouse.
When the greenhouse got blown away in a windstorm, he helped me find another to
replace it with. Both times he helped me build them without complaining that I
was creating more work for him. Even though the second one had directions that
were about as clear as mud and we had to figure out a lot of things by looking
at the diagrams and experimenting with how the pieces fit together for
ourselves. There were times when I would have given up on the second greenhouse
and returned it, if it were not for the fact that it had the tallest ceiling in
it of anything we found suitable for our situation, but I really hated working
on it. There were times when David would kind of have to push me into getting
out there and working on it.
About the time we got to a good stopping place on
the second greenhouse, I realized why it had been so tough for me to work on
it, even though it was primarily being built for me to work in. Something about
the situation was causing an emotional issue to surface. One I didn’t even know
was there.
All my life my mother has treated me as an unpaid
servant. As long as I did what she wanted and conformed to her ideas about how
my life should be, things were fine. If I tried to be myself or deviate from
her ideas in any way, I was treated rebellious. I’ve often said that even now
my mother would control me if allowed to.
What really caused me to look at the being my
mother’s servant was a lady who owned one of my favorite hamburger restaurants.
David and I stopped in there the day we got the main parts of the second
greenhouse up, for a celebratory milkshake. The owner mentioned that she’d met
my mother one night when she had my son with her. She said that my mother
seemed like a nice lady. I just kind of went, “mm hmm.”
For some reason I told her about my mother’s
controlling me as I was growing up because the next thing she said was that I
was right, my mother was very controlling. When I told her my name was “Mayone
(my own)” she looked at me and said, “That’s too possessive. You should change
it.”
I realized she was right. I started working on a new
name right away. At first I thought I’d just use my middle name, “Marie” and
not bother with a complete first name change. Then I realized that although
“Marie” is a nice name, it doesn’t really suit me. Not to mention that if I
kept my original first name, it would leave me open to someone thinking I am a
possession. So, I did some internet research about names. I wanted something
unique and hopefully something that didn’t start with the letter “M.” I found
some great choices and some interesting choices, but nothing that really seemed
to fit me. David suggested I try some combination of my first and middle names,
so I started playing with that idea.
Some of the names I came across online or came up
with on my own were nice and some were silly. It was an interesting process which
took longer than I hoped it would. I just kept reminding myself that whatever I
chose, I would be stuck with for the rest of my life. It took me over a year to
settle on the name “Wynter.” Originally I was going to keep my middle name, but
it didn’t really work with “Wynter,” So I changed that, too.
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