Unchained Memories

I still feel as though I'm in a transition of sorts.  No more of those panicked feelings even though life here feels a little like the waves when you're sitting on a raft in the ocean.  It's not a stormy sea, but it's not calm waters, either. 

Thanksgiving here was nice, though, because of work, my son couldn't be here (first time) so it was my daughter, my dad and I.  It was  a nice, calm and relaxed day. 

My daughter and I were out yesterday, walking through the stores, testing perfumes,  looking at clothes, admiring odds and ends.  It was fun begin part of the shopping crowd without that nervous feeling of needing to find the gift everyone else is looking for.  I stopped worrying about shopping for Christmas a while ago.  I take it slow, now, and things seem to turn out a lot better than when I was one of those frenzied feeling shoppers.

On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store and my daughter ran in to pick up a few things. I waited in the car.  I sat and thought about a quick comment that I made leaving the mall.  It had something to do with wanting memories of places we go to or things we've done that have nothing to do with a drinking memory. I don't want to look at some picture that was taken that on the outside looks 'normal' yet I know that she had been drinking.  Or, some place we drive past that has some memory of a drinking moment.  I did comment to her about it and we kind of joked about it, which feels like a good thing to me, because in the past anger could erupt with only a one word mention of drinking.  Progress.  Anyway, as I sat in the car, I started to wonder, how do you make new memories to overlap the old?  Those old memories feel like false ones, anyway.  That's not really how life should be or how it was supposed to be.  Those are not the memories that were supposed to be held onto.  Those old memories do not really reflect the life situations that my child should have been in.  I know it may not make sense, but that is what I was thinking, and pretty much how I feel about it.  I'm not resentful.  Not really remorseful, either.  More like going through my mental album of memories and wanting to remove the 'false' pictures and replace them with the mental photos that should be there. 

So, that's what I'm doing.  I'm toying around with the idea of revisiting all of the 'haunted' places with the false memories and doing something positive to recreate better memories.  I'm not sure that I will actually go through it with all of the places, but I do think I just may make my own pilgrimage to some of these places to  'set things straight' so to speak.  I don't want to drive past something (I've written about this before) and constantly see the ghosts of drinking past, waving to me or peeking out from behind a pole as I drive past.  I want unchanged from those memories.