Tag: being present

Zigs and Zags #atozchallenge

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Recently, I departed my parents’ home to drive to a college visit with my daughter. The road was circuitous, winding through small towns, farmland, and valleys on its way to our destination. This trip was one that I had taken many times throughout my youth and college career, though I had not traveled the road in decades.

As we zigged and zagged along, J dozed in the seat next to me. While I was confident in our journey, the landmarks had changed over the years of my absence, and buildings existed in new forms along the route. I was hit with an occasional twinge of uncertainty.

It suddenly struck me just how deeply my children trust me. When my daughter gets in the car with me, she assumes that I know where I am going. Despite the zigs and zags of our path, she is right there, believing in my ability to get us from point A to point B safely.

Fostering and maintaining such a deep and abiding trust is a huge responsibility. I hope I never lose the trust of my children as we travel life’s zigs and zags together.

eXpectations #atozchallenge

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Sometimes—more frequently than not, nowadays—my children say things that are completely unexpected, and I have a very difficult time maintaining my composure. Sometimes, I just can’t.

We were driving to my parents’ house recently. The drive had been a slow one, and it was getting on toward dinnertime. I asked J to call Grandma from her cell phone to let her know where we were. At that point, we were about 20 minutes away, and had just gotten close enough to civilization to have cell service.

She dialed, held the phone to her ear, and waited. The first thing I didn’t expect was her decision to masquerade as her younger brother, feigning a deeper voice. (Interestingly, despite the deep voice that made her seem more like her brother, she chatted with Grandma as herself.)

When she and Grandma finished their conversation and got ready to hang up, J said, as her parting words, “Stay pretty, Grandma!”

I burst out laughing. And I couldn’t stop. I had tears streaming down my face by the time I was able to pull myself together. And I was driving. Luckily, we arrived at our destination safely.

Driving or not, always expect the unexpected.

Self-care, Sleep, and Single Parenting #atozchallenge

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When one of my coworkers left work on Friday, she said, “Have a good weekend. Be sure to do something for yourself this weekend.”

Yeah right, I thought, mentally running through the lengthy list of things that would consume my time in the two days before I returned to work.

“It’s important to take care of yourself,” she continued. “If you don’t, you won’t have anything left to give others.”

I know she is right. But for single parents, self-care is a luxury that is too often pushed to the back burner. For me, self-reflection takes place in the car on the way to and from work, and sleep…? Well, there is never enough of that.

But her comment did give me pause. Maybe—just maybe—I can figure out how to shake up my priorities so I move “self-care” a step or two up from the bottom of the list.

Lyme Light #atzchallenge

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Spring is taking hold here in the northeastern U. S., and our weather is slowly growing more temperate. In the springtime, I begin to see my neighbors again as people come out of their homes to enjoy the warm weather and bask in the sun’s bright rays.

However, spring also brings unwanted pests in the form of insects of all types, most notably, ticks. In these parts (as in most), ticks carry Lyme disease, as well as a whole host of other illness-inducing bacteria that most people have never even heard of.

I take some (albeit minimal) comfort in the fact that my cat is not currently going outside since his fall from the position of king of the food-chain (written here in my F-blog). His temporary status as an indoor cat will reduce the risk of ticks in the house. Before, I felt a need to vacuum him obsessively when he came indoors. With the frequency with which cats go in and out and in and out (and in and out…), my vacuum was in constant use. Keeping him in once the windows are open and the screen door is all that separates him from the outdoors will be increasingly difficult.

I have Lyme disease, a diagnosis that came after more than one bout with a “virus” that confined me to the couch for several days at a time—a roundabout way to say I was not immediately diagnosed. In fact, no one really knows how long I had the disease before I was diagnosed. That’s a funny thing about Lyme

The symptoms of Lyme mimic so many other diseases, it is important for everyone to know and recognize the signs and symptoms; if you are armed with knowledge, you will be prepared to advocate for yourself or for your loved ones. Lyme is a growing concern that is now found in 80+ countries around the world. Your ability to help yourself begins with awareness.

I was not in the woods. I don’t remember being bitten by a tick. In fact, I never saw a tick. I never had the telltale “bulls-eye” rash. The standard CDC recommended 28-day course of antibiotics did not make me better. Getting in to see a Lyme literate practitioner was a months-long process. Sadly, Lyme disease is a politically charged disease for which it is difficult to obtain proper, aggressive treatment. Below are some resources for education. If you know of other helpful resources, please share them in the comments.

Today’s Public Service Announcement has been brought to you by the letter L.

http://www.underourskin.com/#home-underourskin

https://www.lymedisease.org/lyme-basics/lyme-disease/about-lyme/

http://www.ilads.org/

Danger & Discovery #atozchallenge

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I am navigating the line that separates danger and discovery. Walking this line used to be a piece of cake—it was solid, and there was a clear delineation from one side to the other. But over the years, the line has flexed and grown treacherous, making my footing uncertain.

When my children were younger, it was easy to create opportunities for them to discover the world in ways that involved little risk. They would play in the sink with soapsuds, “experiment” with science kits that were designed specifically for kids their ages, or don their puddle boots and wade along the shoreline of our pond with a net and a bucket catching frogs and fish and turtles.

Now that the children have become teens, the line I walk is thin and often barely visible. Their discoveries involve delving into some project that has an uncertain outcome. Take, for example, the electronic interests of my younger son.

He has, in our basement, an area in which he satisfies his technology-driven need to create. He has electronic components culled from the drawers at the back of his favorite Radio Shack stores, before his they all closed. He has an array of lights and breadboards and switches and transistors and miles of wire.

For his most recent project, he created a speaker, wired and assembled and tested by his fourteen-year-old self. But then he needed a transformer and an amplifier, so he built those, as well.

And then he took his creation, and he plugged it into a wall outlet carrying 120 heart-stopping jolts of electric current. That part I made him do in my presence at the kitchen table. And I readily admit, I took a step away from the table, just in case. There was a deep sigh of relief from this mom when the entire contraption did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Yesterday, he began to assemble a box for his speaker. He used power tools to cut the ¾” MDF while I made dinner, pretending not to hear the whine of the saw emanating from the basement. Pretending there was no danger involved in my son’s latest exploits.

Today, when I arrived home from work, he proudly demonstrated his new speaker—assembled and working and sounding pretty darn good, I must say. There is no doubt in my mind that the “discovery” aspect was an integral part of the process: he built, he learned, and now, he will move on to the next project.

Bigger and better discoveries lie ahead for him. And the line I walk—between danger and discovery—becomes ever more treacherous.

D

Challenges #atozchallenge

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Years ago, when I was facing a difficult time far from my family and support system, a minister said to me, “Bloom where you are planted.”

In fact, we all face our own unique challenges, and oftentimes, we forget that. We snap at the cashier at the grocery store who is moving too slowly because she has just returned to work after surgery. We honk at the teenager stalled at the intersection in front of us because we don’t realize he hasn’t quite adjusted driving a car with a manual transmission.  We sometimes get so caught up in our own lives that we forget others are dealing with their own struggles.

On my way to work this morning, I had to make a stop at the grocery store. Of course, I was running late. And it was snowing. I picked up the three items I needed, and I found myself debating which too-long check-out line to pick. Did I mention it was snowing? Because of the weather, the early morning shopping crowd was larger than usual.

I chose a place in the express lane. At one of the check-out counters, an older, somewhat disheveled man was loudly conversing with the cashier. He wasn’t angry, exactly, but he might have seemed so to a passing observer. He was questioning the charges. Each and every one. And as he did so, he was holding up the line.

I turned to survey the shoppers in my line, and I flashed an amused smile at the man directly behind me. He smiled back. “What do you think he was when he was younger?” he asked me.

“Hmm. That’s a tough one,” I responded, turning back to the man. I observed his gesticulation as he opened his wallet and displayed the contents (or lack thereof) to the cashier. She nodded and talked in a manner that was soothing but authoritative.

“School teacher?” he asked.

“No,” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“College professor?” he asked.

“That’s possible,” I responded. “Absent-minded type.”

“Sculptor!” he said, this time definitively.

“Yes! I think that’s it!” Truly, this man could have been just about anything.

“Guess the occupation,” the man then said to me. “It’s a new and amusing way to pass the time in line.”

“Well… that’s all well and good,” I told him. “Until someone looks at me and says, ‘I wonder what she did when she was younger.’” We both laughed.

Sometimes, the best way to handle challenge is through humor. Sometimes, the challenges we face make us stronger, and we are able to bloom more beautifully.

 

C

Theme Song

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Recently, I realized that every morning, as I’m making lunches, I am humming some sort of tune—a soundtrack for the day, if you will. Apparently, this is a habit that I have had for a long time, but I never really noticed it.

One day last month, I was humming a particularly melancholy melody which seemed to be on infinite repeat as I stacked cold cuts on cheese on bread and slathered on the mayonaise and mustard. After the umpteenth repeat, I became aware of the tone of what I was humming. And I realized that it was different from the usual morning medley. My usual morning soundtrack is upbeat and motivating. The tune that day was not.

Is my brain determining this melody? I wondered as I carefully considered my emotional state (which seemed okay, though maybe not as peppy as normal). Or is this some eerie foreshadowing of the day ahead? It was an interesting thought, one I pushed aside; I moved on with my morning activities, but the tune didn’t change.

Since that day last month, I had not focused on my morning humming. Until yesterday, that is. The tune yesterday was, again, different from the usual. It was a very determined, get-it-done type of melody. Not inspiring, exactly, but more of a dutiful tune that would follow me through the day.

It was not surprising then, when a couple hours into my work day, some not particularly positive news came my way. It was a situation that took determination to process to a marginally workable solution. But as the situation churned in my head, I went back to that theme song, the one that was different and somehow ‘out of sorts.’

Perhaps, just perhaps, my morning humming is my brain’s way of working through the events of the day that have not yet happened. Perhaps this really is a foreshadowing of the events to come since the melody is never a conscious one.

But now that I am starting to sense a pattern, the next time my theme song doesn’t seem quite right, I might just go back and bed to see if I can restart my day. Or maybe I’ll stay in bed until the next day!

Resolutions (2)

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It is January first, and I am feeling unmotivated. I want to set some goals for the year and work on the things that need fixing—to write more, to clean and organize, to focus on health and fitness, and to find ways to give back.

But today, I am unmotivated.

I want to write a blog post every day, though based on my past performance, I might focus on writing one post per week. This drop in expectation is not because I am unmotivated, but because I am a single parent to three children, and like many single parents, I maintain two jobs to cover expenses. And well… priorities.

I may be unmotivated, but today, I am realistic.

This is the year that I will sort through my clutter, clean, and purge. I realized at the end of this past year that if I tackle one small area per day/week/whatever, I will get through the trouble spots (eventually) and deactivate the clutter magnets in my house. At the rate of one small area per day (or week), my house will not be clean and clutter-free as quickly I might like. But little by little, the house will become uncluttered. My hope is that by January 1, 2017, I can blog about my success and how amazing it is to live in a house with a manageable amount of stuff. In the meantime, I can blog about the fun (okay, interesting…) stuff I uncover while de-cluttering!

Being realistic means that I will acknowledge my limitations.

Then there is the “taking care of me” resolution. I have two health goals for the immediate future. The most important is to sleep/rest more. Five hours of sleep a night is tough on a healthy body, but such limited sleep on a not-so-healthy body makes it nearly impossible to maintain normalcy. My second goal is to get back to regular exercise—walking regularly will be a step in the right direction. And baby steps are better than no steps. There are a lot of years between me and my most fit self, and I don’t expect to regain that level of fitness in the foreseeable future. But I do know that taking better care of me will allow me to take care of others. And that is important.

Which leads me to my final resolution…

… to actively look for and act on opportunities to give back. It’s not always easy to see beyond the chaos that follows me like a cloud and obscures my view of my surroundings. Paying attention to the people and opportunities around me will keep me grounded and present and will foster a greater sense of community connection.

These changes, I think they are doable. They are memorable—meaning I won’t forget them halfway through the month of January—because they are important. Of course, I set goals knowing they could always be derailed by more pressing issues.

What are your goals for the New Year?

Writing

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This post was written in response to the Writing 101, Day 1 prompt: I write because….

I write because I grew up in a small town where fitting in was not my forte. I was artistic and academic, borderline hyperactive (before that was a diagnosis) and just about the opposite of athletic. I created “treasures” from items that were tossed aside, and I was overflowing with sass. The combination was one that didn’t work well for a kid navigating the waters of small town school life. At first, the fact that I didn’t fit in mattered to me. But after a while—and too many reminders that my sharp edges and rounded corners didn’t match everyone else’s—I accepted my lot in life.

I write because in kindergarten, a light went on when I learned to squeeze meaning from the squiggly lines that formed words on a page. A door was opened to new adventures and new worlds where I could easily lose myself. The public library and local bookstore became my refuge, and I hid behind the mask of a voracious reader.

I write because sometimes, when I felt lost and alone, reading was not enough. I would take out a notebook, usually in the late hours of the day when dusk turned to darkness. At first, I wrote fiction and poetry, depending on my mood. I would craft stories, churning out page after page, simply to see how much I could write and to watch the page curl under the weight of my words.

I write because as I ventured from adolescence into adulthood, my ideas and my identity were fluid and changing. I wrote my feelings and my dreams into stories as I worked to make sense of the world and my place within it. I wrote stories of realistic fiction with characters who might have been my friends.

I write because when I divorced, I needed a way to pull myself out of the all-consuming black hole that is emotional abuse. Suddenly, I was the character, and the world was my own. There were many soul-searching journal entries. Many nights of listening to the rain outside my window while my thoughts and my words spilled onto the page.

I write because once I freed myself from the abuse and regained my confidence, not writing was no longer an option. Through my journey, I had evolved into a writer. I had discovered a home in creative non-fiction. I discovered that writing my story helps me to live a better life.

I write because I never did find the place where I fit in. But fitting in is over-rated. Writing is a journey that fits perfectly with who I am.

Wishes

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Yesterday was a quiet day. I spent much of the day working, and J spent much of the day on the couch reading and messaging friends on her iPad. Her brothers were off doing their own thing; one was planning an overhaul of our shed while the other one had gone to the beach with a friend.

Several times, I tried to entice her to come out on the deck with me and read, but the fact that I was working was not terribly enticing. Instead, she took up some creative pursuits: a chalk mural in our parking area, sketching, origami.

Later, after the head of the day had cooled, I came downstairs from a refreshing shower. She was cleaning up small strips of paper from the floor in the living room. They were squished and rustling in her left hand. She held out her right hand as if to give me something.

“I don’t want your trash,” I told her, as I walked by. “Throw it out.”

“It’s not trash,” she said. “I have something for you.” Whatever “gift” she had was paper in her hand, white and rustling just like the trash.

“Throw it out,” I reiterated. “I know it’s trash.”

“No, Mom, it’s not trash. Just hold out your hand.” I sighed, weary and worn down. I held out my hand, fully expecting it to be filled with her paper scraps.

Two tiny folded paper stars fell into my hand. “Oh!” I exclaimed, drawing in my breath. I was surprised by their simple beauty, their tiny-ness, their perfect star-ness. “They’re beautiful! I love them!”

“They’re wishing stars.” She smiled. “The first ones didn’t come out at all, but I figured it out.”

Beautiful! And what could be better to fall into your open hand than two paper wishes?

 

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