Love

 

It is hard to find things to fall in madly in love with now.

Whether that is a sign of the times or my age, my attitude, or what I may never know. I only know that the heart pounding throb I have so often experienced in this life seems to be quieted.

I still love people, but I don't feel the urgency I once felt. 

Some people might call it reality, but I suspect there is something else going on here and that might be the lack of the hunt. I am not looking for love in any places, right or wrong.

I know where love is now and what it is. I have found it, but I don't need to cage it, or twist my life into odd contortions to make it fit in order to feel secure. 

I only need to breathe in and breathe out.

Love is part of me now and with that knowledge comes great peace.

Betrayal

 

Of all the sins in all the world, the worst one is probably betrayal.

First of all because no one can really betray you unless you trust them first.

Trusting someone not to hurt you is an important part of being around each other.

It is a little like looking at an electric stove. It is always there and when the burners are red, you know not to touch it, but what happens when the oven is on at 425 degrees? The stove looks the same until you lean on it, or put your hand on it - then you get a nasty surprise.

The fortunate thing about stoves is that if you are careful and hold your hand nearby, you can generally feel the heat radiating off of it and avoid it. 

People are not as easy to avoid. One phone call looks like another until you speak to the person on the other end, but once you answer it you can get caught up in all sorts of betrayals. One of the worst of which is lying. In order to get you to listen and be sympathetic people have all sorts of ways of pulling you into their own personal situations and some people thrive on problems. They don't know how to live without embroiling themselves in bad situations.

These people cannot admit to themselves that they created these problems, but misery loves company and they are quick to share them. They want sympathy, care, enabling, anything but a real solution, because a solution often means admitting they are part of the problem. To them this is a normal way to live.

There aren't many good solutions for dealing with betrayers. Because the main way is to avoid them and most of us don't want to avoid people we love.

It is a last resort, but it is one answer.

Weight loss

 

After over fifty years of losing weight I can promise you one thing. 

You cannot buy weight loss.

If you could there would be no fat rich people. You can buy quick fix tricks, but unless you are willing to repeat these forever more, you will eventually gain back your weight and maybe even more. I kept my weight between 102 and 126 for nearly ten years by eating small and very small amounts of food along with very high levels of exercise. There was a point where I was playing tennis almost six hours a day.

This is not a sustainable lifestyle if you have children, or other priorities in your life. Neither is it sustainable to do something that will get you to your goal quickly so you can eat the way you want and hope to maintain the weight loss. In the past fifty plus years I think I have tried all these things and more.

Bread and bread type things are comfort foods for me, but they are also full of carbs and sugar, so it wasn't until I became a full fledged type two diabetic that I gave them up.  It has been hard. I used to dream of crusty loaves of bread, toast, buns, cookies, pasta, corn and rice. I have found sprouted bread which is better for me and even then I only get one slice early in the day. I don't get ice cream except on very rare occasions and that goes for any other desserts even canned fruit. 

I know this is not just until I reach a certain weight. If I want to keep my diabetes at bay it has to be forever.  My  glucose averages 100 and my A1C is 5.1 and I want to keep it that way, or lower it. My kidneys, my heart, even my skin relies on that and at my age there is no room to fool around. 

I have found a combination of foods that seem to satisfy both my body and soul. They help eliminate the cravings I once had and with a little bit of self encouragement they work for me. I still have a tendency to want to eat more right after a meal, especially in the evening, but I now know if I just wait an hour I will be fine. I am not physically hungry. I am mentally primed to eat.

Exercise is good, but it really does not maintain weight loss unless you do extreme amounts. I lose weight with a normal amount of movement and it works. My exercise is to maintain muscle coordination. It is a scary balancing act that requires lots of small rewards, but not food rewards. 

Old Pub House

I just had the most delightful tour of a British Pub House built in 1750!

Bestest is visiting friends over there and they agreed to show me around via Facetime on my phone. 

I expected low beamed ceilings and fireplaces, but I did not expect all the rest.

Charming rooms with beautiful paintings, antique furniture and exquisite needlepoint hangings framed English elegance that looked out upon a garden filled with flowers, niches and shrubbery. I had the feeling that fairies might be fluttering just out of sight.

Every place I looked there was something eye catching and amazing, yet it all blended together in cozy perfection.

If I were to pick my dream house, this would be it!

One thing at a time

People can embrace craziness or work around it and by that I mean those idiosyncrasies everyone has that may seem funny, or annoying.

Maybe it was the old Charlie Chaplin type movies that made people believe that doing dumb things over and over had a humor they wanted to emulate. It is funny, for a short time, in movies, or stories, but not as a lifestyle choice.

The idea that a person cannot control themselves, cannot stop themselves from doing crazy things is not a valid one - unless you are mentally ill. 

It may be funny the first time you make a mistake. (Taking the dog's heartworm medicine with your own, forgetting to do something that is necessary for health or safety, even allowing a child to do something that could be dangerous to them if it goes south.) But that first time was the warning bell.

If you don't know whether or not you took your daily doses of medicine, get a pill planner with the days of the week on it. If you can't focus on more than one thing at a time, focus on the most important thing and skip the rest. 

You can teach yourself to be more organized even if you start one project and move to another room when you suddenly have the urge to start another. Put a rubber band around your wrist to remind yourself you are already involved in one project and do not allow yourself to start another.

People who tell me they can watch television and talk to me at the same time are not giving me their full attention. Does that mean I am not important enough to deserve their full attention? It makes me feel that way.

Life is not that complicated unless you are the caretaker for a large number of children, or adults who need you to organize all your lives. Focus on the important thing. There is enough time in most people's day to get to the others in a timely manner.

The Goal

Everyone has their own kind of crazy and it stands to reason that it gets its start in childhood, so when my sister drives me crazy I know that some part of me comes from the same place.

What is it that makes one person branch out in one direction and another in the other? Is it pecking order growing up, or simple personal differences? 

Probably a little bit of both.

Growing up, I saw things that made me want to steer away from many of my family's most cherished traits. My sister embraced them all fully. The people I was taught to look upon as odd turned out to be the very people I have tried to emulate as an adult. (And I am aware that they have their weak points too.) 

My mother, my uncle and my grandmother are known as family icons of hard work and kindness. Yet I remember my mother and uncle getting so angry they threw furniture and the occasional living creature against the wall. These similarities had to come from somewhere. Were they from their mother, the youngest, most adored child of a large family who became a woman so famed for being a tiny whirlwind of self sacrifice that people always overlooked what even I saw as a child? 

Nobody could have possibly loved grandma more than grandma, although she didn't mind them trying.

The immense amount of creativity and love in our family were eclipsed by the fact that all the world was a stage and there could only be one star who tied rags covered in Ben-Gay around her head, weeded the garden right after work so people going home would notice, and had a closet filled to the ceiling with matching outfits, purses and spiked heels. She deserved it. She was tiny, self sacrificing and hard working. Her insincere smiles still haunt me. She was controlling, passive aggressive and narcissistic.

Imagine growing up believing that your main goal in life was to be tiny, beautiful and to perfect the art of working yourself to death in the public eye. 

Wouldn't it be nicer to shoot for being happy and fulfilled? And making sure your children had the tools to do the same?

I tried. I really tried. I read books, went to counseling, talked to people who should know and I think I finally veered off the family path into something a bit more humane. The problem lies in loving the people who didn't.

Beware

 

Never challenge the gentle one. It is like feeding the mogwai after midnight.

Her sensibilities rise to the surface with a transformation that begins with tears and indignation. Armor unfolds in cold passive aggressive waves that will freeze you.

She trembles in rage. Her thoughts begin to jumble, and she turns to her enablers for validation and comfort.

If only the rest of the world understood her delicate sensibilities!

Her bag of tricks depends on fulfilling her needs and she needs to be needed! Drama feeds her vision of self, calling all those nearby to come defend her.

Against who?

Why reality of course! The long nurtured and carefully curated line of people who must need her in the way she chooses has altered over the years and now she is panicked. Her soul begins to shrivel and starve as her son attains independence. Retirement looms along with those needy patients and that awful job she has moaned about for years. 

Her last bastion for pity and power comes from the child whose needs were never met. The pretty pet who was curled and dressed, shined and polished and kept on a leash just short enough to maintain mama's ego.

Yes, beware the Gentle one or she will eat you alive.

Addiction

If the woman I just spoke to on the phone were not my sister I would block her out of my life forever. She is an enabler who cannot seem to learn that love is not giving people what they want and then being surprised when they continue to act badly.

My sister is a passive aggressive person who does exactly what she wants and then if things don't turn out the way she wants, she cries and moans and plays the "pitiful me" card. Yet if someone tries to really help her she goes right back to her old ways.

She is as addicted to being needed as her daughter is addicted to drugs. 

Neither of them will ever get better after forty years of the same give and take. I know that and if I continue to let my sister say what she is doing is everybody's fault but hers, then I will be an enabler too.

Now it has trickled down to another generation. My sister's grandson has an ulcer. He has had to live caught between his mother and grandmother his entire life and neither of them love him enough to make them do the work it will take to make things better. Instead each one blames the other for his problems.

But that is the way of addicts, isn't it?

Love never ends

 

Every child is a piece of a mother's heart and no matter what happens, nothing can change that.

Losing a child is too painful to even think about, so it is easier to pretend only the best of things.

But sometimes the reality creeps up on me and my heart aches so fiercely that I know I will die if I let that feeling linger too long.

Love, unlike other things, never ends.

Home

 

If you had asked me before this week, where is home? I probably would have given you some trite answer like home is where the heart is.

For most of my life home was where my parents were. We moved a lot, but home was always quickly accepted as the place our family lived and even after I no longer lived there, I still thought of it as home, so for me, home has been a house long since demolished by a angry woman after her daughter, my mother died. It did not exist except in my mind, but it still usurped all the other places that might have been called, home.

I thought of those other places as Caroline's house, John's house, Bobby's house, Jimmy's house. The turmoil in my own house kept it from ever feeling like the safe, nonjudgmental place I wanted my children to call home. I was constantly looking for that, always hoping to find it in a place with a family room, or a pool, or by a lake, but it was never really there. The possibility that it could be ripped from under us made it disposable.

Those last few years were a frenetic search for a place that could not exist and so I had never really given it any more thought until today. Today I realized that although this is the fourth year in the fourth apartment I have lived in back here in Bloomington-Normal, it is really my home!

I feel safe here. I am at home here. The decor is mine. The furniture is mine. The books are mine and I am in a place I love. When my daughter comes to visit in a few weeks, she will be coming home. Maybe not to her home, where she grew up, or where she lives now, but to me and the place I call home.

Tell me why

 

I often find myself feeling twinges of guilt when I should just be enjoying the moment. When I realize I am doing this I have tried to analyze it. Why should I feel guilty about feeling good?

Is it that old superstition about tempting fate or the gods by making them think we are trying to compete with them. In other words, do I have a right to feel heavenly?

Is it that old wive's tale that good times are just waiting for the other shoe to drop, just a precursor to something that could be unimaginably awful?

Is it because, like my devout Catholic friend believes, my suffering is keeping someone else's suffering to a minimum. I am suffering so they won't have to suffer as much and therefore when I am happy I am adding to their pain? Should we all strive to be saints buried alive, or living in some kind of torment?

Or is it just our Puritan roots coming back to haunt us. Miserableness is next to godliness.

I suspect it is all of those added onto the burdens passed down from ancestors who lived during the depression and think life is supposed to have a cloud hanging over it. The old, if I had to get up at the crack of dawn and work my fingers to the bone it made me a better person and by golly I'll make you the same way!

The idea that I am not entitled to feel pretty, or happy, content, or blessed without being "bad" in some way is one I am trying to get over. My head has always known it was wrong. Now I just need to erase these ideas from my subconscious.

At a loss

 

I am experiencing frustration. 

I am eating the exact, really exact, same food in the exact same amounts I ate to lose the last thirty five pounds. I am off the Glipizide and walking 20 to 40 minutes a day. All of this since May 1st.  And I need to make a note that the food I eat is both low in carbs and calories (900).

I am not even close to a healthy weight and I haven't lost an ounce in seven days!

My body cannot tolerate any more walking without injuring my feet or back muscles right now. They are just not there. And I cannot eat any less.

The only loss I am experiencing is a loss of ideas. I have no idea what to do.

It's Magic

 

I have been eating basically the same food at the same time since December 28, 2021. Up until May 1st. I was taking diabetes medication just before both meals, but that began to make my glucose drop too low since I lost the last few pounds. For the past six days I have been able to maintain a good glucose level without any medication as long as I eat right and walk at least twenty minutes a day.

I don't have to walk hard, or fast, just stay upright and keep going for 20-50 minutes a day, often holding the handle of a shopping cart to take the strain off my back. It's a routine and normally I'm not good with routines, but this one is necessary if I want a quality life and it has taken years to figure it out.

It feels a little like magic, like a child's game. Step on a crack, break your mother's back, only in this case if I just don't break the spell, I can keep on going. The plus sides are many, but the one I am enjoying the most is that I've lost 55 pounds since this time last year.

The only problem right now? I have so much more energy, but my back is not strong enough to support me doing all the things I want to do. I have to balance out standing and sitting while those muscles get stronger. Otherwise I end up like I did a few weeks ago, at the prompt care.

Imagine. Me eating right, exercising intelligently and having energy to spare! It feels too good to be true.

Wild and Free

There are two kinds of people. Those who think of themselves as wild and free and those who don't.  When I was young I thought the people who ran around in groups, driving fast cars, doing crazy things were the wild and free ones. They did too. Many of those people still consider themselves in that group, or wish to be in that group.

The other group tends to be a little more reticent about what they do. We don't follow the crowd so much. We aren't the in-people. We don't always wear the latest fads, most makeup, craziest shoes. We might do all those things, but we tend to do them on our own time, in our own way. If we are out there dancing on the dance floor, it is because we love to dance, or we love the person we are with. The same is true for almost everything we do. We do it because it fulfills us.

Our lives are not for other people. We don't do things for show. We don't need adulation or recognition. We need to feel like our deepest selves are doing okay. And strangely enough, this seems to bring the recognition along with it more times than I ever expected.

I would describe myself as reserved with a taste for quality, not wild and free and yet I have never kept a job I didn't love, seldom worn clothes I didn't love, or been afraid to up and move half way across the country because it felt right. I've sampled life all up and down the spectrum in ways that would amaze some people and stun others, but it is my business and I hope you won't be hurt to know I don't share a lot of that with most people. 

A friend once told me, "You only share things with people who deserve to know." 

I believe that.

Shopping for nothing

 

I've been on a journey since Christmas. In the beginning I knew right where I was going: to get as close as possible to the diabetic A1C one doctor wanted and to get my blood pressure as low as possible for another, both due to be seen in March. I didn't have high hopes for either one. In fact, I have recently realized that I haven't had any real hopes since coming out of the Covid Quarantine.  I turned 72 just before it happened and that was the definitive age I had assigned to being old. 

 I had given up imagining myself svelte, glowing with health, active and attractive. In the last fifty years I have been unable to maintain any of those things for any considerable length of time. My feet and ankles have always been iffy, even as a child and they are worse now. Add modern medicine's apparently inept ability to do much more for older people than provide panaceas that don't really work and I had given up. 

My first real step forward was when I was able to find the right shoes for my diabetic orthotics, in spite of my podiatrist's office four month failure. My next was finding food I enjoyed that fit into a diabetic diet in quantities I could live with.

Now fifty plus pounds lighter, wearing good shoes, I am trying to recover the muscle tone in my back necessary for doing things I enjoy. But what do I enjoy? Tennis is beyond me, at least at this point. Even walking in the woods is beyond me, but I need to walk every day. I can do that if I am holding onto a basket or walker and today I actually walked almost an hour without any assistance.

Walking around the block, or even the park, like I'm on a huge human hamster wheel is not going to cut it for me. I hate that. It's boring beyond belief and even listening to podcasts doesn't help. I'm in enough pain that I can't concentrate enough to enjoy them.

I do enjoy fixing up my apartment, so I have been downsizing even more. I have cleaned out drawers, and closets and cabinets. Then I go do what used to be called window shopping, but since we really no longer have windows to shop in, I go to big stores that have carts to push and buy nothing.

I love the hunt, but I don't want the stuff accumulating so I have a rule. I have to absolutely love anything I buy. I can't just like it, or find it useful. I have to be struck by it in some emotionally profound way, or I won't buy it.  So far this is working out really good for me.

I've been to big box stores, specialty stores, antique malls, thrift stores and in the last month I have bought one coffee cup. It is a beautiful cup, exactly 12 ounces, made of porcelain, and a lovely color. When I drink my coffee out of it, I marvel at its beauty.  

Some how all of this is clearing out my mind and giving me room for hope again.