Musings
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Memories
A few smart people commented on this post that the hard last days with my mom were not the sum of our relationship. The suggestion was made that I might find some comfort in stopping every day for a few minutes, and remembering the good times. You know what? You people are smart. I’ve been doing this, and it’s been helping. Not a cure all, of course, but when I start remembering that last visit, I shove my brain over to other visits, other times, and it cheers me right up. I’ve shared my pain and frustration with you, so now, I’ll share some of the good times as well,…
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Wordless Wednesday
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08.08.08
(image found here, and no, this isn’t Dorothy’s wedding invite, though it is a beautiful invitation designed by Daniel Larsson) Today we go up to Nevada City to witness the coming together of two families in marriage. My dear friend Dorothy is marrying her beloved J, and their 5 children will become brothers and sisters, though it seems that they feel that way already. I was thinking about marriage, or more specifically, about weddings, yesterday. I love weddings. I almost always cry at weddings. (I say almost, because I didn’t cry at our wedding. But I think every other wedding I’ve ever been at, I’ve cried.) And while I say,…
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Public Service Message
Yesterday’s mail included the new Ikea catalog, and started me thinking about the crap that shows up in our mailbox, and how there should be a ‘do not send’ registry for catalogs, like the ‘do not call’ registry for sales calls. Well, there isn’t one registry that you can blithely say, “Please don’t let anyone send any catalogs to me anymore”, and that’s that, but there is a service you can use, Catalog Choice, to opt out one by one. This seemed like a good time to do something like that, rather than waiting until November or December, when it will almost surely be too late, and my mailbox will…
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Wanna See My Plumber’s Crack?
(image found here) Remember back in the early 80s, the painter pants? Any idea where a girl could get some plumber pants? Oh, that’s right, any low-rise jeans will show my butt-crack quite nicely. Well, get ready to see my ass, world (not a pretty sight, btw), because guess what I did yesterday? I fixed the toilet. That’s right, me. I’m disproportionately proud of myself. Why is my pride disproportionate? Because it was a really simple fix. The stupid toilet has had a slow leak for a long time now, where the tank drains a bit, then fills, drains, fills, on and on and on, I think about a hundred…
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I am my body
I wrote a post last week about yoga, and (un)relaxeddad made a comment that included this: “It never ceases to amaze me how much our bodies know about where we are and what we need (and how separate we hold ourselves from them except in situations of extremis). ” That comment really stuck with me, and it reminded me of my mom in a lot of ways. She was working pretty hard to try to come to terms with her body, to accept and love it, and to not judge herself because she was fat. She was working with a program called Overcoming Overeating, and I think she was doing…
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Why?
Why does there have to be a TV wherever you go? There’s a nice spa down the street from our house, where we sometimes go for a massage. They have a stupid TV in the changing room, set to a horrid show, talking about some guy who murdered his children. Not the news, either, some sensationalist channel. So you come out after having a wonderful massage, and you’re confronted with that crap. They also have a changing room for after you work out, and I can understand having a TV there, since some people like to watch the news in the morning, and they go to the gym in the…
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Yoga and Grief
I used to take yoga somewhat regularly, meaning a once-a-week practice. It kind of fell by the wayside a few years ago, and while I was too lazy to do anything about it, I missed it. When my mom went back into the hospital in May, I was so overwhelmed by the stress of her illness, it seemed like getting back into yoga would be a good way to help me deal with some of this stress. So I started up again, and it did help some. The class I take is through our city’s recreation program, so classes are 9 or 10 weeks in length, and then a new…
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Banyan Tree
Have you ever seen something that made you realize that the world doesn’t always work the way that you think it does? Often it’s a matter of nature…an animal or a plant that is so different than what you might expect to see, that it makes you stop in your tracks and think. While in Hawaii, I was struck by this very strange looking tree…turns out it’s an Indian Banyan Tree, which originates in India. The branches of the Banyan tree fan out over a large canopy, much like an Oak tree. One problem with Oak trees is that when the branches grow long and cover a large space, they…
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Home Again
(photo found here) Monday morning, and the vacation was, as most vacations are, all too brief. Now there’s laundry to be done, groceries to shop for, library books to return, and prescriptions to pick up. Back to the old grind, as they say. But it was a great week. I would say that the high point of the week was Thursday. When we went kayaking on Tuesday, we mentioned to our guide that we really liked the snorkeling, and he suggested that we might enjoy the snorkeling at Shark’s Cove. So on Thursday, we rented a convertible and drove up to the North Shore of the Island, to Pupukea. Isn’t…
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Hawaii Update
(photo found here) Hi Everyone, It’s Tuesday afternoon now…we had an AWESOME day today. We got up early and went on a kayaking tour, which meant kayaking out about a mile in the ocean to a little bird sanctuary in Kailua Bay, getting a short lecture on the formation of the Hawaiian Islands (interesting!), lunch and a swim, then kayaking down to a wonderful beach, where we did some snorkeling, and saw lots of beautiful fish. I have the say, the area that we were at today was SO MUCH nicer than the super-crowded Waikiki beach, which is closer to where we’re staying in Honolulu. It wasn’t crowded, the sand…
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Two Weeks
It’s been two weeks now since my mom died. Two weeks. It’s hard for me to believe sometimes. Everyone wants to know how I’m doing, everyone wants to help me get through this. Which I appreciate. I want to get through this, too. Two weeks ago, I felt hollow, I sobbed rather than cried, and I wasn’t sure that having Maya had been a good idea, since someday, when I die, she would have to go through this horrible pain. To quote a quote within The Year of Magical Thinking, that immediate grief feels like “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at…
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Reading in Grief
V-Grrrl mentioned in her comment that when her parents died (within 6 weeks of each other! God, Dad, be careful!), she had to put all photos of them away, couldn’t drive past their house, couldn’t bear to be reminded. Not that doing these things helped her to forget, I don’t think anything could do that…but she was too raw to cope otherwise. Which made me think of the different ways that people grieve. My uncle made me a lovely collage of photos of my mom, and I find comfort in looking at it. None of the pictures are of her when she was sick, they’re all of her in her…
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For Want of a Nail
The race was lost…and with it, the latest attempt at the first Triple Crown victory since 1978 (not 1979, as ESPN claims…how pathetic is it when I know more about a sports statistic than ESPN?). Sorry, Big Brown. And, I must add that the trainer’s petulant bitching about how the loss was all the jockey’s fault rubbed me the wrong way from day 1. Asshat.
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
It’s so smokey and hazy around here lately. We sleep with our windows open, and I fall asleep and awaken to the smell of smoke. There are hundreds of fires in Northern California right now,  and they’re contributing to making the air quality pretty darned bad. So folks with asthma and so on need to stay inside. Thankfully, the fog has come in and cooled things off a bit, because otherwise, we’d be in even deeper shit than we are right now.