ON ANOTHER'S POST

This is a reflection on the post I Answer to Myself by MilesPerHour @ Thunder From A Quiet Storm: I don't think I use that phrase myself, I Answer to Myself, but if I did, my point would be that I alone am responsible for the choices I make, and the consequences of those choices. I don’t try to lay fault with anyone else when things don’t go right. It's true we don't live in this world alone and the choices we make often, if not always, affect others around us. If we look at our choices in that light, we would be a lot more conscientious about our behaviors, words, and attitudes because that is a huge responsibility, affecting the course of another’s life. If everyone made choices based on what was best for the people around them, instead of what was best for themselves (selfishly), wouldn’t that be a wonderful world. We wouldn’t have to look out for our own best interest because those around us would be doing that, while we’re looking out for them. But life isn’t that way, and although I try, I can honestly say I don’t always put others first. I still have a lot to learn, a lot of progress to make, and a lot of growth to go through.

THE SWINE FLU AND FLATULANCE

I came down with the swine flu two weeks ago yesterday. It hit me all of a sudden, like running smack dab into a brick wall. BOING ING ING ING . . . Suffering Succotash, (suffering being the main focus.) I was fine one minute, out shooting pool and playing shuffle board with a couple of friends then, ; sore throat, fever, body aches, heavy sinus drainage. It carried on the rest of the night and into Sunday until around 5 PM when the fever broke and I finally started feeling human again. I was feeling alright, not 100% but alright, Monday morning when I went to work. The only thing I couldn’t shake was the cough but it wasn’t that bad. Tuesday morning, I was feeling 100% again, no cough even. Then comes Wednesday, when I woke up feeling pretty rough. I considered calling in sick, but I didn’t want to take any time off from work, so I go in anyway. Bad decision as I went from feeling rough to feeling like I was on my very last leg . I couldn’t focus mentally and my physical strength was waning fast. My supervisor finally told me to go home. Thursday I felt as though I was starting to get over it, but then Friday evening I relapsed again, coughing, body aches, and fever on and off. Saturday, one week after first coming down with it, I’m feeling a little better and was pretty stir crazy having been cooped up in the house most of the week. So a friend and I went to the movies and then for a drive out to the Multnomah Falls . It was nice getting out of the house but it wore me out. Sunday, instead of feeling better, I relapsed yet again. OMG, this is getting to be pretty ridiculous. I just can’t shake this thing and my back is hurting from the coughing. I thought I had been coughing hard until Sunday night when the coughing spasms really hit. I finally got out of bed and took an Antihistamine to dry up some of the drainage. It helped and I was able to sleep through the rest of the night. The rest of the night?! What am I saying??? I slept until early Monday evening only waking long enough to go to the bathroom, get a bite of breakfast, and later lunch, and moving from my bedroom to the couch in the living room. I figured I’d lay on the couch and watch TV, so I started watching a movie I had recorded on the DVR. I watched about five minutes before I drifted off to sleep. When I wake up, I rewound the movie back to the last scene I remembered and watch for about five minutes before drifting off to sleep again. I repeated this about four times (yes, sometimes I’m a LITTLE slow) before I just turned off the TV and slept. Finally Tuesday I felt better. There was a little bit of cough but not much thank goodness because I had a root canal scheduled. (Yeah, I know, I’m sooooo lucky!) To make matters even better, after two and a half hours of root canal procedure, the dentist tells me he could not finish it because one of my roots curves at an odd angle and has developed a calcium deposit blocking the end of the root. He said he put stuff in my tooth to dissolve that and then on December 11th he will go back in to finish it. He said it will take about another hour. (Oh yeah, I really am sooo lucky.) Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I go to work and am feeling a little better each day. One thing I’ve noticed though, starting on Thursday, I developed a new symptom. Every time I would cough, I would also fart. These are not SBD (silent but deadly) farts, they are short, LOUD farts. But in spite of that unusual symptom, I continued to feel better and the coughing lessened in frequency, so I was really looking forward to a nice weekend of feeling better and better. YEAH RIGHT!!! Saturday I wake up with full blown symptoms again, including the flatulence. This new bought continues all day and into the night. I woke up this morning with such a terrible sore throat that I could barely swallow. Aaaarrrrrgggghhhh. Will it ever stop? I’m starting to feel better as the day wears on. I hope this is the last relapse. I would really like to be able to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with my son once he gets here. But I’ve got to tell you something. I have never had the flu, or even a cold and cough, that included a symptom of flatulence. Pretty danged weird . . .

RUNNING AWAY

While I was living in my sanctuary, my basement bedroom, my childhood best friend lived right next door. Her younger sister and my younger brother were about the same age and the four of us hung around quite a bit. She had two older brothers and Randy and I had one older brother and one younger brother, we were the middle kids and we decided we were being mistreated and was going to run away. Nettie and Irene wanted to go with us.

Now in between the little town we lived in and the next bigger town just south of us (about twenty miles I think) there were these cliffs with caves in them on either side of this stretch of road. We had a beautiful Samoyed Husky and Nettie and Irene had this HUGE wagon with tall sides. The plan was to have Bear pull the wagon with our stuff, including bedding and food, to the caves and we would live there. Well, I had a small suitcase to pack my clothes in but Randy didn't, so we started packing his clothes in small boxes and stored them on the wooden shelves in my bedroom. These were like shirt boxes and stuff like that so there were a lot of boxes with one or two pieces of clothing in each.

One day, I'm sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast with the family when my dad says to my older brother, "When you're finished eating, I want you to go downstairs and get those boxes that are on the shelves and take them out to the burn barrel and burn them." Randy and I looked at each other in horror and then Randy said, "I'll do it, let me do it Dad." "Ok," he replies, "but no playing around. If it's not done within the hour, you'll be grounded and I'll do it myself." "I'll help since they're in my room" I said and asked to be excused from the table.

You never saw two kids hustle so fast in their lives. We were dumping boxes on the bed and running them out to the burn barrel as fast as we could, then we had to sneak Randy's clothes back to his room. Boy did we think we had pulled one over on my dad and saved the day. Looking back and knowing my dad, he KNEW those boxes contained Randy's things and that we would panic to "save" his belongings. So much for our plans to run away. I laugh to myself when I remember that. My dad was quite the wily little fox.

BUGS

I had an insane fear of bugs as a child and into my adult life. An unreasonably insane fear I would call it; ants, moths, spiders, roaches, beetles, it didn’t make any difference. Why was I so afraid when I was so much bigger than they are? Even as a child I was much bigger than a spider or a beetle. Yet I would be rendered to a mass of quivering, terrified, boneless flesh if in near proximity to an insect.

When I was in the first grade, my mom hollered for me to get up and get ready for school. It was in the winter and my room was still dark and shadowed. As I started to rise, I saw what looked like a very big bug, or something, on my clothes that were on the dresser across from the foot of my bed. I was immobilized by fear. “Get out of that bed, you’re gonna be late” my mom yells, but I can’t even yell back. I was in the grip of terror. Finally I gradually slithered out from under my covers and inched toward the bedroom door, never taking my eyes off of the “bug”. Once I hit the light in the hallway, I ran to the kitchen and told my mom about the monster bug. I was in tears, my heart pounding against my chest like a gorilla beating against a cage. “What is it?” she asked. “I don’t know, it’s dark in there.” I cry. “Well, that’s what lights are for. Go turn on the light, brush it away, and get dressed. Breakfast is almost ready.” she admonishes. “I’m scaaaarrrredddd.” I whine. She slams the spoon down and marches down the hall saying, “This better be a really big bug.” Into my room she goes, flipping on the light switch and there on the dresser is my pile of clothes and the biggest, darkest indentation of cloth leaving a shadow that you could have ever expected. No bug… just a shadow. I was so relieved.

I was the second oldest child, an only daughter with three brothers. At the ripe old age of ten, I was sharing a bedroom with my youngest brother who was four years younger than me. I had been begging for my own room and finally my dad fixed up the basement for me. It was a small room with wooden shelves on one wall and my twin bed against the opposite wall. I loved it. One afternoon, shortly after moving my things down there to my little haven, I was laying on my bed reading a book (probably a Nancy Drew story which I loved) and as I was turning a page, I lookup up and saw a spider on the wall next to me. I rolled out of that bed so fast it was probably invisible to the human eye. I was on the bed one moment, standing next to it and staring at the wall the next; MAGIC. But I was scared. I couldn’t kill the spider; that would bring me too close to it, besides it would leave all that icky, bloody, gut mess on the wall, and I didn’t want to be close to that either. It was just as scary. What to do? I ran upstairs to my hero, my dad, and told him about the spider. Do you want to know what my hero did? This is my HERO I’m talking about. He told me to go and kill it. MY HERO! How could he betray my need like that? I was devastated. I told him that I couldn’t, I was scared. He said if I was too afraid of the spider then I could move back into the room with my little brother and my older brother, who had wanted the room, could move down there. Guess what I did? I went back downstairs, pulled my bed away from the wall and sat on the edge. The spider was gone by then, but I had determined that I would try to kill it if it had still been there. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I STARTED getting over my fear. I still don’t like them but I’m not terrified anymore. I grabbed a Praying Mantis a few months ago and carried it outside to set it free. My heart was fluttering like a swarm of bees beating against a glass wall, but I did it. A few weeks after that, I took a beetle that had gotten into my house outside and dropped it over my third floor balcony. I hope it didn’t die on impact but I didn’t want it coming back in either. I figured it would have quite a crawl to come back up three floors and maybe it wouldn’t want to. Hmmm, I wonder if it had wings and impact wasn’t an issue. Anyway, I’m getting over my unreasonable fear of bugs and I’m proud of myself.

NIGHTMARES

When I was very young, starting about the age of six, I started having a recurring nightmare. It was always the same: I was being chased by a man, a mean man, a bad man. While running from the man I ran into a building and down a very long hallway lined on each side by teachers and children. As I was exiting the door at the other end I would turn and see that the mean, bad man had just entered. After exiting the building I found myself on a playground and as I ran to the edge of the playground with more teachers and children watching, I ran into a shallow body of water (about shin deep on me) with a dense woods on the other side. Just as I am about to reach the other side of the water, I look back to see the mean, bad man in the middle of the body of water, it's depth up to his waist, being attacked by alligators and killed. That is the dream; I'm alone to fend for myself while people stand around and watch, and just as I'm about to be caught I'm saved by alligators. I had that dream for years as a child, into my early teens in fact, although the frequency lessened as time went by.

I often wonder what triggered such a young mind to have such a horrid dream. Could it be that I had just started first grade, in a Catholic school no less. I remember those Nuns were mean, so maybe I felt threatened by them and the other children were helpless to come to my aid. That would fit except that it was a man chasing me, not a nun or a black bird, but a man. And what of the alligators? What did they symbolize? I have always found it to be an interesting puzzle, one that I will likely never piece together. Do you remember any childhood nightmares that continue to puzzle you?

TAPESTRY OF LIFE

I have never done a blog before but my good friend KaLynn started one and since she seems to be enjoying it so much, and since I love to write, I figured I would try my hand at it too.

Writing has become very cathartic for me during this journey from happily married to where I stand today. "Where do you stand today?", you might ask me. That's a very good question. The best, most accurate answer I can give is that I am standing in the middle of a path that is taking me somewhere I have never been before. I don't know where that will be, if it will be a place of joy or sorrow, peace or anguish, health or illness. I've learned many things from my "late" marriage (may it rest in peace) but the most valuable, I believe, is to have no expectations for where my life is going. I try to live every day in the moment without expectations that any one "event" will take me in any particular direction. I have hopes for my tomorrows and I work pro-actively toward a positive future for myself but I understand that life has a way of washing out the path before us, leading us in a direction that we never expected and sometimes never wanted. I used to try to force my life to go into the direction I wanted it to go. Now I try to embrace whatever comes my way; even the fearful things, the hurtful things, the scary things because every person and every experience, coupled with my attitude, has shaped me into the person I am today.

I'm an unfinished tapestry, woven of many different colored experiences. How those colors have changed; from the bright pastels of childhood, to the vibrant primary colors of adolescence and young adulthood, more pastels blended in with the birth and raising of my children, mingled with the greys, browns, and dark yellows of illness, then the blackness of a hole opening up under me when the life I've worked for and expected is suddenly shattered into a million pieces like a jar of spicy salsa dashed against a wall of rock. There's the white of an empty slate when the pain was so great that I felt my very self had been erased and nothing but a shell was left. The colors are coming back now. It's an interesting tapestry and it's been an interesting journey. What does your tapestry of life look like?