The animal in my bed

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animals, being yourself, cat, dog, marriage

I got up around midnight and wandered the upstairs, landing in my son’s empty bed because there were fewer animals there. Since I don’t use a pillow, one of my cats has claimed mine, and only at the concession of my dog who often takes a queenly posture on my Posturpedic that later degenerates into a most unfeminine spread eagle sack-out. The other cat, if I am sufficiently unconscious, plants himself literally as close to my face and neck as is possible without allowing his hair up my nose so much as to suffocate me. Round about morning when my breathing is so labored due to animal dander and there is a crushing sensation on my chest, I might wake up just in time to save myself. And when I do I see that my husband, the preferred animal in my bed, is gone.

You might wonder why I don’t shove all these creatures out and reclaim my space. Maybe it’s their tenacity, but maybe it’s just that right now it is pretty sweet to snuggle up in the sheets of my little boy who is a big guy now, and soon won’t be here much at all. I guess it’s all because I’d ruined my well-established sleep rhythm by sleeping-in for fourth of July, and then likely a failure to exercise enough on the third of July, despite two trips to the pool to do laps.

This all had me roaming the halls thinking up silly pieces to post, like this one.

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Clearly my own good common sense is broken

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being yourself, common sense, express feelings, pain, parents, physical therapy, stonewall, swelling, torn tendon

The longer I do physical therapy on my foot, post-surgery this time, the more I have to explain to people what happened, and therefore the more I hear myself tell the absurd story of self-neglect. If any of my kids had rolled their ankle on the stonewall out back, saw stars, had significant pain, and then swelling for 18 months (yikes!) I would certainly have taken them to the doctor. Not only did I not take myself to the doctor I thought it a fine idea to start dance lessons with my husband. Now, for that I have good reason in that he’d denied this great opportunity the first 27 years of our marriage, so why would I let a torn tendon I barely acknowledged stop me at last?

So, I need the physical therapist to remind me to take care of my healing foot and ankle today as I head into Philadelphia for a movie and dinner with a friend, because my own good sense is clearly broken. The obvious measures one would take to care for herself apparently do not function well in me, and so I ask my guy to remind me of when to slow it down.

Maybe we are all born with some basic common sense about protecting ourselves from further harm once we are injured, but I am pretty sure this normal process was forced out of me when I was young, by claims that my ailments would heal themselves, or go away, or not matter, or something else equally non-action oriented. But now I am a fully grown adult in charge of my own well-being, and I need answer only to myself. When all else fails I purchase my good common sense from professionals.

My fancy thing-finding business

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being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, listening, lost glasses, love, marriage, relationship, trust, words

It happens from time to time that someone mentions off-handedly that they have lost something. I often feel inspired to help them find it using my not-exactly-patented thing-finding process. In no time our discussion has led to a eureka moment and the person heads off to check a quite likely location. And lots of times it turns out that they find whatever it is.

So it has become a personal challenge. When my husband lost his glasses in the back yard a few days ago I used my usual means to help him locate them. But it was difficult because he frequently jumped ahead in the conversation to dismiss my supposed idea of where the glasses might be. But the truth is, I have no agenda. I do not suppose to know where or even suppose to figure out where the lost item is. I always expect the person, slowed down to a conscious awareness of where the lost item was last seen and the events just after, to tell me where it is. How would I know?

But with my guy it didn’t work. He wouldn’t slow down and let me lead the conversation. He wanted to try to guess what I was doing. He was not being cooperative. So I was pondering this difficulty between us, and staring at the shelves in the garage wondering if the glasses had somehow landed there, a guess based on the conversation we did have about the sequence of events, when he came out and I confessed to my thoughts. Frustration with him.

This led to another conversation, mostly me complaining that he is a difficult customer for my lost-thing-finding-business. This led to another series of words that ended with us together, surprisingly, locating the three-days-lost glasses behind the garbage can.

Eureka!

Tarzan and Jane tell the truth

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being yourself, friends, marriage, relationship, security, Survivor, Tarzan, telling the truth, trust

I asked my husband the other day if he thought we’d ever lied to each other. We learned on the “Survivor” finale Sunday night that the long-lasting marriage of one competitor, Tarzan, and his wife, was supposedly due to not ever having lied to one another. It has never occurred to me that lying to my husband could be a means to something. It just never did, because it never could be.
And anyway, with me being Jane, my husband has sometimes suffered being called Tarzan.

Telling the truth is second nature to me when it comes to my husband because if I don’t tell him the truth I don’t have a lot of other options for being honest. If I lied right in my own home I’d be shutting down some opportunities I just can’t get anywhere else. I really need Tarzan to be my ally and life partner, so being honest about everything that matters is all I’ve got. I have not lied to him about anything that matters.

And according to my guy, he didn’t think we’d lied to each other, either.

Olympic denial

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being yourself, change, cooking, dirt, inspire, marriage, mother, parents, psychotherapy

My parents taught me to not see things – to deny their existence. We were kind of like Olympic deniers. I am aware I’d been denying feelings because sometimes they burst forth inappropriately before I went to psychotherapy and figured out their proper role in my life. That was one thing. But I realized when I met my husband that I’d been denying the existence of dirt as well. I do love dirt. I was raised pretty close to the earth in a farmhouse that melded a bit with the out-of-doors, as we called it, what with critters visiting the laundry room at times, birds caught up in the attic occasionally, and constant noises in the walls. Dad came home every day in a filthy car wearing filthy clothes reeking of manure, and Mom was more of a cook than a cleaner. Dust and dirt and cobwebs were kind of accents to my mother’s decorating. My love of dirt comes honestly. So when my husband and I moved in together I was not the cleaner – he was. I cooked and he cleaned. The first few times he cleaned the bathroom I was shocked at the degree to which I’d denied dirt. That thing sparkled!

Wow, I didn’t even see all that dirt!

(See my husband’s haiku about cleaning the shower on my post of 9 November 2011.)

Actually changing your husband

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being yourself, change, dancing, dreams coming true, inspire, joy, play, scuba

We broke all the rules tonight and put on the music and danced together for the first time in weeks, and against doctors orders, because we just couldn’t stand it anymore. The whole idea that my husband is finally dancing with me and has to watch me sit it out due to an injury is just plain ironic, because it was he who wouldn’t dream of dancing at all just a year ago forcing me onto the sidelines. It’s just been stressful for us both to look at my foot in a boot, immobile on the sidelines, rather than kicking up and flying about as it should be on a glide around the dance floor. So I clomped around in the boot, dancing sort of, because we wanted to.

My friend, Judy, just shook her head. She knows the whole story, and for her it’s about the fact that I get to dance at all. ‘You changed your husband! Everyone knows you can’t do that.’

In truth I was afraid he was developing a new love, apart from dancing, because he’s taking scuba lessons twice a week while we wait for my ankle to heal. And unlike some daredevils I am aware of I am not eager to jump from airplanes or delve beneath the sea, and so maybe he’ll find cooler things to do without me, leaving dancing behind. But no, when I voice these concerns he assures me our dancing is not going anywhere but onto the dance floor. Miracle words coming from a man who said ‘no’ to kicking up heels for the first twenty-seven years of our marriage.

Indeed I can say that I inspired that change in him. That I take credit for.

But truly, he is the one who did it.

(for the short version of how I inspired my husband to finally dance with me see my post of 12/21/11)

Me

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being yourself, dreams coming true, friends, friendship, games, goals, inspire, joy, play, relationship

As is usual for the past thirty or so years, once a week I do stretches and exercises and yoga, to reconnect with my body and see if I can still do what I could the week before, but this time a funny thing happened. I think it was a ‘downward facing dog’ kind of thing that had my head upside down, and there on the carpet came a little black square with the word ‘me’ on it! My hair is a pretty vital body part for me and so many times I discover it is carrying things I did not expect (twigs, extra bobby pins, food, the sweet smell of dinner) so I knew immediately is was a vestige of the fun night of before. “Me” that is right, it was me who finally felt up for having friends over to play. It was me who felt confident to call friends last minute to say, ‘want to come over to play a game?’ So last night it was me and eight other of us who sat around the dining room table laughing and giggling and blushing and accusing. We were trying to figure out who wrote which response to an idea suggested by the reader. ‘The Game of Things’ is how I got to know my friends even better last night, and happily learned that some of my friends really want to laugh and play and be silly with me. This is great news because it is on my goals list for the new year to play more games, to balance my life with more laughing and playing and being with friends, because I work hard and I think hard and I do hard things.

I could not be more pleased with ‘me’ for taking the steps I did yesterday to start my new year off so well surrounded by friends, in my house, laughing, and building stronger relationships.

Oh yeah, and it must have been when we were all peering into and around and under my refrigerator during our appliance class action suit discussion last night, that a piece of magnetic poetry (“me”) on the door jumped into my hair. It made it through the whole evening, I suppose, and through all my bedtime dreams, and all the way to today when I discovered it during my morning exercises. Nice.

Dreams coming true

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being yourself, cards, cooking, dreams coming true, ice cream, inspire, marriage, play

I had ideas about what I wanted to do on New Year’s day. They were things like read the newspaper in its entirety. Play a game with the whole family. Cook together. But really, the chances of my dreams coming true seemed slim, after all, my family consists of a twenty-year old son, and two teenagers, besides my husband and myself. Almost-adult kids/teenagers are not known for wanting to play games with their parents or to cook with them. I wanted to cook with them because I didn’t want to BE the cook for a family of people who were vacationing on New Year’s day. But it happened, in a wonderfully good omen for the new year, that all my dreams came true.

First, I did not hurry to make breakfast, but instead when ‘children’ inquired about when breakfast would be ready I said little. When pressed I said that I was just waiting for folks to put things together, and then mentioned that I had cut up fruit and Dad was making bacon. Eventually muffins and coffeecake were put on the table by a kid, and then another kid set the table, and then we all sat and ate. As we finished I said I’d love to play the new game we got for Christmas, but my eldest countered with a request to play a card game he had learned. Sure! So we did. He taught the rest of us how to play and we sat there enjoying a card game together for an hour! This may not seem like much, but it is, as I said, a dream come true. Yeah! When that was done I said we’d all probably like to try it again, the card game that is, after dinner now that we knew how to do it. Then I suggested we get a consensus on what dinner should be and who would make each part. I offered up two choices, we voted, then volunteered, and voila, just after reading three days worth of newspapers another dream came true. We made dinner in record time since there were five of us doing it.

Afterward we loaded the tea cart with everything to make ice cream sundaes because we hadn’t had any holiday sweets in hours, and then we played cards and ate ice cream sundaes.
Thank you whoever is in charge….I LOVED THIS NEW YEAR’S DAY.

Sweet dreams

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being yourself, marriage, relationship, sleep, snoring

I was the only person I knew of for whom the snoring of their spouse was not a problem. Nope, doesn’t bother me. Once in a while I had to suggest to him, in the dark of the night, that maybe he could roll over so that he might change his tune, but otherwise it never mattered. It was loud, it was floppy sounding, it was the stuff of stories after the cub scout camp outs, and yes, it sometimes scared small children that slept at our house, but it never bothered me.

Then twenty-five years into our marriage I learned that all that snoring might be a sign of trouble and I urged him to get it checked out. In no time he brought home a CPAP machine ordered by his doctor and the snoring came to an abrupt stop.

The first night I couldn’t sleep. The machine made no noise at all, nor did my man. I couldn’t bear the quiet. Where was everyone? Where was Mike? Apparently, who would have guessed it, but I liked the snoring. Maybe I even needed it. I was exhausted by the arrival of his medical treatment. After a few more restless nights I asked him to consult with his doctor about the effects on spouses and what they did to cope.

Turns out I am the only one who does not appreciate the sudden silence of their bed mate.

Dancing queen

Tags

being yourself, inspire, parents, play, words

Yeah! I finally heard back from MomSense magazine that the three essays I wrote for them on issues of kids and being a woman have been considered for publication! Yeah! And after considering them for publication they decline to find a use for any of them. Even though this may not sound good, it is fine news for me because now I am free to post them on this blog. The other great news in this is that at last I know, at least I think I know, that another person has read the thing I spent quite a bit of time crafting. And that’s really the issue…that my effort is appreciated by some person out there even if they didn’t see it fit for publication. It is far better to be rejected in this way than to believe forever that my work was sent to a black hole where not even any one person found it suitable to look at. Yeah, someone looked at my work.

So here’s one I wrote about dancing with my husband, that personally, I really like.

Thank You, Cardboard Cutout Dance Partner
Finally, I get to dance with my husband after years of him refusing, all because of some unintentional reverse-psychology. Early in our marriage I announced my desire for us to learn to dance and he likewise announced his contrary desire. Instead, I flitted around the house whenever I heard music. After we had children I took a few classes but it was frustrating waiting on the sidelines to share the lone male student without a partner on every fourth dance. I took ballet for adults, later salsa by the pool on a Mexican vacation.
Twenty-five years into our marriage I realized my regret and contacted an instructor. As I saw it, if my husband had said, yes, after that first invitation I would have been cutting the rug for a quarter century already, but instead my yearning to dance had been undernourished long enough. The teacher promised to call back if any gentlemen without partners called. A week later I met Sam on the dance floor for the first night of a twelve-week session.
Any fears my family may have had of me being swept off my feet were assuaged by my dinner table stories of the gentleman who was no more interested in dance than a cardboard cutout partner I might drag around the dance floor. Sam was not a threat. Even he was not sure what he was doing there, yet everyone witnessed my disgust when he regularly canceled our dance dates. For me, apparently, a reluctant partner was better than none.
That Christmas I put my wish list on the refrigerator and below ‘new garlic press’ I wrote ‘dance lessons with you‘. My instructors must have been smirking every time I showed up to meet Sam, because unbelievably my cardboard partner had helped set the bar so low, now even
my husband could envision himself dancing. As it turned out he had already placed an envelope from the studio under the tree.
My man generously did it for me but when the time came, although he was game, he was secretly afraid it would be too hard. Now he grabs the dish towel from my hand and suddenly, laughingly, transforms me into a dancing queen.
My explanation for all this is that I respectfully left my husband out of it each time he declined to join me. Likewise he respectfully honored my desire to go on without him. In this way I showed my true love for him and he showed his true love for me. Here in the end the fantastic power of these two forces, love and respect has won out, and is the true reason I get to dance with my husband.