Surface Tension

While I was in Ohio, I visited one of my closet friends from high school, Betty. We went to a coffee shop after dinner and talked for about two hours. I saw her in January when I visited Ohio, but we hadn't really talked since then. Betty has a job, two young children and a husband who travels. Between her limited time and a three hour time difference, it isn't simple to keep in touch.

I talked about my life; she talked about hers. Betty is everything you could want in a friend: funny, empathetic, a good listener, caring, and intelligent. She asked me how I was doing with my mom's illness, my knee, and losing the School Board election last fall. She asked how my dad was coping with my mom's illness and his subsequent loneliness. She asked about Jack and how we were recovering from his betrayal that I first learned about two years ago. She asked about Claire Adele and the Boy. I talked about dealing with the Boy's reorganization of his teenage brain and his frustrations with friends. While the Boy is generally pleasant, he is capable of epic mood swings. As my friend Sarah says, "The Boy has a large emotional range." Yeah.  And it is awful to be on the receiving end of his tantrums.

As we were talking, I didn't think I was being excessively whiny or complaining. I was more or less giving her an inventory of my life, as we commonly do when we haven't seen each other in a while.

"How is the job search?" Betty asked.

"It has been on hold since the knee injury," I said. My daughter's piano reminded me of the emotional and physical energy required for healing. It is one thing to continue to work at a job you already have when you are injured; it is another thing to look for a new one while recovering.

"What about getting back into education?" she asked.

"The entire new School Board except one director campaigned against me," I said. "I have no clout with that group. I can't return to advocacy in the current environment. Nor do I want to. I decided to go big or go home when I ran. I lost, so now I am going home. I can't go backwards. It is really difficult that I spent nearly ten years in that arena and I really can't go back."

"Have you looked for a job at the university?" she asked. She works in a university setting and she knows we are close to UW.

"There was an opening for change management position to support the new payroll system roll out," I said. "I applied for that."

"You sound perfect for it!" Before kids, I had worked in Change Management.

"I didn't hear anything back," I said. I didn't tell her there were probably 300 other resumes that came in for that job.

"Oh," she said. I didn't tell her about the other half dozen jobs at the university I applied for. Betty paused.

"How are you managing all of this?" Betty asked.  Translation: Wow, your life is in a bad place.

I imagined myself being a tightrope walker being unaware I was 300 feet in the air, and then having someone tell me. I looked down and saw the people looking like ants while I was floating above them and freaked out. I thought, She's right. This is really hard. How am I coping?  

Betty is a dear friend and meant no malice. Her only fault was being empathic, which is the opposite of a fault. I have other empathetic friends, but this was a high density conversation about all that is going on in my life. When she asked, "How are you managing?" the surface tension which was keeping the liquid from overflowing burst. My cup was overfilled, held together by exceptional laws of physics. When the tension was released, my emotions poured out, not at that exact moment, but slowly: when I got back to my dad's empty house, when I was flying home, when I went to dinner Saturday night with Jack and the kids and the Boy decided to have a snit fit which then expanded into full blown tantrum by the end of the evening. By Sunday, I was a wreck.

It is a minor testament to resilience that I could manage to keep moving and maintain a reasonably positive outlook. At the same time, a little pessimism doesn't hurt. It is what inspires and motivates us to makes changes. Okay, I can't end on this Pollyanna note. I want to say my life is a mess and I need to clean it up, but sometimes life is just messy, and there are things that can't be cleaned up. I can't change my mom's situation. I can't go back and re-run the School Board election. I can't change that I have a teenage son who is at times my favorite person in the world and other times my least.

While on the stationary bike this weekend, I read Roz Chast's Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?* It is her graphic novel memoir about her parents' slow deaths. She had no control, but she could collect her insights and write them down.  I laughed in recognition when she wrote and drew "The Aisle of Tears" which sold adult diapers, adult wipes, pureed food, and other things my mother needs. She talked about the dining room at the Assisted Living Center being like a high school cafeteria with its cliques and unofficially assigned seats, which I also saw where my mom now lives, but on a much smaller scale.

Reading Chast's book made me realize that there are parts of life that just suck, and there is very little we can do about it except get through it. There is no shortcut through suffering: it is part of the human condition. Reading her book, I felt like I was in a conversation with a friend who was guiding me through the wilderness of aging parents. For now, my experience with my parents' aging is not up close, but from a distance. She turned her and her parents' suffering into art, a story that resonates with people like myself who are going through something similar.

Sharing coffee with a friend, telling her how I feel, that is good way to make it all a little more bearable.


* I used to like Roz Chast but now I love her.

Clothes, Cleaning and the Bike

Bike Time: 20 minutes    x 2

Distance: more than 6 miles* total

Clothes
Now that I am out of the brace, I can go back to normal clothes. Hurray?

I am still wearing my old yoga pants that I can pull up over my knee. I need to wear baggy pants to so I can fit the cryo-cuff ice pack on my knee under my pants. I exercise four times a day, and twice a week I got to physical therapy, so it is easier just to wear my old yoga pants all of the time. I usually squeeze a trip to the gym around running errands so I have one less trip up and down my stairs.

Spring is here in the Pacific Northwest and we had a warm weekend. In the spring and summer, I love to wear skirts. I haven't returned to my usual state of personal hygiene and waxing my legs. In addition to hairy legs (which I could fix), I have the scars and swelling of my Frankenleg (which I cannot fix.) This weekend, we took the kids out to dinner and I wore a skirt anyway.

Cleaning
I haven't done much cleaning beyond the absolute necessary--like dishes and laundry--since the accident. The cooktop is gross, the cabinets are covered with fingerprints, and I found this the back of the bottom shelf of my pantry. I saw one of the roots and thought What is this? and then I pulled it out.

Fingerling potatoes, past date. They kind of look like a bouquet of something with the purple bag.

Bike
I am supposed to ride the stationary bike three times a day. It is somewhat easy to get out of the house twice, but the third time is a challenge. Jack put my road bike on a stand in the dining room. The Boy seems to like riding the bike in the dining room. Yesterday, he sat on it while he ate.

The boy refused to let me post a picture of him riding this. I wanted my dog Fox in the picture, but he is rightfully afraid of the bike, especially when someone is riding it. Now that I think about it, I am glad he is afraid of the bike.

For the Boy, the bike in the house is novel. When I ride the bike in the house, time slows to a post-Einsteinian realm otherwise not known to man. Below is the view from the bike. It makes the view of the three beige houses across the street from the YMCA seem divine. I timed my ten minutes on my watch. It stopped when I had completed nine minutes. It wouldn't move forward to ten minutes, so I had to ride the bike for what seemed like infinity. Time moved slower than Christmas Eve for a five year old. I finally quit at nine minutes. I could have literally died of boredom.

I could put a picture on this wall, but still...

* Distance on a stationary bike doesn't mean much.

15 Minutes

"Fifteen minutes could save you money on car insurance," goes the ad for either Geico or Progressive.  (I am feeling too lazy to Google it.)

Aside from looking for car insurance, what can be done in fifteen minutes? Yesterday, I had a small pocket of time between running errands, walking the dog, and picking up the Boy from camp.  Instead of looking up the latest on Facebook or Instagram, I took the time to work on painting the upstairs bathroom.   I had started Monday, and yesterday was the day for a second coat.  Yes, this blog post is as exciting as watching paint dry, but aren't there times we miss out when we have just a few minutes and decide to do nothing or zone out?  I am all in favor of the mental break, but I was surprised at what I was able to accomplish in such a tiny window.  And the work wasn't onerous.  While it is helpful to have an afternoon to paint, it was equally helpful to get started between my carpool rounds.

And the other good news is that I am painting and fixing up the house in small bits and pieces.  Feathering my nest, focusing on home.