You Know You're Hairy When . . .

I caught up on a friend's blog this week and had a great time laughing along with the stories of herself and her family. She started blogging in September last year, rather tentatively, and is now an avid blogger (26 posts so far in July!). Her writing reads easily and with much humor and openness these days. I just hear her saying, here it all is, warts and all. She had quite a funny entry titled "You Know You're Fat When . . ." in which she bravely discloses some embarassing facts about being over weight. This got me thinking about the embarassing fact of how hairy I am for a woman.

Way back when I was in third or fourth grade, I was at gymnastics practice (at the gym where I first did an aerial - oh, the feeling of flying!), and one of my coaches said something to the effect of, "You have legs as hairy as a gorilla." I remember where I was standing in the gym, who I was with, and being absolutely mortifiedopenaholeundermeandletmedisappear. I started wearing some stunning hot pink leg warmers to practice. Yeah - you're definitely hairy when you're called a gorilla at age 9 (a trait I most likely get from my dad).

Ever since, I have been a wee bit shy about how hairy I am. I have dark brown head hair and dark hair on my legs and arms to match. I have for some reason lost some of my eyebrow hair since high school (what a blessing) and still pluck a little, but I used to pluck and trim a lot more in high school and college. One of my most embarrassing moments in high school was walking out of a makeup session before a silly fashion show my high school put on each year with seniors, and having my larger than normal eyebrows made even larger by the makeup artist - who had them standing up on end like freakin' feathers! Fortunately, my sister was there and oh so bravely defied the makeup artists and smoothed them down for me (duh). I remember my boyfriend freshman year randomly asking me if I plucked my eyebrows, and I flat out lied. (I still want to clear that up someday because I keep thinking about it, and I just don't give a crap now about it). Michael once mentioned that I need to trim my nose hairs, and I was about mortified. At some point in high school and maybe college, I bleached my arm hair (when summer sun and pool didn't do it fast enough) and upper lip hair, pluck a few random chin hairs that have shown up, and once tried home bikini waxing (I highly recommend not trying that at home) and Nair (not all it's cracked up to be but the TV ads are so seductive).

My favorite cosmetic tool that I've bought EVER is an electric personal razor that includes a nose hair and bikini line attachment. YES! I own three pairs of tweezers and highly prize the pair that works really well. And if there was any cosmetic procedure that I would have done (outside of laser eye surgery), it's electrolysis of my arms, legs and bikini line. Maybe I should title this blog, "You Know You're Obsessed about Being Hairy When . . . "

Note: The picture of scissors and razor came up titled "Mistaken masonic symbols." Hilarious.

Capacity

In one of my therapy sessions with Rhonda, she forewarned me that when I entered a new relationship with a man, I would experience painful emotions again as the new relationship triggered old wounds. I was no where near a new relationship when Rhonda told me this, and I filed the idea away.

For almost two months, Michael and I have been seeing each other and going to couples counseling. Our new relationship and time together brings up so many emotions - happiness, joy, fear, distrust, sadness, excitement, anger. As we work through our individual and combined issues, I am partly fascinated by what I am learning about myself and partly (because of that perfectionist in me that I really thought I had dealt with in a perfect way) mad at myself for not seeing them and contributing to them.

One Saturday after returning from California, I was driving back from Boulder with my friends, Shari and Linda (Ardis' mom), and Linda was talking about the kind of care facility her mom, who has had Alzheimer's for 10 years or so, is in. I shared with her how hard it was to find care for my dad when he got really sick because many care facilities didn't want to care or didn't have the capacity to care for Huntington's Disease patients. This conversation, having visited my grandmother's house and catching myself looking for my grandfather who passed away six years ago, and having put my dad's ashes in the Pacific Ocean with my sisters during tht visit triggered a snow ball - well, maybe, avalanche - of emotion. Michael was in Alabama, and one night as I tried to fall asleep (in my bed, which seemed to be cursed for a few days by the gods of no sleep), I began to cry and then wept and then wailed. Great pain of the last two years sits my chest - the day Michael told me he wanted a divorce and the first night I spent alone after Michael moved out the second time. Crying in bed, the pain returned as I grieved not my dad and grandfather's death, but not having Michael with me through my dad's passing and handling his estate. A new relationsip had indeed triggered old pain.

In our counseling session today, our therapist again reminded us of the importance of letting difficult emotions out, unfreezing them in a way, and having them witnessed by others (my dear friend, Maraiya, might like to hear she's not the only one who thinks of memory as being lodged in the body, remembered by our cells). They have to move through us for us to heal, that familiar idea of feeling it to heal it. How overwhelming the hard emotions can feel as if they will overtake us and just never end! I have had to build my capacity for feeling deep pain and trusting that when that wave comes, it will roll over me, might knock me down, but I will stand again (Jesus, heal me now).

I was curious today, sharing this with a friend, why we don't have the same fear of joy, of joy never ending. When I am happy, I fear being happy because it might end. I read in the book Conscious Loving how we have to actually build up our capacity for happiness and joy in levels - really feel joy, then more joy, and slowly learn to trust joyful feelings. It might just be harder for me to build up a capacity for joy.

I Will be with You

Since I was young, I have gone through periods of time where I am seized at night by thoughts of death and imaginings of death leading to nothingness - manifested in my mind as sightless, soundless, feelingless. It's frightening and overwhelming and constricting. Everything screams, "I don't want to be nothing!"

With my dad's passing and discovery that he had Huntington's Disease, I have recently lain in bed and thought about what it would feel like to have Huntington's and to progress through the illness, losing physical and mental capabilities to the point that my body one day can't function and wondering if I would mentally understand what was happening (when my dad was quite sick, he told my sister, Lesley, that he was part bat to explain all his movements. Did he know he was sick and ailing?), if my dad knew he was dying at the moment. I imagine death like a relief but also as fear, an end into nothingness. I worry about my children losing me too soon.

I wonder at times if I lived in another country or earlier time where or when death is a bigger part of life, a daily part (and not in a sensational news - fear this - way), if I would be less fearful of death. I haven't been to a single funeral, which feels like a blessing.

In February of last year, I was still breastfeeding Harper. I was at a women's Bible study at my friend Megan's apartment, sitting on the carpet and listening to a discussion about heaven and different visions of what heaven will be like. In the midst of the discussion, I imagined death as another part of living, a next step, and I felt this physically as the sensation of milk being let down, a fullness and and then release. This seems to match with what elderly people sometimes say, being "ready" for death, welcoming death. I am still forming a vision of heaven and struggle with doubt of it's existence, but the sensation of death being part of the fullness of and release in life felt real and comforting.

This Father's Day, we attended All Soul's Church of Boulder, and the pastor - love when this happens - spoke about death, describing the deaths he remembered on this Father's Day, his first marriage and a baby named, Sarah, who he and his wife adopted and who died in infancy of trisomy thirteen. He was a father for a very short time. I cried during the sermon, and my friend, Shari, asked if I was thinking about my dad. I wasn't at that moment, but it was probably part of the emotion of the day and the vision of losing a child young, of having "lost" my marriage, of the fear of my children losing me.

During the sermon, the pastor quoted C.S. Lewis (from Transposition and Other Addresses), "We remain conscious of a desire, which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it?... A man's physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely that man's hunger does prove that he comes from a race that repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. I do not believe that my desire for [heaven] proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called 'falling in love' occurred in a sexless world." I hunger for something beyond death, a next step after this life, a rich something that is far beyond the fearful nothingness, regardless of how my life ends. I find comfort in the idea that this longing is an indication of heaven's existance.

I believe in God's love for me (even as I wonder how to interpret it in this life) and felt it deeply once during a therapy session, felt it as pressure in my upper arms. How I wanted to hold on to the strong, loving sensation and walk every day of my life in that love. I came to realize one night, talking to Ardis and Shari, that if God loves us like that and even more (how much can we feel it even at the best of times), no doubt He has amazing plans for our death. No doubt He will be there, and as in all things (a hymn that can make me cry at church - I have done a lot of that), "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, And the waves will not Overcome you. Do not fear, For I have redeemed you, I have called you by name. You are Mine. . . . When you walk through the fire You’ll not be burned, And the flames will not Consume you. Do not fear, For I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, You are Mine." (Isaiah 43)

Home Pieces

A few posts ago, I wrote about not feeling like I have a family home to go to and how my maiden name feels like a homecoming. On my recent trip to California, I found a few more pieces of home.

My kids and I flew to the San Jose airport and spent the first three days of our trip in Portola Valley. My mom has worked at Woodside Priory School there for over twenty years (this is mind boggling to me). We moved on to the campus when I was ten, and I lived there until about my sophomore year of college. My mom still lives there but in a new location so that I thought certainly my home is no longer there. But watching my kids walk around the campus - like they owned it, as kids will - swimming in the school pool with them, tromping the big hill, playing outside in view of Windy Hill (pictured), smelling the wonderful smell of dried grass and oak trees, I felt home. I felt that sweetness of my kids walking where I walked, discovering warm steps and walkways that I walked in the dreaminess of childhood.

On a run one evening in Portola Valley, I found my way again along familiar trails; crushed the golden dry grass that reminded me of playing light and dark games with Jen in the hills behind her house; ran past the pool where we used to swim in the summers (me off and on trying to avoid the adolescent boys when the Priory was an all boys school and where I once sat on gym roof overlooking the pool eating fresh doughnuts at midnight with my best friend, James) and a one room apartment over a garage on the Priory campus where my mom and sister Lesley lived for awhile and where I once raked leaves for woman who worked at the Priory and had been severly burned in a fire on the campus started by an electric blanket (I remember her disfigured face and the smell of medicine and damp in her house when I went to collect the money she paid me to rake). I continued down the gravel path that I used to ride my bike on to school, where once, in fifth grade, two boys had blocked my way with their bikes and teased me, where I used to walk when my parents fight, where there used to be two blue healers who barked viciously at passersby. I ran past the elementary school where I attended fifth grade and admired the face lift. I remembered where to turn to continue up a hill, past a house where my friend Katie Collins used to live, down a hill and past a house where Darcy used to live (Darcy who was obsessed with "Gone with the Wind" and named her two golden retrievers Rhett Mutler and Scarlett O'Hairy) and to a trail that led past blackberry bushes and back to the Priory where I one walked holding hands with my first boyfriend.

I don't have a home structure to return to in Portola Valley - though my mom's apartment is quite lovely, and I could sit all day in her living room listening to her fountain and watching the humming birds in her garden - but there is home at the Priory, the memories of childhood and adolescence, the familiar paths and smells, a place where my life was built and where I love to watch my own kids play.

Plexi, Plexi

I remember some time in high school my mom commenting one morning before school as i took my time in the kitchen making breakfast, eating it standing at the counter, packing my bag, that I don't like to be rushed. This was surprising to hear but so true - I don't like to be rushed. I like to have the time I want to think about what I'm doing and to do things in a calm manner. Calm. Peace. They can be idols for me - peace above all else. But there are times when I don't have the time or the peace I desire, and I have to force myself, dig in and speed ahead - usually with tears and a scream of, "I don't want to deal with this." Maybe this is why I hyperventilated as a kid when I swam in a race (not a pretty sight).

I've been flirting with the idea - like a bee looking for just the right flower - of getting back into some kind of regular exercise. I get lots of sprinting exercise - to the kitchen for food or milk or towels for the kids during meals, to different places in the house and yard to pick up a screaming child, and between the car and the house in the mornings (to get milk (check), a spaceship, ninja, and Lego man (check), blankets (check), another blanket (check), my sunglasses (check)). But after my lovely hike up Twin Sisters, I realized I wanted to do more and to get this body I've been given into action. I was waiting for just the right time, not rushing into it (maybe waiting for an engraved invitation), and then - spurred by Michael starting to ride his bike to Boulder and by a beautiful evening - I made a quick decision last Tuesday to just get out and, well, just do it. And it was lovely, and I went again on Thursday and can't wait to go this evening.

One of my other idols/obsessions is education. I can get sucked into a report on what works in schools like Asher gets sucked into cartoons. So as I started to look at preschools for Asher last fall, I laid out a possible plan for him and Harper - when they might go, options for them (I have to say that as much I look for the right timing and want to take my time, I do have the ability to change my plans - I love plans but can be quite flexible. So when I found out last month that a Montessori charter school may be opening in Longmont, I jumped on the bandwagon), how we would decide where to send them, backup plans (yes, Asher really is only 3, but this is an obsession). Part of this plan was for Asher and Harper to stay at the daycare they attend until fall 2009. Uuuurrrr (tires screeching). And then I got an e-mail from our daycare provider that she is closing and her family is moving to Texas - in three weeks. Not the right timing - tears and a cry of "I don't want to deal with this" and denial and disbelief. I told a potential daycare provider as she was trying to make an appointment with me for an interview that it was all just happening too fast.

"Plexi, plexi bend don't shatter" sings Jack Johnson in his word fun song "Sexi Plexi." And so it is that I learn when to bend, when not to, when to take a step back or a run outside to return to a problem or emotionally charged situation at a later time, when things don't seem to be moving too fast or when I can take my time with them so as not to shatter.