One Step at a Time

I am away at this beautiful place on a writer’s retreat.  Incredible view, incredible mentors, incredible feedback for the children’s stuff I’ve done.

Yet today, when we got Prompt #One Million, I decided to ditch it and go for a run.  I’m not a ditcher.  At these things, I can often be a goody-two-shoes.  I like to stay with things, do things well, soak up the experience, etc.  Today, I needed to run.

 It’s a beautiful, beautiful place to run.  My ankle twinged later, but nothing serious, just definitely worth it.  Even though I may have been slightly depressed because it was tougher than it used to be, and I had to stop for some walk breaks.  I didn’t let that rain on me though … I just truly enjoyed the mountains and the cool, fresh air. 

And I said a prayer for my Troy, who yesterday afternoon, only an hour before I was scheduled to leave, threw up all over the library at school.  Eeeeek.  (I don’t like to throw up in front of ANYONE, so this was particularly disturbing to me.  Him:  “The janitor came running, Mom.  No big deal.”  )  I went to get him and delayed leaving about 3 hours.  I got in late last night, but it was no big deal.  Travelling alone is a cinch.  Also, thanks to my friend S, who seemed strangely thrilled to have Troy come and lay on her couch today.  She’s a great friend and is exactly the kind of person I’d want to hang with if I had just thrown up. 

 Here’s a writing bit I wanna share, and I’d LOVE to hear yours.  And if it’s hard to come up with, think about it on your next run.  (It totally works.)

Recall a childhood memory or image that relates to each of the five senses.

• Taste:   The last two bites of mint-chocolate chip ice cream, trying to make them small and lasting, not knowing when my dad would break down and buy another from the fat, happy man on Waikiki beach.

• Touch: The smooth oily-ness of my beagle’s fur, as I alternated dragging my fingertips and fingernails through her sleek coat.

• Smell:  Walking into my grandmother’s tiny creaky house, and the smell of sauerkraut enveloping my nose so strongly that my eyes watered.  Offensive to some, but completely comforting to me.

• See: Peering out a window that I could only see out of on my tiptoes, and seeing my dad’s work van come around the corner of our winding driveway, and feeling such …. glee …. the kind that makes you scream from your toes.  (Have I mentioned that my dad was a workaholic??)

• Hear:  The sound of my older brothers starting up their old farm truck, and patiently listening to the chugging engine and hoping it would “catch” (my technical term that I have actually written in a journal when I was five, and I still use, much to my husband’s frustration).  If it “caught”, we would get to pile in and ride in the fields carelessly, like only kids in the country can do, and go so fast over the hills that I would scream and my head would touch the truck roof ….

1.  People who do really strange things when they build a house, like put electrical outlets in wierd places, or cover basement walls in barnwood that the current owner (that’d be ME) then decides to try and whitewash, and spends 7 hours, until 2 a.m., completing one small wall.   Barnwood should be illegal.  In urban settings, anyways.

 2.  Seemingly nice neighbourhood mothers who send kids home with a bag of cookies, when they don’t know if their mother could be giving up sugar and struggling on a minute-by-minute basis.  There should be a trafficking charge, I’m thinkin’.

3.  All Diet Coke advertising.  It’s been around for how many decades now?  Enough with the overkill advertising.  People may be avoiding it for health reasons and that kind of constant advertising just doesn’t help.

 Yeah, I’m a chipper gal.  Renovations zap me, and I’m sick of drinking herbal tea and funky water.  Tell me about your long weekend … cheer me up already.

This is so hard.  I know that sticking to this diet is nothing in compared to, say, battling a war or taking chemo or burying a loved one.  But in the scope of my life right now, this is bloody hard.

 Do you know how many times I reach for sugar without even thinking?!?!  Do you know how much sugar enters our house without my control??  My mom baked cookies with my daughter yesterday and sent them home with us.  The boys got a booster juice after swim club …”Mom, you wanna taste?”  All of the stuff I can’t eat right now seems EVERYWHERE.  All of the stuff I can eat seems like an EFFORT.

The Diet Coke thing, as hard as that is for me … has been manageable because I just haven’t had it in the house.  Today, Camryn and I are going out for lunch with my friend and her daughter … and I know I’ll want to order one.  Instead, I’ll go for the water.  Sigh.  And I just got an email from Jacquie, trying to plan our vacation, and as crazy as this sounds, I can’t IMAGINE sitting with her and talking for five hours and not cracking a Diet Coke.  Sigh.  These days, I’ve been drinking water with lemon slices, water with lime slices, water with lemon and lime slices, and water with cucumber slices.  If the last one sounds gross to you, you should try it.  I went to a spa once and that’s what we drank post-massage and it was heavenly.  Not sweet, but completely refreshing.  I wish I could get it in a can that goes pssssssssssssssssssst when you open it.  That sound literally relaxes me.  How sad is all this?!?!

 Am I just shallow?  Or is radically changing your diet the toughest thing ever to do?  I hope I get the benefit of some huge, no GIGANTIC, swing in my personal wellness for making these tough changes.

 And in my state of deprivation, where I needed to be treated carefully, the boys’ swim coach comes up to me for a chat yesterday.  She starts all positive, telling me how well Troy is doing swimming.  Then she continues.  She doesn’t know if Derek is up to this.  If he can read the workout and follow-through.  She knows he loves the water, but isn’t convinced that his heart is there, so she’s going to make a decision on Thursday.  I just blinked at her.   It’s all I could muster, really.  I’m thinking, Was it not rookie week last week?  Were you not supposed to tell me that he was “borderline” before I wrote the cheques and got the kid all pumped up about being a part of this team and gave him his new backpack and his new racing suit?  I’m not discounting her opinion, because he indeed is a distracted little guy … that’s just a fact.  But he ADORES water, and he has a big need to move and I think once they have a few races, he’ll catch on to why they’re practising so much.   We’ll see on Thursday, but I was kind of ticked that she didn’t let me know this prior to the weekend.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, when I am “kind of ticked”, I really, really want sugar.  I was itchin’ for chocolate last night.  Instead, I went to bed.  Sleeping more and not eating crap.  Hmmmm.  Might be on to something.

You might want to sit for this one.  Here’s what I’ve found out in the past 72 hours about my health. 

 –I do NOT have skin cancer. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)  This is tremendously relieving to me.  When an experienced dermatologist removes a mole off of your lower back and sucks in his breath sharply, as if he’s in awe of the condition of your skin, you tend to worry.  Let’s get this straight, just in case you’re picturing some grotesque-ness on my lower back (which is quite a nice lower back, actually.)  I have nice skin.  Foolishly from 1981 – 1987, I worked at an outdoor pool as a lifeguard and swim instructor.  Sometimes I wore a hat.  Sometimes I wore zinc on my nose.  And lots of times, I didn’t.  Those were strange years.  I’m a fair girl, and it wasn’t the smartest thing to worship my tan for those years.  The reflection off of the water (and I spent 6 hours a day in the water … I wasn’t the barking-orders-from-the-deck-kind of teacher … but I bet she’s not getting moles removed twenty years later …. hmmmm….) caused me to burn my nose badly, very badly, every summer.  When I have no make-up on, I can still faintly see the scarring from that.  I have a very pinkish complexion, so it’s not so freakishly noticeable, but I see it.  Every year, some mole or blemish concerns me or my GP, and I end up getting it removed.  My whole body has been photographed by a dermatologist, so we can monitor changes, because I’m just a high-risk gal in this department.  So, thank God, that I’m OK.  For the rest of my life, it’s sunscreen and regular dermatologist trips.  But I’m OK with that, believe me.  Cancer scares me.  More on that another time.

I’ll think I’ll let the dermatologist know next time that he should NEVER suck in his breath like that when removing something off of someone’s skin.  He should practise perfectly controlled, even breathing, for the well-being of the patient.  Yeesh.

 Besides the whole rig-a-ma-role with the skin, I’ve been feeling progressively crappy (pardon the medical terminology) for weeks.  Insomnia like crazy, sugar cravings so out of control that I even chewed my son’s grape Hubba-Bubba one day (and I HATE simulated grape flavourings).  I’ve been struggling, much more than usual, to drop a few pounds, and the ankle deal limiting my running hasn’t helped.  So, I went and saw a holistic practioner, and MD (who also practices many “ology”s, but primarily iridology).  He believes there’s something funky with my pancreas.  My bloodwork came back all wonky.  He’s sending me for an ultrasound this week to check it out.  Meanwhile, he’s killing me slowly with a “_____________-free” diet.  Oh, insert whatever you want in the blank, because I can’t seem to have it.  Chocolate.  Coffee.  Diet Coke.  Sugar.  Pleasure.  That’s it.  It’s a pleasure-free diet. 

 This is day six of the pleasure-free diet.  The first few days were horrid:  headaches, tears, irritability, forgetfulness, stomach aches … all yucky.  Last night, I felt like I surrendered.  I got the kids to bed just before eight (very easy now that the boys are swimming in swim club …. they’re tired!) and hopped into my bed right after them.  I couldn’t even read, I felt so exhausted.  I slept right through to 7:15 this morning, and feel like the fog has now lifted somewhat.  I feel the closest thing to Bev that I’ve felt in awhile.  I’m now feeling hopeful that perhaps this journey with the pancreas will lead me to a much better place in my health, and be worth all of this.

A side note to end this wordy post:  Cutest thing ever:  Watching the boys swim a mixed-age relay at swim club the other night.  A fifteen-year old girl cheering on Derek the whole length, even though he floated on his back a bit in order to adjust his goggles … adorable!

Yep, I love this notebook.  I’ll have to post pictures about the current condition of our basement, as my husband lays the subfloor in preparation for laminate flooring …. and my little puny office sits quietly, the last room to be renovated.  Then you’ll all truly understand what a big deal it is to me to be able to write on the couch.

 A very Sunday-ish, sluggish day today.  Insomnia last night, and then had a horrible stomach-ache all night that resulted in little sleep.  I should’ve been an owl.  It’s 11:10 p.m., and I feel ready to clean closets or something.  Watched movies and played board games with the kids all weekend long.  I did feel like I had a weekend, which is nice.  Some weekends are so hectic around here, that I’m relieved for Monday when the boys go to school, so that I can rest a bit?!

Planning a walk, that may evolve into a run, tomorrow with a buddy.  Really, really need that.

Call from husband to me on Friday afternoon:

 Him:  “You need to go to the business centre and pick up a Purolator package that they couldn’t deliver because you were out.”

Me:  “That’s wierd.  What could it be?”

Him:  “I have no idea.”

Me: ”Maybe I’ll get it Monday.  I have about a million things to do before the boys swim tonight.”

Him:  “I think you should actually pick it up today.”

 

I should say so.

 It was this, you see.

 This thing … this thing that will allow me to work not just in our yet-to-be-renovated and windowless basement home office … but this wonderful, beautiful, portable, sleek thing that will allow me to write on the deck, in my bed, on my big arm chair in my living room, in Baja … (I wish.  Forget Baja … I’m just so happy to be let out of the basement!!)   For my work or for my passion of creative writing, this is a gift of all gifts.

He still can surprise me.

 PS:  Troy, age 8,  had a classic quote:  “Cool!  Did you get that so we can watch DVD’s on our bed?”

Yeah, right, son.  Because your father and I have been quite concerned that you kids just don’t get enough TV. In bed.