I get so tired of New Age Gurus and other “Experts” telling me I have to focus on the present. My memories are a great source of joy; they also contain the lessons I’ve learned that make me who I am today. The future is my goal, it’s why I endure today.
Because, let’s face it: sometimes NOW sucks. Sometimes it’s downright unbearable.
If I focused only on the present, I wouldn’t endure the hives that come with exercise. If now was all that mattered, I’d eat chocolate all day. I wouldn’t be taking classes required for graduation in subjects that don’t interest me. I wouldn’t have the goal of graduating. I’d never take the potential hangover into consideration when opening, or finishing, a bottle of wine. I’d spend my rent money on airfare to Hawaii, or France, or Greece.
If I lived only for the moment, I wouldn’t have gone through chemotherapy.
If I lived my life in the now, I likely wouldn’t have a family. My marriage started with the idea of the two of us spending the rest of our lives together. You have to look ahead to make those kinds of dreams. I would also be repeating the same mistakes over and over, because learning from those mistakes requires looking back.
I realize that there may be a time at the end of life when now is all I have. I’ll take that when I get there. Until then, I will continue to enjoy my memories, and reach for my goals.
I’m not opposed to embracing the moment. I’ve written about how my daughter gave me the gift of now. It’s important to live in the present, but it has it’s time and place. We need a balance. Each moment of our lives must be informed by our past, and driven by our dreams and goals for the future. Otherwise we’re just stagnant hedonists, and that’s just pathetic.
Today is the one year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. This is actually a big day for me. It’s the anniversary of the day my life was turned inside out, and it has put me on a wild emotional roller coaster ride. Thinking about this cancerversary has eaten up all my energy and focus lately – right in the middle of midterms for my school and due dates for my other writing projects, as well as finals for daddy’s school, and his preparation for teaching classes next quarter, and all the other urgencies and emergencies we tackle day after day. Here we are less than two weeks away from your second birthday, and I’m just now getting around to writing this letter for your 23rd month. I haven’t even started planning your birthday party.
Don’t go thinking you are being neglected. You are by far the best part of my day – the one I will drop everything for, no matter what.
But it’s important to know that there are times when life is like this. There are times when everything seems to be coming at you from all different directions, right while you’re dealing with an emotionally heavy load, and you just can’t seem to get anything done. Forget everything, it’s hard to accomplish even one thing. It’s hard to focus; when you react to one urgency, 3 more show up right away from other arenas. You bounce from crisis to crisis, putting out fires without ever touching those all important items on your to do list…
Yup, everybody has days like that. It’s part of the human condition.
That is the most important thing to know about this situation. That when you are overwhelmed like this, you are not alone. Everyone else has been there, they know what it feels like. The details may differ, but the everything-all-at-once-ness of it is universal.
Lately, you’ve taken to holding your little hand up, palm out, and telling me to “Stop” when things aren’t going quite the way you think they should. I’m not quite sure where you got that from, it’s not something that I do, but that idea might be right where you need to start in order to get through a situation like this. Well, without the hand gesture. Most grownups don’t respond very well to that particular gesture. But take a minute. Stop everything. You might even need to tell people that unless someone is bleeding or on fire, you need 5, or 10, or 50 uninterrupted minutes to sort things out. Lock yourself in a closet if you have to, and take some time for yourself.
Taking a long walk is also a great option, if you’re in a place where you can do that. An outdoors walk is best. Yoga is also a great option for releasing nervous energy and helping you regain focus.
Then once you’ve expended a good bit of that nervous energy, come back and pull out a notepad and start writing. Write whatever. Anything and everything that comes into your head. Just dump it all. Let it all out. I call this the brain dump. I got the idea from the Artist’s Way, where you start each day with writing time. The idea is that all these little stressful bits and pieces of everything that you’re carrying around with you are keeping you from connecting with your creativity. While I don’t necessarily do pages every day in the morning, I do agree with the general idea. I find that all that crap floating around in my brain gets in the way of my productivity as well. So just empty your brain onto the page. Shred the pages when you’re done if you like, this is for you and no one else. You’re just clearing your head of all the noise and static.
Now you can start writing your to do list and prioritizing items. This whole process could be done in half an hour or less, but would likely be more effective if you invested a little more time.
Of course this wont make all those emergencies go away. But it will help you dodge, parry, duck, or deal with all the crap that comes flying at you.
I went through that process myself today, and as a result, I’ve decided that your birthday party is not going to happen in March. And since I have a conference and finals in April, it might even be later. I suppose we could just cancel the party altogether, but I do love getting all our friends and family together, and it doesn’t happen very often. I have also been looking forward to using your birthday party as an opportunity to say thank you to all the people who have been so supportive of us through this entire cancer ordeal (and I can’t bear the thought of missing one of your birthday parties). I still don’t know what I’m going to do as far as that is concerned. I just know I’m not going to put the time and energy into a party for this month.
I have already started rounding up and just telling people you are two years old. There’s a part of me that resists this still, but you are behaving like a two year old. Yes, the temper tantrums, and the back arching, and the constant testing of boundaries, but also a more sophisticated sense of humor, you can count to ten, know all of the letters, and draw these amazing little smiley faces.
We’ve had a rough, and very busy month. You even had your first Emergency Room visit with a significant fever and cold. But we got through it all, and we had a lot of laughs, too.
You bring so much joy to our lives. I’ve had a very difficult year, but there has not been one day since you were born where you did not brighten and improve my day.
Every single one of my New Years Resolutions have already been derailed, in the first six weeks of the year.
My resolutions weren’t anything revolutionary or out of the ordinary. Not even all that difficult really, with the exception of that 33 grams of fat thing (multiple sources recommending this as a means of preventing a cancer re-run). That one is REALLY difficult.
Exercise daily
Become skilled at yoga
Keep daily fat intake under 33 grams per day
Eat 7-9 servings of vegetables per day
Take at least one picture every day
Get my house organized, and keep it looking nice
So what’s going on? Why can’t I stay on track with these relatively simple and straightforward changes? Well, aside from the fact that I’m a full time student, and I have a toddler that climbs on me like a monkey all her waking hours, and I’m still recovering from 2nd degree radiation burns over half my torso, I’ve had a few writing gigs lately as well as some other opportunities to learn and gain experience doing exactly what I want to do for a living. Mama’s been a little busy. Maybe, for starters, I over-committed myself. Maybe I need to give myself a break.
So what to cut? Most of the items on the list above are recommended to prevent a recurrence; the house, well that just needs to get done. Obviously I can drop the picture a day idea, but that leaves 5 things – major changes for a 15-hours-a-day-on-the-computer-while-eating-junk-food type of girl like me. Bear in mind that the vast majority of the computer time is spent on school.
I read a wonderful article a few weeks ago about creating sustainable change in our everyday lives. I really wish I could remember where I read it; I would give the author some link love here. The article stated that in order to make a real and lasting change, we need to make one change at a time, make it really stick, before adding the next change. Over the course of the year, devoting 6 weeks or more to each individual change, we can create sustainable change in several areas with a much higher degree of success than the “I’m going to change everything all at once” approach.
Change is not something you do once and then get on with your life. It takes practice. You fall down and then you get back up again. Over and over and over and over again.
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to decide to make a change, but I’m not going to change everything at once. I’m starting with the eating 7-9 servings of vegetables per day, and if I don’t hit my goal one day, I’ll keep trying the next day. Once I’ve built a practice of eating vegetables, I’ll add working out every day. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to exercise between now and when I start working on that resolution, it just means that the focus on habit building for that particular change will be delayed.
I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the amount of kitchen time eating that many vegetables will take. I’m now accepting applications for volunteer prep cooks if you’re interested in chopping vegetables.
The first night I met him, he glared at me then leaned back a ways before slamming his head down on to the table. That thud of skull connecting with wood was so hard it made the walls shake and the windows rattle. I choked a bit on my heart, and my stomach churned with that nauseous fear that comes when everything is wrong. Very, very wrong. What were we doing with this kid in our home?
To say I wasn’t thrilled about my mom’s decision to take in foster kids was an understatement. That she was specifically interested in taking developmentally challenged kids, made it worse. This was a bad idea. I was sure of it.
Matt’s case manager told mom that he was a “head banger.” Those two little words were inadequate to describe the frequency and force with which his head made contact with any nearby hard surface.
He was difficult to look at. His brain had not developed properly, and he was born with cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. His hair grew in funny little tufts around the patchwork of scars on his head. His face was scarred, and frequently bloody from the head banging. He couldn’t stand up straight, and could barely walk.
And he was angry. Mad. Furious at the world. And with good cause.
It was Matt’s story specifically that finalized my Mom’s decision to become a foster parent. At the time she first heard about him, he had been living in a motel with hired care givers taking shifts sitting with him in that room, because they could not find a home that would take him. He had extensive medical needs, that required a great deal of work to manage. And developmentally he was a two year old, still a baby.
He didn’t know what was going on; he just knew that most people were mean, and he didn’t know who to trust.
It was a long period of adjustment: him getting used to our large boisterous family, and us getting used to this new person in our midst with so many new needs (like needing help with toileting, among other things), and of course, that head banging.
But one day we discovered something. If you put your hand on the table, or wall, or whatever else was the target of his swiftly moving head, he would stop mid-swing. He would bang his head, he would hit things, he would break things, but he would not hit us.
That discovery started a little shift. For one thing, it helped us significantly cut down on the head banging by just putting a hand in the way. But it also started to change the way we saw him: self-destructive, yes, but not violent towards others.
He got easier to look at over time as well. Eventually, we started to see past all the scars, and notice other things, like that mischievous twinkle in his eye.
Matt was a little prankster, especially once he got comfortable with us. He was funny. He’d blame his farts on you. He’d pull your chair out as you were trying to sit down. If he was done with you, he’d dismiss you: “Bye!”
And he was gentle, so very gentle, especially with babies.
The obvious lesson here is about not judging the book by the cover, or the person by how they look. But there’s more. It wasn’t just the way Matt looked that was scary at first. It was his behavior that terrified us. Matt also taught us a lesson in looking past the angry in others – that the attitude is likely a hard-earned, self-protective shell, and not necessarily indicative of what’s inside. Its a difficult lesson, and one I forget frequently. But I’m still trying.
Over the years, Matt went through dozens of procedures and surgeries. His hydrocephalus was managed by a shunt that drained the excess fluid from his brain. That shunt frequently had issues, perhaps caused by the head-banging, but that pressure may have also been the cause of the the head banging – the pressure caused a great deal of pain, that bang momentarily equalizing the pressure.
He actually became quite popular, at school, at church, in the community. He passed away from complications of surgery when he was 24. He was still a toddler developmentally, but he was a happy toddler. When he died he was surrounded by his family, foster family perhaps, but family still. And he knew he was loved. His funeral was standing room only; the community had learned to love him as well.
It has been 11 years since his death, today would have been his 35th birthday. I still think of him often. He taught us so much about accepting others, and about resilience and redemption. I’m still learning that lesson about forgiving and understanding the angry.
I was running late for a meeting, but I just had to stop and capture a couple shots of this sunset. I pulled over alongside the lake, rolled down the passenger-side window, and clicked away.
As I continued on my way to the meeting, the sunset intensified. Each time I pulled through an intersection, the break between buildings revealed a different sky, full of different colors. It was changing by the second. This was during rush hour traffic. I was looking around for a place to pull over so I could catch some more shots when I pulled off on a side street – and in to gridlock. The sunset, of course, completely blocked by the concrete monstrosity of a building where the road curved in front of me. Now, not only was I late for the meeting, I didn’t get that additional shot I was looking for, and I was trapped in place by traffic. Crap.
It occurred to me at this point that the sunset was not there to stress me out, or even for me to “capture” on film; it was there to bless my day. At that moment, a spot opened up for me to pull a U-turn and get back on my way, and the next break between buildings revealed the Space Needle, backlit by a fully fuchsia sky. Breathtaking. And just for me. I did not capture that shot of the sunset, but it did bless my day.
This has been an amazing week, full of wonderful news and new opportunities. Much of it I can’t discuss just yet. As if full-time school, cancer treatment, and motherhood were not enough, I’ve had a few writing gigs come my way as well. I’m stealing this idea from The Bloggess and creating a regular post that will link to some of my other writing on a (hopefully) regular basis, as well as drawing your attention to other creators of awesomeness on the web.
Me: As seen on…
Goodies: Five Fabulous (and Inspirational) Bloggers – I was asked to highlight 5 amazing bloggers, and when I did, I used the opportunity to describe one of the coolest literary events I have ever experienced.
Awesome people who mentioned me (or linked to me) in their posts this week
The Pioneer Woman: Daisy the Dog – I love the Pioneer Woman, but I usually don’t highlight her because she already gets more hits than Google. However, this post reminded me of the cow I had when I was a kid. The one with the oh-so-clever name of Milky, who then calved, and I assigned the even-less-original moniker of Calfy for her offspring. Yeah, my naming skills have improved since then. No, Milky and Calfy did not have this much access to the house.
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Because, let’s face it: sometimes NOW sucks. Sometimes it’s downright unbearable.
