Life in General

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It’s been a queer couple of months since my last post. I feel lethargic. Tired. But agitated at the same time. Disinterested in my normal activities. An odd feeling of disassociation with the things I usually do. I feel myself pulling inward, spending more time alone than usual. Not really caring about much. 

During the first year after I lost my mom, I wrote a lot about grief being like a roller coaster. There were huge vacillations in my emotions - one day I was riding an almost manic high, while other days I was in the depths of despair. I kept extremely busy, scheduling social activities with friends, trying out all my mom’s recipes, gardening like crazy, looking for ways to stay close to her, to keep her presence alive in my life. 

With the passage of the first anniversary of her death, it’s as if the roller coaster has come to an abrupt halt at the bottom of the hill, leaving me strapped inside the carriage, motionless. 

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On the Night You Were Born

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It was crazy windy here yesterday. March made like a Lion, and roared up a storm. Our utility company reported more outages than any other time in history, and says it will take up to a week to restore power for everyone. Trees are down all over, schools and businesses are closed. 

It was a mess. But all the while, the sun shone beautifully and there was nary a cloud in the sky. 

On the night I was born, 61 years ago today, it was crazy windy as well. My mother loved to tell that story, of the wind whistling around the windows on the top floor of the hospital. Of the way the large window by her bed rattled and shook until she was afraid it would crash into a million pieces. “There was thunder and lighting and rain pouring down all night,” she said. “I was a nervous wreck!” By morning, though, the wind had calmed, the sun was shining, and I had come into the world, red-faced, screaming, and with a headful of dark, wavy curls. 

The Incredible Shrinking Woman

I’ve always been “vertically challenged,” as my friend Darlene puts it. In practical terms it means I need to keep a folding stool handy just about everywhere in the house. It means I need to stand on a small wooden riser when I play handbells. It means I really need a six-way adjustable drivers seat in the car so I can reach the gas pedal and still see over the hood. It means any pants I buy ready-made are too long, even those marked “Petite.” It also meant I could wear the highest heeled shoes I wanted without being taller than my boyfriends, (although that was always a moot point since my one and only “boyfriend" was a good seven inches taller than me.) It didn’t take long for my son to surpass me in height. At age 12, he was a full head taller than I was, a sobering realization for me in more ways than simply physical. 

I’ve never minded being short, never seriously wished I were tall and willowy like fashion models. Occasionally I’ve longed for an extra inch or so, mostly when I’m in crowds - it’s surprisingly claustrophobic being in a dense crowd when there’s nothing in sight except a sea of backs and shoulders. Overall, I’ve been content with my stature.

But in the past few years, I’ve had an inkling that I was shrinking. It’s not surprising - most of us do lose height as we age. I noticed it first when we lived in our old house and I started having trouble reaching the mixing bowls on the top shelf of my cupboard. Those bowls had lived there since 1976, and I’d never had a problem reaching them before. Until one day, I couldn’t.

A Fine Balance

So, the other day in a blog post I wrote about “cutting the cord” on social media (Facebook and Twitter particularly). I wrote that I although I value social media as a “big village green” or a place to connect with people from so many walks of my life, I felt that in the current political climate, it was feeding my anger and frustration and affecting my ability to get on with life in a positive manner. I wrote about using the month of February to “detox” myself from Facebook and Twitter, in favor of engaging in old-fashioned personal communications like handwritten notes and letters and I invited readers to be my “pen-pal” of sorts. 

The truth of that post is this: I wrote it about six weeks ago, when I was sick and tired of my own terror over the state of the new world order. I wrote it when I was angry and totally disheartened. I wrote it when I had maybe had one too many glasses of wine on a dark December day. I scheduled it to post at the end of January, and then completely forgot about it until I started getting comments about it in my email box on Friday.