BTW

Visual Stuff

I love finding these kinds of gems on the net.  People are so damned creative!

http://www.ikea.com/ms/sv_SE/kampanj/fy06_dromkok/dromkok.html - wait for it to load, then click on the right or left side of the picture.  I have no idea what the text says, but the graphics are amazing.  I think my favorite is the chicken one.

http://www.zoomquilt.org - Don't bother with the html version, the flash is the MUST-see.  Again, wait for it to load, then slowly zoom through it.

Photo Challenge

I decided I would do this week's Photo Challenge, the theme being one of my favorites: FOOD.  The problem was deciding which pic to submit.  I opted for my favorite addiction - chocolate. 

Experimenting again with my new camera, using the macro feature, and proving that (for me at least) you can never get too close to brownies.

Mom's Birthday

Today is my mom's birthday.

She would have been 67 today.  I would have called her up this morning, maybe woken her up, to sing Hippo Birdies into the phone.  She would have laughed and said how old she feels, and then maybe she would have come up for coffee.

She's been dead for almost two years.  This month is the month it all started, two years ago, the month when we found the cancer.  It had been growing inside her for a long time, but she thought it was her colon, a dietary issue, something she could fix by eating right.  She told me she went to a naturopath and they thought she had food allergies. 

Food allergies.  Good god.

What she had was cancer on her cervix, which by the time we got it checked out, was the size of a cantalope and had invaded many other organs.  She told me she'd been back to the doctor.  She lied.  She lied to me, because she didn't want me to worry, because she had only part-time work, little money, no medical insurance.  She made too much to qualify for the Access program which passes for medical relief here.  And she thought she couldn't get Medicare until she turned 65.  So she waited, tried to ignore the pain, lied to all of us about how she felt and what she was doing about it.  I had offered more than once to pay for a doctor, but she knew I couldn't afford it either.  She didn't want to be a burden to anybody.

This month, 2 years ago, I made some calls and found out she could get on Medicare right away, didn't have to wait for her birthday, and so we started the ball rolling ... on the 10th of October.  Began a series of doctor's appointments and phone calls and forms to fill out, and it was then I realized how bad it was for her.  It had become bad ... seemingly overnight.  Was it that the cancer suddenly erupted and blossomed inside her, or was it that she'd been holding on with gritted teeth for god knows how long and now that relief was in sight, she let go? 

She had always had such steely self-control.  And she had a very high tolerance for pain.  So I know it must have been really bad.  She couldn't make the phone calls.  She couldn't fill out the forms.  She couldn't drive.  I took on the jobs, drove her to appointments, sat with her to hear the news, took notes, asked questions, did research on the net to see what was what and what could be done ... none of which helped in the end.  There were no options.  They shouldn't have bothered to remove her uterus, it didn't help.  We put her body through that horrendous surgery... for nothing.

Two months to the day.  October 10th we started this ball rolling.  October 21st we celebrated her birthday at the doctor's office, then went to a restaurant to try to recapture moments we loved together, over coffee, which she couldn't drink, and brownies, which she couldn't eat.  She became fragile.  November 10th she went in for surgery.

I stayed with her in the hospital while she "recovered", a full week spent on a cot, helping her to the bathroom, worrying that she wasn't getting better.  I listened while the doctors explained about Stage 4 cancer, as if that term was supposed to mean something to us.  We didn't understand, and I'm sure they thought we were dummies.  They finally said she could go home, but she didn't seem better to me.

All the empty reassurances we tried to believe.

She came home with me, and I thought ... we all thought ... she would recover, and then she could start chemo therapy.  That's what the doctors said to expect, that she would recover, that she could beat it.  We were wrong.

December 10th she died.

These three months will never be the same for me.

Fall Memories

I really wish we had an actual "autumn" here.  We go from way-too-hot right into winter, it seems.  And although there are a few trees in the city that change color, you can tell they're struggling against the tide.  Waiting for a chill night cold enough to help the colors change.  Some years they just go brown and drop off.  It's sad.

When I was a kid, this was a hard time of year.  We moved around so much that we were rarely in the same school from one year to the next.  I wasn't an outgoing child, so it was hard for me to make friends.  I tried to be the "good kid", doing whatever the teacher's wanted.  Coping skills learned in an alcoholic family don't always translate well to the real world.  And being "good" didn't set well with the kids, of course.  I got shunned a lot as the teacher's pet.  Although, actually, many of the teachers didn't like me either.  I suppose brown-nosing is annoying, no matter how old you are.

They didn't understand the precariousness of my existence.  And I didn't understand how to get people to like me.  When by chance some kid happened to take to me or try to be my friend, I was baffled, confused, and desperate to keep them.  I didn't know what made them like me in the first place, so I was always scrambling to figure it out and do it right so they would keep liking me.  Which came across as more brown-nosing annoyance, I'm sure.

Everybody wants to be liked.  It's not unusual.  But for yin-polar type people like me, it seems to be an accutely painful thing.  Folx with more yang energy seem to have a stronger sense of self, and don't seem to care so much what others think of them. That's a great quality, I always wished I could be like that.  But how do you make yourself stop caring about something that FEELS so desperately important and scarey? 

The fact is, the more you want and need other's approval, the less they give it.  You're seen as desperate, needy, clingy, false, cloying, blah blah etc etc. 

When I became a teacher, Autumn meant a different kind of excitement and fear.  I almost didn't make it to my second year.  In spite of all my education and training, when it came right down to it, I wanted the kids to like me.  And as any teacher can tell you, being liked shouldn't be your first priority.  I left myself open to all kinds of problems.  I ended up my first year teaching close to a nervous breakdown.  I had spent most of my time in a state of high emotion, with the kids out of control and taking advantage of my desire to be liked.  I, of course, thought I had been hiding it, but kids see through you.  They see through to your most hidden and secret desires and weaknesses, and they pushed all my buttons gleefully. 

I almost didn't go back the second year.

But then my principal, bless her forever, pointed me toward a summer class that focused on discipline and structure.  That was without a doubt the best thing I could have done.  The most important thing I took away from that class, the biggest jewel on the PILE of jewels the class gave me, was the notion that you must build a structure first, and be the bigbadmeany within that structure, and then from within that structure, you can relax.  Once the structure is in place, the teacher told us, you can and will be liked. 

I was stunned.  She was addressing my biggest most secret fears.

I had to confront a lot of old demons to pass through this fire.  The first month of teaching this "new" way was hell for me.  The kids were surly and unfriendly.  I struggled to maintain the structure.  Every time I enforced a rule and a kid got angry or huffy or cold toward me, I panicked.  I went home and cried in the evenings, wrung my hands, hollered at the ceilings, and went back the next day with my spine firm again.  Standing tall and putting your foot down was a very hard thing for me to do.  I had always wanted to be liked more than anything in the world.  But my "issues" were getting in the way of being able to be a good teacher, so I HAD to learn a new way, and that meant dealing with the old baggage I was carrying too.

And then a miraculous thing happened. 

The kids DID relaxed into the structure, and the DID start to like me anyway.

And after the second month or so... I started to be able to stand up without effort, without fear of being disliked.  And without anger.  The structure was the structure, the rules were the rules, and there were both consequences and rewards in place.  Those things were separate from my feelings, and separate from the kids' feelings too.  Once that was accepted, we could all relax and be ok with each other.

I still have trouble with wanting to be liked.  I still find old demons rearing up at odd times.  But those years of being a teacher helped me begin to develop a backbone.  It was the first step for me, of learning to say no, of going inside to find where my fears were and healing them.

The next step was discovering what *I* wanted and liked.  Amazing to think that had never occurred to me.  All my life before that had been spent trying to figure out what other people wanted, how to be what they wanted, who they wanted.  It was a matter of survival, and I had been stuck on that looping pattern for a long time.  Stepping off the loop, I suddenly realized that I had needs and wants and likes and dislikes of my own.

But I guess that's the stuff of another post.