Contact Lenses...A Late Start

This year we have double vision insurance, which is fabulous because 3 people in my family wear glasses and we've really struggled with keeping everyone who needs glasses in glasses (between breakage & loss in rivers/lakes/corn fields), so we were thrilled when we all went off to the optometrist to have our eyes checked...

My husband has really bad eyes, right on the edge of legal blindness. His glasses have always been our first priority, because he literally cannot see without them.

Our youngest son, Sean, has been our next priority, because his are the next worse eyes in the house, and because his seemed to be broken/lost the most often. He just turned 18 so, hopefully, that will start happening less and less.

And then there is Michael, who has always, always wanted contacts, and we just never could swing the contact appointment fee. Well with double vision insurance, he gets his contacts this year!!!!

And then there is me...I haven't seen an optometrist since 2004 and have been only wearing reading glasses. But my distance vision has gotten a tad blurry, so I knew it was time. Because I tend to leave my glasses all over the place and lose them, I wanted to try contacts too. I went for monovision: Close vision in the left eye/Distance vision in the right eye.

The first night after wearing them for about 4 or 5 hours, I tried to take them out to go to bed. OMG, who knew removing thin, membranous lenses from ones eyes would be so freaking difficult??? Not I, and I almost pulled my retina out while removing it. Evidently I need help in contact removal technique, so I called my daughter-in-law who taught me the slide it over onto the white of the eye and THEN pinch it out technique, whew. I'd have ended up damaged the way I was going!!!!!

I'm sure my experience with monovision has been duplicated all over the world. No one told me how difficult it would be for me to "see" the lip on the contact that helps you put it in your eye right-side out!!! So the first day I wore them to work, they were wrong side out, and the 2nd day began with the same issue (but I didn't realize it then). There was just a slight irritation at the lower left corner of the contact, and the vision was just not right.

After 2 hours on the second day, I couldn't bear it anymore and went to the restroom to clean the lens. I dropped it, found it, cleaned it and put it in.

VIOLA!!! Vision and no discomfort!!! That's when I learned I had had them in wrong-side out from day 2 (the first day I wore them I started at the optical shop and she verified the lens was facing the right direction). It is AMAZING how quickly ones eyes adjust when the contact is simply facing the right direction!!!!

So today we go for follow up and I have to ask them to make the close vision better. I work on computers sometimes 12 hours a day, and I have moved everything as close to me as I can at work. It's "almost" visually workable. It simply needs to be tweeked. Wish me luck!!!

Caffienated Soda Pain

I did this semi-unscientific experiment and wanted to share it with you. I did the experiment quite accidentally, but that doesn't change what I figured out...

I have a lot of leg pain (which I realized the year I went to work at the YMCA: 2005). I had decided it was my lot in life and I'd have to live with it. From knee to ankle, almost all the time (except when sitting) my legs ache.

Then came Lent, 2012. I gave up all soda. (I've done this before but was never observant enogh to put this together in my head). After 2 weeks of no soda, I remember thinking, hmmm, my legs don't ache, and I went on with my day.

For the rest of Lent, though, no leg achage!!! I thought to myself, I wonder...

So a couple weeks after Lent, I went back to drinking soda (not Coca Cola, but Barque's Root Beer)...1 a day with my lunch and a couple of weeks later I stood up from sitting at work for my 2 hour stint on the phones and my legs ached again. I was dumbfounded. Could I really have found a link for this constant, I have to take Motrin/Exedrin all the darn time, pain? Maybe...

So, I've had my last soda today. I don't know if it's just the caffienated sodas that do this to me (probably not all the people of the world, right?), or if it's all soda in general. I may try a non-caffienated root beer for kicks down the road (because, really, who can live their whole life without a root beer float???) and see if it causes the same thing.

I also don't know if it's just Coca Cola products, which are my sodas of choice, or all caffienated sodas. But I like the idea of not having leg pain when I stand up, so I think it's worth it to me to not have soda.

Pink lemonade, anyone?

On having a home...

I've used this picture once before, in a blog named "Superfluous". It's a shot I took just after I refinished the table, but the other day I was looking through my blog and another thought struck me...This is a dream shot.

Let me explain: I know people who have basically lived in 2 houses their entire life. They grew up in their parents house, and their parents never moved. Then they went to college and either lived at home or in a dorm. Then they married and lived with their spouse and raised their children in the house they share with their spouse. One life...two homes.

My life was NOT  that way. My parents divorced when I was 6 months old. My father and my first step-father were military. We moved a LOT. I went to 10 schools from first grade to High School, for instance. In 3 states and 2 countries. 

My ex-husband was also military. The moving continued. 

Even after I married a civilian, we moved a lot. We were in the same city, but we moved from one rental to another. Eventually we moved back to my home town. Since moving home in 2004 we have lived in 2 motel like places, 3 different apartments and 2 houses. 

So, I was looking at this shot from the stairs through our dining room and into our kitchen and my thought was "home". It looks like home. Someones home. My home...for now. It has that warm, "lived in" look of a home. And that made me profoundly sad, because I know, once again, that this is temporary. Next year or the year after we will move again. And suddenly, I understood peoples desire to "buy a home"...somewhere you don't have to move away from every year or two or three. Somewhere you make "yours". Where you paint and decorate and you know that next year or the year after stuff will still be where you put it...in your home.

I've always said I didn't inherit that "got to own my own home" genetic thing that makes up the American dream...but looking at this photo, I finally got it. Not that I'll ever own my own home, mind you, but I got a glimpse of the dream and I understand it now. Amazing...

For my Mama...

(my mother loved jade green flowers)

All of my life, I have claimed to be a realist. I clung to this label as a way to stand against the unreality of life, the fantasies people tell themselves, the drugs/drinking/sex people fall into to not have to deal with the realities of life (I typed that sentence and sat here looking at it thinking: REALLY????).

You and I, Mama, had this conversation a few times in my life as you tried to explain to me your way of dealing with reality. And I didn't listen in my moral superiority, in the safety of being "a realist".

I come to you now, too late, of course, to tell you I'm sorry. The realist has always kept a toe (or maybe a whole foot or leg) in unreality, utterly incapable of seeing it, of shattering the safety of thinking "I'm a realist".

I am...most of the time...but in one area of my life I have lived an utter fantasy. A dream that could never be reality based on a perception that was never a reality. And I never even saw it until the other day...

It almost shattered me. Then it humbled me. And now it brings me here, to you, to say I'm sorry, Mama. I was so blind. Thankfully I know you loved me anyway. You and Gram and Daddy had to have seen it, but you all loved me too much to slap me in the face with it. I love you all and I thank you for your grace...

Judgmentalism

At what point do we get to look at another being and say, "You are a despicable person," or "You are trash or a tramp" or any other combination of disparaging words that say that that person is more "sinful" than we are?
I recently had an evening of someone revealing to me things that had happened to them and I found myself judging the people that they were talking about. They didn't understand my judgement and at one point focused my vision on an incident now 22 years in my past, and called it almost the same "kind" of behavior as the people they were sharing with me.
I have a troubled and difficult past. No one who knows me would say I try to hide who I am. But I had romanticised this "piece" of my history to a point where it was almost unrecognizable as reality because the truth of the matter is that if I had to look at my behavior 22 years ago very closely, I'd break.
Last night I spent the night looking at my behavior. Judging myself and judging myself again for being judgemental of the people originally shared with me. If I had had any money, or ANY where to go, last night I would have run away from home. But I have neither money, nor place, so I had to stay.
Not to mention, as I am wont to say, you cannot run from yourself.
So here I am...looking at myself, my behavior, my choices, and wondering is my whole life since that time 22 years ago a lie? Because I didn't face my own behavior HONESTLY 22 years ago, does that make everything that has happened in my life since then a lie? An unreality? Invalid?
I want to believe that I am no longer that person from 22 years ago. That given the same circumstances now, I would make better choices. That loneliness and brokenness would not drive me to make the decisions I did...but I cannot know. I can never, ever know.
I am intelligent enough to know that I cannot go back, I cannot change a single thing I did in my past, and I also know that to beat myself up about this aberration in my being is not at all productive, but having once looked, I cannot yet look away. Like a train wreck or a car crash, I have to look and examine and see all the parts and things and pressures that caused me to step into the life I have now...
I said to my children at one point (my 4 older children that is) that I don't know who I was at that point in my life, and I believe that is true to a certain extent. And I've also said that it wasn't me who made that decision, but, the choices preceding this one, from age 15 to age 37 make that a lie in some way. Because my choice for acting out in my life clearly went the direction that this choice took me.
The differences, however, are breathtaking in their scope. And the consequences have been both so good and so bad for everyone around me that I hesitate to even speak of it. How do I talk about that time that destroyed my "family" and the decisions that led up to it without hurting people yet again? So I don't talk about it as a general rule, which leaves me fighting my way through brokenness and sorrow and unforgiveness so deep it threatens to drown me if I look too close. So I try not to look. And for the most part, I succeed.
Until nights like last night. Where the ground beneath me opens up and threatens to swallow me whole if I let it. And I run around seeking a confessional, but feeling nothing confessed would ever be enough. And knowing that is a slap in the face of all that is divine, my own unforgiveness...

Santa and my inner child...

I’ve had to have several talks with my inner child lately…at my new work a woman has seemed to focus on my weirdness (weird childhood) and my unusual perceptions of things. This has caused me to be hurt once (almost to tears) and to examine the perceptions of my childhood that created me.

One thing I have realized in this is that the “kind” of childhood I had probably doesn’t happen anymore. There is no one I have to protect…except the little girl I once was…

It began with a discussion of food. Several of our classmates had gone for sushi so the room was discussing food. I mentioned I don’t eat sushi (or seafood for that matter) and the discussion was off. We went from that to favorite foods in general and in our childhood. Cheesecake came up…I mentioned I hadn’t eaten cheesecake or lasagna till I was 32. The room was shocked. Surely, they said, SOMEONE near me as a child ate/served/had cheesecake? I told them no. That no one I had known as a child had ever offered me cheesecake, although I had read the word in a book as a child BUT the only cheese I had ever seen as a child was Tilamook mild cheddar, so in my mind, the thought of cheese and cake being anything yummy was not possible. The woman said that if she had known me when I was a little girl, she’d have laughed her head off at me for that concept. That was my first discussion with my inner child, and the one that almost brought me to tears.

The second discussion with my inner child happened because of a conversation in CC3 just before Christmas. It was about Santa. And this conversation reminded me of one of the more painful of my childhood memories…

My mother was not very trustworthy when I was a child. She lied to us about many really important things. So when I found out about the Easter bunny, I was DISGUSTED that she would lie to me, yet again, and about something so utterly stupid. I tell you this to set the stage. When one doesn’t trust the very person who is supposed to care for them, it warps them. I always knew my childhood had warped me in some ways, but some of the ways it reaches out in my NOW are very subtle…

So, back to Santa. It had to have been the Christmas before I turned 12. That would have made my brother 7. It was Christmas Eve and my mother was drunk and not conscious/coherent in her room. I had torn the house apart looking for the goodies for my brother’s stocking and the presents from Santa to put under the tree for him. I couldn’t find them. (Turned out they were in her room, but I wasn’t allowed in there). I sat up all night knowing that disaster was coming at dawn…my brother got up and came to the living room where there no presents for him from Santa and nothing in his stocking. He turned his huge blue eyes on me crying and said, “I must have been a really bad boy this year.” It is one of two times in my childhood that I contemplated murder. And it put the whole Santa story in a HORRIFIC light in my memories. I swore (you know those promises you make yourself when you are too young to recognize the future repercussions) that I would NEVER lie to my children, especially about Santa Claus.

Not that I didn’t tell them about St Nicholas, and the whole Santa myth. I did tell them the stories. But I never let them believe that some strange man at the North Pole brought them presents.

Seriously people, think about this. A STRANGER (we teach our children NEVER to take gifts from strangers) who stalks our child throughout the year (he KNOWS when you’ve been naughty or nice) breaks into our home on Christmas Eve (he doesn’t have a key AND he’s a freaking stranger) and leaves presents for our child!!!! How can we teach our children this?

Add to this that the first 2 churches I belonged to as an adult, were conservative AND the 2^nd one was right-wing-fundamentalist (and they didn’t allow you to teach your child the lie of Santa either) and you can understand that my children knew who brought every gift, there were no gifts from strange men in red suits. And when I was in my right-wing-fundamentalist group, I didn’t stick out like a freak of nature.

But now? Now people want to know how my children ENDURED being DENIED the Santa story when other children around them were allowed to believe, and how I hindered their imagination by not allowing them to believe in Santa. NOW I’m considered a freak of nature IN A CHRISTIAN CHATROOM. I was floored, since the Christians I knew in my right-wing-fundamentalist stage agreed that lying to your kid about Santa would make them doubt what you taught them about Christ.

So, what do you think? Am I a freak? Am I warped and twisted? Or am I just a parent trying to do the best I could with what I knew?

Oh…and we haven’t even TOUCHED on why I didn’t read my children fairy tales!!!

Thoughts on unity and compassion...

Thinking of the New Year: 2012. Some think it’s the end of the world (as we know it?)…others think the end of an age/era/epoch. Who knows? No one does till we reach that 12/21/12 date! LOL

We can look ahead to that date with FEAR & trepidation OR we can choose to look ahead with JOY & anticipation. I’m going to choose to look ahead with joyful anticipation!

The thought remains though: What if this was the last year of life you had to live?

What would you do differently, if anything, if this was the last year of your life? Would you fight those petty fights? Probably not! Would you make amends often? Hopefully so…

There is so much brokenness in the world. Broken hurting people everywhere, longing to be whole. If we could all see that about one another & reach out in compassion. The world would be a calmer, better, more loving place.

THINK Compassion

LIVE Compassion

BE the Compassion you seek to see in the world!!!

Compassion is not pity or condescension. It’s the “knowing” that there but for grace go I. In any time, in any place, that could be me. I am the same. We are the same. We are all the Human Family.

Some people fear the concept of “one world/one people”. They feel it is bad/satanic. The cling to their boundaries (nation/state/city) & divisions (race/creed/color). We humans seem to thrive on division, much to our detriment.