BECOMING REAL

For several years now, Margery William's The Velveteen Rabbit book has been a part of my Easter decorations.  It was one of my most favorite stories from childhood and as I read it to my children this week I found myself overcome with emotion.  Although it may have been due to my PMS, after reading my favorite part I began to weep to the point where my children began to rub my back and tell me, "It's okay Mommy, it is just a story."

Yes, it is just a story.  But, it is also the closest explanation to why I am still around after so many ups and downs along the way.

The following is an excerpt from the part of the story where the newly arrived Rabbit is asking the oldest toy in the nursery what it means to be real:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.  "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" 

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse.  "It's a thing that happens to you.  When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become REAL."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.  "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin horse.  "You become.  It takes a long time.  That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of you hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to those who don't understand."

"I suppose you are Real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.  But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's uncle made me Real," he said "That was a great many years ago; but once you are real you can't become unreal again.  It lasts for always."

To me, this explanation is what living a meaningful life is all about.  Surrendering to the not so pretty experiences like getting hurt, aging, and (in my experience) being called, "loose" - is all a part of living a life of love.  And just as the very wise and old Skin Horse said so himself, once you are real you can't become unreal again. 

Happy Easter 2012!

DROWNING IN THE DEEP END OF DEPRESSION

There is no sufficient way to truly describe what living with clinical depression is like.  I just know that when it gets rough, it gets really rough. 

It seems like the best days of my life are like freely and energetically treading water in the deep end of the pool while enjoying the sun filled blue sky all around me and occasionally feeling my body burst with the urge to do back flips and various synchronized swimming moves like the nuns in some campy Mel Brooks movie. I am gratefully aware of my body, my breath, and the security of only being a few feet away from the ground.  My perspective is clear and sharp and the smile on my face exudes a powerfully positive effect on those around me.

The worst days, which can last for months, are more like fighting the current of a very cold and stormy ocean in the dead of night where the only awareness I am capable of is survival.  No matter how often the Coast Guard of those who love me throw me a life raft, each time I reach for it my hands simply move through the transparent object and it is not within my grasp - no matter how much I try.  The only comfort I find is that I am still breathing, and sometimes even that fact alone is too much for my reality.

The harshest example from my life has been since motherhood and sufferring post-partum-depression (although I am not really sure what it is called when you were depressed pre-nataly, then sunk further post-partum.)  There is little worse parenting than being the depressed mom of small children. I owe it to them to suit up, show up, and cut the shit.

During my hardest days I get the bare minimum done by feeding, clothing, and keeping them safe. Those are the days when I pull back and watch my beautiful children play around me as though I am watching them on TV and unable to participate. Lying on the couch and going through the motions of smiling and clapping while they perform a play in their dress up clothes, but not really being there to share their joy only continues to feed the sadness.

It isn't a pretty example, but it is true.

This has been my life as long as I can remember, but without the perspective of my thirty-eight years I have never been able to truly accept it, until now.

Depression is as much a part of me as my long legs and freckled skin.  It is a part of who I am, and I have learned to fit it in to both my desire to truly live and my struggle to simply survive.

Twenty-five years of prayers, pills, and professionals have helped ease the pain and kept me from passively checking-out.*  I no longer struggle with the fear that I can't survive this, nor do I continue to be paranoid that the love of those around me will be revoked because I am altogether too much and not enough all in the same moment.

As I dipped my body into the pool this morning to indulge in my on again/off again passion for lap swimming, I realized that my cycle of sanity is just like getting to the other side of the pool. Sometimes it takes a confident and easy streamlined backstroke with my breath free and easy and my face shining up for the universe to see.  Other times I can only maintain my movement by breathing with every third stroke, like with the forward crawl.  And occasionally, I must dive deep and hold my breath and my life away from the world until the storm clouds have passed.

I may go under for a while, but I always, always come back up.

(Perhaps that is the reason God blessed me with two such humongous DDD floatation devices...wink, wink.)

*  I should also say that my quest to overcome my depression has included the following:  accupuncture, art therapy, music therapy, naturopaths, chinese medicine, vitamins, herbs, hormones, and howling at the moon.  But these didn't work with the alliteration of that particular sentence.

A TALE OF TWO SYNDROMES

The other day my husband walked into the room where I was furiously shoving his neatly folded laundry into his over stuffed dresser drawer and said, "It will be two days...three days, tops."

"What are you talking about?"  I annoyingly responded to his obtuse statement.

"You period.  You are going to start in two days,"  he confidently declared.

I immediately felt the tension throughout my entire body begin to relax as I tried to take deep breaths while letting his arrogant, yet very attuned and wise accusation sink in.  Although admitting it is tough, he is right.  I don't even need to check my calender to affirm that I have a perfectly physiological reason for acting like an overly-sensitive, angry, irritable, whiny, weepy, psychotic, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive, BITCH for the past 24 hours:  PRE-MENSTRAL SYNDROME.

I have THE WORST PMS in the history of the uterus and the worst thing is, that despite its clockwork occurrence,  I never seem to realize why I am going crazy until someone else points it out to me.  Along with cripling cramps, bronco busting back aches, and merciless migraines, my pre-mentstral syndrome obeys no boundaries and creeps into the very center of my central nervous system hijacking my brain for a good 48 hours.

At its worst, I have found myself scouring my husband's cell phone statement convinced he is having an affair in spite of the fact he has never behaved in any way suggesting even the possibility of there being someone else.  It is quite typical for me to respond to my husband's mere suggestion that perhaps if I put the extra salted pretzels into a bowl instead of eating them out of the bag, that I may not eat as much with the fury Medea followed by severe break down sobbing like a scene out of the 1979 movie, "The Champ."  No matter what my husband says to me during my PMS peak, even if it is something as simple as, "What are we having for dinner?"  my brain always interprets it as, "HE THINKS I'M FAT!"

Luckily my husband, Ken, is the most mellow, balanced, and all around nice guy on the planet, so it doesn't take long for him to draw me a bath, pour a glass of wine, pat me on the head, and tell me he is taking the kids to the park so I can have some time myself.  All is well with the world by morning.

So to remedy my horrible mood swings, piercing voice inflections, and mild rage over the smallest of transgressions, I have made friends with over the counter progesterone cream.  My gynecologist advised me to use this two years ago when I thought the only answer to my monthly metamorphosis was a hysterectomy and a exorcism. I simply rub a dime sized dot anywhere on my body where fat cells are present (which on me means anywhere other than my teeth) - my gyno referred to it quite kindly as, "where your skin is at it's softest."

My progesterone pal has done wonders for all the symptoms of my epic PMS and makes being a woman, once again, a wonderful thing.  Yes, it does say in the fine print that this cream has been shown to cause certain cancers after extensive testing done in California, but I figure as long as I don't use it while I am IN California I am clear of any carcinoma catastrophe.

It may not seem fair that Ken has to suffer my PMS, until it is understood that I also suffer his "FBS" - Full Ball Syndrome.  My friend Eartha coined the acronym, FBS, during her first year of marriage when she noticed how her husband's entire world, (including body language, sentence structure, word choice, use of eye-contact, and  all around demeanor) becomes more and more sexually focused the longer he goes without a "release."   

Full Ball Syndrome (FBS) is what happens to all testosterone charged men when they go a certain amount of time without having sex and ejaculating.  The amount of time varies from man to man, but in my household if we go more than three days without sexual contact, my husband is a walking, talking, fourteen year old boy who will find sexual inuendo in EVERYTHING I may say or do.  For example:

Me:  "Honey, when you get the lawn mowed and the trimming done could you please move these boxes upstairs for me?"
Ken"  "When I am done in the yard, I am coming IN for some TRIM and I will take care of YOUR BOX while thoroughly inspecting  YOUR UPSTAIRS!"

OR

Me:  "The news said the mountain should get five to ten inches this weekend, so maybe we should postpone our golf plans and go skiing."
Ken:  "Why don't I just give you five to ten inches right now and we can still go for eighteen more holes this weekend!"

OR

Even when it doesn't make the least bit sense.....

Me:  "We should check out this spot next time we are in the area and come for dinner." (Referring to a restaurant near his family's vacation home.)

Ken:  "I typically like to check out ALL the spots in the area before I GO IN...sometimes I even like to park around back!  Ya see Honey, my style is to consider all of my options and then hone in on the area that feels the best!"
Me:  "Huh...?"

There are some days I can't even have a serious conversation with the man because even if I am talking about third world poverty he remembers how exciting it was to see boobs for the first time in his childhood National Geographic magazines when photojournalists spent a lot of time with tribal peoples near the equator.  Then the entire day is then filled with boob jokes and annoying fondling. 

The only cure for FBS is sex, as they don't make a cream for it yet.  Although one could argue that if a man uses enough lotion to work out his FBS on his own, it might help to curb symptoms.  Nevertheless if you live with a man and he suffers from this syndrome regularly - the sooner you give it up, the easier he is to live with.

THE MYTH OF SCARCITY

"There is a natural law of abundance which pervades the entire universe, but it will not flow through a doorway of belief in lack and limitation."  ~  Paul Zaiter

It hasn't been until quite recently that I have become aware of the fact that much of my "Monkey Mind" is related to one of the biggest lies I have been telling myself ever since I can remember.  That great lie is that there will never be enough.  And at the very root of that sham is that I will never be enough.  I will never be smart enough, thin enough, pretty enough, and happy enough to live the life I deserve to live.  So many times I have felt the unsettled vibration of my inner critic frantically asking, "Do you love me now?  Am I pretty enough, smart enough, thin enough, and tap dancing backwards in this penguin suit fast enough for you?"

I now am beginning to understand that at any moment I can see abundance all around me if I only choose to do so.  I have been taking a class this fall at BeNourished in Portland which is helping me to understand the surprising truth of sufficiency.

The following is last week's lesson from Dana S. - one of my teachers:

The Myth of Scarcity

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.”  The next one is “I don’t have enough time.”  Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it.  We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…. We don’t have enough exercise.  We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits.  We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends.  Of course, we don’t have enough money either.

We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough – ever.  Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we are already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something.  And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day.  We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack…. What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.

Choose a mindset of sufficiency.

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity.  Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency.  By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything.  Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance.  It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough.  Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all.  It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

From The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist.

Acceptance ~ Regina Hill

 Acceptance

Acceptance means that you

Can find the serenity within

to let go of the past
with its mistakes and regrets,
move into the future
with a new perspective,
and appreciate the opportunity
to take a second chance.
Acceptance means you'll find
Security again
When difficult times come
Into your life,
And comfort to relieve any pain.
You'll find new dreams, fresh hopes,
And forgiveness of the heart.
Acceptance does not mean
That you will always be perfect.
It simply means that
You'll always overcome imperfection.
Acceptance is the road to peace-
Letting go of the worst,
Holding on to the best,
And finding the hope inside
That continues throughout life.
Acceptance
Is the heart's best defense,
Love's greatest asset,
And the easiest way
To keep believing
In yourself and others.

~Regina Hill

MY GAY SON

Verbal exchange from this morning between my 4 year old son and me:

Helmut:  "Mommy can I tell you something, and do you promise not to tell anyone?"

Me:  "Yes."

Helmut (whispered tone):  "I love Bobby."

Me (Confident): "Honey, you can love whomever your heart chooses to love. Don't let anyone ever tell you anything different......" (Confused):  "Bobby? Who is Bobby?"

Helmut: "You know...Bobby...Bobby Dahl."

Me:  "No, we don't know anyone named Bobby or Mr. Dahl. But if you love Bobby, the I love Bobby too!"

At this point I maintained my confidence in letting my children choose their own paths throughout life and holding back my own dreams and will for them as much as possible.

Later, when I saw him playing in his sister's room I realized I had it all wrong. Helmut was saying Barbie Doll NOT Bobby Dahl. He loves Barbie NOT Bobby! I am such an idiot of a mom. Frankly, I don't care if he grows up and lives with Barbie or Bobby or if they all three live together...he still might turn out to be the best fashion desginer, choreographer, or interior decorator of all time.

His dad has his fingers crossed for line-backer, but I am still holding out for chorus-line. Damn! There I go with pushing my own dreams again. A talking Barbie Doll was once recalled for saying, "Math is tough!" -- Well Barbie, I say math IS tough, but parenting is even tougher.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO0cvqT1tAE

CLEANING UP BY GETTING DIRTY

So let's just say that although I am quite tidy by nature, I can let things go for a while before I muster up the motivation to actually get the deep cleaning done in my home.  With my husband Ken and kids at home with me all summer - ALL DAY LONG - I find very little time to do the things I want to do, let alone the things I would rather have done for me.

The other day Ken was getting quite frustrated with the piles of paperwork on the kitchen counter and dishes still in the sink from breakfast. I could tell his displeasure was mounting to the point of possibly grumbling his frustration in my direction at any moment.  In order to subvert a lecture (I know, I married my father) and a follow-up "action plan" for maintaining the household orderliness, I came up with a better plan.

My darling husband arranged a playdate for both Valerie and Helmut and packed them in the car letting me know he'd be back in ten minutes after dropping them off.  I took this as a warning that something must be accomplished or in the process of tidying up before he returned. This meant I better get out of my jammies, off the couch, and shut down the computer asap.

The moment the SUV left the driveway I spent three and a half minutes emptying and loading the dishwasher, organizing the paperwork, wiping down the cabinets and floor, and spraying the kitchen with my super-secret-miracle cleaning weapon:  Mrs. Meyer's Cean Day Countertop Spray in the Lemon Verbena Scent.  I need only spray down the kitchen surfaces with this Heaven sent helper to make my husband think I spent all day long scrubbing the kitchen.

With six and a half minutes left I slipped into my red lace thong boy shorts and matching bra, and tied my red and white Jessica Steele hostess apron over the ensemble while finishing it off with my red satin stilettos.  I sprayed my morning bed head with Suave's Dry Shampoo and gave it a quick neck flip and root tease, then borrowed my six-year-old's strawberry flavored Lip Smackers.  I returned to the kitchen with a clean sponge and my best friend Mrs. Meyers.

As I heard my husband ascending the stairs towards the kitchen he mumbled, "CARRIE!  Are you still in bed?" huffing and groaning all the way up.

"I'm in the kitchen Sweetheart!"  I cooed in my best Marilyn Monroe voice. 

As Ken made it to the kitchen entry, his facial expression changed from grumpy and frustrated to delighted and quite humored.

As I bent over stretching across the countertop spraying and wiping I said with pouty lips, "I'm just trying to clean up this dirty, dirty, dirty kitchen...and next I am going to go to work in the bedroom where things always are even dirtier!"

Ken received my creative expression with great enthusiasm and I led him to the bedroom where I had candles lit and his most beloved French porn cued to his favorite part.  We spent the next few hours delighting in the "dirtiness" of one another while abandoning all stress of having a perfectly tidy house.  I also convinced Ken that until everyone is back in school and out of the house for the day, we will just have to live with the disorder as is.  Of course I will continue to swallow all evidence of the messes he and I make together.