When the Lies get too Heavy

My daughter suggested I find a picture of myself when I was thin and hang it on the fridge to keep my weight loss goals on target. Just thinking of the skinny me makes me crave chocolate cake and glass after glass of milk.  

Skinny me. Sad me.  She didn’t lose weight to get thin. She stopped eating to get noticed. She might’ve taken to cutting if she hadn’t been so squeamish. Skinny me needed people to recognize that something was wrong, something so horrible, she lacked both the courage and vocabulary to describe it.

I didn’t give myself full permission to eat until years later when I became pregnant. Like anyone with a true love for sugar and fat, I packed on the pounds quite easily. Low and behold, there were benefits to being chubby, as least that’s what I told myself.  No one could pick me up off the street and stuff me in the trunk if I was heavy. Just being overweight would make me less attractive, and therefore less likely to be victimized, right? Wrong. Rapists target everyone from babies in diapers to elderly women confined to their beds. Rape isn’t about the short skirt I’d been wearing. It wasn’t about me “accidently” sending signals.

So how do I pull myself out of this false security of fat? How do I stop self-medicating with food?  I don’t have a clue. Sorry if I’ve disappointed you. My best guess is to stop buying into all the lies and propaganda. Fat shaming. Slut shaming. How can these possibly lead to anything healthy?  I’m thinking true weight loss has to stem from self love. What a challenge though, when even strangers are critical. I think the trick is to stop measuring success in pounds in inches. My new benchmark should be how good I feel in my own skin. I think today will be cake free! And I'm not even craving a soda. 

What's she up today? Back to the dollhouse

I asked my husband for a house last Christmas. And this is what he got me. Thank goodness I wasn't hinting about wanting a real house. Just in case he didn't catch on, I dragged him to the hobby store and pointed out the dollhouse I wanted and then handed him the 40% off coupon.

The dollhouse to the left is what you get if you follow the directions. The instructions weren't the easiest to follow (no pictures or diagrams *gasp*). So I gave up on following the directions and had some fun in the process.

This is what it looks like after you punch out all the pieces. Word of advice. Label everything.
Oh! And don't through anything out either. I ran out of shingles because I placed them too close together. Ooops. I was able to cut extra shingles from the leftover roofing material.

Not too shabby. I'm particularly please with the bricks and grass. The bricks were cut from paper egg cartons, painted, and spackled to the house and yard. There are plenty of how to's on Pinterest. This was not my first adventure in paper brick making, so it went fast. I really wanted a yard and wasn't overly impressed with the ready to purchase grass at the hobby store, so I searched for some alternatives. Painting a towel sounded silly at first, but given that I could purchase one at the dollar store, I gave it a try. The towel worked great, though it did take take to get the texture right and to apply enough color to keep it from appearing too flat.

 The towel worked great for creating dirt as well. My garden isn't quite done, but here's an idea of how the dirt came out.




The outside's looking pretty nice. Time to get to work on the inside.

 

Taking it One Stitch at a Time

In times of stress I dream of whirlwinds. Winds that tear the walls off my house and shake the floors. Last night I dreamt I saw the tornado coming. I rushed home and crocheted my family members to the pipes, the bathtub, anything heavy. Like Spiderman spitting out web, I was spitting yarn, and in such pretty patterns.

I shared the dream with my teenage son. He rolled his eyes. "I think you have an addiction." He might be onto something. I have small tidy projects that I pull out in waiting room. There are beefier projects that keep me company on car trips. Every room in my house seems to have some sort of projects slowly nearing its way to completion.

In truth, I'm rather proud of my Spidey crocheting dream. Instead of panicking I was able to think outside the box. Each of us are collection of such unique skills. We need to remember to celebrate that.

When All the Sounds Leave

I'm going deaf.

Most of the time I'm too busy living this life to contemplate the reality of a world without sound. But then I get an earache. A pain that most of you would take some Tylenol for and then forget the ache. I wake in the night, my ear throbbing and I imagine the nurse in the ER asking me to rate my pain. "Its a three." A three?  How can it be a three?  I can't sleep. It hurts so bad that I'm crying.

Then I realize I can't hear the fan. I can't hear myself sit up in bed. I wonder, 'Do blankets make sound?' Anxiety hits. I try to remember all the other noises I've forgotten about. Paper rustling. Keys jingling. Feet shuffling across the floor. Birds. Can I still hear birds? Shit when was the last time I heard a fucking bird? I cry harder. My ear throbs. The left side of my face is hot and I can't open my jaw without it hurting. But its only a three.

Instead of counting sheep, I compose a list of sounds I want to keep. The crunch of leaves. The crackle of a campfire. Rain. Waves. Wind. Crickets in the summer. I rush on to the list of music I want to be able to play back in my head as though my brain could function as an MP3 player. From Beethoven to Nine Inch Nails...I want it all there. But what about the bands I haven't heard? Musicians not even born yet?  A lump burns in my throat. What about my future grandkids? Will I get to listen to their voices and laughter as they grow up?

My pain is at least a four. I take a prescription pain killer and put expired steroid drops in my ear. I'll see the doctor tomorrow. I'll get a Z-pack. More steroids. Better pain killer. I'll be warned to be careful. Be told my hearing is precarious. I'll laugh in agreement like I always do. I'll take the meds. I'll get better. I'll forget I'm going deaf. Or at least I won't think about it. I'll thank Heaven that there's nothing serious wrong with me...until I get that little throb again...and I'm reminded that someday all the sounds will leave me.

Another Day of Mongering

Ebay is like the toxic friend I had in highschool that I put up with because I thought this friend had something I wanted.. Just when I was ready to walk away from the relationship, there she was. "Wait!---"

And here eBay is.  "We've got a special offer just for you!"

Just for me? 'Yeah, right,' I tell myself, though I'm already plotting how to carve out the time to list "400 items for FREE!!!" Not easy to do when you homeschool a "special needs" child and are committed to finishing a second novel. 

Thanks to my friend Rachell, I've been eBay free since April. She pops her tent up three days a week at local farmer's markets. I've only committed to twice a month. Maybe I'm afraid of being caught in the tracker beam again.  If you think eBay takes effort, you've never worked a booth at a farmer's market in the desert.

Lucky for me, I like a challenge. First mission- how to display everything. (I'm gonna pat myself on the back and say "well done." I put all of that up there together for under ten bucks. Thank you Pinterest!) The second mission- keeping everything upright in the desert wind-not so easy.

This was our first day at the new prime corner spot, and I think we rocked it. Don't you love the line of people? The people are what bring me back. They're so much more interesting to talk to than eBay. Even the pets there are interesting.The pup pictured below was by far the cutest.  I wanted to snap a picture of the young woman and her hybrid lynx cat, but the kitty looked rather put out about its forced socialization with so many canines. 

The only drawback to the awesome corner spot is the ice cream man.  You see him?  That's my view for the day.  We get to listen to hours of tinny ice cream truck music. I manage to block it out until the loop returns to "Silent Night." The song is hard to miss when its a hundred degrees out and we're all melting.

Death by Insomnia

Fun find from Maud Starr on Etsy

I’ve managed to squeeze in three hours of sleep. I was up at 3:00am Googling the effects of sleep deprivation, so I know for a fact that my cognitive abilities are impaired.  My facilities have to be impaired If I’m about to pull back the veil and give you a peek at the reality of having an Asperger’s child.

Most people assume the biggest challenge of Asperger’s is the difficulty these individuals have with social situations. True, my son did have a series of mini meltdowns at the last big family gathering. In his defense, there were about fifty people, many of whom he’d never met. As soon as these stressful events pass, life pretty much goes back to normal.  My son goes back on the computer. He asks me again, why the kids in the neighborhood are screaming. In his head screaming signals trouble. So the high pitched squeals of summer play both worry and annoy him.

Worry.  Now that’s the big one.  Most people with Asperger’s deal with anxiety. My son’s is extreme, and fortunately is fairly controlled with a low dose of an antidepressant. But what happens when the doctor doesn’t return your calls about refills and then the pharmacy fails to contact you when your order is ready? Then you skip more days than needed and sometimes things can get a little hairy.

Sleep is the first thing to go in my son’s case. He’ll go more than 24 hours without sleep and then start worrying about why he feels funny. As the sleepless hours tick by he starts googling every psychiatric diagnosis known to man and rushes to me, asking if I think he might have a multiple personality disorder. I tell him to look up ‘sleep deprivation,’ but he’s so caught up in how the whole multiple personality thing works, that he totally ignores me.

Okay. Let’s go back to 3:00 am when I was on my iphone reading my son the laundry list of sleep deprivation symptoms. I’d made the small mistake, as one is apt to do when one is sleep deprived themself, and was reading a report on the use of sleep deprivation as a form of torture.  Not exactly bedtime reading material for a kid that freaks out over the kids out front playing on their bicycles. I managed to skip past the part of the report where every single puppy in lab experiments died from lack of sleep. Seriously? Who kills puppies for sleep studies? This is a rhetorical question people. Instead of counting sheep waiting for my son to doze off, I’m counting dead puppies.  My son’s anxiety slips under my skin.

Sleep deprivation was popular during the Spanish Inquisition, witch hunts, and more modern information gathering missions. My mind wanders from Guantanamo Bay to our local prisons. I think of the less than human animals there, caged for violent crimes, especially crimes against children.  The dead puppies bark in my head. “Why do those bastards get any rest?” they yip.  Shit. I can understand what they’re saying. When did I turn into Doctor Dolittle? Am I delusional? Which psychiatric disorder would my son diagnose me with? I glance over to check on him. He’s asleep.  He looks so peaceful. We’ve made it through another night. It’s too soon to worry about tomorrow.

Got this thing in the bag-mostly

Some days all I want to do is lie on the beach and eat chocolate.  Today is one of those days. Too bad I'm stranded at home, an hour inland, where it’s so hot your chocolate bar won’t make it back from the store without melting.  Forget working on the novel.  I’m not making any jewelry either. Thankfully its summer, so I don’t have to think about homeschooling my eighth grader. The only thing harder to motivate than a chocolate deprived woman, is my son with Asperger’s.  

Despite my whining, the day hasn’t been completely unproductive.  I managed to figure out how to get my six foot tall jewelry displays to remain upright for the next farmer’s market. YAY! I also designed some nifty new bags so that I don’t have to mooch of my business associate, Rachell, any longer. Click here to see what her and the  Black Swan Jewelry company is up to. And you can click here to visit The Winsome Wench on Facebook.