Dear body,
Okay, I get it. We’re not as young as we once were. Pregnancy took its toll, aging is an ugly business, breasts are heavy . . . blah, blah, blah.
All that said, I have a message that I wish to deliver: Fuck you and the spine you rode in on.
Sincerely,
Your tenant
No exclamation points today. No all caps moments. No gallow’s humour.
Found out yesterday that I have a bulging disc in my back/sciatica.
It hurts.
It hurts less than it did, because I’m on pain pills in a wonderful array of colours and a tremendous variety of side-effects.
So that’s . . . three different hernias in my innards in the last three years.
I feel like a tube of toothpaste, only I don’t know who squeezed me.
Sigh.
I wandered over to my local mall (a tiny mini-mall that somehow perseveres in this era of big box stores and mega marts, owing in part to having the best movie theater in the city) last night on a mission.
The mission: Shoes that don’t exacerbate our aches and pains.
I did this because I have one knee that has tendons sliding over it with every step I take (which results in a cracking sensation and THX sound effects), a pelvis that doesn’t seem to want to get better any time soon (though my chiropractor didn’t suggest that I stop with the nookie*, thusly sparing Buddy the inconvenience of having to picket the chiropractic office) and ankles that cannot be relied upon to walk a straight line.
All of this has been making my 4km walk home from work a leedle less than comfortable.
So I got these:
Lovely, aren’t they? I could’ve had any pair of white mesh-top runners with blue striping in the store (and there were hundreds. Boo to you if red or green were more your colour preferences, or if you’d like a nice non-white runner), and these are the ones I chose.
They were not inexpensive. Therefore, I have some pretty high expectations for these runners. I left them in the kitchen overnight and they didn’t cook breakfast or take out the trash or fix our dishwasher, so they’d better perform miracles on my legs as I walk home today.
*Okay, fine. It has nothing to do with nookie. My pelvic joints are messed up because I have a desk job and sitting as much as we do was never part of our genetic plan.
Rosebud: Mama, I’m gonna blow you a kiss.
Me: Okay.
Rosebud: But you have to swallow it.
Me: Swallow it?
Rosebud: Yes, that’s how it gets in your stomach and then to your heart.
There’s something restorative about singing Bob Marley songs in the shower.
I’m just sayin’.
I was at a party on Sunday. It wasn’t for candles, foodstuffs, cooking gadgetry, Tupperware, happysexyfuntime or anything else of this sort.
It was a toy party. A CHILDREN’S toy party.
Still and all, with Christmas coming up, I’m not going to miss an opportunity to shop whilst snacking and chatting, instead of shopping in a mall in the dead of pre-Christmas retail or the ‘net and its myriad stores that refuse to ship to Outer Mongolia (a.k.a. Canada).
So I went over to my friend’s place. The hostess, as it happens, is someone I’ve been acquainted with over the years. (Hey, we’re a reasonably small generation in a reasonably small city. It’s not like there are that many degrees of separation between any of us. Happily, we’re on the right side of Not Inbred, though I think it might be by a narrow margin in some cases).
Last time she saw me was pre-baby, pre-Buddy. Naturally, being the toy rep, the saleslady extraordinaire, she was immediately interested in ascertaining how big a mark I could be many kids I was shopping for.
Me: Two - Rosebud and Juniper.
Her: Oh, you have two kids?
Me: Yes - one I made and one I inherited, through marriage.
Her: So you’re already remarried?
Me: Yes.
Her: Well, that was fast.
In case anyone is wondering, “Well, that was fast” is not listed anywhere on the Miss Manners Spectrum of Congratulatory Phrases.
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the time that Buddy and I have been together - those scant and measly not-quite-two years - people sure do like to have an opinion about how a relationship ought to proceed, particularly post-divorce.
According to the timeline written in the sky, I should’ve painted my skin with ash and shaved my head and mourned the demise of my marriage for a lot longer. Sex and the City informs us that the shelf-life for relationship grief is half the length of the relationship, which means that I should have been torturing myself for four years before I even considered dating another man.
Fortunately, as much as I’ve always enjoyed the TV show, Sex and the City is not my bible, so I don’t feel compelled to hang onto anger and/or grief for any circumscribed period of time.
But honestly, I’ve confronted this attitude (both subtly and directly) more times than I’d care to count. And it pisses me off.
Here’s the thing that I’d like everyone to *get*. I didn’t marry the next man who came along. It’s just that the next man who came along happened to be my soulmate. I didn’t marry him so that I didn’t have to be a single parent. I didn’t marry him on the rebound. I didn’t marry him because I didn’t think I could hack dating. (For the record, I’m a very good dater. I meet people easily and can usually find common ground with anyone.)
Here’s the flat truth: If anyone says to you ‘I’m really into you, but the timing sucks’, guess what? They’re not really all that into you. You know how I know this? I know this because if you happen to meet *your* person, the one single solitary soul in all the world who speaks to every part of who you are, well . . . the timing of that meeting won’t make a damn bit of difference to either party. You will move heaven and earth to be with your person and if you’re smart, you will do so immediately.
In the end, as much as it ticks me off to have people presume things about my life based on their own sense of appropriate timelines, (even though they have little to no frame of reference for how my first marriage ended, the fact that Buddy and I were already friends AND that when I was still married, I thought he was awesome enough to want to set him up with a girlfriend* of mine), I also know that it doesn’t make a difference. People will have to figure out, in time, that we are together because we belong together.
(And the sex is pretty great, too.)
*Dodged a bullet there, didn’t I?
There is a reason that I don’t eat a large lunch, despite the fact that I also don’t eat breakfast (as soon as I typed this, I felt the urge to duck and cover. You’re not going to throw harsh language or small, pointy objects at me, are you?).
I normally eat a sandwich at lunch. If I’m extra hungry, sometimes I’ll eat a granola bar or cheese string stick, even though I’m not sure what exactly they’ve done to cheese to make it function in this fashion, and would likely be sickened if I did know.
That’s it. That’s all my lunch generally provides me. And you know? I’m truly okay with this fact. I work in one of those offices where there always seems to be food floating around, just waiting for an unsuspecting passer-by to get within striking distance so that it can force-feed itself to them*. It is physically impossible to go hungry in my workplace.
But I cope. I manage, and I somehow avoid eating more than is good for me at lunch. Most of the time.
Once in a while, we have a lunch outing. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but it’s virtually impossible to eat a reasonable quantity of food in a restaurant, unless you confine yourself to salad (in which case, why even bother going out to dine?).
Today - we had a lunch outing. I had soup. Sounds perfectly restrained and reasonable, right? Ha. I had a bowl of soup as big as my head, full of noodles and spices and duck and veg and spicy peanut broth. Ooooh, dearlins. It’s truly divine stuff - the very nectar of the Gawds.
Only . . . I need protective chest gear in order to avoid soup-soiling myself, a steady supply of water to keep my mouth from burning off and a goodly distance around me to avoid collateral damage.
But the absolute worst drawback of this divine meal is the inevitable soup coma that comes afterward. Suddenly, all that warm and tasty goodness has settled in my stomach and it appears to want all the blood supply for it’s own selfish purposes.
All I want is a nap. All I get is more digestion whilst I attempt to remain upright at my desk.
P.S. Also - I am the human equivalent of an office supply. It’s like being a rock, only nominally more useful. A paperweight, maybe.
*What? You’ve never been assaulted by a cookie?
Today is an historic day for me. For the first time in my adult life, I’m the proud owner of an allowance.
“An allowance, Wylie?”, you say. “Did your husband pat you on the head when he doled it out, too?”
You know? I’ll let you be snide about it - just this once. Because no, Mr. or Ms. Smartypants, with whom I am not having an imaginary conversation, so shaddup - he does not pat me on the head, because the allowance isn’t like that.
See, I have an ever-growing list of things I want/need, with a sideorder of all the nice shiny things I pass by whenever I happen to be in a place that houses and/or sells shiny things. Shiny things are good. Shiny things are fun. Everyone should have bits of shiny in their lives.
Here’s the thing. I don’t buy the shiny things I see, or if I do, I spend far too much time gnashing my teeth and donning my inner hair shirt. And then, I get mad at myself for feeling guilty, so I don’t buy the next shiny thing I see and covet.
Do you see how this might be a wee bit depressing? Do you see how I might go months and months without buying a new black sweater, to replace the one that got mysteriously shredded, like an object placed between Garfield and a tray of lasagna? Can I really justify taking food out of my own children’s mouths* to purchase a black sweater?
A couple of weeks ago, I announced to Buddy that I wanted an allowance. I wanted money that I could sit on, spend, secrete in a mattress, fritter away, impulse purchase or in any and all other ways not prohibited by law or my own moral compass - manage on my own.
As a good, sweet and sensible husband, he readily agreed to this plot.
So now I have an allowance. And no surprise, I immediately want to take my two dollars and head down to 7-11 and spend it all on the candy aisle, just like I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. Swedish fish for all!!!!
Who’s with me?
*Okay, honestly. We’re not that poor. It’s simply that this is the psychological barrier I confront when I’m spending communal money. It *feels* wrong to spend that money on things just for me. Carving out some funds for me to do with as I please makes all the difference in the world.
