It’s interesting, because upon seeing this prompt, my first thought was to use an example of physical bravery. There is a lot more to bravery than just the physical…
“Mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty.” The definition from Merriam Webster doesn’t actually say the danger, fear, or difficulty is physical.
I’ve been brave in the face of anxiety, of panic, of grief, of the unknown. Every morning I get up out of bed and face a day of unknown. That has been one of my biggest triggers ever, the unknown. Learning to let go of the fear of the unknown has been an undercurrent of all my therapy. I had to really understand that being afraid of it didn’t help me, it made me unable to manage when things happened. Now I do my best to understand that I can manage anything that comes to me because I’m capable and resilient. I have 100% been able to handle unknown situations. I’m still here, sometimes battered and bruised, but I survive.
I have been brave in the face of growth and transformation, a current battle in therapy. I’m becoming a better me, more of me, and a lot of this change has been scary. I’m looking to find validation for myself and within myself, versus finding it from others. Having spent the majority of my life seeking my worth and my value from others–especially my family and my husband–it’s been quite difficult to let that go. To let go of the need to know how others have judged me. I’m the only person who can judge me, validate me, approve of me.
Yeah, I know, don’t be weird about it. (Trigger warning, omg so much food talk and pictures…)
A few weeks ago, when Hub took off a week for our anniversary, one of the things we wanted to do was go to a local farm to buy fresh “groceries”. It was about 30 minutes from our house and we went smack in the middle of the day so there would be fewer people there. Also, it was cold and sort of raining, so we had hopes there wouldn’t be a lot of people.
I didn’t take pictures, but I should have. We were too excited (nerd alert!) to be checking out what fresh fruits and vegetables they would have. Okay, Hub was excited about fresh bread (from a local baker) and I was hyped to get fresh dairy items (from a local dairy farm). Bad news, the dairy refrigerators were empty. We were there on a Tuesday, and learned that their dairy is re-stocked on Thursdays and were usually sold out over the weekend. Booo! Even their bread selection wasn’t great. On the upside, we bought some nice fresh fruits and veggies–including some beautiful lettuces–and we bought my father a jar of beet balls. Pickled beet balls.
That’s a giant picture of beet balls.
We also bought a jar of local honey for me. Cuz I love me some local honey. It was a fun trip, even though we had some disappointment.
The same week, we decided to check out a local farmer’s market about 20 minutes away. It was a Sunday, it was cold, I bundled up and we went prepared with our reusable bags. Although there were less vendors than we expected, we were kind of overwhelmed with the fresh fruits and veggie options. At the very first vendor, we loaded up with squashes (yellow, zucchini, spaghetti), lettuces, spinach, tomatoes, broccoli, and cauliflower. The next vender had more than 15 different types of apples (!) and multiple varieties of pears. Clearly they knew what they were doing because each apple and pear had a little sign with how they tasted/what their characteristics were. Hub picked out random apples to try, while I bought some small bosc pears (my fave), and some ginormous Shenandoah pears. I’d never heard of them before, but the description said “sweet and spicy” so I was sold. I found out later they are a variety of Bartlett pears, but they taste like a cross between a pear and a granny smith apple (it’s lumpier and bumpier than a regular Bartlett). Needless to say, I enjoyed the hell out of those (and also made Hub take me the next weekend again to get MORE). We ran across a vendor selling fresh chicken eggs and fresh duck eggs, so we bought one container of both. I’ve never had fresh chicken eggs before, and I’d never even seen duck eggs in real life before. We bought a few treats for our pups (there was a canine food/treat bakery there), and Hub bought himself a fresh, hot waffle smothered in nutella and bacon. He said it was yummers, as he was smashing it into his waffle-hole.
We had no plans for the chicken or duck eggs. When we got home, I decided to make homemade mayonnaise with the chicken eggs to see if it tasted any better than homemade mayo that I make with store-bought eggs. Sad spoiler, I don’t think it tasted any different. We also had no expectations for the duck eggs, we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I pinged an experienced baker friend and asked her what to do with the duck eggs; she suggested custard or a pudding (because of the extra richness of duck eggs), although she confessed she’d never used them before. So pudding we did (the following weekend).
Technically, Hub fried one of the six duck eggs (over hard) to see if it tasted any differently than a chicken egg. He said the differences were subtle. Meanwhile, we made a last minute run to the first farm the following Thursday, where we ogled all the delicious options in the stocked dairy refrigerators (so much fresh cheese, but I couldn’t east most of it because it would not be migraine friendly). We ended up buying a bunch of small containers of heavy cream, a couple of whole milk containers (for me and for my father), and two pounds of fresh butter (plus half a pound for Dad). Hub bought fresh cheese bread, we found more tomatoes for my father, and we headed home. Upon arriving home, yours truly pulled out some crackers (they were easily available) and slathered them in butter just so I could try the butter. OMG that butter. The farm closes for the season soon (closed by the time this posts) and I’m considering making a final run to buy more butter. Like ten pounds. OMG so good. I roasted spaghetti squash with the butter for dinner. I also roasted my other squashes (Hub doesn’t eat those) with the butter for myself for the week and YUM. I have also continued to snack on crackers with butter…obviously the crackers are just butter delivery systems. I mean eating butter straight out of the container would be weird. Delicious, but weird.
On Sunday following the dairy acquisition, we made a MAPLE PUDDING WITH THE FRESH HEAVY CREAM AND REMAINING DUCK EGGS THAT WAS SO AMAZING THAT I ALMOST COULDN’T STAND NOT EATING ALL OF IT AT ONCE. Ahem. We had doubled the recipe, it was a lot of pudding and I would have been delightfully ill if I had eaten all the pudding. We also made fresh whipped cream with some of the heavy cream leftover from the pudding recipe. I’ve never had maple pudding before, nor the duck eggs. I believe the duck eggs and the fresh heavy cream (and butter) made an amazingly smooth, creamy, riiiiich pudding. We used real dark amber maple syrup, which didn’t hurt one bit. Please, drool over it…
Also, I didn’t mention that during our anniversary week, Hub and I made gluten free funnel cake. I’ve been asking about doing this for years and we just never got around to it. It was well worth getting around to…
So much yum. And incredibly easy once you get the concept.
Not pictured, the ricotta donuts rolled in cinnamon and sugar that we decided to make since we were already heating up oil for frying. They, too, were yummalicous.
You would think all I do is eat. Jeezum wheezum. Truthfully, I have been on a very restrictive diet for my migraines and I’ve been afraid to eat anything new. Over these months of COVID times, since I’ve been able to identify some triggers that really screwed me up, I’ve been adding some items back into my diet. And since I’ve been able to get my weight under pretty good control, I wanted to splurge over our anniversary stay-cation. The funnel cake, the ricotta donuts, the maple puuuuudding…those have been my gifts to myself. To enjoy food when I want to enjoy it. And so I enjoyed, and I took the opportunity to learn to relax a little bit. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to enjoy food again. A lot of time I eat to fuel and to watch my weight (migraine medication has helped me so much that I’m willing to take the extra effort to watch my weight while taking the meds…almost all of the options have weight gain as a side effect), so I’m learning that there is a time to enjoy foods as well.
ETA: Meanwhile, tonight I roasted more yellow squash and zucchini tonight (spaghetti squash again this past Sunday) from the farmer’s market Sunday morning. And tonight we roasted sweet potatoes from the market, and something called Honeynut squash. It’s related to butternut squash but is smaller and sweeter, and all around more flavorful. Pictures? Why yes…
I’ve already instructed Hub that we are going back to the farmer’s market this weekend. He was agreeable. I don’t think we’re going to make the farm (with the delish dairy) tomorrow, and then they are closed for the season. Question of the day? Where will I find my fresh butttttter???
Depending on where you live, remember when it used to snow? In my childhood, we had many a snowfall, even times when it was taller than I was. My neighborhood was pretty flat, so we didn’t have a ton of places to sled. If the snow was bad enough and streets were shut down, there were a few places to go sledding on streets. There were a bunch of kids my age or just slightly older, and we would take turns sledding. Of course walking back up the hill was the WORST, especially since I was always a fat kid and I was bundled up in–omg–snow pants and a big jumbo parka. I don’t actually remember having one of those sleds, but I know we had a couple of different kinds of sleds in our household.
Beyond the couple of streets that were sloped enough for sledding, one of our neighbors had a really good, steep hill in their front yard. Most of the kids sledded down that hill but I didn’t want to. With good reason, because one year B2 (also called “Bulldozer” in his youth) sledded down the hill and went head-first into the hubcap of a vehicle at the bottom of the hill. Not the first time he got stitches as a kid, but it scared me. Of course as a kid, I was scared all the time anyway…
Did you have an old red sled? Or one of those plastic round sleds? What about the rectangular plastic sleds? I think we had all of them over the years we were growing up.
I am still learning about my new, smaller body. It’s at once mine and not mine, as I am attempting to move it, wash it, dress it, understand it… When I first lost the weight, I bought a few new things to wear that better fit my body. The reason I did that was because I had been wanting to replace some old pairs of (comfortable) jeans. And when I mean old, I mean…oh jeez, probably more than 15 years old. They fit okay, I took good care of them so they were in good shape, and I liked the colors (one was purple, another was black, the third was a standard blue). Before and after my weight loss, my biggest issue with jeans was that my hips were a good bit larger than my waist, so jeans never fit right. If they fit at the hips, they were too big in the waist. I didn’t wear belts, I wasn’t paying to have a $20 pair of jeans altered, I just dealt with it. The jeans I had were sized/shaped in a way that the gap at my waist wasn’t horrendous, and I mostly covered it with long tunic shirts anyway. For the rest of my wardrobe, I bought knit pants that had elastic waistbands, they were forgiving and stretchy knit that I could wear even if my size changed. I bought leggings and lounge pants for around the house (since I hadn’t worked out of the house in years). I bought tee shirts in tunic lengths to cover my hips and butt. I dressed for comfort, wasn’t looking to show my body but rather was looking for clothes that covered me. The three pairs of jeans I had were the most “fitted” items I owned, and I didn’t even wear them that much because they were not meant for warm climates, so they were winter-only items. And I didn’t bother to wear them at home. Winter sometimes came and went without me going out of the house, so the jeans did not see consistent wear.
I had a slew of clothes from stores like Roaman’s and Woman Within (who are now the same company), because they were the stores that carried my sizes. I bought the same clothes over and over again, when they were on sale so I wasn’t spending a lot of money. Sure the clothes wore out, but I literally bought pants on sale for $10 in every color I could bear wearing. Sometimes I bought multiple pairs in black, blue, and gray. If I was daring, I bought purple pants. Then I had the $10 tunic shirts from the same store, during the same sale. For years I lived (at home) in leggings. Over the last five or six years, I’ve been wearing men’s lounge pants from Target that I buy on sale. They last forever, they’re comfortable, and they have GREAT POCKETS. As I was losing some weight, I went down in sizes, but continued to buy the same lounge pants. And I was collecting tank tops (thanks to my heat intolerance) from whatever store had longer length sizes. Again, cheap and easy care, because I don’t work and I didn’t have to worry about anything more than (sloppy) casual clothes.
As I was buying smaller sizes in clothing, I started taking the larger sizes out of my closet. I hang most of my clothes, so my dresser drawers have either held duplicates of clothing, or things I wasn’t ready to get rid of. I’ve gone up and down in weight for my entire life, but I’ve never lost so much weight as I have in the last four years. I assumed, like every other period in my life, I would just put the weight back on. So far, that did happen because of my migraine medication, but I was able to catch it after 15 pounds. With great concentration and attention, I have lost all of that weight again, and I’m very near to my final goal (another 2 pounds!). I am planning to stay at this weight because it is where I am physically comfortable.
I’ve had so many clothes sitting in my dresser drawers that are…four sizes too big. I was (and am) afraid to get rid of them, because what if I gain the weight and need clothes again? What if I fail again? What if…what if…what if… Last weekend, I got a bug up my butt and went through several drawers in one of my dressers and threw all the bigger clothes into bags for donation. I felt…okay. I knew I still had more drawers of clothing, so I let it go for the time being. Last night I ordered clothes from Woman Within again, because I wanted new leggings that fit and I was familiar with their options. And they were cheap. I stopped myself from buying their tunic tee shirts, because I don’t wear that kind of shirt anymore. And I didn’t buy any of their knit pants, but I have several pairs in only a size or two up and they fit for when I need them.
Tonight I went to my other dresser and started stuffing more clothes into trash bags. Pants that were four sizes too big, shirts that were too big and I would probably never wear again. I had clothes that I’d bought my mother in the last months of her life because she had lymphedema in her legs and needed stretchy knit pants. When she died, I took the pants from her house because I wanted to clean them, and they just ended up in my drawers. I had history with every pair of pants and shirt that I ripped out of the drawers and stuffed into the bags. I had lived my life in these clothes, covering my body without much thought. Covering my body with clothes that covered, not that fit.
After I lost the weight the first time (before the medication issue), I bought jeans. I struggle to find jeans again because my body shape is still such that my hips are 10″ bigger than my waist. I bought and returned clothes (from online) over and over again, giving up time and again. I finally found two pairs of jeans that were manageable, and I bought them. Then I hung them in my closet and didn’t wear them for months. When the winter season came after I bought the jeans, I had nowhere to go, and I was often sick from my migraine disease. I finally started wearing them to therapy because that was the only time I left the house. The winter is coming, I’m hoping to wear them again. I mostly like how they fit my body, and I’m learning to be okay with showing my shape.
I bought a pair of knee high boots that actually fit my legs, for the first time in my life. I’ve never been able to squeeze my calves into a pair of boots…all my snow boots were short because I had big calves. I’ve never worn those boots. I tried them on again tonight, they still fit, but I have no occasion to wear them. But I have them, and they are wearable.
I buy tank tops both that are fitted and relaxed. I wear them all, and I show the shape of my body. I show the shape of my stomach and I show my big upper arms. For better or for worse, parts of my body will never change (without surgery) because my skin was stretched out due to my weight. My upper arms are that way, and despite how flabby and floppy they are, I wear the tank tops and I don’t care. I don’t care who looks at me and sees flabby arms, I see progress in my physicality.
Last week I crocheted a top out of some yarn I’d been hoarding for myself. I shaped the top to fit me because I am comfortable showing my upper body. When I finished the top, I decided to crochet a skirt to go with it, in the same yarn. I figured like all the rest of my store-bought skirts and dresses, I would crochet a long skirt. I usually wear straight skirts, but they are always ankle length. Because I’ve never crocheted a skirt before, I was trying it on constantly to make sure it fit my waist and hips before going straight down to my ankles. As I tried it on where the hem was just above my knees, I stood and looked at myself in the only full length mirror in my house, which is in our guest room. I’m short, and I know logically that long skirts make me look shorter, but I do not like my legs. I have always had very heavy legs, and I really had no shape to them from hips down. So I always covered them with long pants, long skirts, long dresses. I’ve never owned shorts. One year I went crazy for our anniversary trip to the beach (in winter) and I bought capri pants. I wore them at the beach (so we could slosh through the waves) and never again. I literally found them this weekend and just stuffed them into the donation bags. But back to my crocheted skirt…I looked at the short skirt and I looked at my legs. And I looked at my body. And I realized I didn’t know who I was looking at. Again, I’m not–nor will I ever be–small, but I did lose weight and it is visible. And I saw shape to my legs, and I saw that the shorter length skirt looked good. Better than I could have expected. It was…weird. I ended up adding some length to the skirt (I would have been afraid to sit), but only just below my knees. I have no clue where I’m going to wear this outfit, but I made it and it’s pretty neat.
I have a second closet full of more “dress” clothes, the majority of which are the same four sizes too big. Multiple times I have tried to sell some of the clothes–they are all in good condition, but many are old even though the “styles” are pretty classic looking–but I have not been successful. Where I was fine tossing the majority of my casual clothes into bags for donation, the dressier items I would like to get some of my money back. Even if it’s a small amount. I can’t imagine that the companies I donate to will be able to do much with my dress clothes and I hate to see them just recycled or thrown away. I am on the fence about this, so we’ll see how I feel as I find time to go through the stuff in that closet.
I’m both afraid and excited to get rid of the oversized clothes taking up room in my dressers…and maybe in my “dress” closet. I’m trusting myself to stay at this weight, and trust isn’t something I do very often. I fear failure so much that I don’t do things so that I won’t fail. But these days I am challenging myself to grow and learn and be a better version of me.
My whole life I’ve had a very good, strong sense of smell. I smelled things that others didn’t, or I smelled it before they did. It was actually a kind of curse for me. My father was/is a smoker, and his cancer of choice is a tobacco pipe. His favorite tobacco was a cherry flavored one, and I hated it. I hated all of it. I still do. The smell of the pipe in use and the stale after-smell made me nauseous. I hated having to sit near him because even when he wasn’t actively smoking, I could still smell it on him. I was actually relieved that he was never the hugging type, because if I had to hug him, the smell would transfer to me. He still smokes, oftentimes sitting out in his garage while reading a book, and I hate having to go in there to talk to him. Door open or closed, the space becomes filled with the smoke and the smell. And when I leave to go home, the smell is in my hair and on my clothes, and sometimes I feel like it just gets into my nose and won’t go away.
Another drawback was that everyone always came to me and asked me, “Do you smell something…. __________?” Something weird? Something bad? Something rotten? Something burning? Whatever it was, they always asked me, because I had a sensitive nose. These days, it’s weird because I often get phantom smells with my migraine attacks, and usually they are smells of burning or smoke or cigarettes. All of which I hate. It stinks, literally and figuratively.
My mother loved perfume, and she wore many different kinds. As I grew older and I learned to express myself better to her, she realized that I would sometimes get ill from the smell of her perfumes. Especially in a car. And so she would only wear one perfume when she was around me, called tea rose. Although she wore other perfumes all through her life, the tea rose was just for me. And when I smell roses, I think of her.
Sometimes I think people miss the smells of life. I’m sure they would be different for everyone, but how about the smell after a good rain? I love that clean and fresh scent, something that can’t really be captured in a fake fragrance. The smell of my husband. The smell of our house. The smell of our dog’s paws (corn chips). Smells are powerful, both positive and negative, and I cannot imagine going through life without them. I know there are people who don’t have a sense of smell, or have lost their sense of smell, and I don’t know how I would respond to that situation.
Three years ago I was talking about living on borrowed time with Le Moo. I have recently updated that report with a new post about Le Moo. Last night when I was sitting on the floor with Butthead, I realized that Butthead is today almost exactly where we were with Le Moo three years ago. Best as we can tell, since BH was a stray, her age when we adopted her was roughly eighteen months old. She came to us in spring 2013, which means she should be about 8 1/2 – 9 years old.
My two girls…and lots of dog hair on the carpet.
My once slender and and gangly dog is now the same weight as Le Moo–roughly 95lbs–and has grown into a lovely looking adult. Her fur is shorter and much denser than LM’s, and her body shape is different, but she’s become a Big Dog. And as previously discussed, Big Dogs have a shorter lifespan than their smaller compatriots. Butthead is guessed to be a Newfoundland and Great Pyrenees mix, both of which have life spans in the 7-10 year range.
Resting sad face.
It was quite a shock to me to calculate BH’s age and realize she has become a senior dog. She’s still that goofy and overly animated younger sibling to LM that she was from day one. It’s difficult to see her as a senior dog when she acts like a two year old. I do acknowledge that she isn’t playing with her toys as frequently or as enthusiastically as she once did, but she’s so goofy and playful and affectionate, and so opposite to Le Moo. Because of her personality, I don’t worry about her the same way I worry about LM. I should be just as worried, considering our vet said BH has the worst case of hip displaysia he has seen, even though she hardly ever shows symptoms. She’s also torn her CCL and had it replaced once, then fixed shortly thereafter because she tore her meniscus after the original surgery. She also has food sensitivities, which we have spent most of her life trying to figure out. And for years she would randomly throw up and we didn’t know why…until we realized that if she ate anything frozen, she would throw up within 10 minutes to an hour later. We figured this out one year when we had a terrible snow storm and she was out there eating frozen chunks of snow off the deck. Puke, puke, puke, puke. And then she snatched a frozen green bean off the floor (which LM gets after her dinner), and promptly went outside and threw up. It’s so weird.
She’s so weird. She’s a good dog, but she barks a ton and that can get so annoying. She will go outside and bark to see if anyone is out to bark back. Then if someone barks back, she will bark for the next hour (if we let her) even if they don’t bark back again. She’s afraid of the oven when we open the door, and the smoke detector (understandable) and the vacuum…but she loves when Hub grinds coffee beans and she comes running when the air popcorn maker starts up. And now she’s afraid of flies in the house, and she’ll run into her crate (which she sleeps in a lot during the day, but we never close the door anymore). We’ve started her on an anti-anxiety medication to see if it will help her, because her anxiety is getting worse as she ages.
That’s Butthead in the back against the wall. She squeezed herself into that spot to be touching Le Moo.
And above all else, that girl loves Le Moo. The majority of the pictures I have with the two dogs together, BH is touching LM. Head, feet, tail, butt…somehow and someway she’s gotta touch LM. She follows LM around, and outside she’s almost always near her.
She’s a good dog, and she’s aging almost without notice. Until now. I gotta remember that even though I don’t want to miss a minute of Le Moo’s life, Butthead is getting up there, too. I don’t want to look back and realize I missed something because I didn’t realize she was aging because of her youthful personality.
Ahhh, childhood. Remember the simple days of yanking all those pillows off the sofa, grabbing the kitchen or dining room chairs, and building that pillow fort? Hunh, me either. If we had taken pillows off the sofa and tried to put them on the floor, or if we had grabbed the dining room chairs and turned them upside down (or sideways) on the family room floor, my mother would not have been happy. As a household of three dirty boys and a hairy dog, my mother was forever fighting to keep the house clean.
In our first family house, there were two living spaces…one was “formal” and was just inside the front door, which meant it was seen literally before you even stepped foot in the house. This room had first dark green sculpted carpeting, and then later deep, thick, white pile carpeting. The dark green showed all the dog hairs and dust, the white showed, well, everything. Including the vacuum marks. I remember roller skating on the thick white pile…and I also remember vacuuming the room afterward so my mother didn’t know. This room was off-limits to all of us, including the dog who was trained to not step foot on that carpet, so no fort-making there.
The second living space we had was what we called the family room, which had a big wood burning fire place and a hearth big enough that you could actually sit on it. It also had a cut and loop pile carpet that was a mix of browns and beiges, so the dog’s hair blended in. The furniture in there was dark and outdated. We were not allowed to eat in there, but everything else was do-able. Except throwing sofa pillows–or any pillows for that matter–on the floor. The sofa was dark brown weave, which would pick up all the dog hairs and never let them go.
I think my only fort options were in my tiny bedroom closet. My bedroom was about the size of a closet, and somehow the builder fit tiny closet inside that closet. My room was so small that one of my two dressers was IN the closet. Next to that was hanging space, which meant there was empty room underneath. I’m pretty sure I hid out in there under the dangling digits of my clothing with the louvered doors pulled closed. Then again, I was an only girl and very afraid of everything, so the closet probably seemed dark and quiet and safe.
Getting a better picture of why I grew up to be this confused and questioning human being?
Did you build a fort in your childhood? Or was your mother like mine, always trying to keep the house tidy?
meANXIETYme 