Artist Dates at the Flower Market

If I had another life, I'd totally open a flower shop.  I could definitely get myself out of bed at 5:45 a couple of times a week if it meant I got to play with flowers all the time.  The LA Flower Market is the most awesome place on the planet, and the best place for an Artist's Way Artist Date...

Wrigley came out on the deck to lay in the sun and play with the flowers.

Thousands of orchids...

Row upon row of gerber daisies

Lots of roses

What $35 at the Flower Market will get you

With which you can make lots of arrangements

A day with lots of flowers is a Good Day

On Grooming...

The Music for the day is Dido, because Dido makes me feel girly and 24, and I just really like her.



Given the fact that I'm not pregnant, I am dyeing my hair.  I also did a serious eyebrow plucking this morning.  You know, the kind you do once every 6 months or so, where it takes half an hour, and your eyebrows get all red and irritated, but dang, do they look good, and you think, "man, why don't I try to keep this up?  It looks so good!"  But then you don't, and eventually the cycle starts again?  That kind of eyebrow plucking.

All of this self-improvement is making me think about grooming in general.

I've never been a fan of grooming.  It reminds me of something you do to a dog.  I have always been a nail-biter (though since they look really good now from being preggo, I'm going to try to keep them that way).  My hair was a complete disaster until I was about 23 and went to a good salon for the first time.  And the best thing?  When I was 20 I got my eyebrows waxed for the first time.  And fainted.  And woke up in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.  No joke.  That eyebrow waxing cost me a $500 deductible.

Nope, grooming and I do not get along as a general rule.

But as I get older, I realize that appearances do matter, as much as I'd like to pretend they don't, and it doesn't matter how firm and confident your handshake is if your nails look like they've been through a shredder and the cuticles are bleeding.  So I put a clear topcoat on a couple of times a week, and that keeps me from biting too much.  It's a small annoyance, but it's worth it.

I used to dye my hair fun shades - like green, or blue - for fun.  Now I've reached the point in my life where I dye it because if I don't, the silver appears, and I'm still not ready to embrace the silver.  I used to get it done pretty regularly by professionals, but I spent enough hours sitting in the chair watching what they were doing to be able to figure out how to wield the highlight foils without making it a complete disaster.  I have bigger priorities now than dropping $150 on getting new highlights every 8 weeks.  Like cruises.  And clothes for cruises...

I have realized that there is a direct proportionate relationship between the amount of time I spend on these small annoying grooming tasks, and the care I take of myself in general.  For example, on the days when I'm too busy to put lotion on before bed, and wake up with flaky skin, I generally don't drink a lot of water either, and I probably ate fast food.  However, on days like this, where I'm plucking and dyeing, I'm also fixing a big salad for dinner, and made myself a fruit smoothie for breakfast.  And have had five glasses of water so far today.

It makes me think that the grooming isn't a cause, but it's an effect.  If I spend time taking care of myself, making myself a priority, good grooming is the natural outcome.  Which means I need to think less about the grooming as a "to do" and more about the big picture of the Care and Feeding of Heather.

A Room of One's Own

My hubby and I are both only children.  I loved being an only child.  In fact, I'm slightly afraid of having more than one child myself, because I'm just not sure how that dynamic would work.  I had lots of imaginary friends, and talking stuffed animals (I still do, and feel bad for anyone who doesn't!).  Plus, from the time I was about 10, we had an awesome Boxer, who snuggled with me until I was in high school and he got sick and peed all over the house, so we had to restrict his living spaces, poor guy.

Anyway, I say that because J and I are kind of weird, as far as married couples go, in terms of how we use our space.  And yes, we're weird in other ways, too.  Come on, I'm quicker than that.  I saw that one coming a mile away.

Ok, so we're weird in terms of our allocation of space in that we each have our "own" rooms.  We have a two bedroom house.  The bedroom is "his" in that all of his stuff is there.  His clothes, his baseball bobble heads, his giant baseball card collection, and so on.  Our home office is "my room" in that I keep all my stuff there - handbags, books, notebooks, pens, makeup, jewelry, etc.  The living room is shared, though that being said, it houses Boy Things like the TV, Playstation, etc.

This presented a bit of a conundrum when we were expecting.  We always assumed that the home office would become the nursery.  My desk and work area could be moved to the living room.  But where would that leave me to put my girly stuff?  The thought of combining stuff in the bedroom has honestly never crossed my mind.  I'm an only child like that.

We have an attic space that goes over most of the house.  There are no stairs up to this space, but J can climb up one of our bookshelves to get up there (he used to rock climb) and we would bring in a ladder for big jobs, like taking down Christmas decorations.  J also built a ramp for the cats so that they can get up and have all that space for themselves, undisturbed by the lesser species of human with whom they cohabit.

This attic is much more of a crawl space.  It is a-shaped, and at it's very highest point it's about 4 feet high.  Not really a dancing spot.  But I thought I could create a perfect Girly Nook in part of the attic.  I just needed to be able to get up and down easily.  So in mid-October - actually, the Saturday before I miscarried - J installed one of those fold-in-the-ceiling ladders like Chevy Chase had in the National Lampoons Christmas Vacation.  It folds down into the kitchen, and is easily climbable for a heights-wimp like me.

I ignored the Girly Nook for a while because it brought back too many memories of being pregnant.  Now that we weren't having a baby, I still had lots of time to enjoy having my own room, with all my things intact in that room.  But slowly, I'm discovering the joy of my attic Girly Nook.

When I was sixteen, my parents finished off our own attic and I moved my room up there.  It was actually two rooms, and probably 6 and a half feet tall at the highest point, so easily standable for most of it.  My parents put bookshelves in the middle, dividing it into two rooms; a little teenaged-girly-haven-suite.  They also put in a skylight, so I could lay underneath it in the rain and write my "cellophane-wrapped-soul" poetry while watching the rain come down.  It was awesome, and I loved it.

My Girly Nook here isn't going to be a replacement for that one, and I'm still going to have to figure out where to put most of my stuff when a baby comes.  An attic nook is no place for my handbags, for example.  If my Simplification Quest continues on pace, though, I shouldn't have as much stuff to worry about (I'm trying to get back to the way I was in the days when I could move to England with three albeit-giant suitcases).

So I put down a colorful rug, got a beanbag chair, hung up fairy lights, put in one small bookcase, with another one waiting to be put together, and made a little meditation spot on an ikea coffee table.  This has become my new favorite place to sit and think.  The cats aren't used to me being up here yet, though.  They still stare at me and give me glowering looks, the unwelcome intruder that I am.  Once we have a baby, I'm hoping I can still come up here to have some quiet and be around my favorite books, journals, pens, and pictures.

Here's a picture taken with my cell phone of my Girly Nook.  Oh, a note on the stickers on the wall - about 20 years ago a family lived here and they had teenage boys.  The boys put those stickers up on the wall, and I don't want to take them down because it's part of the history and spirit of the place.  

I'm sitting in the Girly Nook right now, listening to the monsoon outside, and drinking my hot cocoa.  It's warm, cozy, and very comforting.  Kind of like a bubblebath, but without your skin getting all pruny.

Out of Hibernation

So I've been blogging almost exclusively about my miscarriage for almost 7 weeks, and I'm getting tired of it.  I'm getting tired of being consumed by my miscarriage.  It's bad enough that I'm going to have to live with this hole in my heart for the rest of my life.  I don't need to blog about it exclusively forever as well.  I'm not, believe it or not, Miscarriage Girl.  Oh, I'm sure it will come up from time to time - there's no way it can't, and I'm not going to hide it.  I'm going to continue to talk about it and share with others who are going through it because the alternative is to keep it all hush-hush, which I hate, but I'm not going to start off every blog entry with something about my miscarriage.  It just doesn't work like that.

I've been hibernating, but I'm starting to come out of the cave.  I'm a different person now, that's for sure.  There's more grit, less giddy trusting in life, and I'm pretty much not hip with putting up with anything anymore.  I have less patience for some things that have always bothered me, but I've always stayed quiet about because I'm a Nice Girl.  But in other ways I'm more understanding, and in awe of the human spirit because people go through so much, and they are so resilient, and I'm amazed at that.  

In celebration of my shedding of the hibernatory cave, and entering the springtime (albeit in December), I'm making some early resolutions.  I will spend time doing the things I like to do, and not doing the things I think I ought to be doing because it will make somebody else happy (and my job does count as something that makes me happy, so that can stay).

1.  I will do a Renaissance English History podcast at least once every 6 weeks, starting this weekend.  Like, no kidding.  It's on my calendar.  I'm getting back on that train.

2.  I will figure out how to work my new d60 camera which I've had for nearly 6 months.

3.  I will also figure out how to photoshop my photos to make them look even more awesome.

4.  I will not be ashamed of the amount of Peter Cetera I listen to.

5.  I will really (and I mean really) read all the classics I've never read but always meant to.  At least one a month. 

6.  I will do NaNoWriMo in December.  It won't be the same as doing it in November, but I'm not going to wait until next November to write my book.

7.  I will not feel guilty because I don't send out Christmas cards.  Seriously, Christmas cards were only invented to get people to use the new Penny Post in Victorian England, so it's a bit of consumerism that I don't need to feel guilty for not being part of.  

8.  I will also not feel guilty about the fact that I listen to Christmas music all year long.  And I don't just mean classical Christmas music like the Messiah, but rather, I listen to schmaltzy stuff all year long.  And I don't care.  

9.  I will unsubscribe to my RSS feed of the New Yorker because I never read it, and it just makes me feel guilty for all of the intelligent conversation I'm missing out on.  Vanity Fair can stay, though.  It doesn't make me feel as guilty.

10.  I will listen to the Harmonia Early Music Podcast every week because it is awesome.

11.  I will drink more water and less soda.

And finally, I will figure out a way to do something with my grief that is productive.  Whether it's my camp/retreat idea, or something else, Baby Teysko will be honored, and his little life will have more meaning than he could ever imagine.   

So that's what you can count on me for ongoingly.  I might break down and lose it from time to time - that's to be expected - but I'm coming back into the world.  

Doing the right thing, losing it, and keeping it together (and nose piercings)

Another week, another celebrity says she had a miscarriage.  Pink opened up on the Ellen Degeneres show, confirming her pregnancy, and sharing about a previous miscarriage.  Seriously, is it just me, or are miscarriages absolutely everywhere?

As for me, I'm doing all right.  I had a breakdown on Sunday when we were going to see some friends of J's in San Jose.  On the way from Sacramento we stopped at Sonic (their pumpkin hot chocolate is on the list of things I'm absolutely sure I like) and J was sharing stories of the trouble he and these friends used to get up to in college.  Particularly things like raves and ecstasy and other assorted illegal substances.  This set me off because:

These friends of his have babies.

These friends of his partook of lots of illegal drugs.

I can count the times I have inhaled pot on my right hand.  That is the only illegal drug I have ever consumed.

I have no baby.

In my grief-stricken, hormonal world, this seemed grossly unfair, setting off a crying marathon the likes of which I doubt that Sonic has seen before.

Yesterday my awesome friend Meredith reminded me that just as I was not punished by losing Baby Teysko, these girls were not rewarded with their babies.  Sh*t happens sometimes.  Sometimes girls who did ecstasy get babies, and sometimes girls who smoked pot four times lose babies.  It's just how it goes.  

But here's the thing.  At the end of your life, you don't get a medal for playing by the rules.  Nobody cares.  Seriously.  Nobody really cares.  You can care, and if that's important to you, that's great.  I'm not talking about the harming-others-and-society kinds of rules here - obviously people care about those - people in uniforms with badges, for one.  But the little stuff.  Like whether you go through the express lane with more than 15 items.  Whether you litter when you're on back roads and nobody sees.  Whether you make a habit of speeding, or tailgating, or generally driving like an asshole.  Whether you take ecstasy tablets when you're in college.  

I noticed that when this first happened, I said that I really wanted to do a drug to put me to sleep and take all the pain away, but I was too smart and would try to grieve like a healthy person.  That's a phrase I've used before.  

My parents' divorce when I was a teenager was very messy.  Like, alcohol and firearms messy.  In a classic child-becomes-parent scenario, one night when the house was empty, I went through all of my dad's things, taking all of the aforementioned alcohol and firearms, and hiding them in my room up in the attic.  I wouldn't tell him where they were, but at least a few times I remember taking them all out and placing them around me - the bottles of alcohol and the gun cases- and thinking how it would be really easy, fast, and relatively painless to make the hurt go away.  

But you know what stopped me?  I remember thinking that I was too smart for that.  Plus, I recognized that it was the height of teenage-girl-drama to do something so stupid.  I knew that my parents pretty much sucked right then, but that I would be able to leave home soon enough, go away and live my own life away from them, and create my own family.  But if I indulged in the alcohol/firearm way out, I wouldn't have that opportunity.  And I'd really be cutting off my nose to spite my face. 

So I continued to do well in school so I could go away.  When I was 17 I smoked a Camel Special Light in the parking lot of kmart after a Spin Doctor's concert.  That was the height of my teenage rebellion.  Oh, and I wore doc martens.

I moved to Knoxville.  Then I moved to LA.  Then I moved to London.  Then I moved to New York.  Then I moved to Nashville.  Then I moved to LA again.  In the space of 11 years I had 15 different zip codes.  Then I got married and bought a house with a mortgage I could afford, and got cats, and got pregnant, and it seemed to be working out.

But here I am again, wanting to do something destructive, and not doing it because I'm too smart.  

A few weeks ago I went with J to one of the open AA meetings, and I found myself incredibly uncomfortable.  I hated all of those people.  Really hated them.  And I hated being there.  I didn't belong there, with those loser alcoholics, I thought.  When I shared my experience with J, he suggested that maybe I hated them all so much because I'm jealous of them: they did something I have always wanted to do, but never did - that is to say, they all completely lost it/ went crazy/ hit rock bottom/ checked out/ broke down / etc.  And they had people to pick them up, and they're all recovering now.  Maybe I hate them so much because I want to do that but never felt like I could.

I've danced at the brink of losing it - I've come close enough to peer over the edge and kind of make out shapes in the darkness down there (1995, for example, was a bad year which involved too much irresponsible credit card usage and bad internet relationships) - but I've always been able to stay on level ground, either through my own ingenuity and brains, through good luck, through the help of my parents (they weren't always crazy) or someone else who mentored me out of the muck (I'm looking at you, the teachers and counselors at PVHS), or a combination of all of those things.

A lot of the feelings I think I'm dealing with now are holdovers from being a teenager, when I wanted to collapse and completely lose it, but I couldn't because I was an only child who was desperate to get away from home, and was forward-thinking enough to know that in order to get away, I had to keep it together.  The circumstances are different now, but the feelings of wanting to just give up and let someone else deal with life for me for a while are the same.

For example, I forgot to pay the homeowners insurance bill that was due at the end of October.  Now I can't find it.  How am I supposed to deal with f*cking homeowners insurance when I'm dealing with mortuaries and death certificates?  I'll call them and sort it out, but it really pisses me off.  There should be some kind of service.  Like a "we'll handle life for you while you relax, and listen to peter cetera and blink 182 (can there be a weirder combination??  I'm not questioning it, I'm just going with it) and play with crayons, and read silly books, and sleep in, and drink hot chocolate for a few months" kind of service.  Does something like that exist?  Can somebody do that?  Maybe I should.  Maybe it should be a non-profit.  Hospitals could offer it to grieving people.

When I told J about my wanting to fall apart feelings, and shared the whole "I'm too smart for my own good" thing, I asked him what he thought.  He said that obviously as my husband, he didn't think I should fall apart.  But as an alcoholic, he thought for sure I should fall apart because I'm a mid-life-crisis waiting to happen.  That's how he put it.  Like eventually there's going to be something that will make me snap, and I will seriously lose it on a grand scale, making up for however many years of keeping it together.  I'll take off and move to Italy and wear designer sunglasses and chiffon scarves everywhere (I don't know where I came up with that).

So this is the stuff that I'm talking about in therapy, and trying to figure out.  Why, for example, do I so strongly hate people in AA so much when I'm in their meetings?  On a purely intellectual level, I really have no desire to fall apart.  I am blessed to have a good job that I enjoy, and I like going out into the world, and I even like talking to people sometimes.  I like my espresso machine, and I like being outside on our big deck.  I don't really want to completely fall apart.

But on an emotional level, it's very tempting.  And that takes me back to the beginning.  My first response to the temptation of falling apart is "you can't do everything you want to do all the time, like fall apart.  You have responsibilities."  And I sound exactly like my dad.  Who, incidentally, fell apart.  That aside, he's German, so he believes in following rules and fulfilling responsibilities and duty to family and job and country and everything like that.

My dad doesn't so much hate people who don't follow rules, as much as he just finds it incomprehensible.  "How can they be passing you when you're going 70 and the speed limit is 65," he asks, on the freeway.  "How can people have meth labs in their house?  It's illegal," is his response when I tell him they did a meth raid.  He just doesn't get it.  I've taken that incomprehension and moved it up a notch to disgust and hatred.  Unlike my dad, I understand that people don't all care about rules.  And I hate those people.

Which brings me back to the breakdown at Sonic.  People who have babies after breaking so many rules seriously piss me off.  Like, seriously.  I'm sure the emotional response I have to it will subside, but right now I already want to hit almost every pregnant woman I see, so, well, it caught me on a bad day when I have little patience...

Maybe my problem isn't so much all the people around me breaking rules, but the fact that I'm standing on the sidelines going, "you can't do that," when they so clearly can, and are, doing that, and they don't even hear me trying to referee, nor do they much care.  Maybe I should learn something from them.  Maybe I'm too far one way, and maybe there are people who are too far the other way, and maybe a good way would be to ride the center line.  Maybe, rather than going out and purposefully breaking rules, I just need to not care about the rules so much.  Because as I said in the beginning, they don't give you a medal for abiding by rules, and nobody really cares.

And that is why I am seriously considering getting my nose pierced next week.  And I would actually be saying I'm definitely getting it pierced, except I'm a real wimp when it comes to needles, and I'm afraid I might pass out.  But I'm really playing around with it.  Which, in and of itself, is a big deal.  I'm all worried about how that will affect me professionally.  Will it hurt me to walk into a meeting with a tiny stud in my nostril?  Will people not take me seriously?  Will it be something I regret?  To which I say, screw it.  I'm sick of worrying about whether I'll regret something.

Maybe some nose-piercing will keep the midlife crisis at bay until I can figure all this stuff out.

  

I'm staging a stress-intervention on myself

Setting the scene for my blogging tonight:
1.  The Beatles - Across the Universe - playing - really loudly
2.  Candles - the mango ones from Ikea.  I'm trying to use them up because they smell summery, and it's time for fall-smelling candles, but I have way too many candles anyway (wasn't there a line in Sex and the City where Samantha talks about how candles are the single woman's new version of cats?) and I don't want to keep them all winter.
3.  Just got out of a bubblebath and smell like lemon.  I like lemon-scented things.

So this is my stress-intervention. 

I'm nearly at a breaking point, and I have to do something, so I'm pulling out every stress-relief tip I can remember from the past 17 years of reading magazines, self-help books, personal development seminars, yoga, meditation, etc.  I even sat at my Simple Abundance altar - a shelf on my bookcase that has lots of my favorite pictures - me in the greenery of Bath, me in Scarborough, photos by Joe Cornish, a nice little laughing Buddha, a calming dolphin I painted at Color Me Mine 12 years ago, and a stack of these angel meditation affirmation cards I've been lugging around for about 14 years and never really read.  I've got to get in the habit of using all these things because here's what's going on:

1)  I'm pregnant.  As if we didn't know that already.  I am seriously suffering from a case of unrealized-expectations.  I thought the whole second-trimester thing was supposed to be great.  But maybe because I wasn't so bad in the first, or for whatever reason, mine is pretty much sucking.  The worst is the insomnia.  I'm really affected by sleep - I don't function well on less than 7 hours, and never have.  But these days I'm waking up at 3am.  My belly is also getting bigger, which is making my back hurt, particularly when I sit.  I'm trying to do regular exercise, but with the whole waking-up-at-3am thing, and being exhausted, it hasn't been happening as much as I'd like.  It's all giving a distinct gray and nasty color to everything that happens throughout my day. 

not the least of which is including...

2)  My hubby getting sober.  I don't want to say too much about this because it's his journey, and mine is through alanon, but suffice it to say, hubby wants to be sober when Baby T is born, and has 54 days, thanks to AA and the support of an amazing group of men who are standing for him making it one day at a time.  I'd like to be proud of him, but it's hard sometimes when he's being a royal sh*t.  He's also been in this really intensive 6-month Landmark course, which has been putting him through the ringer as well, so he's got it coming at him from two fronts.  That has come to an epic conclusion this week, so I'm hoping that once he can fully concentrate on the twelve steps and not be dealing with himself from so many angles, that he'll be a little calmer.  And less grumpy. 

And then there are the little daily things that happen to just royally f*ck with your head.  Like:

3)  My bank account got hacked on Thursday.  So now the bank opened a new account and moved everything over, but I won't have access to that account for at least a week or two while the new atm cards are being sent.  Stupid fraudsters.

And then today,

4)  My car wouldn't start.  Needed a new battery, which hubby has procured and put in, which is great, so it's well and happy now, but when it refused to start this morning, I decided it was time for the stress intervention, because I almost lost it.

So here's what I'm committed to doing.
1)  Meditating at my altar every day, at least for 10 minutes, if not longer.
2)  Journalling
3)  Listening to my favorite music, and only my favorite music, all day
4)  Drinking lots of water
5)  Spending time outside every day
6)  Going to at least one alanon meeting a week
7)  Learning the things that really work for me, that aren't covered in this list, and putting them into practice.  Habits to cultivate now, so that when Baby comes, I will already have a solid foundation of taking care of myself.

On an upshot, I'm really hoping I can make it to Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity in DC at the end of October.  I had wanted to go home anyway, and it would work out perfectly to make a trip back to PA and then join the Million-Moderate-March.  Jon Stewart should be President.  Seriously.  Weirder things have happened.  Like Al Franken, for instance.


Here comes the sun.