Jumping Daisy

I recently entered a flash writing competition. There wasn’t like a prize or anything. Spoiler Alert: I did not win.

My Take aways? 1. My mom told me I was special too much when I was a kid. I am more conpetitive and definitely have a very fragile ego. 

Anyway, here’s what I wrote. It was just a short story with a required Genre of Fantasy and had to include a balloon and an elevator inspector. Oh well.

When she saw the house listed, it was love at first sight.  Some people see an old home and only see the dollar signs that will ultimately come along with all of the needed repairs, but not Julie.  Julie looked up at the tall, narrow building and could almost feel the energy of the many families who had called this house their home during its over 100-year existence.  The history warmed her immediately and she knew it had to be hers, even if it meant years of renovations.  The non-working elevator was an added quirk of the home, uncommon for this neighborhood, but to Julie, it just added to the charm, even if it would be a glorified closet until years down the road. 

After several trips from the moving van that she had managed to drive across four states to pull up to her new front door, Julie sat on the one chair not stacked with boxes in her cozy living room and considered how she had gotten here.  Leaving Illinois was always the plan, but after losing Gramps, it just felt like it was time.  Now sitting in this brownstone in Philadelphia, home felt so far away, and yet, surrounded by all of her familiar belongings, this change wasn’t so scary after all. 

The elevator was like nothing that she had seen before, unless you count the old movies.  The elevator itself was a plain metal box with smooth edges. The box was encased in a beautiful cage that reminded Julie of an old fashioned bird cage, meant to sit in a sitting room on display like a work of art.  Even if it didn’t work, the aesthetic was gorgeous. Julie slid open the gated door to the elevator and walked in to try out the experience of turn-of-the-century engineering. 

The immediate feeling of nostalgia caused her to close her eyes and smile.  Then the smell of cotton candy and the feel of the sugary treat melting on her tongue overtook her senses and she found herself transported.  She looked down at the warm soft feeling of another hand in hers and she knew it was him, it was Gramps.  She smiled over at him as he gave her his most mischievous grin and led her through the gates into the carnival, just like when she was a child. Julie was stealing glances, trying to decide if this was real, but not knowing if she really cared to know. Gramps reminded her that it was his own adventure that led the family to settling alongside the Mississippi River two generations ago.  Gramps had been the first of his family to leave his parents behind in New Hampshire and he understood the exciting adventure that Julie was about to begin. He wanted her to know how proud she made him and to assure her that everything would be just fine.  

The two of them took a spin on the ferris wheel, played games no one ever wins and ate cotton candy. We walked toward the clown selling trinkets from a colorful booth and Gramps reached out to choose a bright yellow balloon for her and gently tied it around her wrist. The carnival was beginning to close down and Gramps reminded her that the elevator was likely to open again.  Julie had forgotten all about the elevator and was startled when she opened her eyes to find herself right back in the center of the antique, having not moved at all during what seemed like an entire evening of reminiscing and enjoying the carnival with Gramps.  

She took a deep breath and remembered the feel of his soft hand in hers.

The last time she felt his hand was when she had visited him for the holidays a few months ago, only weeks before he had passed.  She had crouched down on the floor next to his recliner and taken his hand in hers so she could gain as much of his attention as possible for her goodbye.  She knew this would likely be the last time that they would be speaking and she wanted to drink in everything about the experience.  For a man who had spent his lifetime toiling in the fields and caring for animals and crops, his hands had been enjoying the quiet retired life. His skin was now so soft against hers, but she knew how much life they had lived. 

Now, standing in the dark elevator, Julie took a step out into the hallway and felt an immediate shift into the here and now. She walked down the hall with a new feeling of both gratitude and grief as she headed out the front door and took a seat on the steps.  Walking toward her on the sidewalk was a man.  He was tall, thin and wearing the uniform of the local inspector’s office.  He stopped in front of Julie’s gate. 

“Hi, are you Julie? The new homeowner?”

“Yes, that would be me,” replied Julie. “May I ask how you know me, and what I can help you with?”

“I was sent by the realty company.  I am here to inspect the old elevator in the home. I heard you have a pretty spectacular antique that isn’t quite in working order these days and we need to ensure it is safe.  I would love to see if we can get that old thing operating again”

Julie looked back into the house where she saw the yellow balloon – the very balloon that Gramps had handed her at the Carnival – floating down the hallway. 

She smiled at the inspector and replied, “No thanks. I think I quite like the way it works just as it is.”

Here is a link to read the winning entry: https://www.foriowa.org/iowa-stories/iowa-story.php?namer=true&isid=242

Cory is the holder of the paper in our family. He takes care of the taxes, and records the things that need recorded, plus stuff that doesn’t need recorded. I am not patient enough to be interested in such things. He recently brought home a stack of family papers that had been living in his office at work. In that stack, for some odd reason, was my work performance evaluation from 2014. I read through the feedback, and reminisced in my mind about the work that I had done during that review period. It was a good year. One of those when I was still only a couple of years into my tenure at the company I still work at 9 years later. I loved my job. I was doing important work for a company that does really important work. I was getting to travel to new places, meet lots of new people and learn the ins and outs of project management for a B2B and B2C company. I was learning how to do my job better, and learning so much interesting science.

Between then and now lots of things have changed. The company has more than doubled in size and was sold to a larger company. Lots of the things I loved have morphed, into new things that I don’t not love, but I am missing something. I am trying to understand what it will take to get me back to the energized employee that I once was. Is my role the problem? or my attitude? Am I the problem? Is it my management?

And in the meantime, two rounds of layoffs in the past 6 months and performance based bonuses may not exist this year. Is this just part of getting old and realizing how many long years of necessary employment remain while my back hurts more and my kids just keep getting bigger and closer to leaving the nest?

If anyone has any advise on this rut, or some low upfront investment passive income suggestions, I am all ears.

Late in the summer I asked Eliot to show me around where he and his friends had been spending their days all summer. As I worked in our basement office Eliot would stop in and ask for permission to go places or do things with friends and frequently that request was to go to “the creek”. We live in a very suburban area. There is both an elementary and Junior high within easy walking distance of our neighborhood and between those two schools there is strip of timber surrounding a shallow creek that will make you feel like you are in the middle of nowhere just feet away from the busy street that runs North through town. We rode our bikes and once we passed the Elementary and a small bridge that topped the creek I followed Eliot as he took a sharp left into the trees on a small worn path that many bicycles had obvious traveled over the warm months. Once we arrived at a bit of a clearing right against the creek bed we jumped off of our bikes and Eliot showed me the fish traps that the kids had made out of disposible water bottles. So far the homemade traps hadn’t brought much success but luckily one of the boy’s had the real deal to denote to the cause. I asked Eliot what they did when they got a fish in their trap. He told me that they would identify what they had caught and then release the fish back to their watery home. We walked in the water a bit and Eliot told me that fiurther down the creek the would find some crayfish and frogs too.

We backtracked out of the water and left our bikes while we walked a bit further through the timber and he showed me the fort that the kids had put together as well. The fort consisted of a combination of reclaimed materials likely pilfered from each child’s garage, and the brush and sticks that they picked up off the ground nearby. Eliot was so proud of the work that he and his friends had done to pass time during the long warm summer days and I have to say – I was even more proud. I was reminded of this tour of the outdoors last week when Cory, Leila and I visited a college campus and the presentation included a picture of students in the biology department taking water samples from a local waterway. If only all of the joys of childhood could continue through college!

Sometime when I was between 8-10 years old I picked a swimming suit out from the JC Penney Catalog. It was a bikini, and though my mom may have tried to steer me in a different direction, to a suit that would better cover my chubby body, I wasn’t hearing it. The suit arrived and I put it on and came out of my room to show mom and I still very vividly remember the look on her face and the “oh, Tricia” that fully conveyed her disgust. I took off the suit and did not wear it again.

When I was 12 I found a book of exercises on the bookshelf and brought it up to my room. I religiously did the exercises (mostly crunches) every day for the 30 days that the book said it would take to see results. I saw no results.

At 14 I was counting calories. Skipping school lunch, only to come home and make up for all the calories I missed and more. I could tell you how much I weighed and what size wore of year of my life starting at about 8 years old. 3rd grade. I remember monitoring how my jeans fit me and hoping they would start to be too big. At 8 years old. Spoiler alert. They never became too big.

I went from wearing the same size and stealing clothes from my older sister to no longer fitting into my sister’s cute clothes and instead outfiting myself in t shirts and sweatshirts that I hoped made me blend in, and at least didn’t draw attention to my body.

In a casual conversation about my latest weight loss adventure I mentioned to my friend that I have been trying to lose this weight since – she cut me off. “You have been trying to lose weight for the entire time I have known you.” We met at 13 when I moved to a new school and she became one of my only friends.

TikTok is full of gross and stupid content, but it isn’t all bad. When my doctor suggested a new, pharmacuetical approach to weight loss I found lots of information on TikTok, and I found WeightDoc. An Obesity specialist who has helped me see that my weight is not a reflection of my inferiority, but rather a reflection of my genes, my environment, all of the ways that I have reinforced my own feelings of shame and disgust and self hate. I’m not really any better, but maybe one day I can believe this new reality. In the meantime, I have started taking a life changing medication that is helping to calm the voices in my head that tell me I should go ahead and eat until my stomach hurts.

Walking from the second restaurant of the evening, picking up some to-go nuggets for one of my picky eaters back in our D.C. hotel room I enjoyed the quiet and the people watching. As I make it to the top of the hill and started across the overpass I was met by an interesting group of people. There were five or six of them and the men looked my age or maybe a bit older and the women were young, thin beautiful and dressed to show it off. I probably looked at them a little too long trying to figure out how they all fit together, but maybe I was giving off a judgmental vibe because one of the young women looked directly at me and said, “You are beautiful.”

I can’t tell you how I reacted. I might have said thank you. I might have looked away in embarrassment. I know what I looked like, what I look like all the time. My hair is going gray because I have given up on hiding it. During the past two years I have gained 30 lbs on my already firmly overweight frame. I have given up.

Why did she say that to me? I’ve been thinking about this for 3 months.

I am really struggling. Not in a way that I can put into a clear list of what’s wrong and what needs to change, though I do have a list. I am not sure addressing the list would change anything in my heart and mind. I just wanted to put something out *there.*

The last time I was regularly seeing a psychiatrist I started a new medication and for the first time in as long as I could remember I was feeling like when I walked into a room, it was just me walking into a room, with my present mind and my present body. I didn’t have the weight of my thoughts, my feelings about how my body looked, what everyone else in the room saw. I haven’t changed my medication again, but that feeling of presence is gone. And I miss it. I don’t think there is any amount of yoga, meditating, salt floating dieting that can pull me out of this sluggish, sad, fat body. Not the one that you see when I walk in a room, the one that I feel every moment of my life.

I keep buying things. Clothes and plants mostly. It doesn’t help. I would like to test if a vacation would help.

There was a time shortly after Thea was born when I clearly remember being in complete misery.  There is a certain amount of misery that comes with every childbirth experience.  I had that.  Then I also had some nursing issues that were causing me sharp shooting pains in my chest, coupled with mastitis so I also had a lovely fever.  No sleep.  Fat uncomfortable body with added pain and I clearly remember wanting to give up, crawl into bed and never emerge.

I’m getting there.  This time the misery is much more mental than physical, though the fat uncomfortable body is still around for the excitement.

I know that many of us are at some version of this hell.  This year has been such a disaster in so many ways, but this pandemic has me feeling like I am balancing on a very precarious rock perched over oceans of dark seas of unknown depth and lingering monsters. At the same time, I am holding tight to the precious gift of time at home.

In this very unsettling time I must also admit that there is a certain loveliness in the uncertainty, and the required break from the daily grind that was my life prior to March of 2020.  Some of it is great.  Time at home, time with my dog, time with my kids – watching them enjoy a true old fashion summer of running the streets and riding bikes and having fun from sun up to sun down.

For me, I am at that point where I am feeling like I have squandered so much opportunity during this “escape.”  I haven’t been exercising much, though I could go out and walk or run between meetings and no one would know because I am working from home and no one has to smell me.  I have been eating fast food and drinking too much beer.  I should be making homemade, healthy meals because I am here 30 minutes earlier every day without the commute/kid pick up time in the schedule. I am wasting, and I can’t say that this is time well wasted.

Some days I think this time will be passed before I know it and everything will be as it was before, other times I feel like this will never end. Much like maternity leave.  Some days I can’t wait to get back to work, to my regular routine, others I just want to be here, in this place with my kids and the mess and the chaos, forever.

Before I was about 20 I never exercised on purpose. Ever.  I eventually realized working up a sweat wasn’t the worst thing and in fact, the post workout feeling was actually pretty nice.  By the time I was 25 I became a regular exerciser.  I am not fast, but I enjoy running. I like having to focus so closely on my own body movements and breathing that I can’t worry about any of the endless things that my brain is normally focused on.  As I have aged, I still enjoy running, but my body works harder, my hips, back, feet and ankles protest if I do it too often, and frankly, the extra weight I am carrying just makes the whole experience a lot of effort to work up to.

Walking is boring.  When faced with a workout, I would always pick running over walking, but when I started working at IDT I made a friend who liked to walk.  Granted, her idea of walking was not that far off from my running, so maybe it was kind of a compromise, but many spring/summer/fall days we would take off from the office to walk.  Some days we would change into workout clothes, go for a long walk, come back to a quick shower and get back to work.  Other days we would drop everything when one of us had a particularly frustrating meeting or needed to rehash last nights activities and just hit the trail behind the office for a quick lap and a mind clearing conversation.

I am the kind of person that is pretty uncomfortable.  Yep, end of sentence. I am awkward and also very intuitive, so not only am I anxious, I notice that you notice and when that makes you uncomfortable I get more uncomfortable. I don’t have many friends, but the friendships that I do have are deep.  And when they end, it hurts.

Last summer was hard. We lost a family member that meant the world to all of us. I was reminded that no one is invincible and then I was reminded again when another close family member was diagnosed with an incurable, life altering disease. I was dealt another disappointment in my professional life that caused me to question relationships that I had misinterpreted, the hurt was deep. The deepest cut was that I lost my walking partner. I wasn’t my best self and I let my own feelings get in the way of those of my friend. I can’t even really explain what happened, because I honestly don’t know but as hard as it is for me to let go of those that I am close to some people are quick to cut ties when they are let down.

In August we decided to bring home Penny and now I have a new walking partner.  She will run with me too, and I think she is improving my times by giving me an extra pull when she really wants to go.  It’s kind of funny to watch us I am sure, me running along like I am about to die while Penny prances ahead of me like she’s on a Sunday stroll.  But more than the improved running times I am appreciating her company on long walks.  I have discovered lots of trails that I never really appreciated.  The conversation isn’t the same, and I am still sad over the loss of my friendship, but now I have a new partner and we are discovering how many beautiful places to go there are right in our own town.

Without my own breath control to keep me distracted or a friend to converse with, I am learning to appreciate the quiet and trying to take some time to enjoy my surroundings.  Appreciate what is here in front of me, because it won’t last and it won’t always be my choice.

Plus.  A tired pup is a snuggly, well behaved pup.

Yesterday was Mother’s day.  I am one of those very lucky women who has only had positive mother figures in my life.  From my own mother, to my grandmothers, mother in law and aunts. I still had one of those days. I didn’t even call my mom, and I felt like garbage about it.  I had a few text messages from friends, didn’t respond. Nothing.  I can’t tell you why I feel this cloud that has made me a selfish slug, but here I am. I read many accounts on Facebook from friends and family of how they were either so happy with their wonderful mother’s day gifts/activities/memories or they were so sad for their lost mothers, lost children, lost opportunity.

I often wish that it was as easy for me to bask in other people’s joy as is for me to jump into their sorrow.

Mother’s Day weekend is also the time when the photo memories from the Market to Market Relay appear.  When I ran that relay race in 2013 I was not yet pregnant and still at one of my healthiest weight and activity levels of my life. I felt fat and uncomfortable in a group of gorgeous fast women, but I was there.  What I wouldn’t give to be where I was then in my mind and body. I obviously wouldn’t give up sugar, beer or sitting on my ass.

I think about my behavior, and how some days I do only what I need to do to be employed so I can come home and crawl into my bed. Sometimes I yell. A lot.  Sometimes I ignore everyone and play on my phone, or shut myself in my room and watch Netflix.  Sometimes I cry for no reason, or shut out my friends and family.  I wonder about my kids now, and what they think of everything they see from me.  I hope that when my kids are grown, they won’t spend mother’s day thinking about how dysfunctional their mother was.

Today was one of my favorite days of the year.  I know it wasn’t April 25th – when the weather is not too hot, not too cold (:) Miss Congeniality reference) but it was pretty special.  Every year I trudge through winter dreaming of the warm sunshine.  Strangely enough, this winter wasn’t all that bad, as far as winters go.  Not only was it not that terribly cold and snowy, but I had a March beach vacation to look forward to.  I should have known that the combo was too good to be true and there was a global pandemic on the rise.  But alas, even in a year of mild weather and early season vacations I appreciated so much one of the first weekend days of the year when I could wear shorts and a tank top outside, get some exercise, complete some yard work projects and sit in the sun with a book, all in the same 24 hour time period.  When things are weird, like they are these days, grasp on to the best parts.  Today was one of the best parts.