I readily admit that my orientation to family (unfortunately, perhaps) is less than warm and fuzzy. I realize I wouldn't even be here if my father and mother hadn't...well...you know. And I'm glad they did, of course.
But my father was a pedophile and my mother was psychotic, so my childhood was right up there with "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?" on steroids. I don't even like to imagine what happened to my two younger brothers and two younger sisters after I ran for my life at eighteen. It has taken me seven decades to reach a point where I'm not dragging the wreckage of my past around behind me like a dirty blanket -- often for all the world to see.
At some point in my adulthood, however, I came across a book that I found helpful in processing my "issues" and some of its ideas have remained useful over time. It was a book on "self-parenting."
Last weekend, I set up a table at the local Farmers' Market. There were booths with vegetables and plants, of course. And booths with crafts of all kinds and tasty morsels to be eaten or taken home. And, in the middle of it all, I stood behind a table with my stack of books and a big sign to draw attention. It worked. I was pretty much busy from 8 a.m. to noon and I dragged home tired, exhausted from the heat, and with a head full of thoughts.
I sold one paperback and gave out a bunch of flyers so that folks could go home to download the Kindle edition of Your Life Isn't Over ~ It May Have Just Begun! for free. But what really wore me out was the conversations. There were only a couple of people who told me they've been diagnosed "pre-diabetic." And there was one, I think, who said she was managing her disease. But the bulk of those I spoke with were folks who stopped to talk about their loved ones who have diabetes and are making no attempt to control it.
