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."
Three weeks ago, I stood in front of an audience of 1900 strangers and admitted that I'm seventy years old. I had to work up to the admission for a month before the event. I had spent some years already telling people, "I'm really, really old." But I couldn't typically find the nerve to casually admit my age in conversations. Except with my doctor. Or a very close friend. And then only in a whisper.
I cracked jokes about it in front of my students in class. "I would tell you how old I am," I'd say, "but I'm afraid they'd come make me retire." Or I'd quip on a different occasion, "I'm perfectly fine with getting old. There's only two options, you know: getting old or getting dead -- and I'm not nearly ready to get dead yet."
I'm no doctor or nurse. In fact, I'm not a trained health professional at all. And I know that each body is different. Some of us are older than others. We represent different genders and body types. Some of us jump out of planes for fun. And some of us can't get out of bed. It's complicated. But I hope that, if I communicate anything at all in these posts, one of the principal messages that comes across is that balance is key to managing diabetes.
When I was diagnosed with our shared condition in February of 2008, all I heard was, "Here's a list of everything you ever loved about food and drink that you can't ever eat or drink again" (a list four feet long) "and here's a list of what you can eat and drink from this point forward" (a list that fit tidily on one page of a 4" x 6" notebook). New information was coming at me so fast, I couldn't possibly catch it all, let alone understand it. So I got some of it confused. And I got some of it wrong. And I missed some of it altogether. Not to mention brushing some of it aside until later -- years later, actually -- because it was complicated and my brains were already stir-fried.
This morning, I'm sitting down to write this post on Monday instead of Sunday (as I usually do) because I was out of town all weekend after a week so hectic that I didn't have time to write it in advance. This caused me to remember that, when I was a kid, my mother used to say ruefully when someone would fail to meet her expectations, "A day late and a dollar short..." But, though I'm a day late, I'm richer than I've ever been. Not richer in money, but richer in spirit.
The Universe sent me two curves this week. And since I'm one of those folks who overthinks and over-analyzes every possible detail of her life, I've already had to talk my brain out of overdrive multiple times in a few short days. One would think I might have learned to exhale sooner by this stage of my life, but not so much.
Anyway, the first curve (on Tuesday) involved the final nudge toward becoming a vegetarian. To make a long and winding road a simple statement, suffice it to say that my overall principles are consistent with the idea of not eating animals, but my belligerent commitment to doing whatever I please based on whatever I'm used to has influenced me to ignore my principles. *sigh*
As long as I've been ducking and running from the ultimate decision to go in this direction, one might imagine that I'd just say yes and get on with it. But managing diabetes makes diet complicated, at best. And I've got the hang of the way I'm handling it now and, frankly, dread trying to figure out how to do it differently. So Wednesday unfolded with my brain a jumble of thoughts and emotions. I bounced from grieving the loss of yogurt to balancing proteins and carbs to irritation and back to grieving over and over all day till I went to bed exhausted with the issue unresolved.
