Lifestyle choices

Simply Saturday


A beautiful day in Josephburg follows hard on the heels of a warm, melty spring day yesterday. There is no mistaking the smell or feel of spring when it begins to arm wrestle with winter. It’s a bit like watching my daughter arm wrestle with my husband however. She hanging with both hands onto his wrist and dangling a few inches off the ground in a futile attempt to subdue him. Spring will not suffer the same loss that Katy did to Rob. Spring always wins out in the end simply because she is patient and persistent. Certainly more-so than we who want wearily for her victory at this point in the winter season. It’s a thrill to see the shingles on the roof and the asphalt of the road reappear for the first time since early December. The constant dripping from the eaves stops and the sun pulls away enough moisten from the roads that one can ease up on the wiper fluid. The wind carries a hint of warmer days and the branches of the trees and bushes seem to know it as they dance, sway or bounce, depending.

The sky looks warmer. And the sun? The sun! It was quarter to six and just dusk the other night when we were leaving dance. Another month and daylight savings returns with its plethora of light to cheer Spring on in her quest for reclamation.

The day began with Katy and breakfast as most weekend mornings do. Sometimes I get up and sometimes it’s Rob. Pour the Fruity Cheerios, get the half-full juice box and rice milk from the fridge, and make sure the TV is on and set to Treehouse. Back to bed then for a bit more shut eye or snuggling or whatever. Around nine there is the long leisurely breakfast – today’s menu was Cream of Wheat and half a Starbucks scone each. Did you know that they are a whopping 470 calories and 23 grams of fat – with or without frosting? Pure evil carb. After there is showering, dressing and readying for errands. Today I went right to the Safeway and groceries and Rob took Katy along with him to Canadian Tire on the left for paint and supplies.

The afternoon was laundry. Painting. And Katy spent time in her winter wonderland that is our front yard, scaling the melting drifts, sliding down on her seal-skin like bum and digging. Oh, the digging.

At the moment, Rob is hard at work on the NYTimes crossword and I am writing while simultaneously making a poor attempt to bake a banana bread. It will be edible, just, but not photo-worthy.

A simple Saturday. Something to savour.

Perimenopause



I have never been a fan of my plumbing. From the day my mother handed me a little booklet with characters out of a John, Jean and Judy book explaining the “exciting and wondrous miracle puberty”, I pretty much knew that girls got more than their fair share of the short end of God’s stick. It starts with not being able to be an altar-boy and just goes down hill from there. I think I was in sixth grade. Not quite twelve. And big for my age. So, my mother assumed, incorrectly I might add, that it was time to bring me up to speed on the whole menstruating thing. As it turned out, I didn’t start having a regular cycle until the beginning of eighth grade and that my greatest source of information about getting my period was not my mother, who’d had a hysterectomy before I was even born and hadn’t ever had what one could call a “normal” cycle, or the charming pamphlet or even the 1960-ish filmstrip presentation the sisters at my school inflicted on all the girls when they reached a “certain age”. No, like most things to do with the nether regions of my body – I learned what I needed to know from my peers. A dubious source of information to be sure but one that has stood the test of generations of young people everywhere. That is to say – the near-blind leading the legally so.

Now that I have once again reacher “a certain age”, I am finding that my peers are once again the leading edge of information as I wander, sometimes willingly and sometimes resentfully, into the valley of the shadow of menopause. 

Ironically, it is my husband who has supplied me with much of my current information as he as been down this path, so to speak, before with his late wife. All manner of natural supplements have been suggested for my own good and his comfort. Black Cohosh and red clover for hot flashes, he thinks. The hot flashes are mainly a night time thing right now and only around that time of the month. Too much information? The change is like any other phase in a woman’s reproductive and sexual existence. When it is in season, it is fair game for conversation. That’s why preteens obsess about their breasts and when they will get their firs period and teens and twenty somethings can think and talk of little else but sex. It’s why married women suffer, loudly, about baby hungry and pregnant women will divulge the most intimate (and disgusting) information to anyone without even being asked for it. Labor and Delivery stories, breast-feeding adventures, and the big C of life – we are arguably more fascinated with our bodies than any man could ever be.

I am technically not menopausal. I know this because I was having issues last spring and my wonderful doctor did blood tests and had an ultra-sound done just to make sure that nothing more sinister was afoot (which caused a fair degree of worry for both Rob and I because we are now firmly in the camp of “it can happen to us” because it has). As it turned out I am just experiencing that long and winding down part of the reproductive years. From my reading, I know that it can take up to a decade to wind down to the point of actual menopause and that your best predictor for a time frame is the age at which your mother and grandmother stopped unwinding and ground to a halt. Being adopted, I don’t have that information. But, given that I was about 42ish when I first noticed things starting to change, then 52ish is a good guess. That’s eight years. Good God. That is a heck of a long time to wait for the demise of something I have never been all that fond of in the first place, and the list of symptoms that I am/could experience just bring up the short stick thing I mentioned earlier. One of the symptoms I noticed on the list was memory and concentration problems. Oh great. First it is PG brain, then mommy brain, followed by caregiver brain and then widow-brain. Top these last six years off with the hormonal (or lack thereof) induced thinking blips caused by peri and definitely menopause and by the time I am in my “right” mind again I will be too far gone in senior “moments” to notice.

Until recently, the whole aging thing hadn’t been a big deal to me. I look a tad younger than most of my peers – which I attribute to good genes and a near shunning of the sun when I was a teen and in my youngest adult years (fat girls don’t wear bathing suits). But, the white hair is getting harder to hide with just highlights and the physical things I once did without thinking need to be thought about it, and I am not sure that when you throw hormonal imbalance on top of this that I am as indifferent to getting old as I have been in the past. Rob is always talking about having this finite number of “good” old age years. As he sees it, one can still be okay – as in fit and healthy – enough to do as they would like during the 50’s and into the 60’s but that one gets maybe about 15 years max once you reach the top of the hill and round over. That is so depressing and what is worse is that I appear to be under the elder Boomer delusion that I will still be functional as a 70+ year old. Of course, perhaps I will. I read an article in the Globe yesterday about a couple of studies down with centenarians that determined it is not simply good genes that help people live into their 90’s and hit the 100 mark. Lifestyle is key as well and that they really can’t say when it is too late to improve one’s lifestyle. 

It is not easy. Undoing the damage of caregiving and the stresses of the last years. Going on six now since Will’s first troubling symptoms began. I have started Yoga and I find that if I ignore the Mahareshi side of it I enjoy it quite a bit. I walk. I even have Rob walking. I can run again but try not to overdo it as it is hard on my knees. I lift weights. Heavy ones. I am Zena. I am a near total vegan but I need to work on the fruit thing. I hate out of season fruit. It’s squishy during the winter. How can anyone think about putting squishy fruit in her mouth without gagging?

Perhaps I will do okay. 102 is a good age to shoot for, don’t you think. One can’t set too lofty a goal where living is concerned, in my opinion.

Stuff is Us


One thing I have discovered is that impending guests, whether they be overnight or just for the evening and moving are about the only things that really spur people to action when it comes to cleaning and purging. Christmas brought us multiple overnighters which meant that the main room in the basement had to be cleaned out to make space for another bed. Cleaning out lead to a pile of junk in our backyard which meant a trip to the city dump in Edmonton was now necessary. Because a trip into Edmonton takes time and gas, it made sense to also purge the garage a bit for anything else that might profit us with a good dumping off.

The Edmonton dump is located in a section of town near the river called Clover Bar. No doubt the first pioneers who came west found a verdant expanse that lead up to the water’s edge and entranced them with the smell of clover. I wonder what they would think of it today? It is no longer flat but a huge mini-mountain of refuse hidden by the packed mud and towers over what is left of the river bar. It’s just a guess but I am betting clover doesn’t grow there anymore. More people should have to haul their own waste away because it is an eye-opening experience that I find humbling and not in a good way. Visiting the dump, or the recycling center in town, has the same effect on me that purging and cleaning do. I feel ashamed and angry. Ashamed that I am such a materialistic consumer. Angry that I allowed myself and my life to be laden with crap that I don’t use and shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

I have right now four boxes in my office to sort. Two are photos. Two are full of papers that I was too overwhelmed to sort through before I moved. I wonder sometimes that if I had never met Rob would I be complacently tossing junk into my basement, waiting for the day that sorting through it would be easier? Sorting is never easy. Many things I simply gave away or thew away with little more than a quick glance back in June. There is a box of Will’s collectibles in the basement here that I couldn’t bring myself to pitch or sort and when I think about it all I can do is curse him out for acquiring stuff that has no value to anyone but him. And now I am stuck with it.

I was not much of a materialist before I met Will. My big weaknesses were jean and running shoes and books. Aside from that, I had few major possessions aside from my house, my car and my computer. I was and still am not much on kitchen gadgets, cutlery and cooking apparatus. I could live with just a sofa in my living room, a table and chairs and enough beds for those living with me. Matching accessories? Color coordinating? A rec room with paraphernalia? A decked out deck? These were Will’s ideas of the perfect home that he got from someone or somewhere. I used to think that he thought having these things made him like everyone else and he wanted that more than anything after the kind of upbringing he had, but maybe it was more than that. Aren’t we all raised to equate stuff, or material gain, with substance to one extent or another?

I was admiring my friend Char’s home the other day while we were having tea in her kitchen. The kids had just headed downstairs to play. We’d been out most of the afternoon on a nearby sliding hill and the remains of hot chocolate were still evident. Her home is on the large size as far as livable space goes but unlike many people I have known, hers is not cluttered. The walls are bare for the most part but for a few family pictures and a wall hanging or two. There is a single sectional in the living room off the kitchen. The kitchen has just a dining table. The bedrooms are beds and a dresser each. The family room in the basement has two small sofas facing each other and a tv. It’s simple. And it’s nice. It’s the way I would like to live myself. But right now there is still stuff to be dealt with. Will’s, Shelley’s. The girls – all three of them. I would love to pack up just our clothes and whatever toys we can limit Katy to and take just that to Texas. A bit unrealistic.

In our kitchen cabinets we have no fewer than three sets of dinnerware and a plethora of glassware and cups. Rob was telling his younger daughter recently that we were going to pack all of it away and just use the dinnerware I brought with me from Iowa. A cheap Correll set I got on sale at Kmart to replace the daily ware that Will and I had gotten as a wedding gift. Why? She wanted to know why we would give away perfectly usable stuff. Memories is only partially the answer. I bought the Kmart plate set because I couldn’t stand being reminded of Will every time I ate off a plate or drank from a cup. And I was reminded and not of the good things generally. It was a way to preserve the sweet and my sanity at the same time. But even more important now is that we don’t need a cabinet overflowing with plates and cups and glasses and bowls, and perhaps someone else could use these things. Someone without the resources to buy brand new or at all.

My daughter tends to hang onto everything. There are drawers in her room stuffed with school papers from two years ago. It is a pack rat tendency that is somewhat related to her age and part inheritance from her father. Children, I think, tend to need physical reminders of the past more than their parents do. But I know there are many adults who can’t part with their stuff anymore than Rob and my daughters can.

One of my goals, and this is not a resolution – those are far more mundane and flexible – is to become a minimalist and give up many of the things and trappings that have come to symbolize the middle and upper class lives of North Americans. My gadgets will have to have meaning. My computer obviously does and my iPod but I am seriously rethinking the cell phone – something I have never wanted and have regretted since Will gave me the first one seven years ago. Clothes will need to be purposeful and worn. Styles and trendiest will not be considered. Books can be purchased but should be borrowed first from the library. There is no need to own cd’s or dvd’s as long as one lives near a library too. Furniture should be for using and not decorating or filling up space. As long as we have family and friends to photograph, we haven’t any need of wall decorations. Though I haven’t completely fleshed this all out, someday I want to be able to pack and move without purging.