This is February’s Thanksliving page:
Friday, February 1. Water. Rained like crazy today, very hard for a very long time. Rain has never been depressing to me, the way it is to some. I find it refreshing, renewing. Having visited another website where someone was being thankful (I went to put the link, but the post had disappeared), I am reminded to be thankful for indoor plumbing. And three (my bowl runneth over) working toilets. Some work better than others, but still.
Saturday, February 2. Coffee was ready when I came downstairs today. I don’t drink it every day, but I do like it on weekends. Coffee being ready first thing in the morning for me is a rare occurrence. Usually, I am an early riser and Jif could sleep all Saturday if LG didn’t bug him up. But today, while I showered, he made coffee. That’s nice.
Sunday, February 3. Pineapple, in all forms. Silicone bakeware.
Monday, February 4. Thankful for kind people who work in docs’ offices. It has amazed me, over the past couple of years, how few of them there are. They are often gatekeepers, Cerberuses, guards, rather than welcomers. But wait, I’m being thankful. Mindy, she’s a good one. Gentle voice, willing to be as helpful as she possibly can. Which is way more helpful than her employer ever was. Oops. Trying to stay thankful. Mindy.
Tuesday, February 5. Thankful for choice. Not in its current political connotation, but just generally, thankful for free will. Terrible freedom, it’s been called. The ability to either choose the right thing or the wrong thing; the best thing or the good enough thing. Many, many choices I can make every day, with short- and long-term consequences.
Wednesday, February 6. Thankful that I’m such a tremendously cool mom. Well, this morning I am. My precious only child has left for school wearing flip-flops. (In January. In Baltimore(ish). OMG!!! WHAT WAS I THINKING??!!!) We will all survive. I continue to hone this motherhood thing. I say “no” a lot. Often, when all other parents are saying “yes.” I realize that sometimes, on the minor things, it’s important to say “yes,” when no one will get hurt, and no one’s values will be compromised. Even when it makes no damned sense to me. I did yell out to the sidewalk, “Are your piggies cold?!” I mean, I can’t be totally cool. I must maintain a certain level of embarrassingness.
Thursday, February 7. Met with three of LG’s teachers, and that went very well. They all like her, and they seem to be really good teachers. One remarkable thing came of it. While her science teacher was showing us her grades, he said, “Wait a minute . . . she got a B on her report card, right?” Yes, she did. “Wait a minute …” and he recalculated her grade, just because it didn’t look quite right to him. He turned the calculator around to Jif, and it showed 89.9999999999. He said, “What do you think I should do?” And Jif said, “I think you gotta round UP.” Which gave her an “A” after all. We all had a good laugh about it, with me joking that now that we’d gotten him to change her grade, our work there was done . . . but I did feel the need to repeatedly assure him that wasn’t the purpose of our visit. He said he knew that . . . after all, he was the one who happened to notice that her grades didn’t look like a “B.” Then he told us stories about crazy parents who have accosted him over grades, even in elementary school. We really aren’t like that. We want her to be a good student, but mostly we want her to love learning. I think he believed us. LG was very thrilled, because one more “A” qualifies her for a fancy certificate to put up on the fridge. None of us had any idea that we’d return home with another “A.” Again, sometimes it’s the little unexpected things.
Friday, February 8. Thankful for the internet, and the way in which it offers the means to share things like this video, that made me listen, and this one, that made me laugh. I received both in emails and saw them on blogs, and now I’ve passed them both on in both of those ways.
Saturday, February 9. Jif gave Biscuit a much-needed bath. Biscuit gives thanks, too. (He is so thankful, that Jif was moved to say, “Oh, no! Now he thinks I’m his friend!”)
And The Fever won!
Sunday, February 10. Was thankful that the electricity came back on.
Monday, February 11. The laugh supplied so generously by the (approximately) 7-year-old boy in the Hallmark store, who somehow managed to knock down an entire several-yards-long, six-feet-high Crocs display, amidst banging, clanging, thudding, people ducking for cover, and just general mayhem and madness. When the last Croc had hit the ground, and before his mother could unleash on him, he reassured onlookers, cool as a cucumber, “I meant to do that.”
Tuesday, February 12. An ice storm meant that the agency closed early. I needed that. My intentions were good, trying to work after my doc’s appointment, but really, I was too wiped out. So God iced us. Nice.
Wednesday, February 13. I thought I had an appointment with my therapist, but it wasn’t in my book. So while I was looking up her number, she called me to see if I was still planning to come in, with the ice and all. I was, except that I didn’t know when. In half an hour! So, that all worked out just right.
Thursday, February 14. There’s a client of one of my students, a little girl who has no one. Except this distant relative of the father’s, who has chosen to love this little girl and look out for her when no one else will. Thankful there are people like that, and this child has one of them.
Friday, February 15. Thankful for both Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, and entirely unable to decide to which Queen I would pledge my allegiance. Also thankful for queens who see the importance and the absurdity of being queen, like The Sweet Potato Queens, who advocate that everyone should claim to be the Queen of Whatever She (or He) Chooses. Now must decide what I am the queen of. I’ll just lounge in my Aretha-sized bed while I ponder . . .
Saturday, February 16, the Fever won again! And LG scored. I wasn’t able to go to the game, but my generous family told me all about it. LG’s team won by one point. They’ve come a long way since the beginning of the season.
Sunday, February 17 through Monday, February 18, SO thankful I was able to persevere through WTF, to co-host LG’s birthday party. I might post a little bit about it in a day or so. The short version is, I planned a party that required me to do no cooking, no decorating, little more than just hanging around, and I hung. I hung around, I hung in, I hung over, I was well hung. You woulda thought I was William Hung. OK, that might be a bit much. But the girls had a great time, and the guest of honor pronounced the party AWESOME.
Tuesday, February 19. This was a day when WTF was relatively quiet. My arms had trouble, but everything else was better than it has been for a long, long time. It was also a day when I came to some decisions about how to proceed, diagnosis and treatment-wise. I’ll soon write more about this in other places, but I came to realize I cannot count on medical professionals. Short version, I discovered some information that had been recorded in my “official” record that was absolutely inaccurate, at best. This from one of the few docs I thought had a clue. From now on, I’m going to increasingly view WTF not as an illness so much as a . . . state of being. And I will do all I can to alter it. Mentally, physically, spiritually, environmentally, relationally. In the meantime, if it IS an “illness,” I will either recover or become worse (perhaps making me more diagnosable/treatable), or I will stay pretty much the same, in which case the focused pursuit of mental/spiritual/physical/environmental/relational health can only do me good. I am thankful to have gotten a little bit of clarity, a little bit of light on the path ahead, even though it came via a very distressing revelation.
Wednesday, February 20. Tonight, LG and I completed her Nefertiti “hat,” to be worn in a Grrl Scawt program in which she will portray the Egyptian queen. Thanks to blogging, we had access to the creative guidance and encouragement of a famous costume designer to the stars. We were pleased with the finished product. And I, for perhaps the first time, was very thankful (and I told her so) that my child is not a perfectionist like her mama. There are some asymmetries and wrinkles and whatnot, which irk me no end, but about which LG said in all sincerity, “That’s no big deal! It’s great! I love it!” If we were both perfectionists, we’d both be miserable. As it was, I was miserable for a millisecond, but how ridiculous would it be for me to remain that way when my kid was perfectly delighted with our finished product? And I try not to be ridiculous — in a bad way.
Thursday, February 21. A surprise visit from LG’s godfather, who shares her birthday, tomorrow. He was in town for sad reasons (his mom’s health), but we were delighted to get to take him out for a birthday dinner. He and LG took cell phone pictures of each other and sent them to his daughter’s (Jif’s goddaughter’s) cell phone, then she called us at the restaurant . . . it was all very pleasant, and I hope, a distraction from his family’s current crisis. I know it was a distraction from my various crises.
Friday, February 22. My girl’s birthday. It was a snow day, so we got to hang out at home. She loved all her birthday gifts. Maybe a little too much, but I’ll post about that another time. We watched one of Jif’s and my favorite family-friendly movies, from way back in the day, which we introduced to LG over the summer (having forgotten some of the language in it), and she loves it, too.
Saturday, February 23. Thankful again that we had LG’s party last weekend, and did not schedule a family get-together until next weekend. Turns out she had a fever all day, and ended up sleeping about 15 hours. Our timing was good; cancelling kid parties is such a disappointment.
Sunday, February 24. LG is doing much better. I put on nail polish for the first time in memory (over a year?). That means I felt well enough to bother with it, and my hands worked.
Monday, February 25. Jif is sick today. Flu. I’m very thankful for what an oddity this is. I can count on one hand the times he’s missed work due to illness, in our 25 years of marriage. And I was able to do a lot of what needed doing, things that he does most of the time these days. So, we got through the day. By evening, he was feeling a bit better, with a bit lower fever.
Tuesday, February 26. Found myself feeling very thankful for the new crop of interns that we’ve accepted into the agency for next year. So far, so good.
Wednesday, February 27. I’m thankful for my acupuncturist, and her ability to tolerate the not-knowingness of my illness/disorder/state of being. Jif was back at work today, with a meeting afterward, so LG and I had dinner alone together. We talked a lot, and I so treasure those times of being able to know her better. She talked about middle school, which I think is a plague upon humanity, for the most part. She told me about who is popular and who is not. She says that she is not popular, but the popular kids like her well enough. She says that she and most of her little group of friends are somewhere between popular and dork. I think that’s a good place to be. I’m thankful for that.
Thursday, February 28. Jif’s flu came back strong. Thankful that my work is very flexible now, and I can decide to leave when my family needs me, without stressing about it.
Friday, February 29. I had a doc’s appointment (non-WTF-related) this afternoon. After I showered, I put on the jeans I wore yesterday. Thankful to have discovered yesterday’s panties when they fell out the leg of the jeans before I walked out the front door, rather than in public. That’s always good.
