look up

To my favorite. You know who you are.

Look up, sweet girl! Beauty is out here! We are in possibly the prettiest place in our whole state, and you are in your phone. I know it can create the illusion that there are universes in there, but I swear it's only ones and zeros. So many zeros.

Look up, sweet girl! Life is out here. Even the amazing works of imagination that exist in there are inspired by what's out here. Get your feet wet!  Feel the sun on your face! Talk to strangers! (Just don't leave with them). 

Look up, sweet girl! Love is out here! I am so privileged to get to take you on adventures. I have revelled in watching your take your first steps, say your first words, read your first book. I know you feel judged sometimes, but it's not that we think you're not good enough. It's that we know you are capable of so much.

Look up, sweet girl! God is out here! Nothing man had ever made can compare with seeing His wisdom, His Grace and His mercy in action. You won't find Him in the metaverse. You will find Him in the incredible diversity of a system that couldn't exist if a thousand things were different by a percent of a percent. You will find Him the actions of His people. You will find Him in church and in His word.

Look up, sweet girl! Now is out here! I know it seems like technology exists at a lightening pace so you must be on it every second, but everything in there will wait. Butterflies and hummingbirds flit by for only seconds. The sunset will only happen quite this way one time. In the blink of an eye the future will be the past and one day I will not be here to remind you to put that down and look up! The best I can leave you is the promise that there's something more and memories of someone loving you more than she thought it was possible to love anyone. 

A Big Man

To look at him, you might think Al Gruber was a small man. I'm sure endless passers-by made that mistake, especially as he surrounded himself with friends like Mark Borgwardt and Hap Klammer. But even next to those giants, in every memory I have of him, he is larger than life. 

Larger than life climbing out of the river at dusk covered in mud and weeds to scare a bunch of kids on their first camping trip. Building his own home and later his sons' homes. Blasting a building-sized hole in the Cedar River with an inflatable dolphin and a roll of toilet paper. Having a little party on a Friday night with a hundred or so guest. Shooting holes in a tent trying to kill the mosquitoes. Hiding six kids under the seats of his over capacity boat when the river patrol came by. And those are the ones I saw with my own eyes.

I feel sorry for future generations who will never hear my Uncle Al and my Dad swapping tales around a fire. I'm glad that most of them wouldn't stand up in a court of law, though. I believed his friend Mark really was a magic giant until I was ten years old. I cringe for children who got on his bad side at school. I will never assume I have privacy on a remote piece of river. I still laugh until it hurts when I recount his call to his youngest sister the day after her daughter's wedding. It's not the most exciting, but my favorite is probably the day he first met my Aunt Trulla, and how he told his friend on the bus that he was going to marry that girl. He loved her to his last breath.

I know we'll all miss that cat-who-ate-the-canary grin and the way he yelled "Angie" even when she was standing right there. We'll miss that guy who would show up to help you with any project and had the best music. The man would do his best to get you out of a jam, even if he's the one who got you into it. He left a huge hole in all our lives. Big guys do that.

Weariness

I'm so done with death - the specter, the cult, the culture of it. I'm sick of hospice being the first answer instead of the last. I'm sick of women sacrificing their own babies. I'm sick of cancer killing children. I'm sick of hospitals and funerals and the Planned Parenthood where I was praying when I found out a friend has an incurable disease today. I'm sick of begging God for miracles and trying to find the will not to be mad at Him when He doesn't adjust the order of the universe to fit my pleas. 

I'm tired of feeling small and powerless and selfish. I believe that all things come together for the glory of God. But sometimes I just want my friend Bill's baby to be healthy and home a little more than I want the glory of God. I just want Justin to be back in the pulpit, not in the ICU. I want to spend my Tuesdays taking care of my home and my husband rather than being mocked by random strangers while I try to offer a lifeline to a woman who is being sold death at every turn. 

I'm tired of it being used to that. I used to sob and sometimes be sick after being outside Planned Parenthood on "procedure day." I watch those women go in so casually to take the abortion pill and I know real human beings are being lethally poisoned just steps away from me. It's just another Tuesday. I'm rather sick of the fact that I can be there and not be sick and sobbing. 

Here lies the valley of the shadow of death. I am struggling today to fear no evil.

The Dark Side

Hello, Darkness, my old friend.

We go back, don't we? I don't even remember meeting you. Was it junior high, when we first started sitting up nights pondering my dark and hopeless existence?  You told me no one would ever love me. You promised me the world would be better off without me. I almost let you win that game time and time again. Only God stopped us from ending our relationship by ending me. We can agree that He still had work for me, even while we debate whether that is a blessing or a curse.

Were you around when I sat by myself at recess in elementary school wondering what was so wrong with me and asking why people did not like me? I know our friend, Introversion, was there then, but I failed to understand that people disliked me because I did not like people all that much. Still, I think it was you who told me I was unlikeable, insisted I was different and I cannot remember not knowing those things about myself. 

We might have been voted worst couple in high school, if such things were voted on. I floundered at love and friendships but you stuck by me all four years. People did try to break us up. They saw the signed of abuse, I think. The isolation. Somehow you made me angry that my parents loved me when other people did not. As if any remnant of human connection was a threat to you. Which is absurd, of course, because when were we closer than when I failed at love, just like you said I would? Every step I took towards the heights was another agony on the way back down. 

I got help in college. Pills made it harder for you to get your claws into me. Easier for me to roll with life's punches. At first, I thought you might be gone for good. It cost me Ambition and Libido, but if I was not going to be a sexy CEO, I also was not going to be on an agoraphobe on disability. 

Except I very nearly was, wasn't I? The pills could only keep us apart for a while. Having you around seems so natural that I did not even realize you had returned until I had turned my whole life sideways. Our pal, Panic Attacks, and you cost me my job ruined my finances and locked me in parents' basement. I could not even make a phone call. I was trapped and paralyzed and so sure it was not you because I had the pills. No one told me they would stop working. 

I wish I could say you only tricked me that once, but that is not true, is it? No matter how well I know you, I am still likely to sit next to you for weeks completely unaware of why I feel irritable and empty. 

Not today, though. I recognized you almost at once when you arrived yesterday like a cold drizzle interrupting a sunny afternoon. You have been dropping by a lot lately, but for short visits only. The doctors are not concerned. They know there are limits to their power.

So, today we may have a good cry. We will reminisce about my failures and examine my worst habits. Perhaps we will discuss unconceived children and other permanently interrupted dreams, reject solutions and lament the way the dirty dishes sink and the laundry hamper refuse to stay empty even for a minute. We will apologize to everyone who does not deserve my short temper and entertain unkind thoughts about people who probably do but who are spared by the sliver of self-control I retain, bolstered by my suspicion that I would be more miserable for giving them a piece of my mind than I am for keeping it. 

Do not worry if you remember a prior engagement or get called to a family emergency. I will not complain. I know you would stay if you could. I know you will be back. Isn't that what old friend do?

Fat brained

 

Looking at these pictures side by side, it's easy to see my progress. Down 65 pounds in a little over one year. To start with, the woman on the right almost never posed with her husband for a picture without putting him entirely in the front to hide behind. She rarely hiked up hills and she never shopped in the "normal" section. She was resigned to being seen first and foremost as fat. And the sad thing is, it didn't even bother her much. Big personality. Big body. Hard to kidnap. 

I'm not here to tell you how I did it. Or why. If you're a friend you already know. And you're probably tired of hearing about it. If not, one of the biggest things I've learned from the whole experience is that each body is unique and the real secret of health is learning what does and doesn't work for YOU, not what did and didn't work for me. 

I'm here to talk about the fact that the woman on the right won't get out of my brain. First and foremost, fat. It doesn't help that my body is almost 50 years old and the skin I grew to fit around 300 lbs of me isn't going anywhere. In the mirror, all I see is flabby, wrinkled, very generous curves. In the picture of me with my love, all I see is that huge thigh and the saggy jawline and dangling bossom. Even as I buy smaller and smaller sizes, my belly bulges and my legs look like something you'd order at KFC. Every, "Wow, you look great!" sounds a little like, "You would not believe how hideous you looked last year."

Thin people tend to view fat as a discipline problem or a health problem. They aren't wrong exactly, but the biggest part of it, for many of us, is the mind problem.  It's the part of every woman that looks in the mirror and sees only the flaws. The pain of the teenager who was probably at the ideal weight for her 95th percentile bone structure trying to process 150 appearing on the scale when a chart said she should weigh between 120 and 140. The misery of failing to diet those ten pounds away. The pounds that followed because, "what does it matter, I'm fat anyway." The voice of the national guard recruiter saying 180 and 5'7" was too fat for the military even with a perfect score on the ASFAB. A record-long run in the friend zone of men who loved to spend time with me, but just didn't see me 'that way'. Depression and chronic fatigue and ADD feeding back on me the popular idea that fat people are lazy and undisciplined creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doctors who said such profound things as "try eating salads sometimes." Walking out of 90 minute of intense cardio and weight lifting during my gym rat period and having an instructor tell you to try water aerobics (one look - first and foremost fat). 

The last vestiges of my before wardrobe hanging off my body make me feel sloppy. Shopping for new clothes is almost impossible. Every 18 I pick up seems impossibly small. Shirts that fit my waist and chest barely squeeze over my arms. Skinny cut jeans (and they're all skinny cut suddenly) that fit over my thighs are several sizes too big at the waist. I can fit into the clothes in the 'normal' section, but they don't flatter. They seem to draw attention to the parts I would rather disguise and exaggerate my disproportion. 

I figured out how to get sugar out of my head (and my mouth). I figured out how to move. I can't figure out how to silence all those voices. I can't see the three stone I've dropped as pebbles on the road behind me, only the bumps and lumps of the ones that still cling to my frame. The final product is literally unimaginable to me. There is no image of me thin that's not also an image of me as a child. There is no 50-ish formerly obese body I can imagine to inspire me on my journey. The body I expect to have, with that extra twenty pounds of skin hanging off its shrunken frame isn't terribly inspiring. More importantly, she isn't ME. I'm big - both garish and invisible. I'm not sure I know how to be small. I certainly don't know how to think it.

Career? Or Job?

I have to go back to work. After almost four years of only working a few occasional hours a week, I need a regular income again. Our budget has always been tight, but I was managing to stretch it far enough until the kid started to drive and our water bill almost doubled (mostly unrelated except for timing). If you know me, you know I have a straight up phobia around looking for work. I'd rather be covered in spiders while making a speech in my underwear in high school (in fact, if someone would like to pay me to do that, let's talk). It's irrational and mostly baseless, but I've never gotten a good job the old fashioned, send in an application, get an interview sort of way. All the good jobs came from someone else doing the leg work or me knowing someone. If I could hand my crappy (because it literally scares me to work on it) resume to someone and just do whatever they choose for me, I probably would.

This time around is extra scary, though, because some big things have changed since the last time I was in the workforce. I'm married now. I can't go use up all my people energy (INTROVERT with a capital I-N-T-R-O-V-E-R-T) at work and then shut myself in my room all night to recharge like I used to do. I have to find something that leaves me able to be civil to my husband and the teenager. No point in doing something for the family that turns me into someone they hate to live with.

Please don't mistake introversion for shyness or devoid of people skills. I am neither. I just find people mentally exhausting. I'd be great at a job that requires strong interpersonal skills and a lot of time completely alone. Comment if you know of one! I just can't people all the time. 

On the upside, I'm Keto now, which means I'm not physically tired all the time. I think I started having chronic exhaustion around puberty (I carried a pillow so I could nap in study hall). I lost track of how many days I struggled to keep my eyes open at work in the afternoon or to find a way to nap over lunch. For the first time in my life I can imagine putting in an eight hour day and still having the strength to cook dinner AND wash the dishes. I think I'd still have my last job if I wasn't so foggy and distracted all the time from being tired. I might even have managed to work my way up. I might have had a career.

And that's really the question I'm struggling with today. To be or just to work. To search out something I think I'd want to do and put my heart into it or to find something that will get the bills paid and put my time in. To use my education and skills or just my hours. To risk the stress of real responsibility and having to attend meetings that should be memos and failing hard (because the higher you climb the harder you fall) or the stress of being insanely bored and treated like I'm lesser because that must be the only job I could get.

In my dreams, I find a professional job that's mostly computer work (I'm a solid graphic designer, great with presentation software, basic digital skills, decent writer) and only required 30 or less hours each week. In reality, my choices seem to be part time unskilled work or out-on-a-limb, they'd-only-choose-me-if-no-one-really-qualified-applied, kinds of full time jobs. If I have to choose between the two, it won't be an easy choice. Wish me luck.

One Wind

There were days when my favorite part of my first real grown up job was the commute.  It took me past a state park full of majestic trees, sparkling water and beautiful wildlife.  I needed the reset after a day full of emails and phone calls and... people.

One winter afternoon, my commute was through the heavy snow and gusting winds of an Iowa blizzard.  As I crawled down the highway at 45 mph, I saw two birds on the chain link fence that separates the park from the road. 

The first was a red tailed hawk. He stood straight and tall on the fence post, scanning the snow for signs of prey. Only the flicker of tiny feathers gave any sign of the storm around him. 

Not twenty feet away, a crow was clinging to the chain links. His feet were splayed and he was using his beak for extra support.  Feathers were sticking out every which way as he tried to use his wings for protection from the storm. 

I was immediately struck by the fact that they were both suffering from the same cold and snow.  One wind,  two very different birds. Something inside allowed one to stand tall while the other visibly floundered.  How often to we assume that the person who is composed isn't going through the same troubles as the one who is visibly disheveled? 

For years,  I tried to develop the inner characteristics to look strong even when the world was trying to blow me over.  To some extent I succeeded.  I've learned a lot of control over my reactions.  I'm not generally buffeted about little gusts like I was in my youth. 

Still,  sometimes I am the crow, showing every bit of my struggle to the world.  I shared the story with my counselor decades later.  He complimented me on my insight,  but pointed out a lesson that I had missed.  No matter how they looked in the process,  the most important thing was that that were both hanging on.