The spirit sprawled under the pile of unmatched socks

I cannot believe how much time and energy this closet renovation is taking. No lie, hours and hours and hours from both adults in the house and while the closet looks fabulous, the stuff that used to live there but got evicted is all over my bedroom.

My house has no storage.

It's a problem, but not a big one!

What blows my mind is what I put up with for five whole years in this set-up with this closet. Really, my clothes were stuffed in these little shelves behind the door of the walk in closet, or piled on top of the highest shelf where not even my super tall brother-in-law would have seen them. And it turns out that I had half the hanging space of my husband.

The thing is? Looking at it, I had no idea that I had an inadequate set-up. I had no idea that things didn't make sense given how many clothes I have in comparison to my ruthlessly weeding husband. I had no idea that there was a problem.

For me this is a big, huge, flashing, neon sign and it says: "You Do Not See Yourself As Important!"

Yep. Or maybe I'm learning to. A little bit at a time, and maybe that's the skeleton key that opens all those doors, and even some of the windows that hold the key to healthy life.

The bad news? I think we have to put my dog to sleep, and no one who has loved this dog could do anything but fall apart for a good long time if that's what we have to do. She's been my other half for ten years; old when we got her, really old now. The kindest being who ever walked the earth.

Maybe I'll go hide in that clean closet for a while.

Yet again

So, I hope none of you are trying to win the laptop in the giveaway over at "Confessions of a Pioneer Woman" because I am clearly going to win it. And someday I'll have a blog that can give away a laptop on NYE, too.

OK, maybe not.

But so far so good in the pre-New Years make-over in my head.

I had planned to whip up a fancy organization system in my closet, which turned out to be much more messed-up that I had thought. Hmmmm, wonder what else is more messed up than I thought it was. Maybe, you know, my HEAD!? Probably.

Love that metaphor. The deep storage in my closet and in my head. Messed-up. But a work in progress.

It turned out that I only have one pair of serviceable socks in an entire woman-sized basket full of socks. And I also have fifty times more skirts than I thought I did. Who knew? Now all the hole filled socks are awaiting execution and the skirts are hanging, breathlessly waiting to be worn in the new year, I am ready for the launch to a tidy and organized closet. It seems that often I stood in the stuffed closet with the lament "I have nothing to weaaaarrrrr!" Now, I have some things to wear. And I know what fits. And I know that eating those french fries is really a lose-lose situation. So, I'm making progress.

Tonight we're eating dinner and then heading to our friends' house. I really am looking forward to the new year. And I'm astonished at how fast time goes. Can it really be nine years since we all celebrated the turn to 2000? Can I really be the mother of three young men? Can it really be possible to let go of the attachment I have to food? Maybe. The teenagers are all there, it really will be 2009 very soon and I keep getting older no matter HOW many of those fancy lotions I buy. Nope nope nope. So, might as well accept all true things as, well, you know. True.

I have no resolutions. I want to be real and love the people I love and stand up for the things I love and be who I mean to be. Nothing new. Just trying to come home, though I've broken my vows a thousand times, yet again, to come home.

Shameless Bribes and Kick backs

Here is my reward for regularly working out. Yes, as much as I want to be healthy and whole and happy with my weight and who I am, I am not above bribes and rewards.

Cute shower shoes. Oh yeah!

Sacred Spaces

Yesterday's speakers at church each spoke about their own sacred spaces. Of course I was enjoying the sacred space of hanging out with a group of kids downstairs playing uno and playmobil. That's the big sacred stuff for sure. But it got me thinking about my own sacred spaces.

During the family money tussles that always follow the holiday for us there was a chicken fight about who is the more frugal adult in our house. (I am.) And I got to thinking about the private spaces of our house, and the money and time and energy spent on them. We have finally given away the last piece of free furniture from our main living area. All of the things we sit on or put our coffee on are things that we bought, somehow. Maybe at the liquidation sale, but nothing was by the side of the road for free. And we painted in colors I love, and even re carpeted a small room, and put in beautiful stone floor in another. Good, grown-up, maintaining of spaces.

Not true in our bedroom. We have never had a real head board, instead just matresses on a frame, my altar is a castoff dresser, and there are three totally unmatched bookshelves. My bedside table was found out by the side of the road, granted at my friend Debb's house, but still, it was headed out. I grabbed it. No, didn't cute it up or paint it or make it "distressed" (I am distressed enough, why do I want distressed tables!!?) I just washed it up and there it sits, seven years later. Yeah.

So, here is one place that being good to myself is not about the food or the right or the wrong or the fact that the damn scale at the Y says I gained four pounds. Taking care of my self can mean making sacred spaces in my own daily life. Space for meditation, and space for good and nice things in my life. No, not fancy or fine. But good. I'm not winning any prizes for having old used things in my bedroom. And I'm not even winning any arguments ( I give too much money away to win frugal parent of the year award, I guess...whatever!). I have not been creating sacred spaces that take care of myself like I really should be.

Here's my plan. IKEA has one of their twice a year sales going on. So, I'm just going to go and pick out a little bedside table that is under $20, and get a bulb for the IKEA lamp that I have that needs one. I'll gather nice things from my altar and make a good, happy space next to my bed. It's a little start, like having only one piece of toast instead of two, and running for 15 minutes instead of 10.

Maybe it will add up.

little things sure add up

So, I did Weight Watchers last year after winning NaNoWriMo. This year on November 30th, after not-winning NaNo, I didn't do WW.

Big surprise.

But what I did do was to start trying to be clean with food and activity. And up until about the time round three of our snowstorm hit, I was doing OK. There were two solid weeks of walk on the path alternating with a cardio/weight work out at the Y for six days and then one day off. Food was OK, mostly stuff eaten to feed body hunger and not head hunger or heart hunger.

I'm still recovering from the points and core and good and bad and right and wrong that I internalized, AGAIN, last year doing ww.

In line at the grocery store on Christmas Eve, during trip number three of the day, the new O magazine caught my eye. Hey, yeah. I thought Oprah was looking a little heavier, but then I never trust my eye to be right about weight loss or gain. A friend can lose 50 pounds and I just wonder if they found a really great pair of jeans. But there was Oprah, weight loss maven, talking about how she'd fallen off the wagon, again. Oooo. Me too, me too.

Not that I believe now that there really is a wagon full of thin and beautiful and happy people who have good skin and good jobs and happy and fulfilled primary relationships and always floss their teeth. Or that I fell off that wagon. If there is one, I've never gotten the pick-up schedule down right.

When I lost the most weight, about six years ago, on the day that I hit a size 8, my husband told me he wanted a divorce. Maybe I found the reverse wagon or something. But it ripped off the belief that I had that the only reason I wasn't happy was because I was fat. I wasn't happy because I wasn't happy. Maybe I was even fat because I wasn't happy. OK, there went the wagon tipping over and rolling down the hill.

So since this past fall when I realized that points and all that program stuff had just really served to feed the beast that is my food addiction, I've been reading Geneen Roth, and Victoria Moran, and trying to feed myself with things that don't go in my mouth. In my head I call it "eating clean". I've been trying to be OK with life and OK with the love I have and to be happy without food.

After all food is the craziest addiction of all! I mean, what kind of lame high do we get off food? Not much. At least some of the psychotropics give you a break from reality. Food smacks you down again so fast, you aren't even all the way up before you're down.

Shakin' my head. What kind of crazy thing is this, anyway.

The new O magazine had this great piece about rats. No really, it talks about how rats in a nasty cage would choose to drink the morphine laced water everytime. But the rats in the rat-heaven enlcosure shunned the happy water, instead, making happy lives.

Ahhhhh! Come on, I have to be smarter than a rat! I'm old enough, wise enough, now to make a happy life, and maybe this time just hang out at a nice-happy-size "just right" for oh, I don't know. Maybe life?

Today the Solstice Storm piles of snow are starting to melt. My whole family is headed to the Y and it is their job to finish the cheesy potatoes (damn you Pioneer Woman and your amazing use of butter and cream!) and to eat or disperse the cookies. My dear husband is creating a closet haven for me out of the closet chaos I have right now, and maybe we'll even paint the bathtub alcove a lovely eggplant color this weekend.

Little things, but they can sure add up.

And if I keep feeling sane about it, why not throw a little insanity in the mix and think about training for a 5k or even a 10k. I did a 5k for my 35th birthday, 'bout time to get on to the next distance, right?

OK, now I said it outloud. Better make it true.

Reading Glasses and Driving.....

How is it that on the very same weekend my teenaged son drove in the rain, in the dark to an overnight with his youth group, AND I bought my first pair of reader glasses.

I'm 41. And it's not really old. It's just older. And when we watched old family videos lately I couldn't even believe that my oldest was 11. Now he's very nearly 17. And often he's a better driver than I am.

So when it was time to go to the Youth Group overnight last night it really made no sense for one of the older glasses-wearing-adults to drive him. He could manage. And of course he did.

But I was an absolute basket case. Absolute.

It probably didn't help that earlier in the day my minister colleague had handed me her reader glasses and told me to get over it and wear them. Oh, I could see! The print was all legible and clear and I could see! But when I took them off, well, then I COULDN'T see.

So, I figured I'd just have to swallow hard and step up and buy glasses that would let me see. So I did.

Now I'd better go to the eye doctor and get real glasses and maybe they'll even be bifocals.

**sigh**

It's a new chapter. Maybe even a whole new book of the master series. Career that follows children, and empty nesting, and retirement and grandchildren and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

But children grow up and learn to drive and mothers grow older and they need glasses. It doesn't matter if your eyes sting with tears. That doesn't help you see. Not at all.

Big sigh.

White Girl Goes to Camp.

Sometimes it’s a lonely existence for me in my family. Yes, I’m the mom and I get to keep my finger on everything from the laundry to lovelife to long division. But in my family I’m the only girl. My dog is a lovely old lady but she doesn’t really count.

I’m also the only white one. My husband is Korean and my kids are “Hapa”—a Hawaiian word that literally means “half” that the Asian community has claimed the way the GLBTQ community has claimed “queer”.

So, today is the Celebration Day at Korean Identity Development Society (KIDS) Camp; class presentations, big Korean food lunch and a drumming presentation. It’s funny, we moved to Seattle to be with families that look like us, and while we often see them or know them on swim teams or at school; here we’re the freaks of nature again. Almost all the parents are white, and seem to be quite a bit older than we are. If there are other KADs (Korean Adult Adoptees) they are usually married to Korean folks from Korea.

People always flinch when I tell them that my adoptee is 41.

And then they want to tell me their story about how they’re doing things right; they’re raising their adoptee just perfectly so that there will never be pain around race or an identity crisis.

Well, good. I hope they’re right, I hope that their child never has to experience the pain of questioning what it means to be Asian in a white society and I hope that they never have to stand by as the white one; part of the oppressive crushing majority that has caused so much pain to the person that they would give their life for.

I hope for them a happy life with rainbows and cotton candy. I hope these camps help. I hope knowing my dear husband and hearing his story helps these kids grow up and not have to live it.

And I hope that these parents never have to feel the pain of being the other that hurts their child.

My fingers are crossed.