I got my right leg adjusted to be 1/8 of an inch shorter this afternoon. All of a sudden, everything is feeling easier–and it’s shocking to me that I haven’t realized that for about six months that I was walking on a limb that was a wee bit too long.
But what an amazing difference. I feel so ready to take on the world tonite…one step at a time. :)
This seems the perfect poem to ruminate on as I’m headed out the door for a morning swim (especially that last stanza). There have been times in my life when swimming was the most important thing I could do–I’m thinking of the night after I learned that my father had terminal cancer. I swam 100 laps then, despite being 8 months pregnant. Swimming until I’d lost every ounce of strength left in me. Because I thought I could swim away the hurt and the reality of what was happening…
And one more thing: I’m looking for a local who’d like to do some ocean swimming with me. If you’re interested, drop me a line.
The Swimming Lesson
by Mary OliverFeeling the icy kick, the endless waves
Reaching around my life, I moved my arms
And coughed, and in the end saw land.Somebody, I suppose,
Remembering the medieval maxim,
had tossed me in,
Had wanted me to learn to swim,Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all
About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace,–
How to survive in any place.
Last night I noticed that my leg didn’t seem to be charging correctly–the microprocessor in my bionic knee needs to ‘charge’ every 30 hours or so, or it runs out of juice. The charging cable that I use for the knee has some simple LEDs that indicate whether it’s charging and how much juice is left in the battery. And last night one of those lights (the one that indicates whether it’s charging) didn’t seem to be working. But it was late, so I plugged it in and figured that the light was broken and all was ok.
But of course it wasn’t. When I donned my leg this morning I realized the battery was completely dead. Ugh.
I have a second charger cord, but it was already packed in one of the moving boxes, and I wasn’t sure which one. And, it seemed as though the problem might not be the charger but the leg itself. I started panicking a bit, thinking that I’d gotten some sand in the computery-parts when I went to the beach a few days ago. And I was already imagining that this uber-busy week was going to get a lot more crazy if I had to get a ‘loaner’ knee and send mine back to the plant for servicing.
But…after about 20 minutes I found the other charger and the microprocessor seems to be taking a charge just fine now (fingers crossed).
Sometimes I resent my reliance on technology–I don’t want to be so physically dependent on cords and batteries and computers. But I also fought for years to acquire this technology for myself, knowing that this type of knee would give me the mobility that I craved. Recently I read a Journal entry that I wrote just after I got my first bionic knee. I was traveling in Paris for the first time and found that navigating the uneven cobblestones was a breeze with the new knee, and I knew that if I had analog parts that I would have probably fallen repeatedly because of the uneven pavement. I felt so fortunate to have access to the technology that gave me mobility under those circumstances. And I still do, even if it means that my Monday needs a bit of a ‘re-boot.’
A few months ago I was reconsidering my legs. For a few years I’d gone ‘robotic’–letting my prosthetic leg show rather than wearing a cosmetic covering over it to make it have the same contours as an organic leg. It was an empowering experience, but also hard sometimes. I don’t mind being stared at–I’m used to it now, after having had that happen for nearly 30 years. I don’t mind discussing my disability–I’m used to that, too. But I do mind when that tends to eclipse everything else that is important and interesting about me. So I started feeling like it was time for a change (that, and I started wearing knee-high boots, which looked REALLY WEIRD with one skinny leg and one normal-sized one).
As a temporary measure, I put some old cosmesis on my leg to see how it felt and looked. I showed my kids and their jaws sort of dropped. They were so used to a Mom with asymmetry–they didn’t seem to like it much. I mentioned it to some friends, who were supportive, but not really opinionated one way or another about which looked better. And after a few weeks of using that old cosmesis (which wasn’t actually fitted to this prosthetic leg so it didn’t look quite right around the ankle or knee), I submitted the insurance paperwork to get some nice cosmesis made for this leg. And, months later, it was approved and I got my new skin about a week ago.
At this point, I’m still not sure which look I prefer. I see positives and negatives to both. But I like that I now feel comfortable wearing my leg either way–I experience no shame in showing my robotic innards, and I also enjoy ‘passing’ as a biped and having my tights and boots and slacks hang symmetrically on my lower body. Perhaps what’s most important is knowing that either works fine for me, and I can change my mind about my ‘look’ at any time without feeling the need to justify or explain it to anyone.
(Pic to the left is me last Halloween with stripey tights and a tutu. Pic to the right is me today at work (with my skirt hiked up a bit to show the vintage-lace edge of the slip that I’m wearing underneath my sundress)
When John told me that he was leaving me, he revealed some pretty ugly things–most of which I won’t write here. But perhaps out of those the one that surprised me the most, was when he told me that he’d basically checked out of our marriage two years ago when I was ill with that mysterious antibiotic-resistant infection. He explained that it was just too much for him to endure–caring for me with no certainty that I would ever get well again.
He was so gracious and kind during that entire illness, I never knew that it had been so terrifically difficult for him. Indeed, I was quite surprised to learn that that was the breaking point. Perhaps not coincidentally, I’d been thinking myself recently about how difficult it’s been to care for John during his ongoing degenerative issues with his back and hips. For about four years John’s been nearly-unable to walk more than a few blocks (sometimes not even that far). When we’ve traveled, we’ve pushed him in wheelchairs at museums and altered our typical on-foot walkabouts to short jaunts to accommodate John’s limited mobility. For a long time he was unable to even walk through a grocery store because of the severe pain that it caused him. I’d wondered how I would handle life with a spouse who had such a long-term physical limitation, and was hoping that I could do so with as much aplomb as John had done with my various health problems…but I had concerns about keeping it up–his pain made him short-tempered and frustrated. He was so much more difficult to live with than before. He lost his energetic “bounce” (I missed that part of John’s personality quite a lot).
So what I wonder is this….at what point do we throw in the towel on our relationships when things don’t turn out as we expected? And when do we hang in there, even at a high cost to our own autonomy?
Some of my thinking along these lines also has to do with recent encouragement from friends for John and I to reconcile. Part of me wants to fight and hope that we could make our marriage work again (as I have many times before), but I fear that isn’t a choice I even have the liberty to make–John seems quite sure that he’s done with us (and with me). But I wonder, have I given up too easily? Is there something more I could or should do? Or some concession or change that I could make that would make John feel happy again?
Or is it time to wave that white flag and move on, realizing that I just can’t endure it any longer?
Well over a year ago, punk rocker Amanda Palmer signed my foot. Now, her “Love, AFP” signature is fading, and I’m debating whether to try to refresh it with a permanent marker or to just let it fade away…
On a not-really-related note, I spent some time at the beach this weekend watching the waves and thinking deep thoughts, my feet buried in wet sand. Times like these I realize just how lucky I am to live in southern California, where I can escape to the ocean nearly any time.
I’d been planning to write this post for awhile, and then Chandelle’s recent conversation about meat-eating inspired me to actually sit down and pound it out…
In the late afternoon my Mom would often set some meat on the counter to defrost for that night’s dinner. It was usually some chicken or ground beef. From that she would cook all kinds of typical American dinner foods. When I was little I thought those packages of thawing meat were beautiful and I loved to scrape a line of frost off the top of the package and then suck the crystals off of the tip of my finger. For some reason I was particularly attracted to the valu-paks of ground beef that she would thaw. More than once I snuck nibbles of slick red meat off the corner, thinking that was a special treat. That my Mom had told me pointedly not to eat raw beef made it all that much more sneaky-special. Sort of like licking a bit of frosting off of a cupcake, I suppose.
Of course now I’m amazed that I didn’t get any major intestinal diseases from licking meat packages and ingesting raw ground beef. Ugh.
About 16 years ago I gave meat eating. The impetus was my father’s death. Seeing his body turn from a living breathing thing to a slab of “meat” was one of those life-changing moments. I’d always struggled with death (yes, I cried in bio labs when we had to kill the animals), and this was such a potent reminder to me of our own fragility. Every time I’d start to eat meat I would feel a repulsion–as if I were eating my own flesh. The world felt so violent and cruel that I didn’t need to add my eating habits to the weight of violence that already existed in the universe. Though this is a bit of a tangent, I believe that era of my life is also when my pacifism solidified into something that began to lead my everyday actions, and I also had increasing difficulty with the necessary violence of the Christian atonement. But back to my main story….
About two years ago when I started experimenting with locavore eating, I realized that I could tolerate small amounts of humanely-raised and slaughtered meat. And since then I’ve occasionally indulged in meat if I was having one of those very-anemic days or if I happened upon an eatery where I was comfortable with the source of their meat. It felt good not to be dogmatically vegetarian (having shed my dogmatism about nearly everything else in my life).
So now, due to a variety of health issues, I’ve begun to eat a high-protein low-carb low-fat diet. Nothing as extreme as Atkins, but I’m more than doubling my protein intake. And in doing so I’m eating meat nearly every day. It feels weird to look at a slab of red flesh and cook it into something that I will put in my mouth. Walking by the meat aisle isn’t exactly appetizing to me. But I am enjoying my forays into meat-eating, and the variety of options that are available to me now that weren’t when I vegetarian. And, quite honestly, I’m feeling better physically than I was when I eschewed meat altogether–I suspect this has to do with the roller-coaster effect of blood sugar highs and lows that accompanied my mostly carb-based vegetarian diet.
I continue to have concerns about the meat-packing business and the mostly unethical practices of those who raise American livestock. I’m not shoving those concerns aside, I’m letting them sit with me as I figure this out and experiment with new ways of doing things. I feel sure that many of my vegan and vegetarian readers will feel offended by my choice to eat meat, and I’d love to hear your side of this–I’m still weighing the evidence and considering the various possibilities. And for those of you who eat meat, I’d also love to learn about how you approach this decision.
And, for the record, I’m no longer tempted to nibble on raw ground beef. Though sushi does give me a bit of the transgressive raw-meat rush that I remember as a child.
Back in the days when I was dating, nearly every Halloween I started a new relationship. I didn’t actually realize that pattern until years later, when I was connecting the dots in my photo album. I’d see me in a costume and then realize that was the night that I met “so-and-so.” Was it just the costumes that did that, or was it those not-to-be-missed Newport Beach Halloween dances emceed by Richard Blade (note: beware clicking on that link–it’s loud!)? Perhaps it was because every October after I’d settled into the school year I was looking for something new and it was convenient to let that emerge on a night where I might be emboldened by a costume?
Since being married to John, we’ve dressed up nearly every year (except maybe that year that I was hugely pregnant with Catgirl–I don’t think I wore a costume). For a long time, we kept with our pirate theme, capitalizing on that look from the first time I ever danced with John (to Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” of course), but we’ve also worn black and worn girlie things or manly things (ok, that latter link is just a figment of my imagination, but it’s worth a click anyways), dressed as fictional characters, and even changed our minds at the last minute about our costumes.
So this post isn’t about me starting a new relationship this Halloween, even thought that’s how it began. And it’s not about what costume I’m going to wear, even though I’m looking forward to dressing up. What it’s really about is the need to be something else for a little while.
Although in recent years I’ve embraced risk-taking and facing my fears, I’m actually a fairly reserved and risk-adverse person (I’m a historian, for crying out loud!). I wear fairly conservative clothes, I listen to my music at a respectable volume, I match my socks and fold them into tidy rolls in my drawer. For the most part, I find routine and structure quite satisfying. I don’t wear loud makeup or attention-grabbing clothing or anything that will draw a second glance. I like plain and simple.
But then there’s this one day of the year where I try something totally different. Like a kimono. Or a tutu. Or a wig. It feels good to experiment with that alternate identity for awhile and to see how it feels. On a day when no one will much notice how far I’ve stepped outside of my normal boundaries.
Last year in October I dyed some sections of my hair neon purple. There was no particular reason for me to have purple hair, it just seemed like something worth trying. I was curious if it wold affect the way people interacted with me and/or the way I felt about myself. As far as I can tell, it didn’t really have much of an impact other than being novel.
Much of my life lately seems to hinge on that novelty factor. There’s such a rush from trying new things, or experimenting with new ways of doing things.
One thing, however, that I thought would always be a constant in my life, is my love for books. But ever since I started reading e-books, my love for actual books with paper pages has waned. I like being able to browse through a text quickly via keyword searching. I like being able to jump from TOC to chapter with the click of a link. And having all of my devices synced to that exact page in the novel that I’m reading…has stimulated my love of reading all over again. Instead of needing to carry a book with me to fill in the gaps of my day, I can simply turn on the kindle app on my phone, and be back where I stopped reading the night before.
What about you, are you reading ebooks? If so, how are you liking them? Are they changing your reading habits?
Quite some time ago, I wrote about my shoulders on my blog, and about the various scars/scar tissue that I’ve struggled with over the years. My left shoulder, especially, gives me a lot of discomfort due to the old scars and the memories that it seems to hold in the muscle fibers. Occasionally when I’m paddling I feel a bit of a pop and a loosening in the tissue at the front of my shoulder and realize that some old tension there has just released itself. It both hurts and feels good to feel those changes.
But what’s probably the most remarkable thing about my shoulders is that they are my most important weight-bearing joint. I walk on and with my shoulders everyday when I use my crutches. Over the years those shoulders have adapted in some remarkable ways to the tasks they bear. Like today, I went rock climbing with John in the morning (sans prosthetic) and my shoulders carried most of the load of my body as I pulled and stretched on the wall. And then when we went grocery shopping afterwards, I used my shoulders to bear all of my weight (via the crutches) so I could use my hands to push the grocery cart. It probably looks awkward, but it works well for me because I’ve been doing this kind of thing for 27 years (or so). The few times that I’ve injured my shoulders have been scary–I depend on them so much for moving and balancing. If I had a long-term shoulder injury, my mobility would actually be more limited than with an injury to my foot or leg. That frightens me.
Sometimes I wonder if I should protect my body more rather than subjecting it to hard workouts with swimming and paddling and rock climbing, or whatever else the exercise du jour is. Perhaps I should do something safe and gentle. Perhaps I should avoid straining and stretching–just in case. I don’t want to risk chronic injury or a lifetime of joint pain. But then there’s this other part of me that fears that if I weren’t asking so much of my shoulders, that they wouldn’t grow strong enough for a lifetime of heavy lifting.
Tonite’s post finds me snuggled in on the couch. I’m sneezy right now, and my glands are swollen. That’s probably far more than you wanted to know about me, but this post is going to have a bit more TMI than my usual, so I thought I’d just get warmed-up from the get-go….
For quite some time now I’ve been meaning to follow up on my #genderd experiment. At the close of that day, one of the things I realized was that I never tweeted about using the bathroom. And I should have. It’s one of the most explicitly gendered choices I make several times per day at the office. I work on the floor of a building that has two restrooms. They are both single stalls with locked doors. One has signage for men, and one for woman. Or at least, they did back on September 1st when I did my #genderd experiment. But shortly after that day, I received an email from Chapman University’s SafeSpace Committee saying that they were working to locate all single-stall bathrooms on campus and change them from an assigned-sex bathroom to a gender-neutral bathroom. So I replied to them about the ones on my floor and suggested that the change would be particularly welcome because the floor primarily has women’s offices, so there can often be a line for the women’s bathroom, but I’ve never seen any men waiting in line for their designated stall. And honestly I thought many times about just using the men’s stall myself–given that it had a locking door, what would be the harm in doing so? But because I still felt so new at my job and I felt too uncomfortable to push the social boundary of using the opposite-sex bathroom stall in front of my colleagues. So I didn’t.
When I returned from my trip last week I discovered new signage on the men’s stall. It now has a men/women/wheelchair sign, while the women’s bathroom stall signage stayed the same. I think that’s peculiar, but I haven’t yet written to the the campus sign-maker to see why both stalls weren’t given the same signs. But perhaps what’s more interesting, are the surprised looks on the faces I’ve seen when I use the now-gender-neutral stall. After I exit that door I’ve seen colleagues walk up very close to the sign as if to see if it’s “real.” I’ve only seen one other woman ever use it, and she wasn’t a regular on our floor.
While I think having one neutral stall on the floor is certainly progress, I still think it would be far better to have two neutral stalls. Because it seems that as long as there is a women’s stall, the other stall will be “not women’s.” However, it could be that the reason they kept one as women’s is that it includes the wastebin at the side of the toilet for “hygiene” products (what a janitor friend of mine affectionately called the “cigar box”), and the formerly-men’s bathroom doesn’t have that feature. I’ve also noticed each time I use the not-women’s restroom that the toilet seat has been left up. I’m going to guess that that’s a leftover from when it was a “men’s” stall only.
And…speaking of men…
Last week I had the strangest concurrence of experiences. By the third time it happened I was so rattled, I could hardly make my way back to the place where I was staying for the night…
Three times in three days I had men call me out in public space, yelling sex-laden obscenities. What is probably most bizarre about this experience is that I’ve never had a man even so much as whistle my direction before (unless, perhaps, it was my partner being playful). Catcalls from strangers seemed like something that happened to streetwalkers and not to women that look like me. I suppose I’ve never experienced this because I don’t often walk in urban spaces–I’ve tended to live in middle-class suburban areas. But I also suspect that women who are disabled are far less likely to garner attention from male strangers.
The third time this happened I was alone and in a fairly deserted area of a city where I knew I probably shouldn’t be walking at night. But I was hungry and there was a corner store a few blocks away. I was sure I’d be just fine. And I was. But having a group of men following behind me and hurtling obscenities my way as I walked down the block? I was so scared. What was I scared of? Scared, knowing that I couldn’t run if they came after me. Scared, because I didn’t think I could dial anything coherent on my cellphone of they neared. Scared, because there was no one else nearby to hear if I should scream. Looking back on it now, it’s possible that these men might’ve even thought that they were flattering me with their opinions about my body. Perhaps they thought that I would respond back playfully or provocatively. But I think they knew that what they were doing was cruel and that I was scared shitless, despite my attempt to walk even more tall and confidently down the block as the vulgarity continued.
There was nothing in my clothing or in my behavior that indicated that I would be a target for men’s attention. I have a “boy” haircut, I’m nearly 40 years old. I was not wearing makeup and I was wearing “Mom” jeans (read: not sexy). But I was identifiably female, still, which is why I suppose I was a target.
I deliberately choose to raise my kids in an upper-middle-class neighborhood where just about anyone can safely walk at night. Though there are occasionally some college rowdy college students around, there is little to fear in my environment. There are, of course, costs to living in such a homogeneous suburban community, and lately I’ve wondered if we haven’t veered towards being too “safe” in choosing a place to live. For example, I relish the vibrancy of the urban neighborhoods that I found on recent travels through Oakland, San Francisco, and in San Diego, and felt the contrast to our “vanilla” community quite keenly. And while I usually don’t feel that I fit in my neighborhood (I am not really a vanilla gal, myself), it would be hard for me to change now if it meant facing the kind of jeering that I experienced last week on a regular basis. I suppose I would get used to it–perhaps even expect it. But it’s hard for me to imagine that now, I suspect I might just always be afraid.
I really really really want to write a long blogpost about my experiences from this past week and my meetings with scholars in NorCal.
But….
I am home. And I just need to be home for a few hours.
And…
I have so much work calling my name, it might be a few days before I get to share all that I’ve learned with you.
In the meantime, let me share just one little thing. Last week while I was staying with my friend Barbara, we decided to go rock climbing at Mission Cliffs. It was sort of a spontaneous adventure and because I didn’t have my beach/sport leg on hand, I climbed as a uniped. And you know what? It felt so right. I clambered up the wall face faster than ever before–hopping from one “hold” to the next with my one foot, and using my arms to pull me up each time. I felt so free and strong hanging on that wall and now I can’t wait to go back and try it that way again. I didn’t get a picture of myself up on the wall last week, but here’s one of me climbing bipedally from a few months ago…
