Godot Has Left the Building

You probably know by now, right? that if I start with a sky picture either it's Friday or Saturday, or a Serious Post is coming. As I understand the calendar, today is Monday. You have been warned.

The other day Crazy Aunt Purl wrote about her lifelong love-hate relationship with food and dieting. Her piece is (surprise!) insightful and eloquent, and you should go read it if you haven't already, even if your physique would make Angelina Jolie weep. Although I'm not much for diets, it got me thinking about some weighty issues of my own, pun intended.

I've never had a weight problem (much). I grew up a skinny little thing who could eat whatever I wanted, and until a few years ago I mostly stayed that way, having only to watch that I didn't totally pig out for months at a time. But this:

...so I finally had to stop "waiting until I got skinny" to take chances and do new things.

This is the story of my life. Only for "I get skinny" substitute "I get a better job" or "we buy a house" or "my kids get older" or... well, then Taz got sick, and I couldn't see anything to look forward to. I traded in my part-time technical-writing job for a full-time gig sitting by his hospital bed. Even after the successful removal of his tumor (quite a story in itself, which I may or may not tell you at some point) the doctors gave him about a one-in-five shot, so there wasn't a whole lot of percentage in thinking ahead. I went to all his therapy appointments, I wheeled him around the hospital and outside by the river when it was warm enough, I sat with him while he ate or rested or slept. Now and then I would sneak over to Quincy Market for lunch and wander through the fancy stores, but I never bought anything: they had nothing I wanted. By the time Taz's radiation treatments started, I had begun knitting for the other kids on the unit. I made small things, mittens and hats.

Some five months later Taz came home from the hospital, returning monthly for four rounds of chemo. The doctors said that after radiation the average time to recurrence of his type of tumor was two months. I learned to change the dressing on his central line and to inject him with bone-marrow growth factor. I knitted more small things.

By the time it became clear that Taz had indeed beaten the odds, and he went back to school, and I went back to work, I had become skilled not only at taking the path of least resistance but at not even entertaining the possibility of other ways to go. I was tied down, after all, and destined to stay that way.

But the truth is that long before I even had kids I knew that "until" was just an excuse to keep drifting along. At a certain point the daily stresses and strains of living with Taz became my new excuse. Life is stressful, no doubt about it, but the pace is slower these days. I have time and space and choice, limited but real, if I choose to use them.

Knowing that I don't have to keep drifting along, that I can paddle, and then actually picking up the paddle — that has been my perennial struggle, at which I perennially resolve to do better. I used to play a game with myself: "If I won the lottery, I would _______" — fill in the blank, as many times as I want. If I play that game now, some of my answers will be things like "move to France," or "quit work," but others will be more along the lines of "learn to decorate cookies like a pro," or "finish a sweater already, this is getting ridiculous." The object of the game is to identify the things I could really truly do now, if I really wanted to, and then do them.

It turns out not to be so easy, for me anyway, but I keep trying.