Driving Forward, Looking Back

When I was up in the weeeee hours of the morning this morning, I did some hard thinking.
I do a lot of hard thinking in the wee hours. What else is there to do?

I think over the past couple of years, since my divorce, I've pretty much been in a holding pattern. Certainly for the last year I've been sort of coasting, letting things happen, taking it easy.

Lately, however, I have a sense of Life Passing Me By. I look at where I've been and where I am and realize I have no sense of where I go from here. At present I have no real future... just tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Maybe it's because when I was married I felt like my future – our future together – was more or less mapped out, I didn't think about it much then. Since then I have had a sense of my future being erased, or destroyed, and for over a year all I could see ahead was rubble. But now I see nothing. And there's nothing left behind me when I look back. Certainly there is nowhere back there for me to go. And no reason to cling to it like a shipwreck survivor.

I exist, in one sense, in a Tabula Rasa. A clean slate.

What I'm learning in talking to others is that most people, at some point in their lives, find themselves starting over. I didn't know that until I found myself doing it. But the more I talk with people, the more I see amazing dips and curves and right angles in their lives. Mine is no different. It is just mine.

So I declared this the Year Zero. And set myself some simple touchpoints to guide me. I thought "I need to know what I want from this new life I'm offered, so I can begin now to create it, not just to take what happens." So here is what I came up with. I'll call them The Nine:

1) I want to feel good about myself: physically and emotionally.

2) I want to manage my relationship with alcohol, and with all potentially damaging extremes

3) I want to be financially secure and independent

4) I want to build and maintain a supportive network of friends

5) I want to have a variety of interesting experiences that enrich my life and the life of my son

6) I want to be creative and productive

7) I want a home of my own

8) I want to live in a world in which I seek ways to say a hopeful yes to my heart's desires, not reasons to say a fearful no

9) I want to love and be loved.

Those are the Nine. And every day I think I need to ask myself "What have I done today to further the Nine?"

And finally, I think there is a tenth principle, but since it's one of negativity, not a want, I hold it separate.

10 is "No regrets. No guilt." In other words, my past is behind me and I am who I am. It's okay to seek out the life I want for me.

I realize Grayson does not figure in this list. Of course, he's central to everything in my life. And of course I want a happy, safe and fulfilling life for him as well. But this is the list for myself, so I kept the focus on me and what I want. I think if I can stay true to this list, and just keep moving forward, I'll get somewhere good.

Starting Today.

I can't sleep. I mean, I really can't sleep. It's 4 a.m. and I've done little better than doze since I turned out my light at 10. And the hell of it is, it's all from good intentions.

I decided to try to kick my weight loss and bikini-plan into a higher gear by knocking off the sauce for a week or two. I've been counting calories, and hitting the gym in the mornings a few times a week, but still not moving things along like I want to. It's discouraging because if there are two things I hate to do, they're diet and exercise. Oh, I'm happy to spend the day working like a beast turning over the garden. But I really and truly hate grinding away on an elliptical machine, for even the deadly 20 minutes I do on my super-speedy morning workouts. And just the thought of dieting makes me feel deprived and grouchy.

So naturally I decide to take it one step further and deprive myself of one of the primary pleasures of life: wine.

Problem is, I'm a more or less chronic insomniac even with two glasses of wine on board of an evening. Without it, I'm just sitting in the dark like an owl, making up shit to worry about: Global warming, the plight of the sea turtles, dogs that died 20 years ago, why I had trouble making friends in sixth grade, why I can't remember the ending of Villette. You name it. At last, to save my sanity, I get up and eat a bowl of cereal and sit in the living room for awhile, hollow-eyed and exhausted, until I'm able to quiet my interior monologue enough to go back to bed. Likely I'll fall asleep around 5:30 and be a zombie when the alarm goes off -- rudely -- an hour later.

I'm not sure the few hundred calories worth of wine are worth it, frankly. But I remain steadfast. I have clothes I can't wear, and bathing suit season -- horror of horrors -- is fast approaching. The stark unavoidable fact of my middle-aged body in a bathing suit is sobering in and of itself, without the extra cottage cheese.

In my callow youth I imagined myself aging gracefully, accepting each line and wrinkle with equanimity. But the reality of it is much more distressing. In my 20s, when I gave lip service to aging gracefully, I always imagined that I would have achieved a certain "maturity" by my 40s ... that simply failed to materialize. Nor could I realize in my 30s that my sense of being a grown-up had gone as far as it ever would. Mentally, I never aged beyond about 34, and let me tell you, for 34, my body has gone all to hell. I didn't realize, see, what probably any woman over 40 could have told me. No matter how mature I become, no matter how experienced or wise or worldly my accumulated years might make me, I'm never going to feel any older than about 34. Okay, a tired, achey and jaded 34, but when I look in the mirror, 34 is about what I expect to see.

Imagine my shock, then, on confronting the tired 44-year-old broad that turns up in my bathroom with me every morning. Those roots! That cellulite! That... thing under the chin! Why, it's enough to drive even a mature, grown up woman to drink. For me, it's falling off a log.

So, the upshot is... I'm awake. At what is now turning up to be 4:21 a.m. Worrying about whether tis nobler in the mind to sacrifice the nightly glasses of wine to the gods of bikini or just chuck it in.

Think I'll go lie in bed and worry about it.

In Which I Make a Daring Rescue

Thursday evening I was feeling kind of bummed out after work. I'd been to the pharmacy to pick up my meds and was told that the insurance company had "updated" their formulary and decreed my medicine "out of formulary," thereby jacking the price up from $30 to $60. This forces me to take the generic version, which is only $10, but works about half as well. That would be bad enough if we were talking about an allergy medication, but this is an anti-depressant, so I knew I was looking at near future of increased bouts of sadness and despair.

Enough to bring anyone down, I think. And it's doubly frustrating because there's nothing you can do. There's not even anyone to yell at. It's not the pharmacist's fault. It's not the fault of the guy on the phone from the insurance company (though I did give him a healthy dose of the rough side of my tongue, I assure you). It's not my doctor's fault. The people who made this decision did it in some shadowy, no doubt richly appointed board room somewhere, based solely on the output of their stock portfolio. It's just maddening. You can get to anyone to tell them what their decision has done you. I can't afford $60 a month for these pills. But can I afford to be depressed and crazy more? I have a kid to raise, a life to lead!

I have decided to just ask my doctor to increase my dosage. I don't necessarily need the increase, at least of the brand name medication I don't. But I know I'm not at my maximum dosage, so there's room for an increase, which should make up for the 20% drop in active ingredient allowed in the generic.

I know generics are supposed to be "Just as effective." And I always used to believe that, until I made the switch one time and was longing for death two weeks later.

Anyway, I told you all that to explain why I was feeling a bit low after work on Thursday. I went out to sit on the patio and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine and read a book. I was sipping my wine and reading peacefully when I heard a ruckus in the limbs of the crepe myrtle bush at my back. The ruckus became a scrambling and then the dogs came to attention and leapt at the bush.

A squirrel had apparently missed its footing and fallen through the branches. The dogs were after it in a flash and the poor thing panicked and took off across the patio, practically under my feet! It actually stopped under a chair in front of me and then was off again like a shot, but it ran the wrong way and got itself cornered between a planter and the porch steps.

At this point I realilzed the poor squirrel was truly in mortal danger, and I jumped up from my chair to try to call off the dogs, but just then the squirrel made a desperate run for the yard, right between Roxy's feet, and she had it.

She snatched it up and made for the yard with it, with Flower right alongside her and me in hot pursuit. I snatched up one of the dozens of fallen sycamore branches that are currenty littering my yard and started wailing away at her, trying to get her to let the poor thing go. Twice she dropped it, but snatched it up again before the squirrel could right itself. And then she dropped the poor thing again and Flower caught it. I switched my attack to FLower.

At last Flower let the squirrel drop and I stood over it, swinging my sycamore branch to keep them at bay. I thought the squirrel would run off, but it seemed frozen, its little sides heaving, just standing in the grass at my feet.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't leave it to go get a towel or box to put it in, because the dogs would grab it immediately. I didn't dare try to pick it up bare-handed. Fortunately about that time Grayson came out to see what all the shouting was about and he helped me out by corralling the dogs into the house and then watching the squirrel while I went into the garage for a box.

The little thing didn't move a whisker all this time. It just stood there, as if it had frozen stiff in the act of running: with one leg out behind it. Grayson said he was afraid the leg was broken, and it may have been, I don't know. When I tried to pick it upwith a towel, it did sort of hobble away and bury itself in a pile of leaves next to the shed, but then it didn't try to escape again when I scooped it up the next time.

It's a young squirrel, which probably explains its poor choices in the melee. I put it in the box with some old baby blankets of Grayson's, and didn't see any blood. Amazingly enough, I don't think the dogs punctured it anywhere, but I do think it was hurt in all the dropping and snatching, but not seriously. Mostly just scared half to death. It held very very still, with its face buried in the blankets, and didn't try to escape or make any move to defend itself, even when I gave in to temptation and petted its soft little sides. I let Grayson pet it once, too, and then I closed it up and we left it alone.

We kept it in the box overnight, with a heating pad underneath to help keep it warm and ward off shock, and some tiny little peanut butter sandwiches and a bit of water. Before I went to bed, I checked on it and saw that it had nibbled on some of the peanutbutter, and was curled up tight and sleeping. On Friday morning I drove the little guy out to Wildcare to be taken care of. The woman who checked him in reached in and picked him up to check him out and again I saw no blood on him. He squeeked and struggled, so I think he'll make a fine recovery.

I'm a hero!

This morning, however, I was out on the patio and heard a scrambling as yet another juvenile squirrel made a miscalculation in the crepe myrtle. He slipped, scrambled, saved himself, and then made an awkward leap to the porch roof, an equally graceless scramble across the cable to the tree and a fairly lumbering climb out of sight. Must be a litter-mate of our rescued squirrel. Lord help him.