Dropped Stitches

People have been telling me for years that I ought to write a book, but as a person who lives life in episodic chapters, finding any one theme in my own life that lasted long enough to complete a book was clearly not possible. But this Blogosphere was built for me—short, intense, globally shareable and with no selling or upfront cost. I am glad I didn’t push out a published effort before I was ready to start. This seemed like a good time.

The truth is, I started when I was ten years old, back in 1966. I had a small fortune on me, as it had been my birthday and I had a twenty dollar bill of my own. My purchases for the day included a 16 magazine, a white Slicker lipstick on a key chain, a pair of powder blue bell bottom polka dot pants, and a diary. Thus began a ritual of reading magazines, worshipping cute performers, putting on makeup and writing down the daily details of my little life and my perspective on the happenings and how I felt about them.

Nothing much has changed.

The bell bottoms were a bad decision, cool as I may have felt in them that day, and that decision set a precedent for the lifelong challenge of costuming myself, which to this day I still find overwhelming.

But back to the diaries. The process of writing down my thoughts has been a part of my daily life for 41 years. The earliest volumes were Christmas gifts from Hallmark Cards, pastel-colored pages in a date-per-page book, bound with a real cover and locked with a little gold key to keep all the secrets -- a security measure reinforced by the warning clearly stated on the first page of each new book: PRIVATE!!!! KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY DIARY!

By the time I was out of high school, girls my age were smoking pot and going all the way, and nobody was interested in keeping secrets. It was that “let it all hang out time” in the seventies, and diaries had gone the way of Nancy Drew books for most of my contemporaries. Since I wasn’t allowed to date until I was 16, sex and drugs had to wait until much later in life. So even as I was bound to the homestead with thoughts pure and impure, my daily missives expanded. Now relegated to spiral notebooks, I was unbound by the Hallmark one-date-one-page restriction, and I could go on and on, sorting through the events of my life.

Nothing much has changed.

And this, then, I believe, is the point I have to make with this blog, that so many people have implored me to write. A collection of stories (and really, I have some good ones, no doubt about that) isn’t important unless there is a benefit to the people who read them. We all have our stories.

Here’s my central theme and purpose: People don’t change. Behaviors do, focus does, and responses might, but the issues that color our lives, black and white or under the covers of many colors, stay with us all our lives, in one way or another. They either continue to hang us up, or ironically, if we do overcome something horrible, that redefines us as “survivors” of that issue, still making It a part of our curriculum vitae.

I won’t exhaustively address why we are this way, but I do emphatically know we do the same silly stuff over and over again until we get it right. And I know that there is no making Things right until you really and truly make It right for yourself. And in most cases, you have to fix It by yourself. If you have had a glitch in judgment that results in pain, shame, injury, loss, guilt, or even gross inconvenience, you cannot outrun it, cover it up, or forget about it. No matter how far you run, you’re going to be there when you get there. And that’s actually the good news and the bad news. We are all running toward ourselves, and this is as it should be.

Events and relationships and school and work and joys and embarrassments and illness and love, as we go along in life, are like the circular rows of yarn in a sweater that link one to the next, row to row, connecting and working their way along toward becoming a complete, attractive functional garment. And if there is a knot, a pull, a missed loop anywhere in that process, every row after that is affected.

I don’t have a domestic bone in my body and certainly never knit, but the analogy came to me in vision and here it is. You have a history of unfixed events, what I called dropped stitches, and when you hold that sweater up to the light, you can see that every careless connection has disrupted and compromised the whole design and pattern. It will droop, unbalanced off one shoulder or pucker, accenting your worst feature. The sweater will not fit, and it will never be comfortable.

If “Tapestry” was the music of our youth, Dropped Stitches is the theme of our maturity. I took a journey, back, and began the necessary unraveling of row after row, finding my own dropped stitches. Now the designer of my own brand, my own signature piece, this is the season to make it right.

I committed to myself that the second fifty years of my life would be different. I would re-knit the whole tapestry of my experience, until my life was something so comfortable, well, that I could just live in it.

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ABS

I don’t know whose big idea it was to make a lumpy hard vertical stack of unseen muscles in the middle of our bipedal bodies into such a paragon of desirability, but I have just about had it with the whole “ab” thing.

Like many things that popular culture keeps throwing in my face, I have a simple solution to end this madness, globally. But since I am not yet Queen, I cannot change everything that is wrong with the world. (You can see my simple everyday solutions recurring throughout this blogsite; search keywords When I Am Queen. See if you agree with me on any of them. Let me know. Maybe we can start something. )

Now back to these anti-AB assaults. Stomachs, everywhere! They came spilling out of swim suits and sundresses, in every color, from every TV channel all through the joyous season of the holidays. It got so bad New Year’s Day, I had to just say something about it. Perky blondes and shiny men in tight shorts yelling at me to buy their torturous devices called Ab Lounge…Ab Dolly….AB Blaster…Ab Kill This and Ab Die That.

And this “six pack” business, what is THAT? Is it the end all of human physical perfection to be likened to a machine filled collection of stupefying brews in Alzheimer’s-producing aluminum cans secured with never-to-dissolve-into-the-earth plastic rings? That doesn’t sound pretty, so why is that the chosen euphemism for the lumpy hard vertical stack of unseen muscles? Six pack? Not even a physiological possibility, and when you deal with me, you gotta get the words right. Get the name of your object d’obsesseion right. I can’t help you if we can’t name the beast.

One more question: what are we really talking about anyway when we say “ABS”? With all this text-talk in letters instead of sentences, this ABS is not even a word: what the hell are ABS? How many ABS do you get? Is it my one abdomen what you mean? What is that, my belly? My pooch, my bowling ball, my gut, my gelatinous mass, my blub, my unworthy mound—is that what we’re talking about?

Most women universally actually use the word “hate” when referring to their mid-sections. I was one of them. And when this all came about with the whole ABS thing it rocked me back to my college days (Salt Lake City, 1974) and man, I had to get my head out of that place but quick. Here’s what I did.

I have redefined it so that every time I hear somebody promising stronger ABS, it means something to me that is, well, meaningful. Here it is.

A is for autonomy. A woman who has married five times in the hope of a fusion of mind, body and soul, I came to the notion of autonomy in mid life. It isn’t that I don’t need other people nor am I unwilling to ask for help when I need it. Accepting help requires a certain amount of strength and it also makes the people who can do something for you to feel really good about themselves. I have been on the receiving end of some remarkable grace from a good many people, for quite some time. This year, I want to realize a phrase I have used for some time, and make it manifest: you can be a whole lot more of a humanitarian when you are stinking rich than broke with good intentions. SO for me, this year, A is for AUTONOMY. Fill up my coffers and I will share as I see fit.

B is for bravery. That may seem odd coming from me because I hardly have a reputation as a shrinking violet. I have surely been bold, but that is not the same as brave. Bravery in my world isn’t about conquering enemies; bravery is about being honest with the people I love who are really messing up their own lives and the lives of people I care about. SO for me, B is for BRAVERY. Tell them the truth and let them take it from there.

S is for sustenance. I have not been hungry, really, for any length of time in my life. Oh, sure, there was a time or two when my own decisions left me temporarily without lunch money. Most times this was because I chose to leave a bad situation knowing it would cost me, but believing that freedom at any price is a bargain. And I have, like my entire generation, lost a lot of years of joy because of the obsession with weight, what it means about who I am, how I should feel about myself, what I can wear, how I apologize for myself and criticize others, in a blanket judgment call that obfuscates all other parameters of character. This is nonsense.

Autonomy, bravery and sustenance, there are the means by which we nourish and strengthen ourselves, inside and outside, mind, body and soul. That really is nobody’s call but my own. How I strengthen my ABS is entirely up to me.

The common thinking that if you’ve got flat abs, you’re a hero and pouchy- bellied people are lazy with no self esteem--- what a crock all that is, and I am so over it.
I want to live a well nourished life of joy, confidence, and fulfillment.

And I want a damn bellyful.