UP A CREEK

I dreamed that I was attempting to cross a very wide river in a kayak, but instead of having a paddle, all I had was a tennis racket. I can’t say that a tennis racket is absolutely useless as a paddle. Thanks to it’s shape and net dimensions it does provide some water resistance for propelling a small craft, just not a lot of it. So I was making little headway getting across this very wide river. I don’t know if I ever made it across because I woke up pretty soon after realizing my paddle was a tennis racket.

On Saturday, Lauren and I attended Community Defense Training in a church packed with concerned community members. I learned a lot and took copious notes. We’re being discretionary with the information while trying to spread it around (please feel free to message me with questions). If anything, it was helpful to know my legal rights and what I can do if I see ICE Agents. Monday morning, Jenn sent a group text to me and Lauren that she had spotted ICE agents in our neighborhood. Lauren immediately had Jenn call the local helpline while I sent her information on what she needed to tell the people on the helpline. The helpline sends out people to get more information on who and where people are being taken by the agents. They also help get legal aid to those being detained. Legal aid is very important since 89% of cases fail without legal representation.

Team work activism!

After the training, Lauren took me home and we sat in her car in my driveway talking about grace and how we tend to not give ourselves enough of it. We tell ourselves we are not enough while trying to do all of the things while being socially and ecologically responsible, but the thing is, it is not physically sustainable or possible to do all of the things and then some. Recent studies of autoimmune diseases show that women are more likely to be susceptible to autoimmune disorders because they are trying to do all the things while ignoring their own discomfort. Instead of saying “wait…I’m not feeling well…I can’t do all of the things?” we like to pat ourselves on the backs for doing all of the things in spite of not feeling well. In turn, the body’s immune system starts attacking you because you have been unkind to your own body.

We must give ourselves some grace.

Lately, I have felt paralyzed over knowing that I needed to help my community is some way but not having any idea how to help my community. I thought for sure that I was not doing enough because I was not doing anything other than blogging about ways to help. Record scratch…sharing ways to help is doing something. Community Defense Training also gave me clear instructions and ways that I can do more. Getting training is doing something. Am I buying the most ethically caught shrimp from Costco? Probably not, but my soap comes from the refill station. That’s gotta cancel something out. I am doing what I can, in this moment.

Even if it feels like I’m paddling a kayak with a tennis racket.

THE THINGS WE DO NOT KNOW

I spent the weekend in Oklahoma not seeing everyone I wanted to see, but spending quality time with those I needed to see. I was able to see for myself that Talaura’s Sarge was alive and well. I was able to squeeze Talaura and hopefully give her a tiny break and an empathetic ear. Most of the rest of my time was spent with Robin, Traci and Chris. I dragged them all to the First Americans Museum, a museum Chris and I watched being built but never got to see its completion. The front of the building looks like the sun and for years, we watched as this sun rose because we passed the construction site on our daily commute to work. It was lovely to finally step inside this sun and see the tragic beauty of our first Americans.

Then Traci, Robin and I spent the rest of the day floating in Traci’s pool. As we floated about, rotating with the shade, we talked about all things and no things. This was the first time Traci and Robin had really gotten a chance to talk to each other and I watched a friendship begin as they learned the stories of each other. At one point, when our fingers were pruney from our time in the water, I told Traci about the hand written note I had found in Chris’s office while cleaning it out. The note contained half a date, a date I couldn’t account for and the thought of it has haunted me all this time. I asked Traci “Is it possible he knew he was sick before we moved?” and without blinking an eye she said “I would not be surprised.” She told me that he would have done anything for my happiness.

This is when I learned something about Chris that I didn’t know.

Traci told me that Chris had not always been the kind, empathetically generous person that most of us knew. She told me about him telling her he had met a girl and all his fears that this girl wouldn’t love him. She told me how I had changed him. I rolled my eyes at this thinking that it couldn’t possibly be true. All the years. All the time. My core belief is, has been, that Chris was the one who made me a better person. Definitely not the other way around. He’s the one who built a place for me to write, to put the camera in my hand, to put my career first. This is how I learned that support is not words but actions and I have spent lifetimes worried that I didn’t act enough in return. Turns out that was not necessarily true.

We made each other better.

MY FLAMING LIPS

Okay, this is not a real entry or worth a whole post but it is a ramble of things I’m a little bit proud of. First of all, most of you know about my peeling lips and how I pick at them. Most of the times my lips are in a state of scabbed, chapped or just a bleeding mess because I lack all restraint and cant’ keep my hands from peeling any bit of a possible flake of skin from my lips. It is a terrible ugly habit, but it is a habit of a lifetime. There have been short snips of time when I have not done this. Once when I was on a gluten free diet and once I don’t know why or remember, but I just didn’t. It has been three months now and so I feel like it is safe for me to disclose that my lips are healed and in the best shape of their lives. How did I do it? One morning I was smearing Aquaphor cream onto my tattoo and rubbed some extra onto my lips. Since then, I’ve been doing that twice a day and even though there have been times I’ve tried to pick at my lips, there’s nothing to pick off.

Pucker up! It’s a gosh dang miracle.

The second thing that I’ve done is print out cute little price tags that include a QR code for my Venmo account that I will place with the prints I’m hanging next month. Is this a big deal? Nope, but it makes me feel real tech savvy and hip like a young person. Some of you are sitting there thinking “But Cindy, you are savvy and hip!” and I’m here to say that I am savvy and hip for my age demographic. My generation invented blogging and online sharing of photos. I can do those things well, but Reels and TikToks and the Snaps? Forget it. I’m not saying I can’t do those things. I’m saying I have yet to create space for learning to do those things and I don’t feel like I’ll be making space for that learning any time soon.

Back at Christmas, when we were at Jenn and Wade’s, we all had to take turns saying something personal about ourselves. One of the questions posed was “what is something you lie about to yourself?” I tell myself that I am unhealthy. Like all the time. I have had people tell me that I am not enough in some way or fashion. Not every day or all the time, but eventually there’s been the review where I’m not doing my job enough or the relationship where I don’t praise enough. Commercials and ads tell me I’m not thin enough, eating healthy enough, young enough, happy enough. I am bombarded with outside ‘not enoughs’ and for a while I had started adopting this language when talking to myself. It’s like spending a week in London and suddenly picking up a British accent. That’s basically how the biggest lie came into being. The biggest lie I tell myself is that I am not enough.

Wait. That is also not true.

The biggest lie I used to tell myself was that I am not enough. I’ve been working on this for a while. That whole unhealthy lie I tell myself slipped by me and I was surprised it even came out of my mouth. Here I was smugly thinking that I had beat the habit of telling myself all the ways I am not enough. Habits are hard to dump. Celebrating small victories has become part of my strategy for dumping that bad habit. Neither of those above things are news worthy items, but both of them are small victories. I am not unhealthy. Look at my lips! They’re so healthy looking! I eat a bag of kale a week. Is that something an unhealthy person would do? Maybe? I don’t know, but you might also notice in that part on my second small victory, I did not allude to being not techy enough. I know enough things and I’d rather spend my time in other ways than spending it learning new tech.

Small victories for today (so far): I added my outside walking loop back in with my inside walking loop. I have taken over 8,000 steps today all before 10:00AM. I figured out a Jupyter notebook coding problem I was having last week. That’s amazing! And the day is young. I think I will celebrate with a dance party at my desk.

You should celebrate your small victories.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Living our lives with more purpose than before.

That was one of the sentences Rebecca Woolf wrote in a posting regarding expectations in widowhood last week. Of all the head nodding relatable things she wrote about society’s judgements on how a widow should behave after the death of her husband, it was that sentence that hit the hardest. Those words were like hands wrapping around my arms to give me a good shake. Living my life with more purpose than I did before Chris’s death is like walking around under a thick heavy blanket. It is exhausting and when it is all I can do to take air into my own lungs, the guilt of not living with more purpose turns that thick heavy blanket into a wet thick heavy blanket.

Now, I know that the people in my immediate circle do not judge or have expectations regarding my widow behavior. I know that those judgment fingers are my own fingers pointing into my own face. No one expects more than I do of myself. After reading Rebecca’s post, I sent a message to her that read “‘Living our lives with more purpose than before’ is so fucking exhausting.” It wasn’t until I had written it out that I realized the weight of what I have been carrying around with me all this time. No wonder I’m tired all the dang time. It is hard enough on most days to live a life of purpose for myself, let alone live a life of purpose for myself and another human. I had a hard time separating the me from the me and Chris. So much of my life after Chris is tinged with guilt because I went from being a person who didn’t care what others thought of me to a person who suddenly cared what a dead man thought of me. It has taken me almost ten years to figure out that who I am without Chris is the same person I was with Chris, with just a few minor adjustments.

This week, I removed my set of wedding rings from the chain I wear around my neck, leaving Chris’s wedding band and my scooter charm. I remember clearly when I added my rings to the chain with Chris’s ring. I took them off my finger because I had lost enough weight to make them loose on my ring finger. Dangerously loose. I remember riding the scooter home from work and feeling them slip from the largest knuckle. At the time, it made perfect sense to add them to Chris’s ring. I really didn’t know what else to do with my wedding rings, but I really didn’t know what to do with myself. As I lifted my chain to place it around my neck, I was astounded by how noticeably lighter that chain felt without my rings and later in the day, when I caught a reflection of myself with only Chris’s ring and my scooter charm on that chain, my hand flew to my neck in a moment of panic. For a very brief moment, I thought “there is no me without him.” Then the thumb of my hand that had flown up to my neck, looped Chris’s wedding band onto itself. I spun that ring around my thumb, feeling the soothing coolness and remembered how light I felt by taking my rings off. The moment of panic slipped easily away because I realized that the truth is, there is no him without me.

The Cabbage recently broached the subject of death and afterlife. I mentioned The Law of Conservation of Energy.

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another.

Chris’s energy is everywhere and nowhere. I feel it when I’m writing and creating. I feel it when I watch any movie or hear new music from one of our favorite bands. He’s holding the pen every time I sit down to make a list of any kind. I feel it when I see something that I know we would both laugh forever about. It is his voice saying that sharp witted subtle thing that makes someone else in the room laugh. I will never let go of Chris or his wedding band. I will always be married to him, but I am ready to let go of living this life for him. I am ready to drop these expectations I have of myself, the ones that whisper “I am not enough.”

I want to have some not so great expectations for living.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Branch

6 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Branch"

I noticed a white powder drifting down to my yoga mat as I moved through my sun salutations. My skin was so dry that it was flaking off of my body with each movement. I was disgusting. The next day, I took a long steamy shower and scrubbed my body with oily bath salts and then coated myself in lotion. This is something I have to do every day or I am just a walking flake. This is called self maintenance. This is something I have gotten better at over the years. I schedule regular doctor visits for all of the doctors. I take time to visit my favorite massage therapist every so often. I keep my toenails trimmed so I can't use my toes as weapons. These teeth get flossed every day. Look at me, being a grown up and self maintaining. 

Once week, I sit in my therapist's office talking about my week which inevitably circles around to how I am not enough. I could write you the longest list of ways that I am not enough. I am not fill-in-the-blank enough. The biggest not enough of them all is the hardest one for me to say out loud, but sometimes I do so I can hear just how ridiculous it sounds. Because I know that biggest one is ridiculous, but still...that's the one that sits with me day in and day out. Dr. Mary doesn't really ever say much when I talk about not being enough. Whatever she says it tends to prompt me into talking about the things I do that are enough. I talk about the money I can spare every month for charity and how teaching yoga at the Y is giving back to my community. This is self care. This is something that I have not gotten better at over the years. 

Whenever the weather is remotely nice outside, all the people in Kansas City get outside. This means that the Y is practically empty. Wednesday night, I set up to teach my yoga class and then ended up sitting around for about half an hour. I was just about to pack it in and call it a night when a woman stumbled into the class. She looked around, slightly confused and then said "Am I the only one? I thought I was only just late." Then we had a short discussion about whether or not to have class at all. I told her that I didn't mind teaching a short thirty minute class with her, so she grabbed a mat and a block and I taught class. And it was a good class. It was the kind of class where I could see the student making those mental connections to the cues I was giving her and see the lightbulb of understanding light up above her head. It was the kind of class that could make me believe that I was making a difference and doing something good. 

This is self care. 

This week, I am thankful for that one student. I am thankful for the opportunity to share my practice and knowledge. I am thankful for that moment where I was enough. I am thankful for self care. 

I am thankful for you.