Grief on little padded feet
Grief is a strange acquaintance, like a ne'er-do-well cousin who turns up unexpectedly or a stray cat that wanders in and out at will. There seems no rhyme or reason to when Grief pays a visit, and you can never know how long it will stay.
Just Like Everyone Else
I don't remember how old I was when I realized I was just like everyone else, but it must have been very young. I was a bookish child, and A Little Princess was my favorite book for a long time, but really I'd read anything easier than Jane Austen (I tried, I really did) until I was probably 11. Then I discovered audiobooks and it broke the wall between my brain and harder books (...like Jane Austen).
The Ides of November
It has been more than a week since the last update. Last Saturday (the 8th) my kids and I went to a friend's house to pack meals for the homeless. There is a wonderful organization in Des Moines that delivers hot meals all over the city to homeless encampments and people on Sundays. Numerous families all over the city take a weekend and make 40 meals (there are maybe 5 families per weekend). The rest of the week, the soup kitchen is open, but on Sundays the meals come to the people. We used to help my sister-in-law every month with this, even after we moved away from Des Moines, but once she got married, and I had a fourth kid, we stopped doing it so often. It was a special feeling to be back and working again.
One Week Update
Tintin comic incoming:
Making Excuses
It seems like some sort of update is in order, so this is a very quick one to explain where I've been, how I've "fallen off the rails" and where I'm going from here. My great intentions for November fell apart when around November 14th, I started experiencing severe back pain. Lower back pain is an incredibly common thing, and I have experienced it on and off since my very early 20s. Sometimes it's a creeping thing that leaves me slightly disabled all day, and sometimes it's a severe problem that happens suddenly and incapacitates me entirely for a day or two. This was, somehow, a combination of the two. It came on fairly slowly and some days the pain has been almost immobilizing, whereas others are merely twingey and sore.
No-Chill November
November gets a lot of weight put on it besides the impending Thanksgiving feast and Black Friday consume-a-thon. There's the recently-defunct NaNoWriMo, where people were challenged to write 50,000 words in a single month (something I'd often hoped to do but never really had time for). Then there's the weird "No-{blank} November", in which the blank could be filled with many other things like shaving. My former church used No-Shave November to raise money for adoption funds, for instance. So with this theme in mind, I was feeling severely unchill about the state of the world at the beginning of October and picked "No-Chill November" for my personal theme.
Care and care
The last month of my life has been marked by constant, often severe lower back pain. I have had back pain off and on since I reached adulthood, both the achey kind that lasts a few days and the horrible twang that flattens you and leaves you crawling agonizingly to a chair you then can't even get yourself into, followed by a day of barely being able to walk, muscle relaxers and rest, and a few days later everything is okay again. This is the first time it has gone on and on. Muscle relaxers have had little effect, and I am hosting Christmas this year so I'm mildly stressed about cleaning and preparing for company.