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Phew, It’s Friday

Woohoo, It's Friday! Pictures, Photos, and Images for Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter

Happy Friday!! I am so happy that today is Friday. So, so happy and relieved, I am. New readers, on Fridays, I stay at the shallow end of the pool. I don’t go deep on most Fridays. Fridays are “Favorite Things Friday” here at Adulting – Second Half. On Fridays, I list three favorite things, songs, websites, beauty products, etc. that make my material life fun. I strongly encourage you to share your favorites in my Comments section and please check out previous Friday posts for more of my favorites. Here are my favorites for today:

MDLIVE – I have a great general physician, but last Sunday, I was at the end of my rope with a lingering cough (don’t worry, I have tested negative for Covid), which has lasted for over a month. So, I got an appointment with a doctor, spoke to a doctor, got a prescription for antibiotics sent to my pharmacy, picked up my prescription and started taking my medicine, on a SUNDAY, all in a time span less than two hours. The doctor was very kind, empathetic and professional and MDLIVE accepts some insurance coverage. I would use this service again in a heartbeat, but I hope that I don’t have to for a while. I hope that you don’t need to utilize MDLIVE either, but keep it in your back pocket, just in case.

StriVectin Powerlift Instant Tightening Mask – I love StriVectin products. I have used their neck cream for a while now. However, this “Tighten and Lift” mask is my new favorite product from their line. The stress of all of this 2020 mess has been showing on my face, and this is the first product that I have ever used that I saw an immediate difference. If you need a lift, literally, try this product. Of course, there are no miracle anti-aging products that mimic a real facelift, but this product definitely helps fill in the lines, a little bit. It’s a picker upper in a tube and worth the price!

SWAD Coriander Chutney – I have been on a ramen soup kick these days. I start with the ramen and then I get creative by doctoring it up with leftovers, and salad about to wilt, and random single helpings of meat from the back of the freezer, and topping the hot, steamy soup with some crunchy cheese toast. Anyway, to give the soup some flavor and kick, I add a teaspoon of this delicacy to my concoctions and it makes all of the difference. If you are one that likes spice and tang, you must purchase a jar of this chutney. It is one of my go-to ingredients for a lot of my cooking. I purchase my jars of this wonderful flavor, on Amazon.

Enjoy the weekend, friends! Thank you, always, for coming by!!!

HAIR'S WHAT I THINK Or Monday, Monday… Can't Trust That Day…

Candy Corn and Soup

Image

I sent this meme recently to some of my family and friends. My middle son and I found it to be hilarious. My middle son said that eating candy corn is like eating candle wax. I’d honestly eat the candle wax first. Most of the responses to the meme that I got back were along the lines of, “Ha! Yes! Nobody likes candy corn.”

Well, it turns out that my daughter and a few of my friends DO like candy corn . . . quite a bit. They took offense. It seems to me that candy corn falls into the “you either LOVE it or HATE it” category. There is no in-between. You either love or hate broccoli, brussels sprouts, cilantro, sardines, mushrooms and . . . . candy corn.

On a food note, while moping in my bed yesterday, I received a phone call from a sweet young lady from Nordstrom Department Store. She wanted to know when I was going to pick up my package.

“What package?” I asked.

“It’s soup, under your son’s name,” she replied sweetly and patiently.

“Soup?!?” I exclaimed. Right away my mind was going into, “Why in the hell did my son order soup from Nordstrom?!? That’s got to be some expensive soup. I didn’t even know that Nordstrom sold soup, but then again I haven’t been to the mall in forever.”

“It’s a SUIT, ma’am,” she said, giggling.

My son and my husband had recently purchased my son a suit for his medical school interviews. The customer service person and I got a good laugh out of our exchange. It feels good to laugh. Laughter is good medicine.

Outpouring

When I experience some of my worst days in any one year, my emotions hit me hard. I’m a fire sign and I am deep. My emotions come at me hard, Miley Cyrus style – like a wrecking ball. I experience my emotions fast and furious. I usually give myself some mope time when I am really sad and disheartened. It is my way of acknowledging my feelings and letting myself feel them. I typically look a mess, and I keep my bed unmade so I can crawl into it and cry into my pillow whenever I feel like it. When I indulge in some mope time, I find that I am able to inch to the other side of it, faster than I would, than if I just powered through it all and pretended it away. I know myself. I don’t like feeling lousy for long. I get tired of feeling down and blah. I get tired of my droopiness. I know that I won’t get lost in the abyss because my natural state is to be upbeat and hopeful.

When I go through something hard, my first thoughts are totally dramatic. I write this blog every single day and on days that something hits me really hard, like my son’s seizure earlier this week, I ask myself, how do I write my blog? How can I possibly write my blog? Maybe I should just shut my blog down! These feelings arise because I can’t stand dishonesty. I am not a good pretender. I wear my heart on my sleeve. But the thing is, I love this blog. I love to write. I love to connect with you, my beloved readers. I find myself through my writing, which feels and seems to be particularly important at this middle stage of my life, for some unknown reason. As you know, I write this blog when I am on vacation (back when there was such a thing) and on holidays. I write this blog when I am feeling amazing, and I write this blog when I feel like shit. Writing this blog is part of my every day breath. This blog is one of my fondest creations, besides my children, of course.

I won’t tell you every detail of my life. I honor and respect the privacy of my family and of my friends, and that is what is most sacred to me. But I won’t lie to you – that would be like lying to myself, and this blog is an outpouring of pure me. People have expressed to me that they read my blog for inspiration and that makes me happy. I love to add inspiration and hope to this world. I will tell you that even in my darkest times, I love life. I am so grateful for all of the good in this world and there is so, so much of it. Goodness prevails and it seeps out of the least expected places, many, many times. Anyway, I am crawling out of my mope fest each day, and I am saying to you, I love you. Thank you for being here, and the blog stays. See you tomorrow.

Charlotte

We had another setback yesterday, with my youngest son’s epilepsy. My son is okay, thankfully, so that is what really matters the most. Lately, when I offer a gargantuan pile of advice, or pepper this particular son with questions (like I have a tendency to do with all of my children and loved ones – thank you for still loving me), he likes to sing his answers back to me. It is sort of like a warning sign, like a dog growling. And it’s hilarious. The very off-key, fervent singing usually breaks the tension, and while it annoys me and amuses me in equal parts, it also reminds me how much I love my children and each of their unique personalities and their ways of being, in my world and in the whole world, in general. That is why days like yesterday are so stomach pitting-ly tough. There is nothing stronger, yet at the same time more vulnerable, than a mother’s heart. When you have days that force you to confront the idea that your strong, vital heart could be instantly shattered, at any moment or at any time, the fear that you feel is overwhelmingly ferocious. I read something recently, which suggested that we women have a lot of our parts and our essence made out of silk. Like silk, we look feminine and delicate and fragile, but here are the real facts:

“Quantitatively, spider silk is five times stronger than steel of the same diameter. It has been suggested that a Boeing 747 could be stopped in flight by a single pencil-width strand and spider silk is almost as strong as Kevlar, the toughest man-made polymer.” (www.chm.bris.ac.uk)

It turns out that we women are really made of gorgeous, silky steel. Don’t we know it! Charlotte, the teeny, tiny “fragile” spider, really was the strongest character in all of our childhood tales. A tiny, knowing, beautiful, wise, feminine spider, spun her messages in silk. Her love and her gift to the world was her silken word, and her safe, silken nest, where her babies grew and came to life.

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Soul Sunday

Hello friends. I hope that this Sunday finds you in a state of peace. Sundays are reserved for the songs of the Soul, here at Adulting – Second Half. Sundays are devoted to poetry. Please share your poems in my Comments section. This is a “no judgment” zone. This is a safe place for release in the form of the written word. Here is my poem for today:

I Hear You

I’m listening, Body.

You are the one who always gets ignored.

The Middle Child, mediator of the Mind and the Soul.

You don’t have the voice, or the emotion of your siblings,

But you house the heart.

You make possible the breath.

You work overtime, trying to keep everyone and everything in balance.

You subtly ask for care, but your subtly is so easy to ignore,

Until your whispers turn to cries.

Don’t let my cries, turn to screams, you say.

I’m listening, Body.

Today, I care for you.

You are the precious vehicle for my travels in life,

And for the acuity of my Mind,

And for the sensories of my Soul.

Today, I honor you and I respect you,

For everything that you give, to the whole of me.

We Like Each Other

There are a couple of young, famous mommy blog writers who recently announced that they are divorcing their husbands, this summer. This has caused an outrage and a disillusionment with some of their many, many followers. One of the bloggers has actually turned her brand into sort of a “here is the secret formula for creating a perfect marriage/perfect kids/perfect life” if you come to this speaking event, or buy this series of podcasts, or if you pay for this expensive marriage retreat, so I can understand the shock and disappointment among her fans.

We all want the secret formula for life, don’t we? We all hold out hopes that if we just stumble on the exact right steps to take, we will be guaranteed happiness and joy and a problem free life, forever and ever. But at our middle-aged time in life, we are humbled. We get it. There are no guarantees. Life has a way of throwing a lot of curve balls our way – many that we didn’t see coming.

For my marriage, I know that we will be soon be embarking on “the empty nest” stage. I see it in the fast nearing horizon. Our fourth and youngest child, our daughter, is a junior in high school. For most of our married life, we have been a traditional sort of family. My husband has always been the main breadwinner, and I did most of the every day child raising. Lately, I’ve been floundering a little bit. I am headed towards early retirement, where my husband is still following his same, steady career path. I notice that I often feel defensive about how I spend my time (which there is now a whole lot more of, with the kids being more self sufficient than ever) and I also feel nervous, not having as clear a purpose that I felt when I was shaping my children’s lives, on an everyday basis. I don’t feel as assured of my direction these days, and sometimes that makes me feel a little insecure and shaky and floundering. But at the same time, it makes me feel excited, too. My husband’s every day life isn’t filled with as many changes as I am going through, so he just gets to experience the bewilderment/aggravation of having a life partner, who is going through a lot of changes (in her daily routines and in her hormones), and all during a worldwide pandemic. It’s not easy. And there are no books or seminars or weekend retreats, that have a perfect formula for navigating this stage in life, either, because the answers to navigating life stages, are different and unique and complicated, for everybody and every couple. We all have different personalities, and circumstances, and values, and mixes of all of it. Not to dash anyone’s hopes, but singular formulas for perfect lives, do not exist for anyone, at any stage of life. Singular, slick, flashy life formulas are often created by great marketers (even if they do start out with pure, well-meaning intentions), for the ultimate destination of a big pile of money.

That being said, I have started to read Phil Donahue’s/Marlo Thomas’ (who, by the way, have been married themselves to each other for about 40 years) latest book, What Makes a Marriage Last. For the book, they have interviewed forty long term, famous couples in order to find out what makes their marriages work. (Some of these couples include Jimmy and Roslynn Carter, James Carville and Mary Matlin, Elton John and David Furnish, LL Cool J and Simone Smith . . . . believe me, you will recognize all of the names) I’ve just started to read the book. I’m in the first third of the book. It’s so charming. It’s a really fun read. This book reminds me of that last part of When Harry Met Sally, when the sweet couples are sitting on the couches, discussing their own love stories, with twinkles in their eyes. I have noticed many common themes among these couples who Marlo and Phil interviewed. There is a lot of obvious compatibility, mutual respect for each other, a shared love for the families and the lives that they have co-created, etc. Sting and Trudie Styler talk about the importance of good communication and “a pretty intense sexual charge” between the two of them.

My husband and I were sitting on the couch last night. He was watching hockey and I was reading the book, sometimes out loud to him. We laughed knowingly, at some of the things which the couples playfully teased each other about. We talked about some of the aspects that have made our own partnership last so long. We couldn’t articulate everything. We can’t really write it out in a simple, easy formulaic style. We had another enjoyable night together, last night. I think Brooke Adams had a really good answer, when talking about what makes her long marriage to Tony Shalhoub work:

“I think the answer to your question is pretty simple,” she said. “We like each other.”

Sacred Friday

A day of remembrance 9/11 9/11 quotes september 11 quotes september 11th quotes… | Remembrance quotes, Remember quotes, September 11 quotes

As you age, you come to realize that there are certain traumatic moments, and surreal time periods in life, that you will never, ever be able to completely forget. These sensations and memories are particularly amplified when everyone you know has been affected to at least some degree, and is hurting along with you. We are living through one of these types of time periods right now. We were devastatingly scorched by one of those time periods back in September of 2001.

9/11 was a horrible, horrible, horrible day and experience, but we survived it. We will always remember it, but we overcame it. We got temporarily knocked down, but we rose back up. Beside all of the disbelief and horror and pain and shock and loss and soul scorching anger, there was a pure beauty that came out of that day. I never felt more unified with my neighbors and my fellow American citizens, than in the rest of that year, and into the new year of 2002. I never felt prouder of being an American than on those surreal days after 9/11, when we healed our trauma, together. We held our heads up high, in sharp defiance of evil. I remember for days that turned into weeks and then into months, the feeling of unification was everywhere. People were kind to each other. People focused on how akin they felt to each other. People did whatever they could, in order to heal and to memorialize this awfulness, in a most graceful, dignified, sacred, all encompassing way. People from other countries spoke only of our country’s greatness, of our unmatched generosity, of our beacon of hope which we give to everyone all over the world. We put aside our differences, during that painful time, because we knew that to become whole again, for the raw vulnerability to be cleansed and to be healed, that we needed the support of the whole body of our great country.

Today, we will get set back into our grief a little bit again, but let us also remember the utterly amazing, awe-striking unified Phoenix that rose from those lowly ashes. Let that defiant Phoenix of destiny, which rose and soared above all that which was meant to destroy us, be an example and a reminder to all of us, of what we are capable of doing with our current fires and traumas and fears. We owe this to the people who gave up their lives on 9/11, and to the families who still grieve their appalling sudden losses. We owe this to future generations, to give them an example of core strength and hope and the proof that love and respect for each other, is really what conquers all. Our future generations will need a positive example to fall back on, a wisdom to thrive from, when dark days happen again in their lives, and in the history of America. We need each other. Today, as Americans, we all embrace each other in comfort and compassion. Let’s find more strength and power and energy and onus, in today’s embrace. Let’s all look outwards, together, from this embrace into a unified vision of the beautiful country that everyone who has fought for, and who has lost their lives for, believes in. We aren’t where we need to be yet as a country, but we can get there. It won’t be from fighting each other, though. We need each other.

We healed over the acute pain of 9/11. There will always be a sharp ragged scar, which will always hurt to the touch, but we survived it, and then we thrived. We know that we are a country that is capable of great, great things. We’ve proven that to ourselves, and to everybody else, again and again. We rise from the ashes, and we continue to do so, every time that we are called to do it. Let’s try now to give our collective healing from our current pains, some wings of unity, dignity, love, respect, kindness, empathy and hope, and let the rest of it all – the divisiveness, the inequalities, the failure to work together, the closed minds, the focusing on all of the negative without putting major energy towards the solutions – let’s let all of this negativity that is no longer useful to our country’s greater good, just smolder away in the ashes of what does not serve us. We are the people of a great democracy. We decide what matters. We need each other.

(I apologize for not sticking with my traditional Friday format, but honestly, not really. Thank you for understanding.)

Pleasure and Peace

Hi friends, thank you so much for spending some time here today at Adulting – Second Half. Your time is precious and I appreciate you giving some of it here. It means a lot to me, in ways that I don’t really have the words to explain. My heart goes out to my west coast readers. Please stay safe and well, amidst these roaring fires. Prayers and love to you.

I keep a lot of paper journals and such, full of words and pictures that have held inspirational meaning and interest to me. I picked up one journal which I kept about a decade ago, which as you recall, was during the Great Recession, another stressful, precarious time for a lot of us. The physical journal itself is kind of gaudy. It is made of a dark red brocade that actually has stuffing inside of it. The cover has large plastic, brightly colored gemstones (some that have fallen off), sewn on to it. It is one of those things that you look at it, and you ask yourself, “Did I actually think this was pretty at one time? What was my mental state at the time of purchasing this?” It is one of those physical reminders to ourselves, that we are constantly in a state of change, always opening up from a new cocoon of ideas and perspectives, sometimes even on a daily basis.

On that note, my husband buys me one of those Awkward Family Photo Calendars, every year, for my stocking at Christmas. I love it. It guarantees me at least one daily laugh, but what I like best about it, is the reminder of people’s humility. The people who send their pictures into the calendar company have the ability to laugh at themselves, and that is a lovely trait in a person. Yesterday’s picture was a professional portrait of a young woman, obviously a product of the 1980s, with an enormous heavily sprayed nest of bangs, that could have managed to be its own head of hair, itself. I thought to myself, this woman is laughing at her 1980s self, along with the rest of us, but on that day, she put a lot of time and effort and money into her “look.” She felt good enough that day, about how she looked, to pay a professional photographer to take her picture. Her real beauty shines through all of that sprayed, elevated, shock of hair, because she has self reflection enough, to not take herself too seriously. She loves herself at every step of the game, and that is so refreshing. She’s beautiful.

Back to my point, despite its over-the-top physicality, the garish journal is filled on the inside with words and pictures and inspirations that have shaped my life. I even have some fortunes from fortune cookies taped in there, and cuttings from newspapers, magazines, and elementary school newsletters. When I was filling up this particular journal, I did not have writing a public blog in mind, so unfortunately I don’t have the sources of most of these wisdoms. Still, I believe all wisdom, comes from a higher source, and those of us who write stuff down, are usually just quirky little scribes and messengers. Anyway, this has just been a long way of me saying that in this flashy, showy journal, that at one time caught my eye and I must have found to be physically pleasing enough to claim it as mine, I found a quote yesterday that was cut out of magazine that explained what I have been trying to say in all of these paragraphs above, maybe even in all of these blog posts, for the last couple of years. At the very least, it describes my precious and precocious inspirational scrapbook/journal perfectly:

“I miss my mother, and I find myself walking through her house in my memory, remembering her ways and seeing beauty. Beauty, for her, was a mix of the deep and the superficial: that which gives us pleasure and that which gives us peace.” (source unknown)

Picking out and purchasing my ostentatious journal, and filling it up with words and images that have helped to mold me into the current version of me, gave me great pleasure. And the words inside of it, still give me great peace. Maybe life is meant to be just that simple, a happy mix of pleasure and peace. It’s quite possible. It’s certainly not a bad way to live.

Like a Roller Coaster

I mentioned before that my youngest son is epileptic. The first major seizure that he suffered was hell. It was hell for him; it was hell for our family. The day that he had his first major seizure is easily in the top five worst days of my life. I don’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the worst days of my life, so I am not going to really try to rank them, but that day was hideous. Luckily (depending on how you look at it), he’s only had three major seizures after that one. And as awful as the subsequent seizures were, they weren’t as bad as the first one. Why is this? The subsequent seizures weren’t as bad as the first one, because we mostly knew what to expect. We had been through the experience, and we knew that we would get to the other side. We knew that we could handle the pain and the uncertainty and the fear and the worry. We knew that processing all of the feelings that result from his seizures is tough and necessary, but we also knew that we were up to the challenge, because we have already proven that to ourselves. People think that negative, grueling experiences toughen you up, but I don’t really believe that. I think that negative, grueling experiences prove to you, just how tough you really are and have always been, but you just didn’t know it. You forgot. Tough experiences reveal to you, your true inner core of strength. And the beauty of going through some extremely hard stuff (which almost all of us have gone through, by this middle stage in our lives), is that you have that knowledge about yourself. You know that you can handle almost anything that life brings to bear. Your inner steeliness becomes your recognizable outer armor.

I read a quote the other day that said this, “Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.” There is a lot of truth to this statement. I always say, “I know in my heart that I can handle anything, but I hate being in limbo. I hate wondering. I hate the times of indecision and waiting. That’s when my self-torture starts.”

We have a lot of limbo going on in the world right now. The uncertainty is so wide and has been happening for so long, that it feels like being stuck on an incredibly tall roller coaster going up, up, up, climbing the metal tracks, ever so slowly . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack, gazing down below, if you dare, to all that you could be crashing down into, at any moment. Lately, life feels like living in the constant build-up stage, to the crescendo of a horror film. Our imaginations run wild as we watch movies like this, as the characters in the story pick up the phone, or open the door to the basement, or hear a fearsome rustle in the bushes outside. The anticipation of what could happen is terrifying, especially since our human nature often takes us to the worst case scenarios. But in reality, what almost always happens at the end of a roller coaster ride? We end up safely back at the wooden gates, laughing and smiling and exhilarated for what we have been through. And even if we didn’t like the amusement ride, it is past us now, and we have that notch in our belts, for having survived the experience. Retrospectively, the roller coaster ride ends up being a lot shorter than it seemed, while first crawling up that first big incline of the ride. And to the same point, what generally happens at the end of a thriller film? Usually, the crazy lunatic is finally stopped in his or her tracks, by our favorite hero or heroine, and we all can breathe again, as the movie ends in a feeling of relief and reprieve and calm. And even if this is not the case, as we parents always assured our children, “The movie was just pretend.” The worst case scenarios rarely, rarely come to fruition in the movies, or in life. A happy ending is almost always assured for us. The point of getting on to the roller coaster or us watching the thriller is because we like the excitement. These are some of the types of things that make us feel acutely alive. Some of us prefer small doses of thrills. The merry-go-rounds and musicals are enough for some of us. And others prefer bungee jumping and hatchet films. And then there is everything in between. Still, we each enter into these experiences because we want to feel the strong exhilaration that they create for us. We want all of the sensations of feeling alive in every state of our being. We feel the tenseness of our muscles, we feel the alertness of our minds, and we feel the relief and the letting go, the very peace of our inner spirits, when the ride safely ends, or the movie is over and complete.

I think that life is a lot like this. I like to believe that we entered into this earthly experience with the full expectation of thrills and challenges and calm periods, and being able to notice and to feel the distinctly different sensations that all of these unique experiences bring to us. I like to think that we step into the ride of our lives, or start the film of our lives, knowing that we will go through all sorts of ups and downs, but in the end, everything will end up alright. We step on to the ride, or we confidently press the start button, because we inherently understand that we are created to be strong enough to handle anything (the good, the bad and the ugly) and we want to give it a try. I think that probably the hardest challenge of this ride of life, isn’t the crazy ups and downs, it isn’t even the horrifying suspense moments, but more so, the most grueling part of this life experience is facing the reality, of how fast this life adventure really goes, as it heads towards the journey’s safe end.