Harriet M. Welch

Wow, life has been getting in the way of blogging this week. I hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a good one! Mine was much better than I thought it would be. First of all there was the Turkey Chase 10K. I was frankly dreading it; my last 10K, which was only three weeks ago, took a lot out of me. It took about 10 days to recover from that, and my runs during the week after the race, well, sucked. But I joined a new running group that uses the Galloway training method. Jeff Galloway is a proponent of the run/walk method. I’ve been doing this for the last few weeks, running 4 minutes and walking 1 minute. I used it in the race yesterday too, and I actually beat my 10K time from three weeks ago! And absolutely nothing hurts me today, there will be no recovery period at all this time. Another thing I noticed during the race was that I have had some really good training over the past 7 months. I noticed a lot of really strong runners who just couldn’t make it up the long (1.25 miles) hill which was during mile 4. But it really didn’t give me any trouble at all. I was psyched! My time was 1:03:42 – it’s not going to win me any medals, but for an old gal like me (who has only been running a little over a year) it’s darn good.

And then we spent Thanksgiving day with my husband’s family. I wasn’t looking forward to that either. I haven’t been in the mood to be with anyone lately, especially them. They can be difficult, in my opinion. But everyone was very friendly and on their best behavior, and there was plenty of wine and liquor which helped. And I think the endorphins from the race were flowing all day, so it was good.

And the food wasn’t as much of an issue as I thought it would be. I missed the brunch due to the race, which was the plan, so I just had my normal breakfast. I passed on the appetizers and had a spoonful of everything during dinner. And no dessert. It was a good food day. I hope you all had whatever kind of day that you wished for, and I’m thankful to all of my blog friends for your support and friendship.

Thank you all for your well wishes during the difficult time of my mother’s husband passing away. It was so sudden. He was supposed to go home from the hospital last Monday. On Sunday afternoon the doctors removed a temporary external pacemaker that he had put in when he had his heart valve replacement surgery. He was taking a blood thinning medication because his heart kept going into atrial fibrillation and that can cause bloodclots, and the blood thinning medication prevents these clots. But it also stops the body from forming clots when it needs to. A couple of hours after the pacemaker was removed his blood pressure became very low. Within a short amount of time he was in cardiac arrest. He was taken to ICU, and the heart could not be revived. They even cut open his chest to massage his heart, and that was when they saw that there was internal bleeding around the heart which caused it to stop pumping.

When we got to the hospital Sunday night his body was already taken down to the morgue and they asked if my mother wanted to see him, which she did. A lovely nurse moved heaven and earth to get security to bring the body back up so that my mother could say goodbye. He looked very peaceful. It was so sad for my mother.

The funeral was really nice and he was buried in a Veterans’ Cemetery; he was in the army during the Korean war. He lost a good part of his hearing during training, which is certainly a huge sacrifice he made for our country. The burial was amazing. Two National Guard officers had a beautiful flag ceremony while a third officer played taps. The officers presented my mother with the flag. They were so regal and respectful.

Everyone was very respectful to my mother and to us – the funeral home director, the rabbi, the cemetery workers. My mother’s husband has four children who don’t live nearby. They were here of course and it was actually nice spending time with them. They have never made much of an attempt to befriend us, and never responded to our efforts to befriend them, so we were never sure if they liked us. But it was very a good week with them, we got to know them in a way we never have before. I don’t know if our relationship with any of them will last now that he is gone, but I’m glad I got to know them a little better.

I stayed with my mother for the whole week, except for one night when my sister slept there. My mom lives about an hour away from me, when there is no traffic, and there is never no traffic! Her birthday is Thursday and I told her I’d spend the day with her. I think I’ll be spending more time with her now. I hate the thought that she is alone. She lost my father 11 years ago, and now her second husband, to whom she was married 7 years, is gone. We don’t always have a great relationship, but I love her and I’m sad for her.

I want to thank everyone for your kind and supportive comments on my blog posts. I always doubt myself, I feel like I don’t do anything right, like I’m just wandering through life without a plan or a path, not knowing what is important, ready to chuck it all. And you all find positive things to say all of the time. I just don’t get it, but I so appreciate it, and I’m really trying to believe what you all say about me. Maybe one day I will. My homework this week is to write down one thing I did good and one thing I’m grateful for every day. I’m having a little trouble with the doing something good column, but today in the grateful column I’m going to write that I am grateful for my blogging friends.

So yesterday was September 11^th, obviously, and it was the day my friend Ann died while on a plane heading to Los Angeles, which ended up flying into the Pentagon instead. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and I kept thinking “I need to go see Ann” but I kept putting it off and then she died. So my lesson for September 11^th is “Don’t put off seeing people who are important to you, because they might not be there tomorrow.” September 11, 2001 was honestly the worst day of my life, as I’m sure it was for many people. I actually found out Ann died on September 12, 2001, so 9/12 isn’t a great day for me either. She was 49 when she died, which is my current age. That’s not really relevant, but just kind of an interesting fact. So I’ve been pensive the last couple of days.

So remember this collage? I had given it to J, and he talks about it a lot. He pulls it out of his filing cabinet every once in a while so we can talk about it. He once referred to it as “your beautiful collage.” This collage is actually a slide show, with music, etc. I like to make slideshows. I thought since he liked the collage so much he would appreciate the slideshow, so I put it on a DVD and sent it to him. I could have brought it to our next session, but I didn’t want to watch him watch it. I wanted to post the slideshow here, but I can’t figure out how to do it. And when I put it on youtube they stripped the music, since it’s copyrighted. Oh well.

So I never wrote about my last week of hotline training. The last night was last Thursday and we had a pizza party and watched a movie about cutting. The pizza was going to be an issue for me. I don’t eat pizza – I haven’t in a couple of years I think. I don’t think there is anything wrong with splurging every once in a while, but when you haven’t eaten that type of food in a long time it’s not a good idea to splurge on it during a training session with lots of people. Spending the whole session in the bathroom didn’t seem like a good way to end training.

It turns out that one of guys in the group is a vegan. I love this guy and I’m so lucky because he is going to be my shift partner on the hotline every other week. I went online and found a vegan/vegetarian pizza restaurant 10 minutes from my home. So I picked up pizza for him and me from this place. It was great because my pizza was basically whole wheat crust, veggies and a bit of feta cheese. Nothing greasy or tomato-y to upset my stomach. And no one seemed to think it was strange that he and I were eating our own food, actually they seemed kind of jealous!

Then there was the cutting movie. It was specifically about teens and cutting, and it wasn’t too bad for me to watch. It was kind of nice, to be honest, to hear professionals who know what they are talking about when dealing with cutting. The hard part for me was the discussion afterward. One of the new trainees said, “I get the impression from the movie that if a cutter calls the hotline we don’t call the police immediately?” I thought, “UGH!” Can you imagine, I’m sure some of you can if you SI, calling a hotline because you are thinking about self harm, and all of sudden the police show up? At least the trainers set him straight. And the label “cutter” bothers me as well. Not everyone who self harms cuts.

The discussion was bothering me, and I forced myself to zone out. I ripped off parts of my pizza box, and tore them into little pieces, and made little nonsense origami things out of them. It’s surprising how easy it is to tune everything out.

As for being on the hotline, I don’t feel triggered. I had my first shift Sunday morning, and I was all alone with the telephones for four hours. I felt pretty confident, and I feel like I helped a few people.

Today I had a wonderful surprise. A blogging friend, Ethereal Highway, wrote a post for me! What an incredibly kind, thoughtful person she is. I’ve been writing about how people think it’s odd, or unusual, or just downright weird, that anyone would want to be a crisis hotline volunteer and she wrote a post about her own experience with a hotline. Go check it out.

The most amazing thing just happened. I was reading one of my favorite blogs – Bubble Wrapped, and I saw that I received the Honest Award.

Here’s the description: This award is bestowed on a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant. This award is about bloggers who post from their heart, who often put their heart on display as they write. There are three rules that need to be followed on accepting this award:

1. Brag about it.

2. Select seven blogs you find brilliant and link to them.

3. List 10 honest things about yourself.

So here we go. I am bragging to the world that I received the Honest Award for my blog. I am truly touched by this because I try to be totally honest in my writing on this blog. It’s the only place where I am completely and utterly honest, and I am humbled that people can see that and respect it and still actually like me!

2. Seven blogs that I find brilliant. The ones that e listed are in my list, as well as the ones Kim at Adventures in Wanting listed. So these seven are ones that have not yet been listed, I think.

Disjointed Thoughts
Imagine Namaste
November Blue
Pratfalls
Rachel’s Wide World of Lunacy
Take Up Your Bed and Walk
Vicarious Therapy

3. Ten honest things about myself.

a. I am 49 years old, and I don’t plan to become much older.
b. I hate emptying the dishwasher.
c. I am a perfectionist, but also lazy – a bad combination.
d. I feel passionately about things, but am also sensitive – also a bad combination.
e. I tend to be obsessive about things I’m passionate about.
f. I’m a people pleaser.
g. I am very creative, and have been since I was quite young. I love crafts, music, art, writing, photography, etc. My creative endeavors tend to come and go in phases.
h. I like to be alone.
i. I frequently have bad dreams about the ocean.
j. I wish I could meet my blogging friends. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we were all in the same room together. Would we talk? Would we eat? Would we instinctively understand each other?

So there you have it. Thank you e, for bestowing this honor on me. I am really quite surprised by the whole thing, and of course, feel undeserving, but I am trying to accept your gift with gratitude and graciousness.

I’ve been reading a lot about gratitude – people keep gratitude journals, write in their blogs about what they are grateful for on a particular day, etc. I’m quite the cynic, and this seems very Pollyanna-ish. BUT…..I have to be open minded about trying different techniques to get to where I want to go, right? I draw the line at certain things (like religion, hope I don’t offend anyone with that comment), but gratitude, ok I think I can handle that. So I have a little journal diary app on my blackberry and as I think of things throughout the day I will type them in. I’ll shoot for five per day, since that seems to be the popular number in the blogosphere. Today so far I have:

I am grateful:

1. That my husband and son arrived home safely on their respective flights yesterday.
2. That we live so close to a beautiful river.
3. For the biking/running trail along the river and the crew that cuts away the trees that fall on it.
4. For baby deer that are so cute and frolicky and run away crazily when you drive near them.
5. For my blog readers, who will probably drop me like a hot potato once they see this cheesy gratitude shit.

This morning I went biking on said trail, and there is an overlook where one can view the rocky area of the river. There are little waterfalls, and rushing water, and beautiful rocks. I pulled onto the overlook and meditated for about 5 minutes (it seemed longer). Whenever a thought popped into my head, which was frequently, I imagined the thought coming out of my head and drifting down to the water and being washed away with the rushing water.

I’ll be away for the weekend at a family wedding, I’ll be back with a new entry on Monday!