the LUSH life

I’m living in a world where everything that I used to reach for has become uninteresting. And I’m trying to suss out what is interesting to me. And I don’t have answers (yet).

I was always the one who loved arriving at happy hour to have that first glass of wine with friends. I loved the warmth that would spread through my body as a delicious glass of pinot noir worked its way down my digestive tract. I loved the social lubrication of a drink that made me want to touch, to dance, to laugh. I would have another glass to keep that buzz going then another then another. As age caught up with me, I would have the second glass and need to go to bed. The days of dancing on the table – any table – any where – have fizzled.

When my son started smoking pot, I didn’t think of it as catastrophic at first. His therapist at the time said that he was becoming an addict, and I second guessed her evaluation of the issue. Then I started seeing signs very similar to what had happened with the first love of my life – Ken – where when he smoked pot he started behaving differently after the high was gone. Because I have issues around co-dependency and individuation, I didn’t understand how my take it or leave it attitude about pot was not the same for my first love and for My Son. Smoking pot affected my son’s behavior for days following the act of lighting up, up until and as long as the THC was in his body, he behaved differently.

Then the obsession and time I put into raising my son for fifteen of his sixteen years now has been outsourced to experts who are helping him overcome more than the effects of marijuana, they are helping him with the trauma of adoption, of being Black with a white mother, and other capital T and small t traumas he has experienced in his short life. While he gets the help he needs, I have become an empty nester, prematurely. Which leaves only me to work on in this house.

My addictions are different. I have always been enamored with working and feeling a sense of accomplishment. I love a to do list, and a to do list that gets checked off is like euphoria for me. I could do do do until the cows came home and would go to bed wondering if I could have done more. I’m a doer – what was that funny cartoon or meme before there were memes where that comedian said with a straight face, I’m a doer! A do bee! That is me!

Food was also my love language. I loved to cook food, to serve food, to eat food, to think about food, to plan food, to have food, and I can remember one time when I was especially broke, and in my twenties, and I went to the grocery and filled my grocery cart because it reminded me of being a child and going to the grocery when my father shopped where he would buy hundreds of dollars of food. A burgeoning shopping cart was a sense of fullness, enoughness, of deep satisfaction for me. I walked around that grocery store filling my cart and then I left it there in the grocery because I had about $10 in my checking account and about $300 of groceries in my cart.

Love. Love. Love. Couldn’t get enough of it. I have been a serial monogamist running through multiple live in relationships, three marriages, and always, always, falling into new love so easily. I never thought about looking for love, love was all around me. My relationships fit together like Lincoln logs – little notches on the end ready to be filled – and there was always another waiting.

Recently, I went to Boston and Provincetown. My friend in Boston lives to purge her small condo of anything superfluous. She lives minimally. I went to P-Town to visit another friend and thought look how he lives here six months out of the year, yet his house has a quality of emptiness. In a good way. I myself was feeling spacious on this trip. Far away from Bay Saint Louis, the 100 Men Hall, and even Tucson, all with unbearable heat, I felt an opening and softening in 70 plus degree weather with different vistas. On the ferry ride back to Boston from P-Town, looking out across the water, I listened to a New Yorker essay with Ann Patchett reading How To Practice – how she came to want to get rid of her possessions.

I made up my mind when I got home to go through my closets. I had been putting off the arduous duty of purging because truth be known, I’m at my highest weight ever, and I have been waiting to be pulled into a new diet and lose pounds before I went through my closet and made decisions about what looks good on me. All this while simultaneously I’ve been holding onto a newer thought and that is could I love myself at my highest weight ever?

I came home and went through my closet and some boxes, not all the drawers, not all the closets, but enough to substantially make a dent in the excess I possess. And it is a lot. I have clothes and have added clothes while thrifting with my son in Arizona – a pass time invented out of necessity – what can I do with a 16.5 year old boy to share time together? I found black tee shirts at $3, jeans that fit my ample butt (which admittedly I’d love to keep my booty), and hats.

I have obsessions – hats, bowls, cocktail glasses, socks. And other obsessions like books and now vinyl again because I am imagining a way of being. I would relax in my living room and listen to an album or read a book, or do both. Doesn’t that sound delightful? It wouldn’t be with a glass of wine. It would be just me, in my living room, with an album playing (and always my mind goes and then what?) I am learning how to relax and how to not be a lush at the same time – how not to be in acquire mode. I’m obsessed with trying to keep the Hall, the House, and all the three sheds free of clutter and wow, it ain’t easy!

Even familiar activities are falling by the wayside. I used to be obsessed with walking. I had to walk 2 to 3 miles every day, or I would lose my mind. This is decades of walking. For a period of time, this walking obsession was supplanted by running but after foot surgery I chose to never run again to not risk that pain – ever – again. But even walking fell away as I was relaxing into doing what was in front of me instead of obsessing about what I should be doing.

I don’t go to matinees alone like I used to. I don’t go shopping like I used to. I don’t cook dinner for friends anymore. I don’t bake.

This past Saturday, I got up and decidedly tried to avoid doing anything at all, only I couldn’t. I worked on my third impact statement to my son as well as a weekly letter to him since he is in a wilderness program and I don’t have contact other than letters. This is the third impact statement – I wrote one when he went into Stonewater and one when he went into the ranch and now that he is in a wilderness program, I have been taxed with writing one again. After the letters, I started working in my garden, which was feeling all sorts of neglect especially since it has not rained here for a minute, and I have not watered the plants that are not on automatic irrigation.

I started thinking about the kind of plastic curtains that restaurants put up when the weather is bad. I was thinking I need to get some for my screen porch before the next freeze. I was thinking about all of this as I dealt with all my plants, and I realized, slowly but surely, that I have a lot of plants! Maybe I have too many plants. I will take a plant and start propagating it and then I always find some volunteers, then there are gifts from friend’s yards, and naturally there are occasional plant purchases and my gardens are like lush jungles in front and back and all of these plants require attention, and I’m already overwhelmed by the fact that it may or may not freeze in a few months.

And I realized I’m BORED with my life AND I’m in transition mode. I’m fantasizing about a trip(s) back to Mexico City. I’m wanting to go hiking in cooler temperatures at higher altitudes because walking over rough terrain sounds way more exciting than pounding the pavement of well-worn streets where I live.

I’m in that interstitial space where I’m pretty much letting go of the trapeze of old habits, of many of my knowns, but I have not yet grasped/grokked/grabbed the trapeze of new ways of being. I’m finding it hard to commit to any of the “new” ideas that pop up: what about collage? you were going to do that. What about joining a gym? ugh, inside, climate control, people, ugh. What about your blog and writing? Blech – I feel flat-lined, nothing to write about?

Things I have let go of:

1. Alcohol
2. Wigs and itchy and scratchy hats
3. High heels that are not platform shoes
4. The need to purchase jewelry, clothing, shoes, cocktail glasses, beautifully shaped bowls (still have issues with coffee mugs)
5. The desire to thin down so others might find me attractive
6. Cooking (especially and most importantly for just me)
7. Ambition to be better
   
   

[Thank you for reading my writing; I love hearing from you and would
love to gather your responses here, instead of on social media.]