Chocolate chip cookies

I love my daily rituals. I confess I have a lot of them, beginning with getting up and making my tea in the morning. It’s getting better now, but for years the ritual required me to take two or three sips of tea, then set it down somewhere, and forget about it. During the time that Uncle Bill lived with us, he decided it was his duty to search for my tea as soon as he got up in the morning, two or three hours after I had set down my cup. He would find it, lukewarm and very strong (the tea bag was still in it) and bring it to me. It was a ritual.

When I was teaching, it was a daily ritual of mine to lose my scissors. At least once during each morning, I would look around the work table, the counters, and inside the cabinets. Finally, admitting defeat, I would ask my assistant teacher if she knew where they were. They were always in the same place: my apron pocket. It’s the equivalent of losing your glasses when they are on the top of your head. But it was a ritual and if it didn’t happen one day, my assistant teacher would begin to look a little worried. Something just wasn’t right.

The kindergarten children had their rituals, too. Every morning, I would wait patiently for Ella to come in, sneak around in back of me and start pounding her fists on my back. I never scolded her for this; it felt wonderful! Katie loved to do dishes every day and Dylan wasn’t happy unless there was something to be fixed. If I didn’t find something for him to repair, he would find the screwdriver and begin taking something apart just so he could put it back together again. It was then MY daily ritual to find him, make sure the play structures outside had not been taken apart, and confiscate the screwdriver.

For one of my high school students, the daily ritual consisted of talking nonstop while I explained to the class the next step in how to bind a book. Then as soon as I finished explaining, he would raise his hand, saying, “Ms. Reinhart, what do I do now?” I was not thrilled with this ritual and finally was frustrated enough that I collared him and yelled. I will admit it would have been much more effective had he not been 6’4” and nearly 200 lbs. 

The beautiful moment with this student came the year after he graduated from high school and was hired by our school to assist the gym teacher. After a particularly trying day, he came down to the teacher’s room and began complaining about how the students didn’t listen to him. Then, graciously, he smiled and shouted out loudly, “I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD APOLOGIZE FOR THE LAST TWELVE YEARS!”

When our children were small, we read stories to them every night. All of us would sit together and listen as the story was read. We did this for years, even after our kids were old enough to read books on their own. When I took them to bed, the last thing I did was to kiss them on the top of their heads. I still do it, when they are home, but they have to bend down now.

Now that I am home, I have been creating my new rituals. Finishing a full cup of tea every morning is a delightful one. So is baking chocolate chip cookies. Having worked outside my home for most of these years, I rarely had time for this traditional mom duty. I started out small, baking one batch for our family. Once I got into it, I began making more. Then I could save some out for John and Coco. Our drama teacher loves cookies, too. So do the rest of the high school faculty. And I thought maybe my friend, Mark, might like some. And Marie should have some now and then. She used to bake for me all the time. And Mr. Thomas next door....and mom and dad...and Sr. Carol and Sr. Diane across the street....

Before long, I was making a triple batch of cookies, every week, and leaving bags of cookies hanging on mailboxes or doorknobs, on teacher’s desks, or leaving a basket full in the teacher’s office. I enjoyed this ritual all winter long and all through the spring. The house would be toasty warm and smell so good! Having homemade cookies to eat was worth the work.

But now summer has officially begun and the weather report says it will be in the 90’s for the rest of the week. Chocolate chip cookie baking season is officially over. It’s just too hot. I prefer eating fudgecicles in the hot weather, anyway. I’m a little sad, though. I can’t leave fudgecicles hanging on mailboxes. I might have to find a new summer ritual.

If it includes food, I’ll keep you posted. Or you might want to check your mailbox now and then.

Finding a balance

It’s amazing how much easier it is to find my balance now. Maybe it’s because I’m getting a lot of practice. Getting older does have that advantage. Or maybe, it’s because I’m gardening again and it’s hard to be too off balance when you spend time in a garden. Wildly optimistic? Try ridding the garden of bindweed. Too pessimistic? Look at the bean sprouts pushing out of the earth and look at the size of those potato plants!

 

And if that’s not enough, you can always visit our small field of borage. It was planted by Miss Prairie’s class several years ago. If you need borage, come see us. If you know what to do with it, let me know...please! My friend, Ed, suggested I cook it with lovage (an herb) and end up with “boring love”, which led me to suggest cooking borage with garlic and ending up with “garbage”. Bad jokes aside*, there have got to be some good uses of the stuff.

The bindweed in our garden is amazing. We try every known method of getting rid of the stuff, short of using poison or really hard labor, and it thrives. I pull them up one day and by the next morning; they have snuck back in and look stronger and healthier than ever. They have been particularly persistent in our lettuce patch and there I am on my hands and knees attempting to pull up the weeds carefully to spare the tiny lettuce plants. It’s easy to see the lettuce among the bindweed as it is a much lighter shade of green. Light green stays, dark green gets yanked out. Then I discovered that the bindweed is becoming clever. After yanking out all the dark green weeds, I discovered a number of bindweeds coming up in the exact shade of green as the lettuce! I had no mercy, however, and yanked them, too.

Finding my balance is easier too, now that my Parkinson’s is once more in control. The week spent sleeping did wonders for healing. I am feeling much better physically and that does make a difference in my attitude. The challenges of the past weeks have not gone away but I have stopped yelling and started doing. There are many questions that I don’t have answers for and so much that I don’t understand. I am not exactly at peace with this yet but I can let it go for now.

For now, I’ll work in the garden, bake cookies for my family and friends, attempt to keep the house clean, and I’ll keep knitting, making books, felting, sewing, and doing all those other artsy-fartsy things I love to do. Maybe someday I’ll have the answers to some of my questions, anyway.

On the whole, in the core of my being, I guess I would have to say I’m optimistic.

And I should be optimistic! Chris and I did just celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary! Chris has been my anchor all through the years, someone who has been there steadily to catch me when I fall (sometimes literally now) and allowed me to flit from project to project. He has endured a not-terribly-exciting job because it was stable and provided for our family. It was only because he endured this job that I was able to have the freedom to have a job that, while never paying a lot, was certainly interesting and provided me with a community that I am still a part of today. Chris retires on June 30^th after nearly thirty years at the same job. I hope that he can have the freedom to do whatever exciting things HE wants to do now!

In the last year, we have added our daughter-in-law, Coco, to our family, and now we find our family will be growing again. John and Coco are expecting their first baby in late December!! I’m gonna be a Gramma! And, of course, Chris will be a Grampa, Patrick will be an uncle (if the name the kindy kids gave him holds out, he’ll be Uncle Patchy-Hero), and Emma will be.....Aunty Em. How can I be less than optimistic after hearing this news?

Bring on the knitting needles! Gramma’s got work to do.

*if you particularly enjoy bad jokes, see this week’s edition of the C.O.W. (Chronicles of Waldorfia), our high school newsletter and read the particularly bad cow jokes (COW 6), written by Mr. John Reinhart: http://www.denverwaldorf.org/index.php/News/The-C.O.W.html

 

Oh Bugger

It seems that whenever I make a bold statement sharing my most cherished beliefs, something happens. It’s as if the universe hears what I am saying and decides to challenge me to be damn sure that I mean what I say.

Did I say that I was an optimist, that I can face life with all its ups and downs and still see all the joy and good and sweet and mellow and wonderful everything about everyone and about life in general? What was I thinking? Was I just in one of those moods where I was floating off into la-la land for awhile?

If so, I can truly say I’m back, back on the hard, cold earth, and trying to find my balance once more.

I guess I did admit that there were still times when I get angry and upset. Sometimes my physical challenges do get to me. But I had made such an effort to keep this at bay. If I am angry, I will admit it, allow myself to feel it down to my very bones, and then let it go. This way, I am not denying my anger or sadness but I’m not wallowing in it either.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that is. That is when I realized that I had overdone it yet again and I had a little relapse from my surgery. I knew for sure that I had overdone it when I dropped something off at a friend’s house and could not speak a clear sentence. I babbled something but I would be surprised if it made any sense at all.

On the way home, I became a little teary, embarrassed by my inability to communicate clearly. This is something that can happen but thankfully, it is rare for me. It is one of those Murphy’s Law things, though. Whenever it happens, the same person or persons will be there to witness it. No matter what I do, that person will always know that I am a fool at heart. The worst thing I can possibly do (meaning, this is what I will do) is to TRY to not make a fool of myself when I’m around this person. That’s a guarantee that I will trip over my feet or my tongue or the planter on the front porch.

That night, as I tried to make dinner, I fell about 5 times in a row. My husband came to rescue me and finish dinner. I said a few choice words and really did begin to cry. I felt awful. I went to the couch and fell asleep.  I slept a lot during the next week. I think I needed it.

At the same time, life was handing out all sorts of challenges, not to me, but to a number of my friends, and compared to some of them, Job got off easy. This has led to a bit of a crisis for me. Many of my long held spiritual beliefs just went flying out the window. I had once thought that everything that happened did so for a reason and that reason was ultimately good. I could not, however, conceive of any justifiable reason for what had happened to my friends. Fortunately for me, my beliefs seem to be hovering just outside the window waiting for me to stop my yelling and arguing and snatch them back. I am not nearly as patient as Job. I didn’t question God; I yelled a lot.

And I wallowed. I admit I was less than optimistic over the last two weeks. I was back to old habits, blaming myself for everything that might go wrong in the world, be it an unsuccessful dinner or global warming. Finally, after subjecting my family and friends to my wallowing, and feeling guilty about that, too, I gave myself a good shake and a talking to. “Terri,” I said, “you are being stupid. You don’t have time for this nonsense and neither do your friends, however gracious they may be. Do something!”

I am happy to say that I listened to myself and took my advice. I did something. I cleaned the whole house (well, not quite, but I got the laundry done) and went out to buy plants. I know that one is not supposed to spend money when they are feeling down; however, it sure felt good! I spent way more than I should have. I bought our vegetables, some herbs and perennials, raspberry plants, grape vines, and two lovely rose bushes.

And then I planted a garden.

“I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.”

~F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace

 "It's okay to have a pity party now and then, just don't forget to flush."

                                ~unknown - from a PLM member!

Optimism

If you didn’t see the television special that was on last Thursday with Michael J. Fox, you can still see it at www.abc.go.com. Select “free episodes”, then select “Michael J Fox” from the list. It’s definitely worth watching!  It's not about Parkinson's, it's about life.

When I was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a number of people responded by saying, “Oh, that’s the thing that Michael J. Fox has.” Yeah, that’s right. I’ve got a celebrity disorder. I wasn’t very interested in finding out about Michael’s experience with Parkinson’s. I had my own challenges to go through and the first one was just figuring out what this was going to do to my life. I didn’t go out and purchase his book right away and I began to cringe every time someone mentioned his name to me. He’s a celebrity who happens to have Parkinson’s. So what? There are loads of regular people who have this, too.

Not that I was feeling sad and sorry for myself or that I had a negative outlook on my life. In fact, I was feeling just the opposite! Somehow, getting the diagnosis of Parkinson’s had a freeing effect on me. There was nothing I could do to change the fact that I had this disorder and nothing I had done to make me have this. It was totally beyond my control. Why that was freeing, I don’t know. Perhaps it is because I have a tendency to blame myself for anything negative that happens in my life. Or perhaps it was because it was the least scary of all the possibilities my neurologist had been contemplating. I did most of my grieving during the years when I was having physical challenges and did not know what was causing them. That was a very difficult time for me.

Whatever it was, I found myself feeling lighter than I had in years. I knew I couldn’t do everything I did before and I knew I didn’t have to do everything! There was so much I let go of. And those things I let go of? I found that I really didn’t need them anyway. At the same time, I was also being surrounded by friends, old friends coming back into my life and new friends who have become important to me. My family has always been my anchor and my support and I have been fortunate to be involved in the Denver Waldorf School, which is a true community. Now I had an even larger circle of support. My social life was and is very full and fun. I am savoring my friends and family, enjoying them more and more and worrying less. Interestingly enough, despite the obvious challenges I was facing physically, and the fact that I had to leave teaching, a job I had worked at and loved for nearly twenty years, I was more prone to depression and anxiety before I was diagnosed than I was afterwards. I found myself actually grateful for the challenges that my Parkinson’s was bringing to me. If this had in any way led me to where I am now, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I guess you could say I had become an optimist.

Then, when I started to get involved with other people who had Parkinson’s, I was surprised. Not everyone had the same attitude that I had. I heard people describe Parkinson’s as a “beast” and the “enemy”. I had people tell me to be strong so I could fight this and beat it. Maybe it’s because I spent so many years as a kindergarten teacher, telling children not to fight, but this didn’t set well with me. I wanted to learn how to live with this, not spend my energy fighting it. I decided that maybe I would look at my Parkinson’s more as a partner, maybe a dance partner even! I would learn how to move in a different way in order to accommodate one more partner in my life, just as I have learned how to make room for all my new friends.

Then, about a year or so after I was diagnosed, out of curiosity, I began to look up a few things about Michael J. Fox. I learned about his foundation and read about the work he had done. I read his first book. I enjoyed reading his book but it was when I watched him being interviewed on television (www.charlierose.com/view/interview/2531) that I was suddenly stopped in my tracks.

Here was someone who understood what it was like to have Parkinson’s, in the same way that I did! He, too, said he was happier than he had ever been before and when someone asked him what he would do if offered the possibility of going back in time and never having Parkinson’s and having his old life back, he freely admitted he would say, “Screw you.” He wouldn’t change his life for anything and since his Parkinson’s is part of what brought him to this point, then he certainly wouldn’t change that, either. Michael J. Fox describes his Parkinson’s as a gift. It’s a gift that keeps taking, but a gift never the less.

I feel the same way. It’s hard to rationalize this attitude and maybe you can’t, really. Maybe it’s different for everyone. Maybe it’s those “happy genes” that some of us have. Of course, there are times when I get tired, feel very ill, or find I can’t do something that would have been easy for me at another time of my life. I do get frustrated. I can also be sad and even angry about my challenges. But those feelings don’t take up a large percentage of my time. Most of my time is spent connecting with people, teaching art classes, helping the kindergarten children learn string games, visiting with friends, and taking care of my family. Maybe I can’t walk around the block without getting exhausted but, hey, walking is overrated anyway. The important thing is that I can find joy in this life that I’ve been given.

And since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I’ve been able to find that joy in abundance!

Thank you, Michael J. Fox, for all you do and all you are.

Long Walks

My husband and I have decided that we are going to invest in a mobility scooter for me. It took a long time for me to come to terms with this idea. It wasn’t just that a mobility scooter would make me look more disabled. It’s the picture in my mind of the villain from the movie, “Waking Ned Divine” that made me balk. If you haven’t seen the movie, the villain is a grumpy old woman who rides along in her mobility scooter, arguing with everyone she sees. She is not the least bit likable. I certainly didn’t want to be anything like her.

What finally changed my mind was when I actually tried one. I had brought my daughter and her friend to the zoo for the day and realized, once we arrived, that there was no way I could walk around the zoo. My limit with walking was, at the time, about half a block. So, I sat and waited while the girls wandered around the zoo without me. They had a marvelous time and when they returned to check on me an hour later, they informed me that they weren’t nearly finished looking at everything and would need at least another two hours to wander about.

The thought of sitting and waiting for another two hours was not a pleasant one. I debated about what to do and then looked across to the main entrance of the park. There I saw the scooters. They actually rented them! I continued to debate, but not for long. The idea of actually being able to go around the park with the girls won me over. I splurged and paid the ridiculous amount of money for the rental, received a two minute driving lesson and we were off.

Heaven...

It was absolute heaven to be able to move without the work! I went all around the park and often went in circles, just because I could. I left the girls in the dust a few times. Or I would have, if the scooter could have gone more than 4 miles per hour. At least I thought about it! I rode and rode and didn’t want to leave the zoo. The time went by quickly and I went home humming to myself. It was so glorious to be able to move!

We considered investing in a scooter right away but, unfortunately, though the neurologist I was seeing at the time, agreed with me that a scooter was appropriate, the family doctor did not, and so we had no hope of getting insurance coverage. We waited. In the meantime, I was finally diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I started on proper medication, and I received new leg braces from my physical therapist. Now, just maybe, I could walk on my own and not need to invest in anything else.

It’s been over two years now since I received my diagnosis. I can walk better now that my medication is stable and I have the leg braces. I can walk better for nearly a block before my feet decide they still want to turn in and then, within 30 feet or so, walking will become almost unbearably difficult. We decided it was time to think about the scooter again. Last week, I spoke with one of my neurologists about this possibility. She was not thrilled. She would prefer that I adjust my medications again and then, maybe I could walk two blocks instead of just one. Exercise is so important with Parkinson’s.

I didn’t say anything then, however, the point of getting a mobility scooter right now, has nothing to do with whether or not I exercise. I still walk whenever and however far I can. I have my exercise bicycle and a whole list of stretching and strengthening exercises to do at home. The scooter has another purpose.

My husband is retiring at the end of June. When he first told me the news, I’m afraid I went into a panic. Retiring? That means that we will...gulp...be together in the same house, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week? For, maybe, the next thirty years?

We’re going to have to have some rules. That’s the first thing I told him. He looked a little bewildered at first and then said, “So we don’t drive each other crazy?” I nodded, though in truth, I was thinking, “So you don’t drive ME crazy”, but that is just selfish. I’ve been home on disability now for over a year and I quite like my schedule and my freedom to do what I want, when I want to do it. This will be a big change. In fact, this is one of those changes where you feel as though your life is suddenly cut up into confetti bits and thrown up in the air again. How it will come down is anybody’s guess.

We are trying to plan for this change, however, and the mobility scooter is part of that planning. The first rule, I told my husband, is that we need to find something we can do together, regularly, that we both enjoy. When our children were younger and there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for us to have time together, we made sure to create time for the two of us, even if it was just 15 minutes at the end of the day. Now, we have plenty of opportunities but rarely take advantage of them. Now, more than ever, we will need to find a way to get to know each other in a new way.

We both enjoy taking long walks. And, since I can’t really go on long walks, I plan on riding the scooter so I can accompany Chris on his walks. Going only two blocks wouldn’t cut it. We plan on being gone for at least 45 minutes per day. We want to savor this time together.

I know we’ll have more challenges and I suspect a few more rules.  We’re both used to a certain amount of freedom and time to ourselves, too. It will be a lot to get used to. But I think we’ll be ready.  We've been through changes before. 

We’re getting used to putting the pieces back together again.