A couple of years ago, I started feeling called to adopt Surrender and Acceptance as my themes for the season I was in. My natural tendency is to be super controlling and neurotic, so those ideas were appealing on a conceptual level, but they didn’t feel easy to lean into.
Yesterday was The Longest Day. It happens once a year when we come back from our trip to Tobago. We fly in to JFK, then drive back up to Albany, and no matter how wonderful the weather is or how smooth the drive, it seems to take forever.
This time, everything went nearly as well as it could have. We made it through the whole process and home sooner than we’d hoped, on a beautifully clear sunny day.
At a rest stop on the drive home, I ended up stuck in a bathroom stall with a two-year-old who was terrified of the toilet, and discovered too late I was in a stall with no toilet paper.
Personal growth.
You realize there is something in your life that you want to change.
You’re aware of it for months or years. You do a ton of work.
That thing you want to change doesn’t budge.
Some other things get better – you’re more authentic, less reactive.
But that thing you would really like to change? Still there.
I used to have a weighted blanket that I used to chill at the end of the day.
Except I wasn’t chilling, I was roasting a lot of nights. At some point, I realized I was experiencing peri-menopause, and it wasn’t the blanket that was causing the night sweats.
I spoke to my endocrinologist about it. He was the doctor I saw the most often, and he ordered unnecessary hormone tests that confirmed that I was not menopausal. Which wasn’t even my question. But, men. Alas, they are helpless in the face of a woman in distress and sometimes they do foolish things the woman must then pay for. In this case, literally $300.
At the end of August this past summer, we quit Amazon Prime and Netflix. A number of factors were at play, but the main thing is that our memberships with those two companies weren’t in keeping with our family values, so we said goodbye.
Now, my kids have rediscovered PBS and are totally into The Great British Baking Show and Wild Kratz. And on the occasion that we order from Amazon, things take a lot longer to get here.
