I thought it was my hip flexor until the pain rooted down deep in that groove where your leg attaches to your core. It was like a squatter looking for a home, burrowing in for winter hibernation. In an effort to fight the pain, I took a stretching class with my friend, Diane, on “Tension Release Exercise.” I learned that it might not be my hip flexor, but rather it might be my psoas. (I never even knew I had a psoas.) So there we were my left psoas and me, squared off in the ring … me issuing eviction notices; it hunkering down for the storm.

I have tried trickery. Befriending it seemed like a good idea. I named it The Lorax. I thought if I pictured it as a bright, fluffy thing, it might reduce its power over me. I asked it nicely to find a new place to live. I stretched it with a strap and chanted …

“I am not a host for The Lorax.”

“I am not a host for The Lorax.”

Perhaps this was too negative, so I switched my chant to …

“The Lorax has found a nice home in the country.”

“The Lorax has found a nice home in the country.”

This is the technique I used to get rid of plantar fasciitis, but The Lorax ain’t buying it. Like a temper tampering toddler, it has thrown itself down on the floor of my hip and will not be moved.

So, I then did what I always do when things won’t change, I started coping with it. Much like we all do when our cars are making knocking noises or our phone batteries aren’t keeping their charge or a letter on our keyboard sticks or worse yet, something is wrong in our marriage or our family or our job … I justified the pain and kept on going.

***

Last Monday, during Boot Camp, we were doing squats. I haven’t really mentioned to our trainer, Blaze that I have hip issues because the only thing I hate more than whining is pansying.

During our heavy squats, Blaze stood and watched me, and then he had the audacity to take the weight bar off my back with this statement, “Don’t put weight on top of dysfunction.”

He actually removed the weight, racked it and told me to work on my range of motion sans weights. I was humiliated. I was stunned and confused. I stood for a moment … cuss or cry … cuss or cry. Cuss.

I was insulted that someone would remove weight when I was working so hard, when I was trying to pretend that The Lorax didn’t exist. I could keep on doing what I always did as long as I didn’t admit that there was a problem. Lifting heavy weights was making my situation worse, because until you fix the dysfunction, it can’t support a load. Dysfunction weakens … this is true of body, mind, heart, and spirit. It is just really hard to admit, especially when the fix might be unchartered ground.

Funny thing about the f-word (feedback,) when you really stop and listen, it has application. I didn’t need weight. I needed to seek something real for healing. We can only be better when we move from denial and coping and call things what they truly are … even when it’s The Lorax and it’s a real bitch.  

My artistic ability never matched my imagination and after I sketched a horse that looked like a hippo having a seizure and a castle that resembled a mobile home just before the repo dude arrived, I suffered the harsh realization that things had not turned out as I expected. But since I was eight, that never got me down, especially since I could flip the paper over and dream some more about what I might draw on the other side … the side that was clean, unlittered by my failed attempts to design and execute the perfect picture.

 two daughters, my Aunt Betty, and my mom’s best friend, Margaret. We were watching the

weather channel’s rain-soaked, wind-blown forecaster explain that Hurricane Ernesto would

charge ashore somewhere around our couch and kitchen table.

The prediction was off a bit. It was a lot worse on the second floor in the bedrooms. We

survived the storm. We just rode it out. The sun came up the next morning and we found some

rockin’ shells along the waterline among the pier and house debris.

Nine short days later, my mom died. As my friend Chris Lewis says, “Sometimes, facts trump

feelings.” Shit happens.

I would like to wax all philosophic here with a profound message of understanding. If I

understand anything … it is this … life has an accomplice called death.

My friend Neill used to say that every year he copied and pasted the next year’s resolutions from the year before. His argument was that it saved time from re-creating crap he might try to do but wouldn’t or couldn’t sustain. When we compared lists, I asked that he copy and paste for me too. I am pasting a similar list below to save you some steps in case you want to use our handy dandy, Norelco insta-resolutions…

~~~

This week during the full moon, I was up at 3:00 am.  Not because I couldn’t sleep, but because our dog, Fergie, was channeling her inner werewolf and felt the deep need to run the perimeter of our property, a Doberman guarding her castle.

Seeing her short, plump hound self run with ferociousness made my heart sing. That Fergie, with her mean little under bite, she is my hero. At that wee hour of the morning, I recognized something, it was small and warm inside me and it was happiness.

I wonder about happiness. I look around me and if people are indeed happy, they have not told their faces. I see stress. I see anger. I see dissatisfaction. But happiness ... not so much.

Dawson was convicted (if you call a negotiated plea bargain a conviction,) and will report to prison on November 15. She will serve a little over a year for her charges. Hardly seems just, but I don’t know that our judicial system is calibrated for justice these days. I think we may occasionally punish and in extreme situations of internal regret, we may prompt rehabilitation, but rarely can we find or even decide what might look and feel like this thing called justice.

I didn’t know Sherman. We were in Spin classes together and perhaps our road bikes crossed routes, but it would not be truthful to claim Dave as friend. He was a close friend of my neighbors’ and to hear him described makes me wish I had known him, that kindred connection of getting on a bike and pedaling away grown-up stress, replacing it with the wind in your face abandon of kid on a Christmas morning ten-speed tends to bind people together.

Based on what I have gleaned from friends and kids, people handle "the talk" differently. There is the family that used a chalk board co-hosted by both parents. Yikes! And, there is the family that threw a book at the children with the instructions to read it and come back to them with any questions. My children swear there is a sex-ed "pop-up" book, but I have not actually seen any hard evidence.  

Perhaps my own childhood mystery and cluelessness turned me into the militant-hyper-communicating-information-sharing-talk-it-through-mom that I am today. If my daughters ask … I answer.  Sometimes I answer on the spot and sometimes I designate a time and place such as with our tradition of the 5^th grade sex talk.

Near the end of camp week, on a Thursday night around 9:30, I got a call from Camp Grier. It was the nurse. She began by saying, “Emily, this is Jeannie from Camp Grier, your daughters are okay, I just wanted to let you know…” Then she paused. It is during those seconds of quiet that my mind spun like a hamster wheel. Just wanted to let me know that a meteor carrying aliens had landed? Let me know that Riley or Ryann or Riley and Ryann were involved in a girls gone wild camp video? Let me know that there had been a bear attack? Let me know that snakes had arrived in herds and were blocking the entrance to the dining hall? Let me know … WHAT Jeannie? Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Tate Street Coffee House is situated beside the campus of UNC-Greensboro. To the walls are nailed: heart pouring poetry, abstract paintings full of depth and angst, and undecipherable metal art. The atmosphere drips of the young pheromones of collegiate revolution, that musky scent of teen rage and readiness pushing at the exit door of confinement, hungry to storm the world.

My wise, country attorney, a man who grows bonsai and rages against technology, pushed back from his table after reading my papers and asked in his slow, southern drawl, “So, why are you at an attorney’s office?”

I was rattled and stumped by his question. He was supposed to be making copious notes and calling in witnesses. Why was he challenging my intentions? Instead, he gently deflated my vision and lowered my ErinBrockovichWonderWomanJackNicholson self back into reality. I answered honestly, with a little shake in my voice, “I want to make her be quiet.”