Here I Go Again

 We are entering one of the hardest times of the year for me: the weeks leading up to Mother's Day. Again, I am not going to get into a bunch of medical details, but I learned when I was in my 20s that physically having children was not going to be a possibility for me. It's not something I think about all that much anymore, but it's always there, a phantom ache that can cast a shadow at the most unexpected of times - or times that are completely expected, like holidays that prompt people to talk about how nothing anyone can ever do compares to being a mother, or how you can't really know what love is until you're a parent, or any number of other (inadvertently?) hurtful things people say.  A few years ago, I wrote this poem as I was contemplating the arrival of this dreaded day of the year. While it was specifically inspired by this particular unfulfilled dream for me, I think it can apply to many other unwanted life circumstances. It was written from a small, opti...

 You know that feature on Facebook that shows you things you've posted in prior years on today's date? I have a love-hate relationship with that thing, because sometimes it pops up with things that just gut me. But other days it shows me things that definitely bring me a moment of joy. Then there are days, like today, where it does both. Many years ago, when I was a lawyer in private practice,* I was indirectly involved in a seriously awful criminal case. I won't go into the specifics, but a really young girl had to testify against her own father about things that many adults can't even bring themselves to mention. She got into my heart, and one night when I was thinking about her and everything she had been through, this poem just came to me. I wrote it in exactly the amount of time it took to get the words down on paper. It is obviously inspired by a similarly titled work by Dr. Seuss, but is not intended in any way to infringe on his copyright. (If you are from Dr. S...

 Today was a gorgeous day in the greater St. Louis area. As I generally do on Sundays, I had lunch with my family at my sister's house. I got takeout from one of my new favorite places, Crushed Red , and headed across the Mississippi, a Karin Slaughter audio book to keep me company. The windows were down and the sun was shining and it was just a wonderful day.  I also received this item, which I had ordered to commemorate 30 days of being on my program, and it just happened to arrive on the day I hit 50 pounds of weight loss. (Not that I'm focusing on that, but it was a fun coincidence.) That's really all I wanted to say, just that it was a particularly nice day. I'll leave you with one of my all-time favorite mood booster songs. And no - it's not "Happy" by Pharrell. 

 One of the things I've gotten the most feedback on since I started this blog has been my "Joy List." I have to give credit for that idea to Your Coach Meg , a life coach I worked with when I first realized my health was starting to decline (again). I told her how I knew what I needed to do to turn things around but just didn't seem to care enough to do any of it. She gave me a homework assignment to make a list of all the things that bring me joy, and thus the list was born. This was my first Joy List, created pre-Covid. I had done something similar to this once before, only that was a list of things I'd do before giving in to a different unhealthy coping mechanism I was trying to stop. (I may be a hot mess now, but I used to be so much worse .) But there's a subtle yet extremely important distinction. The Joy List is a proactive measure, which if used as directed creates a life that you feel less compulsion to escape. The other list, which didn't have a ...

Many years ago, I read an article which I am pretty sure was titled, "Et tu, Camryn?" My memory tells me it was in Bitch  magazine, although I can find no evidence of this online. But I have an almost-eidetic memory, and even though it's declining a bit with age (I'm 47), I still trust it on this point. The article was a condemnation of Ms. Mannheim for losing weight. Granted, she had written an early fat acceptance memoir ( Wake Up, I'm Fat! ). But the article was written as if she had betrayed all the other fat girls and women in the world, and perhaps even feminism itself, by losing weight. Isn't it funny how, apparently, a woman's reproductive choices should be kept private between her and her doctor*, but not her weight? The ad featuring this young woman dancing around in her underwear  while eating ice cream was all over my Hulu for a while.   During previous attempts to get my eating under control (and, OK, lose weight), I've had nightmares wher...

 OK, first, when I typed that title, it was "Fault v. Responsibility." I'm not sure I will ever fully stop thinking like a lawyer.  Today I want to talk about the distance between something being your fault  and it being your responsibility. Here's another song* from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that is obviously an exaggeration, but which I do think sums up current thinking about people's culpability for their mistakes. (Actually, this only applies to white people. For people of color, even other people's mistakes are deemed to be their fault.) An example from my own recent life: back in February, I had made a rare excursion away from my house to pick up a curbside grocery order. On my way home, someone ran a red light and turned left into my path. I slammed on my brakes but couldn't get stopped in time and we collided. The driver of the other car did not have insurance. So while the wreck was not my fault , if I wanted to be able to continue driving, I was going ...

 Hi, I'm Melanie, and I'm a compulsive overeater/sugar addict. ( Hi, Melanie! ) I don't mean that sarcastically at all. I have participated in Overeaters Anonymous at different times in my life, and its program was tremendously helpful. If we weren't in the midst of a pandemic that has kicked in-person meetings to the curb, I'd be going right now. But alas, we are in the mist of a pandemic, so I've been working on this on my own.  And today, I have achieved 6 weeks of sobriety. That's a tricky term when you're talking about food. How do you know if you've indulged your addiction on a given day? Some fellow addicts choose to set a meal plan for each day, report it to someone - preferably a sponsor (something I don't have right now), and as long as you adhere to the plan you have maintained sobriety. Others use a more amorphous standard of "Did I eat with dignity?" But what I choose to go with is not eating any sugar. At all. And also avo...

I identify with Kate Winslet's character in the movie The Holiday  so much more than I care to admit. Her monologue that runs over the opening credits sums it up pretty well. ; Only I've been mired in this nonsense for far more than 3 years. For a long time, I thought this was a character flaw in me, a sign of something deep-seated and pathetic. But recently, a good friend sent me this article which explains what allows a fixation to endure for so long. "You know, limerence can be unending," Tennov says. "I've interviewed subjects who've nursed a fixation on their limerence objects—LOs—for decades." What's the trick? "Their feelings were unrequited," she reports. "Their LOs gave them mixed signals, like ignoring them for months and then calling. Hope, confusion, and uncertainty kept it going. The phenomenon is defined, in part, by feeling a loss of control. The limerent person can't stop thinking about the LO: What did he mean ...

 I grew up with a baseball Dad. He likes other sports, but baseball is his favorite. By a wide margin. I became captivated by the 1998 home run race and we went to a lot of games together. We live in Illinois but in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch, so we're Cardinals fans. Despite the revelations that have come to light in the interim, it was an exhilarating time to be a part of Cardinals Nation. But that's not the point of my post. My point is that, like a lot of sports fans I know, my dad uses sports metaphors for many life questions. The one that I think has stuck with me most over the years is "There's no shame in striking out as long as you go down swinging." (Walking is fine, too, of course, it the pitcher isn't throwing strikes.) What this means, to me, is that the only way you truly fail is if you don't try. This is where my perspective that I can't give in to my health problems originates. If they really do take me out of the game, that's...

 The address for this new blog of mine is wranglingjoy.blogspot.com. Wrangling Joy. Wrestling happiness out of life when it might not be readily available. I mentioned some health challenges in a previous post. I know that the details of another person's medical issues don't make for particularly interesting reading to most folks. But beyond that, no one seems to be able to decide what's wrong with me. I even trekked up to the Mayo Clinic to try to get to the bottom of my breathing difficulties, but all this got me was yet another entry in my list of conflicting opinions. One thing all these doctors did agree about, though, was that I was in the top tier of risk for serious problems, possibly even death, if I contracted COVID-19. So I locked it down and played it safe, only leaving my house to go for drives or pick up curbside grocery orders. I am immensely grateful to be vaccinated now, as are all the adult members of my family and most of my closest friends. So I'm ab...

 This is not going to be a post about fresh starts. Well, not exactly. It's a post about the trickery of fresh starts, especially those rooted in external events: New Year's Day, the first day of school, or the beginning of spring. These events are rife with trickery because of one simple truth: no matter how many things in our lives are new or different or fresh, we still bring ourselves with us. So if you really want things to be different, you have to figure out how you're going to keep your habits and patterns and thoughts from repeating you right into the same choices you've always made and actions you've always taken. Because we all know that just gets you what you've always gotten, right? For me, this means trying to fight past my impulse to eat something really easy that requires almost no effort after having a particularly stressful day. But it also means having plan-compliant foods that require little or no preparation on hand and ready to go for when ...

I am a longtime student of the writer and artist SARK . I have signed up for her latest course offering for writers and know this will eventually lead to blogging, so I'm getting ahead of the game and getting this going today, two whole days before the course starts. I'm a chronic procrastinator, but I want to change the energy of my writing as I embark on this latest attempt to increase the words I'm putting into the world, particularly after the last year has drained me of the energy to do anything but barely survive. I first discovered SARK in college. I was an English major at the time but had several friends in the art department, and I spent a lot of time hanging out there, listening to music, working on writing assignments in an environment I found inspiring, talking to them while they painted or sculpted or sketched, and just feeling like I was in my element. On the wall near the couches where I often took up residence was SARK's poster " How to Be an Artis...