My body felt great when I woke up. I did the yoga postures on the floor, scared that standing might trigger my hip problems and have me down for the count- again. I described my hip/back problem as bi-polar; it's either very good or terrible. When we got home, the young man staying with me and does Bikram asked me if I had learned anything new about my body. In fact, I had, but I couldn't remember what it was.
Before I came home, I stopped off at Island Naturals to pick up some flax seeds to be ground up into my smoothie and some pumpkin seeds for my salad.
I was going to do cleaning today, particularly my bathroom. I still haven't reassembled it from the tenting. I want to clean out the under the counter cabinets before I do. It's one of the things which is holding me back. I have to get down on the floor a reach inside. That's a challenge for me these days, even when my hip feels great. The other obstacle is rearranging the free-standing towel rack and the box with the new toilet seat.
For those of you who don't know or don't recall, it is pretty clear that Mike moved those objects around- well after his death. I had had a nightmare as I woke up that morning that he had told me he was no longer in love with me and left me for another woman. That was the first such nightmare I had like that after he died. When I got up, the bathroom was radically rearranged. I checked with the young woman who was staying here. She said no; it also made no sense that it would have been her. She would have had to go through my bedroom with me asleep in bed. She wouldn't have done that. Elsa couldn't have moved it. She's a twelve-pound dog; the towel rack would have been much too heavy for her to move; not to mention that moving it into its current position would have required her lifting the towel rack over a box that was lying on the floor and placing one its legs on top of the bathmat. I don't think so. Michael was the only explanation.
I had those nightmares periodically while he was still alive. They were easy to dismiss when awake. If he did move the rack, he was clearly more upset by my nightmare than I was. I assure you, I never for a moment would have considered this a possibility when awake. He wasn't that kind of guy- even if he hadn't been madly in love with me.
At any rate, now I will have to move the towel rack to clean the bathroom. I don't want to. I tried to nap, but that didn't work. I finally got up and emptied the under the sink cabinet and cleaned the bottom of it. I washed everything and set it all out to dry. I played the TV series the Crown while I worked. It relieved some of my stress.
Yvette came to pick me up for our therapy session. It went very well. I think the therapist is a little confused by us. She doesn't seem to get that we already have a commitment to the behavior she prescribes. We are not coming to her because we are two people tearing at each other; we are coming to her because we want to understand each other's personalities better and learn how to relate to each other most effectively. We articulated one significant difference in our temperament. We each would benefit from having a little less of our own skillset and a little more of the others. We also talked about strategies we could develop to communicate when we are having difficulty with each other's behavior without resorting to old patterns that haven't been working. Yvette and I were doing well on our own, but we both agree it is helpful to have the therapist there. She's like an emergency fire extinguisher if things get too heated. Just having her there helps us modulate our behavior. We both think she isn't used to people like us coming for therapy. Yvette and I are both good people who want a better relationship. We are not scratching each other's eyes out, spitting hateful words, or worse. We're good and want better. Mike and I would go to therapists with similar needs. I think they were confused about what we were doing there, or, better yet, they made up some bogus explanation that failed to describe our relationship. Maybe in ten years, people will be using therapists to improve their lives instead of just saving them from total disaster.
Yvette was too tired to go out to eat after the session, so we went home. I prepared Elsa's dog food: some of Dr. Marty's and some sensitive skin diet the vet prescribed for her. I added hot water and waited three minutes, as instructed by Dr. Marty's, "wait three minutes and then stir." Elsa gobbles this food down. Elsa and I went for her dinner time walk. My body is holding up just fine.
I made dinner. It doesn't look good, as Mike's meals did, but it nourishes. I eat to live; I don't live to eat, as Mike did. I had salad, frozen spinach, some bread, butter, leftover pot roast that Jean had brought over the other day, and my limeade drink with fresh limes from my garden. It wasn't wonderfully presented as Mike did, but it will sustain my life.
I read more of McGilchrist's book, The Master and his Emissary, on the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. He says that the right hemisphere is for taking in new information. Once that information is solidly learned, the left brain takes over. However, if language is the sole providence of the left brain, and the left brain holds those letters and sounds in sequence, which the right brain doesn't do, which part of the brain learns new words?
I listened to some more of The Crown. Queen Elizabeth is truly an admirable creature, even if she is about as interesting as a cabbage. What a way to live? One can only be grateful that one wasn't born to that life.
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