Sunday, June 30, 2024

  Sunday, June 30, 2024

 

It wasn't the best night's sleep. I was agitated about relationships. I struggled to find a solution. I always feel it's just out of reach. I did that with my mom. I solved that problem, but the solution was not one I had ever thought of until it came out of sheer desperation, with my focus on my survival instead of improving the relationship. I cut her off for what wound up being a year. I gave up any hope of a loving relationship with boundaries. But then I set them myself, and she respected them. She respected them out of fear, but it worked. She must have trusted my positive intent enough since she moved in with Mike and me for the last 18 years of her life.

    Toward the end, she brought up the incident. She complained of how I had hurt her. She never appreciated that I could never have taken her in if that hadn't happened. Oh, well. I won what I won; it was enough. The problem is I often solve the nagging problems. I often don't, too.  My approach worked with the two that meant the most to me, my relationships with my mom and Mike. I am grateful for what I had with both of them.

   I was up by four. Since I have incorporated laughter yoga into my morning gentle seated yoga routine, it takes forever. With each contraction, I 'laugh' until my breath runs out.  Yvette and I talked about the process the other day. She attended a Bikram class after a long hiatus. She was impressed by the difference in her breathing.  I used breathing today to help me deal with my sorrow. Both Yvette and I are seeing changes in our core muscles as well.

   I thought I would fall asleep at church today. I often do. When I get there, it is time for my mid-morning nap. I was swamped with feelings of loneliness. They are so painful.  Many of the people in church can find refuge in  Jesus. It appeared that Mike could, although we never discussed it. Too bad. Mike's trust in me didn't extend to sharing those feelings. His mother's contempt for his thoughts and feelings, when they differed from hers, colored his feelings about me. I would have found his feelings interesting even if I couldn't have shared them. I can approach differences with curiosity, free of judgment when someone isn't stuffing their opinions down my throat.  I've gotten even better at it over the years.

   I theorized that the feeling behind loneliness, besides shame, is fear of dying. Based on my embrace of evolutionary psychology, anyone alone was in grave danger of dying, either from hunger or from an animal attack. That is unless the group didn't take a more direct hand in the matter. I sat in church and kept saying, "You're safe; you're not in any danger," and breathing fully, filling my chest with air as much as possible.  Doing so changed my alignment. It helped.

  After mass, there was no one I immediately recognized to talk to. One of the servers said hello to me as I collected my glazed half donut and left. I was in somewhat better spirits when I got home. At least I wasn't in great pain, needing to sob uncontrollably. Weeding helped. I did a bit of that. Those spider plants are a piece of work. They're prepared to take over the yard and wipe out everything else.

  I had a session with going-into-fourth-grade M today as I do most Sundays.  She had a smile on her face for the first time in a long time. She had her dog with her, Moana. I got a glimpse of her. She looked like a black lab.  M said no, she was a Taffy. I just looked it up on the Internet. It was a Staffy Bull Terrier; Staffy is shorthand for Staffordshire.  We worked on Stuart Little again. There were some vocabulary words from 1940 when E.B. White wrote the book. Lapel was one of them. Stuart grabbed his lapel to look professorial.  No one in Hawaii wears suit jackets. A nice aloha shirt is formal wear. M's never seen a jacket with a lapel.

     Aisle was another word M was unfamiliar with. It talked about the students in a classroom filing down an aisle as they went to their seats.  Those were the seats I sat in in elementary school, desks with ink well and seats that flipped up. M said her grandma had a desk like that in her house. With an ink well? Yes.  She asked her grandma if she had used a fountain pen. She had.  As always, we continued working on decoding as accurately as possible. If the decoding is good but the pronunciation doesn't match the word, she has to figure it out. She does an excellent job with that if she knows the word. If someone doesn't have a word in their listening or speaking vocabulary, there is no way they can figure out what it is.  M decoded lapel as /lap-el/, an excellent decoding which produced a sound that is nothing like the word. It was a fun session.