January 2013 – The Mystic Mom

It’s important to me that you understand something. When I embraced SIMPLIFY as my theme for 2013, it wasn’t my intention to never blog again. That would be OVERsimplifying, which I almost never do. In fact, I had intentions to blog at least every Monday, and then add a second day to each week next month.

The thing is (as is often the case), Life had other plans for me.

So, in my case, instead of blogging, Life has kept me preoccupied by playing nurse to my golden retriever. In an attempt to keep the story SIMPLE, let me just outline for you the past two and a half weeks of my life:

Left Dog in kennel for vacation.
In an attempt to escape and find us, Dog tried to secretly eat his way out of the kennel, but told no one.
We returned from vacation and brought Dog home.
Dog was happy, but had trouble sleeping and seemed unable to relax. Since, in our presence, Dog can easily be confused with a throw rug until you say the words, “walk” or “yum-yums,” this had us concerned.
Dog went to vet and was treated for acid reflux.
Dog slept like a baby that night, and we breathed a sigh of relief.
Symptoms returned for Dog the next day and we took him back to the vet.
Dog was given a special “cocktail” to soothe his stomach and “clear things out.”
Dog slept like a baby, but refused to eat the next morning.
Dog went back to vet to undergo x-ray.
X-ray revealed a mystery item in stomach that would not move.
Dog had surgery to remove the “largest mass of foreign body” our vet has ever seen in his 20+ years of vet medicine. They saved a “small fraction” of it for all of us to enjoy (it’s a gallon-sized bag, just so you know):

We feel Dog deserves a plaque like on Man vs. Food that announces “Food Won” (or in this case, “Foreign Body Won”), but I guess the vet thought we were joking because no such plaque has yet been presented to Dog.
Dog seemed much better.
The next day Dog got worse again.
Dog has been at the vet two of the past three days and was treated for gas and other things.
As a result of trying to guess what all may be wrong with him, I get to give him all these meds at least twice each day. On a good day he’ll take them wrapped in the cheese slices, but he hasn’t had a good day yet this week:

To date Dog is still eating very little and/or refusing to eat altogether.

So, I’m at that scary place right now where I don’t know how the story will end. And so I don’t want to write, because it’s difficult to write when you’re in the middle of something scary and painful.

But that’s kind of why I realized I had to write. Because I want you to show you how my mystic mind has learned to deal with scary, painful times.

Here’s a punch list of how I’ve been dealing with this:

I write down the things I’m grateful for every day. It can be as simple as “The dog pooped!” and as deeply sad as, “I am so grateful that if I have to experience a loved one suffering it is my dog suffering and not my children, husband or other human loved one.”
I lower my expectations for the day. I don’t expect the world to understand how much my dog means to me. But I know our story. I know how much he means, and so I know I need to hold myself more gently right now. I’ve cleared my schedule so that if I need to stay busy, I get busy with housework, and if I need to lay low and watch TV for a bit while the dog walks around backwards into things (which he’s been doing a lot), then I can watch him and use the TV as a distraction.
I stay focused on what matters. This is, for me, at least, much harder than it sounds. I get distracted so easily with thoughts of “what if’s” and “then what’s” that I tend to miss the big picture of what these series of events will mean in my WHOLE life. Yes, it’s hard to watch my dog in pain. And yes, it is EXPENSIVE. Yes, it’s hard to think of having to let him go (if it comes to that). Yes, it would be sad…BUT…Yes, my kids are healthy. Yes, my husband is still gainfully employed so we can pay those bills. Yes, when you can fix a problem with money it’s really not the biggest problem you’ll ever have. Yes, in spite of however this ends, I am still so happy and grateful and better for having known my dog that I would do it all over again– even if the end of our relationship comes much sooner than I’d expected.
I (force myself to) practice what I preach. I’ve embraced a new mantra, and when I do that, I know from experience that Life has a way of testing me on it. My new mantra has been this: THERE IS NO BLAME. And these are the words on which I’ve tried to focus this whole episode. The people who supervised my dog at the kennel where he ate the stuff? They are not to blame. The doctors who didn’t have x-ray vision and know that my dog ate something? They are not to blame. The dog who should just KNOW BY NOW how to be calm in our absence? He is not to blame. And that leaves me with the one person left I like to blame the most for things going wrong: Me. The old habits are hard to break: I should have known….I should have said…I should have told them…I should have been more diligent…. But if I go down that road, I’m not helping anyone. Not the doctors, not the kennel workers , not my kids and husband who are just as concerned and hurting as I am watching our family pet suffer, not my friends and family who have called to check on his progress through this seemingly endless journey, and– most especially–not the dog.

In the meantime, I’m waiting and watching and praying. These acts are the silent language of LOVE IN ACTION that my dog understands. And whether these past few days end up being but a bump in the road of an otherwise long, enjoyable life with him, or they end up being his *gulp* dying days, it is most important to me that he see his life lesson has not gone unnoticed, that his message for me has been received, that his purpose for being has transformed me.

And I feel the Spirit within smiling and nodding and bringing me peace with this SIMPLE revelation: Through the ages, few earthly beings have been more consistent about the message of LOVE IN ACTION than the family dog.

Closing thought: If you have a family dog that you love and have learned some of life’s SIMPLER lessons from, feel free to post his/her name (or names if you have more than one) in the comments section below. I will know through that SIMPLE act, that you are joining your hearts with ours in prayer for a speedy recovery for our beloved Baxter.

xx oo

Lisa

Happy New Year!

It’s obviously been awhile since I’ve posted. And the problem with not writing for a while is the same problem as anything else you like to do that is good for you, but is also lots of work: the longer you stay away from it, the more difficult it is to start up again.

But, I’ll tell you this much. I had a great time while I wasn’t writing.

I had a very relaxing Christmas with my family. We took a road trip to Florida and hung out and did all kinds of fun stuff while we were there. All our worries, and troubles were left behind.

All too soon, of course, I found myself back wading through waist-high piles of laundry, and sorting through endless emails and junk mail. Hard as I tried to stay in the frame of mind from that vacation, it didn’t take long to feel overwhelmed by life’s chores and duties. There was a scene from Finding Nemo that kept playing through my mind. (Probably because we played it in the car about four different times in both of our 17 hour drives). You know the scene where Marlin and Dory are all caught up in the peaceful feeling of staring at the phosphorescence emitted from the angler fish that’s luring them closer, until finally Marlin notices (almost too late) that the light that’s making them feel so good is coming from a fish that is about to devour them and he says, “Good feeling gone!”?

Yep. That’s about how I felt: good feeling gone.

I was back to making list after list of chores that needed to be finished. Volunteer work that needed to be completed. Kids appointments and activity arrangements. Errands that needed to be done. Odds and ends that needed to be completed around the house, and of course, the then looming task of coming up with some resolutions for the New Year.

Buried under all these lists and plans, I thought back to the last day of our trip. On that day, we were going to spend the day at Busch Gardens in Tampa and I was determined to plan and plot out the day, so we could get all the things we (mostly me) wanted to see and do crossed off the TO DO list before we had to return home. So I was marking maps and taking surveys from the family wanting to know everybody’s TOP 3 THINGS THEY WANT TO SEE AND DO AT BUSCH GARDENS. And I tried to plan them out. Then, I panicked with the realization that there were eight of us on this trip and that would result in 24 things to see and do in one day with a wide area of interests since we ranged in age from 7 – 66. So, I went back to the drawing board, and re-surveyed everybody asking them OF THEIR TOP THREE THINGS THEY WANTED TO SEE AND DO AT BUSCH GARDENS WHAT IS THEIR NUMBER 1?

That was better. It narrowed our list to only 8 things to HAVE to do, which felt much more doable. Then, I only needed to plan out lunch times, and locations, times of some of the things that were scheduled events people wanted to see/do, etc.

Even in that moment I could feel myself beginning to go a little crazy with the need to control and plan and plot our move down to every last detail, but it will all be worth it, I told myself.

That’s when my brother, who is every bit as prone to nervousness and worry about controlling time as a Zen monk in deep meditation, piped up and said, “How about we not plan anything and just go to the park and see what happens?”

I looked at him confused.

What was he suggesting, exactly? That we just show up haphazard and leave a day at an amusement park to chance?

I thought about it a bit. If we did that, it would certainly mean I could just “stand down” the rest of that evening. I wouldn’t have to do anything else but go to bed, wake up the next morning and head out the door to the park. (Well, I am a mother of three, so it’s not quite THAT easy, but you know what I mean). It was certainly a different approach than anything I was used to.

So (with some reluctance) I agreed and that’s what we did. Left our day to chance.

And you know what? We ended up getting into a really short line for a big roller coaster, and we saw an animal theater show that hadn’t made it onto ANY of our LISTS OF THINGS TO DO AND SEE, but we all agreed afterwards it was a highlight of the whole day. We also ended up walking past a BBQ chicken stand right as it opened, so we were at the front of the line that quickly grew longer behind us.

Whaddya know? I had to ask myself at the end of that day, maybe NOT planning isn’t such a bad thing after all.

But still, I thought as I starting organizing and listing all the things that I was resolving I would do and get right this year, that was vacation. REAL LIFE doesn’t work that way. If you want to change, you need to plan.

Clearly, I hadn’t yet learned the breadth of the genius lifestyle my brother has always known.

Suddenly as I began listing improvements in the sixth area of my life (yes, six areas, one per page with 12 points to work on in each area, one for each month…makes sense, right? :)) that I was resolving to improve in the coming year, I realized I was growing so tired from the list, I was pretty sure I’d not even have the energy to ring in a New Year let alone make changes in one. Overwhelmed yet again, my brother’s words came back to me. “How about we just show up and see what happens?”

But this isn’t a vacation, I thought. This is LIFE. There’s a difference.

Then I thought of my brother, who, in the best possible way has made his entire LIFE a vacation.

That’s when I realized that maybe vacation isn’t really a trip you take to get away from everything, but rather, a state of mind.

I know I’m still a long way from being able to approach life with the same kind of open-ended questions as my brother, but I can make an effort to try it out more often. And around the same time I was thinking that, is when this little word popped into my head:

SIMPLIFY

And I began to think, what if I only made ONE resolution for this year…and it was this word ? Could it work? Would I get results?

I have no idea. But, I’m sure if I asked my brother he’d say, “Let’s find out.”

So, I am.

And with that, I give you my entire list of resolutions for 2013: Simplify.

I hope you’ll join me!

Month: January 2013

LOVE IN ACTION and THE FAMILY DOG

2013: Simplify