Category: wellbeing

Double Drabble

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I started hating my body at nine when my belly was a white biscuit between two slick navy blue bikini parts. I hated my body when my Dad said we should jog together and started calling my sisters and I the Bertha Butt sisters. My breasts were too small to offset a ribcage that towered over hip bones when I lay deformed on the beach. Later, my pregnant belly swelled and then deflated into two doughy parts on either side of a vertical C-section scar. I gained fifty pounds and lost only the weight of a ten pound baby.

At fifty-nine, I almost love my body, I certainly don’t hate her any longer. My legs are strong and my knees can bounce on a trampoline. My arms, though melasma mapped, can squeeze my grandchildren. My dimpled thighs droop like my breasts, which point southeast and southwest these days. Preschool children love to squish my upper arms. My soft stomach is the bodyguard who tells me when to take a break from sweets and rest my body. My hair sparkles with natural highlights and I still smile with my eyes. If I could just learn to love my neck. 

A tiny triumph, a look back, and an impending exorcism..

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So, I’m pretty sure that there might not seem anything super impressive about a walk/jog to the end of my street, back, and around the circle.  Really, I’ve done it a thousand times and you might be able to do it 10 times as many as I can, faster, and backwards, but it’s the first time I have jogged in I CANNOT REMEMBER WHEN… maybe a year!  I am so excited because this means the Humira is WORKING!!!  It’s been at least 6 months since I attended a Zumba class and that was only 1 or 2 trying to get back into it.  I did climb a mountain last summer [I don’t know how the hell I did that], but I began quickly deteriorating at the end of last summer and I am just now surfacing again.  So there, that’s the RA news flash of the day.

In other news, spring break was wonderful and relaxing and so not long enough.  We went to Topsail for almost a week and it felt like a couple of days.  I really needed that time.  I did manage to read an entire book; Doctor Sleep by Stephen King.  It’s the sequel to The Shining and it was a fast and good read.  I discovered SK late in life [in terms of reading his work instead of watching it], but I am so glad I did because he is such a consummate writer.  His writing is easy and familiar like a soft shirt, his work so well crafted that it worms into your head and you find yourself thinking of the plot throughout the day and longing to get back into the book to see what will happen next.  I do not like horror as a film genre, but I have always had a taste for the macabre and weird, and his work fits that bill perfectly.  11-22-63 has been my favorite yet; I’m a sucker for time travel.

Unfortunately, our blissful spring break was punctuated by shenanigans by our nemeses– narcissistic/borderline, serial adulteress and the geriatric, wingnut mark who has turned out to be a deadbeat hothead loser.  I feel a short story or a novel coming on and boy are they giving me fodder by the mile.  I almost feel sorry for them.  If I’ve piqued your interest, you’ll just have to wait for publication.  Writing is my plan for exorcising them.