You may notice the time of this post and be impressed that I am actually in bed this early! The only problem is that part of the reason I'm in bed is because I've done something to my back and my muscles are in spasms. Not at all fun! I've had two prednisone, two Tylenol, and soaked in a hot tub with Epsom salts and am now on a heating pad. One thing about this Ehler-Danlos Syndrome, if that is what I have, is that joints come out of joint easily, but usually go back in place pretty easily. So I'm hoping that I'll be able to go to sleep and that everything will have sorted itself out by tomorrow. So, you might wonder what I did to mess my back up, but ... let's look at the good part of the day first.
The good part ... well, it only took me an hour to wake up and get out of bed and that's pretty good for me. I didn't leave the house because it was 10:00 before I was functioning and I had a luncheon to go to at noon. So I got dressed and fixed my hair and makeup, heated up some chai and gave my housekeeper some instructions for the day. We are still trying to get all of the Christmas decorations put away.
I had my prayer time and read my Bible and then decided to just double-check to make sure they had food planned for me to be able to eat. This is an annual awards ceremony at which my husband presents two people with awards, and these two people will then be honored at the ball we have in March. It's not hosted on campus, so it is not catered by our usual person. Last year they forgot about me entirely and I got to endure a two-hour luncheon with a plate of lettuce! Well, it turned out they completely forgot about me again and did not have anything I could eat. I'm the president's wife! I'm the First Lady! I've been here six and a half years! I always go to these events! And what makes it worse is that the woman who completely forgot about me is the woman in charge of the department for which I put on all the huge Christmas events at our home! And when I say huge, I mean in the vicinity of 400-450 people! So, let's just say that I was not happy and ... did not keep that to myself. And, I refused to go. My husband tried to talk me into coming but I told him I am not an after thought and would not be treated like an after thought. Ridiculously, I cried about it. I had to sort through all the emotions I was having. Her forgetting me and then not doing anything to accommodate me was really inexcusable. But I was not only offended, I was very hurt as well. It has been my therapist's observation that I regress emotionally when my basic needs aren't being taken care of, and it frequently has to do with not being able to find any food that I can eat. This is not surprising since I was extremely malnourished when I was very young. I wasn't taken care of and was left hungry a great deal of the time. I remember often crying myself to sleep because I couldn't find any food. My brothers and father must have been taking care of themselves, my brothers are quite a bit older than me, but I was overlooked. You can tell it in my pictures starting at about 5 years old through fourth grade at least. It's not until sixth grade that I don't look like I'm being starved. Now, this was in the days before there were child services checking up on situations like mine. But somehow or other the school approached my parents about putting me on the school lunch program for free, and so I started getting at least one hot meal a day.
So I was able to categorize the way I was feeling and determine that the offense was legitimate, but the pain not and was from childhood issues of hunger. Not providing food for me triggered some of the emotion and fear of that time. I was very tired from it all and had to go to bed to sleep for a while. My husband got home a little early and got in bed with me to snuggle and doze some, and then asked me if I wanted to go to Hawaii in March??! Well ... let me think about it and get back to you! YES!!! By then I had to get up and throw a lunch together and drive out of town about an hour to see my therapist. We talked about this incident some and how my sense of self is still pretty shaky. I'm supposed to spend some time thinking and writing about it in the next two weeks.
We met up for dinner at a Mexican restaurant we frequent, I had the fish tacos, and the. Went to a school board meeting where he was given an award for being, in general, a great president and putting a particular program in place where high school students can get dual credit for courses they take here on campus.
I planned on exercising when we got home, but it turned out a Biggest Loser was on, so we watched that and I did not exercise. Yes, I love the irony!
Tomorrow is my take-care-of-myself day and my daughter and I are going to go out to eat and get pedicures. I have had maybe three pedicures in my life, so this will be a treat. My therapist thought that doing something weekly for myself was a good idea. One time I told her that I was all about nurturing, and she challenged me that I nurture everyone and everything else but don't nurture myself. She is concerned that I will have problems when we move from no longer being the First Lady. This university has never done community development and they have no concept of what I do, which is strange since they are board members and this is periodically a hot topic on The Chronicle of Higher Education website! In fact, the big deal is that we should be compensated for our work. It is so archaic for a university to consider that the little wife is supposed to just give up her life and come along and host all sorts of events just for the love of doing it! Some universities even require the wife to quit her job! They consider that they are getting a two-for-mother-price-of-one thing! And universities are supposed to be against sexism and racism and chauvinism, but they have this chauvinistic practice at their heart! Of course, it began ages ago, and people have changed, but this woks for them economically so they don't change anything
Anyway, she is concerned that it means more to me than I think it does, and I'll be unhinged when it ends. I don't think so!!!
So, that's my ramblings for the evening. The woman who messed up planning the luncheon has apologized profusely. I haven't responded yet because, each time I start to, I get either upset or offended again. Hopefully a good night's sleep will help me to have a better perspective.
Oh ... and my back? Believe it or not I appear to have clenched up, involuntarily, so hard when I found that there was no food for me that I threw a few vertebrae out of place resulting in the muscle spasms. How ridiculous!! My back is really killing me and I'm worried whether I'll be able to sleep or not. Time to find out. I want chocolate. I want chocolate really bad! Chocolate would help me go to sleep! Happily, all the chocolate is downstairs and it would hurt too bad to go down and get it! Now, if there were the fantastic gluten-free Oreo-type cookies downstairs, this would have been a much shorter blog!
I hope you have had a good day. I think the continual evaluation of our lives and our strategic efforts to improve ourselves are so important, but never fun!
Cheers!
Lisa
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