Day 28:  Today is a two-fold gratitude day...I am thankful that last Friday, Wisconsin finally joined the ranks of allowing the Gay community to legally marry.  And I am thankful that my children are growing up as open minded individuals embracing these new found freedoms, acknowledging the gravity of their importance. 

My sister is gay and will be getting legally married in the state of Maryland come August. As my daughter recounted stories about protestors outside of the Pridefest celebration held this weekend at Milwaukee's Summerfest grounds, I was quite amazed. It is hard to believe that people still have such distance from the reality the gay life, like "these people" still need to be saved or fixed.  As I watched the news cast capture the first gay couples being legally married this last Friday, I was struck by the tenure of their unions and the emotion which overcame the couples when granted this freedom to express their love publicly. There was a couple of women who have been together for 24 years, then a couple of middle-aged men who have been together for 35 years. There were teenagers in tears, tears of joy that their parents could finally be married in the eyes of the law. At that I was wondering if perhaps they are the ones who should be picketing places that are allowing heterosexual couples to get legally married...they seem to have a pretty clear grasp on what a loving and committed union means.  I applaud US District Judge Barbara Crabb today for further upholding the ruling, denying the Attorney General's and Scott Walker's attempt to get a stay against her Friday order that the state's same-sex ban was unconstitutional.
Congratulations to all those who now have the "right" to get married to their loved one. 

Day 27:

I am thankful for having a very full life...and for having the opportunity in my younger days to help build a church in the small town of Tihosuco, Mexico, located in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Tihosuco was a prosperous Spanish settlement that was destroyed in the fighting with the Mayans during the Caste War (1847-1901). Its Franciscan Church-Convent, the Church of the Divine Child, overgrown by jungle until the 1930's when two families undertook the restoration of colonial buildings, including the church, in the town. This church, as it is now, is spectacular in its own way and there is nothing quite like it in all of Mexico.

The old church is an amazing building, beyond beautiful despite its disrepair. However, the local residents needed a meeting place that was not so exposed to the elements, a house of worship where they could comfortably gather despite weather or time of day. A group of Americans, myself included, got the chance to spend part of a summer building such a place for this welcoming community.

I do not consider myself a religious person, but spiritual, yes. There is no way to deny that there are "Powers that Be" after spending time with people who live in such poverty and still have such passion for life and faith that God is watching over them. It is a feeling I will carry forever.

Learning to sleep in a  hammock, pee in a bucket, and go without a shower forever was an eye opener. But perhaps my best memory was after a long day, our crew would "dress" for the evening in this dusty town. The girls wore skirts and the boys wore dress pants. We played baseball in the town square with the local kids and sat on the curbs as we ate dinner. We were dirty, sweaty, worn out from the day of work, our skin worn thin by the exposure to the lime, but there was something incredibly rejuvenating hearing the local guitar music and Spanish songs...a community celebrating the close of each day with song and prayer and gratitude.

Day 26:

No, you are not imagining things...Gratitude Days 20-25 are missing and soon to be entered. I must apologize. I am still a baby of the paper and pen era.  When my job requires I spend well over 50 hours a week on the computer, my "after hours" creative juices prefer the use of a legal pad, a scrappy old pen, and my dime store magnifying glasses. Not very elegant or technologically suave, but creativity has a way of coming out one way or another.

So, today I am thankful for being able to still write no matter where I am or how I am feeling. I must admit, this week has created roadblocks to the "path of being thankful". I suspected this would be the challenge when I started this 100 day endeavor. Have you ever had a string of days that present you with just minor challenge after minor challenge, making your demeanor one of complete apathy, bordering on grumpiness? You feel completely wrong in feeling sorry for yourself but also just do not have the gumption to see the positive. I look back at the challenges I met face on when diagnosed with cancer. During those days, months, years, I was able to grasp on tight to gratitude. I guess facing a possible life threatening illness makes one regroup and see more clearly. But when the mundane irritants of day-to-day life seep slowly back into your bones, that grasp seems to weaken. Long work days, bills, lack of sleep, family strife...it all wears down the resolve.

Seeing two 12 year olds stab a friend 19 times in our city made my head reel...closely on the heals of the young college student going on a shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, where my mom lives. Where are "Our Girls" in Nigeria? And where did that Malaysian airplane go down anyway? It all makes me take stock in my own life...re-evaluate. It's important to feel the pain of our fellow humans, so that we always strive for change and realize how good we have it. And then that medical bill comes or your teenager starts cursing at you...damn hard to hold onto that resolve.  Time to meditate...time to write...time to go to a Spring art festival with my son and his girl friend in the warm, sunny weather. Okay, the resolve is back. I am thankful.


Check back this weekend....I am rebuilding pages and adding extra content that should be fun...at least for me!

Day 25: Thankful I live in a country where I can pose these questions and not be tortured or thrown in jail or worse. I guess I am struggling with the thought that many of us are faced with certain life-altering events that have now become commonplace, even trivial. I sometimes feel like the poster child for the "broken". Certainly Ann Coulter has rammed her frightful opinions on my life events down everyone's throats.

Single-mother? Check...Yup, root of all society's ills.

Breast Cancer survivor? Check...Yeah, yeah, whatever, doesn't every woman get that at some point in her life!? Quit your whining.

Lost everything through divorce? Check...You and 50% of all marriages. So, what's your problem?

Saddled with child's college tuition? Check...No one said he HAD to go to college.

Struggling with teenager's interest in drugs? Check...Ah come on, Mom, weed is legal in Colorado.

Became one of the midlife unemployed? Check...Jeez, you do cry about the most common maladies, don't you?!

So, my question is this, with these events now becoming so commonplace and inflicting people in our American society with such regularity, are we becoming immune to their impact? The severity of the impact?  It leads me to the question of gun violence...when is enough really enough? It seems like we are spiraling further and further down the rabbit hole and no longer really seeking answers. Have we thrown up our hands and relinquished control to "whatever"? A phrase so often uttered by teenagers and adults alike nowadays.

Is it time to go back to the SmartPhone and watch another funny cat video on YouTube?

Day 24: Fondly remembering the squishiness of the earth, the mud oozing between my fingers as a kid...sitting knee deep in a hole I dug.  The rain had created an ugly mess, but it was beautiful in my eyes. I was swept away imagining being the Queen reigning over the kingdom. Not a princess...no, that was far to girly...I wanted to be the Queen who reigned with her King over the mud gnomes. We were fair royalty, making certain out loyal mud subjects always had fresh mud. The silly fancies of a kid.

Perhaps that is why I have always been so interested in plants and flowers, landscaping. Perhaps I am always seeking that little fantasy kingdom, where the only concerns were keeping the mud fresh and the gnomes happy.

The silly fancies of a kid.

Perhaps that's all we ever search for...that little piece of us that experienced fantasy and joy in the mundane squishiness of mud between our toes.

Day 23: I am thankful to find an easy and convenient way to monitor my health and fitness. I have used other apps and found this to be one of the easiest tools to keep track of calories. The app has the usual settings that you need to enter about yourself to get started and set your goals. It has a nice feature that reads barcodes from food packages which makes calculating calories soooo much easier. It also lets you enter your exercise and nets the food against your calories so you know exactly where you are throughout the day. You can also share your progress with friends...like sharing with friends on FaceBook. My personal trainer turned me on to this, and now she too can make sure I'm keeping track and see where I need improvement on either exercise or diet. I can't recommend this enough because of the ease of it, but also because I quickly learned what foods were LOADED with calories. The database has tons of foods entered from restaurants as well which makes eating out less of a guessing game. Anybody trying to monitor their exercise and diet should really give this app a try. You can use it on your home computer, but I found it easiest to use it as I go on my I-Phone...and it's free!

Day 22: I am thankful beyond words for having been blessed with a friend like Cas. We met when we were 12, the same age my daughter is when this picture was taken. This woman is truly amazing. This picture was taken during a her visit to Wisconsin to help take care of me after surgery number 2. She did the same thing for the first cancer surgery and then again for the third. This last trip took her by way of Philadelphia in a snow storm only to end up caring for an old Italian woman in a wheel chair all night in the airport as they waited for a new flight due the next morning. She arrived, sleep deprived, the next evening as I came out of recovery. My son picked her up from the airport and drove straight to the hospital. I felt so bad for her making such a sacrifice on my account. Then the nausea set in from the anesthesia, and all I could do was say, "Hi..." and then barf in a bag. Heck of a way to great your best friend of 35 years. But she understood and was so caring and comforting.

We recently met in Cleveland for a 24 hour period of freedom from life to do the Run or Dye 5k...both of us driving about 7 hours from our respective states to meet in the middle. And as always, we were quickly able to fall into walk n chat, eat n chat, lounge n chat, run n chat mode. We have both come so far in our lives. We have both owned our own businesses, homes, cars, had substantial retirement savings, had 2 children, had broken marriages, and now struggle with the question, "What now?" We have both had to start from ground zero, a daunting, somewhat irritating task this late in life. But for 24 hours we allowed ourselves to take a break, to laugh like school girls again, jump up and down to crazy music while being doused with clouds of dye.  I am truly thankful for this person that I can text in the wee hours of the morning and with whom I can play Words with Friends and then still end up talking with for hours on the phone when we have a breather.  I hope in the next 20 years to find those "breathers" a little more often. But until then, we thoroughly enjoy our sporadic visits. Next visit...August...my turn to go to DC! Thank you, my friend!

Day 21: I am thankful for finding my "happy place".

As we all work hard in our lives...secretly we are yearning for that happy place. Many of us self-medicate hoping to reach that place or we work harder trying to avoid that emptiness that grows wider and wider within ourselves. Our American society has built empires on "the fix" to this age old problem...the search for the happy place.When I recently moved to the City, I had hoped that it would make "all the difference" in my life....help me find a satisfaction I have been yearning for during the last ten years...help me find my happy place. I had submerged, and, yes, hidden, myself in my role as a mother when my ex left. But as the kids get older and I find that role no longer a sufficient cover story, well, time to engage again in life. Moving to the City has helped but has also been far more difficult than I anticipated. I have had to face my demons on a daily basis and realize that every day is a challenge and quite scary. All my anticipated plans for life are slowly crumbling away like old concrete. Marriage, children, home ownership...I feel like I am on a journey into a foggy place with no road map. It makes me realize why there are so many self-help books, gurus, and medications on the market. This growing up is hard to do.

So, I awake daily...looking closely at my choices through each day. I am one messed up person, but what I am learning is that I can make choices in a very deliberate fashion...good and bad...every day. No self-help book or diet or medication is going to help me find my happy place. My happy place is mine. And every day is mine.  How cliché, right?! Well, strangely enough, I have never approached each day in its own merit...not since I was younger. Life became about "groups" of time. What I could achieve in 12 weeks...lose 20 pounds, get a promotion, get through the first trimester of my pregnancy. And after this last move, my life took a turbo leap. With the changes I am watching in my childrens' lives and my own encounter with cancer, it has become painfully clear...every day is a jewel. Again, cliché, but true. The hardest thing for me has been to enjoy moments...and find my happy place.

Today I shared a special moment with my son. I took an hour break from work a couple of months ago for lunch. My son and I were going to watch a TV show recording we had wanted to see. Funny how we thought watching TV was a bonding experience. The TV was on but we watched none of it. Instead, we sat under a big comforter on the couch with our feet up and talked for an hour about politics and life.  Perhaps seemingly mundane, but it was utter bliss to me.

Enjoying those moments, as fleeting as they may be, remembering them, keeping them in my heart like they are part of my human fabric...that's how I am starting to build my "happy place". It's like an old photo album...an album of stored joyful, significant moments that I can visit anytime anywhere, and no one can take that place away from me. And now I can look at everyday as an opportunity to add moments to my happy place.

Day 20: When you live in an abusive relationship for over 20 years, you quickly learn to adapt out of self preservation. Little things, actions, events become frightening. Take cooking for example. I used to love cooking with my mom when I was young and especially became good at baking desserts for friends and parties in my teenage years. Seventeen Magazine used to publish a monthly recipe which I always waited for anxiously...along with the make up tips.

When I met my husband, he was quick to assure me that not only could I not cook, but I did not want to, and would never be very good at it anyway. I was just 16, so what did I know!? After trying to make cooking a joint venture, a fun couple's experience when we moved into together when I was 18, I was quickly relegated to setting the table and cleanup duty after the meal...I got the joy of cleaning not only the dirty dishes but his mess from preparing the meal. After trying to "enter" the kitchen, only to be chased out with a knife, I acquiesced and accepted the boring role of cleanup.  And because he cooked such "gourmet" meals it also followed logical thinking that I should do all the laundry in the household as well as the house cleaning, vacuuming, dusting, child rearing, etcetera, etcetera.  As years progressed I became actually afraid of making a mistake in the kitchen, putting dishes or food in the wrong place, myself being in the wrong place at the wrong time, turning the stove on incorrectly...still not sure how that is possible, but if it could be screwed up, he made sure I knew it was my fault and that I was just no good in the kitchen.

I do not bring this up to dwell on the past but to show why I am very thankful to be cooking...I'm loving it! The transition was scary, no question. When my ex moved out and the kids and I moved into an apartment, I actually had a physical reaction of fear when I entered the kitchen to cook dinner for the first time...in my own kitchen. Ironically, I got the kids but the ex insisted he get all the cookware because, after all, "She can't cook anyway!" So, I delivered 3 large garbage bags of expensive cookware to his parents' home where he was living, and the kids and I went and bought the cheapest set of pots and pans I could find. And there began my new found joy...or should I say rekindled joy, which had been squelched since I was 16.

For the first few months, my anxiety level still shot through the roof when I went in the kitchen. I was conditioned like Pavlov's dog. I constantly heard the Ex berating me, "What the hell are you doing? Get out, you don't even know how the fuck to boil water!" I started out very simple, microwaving just about everything. The stove had become my nemesis...that scary appliance that I simply was not smart enough to operate properly. But slowly I graduated from the microwave, and the oven/stove and I began our struggle to make things right.

Today I am thankful, and maybe even a little proud, to say that I can cook. And to honor that joy and achievement of overcoming my fears, I am introducing recipes on my Intermission page. These are recipes that fit into a tight budget, a tight schedule, and are kid tested and approved...new ones coming weekly. 

And if any man ever questions my cooking ability again...Well, I'm the one with the knife now.