5 Steps to Happiness (according to Hoda)

I am not usually a big fan of daytime TV but I do like watching the Today Show every morning. Hoda Kotb (of Hoda and Kathy Lee fame) was on today, subbing for someone who is on vacation. Hoda has always impressed me as pretty upbeat. Eight years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery before being declared cancer-free.

John Lawson from Pursuing Happiness

But she outdid herself today when she moderated a story about a movie (Pursuing Happiness) showing how people get and stay happy. The movie featured people who might feel put upon but instead decided to meet their situation with a positive attitude. I vividly remember a guy with metal hooks replacing both his hands. He was playing the piano and pretty well too.

Hoda told Matt Lauer that she had heard that doing five things every day would give you a positive attitude. The five things were (to the best of my recollection):

1. list three things that you are thankful for
2. list one great thing that has happened in the last 24 hours
3. exercise a little (very little in my case)
4. meditate (or pray) for a few minutes
5. practice one random act of kindness

Happiness is a choice after all and even though everyone doesn't exhibit a disability, everyone has had bad things happen to them in their lives, some of them pretty horrific.

Here are some things that are making me happy:

Yesterday, Ron's sister Susan gave me a picture of a fox with Job 11:18 that said:

"And you will feel secure, because there is hope;
you will look around and take your rest in security." 

A beautiful picture from a woman with a beautiful soul. There is no reason why we shouldn't be happy. After all, God is with us and loves us.

Then there's this:

And this:

 

And of course this:

 

I think I will try to take Hoda's advice. After all, it seems to be working for her.

Thoughts on falling

Falling
1. To drop or come down freely under the influence of gravity
2. a. To drop oneself to a lower or less erect position
b. To lose an upright or erect position suddenly
c. To drop wounded or dead, especially in battle

I took a fall last week. I was transferring from my wheelchair to the bed to take a nap and missed the bed. My balance is so bad that I couldn't catch myself and I fell to the floor, wedging myself between a bookcase and my wheelchair. I bruised my ribs on my wheelchair charger when I fell.

Oscar

Oscar (my dog) was with me of course, and seeing me on the floor, he jumped down and tried to play with me. When he discovered that I was not a down there for that purpose, he jumped back on the bed and went to sleep. It was naptime, an important part of his day.

I have a medical alert button that I usually wear around my neck but unfortunately I had removed it to get ready for my nap and set it on the top of the bookcase. (Note to self: Never do that again.) My cell phone was on my bedside table, also out of reach.

I was able to move my wheelchair and assume a more comfortable position lying flat on my back. It was actually pretty comfortable, mostly due to the thick carpeting in our bedroom. However, try as I might, I could not get up. My right side is totally useless and I don't have much strength on my left side -- not nearly enough to raise my body high enough to even sit on the footrest of the wheelchair.  

Since it was three o'clock and Ron wouldn't be home till around 5:30 p.m. at the earliest, I decided to wait for him (I really didn't have much choice).

To pass the time I took the word "alpaca" (I have a little felted one on top of the aforementioned bookcase), and thought of all the words I could make that started the letters of the word. Then, because falling tends to bring out my negativity, I listed all the things about my life that I was thankful for. That took quite a while. After that I rolled over and went to sleep.

When I woke up, Ron was home and he lifted me into my chair. What a great guy! I'm sure it was jarring to walk in and see me on the floor. However, it could have been much worse, and the fall made me aware that I needed to make some changes.

First I am going to increase the hours that my home health care people come. Right now they come in the mornings to help me shower and dress. After talking with Ron, we decided that someone should also be here when I go down for a nap. My most at-risk moments are when I am transferring -- either from my wheelchair to the bed or from my wheelchair to the toilet. I am loathe to have someone assist me with the latter transfer but it would help to have someone in the house who could help me in the event of a fall.

I have been fortunate to be able to get long-term care insurance through AFLAC when I was still working. This has helped immeasurably and was one of the things I was thankful for when I was laying on the floor. (Also their commercials are true -- AFLAC is really fast at paying claims!)

I am so thankful for my many friends and relatives that make my life better by visiting me and driving my van to take me places. But my disability continues to progress and they can't do much about that. However life is good and still holds out much promise.

Carson

For instance, look at this baby! My first grandchild, Carson William Ebert. What kind of person will he be? Only time will tell. I guess its that way with all of us -- how will we end up? Only time will tell.

My Amazing Twin

Me, Mom and Jon ~ 1956

He was always there, because we were twins. I was alone for six minutes at the beginning of life since I was born first. Then Jon came into the world. My parents were overjoyed -- or at least that was my mother's story. "I wanted a girl and your dad wanted a boy and we ended up getting both!" my mom gushed. A tiny woman, Mom was all of 85 pounds and barely 5 feet tall when she got pregnant with us. But the time we were born, a healthy 6 pounds plus each, she looked like a walking Goodyear blimp.

The first child is always made over and if the first child happens to be twins then they get tons of adulation. We were no exception. I feel sorry for my younger brothers and sister who had to live in our shadow.

There weren't a lot of downsides to being twins -- and I am eternally grateful that I had a brother to teach me what the boys are like.

Jon was like that, just cool. My brother took risks -- he was adventurous where I was timid and retiring. He was the bad boy to my trying-not-to-make-waves girl. There was a string of years where he seemed to get a spanking every day.
The 60s were not a good time to be a girl. It seemed to me that boys got to do all the fun stuff and it was particularly galling to watch my twin brother do incredible stuff like join the Cub Scouts -- my mother was a Den Mother so the boys met at our house. Jon had an enviable blue shirt and yellow neckerchief. The Cub Scouts were involved with awesome projects: wood-burning, knot tying, and making Pinewood Derby cars. Once Jon got to make a robot out of a bunch of boxes. I still remember the dials and buttons that he drew on the front.

By that time I had joined the Girl Scouts who earned badges for things like embroidery and cooking, boring compared with the nifty stuff of Boy Scouts got to do.

As twins, we were always in the same grade at school but never in the same class. We avoided each other like the plague there but home was a different story.  I liked the wholesome Beatles but Jon listened to the raunchy Rolling Stones. I still remember the cover of their album Sticky Fingers which had a fully functioning zipper. It seemed impossibly evil.

Jon told me about radio stations that had such strong signals they even reached faraway places like Creston. I remember listening to the silver box radio on Sunday night in the kitchen of our big old family house. "Time of the Season" by the Zombies was playing -- it was 1969. After the song ended, a voice blared "Fifty thousand watts of music power -- K-Double - A Y Little Rock."  Suddenly far away Arkansas was there in our kitchen in southwest Iowa.

Jon with his first wife

Jon married first, a sweet girl that he was madly in love with. Later they moved to Colorado and I didn't see much of him. The marriage didn't last but he married again, fathering two daughters who make him proud. We occasionally talk or e-mail, but not as much as we should.

Jon hasn't had a perfect life, but, last I checked, I haven't either. What Jon does have is what I would classify as a willing attitude. He is ready to help out when needed and do more than what is required.  He faces trials, just like the rest of us, but he doesn't give up.

What would life be like without a twin brother? Far less interesting. I am so thankful that I was blessed with one.

Happy 60th birthday, Jon!

The future that never was

Back when I was still working, I went to a conference in Seattle. As I flew from Springfield, Illinois, to the West Coast, I read a magazine article that talked about nostalgia for a future that had never materialized -- a future that was so well imagined at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962.

That year, when I was 7, the nation was in the grips of space travel fever. When John Glenn orbited the earth three times that year, I was glued to the screen of our black-and-white TV. I longed to go to the Seattle World's Fair, certainly the embodiment of the nation's bright future. The icing on the cake was the premiere of The Jetsons, a futuristic cartoon show replete with robot helpers, instant food, and space taxis.

So I was full of anticipation as I arrived in Seattle for the conference. Finally I'd get to see what was left from that long-ago fair. The first evening I walked down to a shopping center and boarded the monorail. It seemed a little clunky but I rode out to the Space Needle, which was also underwhelming. They both seemed reminders of a bygone age or more precisely an age that never materialized. And they hadn't aged particularly well.

Come to think of it, a lot of things never materialized. For a while in my teens I was a fan of science fiction, and a particular favorite was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Written in 1950, five years before I was born, the book is a collection of short stories set on planet Mars and featuring conflict between human colonists and Martians.

The book contained many haunting stories but the one that struck me most was called "The Martian." The story featured a human couple who live on Mars but ache for their dead son Tom. One night during a thunderstorm they see a figure that looks like Tom standing outside. In the morning, the man finds a child who looks like Tom helping his wife with his chores. After speaking privately with the being, the man learns that he is a Martian with an empathetic shape shifting ability. Because the couple wants so badly to believe he is Tom, the Martian has taken on Tom's shape.



However, when the couple goes to town that evening, they become separated from Tom. The man hears that another family has found their dead daughter and he goes to their home. He sees the Martian, now taking the dead girl's form. He convinces the Martian to return but as they run desperately through the town, each person that the Martian passes sees him as someone else, a person they have lost -- a husband, a child, a criminal.

"Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds.They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand. ....  They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell."

Life on Mars never came to be. Humans have never lived anywhere other than Earth and the whole book was about a future that never happened. But that doesn't make it less interesting to me.

In the 60s, there were many things we thought might happen in the future. We were optimistic, or at least I was,. The Space Race was embraced by the culture at that time and it was easy to get caught up in the excitement of the moment.

I want to think that time was simpler or more innocent or even better. But the truth is, it's the past and that is what I remember fondly. Things often turn out differently than you expect, but that doesn't mean they turn out worse.

My family (minus Dad) in 1963

Body image -- too fat, too skinny, never "perfect"

1971

Even before being diagnosed with MS I had problems with my body. I didn't like it as a teenager and I don't really like it now. But the difference is, now I try not to think about it. When I was a teenager I thought about it a lot.  Back in the 70s, I actively hated my body. I know this because journals that I recently had my husband bring up from the basement recount in livid detail my musings from that time. Overweight with frizzy hair, I was sure that nobody would date me. I wrote endlessly about all the guys I had crushes on but nobody had a crush on me. I could hardly wait to get out of my hometown.

In the course of my life recently, I ran across an article called

1972

"Revisiting My Teenage Anorexia at 63." For 2 years in college, I too was anorexic and I was interested to see how this woman, only 3 years older than me, thought about her dive into that horror. My first impression was that she was brave because she had included a photo showing an obviously bony younger self. I see pictures of myself during this time and wince in disgust.

The oldest of five children, 30 years ago I was on a mission that I could never complete -- that of attaining perfection. Exhilarated by the freedom of college, I decided to take control of my body. Never one to do anything halfway, I pretty much quit eating. I was determined never ever to be overweight again. So it was cereal for breakfast, bouillion for lunch, no dinner, beer with friends every night. Also, I walked everywhere – 10 miles to the mall? No problem. Think of the calories I’d burn!

1976

Diet and exercise had the desired effect at first: All my friends complimented me on my newly svelte self.  However, the routine soon turned on me. After attaining semi-perfection (never quite there), I couldn't stop losing and couldn't start eating. Each time I decided to indulge, I regretted the bulging stomach that I had the next day. There was no moderation, no in between, it was feast or famine and I decided that famine was better.

The author of the article, Sara Ferris, wrote that two caring authority figures

1976

finally helped her out of her anorexia. That was my experience too. My college counselor, seeing my emaciated frame, suggested I visit the student counseling service because "they helped my son" who had been pretty messed up in other ways.  I hesitated -- Did I dare risk eating again? Wouldn't I just end up fat? Then one night I decided that, try as I might, I could not correctly control my life and I had nearly botched it to death.  I was down to 85 lbs. God said, "Well, why don't you give me a try? I love you, you know, and I thought you'd never ask." The next day I visited the counseling center.

1977

By the time I graduated the next year, I was back up to 110 pounds where I stayed until I became confined to a wheelchair a couple of years ago. I've gained 10 more pounds since then and am not happy with myself, but the weight gain doesn't have its former power over me. As I gradually lose my physical capabilities, the essential me seems even more important. And, oddly enough, it isn't connected to my body.

I have been extremely afraid that my daughters would repeat my anorexic experience. So as a result I have overcompensated: I continually reinforced the dangers of dieting and the need to love their bodies. I made many mistakes in mothering but this was not one of them -- I have not passed my anorexia on my children. Perhaps this was the best lesson I learned from what could have been a fatal experience.

Chelsea, me and Emily 2014

A Tale of a Boy

Once upon a time, a baby boy was born to two young people. He was blonde-haired and blue-eyed and always looked so clean that his mother thought he should be in magazine ads. Soon the little boy was joined by a little sister and later still a baby brother and another sister.

His parents moved to Springfield and he went to Southern View Elementary and Southeast High School. He played baseball and was a Boy Scout. When he was in high school he was in a rock band and had a girlfriend. He graduated in 1971.

After he graduated from high school he worked at Fiat-Allis and eventually decided that factory life was not for him. So he went to Lincoln Land Community College at night. After he graduated from junior college, he went to Western Illinois University at Macomb. Around that time he got married to a girl that he'd gone to high school with. He graduated from Western and came back to Springfield. He had one of the first degrees in information technology and that made him very employable. He worked at Horace Mann and then for a company that had gas stations in the area. He worked hard and invented the first gas pump that talked to the cash register inside. He also got to travel some including an overseas trip to Holland.

Unfortunately, his marriage didn't last, and he started running around with two other guys, going to the bars even though he didn't drink much. Once he was at a bar with his friends and a woman about his age walked by. She thought he looked interesting and asked about him. One of his friends said "You won't find anybody better than him." The woman asked him to the dance. He said no. Despite this refusal, the woman and the man started dating and eventually were married.

The woman had been married before and had a young daughter. Together the man and woman had their own child, another daughter.

The man and the woman's marriage had ups and downs but they stayed together. The man was never bored -- he had hobbies that included magic, woodworking, guitar playing and photography. The woman didn't have any hobbies and she had a number of weaknesses that caused lots of problems, but the man stood by her anyway.


One day the woman was diagnosed with a progressive incurable illness. Instead of leaving her, the man took care of her as she gradually lost many of her capabilities. He took her to church every Sunday, cooked meals because she couldn't, washed his own clothes, and never complained. Everything he did said he cared about her.

The guy in the bar was right -- I couldn't have found a better man than my husband, Ron.

Happy birthday!

On giving things up and the joys of parenting

Me and my van in better days

Yesterday was a hard day. I decided that I should give up driving.

I made this decision after having a heckuva time getting into and out of the County Building parking lot last week. I had driven my modified van downtown to get a certified copy of my daughter's marriage license, something I didn't think would be too difficult. And it wasn't, except for the driving part.

Oscar and me?

I got in to the parking lot easily enough --  if easily enough means that the attendant came out to give me a ticket rather than me unbuckling my seat belt and grabbing it from the automatic dispenser. But when I attempted to leave the parking lot it was a different story. I had to make a sharp right hand turn which I apparently didn't make quite sharp enough because I ended up scraping the bottom of the van on the curb. The attendant had to leave his booth and steer me through the exit lane. It was a very humbling experience. I arrived home happy that I hadn't hit anyone or damaged the van, but unwilling to take any more risks.

Giving up driving is a big step -- now I know how the elderly father of a friend felt when he came into the garage and his car was gone. He started crying. Giving up driving means relinquishing some independence and draws the circle of your life in just a bit more. Sometimes I think that circle just gets smaller and smaller until you die. Kind of depressing isn't it? Well, read on.

There is a bright side to any situation; but sometimes you have to look harder for it. Yesterday the bright side came in the form of my amazing children. Luckily it was a day off for both of them and the older daughter, after hearing of my plight, drove out and took me to lunch. Boy was that an improvement in my mood -- I went from feeling trapped to feeling loved!

After a long and tasty lunch, she brought me back home and later on I Skyped with my younger daughter who lives up near Chicago.  Skype is one of the best inventions ever! She works with disabled children and was very sympathetic. It was uplifting just to see her.

When your kids are young, you wonder when they will stop needing so much from you. But I never expected that when they grew up they would give back so much. And right when I needed it. The kids are more than all right -- they're a gift.