Author: mefitzgerald

What the holey . . . ? Two lessons for every homeowner

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About a month ago, I found a little hole, about the size of a nickel in the eaves over my back patio where some conduit was removed, mmm, maybe a year ago. I texted one of my DIY consultants and he said to just fill it with any kind of caulk, even the kind I use to fill in the trim pieces around my kitchen window and door.

As you know, I was waiting for a rainy day to do the work on that trim, and then I needed to wait for a dry day to drag the ladder out and fill this hole before something got in there and made things worse.

Um, sort of like this:

When it comes to home maintenance, I know that a little water can turn into a lot of water pretty fast. But I didn’t know that a tiny little hole on the exterior of my home could turn into this so fast. So lesson number one: “Do it now,” needs to be our motto.

I admit, when I think something (or someone) is living uninvited in my walls, or my attic, or my garage my mind goes all awry and I start to panic. I mean, actually, I panic a little when anything goes haywire because I immediately see dollar signs. But I gathered myself up long enough to send out an SOS on Reddit to see if some helpful person might know what had made that hole its home. I thought it might be either bats or tree frogs because there was some kind of guano below the hole and we have lots of both of those around here.

Big mistake. I only got two replies, both of them snarky; one about cockroaches, and one about someone’s ex-wife living in there. I didn’t know Reddit was full of distinctly unhelpful persons.

Lesson number two: Free advice is worth about the same amount that you pay for it.

So now I’m faced with yet another decision to make in a life that just keeps unraveling: do I just patch it up or do I call an exterminator? I’m pretty sure if I just patch it up, whatever is in there, will exit in some other, more unfortunate way–perhaps through my bedroom ceiling or the attic access in my yoga room.

But the thought of calling an expensive critter ridder to do something that I could probably just suck it up and do myself doesn’t feel right either. I mean, whatever it is, has to be able to fit through that hole, so it’s smaller than I am. And that makes me feel brave.

This situation seems a lot like the first time I taught Freshman composition and my mentor reminded me that I at least knew more than first-year students, so I had that going for me. Remembering her words and that fact that I am clearly bigger than whatever it is, gives me confidence that I can handle this sitch myself.

I know for sure that I don’t want to kill it. After a very bloody incident with a mousetrap this winter, in which I heard the trap go off and found no mouse, but only several rich, red blood splatters, I switched to humane traps only. So if anyone out there (not you Reddit) knows what this probably is and how I can nicely ask it to please leave, I would still appreciate some free advice.

Meanwhile, since it’s ninety-eight degrees in June in the mid-west, I will ditch my outside work again, and go back to finishing the trim in the kitchen. Oh, and I finally called a tile guy to come and put in a backsplash for me so soon I can finally post some after pictures.

My dad always said it’s best to learn by trial and error, but is trying the first step to failure?

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In the early years of my DIY experience, there were some days (actually, lots of days) I just wanted to give up. I knew when I bought it, a three-year-old, two-door Honda Civic was going to be too small for some of my needs, but people in my shoes didn’t always have a lot of choices.  It was pretty much the only car anyone would sell me. Even at sixteen percent interest when everyone else was paying four percent, I had to take it.

But the day I tried to shove my lawn mower into the trunk to take it for repairs almost made me give up for real. And there went the voices in my head, ‘No wonder the husband bailed. No wonder Door Guy ran the other way. No wonder Beautiful Carpenter can’t commit. Maybe if you had better credit someone would love you.’

I knew this wasn’t true, but it didn’t stop me from thinking it. I mean, I was in therapy so I wouldn’t screw up my relationship, my kid, or my life in general, but I still heard this stuff in my head. ‘A loser like me, ‘I thought, ‘doesn’t really deserve love. Maybe you don’t know when to give up. You’re always trying to make things work that don’t want to work.’

It’s always something small-ish isn’t it? A job loss or a beating I can take, but a fucking lawn mower that won’t fit into the back of my little car-that is my undoing, my unraveling again. Ben was trying to help me, and as we hoisted the mower into the trunk, he caught the handle on the trunk hood and it bounced up and smacked me in the face.  Then the tears came; the pain in my face only part of the reason. ‘Geeze, how do I get myself into these ridiculous situations?’ I thought. But again, not many choices here.

I don’t know how I finally got the mower into the trunk, sometimes will is enough. But some days will and determination and even god aren’t enough. That day felt like one of those days, and I still had Tae Kwon Do class, a twelve-year-old’s birthday present to buy, and other general parenting to do.  On top of it all, I had a girl’s night out that I’d rather not go to.

A colleague at my day job, who had a much better position and a whole lot more education than I, liked to write inspirational things on her white board—I think maybe just to make the rest of us feel bad. Usually it said something like, “If you never try, you will never know.”

Ben, on the other hand, had a quote from Homer Simpson on his sixth-grade Freedom of Speech poster that said, “Trying is the first step to failure.”

As much as I sincerely believe the first quote, I can relate much more to the second one most days.  Trying seemed to get me nowhere; trying to be good, trying to be thin, trying to meditate, somehow led to failure more often than anything. And forget trying to parent the way the books say, because no one has yet written the book about me and how I was raised, and then how I married young (the first time), then how everything imploded so many times since, and how that affects my parenting skills. 

Trying to parent by the book is like trying to live up to my colleague’s white board every time she puts up a new inspirational message. It just makes the rest of us feel bad. All I can do is work by trial and error, and it seemed the more trials I faced, the more errors I made. But my kids always forgave me and we always started over, even when I didn’t think I deserved it.

So I tried not to be too hard on my own parents about how much they screwed up and how many wrong things they said, and how they forgot to pick me up from kickball practice once or twice. Especially because as they grew older, and I found myself complaining about driving them and Ben places, I recalled they had more than twice the number of kids I have and it’s not their fault that parents nowadays are too fretful to let their kids walk to the mailbox, let alone walk home from school or to the swimming pool in the summer.  Driving my parents around was only a small trial anyway.

At one point during all of this, I started thinking it would be good to write a book with my dad. I’d grown up watching him fix things and build things, and he was always there to lend a tool or some good advice. He was always saying, “If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself.”  I always thought that would be a great title for a book. So one day I secretly recorded myself asking him questions about how he learned to build houses, fix engines, and smooth the dent from a car fender. Listening to it later, I had to laugh at how many times he said he learned it all by trial and error. The big trials, the ones that require a certain amount of clean-up afterward, are the ones I seem to screw up most. Like when a marriage fails, a utility gets turned off, or say, I start remodeling a room in my house and find a year later that it’s still not put back together. Those things make me a little grouchy and it just might show up in my parenting style.

Such as the next day when I yelled at Ben in the car for being late, then pulled off the highway when he got snarky and refused to take him to his birthday party. Then I watched while he got out of the car and slammed the door in anger, and then I almost drove away but didn’t, then he got back in the car and we both sheepishly said we were sorry, then I silently drove him to the birthday party anyway.  No one has ever put that in a book on effective parenting.

But it happened, and we still love each other, and I’m sure it happens to other people, but they just don’t talk about it in polite company. And as my parents aged, we didn’t talk about the past much, but we talked about what we should do when one of them died and the other one stuck around for a while, or how they both worried about using up all the money on health care and the other one wouldn’t have enough money to left to live on. But only some of that happened.

Is there an easy way to install low voltage staples?

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I mean, I’m really asking because I am a woman with relatively normal-sized fingers. I can’t imagine how difficult this is for some thick-fingered dude.

I tried Google for the answer and all she came up with was a guy who said to stick the new staples in the holes leftover from the old ones 🙄.

Well I didn’t have any of those. I was just trying to finish installing this garage door opener that was almost installed about five years ago.

I know it’s probably best to start at the opener end of the wire and work your way down the connector wire to the safety sensor, but when we installed this, I guess we didn’t have any of these staples because the wiring was installed like this.

The purple iris support I was looking for two weeks ago

And I needed that pitchfork to turn over the compost.

So because the safety sensors were already installed I had to start at the bottom and work my way up. I considered taking the sensors off and starting over but I wasn’t confident that I could get them put back together.

I also very much considered calling a garage door repair guy but people like me who don’t have a lot of disposable income have to try to do this stuff ourselves first. Which brings me to the reason why I was doing this in the first place after living with it happily twined around that pitchfork for the last four or five years.

I had taken extra days off for the holiday weekend so I could do all the stuff around my house that I had been neglecting. But I woke up Friday in a surly mood and knew the only thing that would snap me out of it was to go outside. So I loaded my bike up for a short ride on a nearby path.

In my haste to get out the door (mostly because I made no haste getting out of bed where three cups of coffee, The NYT Morning newsletter, and Wordle kept me overtime), I accidentally let the dog out. He’s a ninety pound runner and the only way to catch him is to open the car door and act like we are going somewhere fun. So Ben ran to the garage and rescued me by getting the dog to jump happily into car only to be disappointed later and sent back into the house. In the process Ben accidentally hit the overhead door remote and the door came down on my bike strapped to the rack on the rear end of my waiting Subaru. The bike was fine. The door was fine (we thought). So I left.

When I got to the path I decided (already being surly and oppositional) to ride south instead of north like I usually do. There I discovered a whole new experience that led to this:

OMG. OMG. OMG.

And, well, I had to try it out. The trail was way too technical for my old gal (my bike) and this old gal (me), but I couldn’t resist so I went for it. I bailed on more the downhills than I rode, but it was really fun.

The best thing was that I was all alone. There wasn’t another human being anywhere so I didn’t have to feel stupid jumping off my bike when it seemed too risky and sliding down the dusty track after it. After a bit I heard three kids on the trail behind me and lots of “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.”

Which is pretty much what I said, too, interspersed with some negative self-talk calling myself a wuss and some self-encouraging, “You got this next hill girl. Make it your bish.”

I made no hill my bish that day.

Needless to say, my short ride turned into hours of goofing off and causing trouble much like those kids on the trail behind me at noon on a school day.

So most the day was wasted on the joy of the ride and fun I had taking pictures to share with my bike-loving friends and all that stuff I had been neglecting, got neglected some more. I promised myself it would get done the next day.

In an avoidant move on Saturday I also promised someone else I would help them get their house ready for a party that night. When I tried to leave the garage, the screws holding the bracket, holding the track, holding the opener popped out and the whole thing fell down. So yeah, I considered calling the garage door repair guy but like I said, people like me don’t have people like that on speed dial. The fix for the door was pretty simple. I just got some longer screws and reattached the bracket to the wall and reattached the carriage arm to the door and it worked fine. So when I also found this box of wire staples in the bottom of a crate full of nails, I decided to finally finish the original installation and do something with those wires.

So there I was in my garage three days into the holiday weekend hammering my left thumb and forefinger into the wall trying to attach these staples. The worst part was when I got to the ceiling.

I’m not that good at standing with one foot on a ladder and the other on a shelving unit doing a backbend and hammering over my head but I managed (thank you yoga).

Most DIYers will tell you they would trade a kidney for a third hand when working alone and that’s clearly what I needed if not just to have a different thumb to pound on. But finally when I was three staples from the end of the second wire I had my eureka moment.

I made myself a little third hand, of sorts.

Out of tape.

Like this.

Grasp staple with tape.

Some kind of stickier tape probably would have worked better but, my mom always taught me to make-do with what I had and painters tape is what I had. And honestly this worked pretty well.

I could hold on to the little wings or just hammer blindly into the tape secured on the ceiling and save my finger and thumb from any further damage.

Secure to the wall (or ceiling in my case).
Hold the little wing thingie.
Or just save your finders and let the tape hold the staple while you hammer.

When I was done, the hook on the ceiling needed a new purpose. So I swung it around and made a nice spot to hang my bike rack next to my lovely, muddy bike.

But they won’t stay there for very long. I’m feeling surly again.

Mother Church, Father Church?

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Photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash

Anybody think it’s weird that less than a week after I leave the church, I started having significant insights into my daddy issues?

Huh.

I think I had been trying to get attention from some unsuspecting innocents. A pat on the head from the men in my life, maybe approval and attention from them where I never got it from my dad. I thought that men in my grown-up life were supposed to be helping me heal wounds from my kid-life. Isn’t that what the relationship experts say? But then I realized that’s too big of a job for anyone. No one should be saddled with fixing me. And so, I began learning to father myself.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the hardware store with my dad, or the dump, or anywhere, really.  I just wanted to be with him. He rarely spent time with us kids, working all day, then going out to the garage to work his side hustle buying, fixing, and selling wrecked cars. So, when I could get him all to myself and go someplace as interesting as the  landfill, I jumped at the chance. But I was a girl, and it was hard for a dad to know what to do with a girl in those days. He never really noticed that I was a girl who loved the smell of grease and car paint, and could build and fix things. And so most of the time I was just the pretty little girl he seemed to enjoy showing off to the guys at the lumber yard or parts store when he accidentally ended up alone with me. I don’t think it was so much that he didn’t want to be with me, he just didn’t exactly know how. 

When I got to around fourteen-years-old, sometimes I saw how other men looked at me; sometimes my friend’s fathers. It felt strange to see them noticing me. I wanted to hide. My body image suffered. I hated being a girl sometimes. My legs were growing long and (I thought) awkward. There were so many limitations and talk of how I should learn to type or do bookkeeping so I could get an office job when what I really wanted was to be a park ranger or race motorcycles.  I felt powerless most of the time, just assuming “something” would happen and map out a life for me.

And it did. I had a baby before my nineteenth birthday and my life was mapped—at least temporarily. I spent the next fifteen years trying to make up for it. I was the perfect daughter, the perfect mother, and the perfect wife hosting football parties and poker nights for my husband’s friends. Everything was perfect. I perfected my body, my skills, and my cover up. And I thought for the longest time, I had to do all of this. But I didn’t. 

Somehow, I realized I could exercise free will. So I willed myself back to college. I willed myself out of my marriage, and into the arms of another man. Imagine how I then married him, a new man who didn’t know how to be with me either. 

I knew when I tried to get his attention, I was just that little girl wanting to hang out with her dad again. When we were dating and he was remote, then in a sort of startled way noticed me across the table and say, “You’re a pretty little thing aren’t you?” that it felt just like my dad saying it.

Still there is something in your mind, like when you were a child, that tells you this is normal, and therefore, good. But it wasn’t all that good. He had all he loud, scary traits of my dad, and all the opposite ones of my first husband. Which meant I didn’t have to host football parties and poker games anymore, but which also meant, those daddy issues were something I hadn’t even recognized yet. It wasn’t until after Ben was born, I was divorced—again—and left to alone to figure out my life that I really started to see it. 

One day during all of this, I found myself looking into my bathroom mirror, pouting like a six-year-old about how everything I ever wanted to do, my dad would say something negative about and stop me from doing it. There was the major in Forestry, there was motorcycle racing, there was getting married (oops, you get props for that one dad). As I stood there feeling sorry for myself and looking at my teary reflection thinking about all of this, I heard that voice say, “Yeah, well who’s standing in your way now?” 

That’s what I think gave me the courage to take on my own life, leave organized religion, and start believing in what I really believed without feeling anyone’s condemnation about it. I learned Reiki and meditation without feeling guilty. I started cooking and eating organic foods again. I had sex for the sheer pleasure of it. I took responsibility for my own decisions without the crutch of a church or a husband or any other daddy-figure to approve or disapprove. 

And you know what? The world did not come crashing down around me. In fact, the world was kinder, brighter, more wide open. 

It was clear that although I had abandoned the church, god had not abandoned me. And in fact, was still on my side. And much like when I heard Warren Macdonald say, he’d  “. . . best get on it,” I heard loud and clear, it was my own turn to do the same. 

Not to spoil the ending, but . . .

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It turns out Beautiful Carpenter was good at everything. He’s one of those people you try not to envy because he can play the piano, and do math in his head, and can fix, build, or otherwise create anything he wants with just his brain, his hands, and a few things laying around in the garage. Not only that, he’s still the only guy I’ve ever known that has the patience to wait for French press coffee in the morning and can change an alternator on a work truck in the dark during an icy rain in the Best Buy parking lot without throwing his tools. I don’t get it. When I’m in a frustrating situation like that, I can’t even fake enough patience to impress someone, but that’s just him.

Between his house and mine, we took on dozens of DIY projects and finished nearly all of them. And honestly my house never looked better. He was even more of a perfectionist freak than I was, and one night we went down into my basement and he ripped up that five-way intersection of crooked tile I had thrown the rug over a few years earlier, and put it all back together nicely. Then the next weekend, we finished the tile in the laundry room and the office, mudding and grouting until three am fueled on homemade organic margaritas and a heavy metal playlist.

It looked like this for a long time. Sorry neighbors.

When I picked up the phone to get an estimate on new house siding from a local contractor, Beautiful Carpenter listened in. Then he asked me about my ideas, threw in a couple of his own, and the next thing I knew, we were calling the lumberyard and ordering up some rough sawn cedar for us to do ourselves. Honestly, he did most of the work, but I never minded being his grunt man, sweeping up, doing simpler tasks and painting trim. As long as he was teaching me rather than doing it all himself, I think we were both happy.

That was a long-ass project that spanned from autumn to the next spring, into summer when it grew too hot to work outside. Instead, we passed the time floating on the lake behind my house, running the trails, and drinking beers at sunset waiting for the temps to cool down. In the mornings, we drank coffee at sunrise at the edge of the nearby creek where, besides us, only the fishermen were out.

When autumn finally arrived again, we trimmed out the windows and put a coat of paint on the whole house. After that Beautiful Carpenter landscaped the front and back of the house so I had a little retreat where I could watch sunrises from the patio or sunsets from the front porch. And you know, it looked pretty good.

To tell the truth, it needed another coat of paint, but like I said, my house had never looked better. So maybe next fall I will add the paint and some new front porch posts, but for now I see the progress I have made over the last several years. I still like to get the old pictures out from when I started these projects, just to remind me that I am growing and progressing every day.

And I know that whatever happens next, is just the next thing. Maybe that’s why I bought this shirt a few weeks ago. Because even though sometimes it’s hard to believe, really, everything is going to be okay.

Kitchen Remodel

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Definitely the before picture

This is a job that I am hiring out–mostly. The hunt for countertops, cabinets, flooring, wall colors, etc., is unbelievably time consuming and exhausting. I have spent hours upon hours just doing this. Thank god there are people who remodel kitchens for a living because I have to make an actual living by working at my actual job.

I have spent so much time shopping on line and running from warehouse to warehouse that I have been neglecting my yard and flowerbeds, and spending no time outdoors. So much so, that the other day, I took a minute to hang my underwear on the clothesline and do a pass through the vegetable garden for the first time in weeks. From the yard next door, I hear someone yelling, “Hello . . . hello.”

I look up to see a woman smoking a cigarette in a van parked in my neighbor’s driveway. “Hi,” she says. I didn’t think anyone lived there. I’m Linda, I take care of Mr. H.”

Mr H is my ninety-five year old neighbor. I have no idea how long Linda has been caring for him. I walk over and introduce myself and she explains why she’s in her van.

“I’m a smoker, and I don’t like to do it in his house,” she says. “I thought that house was empty” she says, nodding toward my place. “How do you do?”

From her point of view, I see clearly why she thinks no one lives here. Last year I planted a wildflower garden, partly so Mr H would have something pretty to look at when he sits outside with his nurse, partly to attract bees and wildlife, and partly so I can stare at it from my office window when I can’t make myself send another email about deadlines. This year the flowers have bloomed like crazy, but the grasses have grown up, too, and the weeds under the window have become a dominant feature.

So I get it. It looks like nobody lives here. Well, she’s partially right. I have just been existing. Existing on bad food and too much coffee. Existing on constant internet research for luxury vinyl flooring and the differences between granite, quartz, and quartzite. I still don’t really know what the difference between quartz and quartzite is. I do know, that just like every other project I have taken on in this house, there are lots of people who like to tell you what you should do, but not so many that will help you do it–even if you offer them ten thousand dollars cash.

Anyone know what this brand is or how much is costs?

So stay tuned. After I unjumble my mind from the search for a back vented under the shelf range hoods like this one, I can start writing checks and get this job started.

By then the rest of the flowers will be in bloom and I can start to pay attention to the gardens again. I’m ready to take this job and my life by the ballz. Who knows, maybe by summer’s end I will be living again instead of just existing.

A word or two about tetanus shots

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Get one. Or at least, call your doctor and find out if you are due for a booster. You will need it anyway, and likely you will really be sure you need one at a most inconvenient time, like 7:30 in the morning when you step on a nail left over from a piece of old furniture you tore apart and dragged out to the trash.  Lucky for me, my day job has a clinic for things like this, but I didn’t know that until I freaked out about how I was going to get this done on top of Ben’s Dr appointment and TKD class.

I’d gotten by without a booster for a few years, even when I thought I probably should have gotten one, like when I scraped my arm on an old piece of drywall bead while stuffing the crap left in my driveway by the drywall guy into a garbage bag. Or the time I was pulling nails out of the privacy fence in the backyard and, first, stabbed myself with one of the nails, then, hit myself in the forehead with the claw-end of the hammer.

Each time something like this happened,  I  got on the Mayo Clinic web site to look up the symptoms of tetanus just to make sure I wasn’t coming down with it. According to Mayo, here are what the symptoms look like:

Common signs and symptoms of tetanus, in order of appearance, are:

  • Spasms and stiffness in your jaw muscles
  • Stiffness of your neck muscles
  • Difficulty swallowing
  • Stiffness of your abdominal muscles
  • Painful body spasms, lasting for several minutes, typically triggered by minor occurrences, such as a draft, loud noise, physical touch or light

Weird thing is, I have most of these symptoms all the time.  Stress and a general crappy attitude will do that to a person. But then they add these other symptoms:

  • Fever
  • Sweating
  • Elevated blood pressure
  • Rapid heart rate

Which could also be mistaken for the symptoms of falling in love—which of course I didn’t have either—so most of the time I got away with avoiding a shot in spite of the fact that tetanus is carried in dirt and animal feces, and out here where I live we have lots of both of those.

But that day, the classic dirty, rusty nail-through-the-shoe-into-the foot scenario happened in my driveway and I had to face the truth. As much as my friends and family would appreciate my jaw to tighten and close permanently, I wasn’t ready to face another hospital bill I couldn’t afford, so I got the shot when I called a friend and she suggested visiting the clinic.

I know when we don’t know what to do, we are supposed to ask ourselves what we would say to our best friend. But trying to take my own advice can sometimes be met with hazards. Thankfully, nothing worse than the flood, the fire, or the storms I’ve faced.  And nothing makes me more thankful than the peace that comes when these events finally subside and I can listen in the stillness. In that listening I usually here something really interesting.

I was facing a particularly difficult personal circumstance recently and found myself whining to God, “Please don’t let this be my life.  Please don’t let this be my life.”  And it took a couple of days, but finally, I heard something back, when he or she said, “Then don’t make this your life.”

And became empowered again to know that some of this is actually within my control, and water in the basement is just some water, and my house didn’t burn to the ground (though I ordered- up a fire escape ladder from Amazon the very next day after it tried to), and I don’t have to worry about lock jaw.  The water in my basement came up with a shop-vac, the firefighters and electricians took care of the burned up outlet, and I got my shot. And one more thing: Sometimes, when I call for help, people who care about me (and even people who don’t know me) will answer.

Inside Out

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IMG_0762There are times when I do  a lot of work that no one but me will see, like the time I painted the insides of the cabinet under my kitchen sink, which is weird, because the outside of the cabinets look terrible. Then I painted the bottom section of the kitchen pantry and let it dry while I spent the entire day throwing crap away in the garage again, sweeping and arranging the lawn mowers and bicycles in a way that Ben (and maybe I) could have some space in there to work out on the heavy bag and practice Tae Kwon Do.

Yet my back yard deck looked like this:

IMG_0757My garden was full of weeds and the grass around the mailbox was 20 inches high.  Even my bedroom (which no one else was going to see either) was a mess with shoes everywhere, sweaters hanging on the door knobs and dust covering the unread books on the nightstand.

IMG_0761Still, I felt better when I opened the pantry or threw something in the trash under the sink and saw the fresh white paint.

What was going on in the kitchen was not unlike what I had been doing on my own insides. The past few years, I’d spent a lot of time out on the hiking trails, riding my bike, and doing yoga. These things are all good for the insides, but if I had to be absolutely honest, I was doing them for some outside reasons too; that primarily being the outside of my thighs, also known as ass extensions.

And while physical activity has always been good for my soul as well as my body, I had been neglecting straight-up soul work for some time. Spring  had a hard time arriving that year. Normally, if I can get through February without medication, I’m good because with March usually comes some hope that the weather will warm and the sun will begin to shine again.  That year though, it was May and we had just gotten a couple of frost warnings and the sun hadn’t been out for more than a few minutes per week.  We had more rain between January and May than we had all of previous year.  I honestly thought I would never go outside again, never show my fleshy legs again, never be happy again.

The long winter took a toll on my psychological well-being, too. Spring took so long getting here, that I just figured it never would. I was a pale blob of depression, anxeity and widening ass flesh.  Being forced to spend so much time inside, I had no choice other than to look into places I didn’t normally look, and slowly I began tidying up my own insides in the same way I had been painting the hidden cupboards of my kitchen. I read my first Caroline Myss book that spring and from what I understand, it’s a tough one to start with. But it was the one on the shelf, when I decided to go to the real bookstore—not the half-priced one—and find whatever book on spirituality spoke to me.

Little did I know that the Barnes and Noble near the rugby practice fields was moving and only had about ¼ of the normal books on the shelves.  But I was determined to find something and Myss was the only author on the shelf I recognized, other than God and Abraham, so she landed in my hands.

In the book she says this (which I think she specifically wrote about me):

“The archetypal hero’s journey . . . always begins with a process of separation or alienation from the tribe, followed by a series of difficult challenges that the hero must meet alone. The journey culminates in a descent into the abyss of self-doubt and a loss of faith in the Divine, but then results in a vital transformation of trust, which in turn leads to a revelation of some new knowledge, insight or wisdom.”

I am almost always in the abyss of self-doubt and loss of faith, which, if you think about it, is not what one would normally think I’d be facing after my own series of difficult challenges, e.g. things catching on fire, lots and lots of flooding incidents (By the way I fixed my constantly flooding basement with a 51 cent piece of plastic from Lowes.), tons of trash and rodent removal, beginner’s Tae Kwon Do, and the loss of my favorite yoga instructor. Normally, you would think making it through all that and more, I would be the poster child for self-esteem, deep faith, and glistening skin, but I wasn’t. I  was the complete opposite. My hair was falling out, my skin looked terrible, I was full of anxiety, and I couldn’t hear God speak if she shouted at me in the middle of the night from the foot of my bed.

Myss is right though, nowhere is it said that if we overcome a lot of adversity and figure out how to fix the lawn mower are we rewarded with clear eyes and a fruitful spirit.  We are only given more knowledge, and hopefully, greater understanding.

So of course the next step is self-doubt and a loss of faith. We used up all our naive faith and confidence doing things we never thought we could do before, like fix a lawn mower and survive an electrical fire. Eventually things calm down, though, and there’s time to poke around inside and uncover some things that aren’t so evident from the outside. Things like, a transformed trust. Maybe less blind and childlike, but born from greater knowledge and experience. Maybe a self that is less about it and more about others. And perhaps even an ass that may have gained a pound or two, but has also gained some hard-earned wisdom.