They All Want My Cucumbers!

So I’ve been on the first diet of my life. Here it is. The Four Hour Body by Timothy Ferris. I like it because Ferris backs everything up with science and chemistry. I’ve had to change a lot of things. In short, I eat vegetables, legumes, eggs and lean meat. No dairy, bread, pasta, rice, or fruit.

My first diet ever!

What I like is that there’s nothing about ‘ you must eat a grapefruit 17 minutes and 33.08 seconds after you eat but 9. 25 minutes before you exercise’. He does have science nerd pages, but you can skip those if you want.

In just 15 days I’ve lost 8 pounds.

Not bad.

This is yet another chapter in My Love of Fight and the demons I want to conquer before I turn 50. The thing I wanted to find out was if I had what it takes to make a major change in diet and lifestyle, to fight the natural tendency to just ‘let myself go’. I wondered if I could speed up my metabolism, firm up my just-go-south body tissue, and say NO to certain foods that I’ve always enjoyed. I am proud to say that so far I have fought well. One of the biggest challenges is when we watch TV. (not TV, really, because we watch everything on the computer) When we are getting ready to watch Survivor, Peter and the girls get their snacks: a large bowl of popcorn and another large bowl of Doritos. Me? I have a peeled cucumber, sprinkled lightly with salt. It takes all my strength to not take one little broken piece of a cheesy Dorito. But I don’t cheat.

However… as soon as I take one bite from my cucumber, Peter turns his head and in mid-crunch he asks, “mmm… can I have a  bite?” So I give him a bite. Sometimes he takes two!

Then, Amanda looks at my cucumber as if she has never seen anything that looks as appetizing as that, and she asks, “Me too?” So I give her a bite.

And then there’s my spinach and cottage cheese for breakfast. Peter has thick-sliced nut and wheat bread toast with a generous slathering of real-fruit jam spread on top of a layer of my former lover – Butter. I have to admit that my divorce with butter has not been amicable. It haunts me in my sleep. But I remain faithful to Spinach and Cottage Cheese. But Peter… oh the cheater’s heart. He said something about Spinach being a huge part of his childhood and would I please make him some of that too.

Interestingly, no one in our family has ever asked for a cucumber for a snack before. Or spinach. Ever. I guess I just have a way of making something very simple look very good. I wonder if I could get them to beg for a spoonful of lentils? Considering that my bowl of lentils looks more like papier mache, I’d be really surprised if I have to share them too.

So I will keep will-powering through this diet, and will keep you posted. They all want my cucumbers but I’m interested to find out whether or not anyone wants my lentils.

Wrestling With the Box of Proof

In less than 2 months I will be fifty years old! It doesn’t bother me at all. Back in January I wrote a post about my love of fight and how I need to wrestle a few demons before June 9^th arrives. One of those fights involves my mother. Not her, but her death.

I often wonder what Mom was experiencing when she turned fifty in 1987.  She had no idea there were only nine years left in her life. How could she know? No one knows that sort of thing. 

Mom loved hunting for partridge.

The reason I face this demon right now is because it was 13 years ago this weekend that my mother lay in her bed at home, and though I was unaware of how soon she would meet the last day of her life, I believe she knew full well that there  were only a couple of weeks left.

A month earlier my mom and dad called to tell us that Mom had pelvic cancer. Right away I went online to do my research. I found the treatments I was sure her doctor was already prescribing, hoping always for a good outcome of more years, hopeful that chemo and radiation would buy time and allow her to live longer than just 59 years. Surely Mom would live till her 60^th birthday on July 23^rd of that same year. Surely.

We talked on the phone even beyond what our budget would allow. I kept asking her about the treatment. It hadn’t started yet. I understood the medical system in Canada and how frustratingly slow it could be. She reassured me her doctor was doing all he could. 

My sister, Mary, went to visit Mom regularly. She started being a little bit more open with me about the seriousness of Mom’s cancer, how she really wasn’t doing well. I wanted to go back to Canada to be with her. Yet every time I talked to Dad and Mom they gave no clue that it was quite so serious. I wrote an email to one of  Mom’s closest friends, a pastor we’d known for a few years, and asked her if Mom’s cancer was aggressive, if I should come home. But she answered that she wasn’t aware that it was that serious. She’d visited Mom a few times at home, and she ‘seemed to be okay’. Surely I could believe her. Surely. 

It didn’t matter what they all said. I really wanted to go be with mom. My gut told me I should be there. I knew she needed me. Whenever we were in Canada Mom would come and stay with us for a few days or weeks. It would get a bit stressful because even though Mom loved Peter dearly, she always took my side of any issue no matter what, and poor Peter had to go toe-to-toe with both of us. Each time she came she knew that I would help her get into a healthy diet and exercise routine, that I would take her to meet my friends, that we would do a few new things and see a few of my favorite places, and she could always count on me to take her to my hairdressers. Now that Mom was sick, I wanted to take care of her again, to do all the things I knew she loved. I wanted to shampoo her hair and set it in rollers and give her a bit of a modern hair-style, and not old-lady curls. I wanted to be the one to give her sponge baths when she couldn’t make it to the tub. I would have massaged her feet and tickled her back, brought her breakfast in bed and spent long afternoons doing nothing but talking about all her childhood memories. 

But I couldn’t go. We had no extra money for the flight. We wondered if I were to go back to visit her, then what if she held on for a long time? Would I be able to stay away from home and baby Amanda and young Joel’s homeschooling for that long? And what if I did visit, only to return back to Thailand and have Mom pass away shortly thereafter? How could I ever afford to fly back to attend her funeral?

It was a horrible dilemma and I never wish it on anyone. 

So I prayed.

I think it was more like I conjured holy optimism… fasting, praying, trying my hardest not to sin during those days so that God would have to hear me, so that I could somehow earn his favor to be spared this pain, so that I could convince him to let Mom survive the cancer. 

I kept sending links to Dad about treatments and options and hoped that mom would be starting any or all of them soon. Time was ticking. I could envision that horrible pelvic cancer spreading irreversibly by the minute.

Then on May 16^th a call came. At midnight. We always knew that a call at midnight was a worrisome thing, unless it was just a case of forgotten time zones. I recognized the voice of my oldest sister, Judy, trying to stifle her sobs saying, “Patti, honey, I think you need to come back home now if you want to see Mom one last time.” 

Peter was out in a small village near Buri Ram for the week and I had no idea how to contact him. We didn’t have cell phones. Desperation became a taste in my mouth. I was in an angry panic. I had to get on the soonest plane and get back to Mom right away! How could ministry go on as normal when I was losing my mom? I screamed silently and angrily at Peter from the depths of my guts, “Where the hell are you? How can anything in Buri Ram be more important than me getting back to Mom right now?” 

Convinced that God decided against healing Mom ( an idea I have also wrestled with and learned much about prayer and control and outcomes and faith) and I believed that anything I said wasn’t going to move Him one way or the other, I got mad at him too and screamed, “I loathe the day I came to this country! I left everything and everyone for You and you won’t even show up for this!”

After many phone calls, I flew out of Khon Kaen the next day, and went to Bangkok, where I would stay overnight at the home of friends and take a Cathay Pacific flight to Toronto the following morning. It was May 18^th in Thailand, but still the 17^th in Peterborough, Ontario. I woke up early, got dressed and came downstairs with my suitcase. My friends were ready to drive me to the airport and we were heading out the door. 

Then the phone rang. 

It was Peter.

He was calling to tell me that he’d talked to Dad on the phone.

Mom had just passed away.

That was one difficult flight. 

And so this is what I have fought with mom about since that day:

 

Mom, why didn’t you tell me?

 

During the weeks after her death I wanted to know why she never told us how serious it was. I would have been there earlier if I’d known. I could have been there. 

One quiet morning when it was just me and Dad I asked him, “Dad, why didn’t Mom tell anyone how serious it was?” 

He sat there in the timeless pose of my father, legs crossed, shoulders relaxed, a mug of coffee in one hand and a cigarette dangling in the other. He took a long puff on his cigarette, then purposefully tapped the ashes into the ashtray as he did when he was pensive. With a frown in his eyes his words came out all covered in smoke, “She didn’t want people to suddenly treat her differently just because she was dying. She didn’t want people who normally would not have given her the time of day coming over and pretend to care.”

I couldn’t fault her for that. To me it felt like one last passive aggressive guilt-tripping Mom thing. But it’s true, isn’t it? When people know you are dying, they treat you differently. They take the time, they make time, and they are generous with loving gestures. If you knew your loved one was dying would you have to scramble to make up for lost time, working hard to let them know how much you loved them? Or would there be a solid trail of evidence left over the years that proves you had loved them?

In my wrestling I have to believe Mom knew I loved her. I wasn’t one of those ‘no-time-of-day-ers’ Dad was talking about. My four sisters – Judy, Mary, Robin and Sam- were all there around her in the end. My sisters said that it seemed like Mom was holding on, painfully, waiting for me to get there. They told me she asked for me, softly, “Where’s my Patti?” There is a strong family resemblance among us Livingstone girls, and my dear sweet sister, Robin, even tried to impersonate me at Mom’s bedside so that Mom would finally let go. 

I always felt like I failed her in the end but today, with you as my witness, I am letting go. I was always angry about the lousy financial restrictions of our work that caused Mom having to die without me by her side. And I was always just a little bit angry with Mom for not having trusted me with the truth about her cancer. I’m letting it go. Finally.

A few days after the funeral, my sisters and I gathered in Mom’s room. We sorted through all her things, dividing up all the keepsakes we wanted to have, crying and laughing and remembering. I have a box full of treasures from that day. And do you want to know the interesting thing about the things I chose to keep for myself? The things I chose to keep were pretty much all gifts I had given her over the years. There are unorganized piles of photos of great moments together, and it was proof that I had been in her life all along. Mom’s things were a trail of evidence that I had loved her not just because she was dying, but that I had always given her the time of day.

 And as I think of her, I will go through my box of her things, things that I had given her, the Box of Proof full of evidence that I had loved her well in life. And surely there will be peace. Surely.

My Love of Fight

My love of fight grew roots that were well nourished in the warp and weft of a lime-green shag carpet in Grandma and Grandpa’s living room. From the time we got up, everything in a Saturday pointed toward ‘wrasslin. Grandpa and I took care of his errands  in the morning, following a comfortably predictable route; grocery store, meat market, Shorty’s Cigar store and then back home for lunch and, finally, ‘wrasslin. We did all our errands on foot, towing Grandpa’s handy cart behind. When I was two years old, Grandpa was driving and we got into a small car accident where I lost my 2 front teeth in a bloody mess on the dashboard. Grandpa could not forgive himself and refused to drive for the rest of his life.

Saturday morning visits to Shorty's Cigar Store

Afternoons allowed Grandpa to  sit back in his grandpa-shaped chair, pack his pipe with his Amphora and enjoy his ‘wrasslin’.

 

Grandpa's brand

Then it started. It always got me in an ‘oh-boy!’ state of mind. I would get so excited, yanking at the strands in the carpet, finding it impossible to sit still. I’d throw air punches, fling my legs around, bounce off imaginary ropes and pound into my invisible opponent flat on the floor to finally pin him for a solid ten-count. And when Haystack came on there was no holding me down. Haystack Calhoun was Grandpa’s favorite so he was my favorite too.

Haystack Calhoun

 

As soon as the show was over, was I ready to take someone on. Without discriminating I would challenge anyone who came around, whether is was a sister, a neighbour or even a boy. Grandma would cluck and complain good-naturedly, “Heavens to Betsy, have you got ants in yer pants?”

I sure did. “Wanna fight?” I’d challenge, wide-eyed and completely wired. But it was all in good fun and I never hurt anyone. Well… not yet.

There are a lot of reasons kids pick on other kids. I had more than my share of pickers. It could have been because I had freckles. Or that I was so darned skinny. Or that I put baby oil in my hair because I thought it would make it shiny like the Breck girl.

 

I wondered, How do you get such shiny hair?

I was convinced, however, that kids wanted to beat me up because I didn’t have a big brother. No one in their right mind picks on a girl who has a big brother. No one, that is, except for me.

Which leads me to my first real fight…

I was walking to school one morning with my little sister, Robin. She was in kindergarten and I was in grade four. About two hundred yards from the school I was jolted with the shock of something crashing into me from behind. Someone had  jumped on my back and knocked me to the ground! Before I knew it, I was channeling  Haystack Calhoun, and with super-girl speed I flung my arm behind, dug my heels into the ground, arched my back, threw my attacker over, scrambled around and come up straddling him. It was none other than my classmate, Jim Ferguson. I knew why he was mad at me. He was the big brother of a kid I had picked on a few weeks earlier. Pinning his chest with my right hand, I pounded him with my left (self defense, of course) while Robin whipped him with her multipurpose skipping rope and screamed, “Leave my sister alone!”

I would get into a whole lot of other scraps, the last one being when I was 19 and I was attacked from behind, again. (I won that one, but that’s another blog.) There have been other times when I was ready for a fight, iron in one hand and bug spray in the other (laugh if you want but I think those are great weapons!) on a dark night when strange noises caused me to believe there was an intruder in the house.

But I never imagined I’d still be fighting at 49.

A good friend pointed it out to me that we are supposed to define and defeat certain demons before we turn fifty. That means I still have a few fights to win before June 9th of this year. That’s actually part of the reason that I didn’t make New Year’s resolutions, that, and the fact that I believe everyday deserves its fair share of resolve and I love the idea of the second chance.

So, I’m taking this to the shag carpet and I’ll be calling out my opponents one by one, going toe-to-toe. No more play-fights. The next time I say, “Wanna fight?” I will show no mercy. Now, if I could just finds me some spinach!