Fair warning… this post is just a tiny bit TMI. But push yourself forward, friends, because I’ve discovered something else my brain isn’t good at, yet.

This past week, we made a quick trip to visit my mother-in-law; just an overnight visit to take care of some things. Hubby made a hotel reservation and surprised me with a room that had a hot tub in it. WOOHOO!!! I have generally avoided tubs except for very rare occasions; when I was much heavier and my knees hated me, bathtubs were a nightmare. Hot tubs are roomier, thank goodness.

We’ve stayed at this particular hotel, before; it has an outdoor hot tub that’s simply fun to be in when the weather turns cold, but it’s currently out of order. Our plan had been to spend time swimming and then head to the room and enjoy an adult beverage in the hot tub, which we did.

Mind you, outdoor and larger hot tubs have steps into them, so they really haven’t been an issue for me, but the type in the hotel room meant stepping over the edge, as well as the ability to push up without sliding across the tub. I managed to get up and out of the tub several times with no issues… until hubby let me sit in the tub, alone, with a bath bomb.

I’ve never used a bath bomb, before; I don’t use the tub at home, only the shower. But I picked one up at a specialty shop when we were at a historic hotel a couple weeks ago, in anticipation of using it, there, but circumstances just didn’t work out that way. So I saved it for this trip and threw it in. And guess what? When you turn on the jets in a hotel hot tub, you get bubbles! I got a bubble bath!

I felt a bit like a kid again. Yes, I’ve had the occasional bath at hotels in recent years; I just like their tubs better than I like my own. But a bubble bath? Ooooh, y’all, I was in bubble heaven! And the bath bomb made my skin nice and soft.

And made the floor and walls of the hot tub nice and slick. Oops.

This meant I needed to get out of the tub differently than I had been because I had no traction at all. I’d have to —HORRORS — get on one knee and then up. My youngest knee is days away from being a year old, and while I’ve gone down on a knee one time to plug something in under a table, I just have avoided doing this. Everything in me screamed DO NOT DO THAT, STUPID.

Hubby had to help me out, but I did get on one knee and no one had to call emergency services to hoist my naked butt out of there. Thank goodness.

I was mortified and sort of ticked off at myself at the time, but have managed to laugh about it, since. I know that my brain has spent most of my life giving me signals on what it sees as my current state; that’s part of self-preservation, but it hasn’t fully adjusted, yet, to replacing original equipment with new and improved bionic knees — and a body that’s more capable of handling them.

Last weekend was my annual writer’s and horn player’s retreat with my dear friend Beth. We always spend it at a local state park cabin, but this year, we changed cabins so my dog could come along. It was a great change; more room, a fireplace, and puppy snuggles all around.

I’ve made a point to write about previous visits because the cabin we used to reserve has a series of steps going down to it. The very first year we did this, it was just a summer escape. Friends came to visit Beth and invited me to go along for lunch — but I couldn’t go, because my right knee had locked. I spent far too much time, after they left, trying to get my knee to cooperate; I won’t go into the ugly details.

It occurred to me on this most recent trip that I used to spend a lot of time just figuring out the best way to get around. When I had endless stairs to deal with, I had to plan my trips, including the emotional tax of working myself up to making the trip — up or down. It took strategy; how much could I carry? How long should I wait between trips? Had I thought enough to distribute weight properly? Had I done everything possible to make transporting items easier?

Throw into this mix that we always meet with our horns, and unless a horn has a detached bell, the case is just plain awkward to carry. I remember as a kid, walking with my horn to and from school, I walked with a certain gait and rhythm built around that horn case smacking the side of my leg with each stride. Now I have a gig bag with straps, and it’s a bit easier, but still off-balance and awkward. If something were to happen to my instrument while carrying it, I would be absolutely heartbroken.

Even thinking about this stuff, now, years afterward, spikes my anxiety. I spent so much time and energy just figuring out simple things that I didn’t have nearly as much time for restoration, which is one of the points of these trips. Yes, we write; yes, we play duets; yes, we gab half the night away, but there’s also time to watch the fog drift across the lake and listen to the crackle of a fire.

Each step I take that brings me closer to full health is also a step away from the days when so much of my energy was expended on things that depleted me instead of restoring me. I waited until recently to share a story for the first time with my husband and my friends; the story of how I woke up, one morning, stuck in bed because my knee had locked during the night, and the things I needed were are the opposite end of the (small!) house. It took me well over an hour to make my way to the next bedroom over, unfold my travel wheelchair, and scoot down the hallway to grab my brace and cane. An hour — not just because my knee was locked in a position that prevented me putting any weight on it, but because I was so morbidly obese that doing something as simple as hopping was completely out of the question.

Although — honestly — I’m not so sure I’d hop down the hallway now, but I no longer have a reason for such things. And that’s the point in this; the time and the emotional and physical tolls I paid for so many years, simply just getting through each day, are now gone. I get around like a normal person, and when these issues took a big bite out of any restorative time I might have designed for myself, before, I now get the full benefit of not having to worry about it.

It means my time I design for the purpose of restoration is spent on exactly that. I get to recharge my batteries without constant depletion. Now I get to happily enjoy the view without worrying what the view will cost me.

So I promised a friend a story, and you get to read it, too. Let me preface this by saying it really doesn’t have much to do with my weight loss & health journey on the face of it, but in some ways, it does. Grab a beverage and set a spell; this could take a while.

I was 18 or 19 and sharing a house with my mother after my parents’ divorce and an ugly issue with my father, where he pulled me out of college against my will. For a while, the going was tough; not long before that point, I was college-bound with full scholarships, so my life changed abruptly. My personal outlook changed from planning to become a band director to working full time at a department store.

I didn’t — I couldn’t — give up music that easily. While I still had the French horn I played in high school, it wasn’t much of a joy to me to play it alone, especially since it had been my dream. I don’t remember how or why, but somehow, I got my hands on a flute. Other than making music, there’s just not a lot in common between a flute and a horn. A flute, though, was easier to find popular music for, since it’s pitched in C (as opposed to a horn, which is pitched in F), so if I wanted to, I could play along with the radio.

Most times, if I was home alone, I had the stereo on in my room; I could hear it while I did other things, and if something came on the radio that I knew, I would run into my bedroom, grab the flute, and play along.

Until one day — when a Chicago tune came on, and I raced into my bedroom to grab my flute, only to slide in a pile of… dog leftovers, if you get me. Not only did I land on my butt, but I managed to make an even bigger mess than the dog had made. I got up, took care of my dirtied clothing, sighed, and did what any absolutely inexperienced carpet-cleaning teenager would do: I created a science experiment of every household cleaner I could find that I thought might get dog poop out of a rug. And I mixed it up in an empty glass carafe.

Nothing exploded, and I managed to clean the nastiness out of the carpet.

The dog got walked, the carpet was cleaned, and I forgot about the matter.

The next day at lunch, my mother served me homemade soup before I was to head into work on a Saturday. My mother was a decent cook, but that soup tasted a bit off and I could see some sort of oily residue swirling on the top, but good daughters don’t tell mothers that the meal isn’t up to par when they’ve gone through the trouble to make you a meal on their day off. So I shut up and I ate it.

And then I realized that she had used the same carafe that I had used for my home chemistry assignment the day before; she had poured leftovers into the carafe the previous evening, thinking it was clean, but I had just dumped the rest of the chemical arsenal down the kitchen drain and left the carafe to the side without washing it.

We both crossed our fingers that I wouldn’t suffer any after effects, but no such luck; my stomach started barking at me about an hour after I got to work, and I finally went to my supervisor and asked to go home. She was suspicious because (a) I was a teenager and (b) I was asking for the rest of the night off on a Saturday, so she made me call the operations manager for the entire store.

I was honest; I told him the entire story. And when he quit laughing, he said “go home. No one could make up all of that!”

Things I learned: if you’re gonna slide in dog poop and make your own carpet cleaner, follow through and also clean the container. Be nice to your mother, but be honest about her soup. Always tell the truth to your boss. And the flute may not be my instrument; my horn never would have done that to me. 😉

I am very grateful, though, to have returned to music.

In some ways, this is about the journey; while the story is funny now, I was lost in those days, after losing the things that I felt defined me, yet to learn that it’s not about definitions; it’s about possibilities and how we each choose to build our worlds. It’s in our hands. While I’ve faltered a lot between those days and now, I’ve also learned immeasurable amounts about myself. It’s those dimensions that now color my world and make me smile.

PS: I did eventually return to college as a double music major, even though I never did become a band director (or music therapist), but music will always be part of my life.

In case you didn’t know, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo); it’s an international movement in which people strive to write a novel in 30 days — 50,000 words is the goal, which is more of a novella. That might sound like a lot to people who don’t write, but my average blog size is around 400-600 words, and the requirement for NaNoWriMo is 1667 words daily to meet the goal. Not all that much, really.

That said, although I’ve participated for many years and usually get a big jump early on, I’m way behind at the moment. I’ve written probably 8-10 books, and the one I’m working on right now is part of a series. While I would eventually love to sell a book, I’ve been writing for me. It’s a fun exercise to unleash my brain and let it run.

It occurred to me in the wee hours of the morning, this morning, that I’ve only had one character with a weight issue, and she successfully managed to lose the weight and keep it off. Not only that, but she had to deal with the mental aspects of what she knew about her existence and what others might think if they knew; she feared judgment. Mind you, I wrote that particular character before I decided to make this current push toward health, and in a lot of ways, I’ve become that character. I’ve lived her life, except that as I progress with my efforts, I no longer fear judgment for what I am and once was.

That means, of course, that I wrote the rest of my female characters as women who did not have weight issues that were obvious. Sure, they eat in my books. I don’t starve my characters (unless I lock them in a storm shelter and then leave them there for nearly a year — which I did with the character I’m working on. Not a real year in HER time; just mine!), but it’s rare that they really even address food, although I’ve started thinking about it.

While they say to write what you know, I’ve been writing a lot of what I don’t know. Until recently, my biggest adult experience has been as a morbidly obese woman — a perspective I haven’t chosen to write about, in part, because I think that not only has it been an uncomfortable subject for me in the past, but I also wonder how many people would really be interested in such a character. We don’t seem to mind the occasional male character who isn’t physically perfect, but we do seem to want our female characters to be more like we wish we were, ourselves.

It occurs to me, though, that as I continue to learn how to live life as a woman without the burdens of morbid obesity (because there are surely many, friends!), that I’ve had to change my mind about some things. I used to think my situation was a bit abnormal, but honestly, dealing with weight and health issues seems more the norm than I thought. So many of us struggle, even if it’s just a few pounds, or because our labs came back with high cholesterol, or we need to control blood pressure or try to avoid diabetes.

No, it’s the perfectly thin, perfectly healthy women who don’t experience these issues as they age, that don’t struggle with maintaining weight or health status, that are the unicorns among us; the minority, really. While I want to be someone like that, it’s not realistic at all — and if you’re here reading with any regularity, my bet is that it isn’t you, either.

Maybe — just maybe — I should explore that side of a character. What do you think? And by the way, my total for this blog is 638 words. 😉