Welcome to the Misadventures of Widowhood blog!

Welcome to my World---Woman, widow, senior citizen seeking to live out my days with a sense of whimsy as I search for inner peace and friendships. Jeez, that sounds like a profile on a dating app and I have zero interest in them, having lost my soul mate of 42 years. Life was good until it wasn't when my husband had a massive stroke and I spent the next 12 1/2 years as his caregiver. This blog has documented the pain and heartache of loss, my dark humor, my sweetest memories and, yes, even my pity parties and finally, moving past it all. And now I’m ready for a new start, in a new location---a continuum care campus in West Michigan, U.S.A. Some people say I have a quirky sense of humor that shows up from time to time in this blog. Others say I make some keen observations about life and growing older. Stick around, read a while. I'm sure we'll have things in common. Your comments are welcome and encouraged. Jean

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The March Madness and a Midwife Post

 

I’m not a fan of basketball but I am a fan of google and I’ve been researching why and what March Madness is all about. I love saying ‘March Madness’ and wish the term applied to something I care about. I do like the way the way those words rolls off my tongue but getting excited about when the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournaments are held rates on a par with my upcoming endoscope and colonoscopy. March Madness, however, is the talk of my campus but no one here knows that in two weeks my personal plumbing is getting cleaned out from mouth to rectum. 

It’s interesting that the term was coined in 1939 and has stuck around ever since. Never under estimate the power of the written word. One little tiny title of an article for an in-house publication give birth to March Madness in its present form. I also think it’s pretty cool that Caitlin Clark made history on the basketball court during Women’s History Month by breaking a long-standing points record of 3,667 set by Pete Maravich to become the “all-time leading scorer in men’s and women’s division 1 basketball history.” Like I said I don’t follow or like basketball but there are plenty of fans here who talk non-stop about all the college basketball or football games going on in the country. Gag me with a spoon! No way out of those conversations if you want to eat. There’s an unwritten rule---but often vocalized rule---that no one eats alone in our cafe or main dining room. Trust me, I’ve tried sitting in the corner with my notebook writing like I used to enjoy doing at the Guy Land Cafeteria but no one would let me get away with that. Finally, I had to quit trying.

Change of topic: Would you go to a lecture in a Continuum Care Complex that was advertised this way? “Have you ever wondered about the process of giving birth in earlier centuries? Come and find out about the key role played by midwives in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and learn about their importance both for the well-being of the mother and the baby. We will explore the training and preparation of midwives and the challenges they faced in their work.” I went, as I usually do with most of the lectures offered here. But on the surface this one seemed like a poor match for a place where no one works in health care and everyone is well past the birthing babies era of our lives. And to the best of my knowledge none of us are writing the next greatest historical romance novel featuring the spare heir to the Kingdom of York and his sister-in-law’s midwife which I now know wouldn’t have been historically accurate because midwives needed to be much older than your typical heroine in a romance novel.

The lecture fell under the heading of Women’s History and since it’s Women’s History Month I’m presuming that’s why our Enrichment Director picked it. Maybe it was her sneaky way to bring the topic of reproductive rights onto a campus full Right-to-Life supporters. Or maybe she picked the lecture because she didn’t get her request for something women’s history related in soon enough to get the first draft choices. I'm betting the lecture circuit program is like our library's Book Club in a Bag program where we have to pick our books to read well over a year in advance and then hope we live long enough to see our choices get delivered.

I did learn my perception of midwives was totally all wrong. I didn’t know, for example, that in Europe they had to have training and be licensed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I thought a midwife was someone who took on the role by calling herself by that title. They also had to be older women without families to take up a lot of their time and they had to be trained to baptist babies who might not live long enough for a priest to get there. It was against the law for a midwife to aid in an abortion and they could also be charged with murder if something when wrong with a birth. A baby’s death in the presence of a midwife caused her to have to prove in court (or not) that the death didn’t happen from anything the midwife did or didn’t do. 

Those days were so long ago and yet our Supreme Court is putting us right back to where health care workers put their own freedom at risk to help a woman during a pregnancy. New anti-women’s health laws are being put into law ever day outlawing medically necessary abortions even in cases of ectopic pregnancies, placental eruptions, women carrying fetuses without brains or kidneys that are destine to die in the womb or shortly after birth etc., etc. and now at least one Republican run state is passing a law declaring that fertilized frozen eggs have the rights of a full, born baby! Have you seen any of the interviews of the senators making theses laws? They clearly don’t understand biology. I need to get off my soap box because the fallout from overturning Roe vs Wade makes me angry. So I’ll end my blog post here by declaring that the topics of March Madness and women’s health/midwives is one of the strangest pairings I’ve done in a long time. There, I said it first!

But then again maybe the fact that women like Caitlin Clark are proving that, when given on an equal playing field, women can do anything a man can do is the very reason why so many old men lawmakers are willing to peel back the reproductive rights of women. 

Until Next Wednesday.  ©

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Rise and Shine Morning Thoughts and Memories


My upstairs neighbor woke me up at 7:00. For such a little thing I can’t understand how she can sound like an elephant stomping around up there. I wish I could be in two places at once. If I could I’d ask her if I could follow here around to see what she is doing to make so much noise. She did tell me she pushes furniture around with her walker---she's a cleaning fanatic, does it every day to my once a month. Others in our complex complain about the same noise issue so it’s not just me in case you're thinking I have super sensitive hearing aids. They built these buildings with great sound barriers on the side walls but nothing in between floors. 

Someone asked me if I was sorry I didn’t pick a top floor apartment because they don’t hear anything. “No,” I told her, “I wouldn’t like having to take the elevator all the time and if we ever have a fire or a tornado to run from, you’ll be wishing you had a downstairs apartment.” Another woman living on the third floor thinks I’m going to get murdered in my sleep by a stranger passing by my ground floor unit. She's such a scaredy-cat I can’t help laughing at her. I’m not being naive, I look at the crime rate map from time to time and know it's very low in this area. She’s in far more danger going to the mall to walk like she does every day. I wouldn't tell her that. She thinks she's safer there and if I ever sent her a link to the crime rate map she'd never go anywhere. A new member of our Creative Writing Group called his 3rd floor apartment a penthouse apartment and I had a hard time not laughing out loud at the pretentiousness of that.

Back to the topic at hand: I laid in bed another half hour this morning wishing I could fall back to sleep but finally my bladder made me get up. I wasn’t sure what day of the week it was but I have one of those old people clocks in my bathroom that told me it was Friday, March first and confirmed the fact that it was too damn early for a night owl to be rising and shining. My mom used to wake me up by calling out, “Rise and shine! It’s daylight in the swamps!” I tried it once or twice on my husband but he was such a sound sleeper it took over a half hour of badgering and occasionally waterboarding him to get him out of bed. Before we lived together my brother, who was an electrician, made him an alarm clock out of a factory bell---the kind they ring at break time and when the shifts change. It hung over his bed and the neighbors across the street could hear it go off. They’d often come over and bang on his bedroom window to get him to wake up and turn off his super-doper alarm clock.

Since I’m looking for blog fodder today, I googled the “Rise and shine. It’s daylight in the swamps” phrase to see where it came from. On the American Heritage Magazine website I learned the last part---it’s daylight in the swamps---dates back to the colonial times. It’s the first thing generations of lumberjacks in the logging camps heard every morning: “Daylight in the swamp---all out!”

The rise and shine part of the phrase comes from biblical times and the 1611 King James version of the Bible made it popular in Isaiah 60:1 “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.” By the seventeenth century other Christian texts rephrased it to: “ “Christians (shall) rise and shine so the glory of God shall be upon them.” I also learned that I’m not the only person who is on the cutting edge of the Baby Boomers who has memories of being woke up with calls of, “Rise and shine. It’s daylight in the swamps.” Apparently some old time radio show used the phrase when it came on the air and our parents picked up on it. And men who spent time in the Marines way back before my time on earth also heard it in the mornings when they served. I often wonder how many phrases that are coined in our times will still be around several centuries from now. I’m guessing not many because with the swift moving social media the way it is today, nothing new lasts long enough for it to become a cherish memory like so many of the phrases we older people remember from our youth.

The month of March in a place like where I live---a non-profit, faith based continuum care complex---is on the boring side for those of use who are not religious because most of the lectures and activities are geared with an eye toward Easter. The Chosen movie series is once again on the agenda plus the Friday Stations of the Cross series is scheduled but not much else besides a St. Patrick’s day dinner, a Show Your Irish dress up day will probably pop up and I found special St. Patrick's Day Mahjong Cards online that we’re going to use one day to add a little spice to the game.

Co-teaching mahjong with someone with Lewy Body Dementia has been---challenging but worth it. She’s got 32 years of playing the game behind her plus she taught all our current players, but she forgets now and then. For example, she came over to my table during the last class to ask me what a one bam tile looks like and when I showed her one on the table she wanted to argue about it. I then showed her a picture of a one bam in a book that was labeled and she backed down but it was tense for a minute or two. 

The classes were my idea. I designed the class curriculum, wrote check-off teaching guides and the hand-outs for all three classes and had her proof-read it all. I also coordinated everything with our Life Enrichment Director. I did a thorough job so anything she might have missed teaching her half of the class they would get by reading the hand-outs and watching the online videos assigned for homework. We all know each other’s back stories and she’s open about her dementia and she’s tells others that I am her star pupil, the heir apparent leader for our group, so to speak. Still, I try not to overstep my place as Luke Skywalker to her Obi-wan Kenobi ...and it's hard. She thanks me often for doing all this to grow our group so I think I'm walking that fine line okay.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

* My beautiful, new mahjong set with an aluminum case. One of the racks is Barbie pink and is so bright that I might have to wear sunglasses. I'm still going to look for a butterscotch aka Bakelite antique set just because I'm not dead yet and antique picking is in my blood.

 

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

War and Play and my Black Jeans

It’s been a head spinning week starting with a lecture here at the continuum care complex that was---well, very complex and totally over my head. It was presented by a woman whose field of expertise is the Holy Lands and she’s spent a lot of time in that area of the world. It was titled: Understanding the War. I went away from it being nearly---if not more---confused than I was before. As one of my fellow residents said, “She assumed too much about our basic knowledgeable of the region and used a lot of words that aren’t in most people’s vocabulary.” I went into the lecture hoping to learn exactly what it means when people say they believe in a two state solution. I was under the (apparently false) impression that the two proposed states would be like our states under an umbrella of united states that formed one country. But, no. The two groups would be living intermingled but with separate religions and governing bodies---this assumes I understood the lecturer correctly.

In the speaker's opinion a two state solution won’t word because they have too long of a history of fighting with each other, with each side having valid claims over the territory. And as much as I really want to understand that conflict I could have easily fallen asleep in the first three-quarters of her lecture because she started around 3,500 years B.C. and went through ALL the conquers and surrenders from that time frame to the present time. 

Beware of a Rant Starting Here: 

Cynical and naive me, at one point I was thinking, Why can’t they just let the past go and start where they’re at? Clean slate; no religions nor scores to settle from ancient history of any kind to muddy things up. I just don’t get holding century-long grudges against people you never met. The blacks in this country have---for the most part (70%?)---let go of their collective grudges born in the slave era in the name of co-existing. How many more centuries is the Holy Land region going to fight over whose religion is "best" and who is the most entitled to live there? Wouldn’t it bring harmony faster if we quit worshiping the person/s credited with bringing us our value systems and just concentrate on living up to those values? I contend, for example, that The Ten Commandments, that are held up as the word of God SHOULD be held up and valued because they are the moral foundation for Judaism, Christianity and Islam---a logical way to live in peace---and NOT because they supposedly came straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, via way of different messengers. I could care less where they came from. It’s the message, stupid, not the messengers who went around spreading and planting the seeds that would become our major religions that are the important part. Forget the spin that has been added to the Word since biblical times; Get back to the basics, find those long-ago common values and take it from there. Compromise. It's not a bad word.

Rant off.

The next day was my play day on steroids. I designed and taught the first of a three part clinic on how to play mahjong. (And after that hour and a half classs was over I played the game for two more hours.) I had on my Mahjong University sweatshirt and my packet of hand-outs and I so prepared it wasn’t funny. As I said in an earlier post my co-teacher and I were shocked by how many people want to learn…a total of eleven people! We cut the sign-up off at six with five on a waiting list for the next time we teach. Halfway through our first session my co-teacher came over to my table of students to whispered, “Never again!” She didn’t really mean it. We both know that if we don’t grow the present group of players, the club will peter out, not just from people in a senior complex dying but someone is always going to a second home up north in the summers or down south for the winter. Some days we can only fill one table and other times we can fill three tables.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with this ancient game from the orient it was introduced to America in 1920 and it’s a gin rummy-like game played with 152 tiles that combines luck, skill and strategy. Every year the National Mah Jongg League puts out a new card listing over 60 winning combinations of tiles and who ever builds their hand first as the tiles are passed around, drawn and discarded wins the game. I love it because the more you learn about playing and its history the more there is to learn. And nearly all the action goes counter-clock-wise which makes your old head work in a brain-cell building way you don’t get from games designed in our part of the world. I love studying the old game sets as art and antiques and I love following the mahjong Facebook groups. I love everything about mahjong and guess what, I just bought my very own set and a tee shirt that says, “I don’t always talk about Mahjong…oh wait! Yes, I do.” Can’t wait to wear that shirt but I’ll have to wait until it gets a little warmer.

For me, I’d like to stay in my winter wardrobe another month or more. I’ve been trying to lose weight and it’s going slow…only down six pounds in a month. But it’s enough to make my clothes feel more comfortable. Hopefully when I can get out to walk more I can lose at a faster pace. I am, however, proud that I’ve been consistently making better food choices. I hate being fat but its been more than a few decades since I’ve been ‘normal’ that I wouldn’t know how to act. Hopefully not like an old friend from my other life who daily posts photos of her body, her face, her meals, her hair or toenails on Facebook a couple of times a day.

Actually, my goal isn’t to get that far down on the scales that I'd be normal sized again, but I’d like to drop a size and a half. I’m right in between two sizes and nothing looks good on me. My friend mentioned above who has lost 50 pounds would go every few weeks to Goodwill to drop off a batch of clothing that got too big and to buy some new things from them. I couldn’t do that. What if I gained the weight back and couldn’t afford to buy new stuff? It’s not like Goodwill and other thrift shops have a glut of queen size clothing on their racks. Anyway, I have a brand new pair of black jeans that I'd lusted after for years that I couldn’t zip up a month ago. Now I can get it the zipper half way up. I plan to be able to zip them fully in another month. Wish me luck.

Until next Wednesday. ©

 P.S. The map above is the same one the lecturer used during her lecture.