From Strength Training to Childhood Memories

It’s been a long haul, my commitment at the YMCA. Five months is the longest I’ve ever stuck to an exercise program. The difference being I was working with a personal trainer this time who kept changing up the workouts and I felt like I had something to prove after getting rejected from taking her "Move it To Lose it" class for not being strong enough. I freely admit my heart wasn’t into the workouts this past month and I wanted badly to be off her strength building train. Exercise is time consuming! Sure, I could have dropped out, not scheduled anymore appointments with Julie but keeping a blog helped drive me to see it through to the end of my paid-up sessions so I could write about her final evaluation on what I’ve accomplished. If I wasn’t a blogger, I’d have gone back to being like a toad burrowing under a log by day and coming out for dinner in the cool of night.

Practical differences strength training made in my life: I’m able to walk up and down stairs one foot after another instead of always leading with my right. I no longer have to seek out the handicapped bathroom stalls. Much improved posture. Improved balance. I can pick up the dog, all 29 pounds of him and easily stoop to do things close to the floor. I’m able to do my own pedicures again. I'm less fearful of falling. But the biggest change of all is I no longer feel physically fragile. 

From my trainer’s evaluation: I only lost 10.75 pounds which sucks but Julie says that I’ve actually lost 13.75 pounds of actual fat because I gained 3 pounds of muscle mass---they have a fancy scales that can tell the difference between lean mass, water mass and fat mass. I also gained two pounds of water mass, probably water retention from the heat, so using ‘gym math’ you could say I lost 15.75 pounds. You could say it but I won’t. I also lost a total of 20.75 inches added together from the nine places that were measured, my waist being the biggest loser with 4.5 inches. She was thrilled that "all my hard work paid off." I was surprised. She says I need to---get this---eat 300 more calories a day to lose weight faster. (I track my calories in and calories burned on my Fitbit.) On the test for upper body strength I can now officially pull 100 pounds fourteen times in one minute and for lower body strength I can do thirty-one wall squats in a minute. And those two achievements might come in handy if I want to get a job baling hay back in the 1950s when they actually used manual labor to stack those bales on wagons.

This week is the beginning of my unscheduled---or I should say my lightly scheduled summer. There was just one other thing on my day planner this week besides the above mentioned ‘date’ with Julie and I’ll write about my appointment with my bone doctor next time. I’m thinking about signing up for a cardio drumming class at a nutrition store now that I’ll have more time. I’ve been wanting to try it and few people know (or care) that I spent time in my youth taking drum lessons only I didn’t have a drum at home so I practiced by sitting on the floor and banging on the hardwood floor. My mother was a saint. Or maybe she had a good set of ear plugs, I don't know which. I also took saxophone lessons and lessons on the Hawaiian guitar, the latter of which I stuck with the longest. My brother took lessons on the accordion for quite a few years while I was jumping around from instrument to instrument. He got pretty good at it and we both played on a “stage” a couple of times. It wasn’t a big deal in hindsight. It was at a yearly Christmas party at my dad’s CIO union hall and other kids of its members took part in the talent show as well. I loved that union hall. I did my first political volunteering there working a phone bank on Election Day to help get out the vote.

What I remember most about being on that stage in front of 200+ people is the plush, forest green velvet dress I wore two years in a row. To this day, my younger cousin reminds me often about how much she loved getting my hand-me-down clothing. We were both sad when we out grew that velvet dress. It wasn’t that I had a great wardrobe back in those days---what my mom didn’t make came from Sears & Roebuck’s. It was the fact that my cousin’s dad drank up so much of his paychecks that they didn't have a lot. My mom frequently slipped her sister cash from her own grocery allowance so my cousins could eat. He was a mean, abusive drunk but despite it all (or maybe because of it) his only daughter grew into a wonderful, caring human being. She is truly a woman with a pure heart who works hard for her church, who would help anyone in need. My cousin’s formative years were obviously harder than mine but she married one of the sweetest, most supportive guys on earth. And they have so many loving grandchildren that she’ll never have to worry about dying alone and lonely. Sometimes the yin and yang of the universe can only be seen with a mind's eye overview that comes from our own longevity but one thing is for sure: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was right when he coined the phrase, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” ©

Photo at the top: That’s me playing my Hawaiian guitar at the Christmas party and I’m wearing the velvet dress.

Widowhood Evaluation Time

Recently I was reading a blog of a woman whose husband died within a few months of mine. I don’t read her much anymore because her plight usually brings me down and that’s sad because we go way back to when we both blogged at a stroke support site. Back in those days our caregiver stories tracked almost the same in terms of the heavy load each we carried and length of time we carried it. Now, she says she misses her husband more, not less than in the beginning of her widowhood journey. She says that everything reminds her of her husband and that makes her feel even lonelier. She’s stuck in grief, she says, and is wondering if she needs counseling.

A person commenting on the post said she is a widow in her seventh year out and she feels the same way, she still cries every day and she’s lost friends because she can’t move on. I have to wonder, though, if after so many years can you still call it grief? Perhaps a different label at that stage of the game would define the problem better and if it were me, I'd start with a lot of blood work to make sure a seven year-long depression doesn't stem from a chemical imbalance. These two widows’ stories make me wish there was a magic pill we could take to make everything okay again. Some would call that an anti-depressant and that may be a necessary tool for some but, in my opinion, after a while most widows need to pull that Band-Aid off and let the healing process happen on its own. Pills and alcohol just postpones the emotions one needs to move through to reach acceptance. At least that’s my layman’s theory.

One thing my friend wrote about I can truly relate to. She said she went from being a caregiver without a moment during the days to waste to being a widow who drifts from day to day wasting a lot of time. It’s a restless feeling to have so much time on your hands and it’s a feeling that still plagues me more often than I’d like. Guilt comes with the idleness. I have chosen to fill much of that time with whatever activities catches my eye in the senior community. Not that my way of coping is any better than anyone else's but we all have needs and I need to talk with someone other than the dog from time to time. Even if it’s mostly the 'shallow acquaintance' talk I find in my travels, there are times when the banner goes to a deeper level and the mystery of when and where that can happen is all I need to keep me going. Sure, I still miss my husband and think of him often. Sure, there are things every single day that remind me of him. But those memory triggers, now, are strangely comforting. They remind me that I was once loved deeply and I was important to the happiness of another person. Not everyone near the end of their life can say that. One thing we can all say, though, and say with conviction is the past is past and we can’t bring it back.

Just suppose we could bring the past back. Would any of us do it if we truly could? If we knew in doing so we couldn’t change a thing that happened back then? Not the outcome. Not the words we said or didn’t say. Not the painful parts as time marched us to the same ending as before. I wouldn’t. I would not want to see my husband go through his stroke again just so I wouldn’t feel lonely or restless now. Nope, once was enough. As I move forward in widowhood I am able to filter out the bad or painful memories of my husband’s and my struggles in his post-stroke world and, for me, that’s a miracle brought to us through gratitude and grace. I may stumble and fall in my pursuit to put meaning back in my life again, but without that goal would any of us get back up again? Some widows apparently can’t. So I raise my glass to toast all of us widow ladies who keep on moving forward! I see you everywhere---on the internet and in my activities here on the home front. We are women and we are strong which reminds me of a conversation I had with my audiologist last week.

She wanted to know if I was dating yet. I laughed and said, “No, way!” Then I got serious and told her that I would never put myself in a position where I might have to be a caregiver again, that I loved Don and didn’t mind doing it for him because we had a long history together of supporting each other through difficult times. I also told her that in my circle of friends from the senior hall there is a running joke that guys in our age bracket are only looking for cooks, house keepers and/or nursemaids. It was her turn to laugh. Then she said if your mom died her father would find another woman right away, that he was so helpless he can’t do anything for himself. Her mother, she said, was tired from doing it all for so many years and the audiologist predicts her mom would be like me and never get remarried. We chatted on for fifteen minutes covering topics like raising boys in her generation versus mine. Just think, that concept of marrying for a cook, house keeper or nursemaid will die out---and good riddance---with the 30-something generation. Young guys, today, can do it all and in my book that’s a good by-product of the Feminism Movement of my generation. Yup, my conversation with the audiologist was one of those light banner things that turned deep and philosophical and I left the place feeling good inside. ©