Nekkid

One of the big things I've had to put to death after leaving my old church was this whole 'modesty' thing that they push.

I absorbed that message so effectively that the first two years I started going to work out after leaving fundamentalism I could not undress and dress comfortably in the all female dressing room. At first I'd slide into the bathroom cubicals, silently undress and redress in my gym clothes before self conscientiously emerging from the stall clutching my clothing to my chest. I'd put my clothes in the locker and go about my workout.

It was a big step when I managed to strip and dress in the dressing room, even if at first it meant I semi-hid behind a corner and did it all in super fast speed. Eventually I was able to dress, undress, weigh myself naked and walk around in only my natural skin.

Another part of my recovery from having to think and treat my body like it was something dangerous, explosive, liable to get me in all sorts of sexual sin, was to start doing nude drawings, studies of my poor, sick, aging, sagging body. Studies in charcoal or pencil of all parts, lovely and something less than lovely. I'm struggling to love my body, to treat my overripe curves like they are as beautiful hills of Italy. Loving yourself that way isn't the easiest thing, particularly when the meat suit (body) you're riding around in doesn't conform to the standards of beauty the world pushes. It takes some intentional drowning out of internal voices to overcome.

I'm moved beyond the sketches now. I'm preparing to do a nude self portrait, from the back down to the hips, in the style of Mary Cassett. As I've been preparing to do this I had to enlist Jim to take a number of photos of me posing nude in the position I'm planning on painting myself in. He was amused by my plans, but he doesn't get it, doesn't get the harm and psychological damage extreme modesty teachings do to women. It doesn't matter that I joined that church as an adult, the toxic teachings still go in.

I'm excited and a little afraid. I'm going to be showing off a lot more than bra straps.

Reading Comprehension

A few days ago one of my friends from my former job was laid off. When she confessed it on Facebook I was pretty shocked. She'd helped train me when I'd started at big internet floral service and she'd been there something like eight years. She was great at jollying people into buying more than they intended and she always had a great smart-assed answer for guys calling in to ask for the price of roses. Deb would say in a teasing voice, "If you have to ask the price you cain't afford them" and she'd follow that booming laugh that filled the room.

I never tried her tricks because with my luck I'd have gotten in a world of hurt from management. I struggled the entire time I worked there because of my ongoing health issues.

What I'm trying to say is that Deb was one of a kind and it was my observation that she was an asset to the company. Apparently they have now decided otherwise. I don't know why exactly they laid her off.

What I do know is that the job was a crazed hog on roller skates because of the inability of the customers to simply understand what was being said or even more, things that were spelled out on the company website. When I was bored at work I'd look up the complaints against the company by disgruntled customers.

They always made me laugh because almost always the complaints were reading comprehension fail. One in particular was funny because of the fact that the person had signed up for the company Rewards program when placing an order online and after 2 years plus being billed for the ten bucks a month started demanding to get it all back and swore they never approved it.

How can you not realize the first few months when your credit card is dinged for something you don't remember signing up for? You wait two long years before bothering to check the charges? How in holy hell does that happen?

Signing up for the rewards program does give you half off your first order and ten bucks off every order after that. There are many places with BOLD PRINT telling you that you are going to be hit with a monthly charge!!!!1111Eleventy

It does everything on the website short of jump up and slap you in the head to let you know the program is ten dollars a month and by accepting the discount you are signing up.

One thing I learned working there is that people don't bother to read things before clicking them. I've observed it's frequently the same problem among hard core religious folks. They take the word of whatever super-pastor or self-appointed seer without bothering to research or read something for themselves.

Example - I know some many people from my old life that will swear that having your kids vaccinated is a government plot to harm your kids. They don't realize that while vaccinations do have some inherent risks (everything does) they would have eradicated the illnesses that are most threatening to the  mortality rate of children instead of them being on the rise again.

Just one example out of many.

Anyway, my main point of today. I'm going to walk you through ordering flowers online/on the phone from one of the many floral middle men, like the place I used to work. Tips below.

• Realize that the prices online are actually less than what most florists charge and you might not get the exact arrangement pictured. Read the fine print under each picture and you will see it usually states something like 'or similar arrangement'
• Most florists are going to bust their hump to get something out even if they don't have the exact elements of the arrangement you see. Calling in to yell because the roses were the wrong shade of pink is pretty petty.
• If you're offered a huge discount there are strings attached, such as you have to purchase a vase or sign up for a monthly program. Get all the details before you commit
• Realize you are dealing not with an actual florist but an order-taking service that farms out their business to the local florist.
• If you need something super specialized or personally what in the heck are you doing calling a huge middle man? I've had people call asking for a bridal bouquet in a few hours. Nothing doing.
• There is always a delivery charge, if you order from the big online places or call a local florist, no one goes out and delivers for free with the price of gas being so high.

Complaining in a way that will get results instead of threatening to come kick the rumpus of the customer service rep.

• Instead of screaming and cursing ask the rep what she/he can do to make this right.You'd be surprised how well you will be treated if you treat the rep with courtesy. Usually there is something a rep can do, such as do a redelivery with a substantial discount. Redelivery and total refund is not possible.
• If the rep tells you that the supervisor is unavailable, guess what, you're never getting through to the supervisor, and it might just be because the rep thinks you're being a dick or the supervisor has told the reps to never bother them with angry people.
• If you call in and demand a 30 dollar arrangement delivered in two hours without a delivery fee, don't be surprised if customer service calls you back to tell you it's simply not possible or a small vase filled with a couple of carnations is delivered late in the day. To get something nice you are going to have to spend some money. If the budget is that tight you'll be better off picking up an inexpensive arrangement at the local grocery store and delivering it in person. 
• Decent funereal arrangements never go for less than about 80 to 100 dollars unless you're sending a dish garden or plant for the family and the cheapest you can go with that is 40 bucks.
• Using a discount code you find on a random coupon website can go against you. Particularly if the code is something like from that florist discount rewards program. The site might take it but once they run it against the known database and charge back your 'discount' since you are not entitled to it.
• Last resort: Call your credit card company and ask for a charge back or discount because you were not satisfied.

Crushed, Bruised and Laughing My Ass Off

Yesterday I spent the first half of the day in the odious clutches of the hospital getting tests run to finally figure out what is complaining, liver, kidneys, pancreas or gall bladder. The CT scan went well, but it always does. The guy that does most of them here is the only other true Cajun in town and we have been known to cut up and laugh during tests in his corner of the hospital.

It was after he passed me off to the ultrasound people that I started having issues with my day.

Our hospital is now affiliated with the big university teaching hospital in Charlottesville, which means it's now a training hospital. I didn't realize that meant that we now had interns and trainees at the local place.

You expect it when you go to UVA hospital. Yes, I know young doctors and technicians have to learn somewhere but I have had a bellyfull of that since moving to this area. The is nothing more uncomfortable than getting a barium enema in a room filled with young good-looking men but it doesn't hold a candle to what happened during my last gyno visit to the UVA clinics.

The doctor started griping as she started examining me that my vagina was too long and she had to keep switching to longer and longer speculum. The viewing interns started tittering as this went on while I'm spread eagle to the world and heavens! Never again.

Sure enough, there was a trainee in the ultrasound suite and after the regular ultrasound lady left to make sure that the shots she took could be used I was informed that I was having a second set of scans by this other person. At which point I could see the nametag that said "Trainee" under the name. That was one rough trainee, I ouched and winced before the interns while the trainee pressed the probe hard enough to leave bruises. My torso looks like Mike Tyson has been beating on me. The backache where my kidneys are is awful!

Worst (or best) of all is that one of the interns shot off his mouth and I now know courtesy of his loose lips that I have gall stones. Original technician told me that my doctor would review the films and make a diagnosis.

I staggered away afterward and went to get something to eat. But mostly I sat around guzzling coffee and read the funniest book I've come across in a coonasses age. It's by Louisiana investigative journalist John Camp and the title is "Odessey of a Derelict Gunslinger" The cover photo makes me laugh the hardest, it's of John Camp leaning over an old television that bears the photo of Jimmy Swaggart when Swaggart made his sniveling tearful confession that he likes to bang cheap hookers.

Camp covers a large variety of Louisiana scandals and colorful characters and he's had his own adventures with Jimmy Swaggart, which really makes me laugh considering my own interactions with Jimmy. Camp also talks about the bank my father was a VP at and many of Louisiana's mafiosos as well as Slick Eddie, Edwin Edwards, Louisiana's free-wheeling governor that used to gamble in Vegas under the name T. Fong.

But I think the most valuable part of the book, at least in regards to recovering from abusive theology, like we try to do over at No Longer Quivering, is his expose of what a religious cult of personality looks like in regards to Brother Swaggart. He lays it out well.

From page 156 and yes, I know he's talking of televangelists but I think these are warning signs of an emotional manipulator in the pulpit using others for their own advantage.

"Observing the preacher had been akin to walking through a carnival house of mirrors and seeing his many changing images. Like an actor in a repertory company, Jimmy switched characters in an instant, from fiery evangelist to hard-nosed businessman to talented musician and entertainer. "

 If you're at a church where the pastor seems that schizophrenic take it as a huge red flag.

Since I'm still feeling like creamed crap on a cracker today now that the bruises are emerging on my torso I decided to go have coffee, sit around and keep reading Camp's book. But I had to laugh, the headcovering brigade of proper fundamentalists/evangelical wives I know from around this county were having some sort of meeting at the coffee shop where I decided to relax and read. They're mere feet from me, verklemping about God only knows what while I read a book with a weeping Jimmy Swaggart on the cover. Got lots of dirty looks and I had to keep biting my lips to keep from laughing. Sort of takes the sting out of the tests.

Oh, this much fun surely is sinful!

Eyes Firmly Shut

This afternoon on Facebook Patheos posted a link to one of the other Patheos bloggers, a gal named 'mollie' with the blog "Get Religion". Mollie posted about adoption and how big old bad Kathryn Joyce is trying to somehow scare people not to adopt with her new book "The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption"

She and her husband are adopting, and typically, they are buying all the happy-slappy say-anything-to-encourage-you-to-take-a-kid that adoption trainers always say. Adoption is an awesome thing but the things the agencies say and do to facilitate the adoption aren't. I'll elaborate on that later.

Her blog posting tells me she's not actually bothered to read Joyce's book, but then again neither have most of the Christian Right that have bee protesting against it either. They do not realize the exhaustive years worth of research Kathryn has done on the many failed adoptions from Liberia that Nancy Campbell pushed. They don't ask to see facts and figures, national and international statistics  recognized as legitmite by governments and they don't ask Nancy Campbell why she suddenly lost all interest in adoption and no longer talks at all about her many Liberian adopted children. No one asked about Serene Allison and CPS or Hana Grace-Rose Williams or Lydia Shatz.either.

This is one of those things that just pisses me off royally about the Christian Right, this refusal to acknowledge when something is a very bad idea. Their version of the British stiff upper lip. Never apologize, never explain. Stick your head in the sand and whenever you run across an idea that runs contrary to your worldview instead of examining it to determine if there is even a possible shred of truth immediately demonize the messenger and call the message a lie from the enemy. Attack! Attack!

I used to be more tolerant of the ignorant Bible hordes as a leftist Christian but quite frankly I've had it with the bellyful of lies they love to pass off as truth. I have tolerance and compassion fatigue now. Willful ignorance is nothing more than a waste, a waste of a life, a mind, and resources.

She says:

But let’s get back to the Lifetime movie script story:

But the movement has also revived debate about ethical practices in international adoptions, with fears that some parents and churches, in their zeal, have naïvely entered terrain long filled with pitfalls, especially in countries susceptible to corruption. These include the risk of falsified documents for children who have relatives able to care for them, middlemen out to profit and perhaps bribe officials, and even the willingness of poor parents to send a child to a promised land without understanding the permanence of adoption.

In March, sending shudders through adoption agencies and would-be parents, the State Department issued an alert about Congo. It warned that several children whose adoptions had already been approved by the Congolese government had been “taken from orphanages by a birth parent or relative,” indicating that those children were not orphans eligible for American adoption in the first place.

Drama! It goes on in that vein. And I have no doubt that the horrors of the Lifetime movies and the Joyce book are true. I really don’t. I have enough friends who have gone through absolute heartbreak as they navigated this process and discovered corruption (or just really sticky and difficult situations that we humans find ourselves in) to know that this is true. But I’d like to know a lot more about what percentage of these 8,668 adoptions last year were at risk of corruption (much less proven to be). I might also wonder why a group that only constitutes, according to this story, a “minority” of families involved in international adoption is bearing the brunt of the blame for any and all problems encountered.

Look, there is no comparison between Joyce's book and the sleazy low-brow movies of the Lifetime network. One is a bad fiction while every single one of Kathryn Joyce's books has focused truthfully on problems in evangelical Christianity. Joyce can back her books with her research, none of the stories are the fluff dreamed up by a screenwriter in Hollywood.

I think it's awesome they are adopting and they're adopting within our nation instead of participating in the travesty that is Evangelicals adopting the children of war or from the Third World and immediately trying to squeeze them into the mold of a perfect, well-scrubbed, little American Christian warrior. I've written before about the idiocy of trying to take a damaged someone (or animal) and force it to be something it's not capable of with the unhealed wounds on their psyche. I hope the adoption trainers mollie and her family are working with have warned them about this because it can make the difference in if the adoption actually works for the family AND the child. 

During my years at my old abusive Evangelical church I got to see up close too many times what happens with foster children that are eventually released for adoption and how the agencies lie to the potential adoptive parents. The foster families know better, but their hands are tied as to what they can tell the adoptive parents. Some of my closest friends have been foster families for many years. Between those experiences and others I've come to see that the adoptive agencies and their workers are not always very concerned what is best for the child, their goal is to place as many kids as possible while they never tell the adoptive parents the truth about the child they're placing in their home.

The biggest example of that I saw was when one of my foster mother friends gave up a boy she'd had for over three years for adoption by another family I knew from my new church. I knew the boy had arrived suffering from horrible sexual abuse from his father at five years old and he was on one long laundry list of behavior medications, prone to horrific outbursts of pure rage, very destructive and at eight years old one very prolific liar. All of that was a huge improvement on how he'd been when my foster mom friend first took him in.

He went to my other acquaintances with the adoption coordinators singing the praises of this kid named Joe. The adoptive mamma broke off all contact with me the day she adopted him and realized I knew Joe's foster mom very well. She told others that she 'didn't want to hear a bad report' I wouldn't have breathed a word to her or around her of what I knew, but I also knew she'd been sold a rosy picture by the agency that did not happen. Joe just about wrecked her marriage and took a toll on her life, her mental state and her finances.

Later Joe's adoptive mother told me she'd have wished the foster mom or I had told her the truth about Joe. She'd gone in to the adoption insisting that it was going to be lollipops, sunshine and rainbows, believing that love alone could conquer whatever issues Joe had and found out it was lithium, special ed and rages. She deserved the truth from the agency before she adopted Joe but it was too late.

Seeing Christians attempt things with the childlike believe that love conquers all is like a bunch of people shouting warnings that the bridge is out while the driver in a car completely ignores the shouts and drives right off the edge while humming a merry tune, because, don't you know, love conquers all.

Adoption is needed but so it truth in adoption, real training to handle things as diverse as Reactive Attachment Disorder to easing the way into the family for the adoptive child, it should all be about the child and for the child's benefit.

I pray it goes smoothly for mollie and her family. But I hope they wake up out of this perfect adoption Evangelical dream of theirs.

Man Brains Lady Brains

Jim made me laugh hard the other night as he lay on the sofa while I watched one of my all time favorite films, "Sense and Sensibility" starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. He summarized the movie into one sentence very quickly. He said "Horny girl and un-horny girl" to describe Maryann Dashwood and Elinor Dashwood. He's right in a weird sort of a way.

Reminds me of a few years ago when I would drag Andy to see films with me or force him to watch a DVD on long afternoons. He called "The Phantom of the Opera" 'Some weird dude tries to get a hot chick to live in the basement with him' and Les Miz 'Old School The Fugitive'

He has a point. At least now I know where Andy gets this ability to sum up a great film in a short sentence that boils down the film to one essential element. Thank god Andy decided to make films instead of review them.

All three of these films were complex and populated with richly fleshed out characters and storylines but to my guys it's all about one thing. Another way men and women likely differ.

Running Away- My Trip

Okay, long post about my trip and life in general while I've been mia. I need to get back into the habit of writing every single day again.

Back in late April/early May I drove down to Louisiana and parts south with my friend Joannie. We had a very good time, it was very casual. We just got in the car and started to drive, stopping wherever it took our fancy.

I needed a stress break really badly as I felt like I was going to break and there were a number of huge stressors affecting me at the time. Simply I just walked away from them for about ten days. I was also hoping that being away from my husband would make him miss me, treat me a little kinder in the day to day. I had been struggling with trust issues in one of my relationships.

Back to the trip. The first night out we stayed in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Jim came with us as far there since he was meeting up with old friends from the Corp of Engineers for a few rounds of golf and a bbq. We left early the next day while he was on the course with friends. The only trouble of this part of the trip was that Jim got a ticket going 70 mph in a 45 mph zone and has ended up with a court date and a probable 400 dollar fine.

Joannie and I continued on down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, staying at the same five star resort I always try to stay at. It was off season so the room was very cheap! This place is just fabulous! I learned about it five years ago after seeing it on the Travel Channel. The resort has nine pools and hot tubs, bowling and all sorts of extras, plus all the rooms are ocean view. I finally managed to feel some of the tension and angst I'd been feeling since Christmas just slip away. Fully relaxed. We walked on the beach, dipped our toes in the ocean and went from hot tub to hot tub to hot tub.

Just sitting on the room balcony reading and breathing in the fresh ocean air was so relaxing, freeing to my soul. The ocean always helps me come back to me, if that makes any sense at all. 

The view from the back of the hotel

 The only unrelaxing this is that on this trip I was reading Jocelyn Zichterman's “I Fired God” to review for NLQ and could not put it down. Her story of the abuse she endured at the hands of her father and the IFB church was worse than I would have ever imagined. It is a must read for anyone dealing with recovery from spiritual abuse.

I'd warned Joannie before we left about the reality of African Americans and the Deep South, warning her that the farther south we would go, the more rudely and dismissively we'd be treated being that we were white. We got our first taste of this at Myrtle Beach when we got into one of the hot tubs with a young man wearing a heavy gold chain and dark sunglasses. We said, hi, asked it if was okay if we joined him. He said not word one to us, would not even look our way, before getting out of the hot tub and going to another one. Wow.

Here, in the suburban Washington DC – Virginia area you just don't see this. Most everyone behaves at least surface polite in different races interacting. For me racial prejudice is just a non-topic. Everyone is human.

The next morning we continued on down I-95 to Savannah, Georgia, to Joannie's friend's house. Her friend had been having a rough time, her husband was in long term care after having a stroke/heart attack fifteen years ago and she felt alone and abandoned by her kids. Add in the health problems of aging and trying to support herself on her small salary as a receptionist and it's a mess. We prayed for her for several hours that first night there, pressing in trying for a breakthrough. Very sweet lady.

Her home was so beautiful and it saved us having to rent a hotel room. But Savannah was hot, oh lawdy was it hot and humid, that winning deep south combination that sends me running for the air conditioned room.

Joannie encountered her second turn of racism when we went late that night to the local Kroger store to pick up a few supplies. The cashier was black, treated Joannie with pushed out lower lip pouty disdain. When I got up to the register and started talking to the cashier and just teasing her a bit she loosened up and got friendly. Another late nigh discussion between Joannie and I on racism and the deep south.

Every day we took a shopping break. Joannie is world champion shopped. If shopping was an Olympic event, Joannie would take the gold medal. Me? I burn out very quickly. Her and I shopping looks like her carrying armloads of clothing into the dressing room and a grumbling me sitting outside on a bench with a book and a bottle of water. She can do it for hours. I can't, I see, I grab what I want and get the hell out of there. It's an evil necessity to me, not a hobby or a sport. Plus most of the time I'm trying not to spend money.

The following day we left Savannah and headed straight for Panama City Beach, getting to PCB by about 4 in the afternoon and stopping to eat at an on the beach seafood restaurant. Literally on the beach. Checked the prices at a few local hotels and they weren't bad but we decided to make tracks for Pensacola Beach to spend the night. Stopped in Destin to look for the Wyndham for Joannie since she has a membership there and pressed on, getting to Pensacola much later than I intended. 

Joannie at the restaurant right on the beach

Once arriving I made the sad discovery that in the past five years or so since I was last down there that all of the mom and pop places were gone and there weren't that many hotels left. The ones still on Navarre and Pensacola Beach proper were charging from 180 to 300 dollars a night! We pressed on, finally finding a Quality Inn in Surf Side. It wasn't very nice, the fridge broke and we had the maintenance man in the room at least a dozen times for complaints Joannie had about various things. I was over a hundred a night for this run down joint. I was in a very dark mood at that point because I'd wanted to stay two nights on the Gulf Coast to enjoy the ocean.

The next morning when we got up and went to breakfast I was amazed at how beautiful the scenery was. While we were on the island between Pensacola Beach and Pensacola proper our hotel had its own tiny white sand beach area with chairs that bordered a marina with boats in one direction and overlooked gorgeous water front houses and gardens. The air was filled with floral smells from the nearby blooming bougainvillaea. 

After leaving that run down excuse of a hotel we drove along the coast all the way to Pass Christian, Mississippi. Except for the casinos most of the hotels in the area were just gone The few that remained standing seemed to have been converted over into condominium communities. The rest were priced ridiculously!

We stopped in Biloxi and walked along the beach. The last time I'd been there had been a few months after Katrina when they'd started reopening small sections of the beach once they'd dredged for bodies. I had walked the beach then and here we were again. This time, however, the beach wasn't littered with things like the Waffle House menus and toaster or the contents of the dept store that stood next to the Waffle House. The sand was clean, but it still feels creepy to me.

Around 3 pm we pulled into the Quality Inn in Hammond, Louisiana to spend the night since we couldn't find a beach place we liked that we could actually afford. My mother said she wasn't going to be home till the next day so we broke the trip about an hour outside of her home in Zachary. I'd called several times driving down and asked mom if we could move up the date of arrival but she actually pushed it back by a day. When I pulled into the QI I wasn't at all sure we'd get a room as the parking lot was cram packed with old hot rods in the wildest paint jobs. The joint was jumping!

I walked in and stood at the counter behind a man that was arguing with the manager about his rooms being located inside of the hotel in the atrium instead of on the outside ring where most of the other car show folks were staying. After lots of shouting, obscene words and other colorful vulgarities the motorhead threw his three sets of hotel keys on the counter, said he'd would go stay at the Motel 6 before he'd have those atrium rooms. I was biting my lips as the manager told him that he would still have to pay for the rooms because it was a non-refundable reservation through an online travel site.

As he stomped off and I went to the counter the manager told me that yes, she had a room for me and she was giving me a special manager's discount! I got one of his rooms and got it for a song! This place was gorgeous! Ever bit as nice as the five star place we stayed at in Myrtle Beach.

The only problem was that once we got settled into the room Joannie started itching to go out and get a big meal. We'd been knocking heads a little bit at this point about stopping to eat. My idea, when I cooked up this trip, was that I would pack food, healthy food and eat what I'd brought with the occasional meal out. Reality, it worked out that we ate breakfast at the hotel, around noon or one Joannie would say she was super hungry and want to stop at a restaurant and then later at dinner time we'd negotiate, she'd want to eat out again, I was ready to stay in the room and have home made yogurt and fruit for dinner.

Since I'd gone on a no processed foods diet since January 1^st I'd managed to lose a couple of dress sizes and shrink my portion sizes and eating. The idea of three big meals a day made me want to barf! This was a bone of contention between us. Joannie and I are both not skinny, but here I was making headway and not eager to jeopardize it by eating a million calories a day.

Was weighed at my doctors office the other day and my eating change has paid off. I am twenty pounds down without feeling deprived, starving myself or exercising for hours. It's sliding off just by the changes I made.

So, back to Hammond, Louisiana and eating. We were across the street from Don's Seafood, one of those Holy Grail kind of restaurants in south Louisiana. I've been eating at Don's my entire life and at this one many times. We walk across the street and find on this Friday night Don's has a ninety minute wait for a table. We talk and decide we'll cross the hallway to the takeout section and get it to go, eat it in the hotel. That's what we do.

Get back to the hotel, sit in the beautiful indoor garden in the atrium to eat, polished brick floors, wrought iron furnishings and towering greenery. It's beautiful and relaxing. I get a salad topped with shrimp, crawfish and crab with remalaude sauce while Joannie has shrimp and pasta. It's good, we eat, we talk and then spend the rest of the evening watching a little tv.

The next morning Joannie tells me she got not much sleep because the dinner made her sick as can be. I was so tempted to point out that eating that much that late in the evening is never a good thing. I let her keep on thinking she has food poisoning. The only bad thing I could say about my food was that I had heartburn all night long. Maybe she wasn't used to the spices.

Quick, quick drive down to my momma's house on the outskirts of the country club golf course. But we made a few quick stops on the way. I have to allow Joannie to get her shopping on and she's spotted a huge new Goodwill store. She buys practically an entire new wardrobe while I buy a designer purse with the tags still on it.

We get to my mother's house and it seems like bringing Joannie with me was the best idea ever. There is exactly zero family drama, my mother doesn't drink openly in front of me and she behaves almost normally, like my fantasy of what a mother really is. It would be nice to entertain the fantasy that she is 100% changed, but I knew by her hasty retreat upstairs by four pm every night that my mother is probably hiding her drinking up there while Joannie and I are here.

 My mother and I. I look a lot more like my late father.

One of the plantations we visited

The days we stay with my mother goes so well. We visit plantations and planatarians. We take Joannie shopping and we watch tv. Joannie gets the biggest laugh out of mom and I mutual love of “Mad Men” and how much we talk about it. We get her to watch it one night with us.

The drive back to Virginia was mostly uneventful. We spent the night near Birmingham, Alabama so I could visit with my good friend Terry before heading home the next day.

I come home so completely relaxed having left Jim dealing with Laura's scamming, refusing to clean up mold landlord. I leave him to deal with this, with that, but as I cross the threshold Jim starts telling me that the garage door broke, and how he is upset how much the credit card is. Just like that I was stressed out again immediately and started feeling like I needed to get in the car and drive away again.

Not trying to make light of the credit card thing. It's truth, we use it way to much and the bill is horrendous. When I went on this trip I was so eager to get away to anywhere that I didn't really think it through. Plus the expenses of eating out with Joannie, even if I was mostly eating salads, really added up.

So what did I learn on this trip. Running away doesn't deal with the issues you must deal with to manage your stress. I think I figured out that one of the things that has been driving me the craziest in my life isn't about putting me down or even really aimed at me. It's just this other persons way of dealing with their stress.

I also learned I can't do everything and sometimes need to get Jim to help out with stuff like Laura's apartment situation. I need to learn to ask, communicate more, be open to help instead of saying I will deal with something without thinking about how that will happen.

I need to learn how to stop worrying in and live mindfully in the moment without much in the way of expectations of others. Is that even possible?

Things have settled down quite a bit since then. Good thing or I might have had to move in with my mother for awhile.

Awkward!

So here I am, at the local Starbucks, glomming off their free wifi and updating NLQ. Today's NLQ's involved stupid things said by Michael and Debi Pearl along with a request from Homeschoolers Anonymous.

It's an awkward kind of a day because Jim is working from home today and decided to poke me awake  when I'm in a sound sleep. He's been so pesky, taken over my office that I decide the only way I can work without him pestering me every five seconds is to go down to the Starbucks.

Sitting there, minding my own business, and I find myself working five feet away from the head of the local homeschooling org, a lady I used to go to church with that hates my bff Joannie with the passion of a million zillion alpha suns. This is the woman who's office at the old church was ground zero for the gossip that killed the church, who stands diametrically opposed to everything I'm posting. Ha.

I keep sitting here, praying, "Don't recognize me... please God, don't let her see me!" to no avail. She comes over and greets me, tells me how this kid and that kid is doing while I am polite to her but cringing away.

Feeling like such a hypocrite for not telling her off for the damage she's done to those I love and to myself before I left the poisonous old church.