The Order of Things…

This has been a challenging week, primarily due to my diminishing physical abilities. Something as simple as trying to budge a bar of soap that had adhered itself firmly to the shower shelf when it dried had me upset with myself.

The hand that was free to attempt the soap’s removal caused additional frustrations. I banged it pretty hard on the grab bar (isn’t that irony) a couple of weeks ago in trying to break an impending fall in the bathroom, it would appear that I might have broken a bone or two in the process. Thank goodness for voice dictation software, otherwise nobody would have had emails returned by me this week. My one handed typing technique is coming along nicely too.

A day of mishaps led me to feeling frustrated and a little beaten down tonight. When my best friend called this evening I was ready to answer the phone with a shriek, holding a fistful of hair. But with a hurt hand, I couldn’t even get that right.

We speak every day, but tonight was a longer call of over two hours. The first part of the call, she listened as I whined. I don’t do that often, but there was a long and torturous (for her) whine stuck inside of me that needed to escape. There are a handful of people in this world upon whom I can inflict a rare pity party for myself, she’s always the first volunteer in line and she gently urged to me to get it out of my system this evening.

That complaining being mostly emptied out of me (I still have a good cry deep down inside that needs to get out sometime) we could get on to the cheering up part of the call.

We traded stories of misadventure that had happened when we were small. Bangs, scrapes, cuts, split lips. We were laughing uproariously – the injuries didn’t seem nearly as hilarious at the time!

A couple of incidents that I shared after our exchange of war stories correlate quite well to my frustrations of this week.

My mother has many times told me the story of how when I used to fall into puddles, instead of using my hands to lift myself up I’d cry for someone to come get me. The idea that getting a bit dirtier meant I’d be saving myself sooner was beyond my comprehension.

When I was in kindergarten, I one afternoon came home and broke into tears as soon as I saw my mother. It took a great deal of convincing on her part to share why I didn’t want to go school the next day. For the record, I LOVED school. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still in school and always will be, I never tire of learning.

The look of alarm on my mother’s face suggested that she wondered if something quite sinister might have happened that day. In reality, my teacher had gleefully announced at the end of class that the next day we’d be doing finger painting. The mere thought of dipping my hands into the coloured slime was fodder for nightmares. I’m sure that I was excused from doing it, but remember being pretty ticked off with myself as an adult when my daughter and I finger painted together. How could I have wanted to avoid such a wondrous mess?

This week’s frustrations have mostly been about my inability to keep up with the high standards of tidiness that I set for myself. If there’s a mess, getting it cleaned up these days is usually a task not completed according to my exacting standards due to my mobility and weakness issues or it doesn’t get done at all until somebody arrives to do it for me. More than a handful of friends and family would recognize an unattended mess as being something that could drive me around the bend. And it has this week.

When all else was crashing around me growing up, at least I could control the state of physical space around me. It’s been one of my coping mechanisms since I can remember. When I moved out at a very young age, I was teased mercilessly by my friends about how my wardrobe was sorted by colour. White at one end, black at the other with a carefully coordinated rainbow in between. The spices in the kitchen were sorted alphabetically, every receipt and slip of paper had its place.

I can assure you that as I got older I loosened up a lot, having a child left me no alternative than to be less precise about the order of things so that I could enjoy quality time with her.

Still a neat freak to some degree, disorder will often grind my gears. Not so much because of the mess itself these days, but more so due to my fact that I can’t return things to order on my own any more.

A process of letting go of what I could once do but can no longer, and grasping as firmly as I can onto what is still possible. What a mess.

There was one pleasant connection for me. For all the times I was quite a sissy about getting dirty, I must have been equally adventurous in order to have gotten so many childhood injuries (we’ll ignore the part about about being a complete klutz). Bikes to be ridden with abandon, hills to be tumbled down, horses’ backs to have fallen from, jump ropes to have tripped over, eyes to have been blackened after trying to turn a guest bed into a trampoline.

In life you don’t get dirtied, and you don’t get hurt if you just sit on the sidelines. Although physically I’m not on the field, in spirit I’m still in the game. An albeit messier one.