Thinking like a duck, not a pitbull...

Learning about yourself is painful. It leaves you feeling duped by your own self perception. My latest lesson came this last week through a set of broken windshield wipers. 

I have an old, battered Toyota pickup. I picked it up last spring off a friend who was retiring it after 215,000 miles. The paint is oxidized, and its history is told in dents and scrapes on every panel. I have studied the bumper on more than one occasion and wondered what must have happened to create the odd shape it has assumed. It sounds like the flubber mobile when I drive it. 

Yet I love that darn truck like one would a loyal family dog. When it snows, I mean really snows, I can put the beast in 4 wheel low, throw a shovel in the bed just to be safe, and venture out when the rest of the mountain has retreated back to the fireplace. Not very "green" of me, but there are bits of my psyche that are proving slow to evolve.

And to be honest, since I was small I have envisioned myself living on some acreage (orange grove in Redlands, meadowy plot under Mt. Shasta, Australian sheep station) tending to four-legged creatures and pulling my muddy boots off on the porch at twilight while surveying the fruits of my labor. A utilitarian vehicle is a prop in that play. Got the truck, just waiting for the rest to materialize. 

So to be fair to my husband, I am a bit over attached to this dumb old truck. 

In the last storm the passenger side wiper quit working. I continued to drive around like a cyclops because the important blade was still functioning, and heck, if I am going to own an Australian sheep station some day, I'd better not let something so small as peripheral vision stop me from doing my work. Eventually my husband stepped in. He was sure he could fix it and relegated me to the family Subaru while he worked on it. 

But a week later, with forecasts of another storm in our corridor, my wipers still weren't fixed, and my patience was gone. When I started the truck this morning, I fumed. There was nothing on the windshield at all--no blades, no arms--my husband had performed a double amputation of my windshield wipers and the carnage was sitting in the back of the cab: a pile of giant insect-like metal wings and legs, and various other bolts and parts. 

We are going backwards on this wiper thing! I thought in frustration, and because I also possess a small concentration of pettiness and spite, I rolled down the window and said, "I hope all the parts are in the cab, because I am taking the truck into the shop."

This evoked our predictable argument that included MONEY and FINISHING WHAT YOU START. In his defense, my husband had tended to every snow berm in the neighborhood last week, and there really is only so much time in each day. In my defense, my husband has a gene that compels him to, out of pure curiosity, disassemble things that never become whole again. This time he was messing with my beloved truck.

 

I drove off in my denigrated truck to open the gym, stewing in self-righteousness and indignation. Immediately I began poisoning the gym it with my presence, subjecting the early morning crowd to my mutterings about men as I scrubbed muddy boot prints off the floor. When they all fled and left me alone, holding a bottle of Pine Sol and a scrub brush, Tina walked through the door to start our training session. In between  sets, I explained to her the injustices done to my wiper blades.

As we transitioned from one-armed rows to reverse flys, she stopped me and said, "I don't know how to say this any other way than to just say it."

I swallowed hard in the pause between her next words, and wondered if she'd employed a spy who'd seen me reach into the chip bowl at the Mexican restaurant a couple days ago. 

"You need to learn to let things go."

In my mind, I began to protest: Me?!?! I do let things go....I mean,  I am waaaay better than I used to be...

"If you are this upset about such small things now, wait until you are four weeks away from the competition and you are dieting and working out even harder. You will explode. You'd better learn to let things roll off you. I mean really, you are upset about a set of windshield wipers."

"Okay." I said looking at her and nodding. 

"You hang on to your anger and you will hang on to fat. Stress will do that. You will not be able to build the muscle you need for this."

"Okay." I managed to say the same word aloud again. 

We finished our session and parted ways. Tina said her last words, "Think like a duck." With a motion of her hand illustrating her burdens slipping off her back, she said goodbye. 

I had just been put in my place, something painful when you are eight and you have just finished throwing a temper tantrum in front of a roomful of relatives at a family party. In the stunned silence and unblinking eyes upon you, you know you're about to catch hell. You even understand that you've earned it. But as an adult, your ego bruises more deeply, and you find yourself dusting off  your collection of Wayne Dyer books. 

I spent the rest of the day doing laundry, grocery shopping, playing princess with one child and Guitar Hero with the other. But I kept bumping against the same bruise: I am too intense. This has been the barrier to godknowswhat in my life. I have indulged this behavior with words like stressed, harried, broke, put upon...when the only appropriate word for my behavior has been ugly.  

When you get a dose of clarity about yourself, it leaves you feeling small for a while. You say silly unrealistic things like, That's it, I am never going to complain again, and Nothing is ever going to upset me again. Your ego tosses and turns uncomfortably in the cradle you lovingly made for it over the years. When finally, you look up and make eye contact with the people in your life again, you get struck by their capacity to forgive you even before you forgive yourself.

The very people who regularly endure the wrath of my ego, helped me find my mojo again:

When I picked up the kids after my workout, my mom offered me air-popped popcorn and her attention.

A close friend invited me out for lunch despite my earlier whinings to her. 

My older daughter asked me to sit on the couch and watch a movie with her. 

My three year-old, dressed in thermals and a gauzy pink princess gown, wondered if I would be her prince and dance with her at the living room ball she was attending. 

And later that evening, after fixing my wiper blades, my husband stood by me at the kitchen sink with a Band Aid when I cut myself on a broken glass. 

While I spent the day repulsed by myself, my peeps were continuing to invite me into their world, even though they already knew about my capacity to overreact, to explode, to be petty. It was a humbling realization. 

Learning to live like a duck may be the biggest challenge I face in this journey. I bloom late, learn hard, and grip fiercely to the belief that I am right in every conflict. Yet the day's honesty brought me a bit closer to understanding that while I am strong arming those who have to live with me, I am also crippling myself, because you cannot experience growth without breathing deeply, without letting go. And you cannot fake these things. You either get it or you don't.  

 

Facing the fear of failure...

Outside, the snow has fallen all day and left the landscape mounded and muted in white, now glowing under the light of a full moon. In the yard, a string of Tibetan prayer flags decorates two snow forts my daughters have abandoned for the night. 

It is silent; the snow plows have forgotten us. Three foot drifts in our street sit untouched. School's been called off for tomorrow already. My husband is shoveling the driveway again anyway, hoping he can get out to ski tomorrow. 

Inside, my daughters are sitting around me. My three year-old's face, smeared with chocolate pudding and red glitter, is intently focused on her drawing. She has recently learned how to make a smiley face. It is a happy miracle to her each time she successfully creates two circles over a crooked crescent. 

My ten year-old is sitting on the arm of my chair, braiding her American Girl's hair. The dinner dishes are washed, and even the dog is laid out on the carpet snoring, enjoying our warm house. 

I am a fortunate woman. So what is wrong with me? 

I made it into the gym, did an abdominal workout, took my run. But several conversations I had over the course of the day made a strange impact that I've yet to shake off. And spending the rest of the day in the house made me come of of my skin with food cravings. My drive and my resolve sits deep in the snow drifts under the soil, with the daffodils.

Today, as the snow piled higher, my mood sank lower. Be productive, I said to myself, find a distraction. So I reunited a mound of unpaired socks. Then I cleaned up my work desk. Unfortunately, my tidying unearthed a composition notebook titled, "Training Log 2003." I had set out to run a marathon that year. In it were only three entries before I sputtered and failed. 

Digging in the fridge for dinner possibilities, I discovered the "best by" date on the cream cheese read 05/09/09. My chest tightened as I realized this competition was actually close enough now to show up on the expiration date of my dairy products.

I spent most of the day steeped in evidence that failure is a distinct possibility. And the problem is that I know failure all too well.

The dark voice inside me reminds me that I have never been pugilistic. Even as a young child I was always relieved to finally get caught during a game of hide and seek. Becoming "it" meant I would no longer be chased. And during my youth, I often chose to sidestep down a daunting ski hill after watching my brothers disappear into the moguls. I could peer over the precipice, but I rarely jumped off it. I spent my first year of college at UC Santa Barbara hoping to get work as a writer, and when the school paper miraculously offered me a position for the following year, I transferred schools and moved to UC Riverside. 

Fear of failure has always had me by the tail. When something good comes my way, I encourage it towards me with my arms outstretched, yet when it toddles close enough to reach my fingertips, I step away and let it fall.  The truth is, it is safer to quit early and make excuses than to hang in until the end and risk making myself look really foolish. Right now I want to retreat from my current challenge like one would pull back from the end of a knife.

My three year-old repeats her summons until I come out of my brooding cloud, "Mama, look! It is you."

I look at the paper she is holding up. A cock-eyed set of eyes with thin-lined mouth. "That's so great! You are getting so good at that."

She returns to her work, talking to herself, "Now I will draw Gwama."

I watch the back of her head as she sits on the carpet in front of me. Why am I doing this competition? Will my kids really care if I spend a Saturday this spring on a stage flexing in a bikini? I am already a hero to my three year-old because I didn't get upset when she scraped my car windows with metal salad tongs, and my ten year-old loves me because I let her pour green Jello over her chocolate birthday cake. It is that simple. 

May 9th matters to me alone, because at one point in my life, for the sake of me, my own self, I want to make it all the way. That is a small a matter in the big scheme of this universe. But it counts. Like learning to draw smiley faces.  

Poached, scrambled, or fried?

It is a frustrating flaw of mine that when I decide to take on a new hobby, I get a little too excited and, well, over invest. Rock climbing class equaled expensive shoes that you really can't wear casually; photography class resulted in a top of the line 35 mm camera, vintage now. Years later both shoes and camera are embarrassingly like new.

 

I see this trait in my ten year-old daughter who gets an idea and turns it into plans that rival the building of the Great Wall of China. 

"Well the school ran out flowers for the Valentine grams so I am going to make my own."

"That's nice honey."

"Yea, and I am going to sell them at the gym. I am going to stand outside, you know, kind of make a booth, and sell them to the people who walk in."

"Umhumm."

"They will get a card, and a flower, and some candy. Oh, and I am going to need a place to store them, so can I use your office?"

"Okay."

"Yea, I and I am going to need some money for supplies so can I work around the gym, and you pay me?"

"Sure."

And the plan continues to grow. I smile and nod in agreement with everything, because I am certain that along with Girl Scout cookie sales that have already fizzled, piano practice I have to badger her into, and an abandoned quilting project from the last inclement weather day, that this too will take its place in the bone yard of past excitements. 

And I smile too, because she got every ounce of short-lived over-zealousness from me. 

A perfect example is currently sitting in a brown cardboard box on top of my pantry. Last month I found an online store that sold powered egg whites, in bulk. When I read that a cup egg whites contains nearly eighty grams of protein, I decided they were a perfect addition to my food program. So I ordered five pounds. Yes, five full pounds.  

I had them delivered to the gym and when they arrived, I was so excited, I opened the package right outside my office. I peered into the box at a large blue trash bag containing a fine, white powder. When I opened the bag, a small puff of dusty powder billowed over my hands and face. I coughed. 

The guy on the nearest treadmill glanced over, "What is that??" he said suspiciously. 

"Egg whites." The dust on my cheeks hid my blush as I tried to contain the cloud of powder that had escaped. I folded the bag down, closed the flaps on the box and hauled it out to my car. 

When I got home, I peered into the blue trash bag again. Five pounds really was quite a bit. It really wasn't as appetizing as I'd expected either. In fact I wasn't convinced this substance was edible at all. But when my husband got home and helped me haul the box up to the top of the pantry, I faked enthusiasm.

"This stuff is great. I can put it in everything and beef up the protein content."

"Umhummm." My husband has long since stopped questioning my sanity. 

My "egg white phase", as it will undoubtedly be called around the dinner table twenty years from now, is now about a month old. In that time, I have turned every dish, every casserole, every formerly finger-licking meal into a meringue. Worst yet, my mess ups have gone public. 

While my cousins were visiting recently, I made chicken and dumplings, usually a slam dunk: gravy-thick soup bottom topped with a salty sweet biscuit. This time, though, I added a scoop of egg white powder and turned the dumplings into thirsty cement. Upon chiseling under the tenacious disc of dumpling, I discovered carrots, celery and chicken bits lying brothless, like dead fish, on the bottom of the Crockpot. We went out that night and left the kids to forage the fridge for leftovers.

Even though I have modified recipes, cajoled neighbors into taking a bag of the white stuff (show up with hot banana bread and you get a very different reception than you do holding out a baggie of powdered egg whites), snuck it into the kids' oatmeal, I still have nearly five full pounds of this damn stuff left.   

This last week I made my last valiant attempt at being creative with this massive blue bag of egg whites, and I started inventing things that would not blow my diet.  First, I tried "chocolate covered cherries." I envisioned myself a featured contributer in the Weight Watchers All Time Best Recipes book with this little number:

1 box sugar-free jello (cherry flavored)

1 T unsweetened cocoa 

1/2 c. powdered egg whites.

Mix all dry ingredients together. Stir in one cup boiling water, then one cup cold water. Mix well, and let set up in the refrigerator for several hours.

What did I discover? Egg whites cook very quickly when you add boiling water. I ended up with mini omelets in a frothy, red paste. I made myself take a bite, gagged a little, and tossed it all in the trash. Elmo, the dog who has been known to eat ornaments off the Christmas tree, did not beg for a bite. 

Last night was my last ditch attempt. I started with egg white power, added some (cold) water, and had my daughter hold the beaters on high while I slowly poured in another box of cherry sugar-free jello. Beautiful florescent pink peaks formed and we scooped out spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet and baked them into cherry meringues. They emerged from the oven in such a gorgeous state that my culinary optimism returned. We left them to cool and went to bed. 

However, hope faded. By the morning they had lost their loft, and sat collapsed and sighing into themselves. They reminded me of when, as an eight year-old, I had tried to chew a whole pack of watermelon Bubble Yum. When my jaw gave up and I spit it into the street, it looked like a huge pink slug, slowly dying on the pavement. 

Out of curiosity, my daughter and I did try one of our "cherry meringue cookies," but promptly spit them out in the trash. Oddly, Elmo liked them. But because I cannot afford to replace my carpet, I have limited his consumption. 

Leave it to my kid to have a plan for all those lumps of meringue, though. I came home late tonight after locking up the gym. Even though it was dark when I got out of the car, I could clearly see a glowing pink "HI" written in the concrete at our doorstep. Apparently, she'd used our cherry meringues as sidewalk chalk. 

Right on. 

(nearly) Five pounds of egg whites. Maybe Ebay.