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(c) 2011 Trina Lambert
However, I can’t really enjoy the more creative aspects of planting if all I see is chaos in the rest of our not-so-great outdoors. So first I was just going to mow the lawn, right? Well, as with many ADDers, momentum is my great friend. Mowing led me to see certain weeds in the grass that just had to go. And, then I needed to mow over by our trellis of “killer” climbing roses. Seriously, when the roses have not been pruned, walking in that area of the lawn reminds me of poor Snow White’s run through the forest. Just ask my husband—we both know what it’s like to have branches grabbing at us!
Can you say obsessed? First it seemed silly to work in the yard and then shower for Pilates—I was going to sweat there, too. Already dirty and sweaty, why not do more once I returned home? When you’re like me, if you’ve got a bee in your bonnet, you better just keep wearing that bonnet and let the bee sting you again! Sting while the stinging’s good. (Thank goodness my young neighbor has informed me that not all bees die after one sting—that makes this metaphor corny but possible.)
Weeding and pruning. Don’t know about you, but I am long overdue for those activities, especially since last year kept me from most yard work—and from moving forward in my own life.
Yesterday in Pilates, my instructor wanted us to do an activity—for the third week in a row because it’s her new personal favorite—that I don’t think is good for me or any of us with lower back problems—which is most of the class.
Well, I modified my form so much that the activity really didn’t seem that worthwhile—and others did the same. I don’t know about them, but I spent a couple thousand dollars (yeah, read that and weep), put in a lot of extra exercise, had to stop moving way too much, and had to prune too many activities out of my life to have anyone else’s personal favorite activity prune any more from me.
Still, with the energy I didn’t use for that particular move, I came home and attacked weeds and any dead branches. Last year’s forced inertia left the lawn overrun by the detritus of nature and the house with other people’s possessions, so unless I throw myself into pruning and weeding, I will continue to be stuck where I am.
Some things will never again grow in my garden and must be cut away—without mercy—to make space for new growth. And, whatever else is toxic cannot remain to choke out that growth.
My body aches today while scratches criss-cross my body from those thorns reaching to hold me back, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wasn’t going to leave any more dead wood on my trellis even as I recognized the utter hubris of plunging into the thorns time after time. Truth is, I don’t mind a little pain if it moves me forward instead of backwards.
To everything there is a season . . . and this is a whole new season for me, baby.
(c) 2012 Sherman Lambert
Christiana came home so we could get in one more day on skis together. We knew better than to expect great snow, though, so we just slept in, ate a good breakfast, and took our time getting up and onto the hill.
Sometimes it’s also just nice to soak up the sun on the chairlift and take your time getting down the slope. Oh wait, I’m the one who takes my time because I’m not such a great skier, of which the deep slush reminds me. I’m still trying to live up to the promise of my slightly sarcastic physical therapist who quipped that all my exercises and treatments would make me a stronger mediocre skier! In all fairness to the man, he’s never seen me ski so he’s just basing his prediction on my reports.
My husband, on the other hand, might actually regain some of his skiing prowess with his physical therapy. After all the years and his recent back pain, he’s still an incredibly graceful skier. You can tell that skiing is an activity that makes him feel free, enough so that it’s worth the physical strain, money, and hassle. On the ski slope, I feel a little badly that he is paired up with this mediocre skier, but I remind myself that he only skis four to eight times a year. The rest of the time we’re a pretty good match, right?
(c) 2012 Christiana Lambert
Our kids are Colorado natives like their dad, so they’ve been skiing since before they knew much fear. They wait for me relatively patiently. My son recently marveled at how I ski with the same speed, whether on steep, difficult slopes or on easier slopes—which is really more of a commentary about how I don’t really adapt, I think. Nonetheless, today he informed me that I really do ski much slower in slush after all. Humph.
(c) 2012 Trina Lambert
Today we skied at Loveland, one of the few ski hills still open. The place is notorious for cold and windy weather, but it was in the upper 50s today so mostly we were sweating. That is until 3:00 when, in typical Loveland fashion, snow started falling just as we took the slowest chairlift to the higher slopes. The new snow hitting the slopes was welcome, although for that last run we all wished we had dressed for winter. Then as soon as we made it down to the puddles that used to be snow at the bottom, the sun came out again and it was spring once more.
(c) 2012 Sherman Lambert
Loveland, you are such a heartbreaker, but we are glad you gave us one more slushy, spring skiing day together before we put our gear away to wait for next season and another chance for us to fall in love again.
But first, I, at least am soaking in Epsom salts in a hot bathtub—I don’t even care that the thermometer outside here hit the high 70s and that the thermostat remains firmly stuck on that same temperature. Spring slush does not appear to be my friend . . .
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert (Trina: after working out at the Englewood Recreation Center)
I remember when my hometown built a recreation center when I was in junior high. Suddenly there was some place to go and do physical things, even if it was too cold and/or icy to run outside—you know like when the temperature dropped below ten degrees and the wind chill below zero—I could at least run around the gym. Oh, the center didn’t have all the bells and whistles today’s centers have, but I could lift weights, play racquetball, or meet friends in the swimming pool (did I mention I’m not enough of a swimmer to swim for fitness?)
Truth is, even in metro Denver, I’ve mostly stuck with recreation centers. I just feel more comfortable there—something about the term “club” just seems a little too high-brow for all the sweating I do when I exercise. These days I think of myself as a gym rat, even though I don’t go to the local recreation center to lift weights or use the equipment. Instead I attend classes there at least four times a week.
Signing up for scheduled classes means I will exercise because I am too cheap to pay for classes and not go. We all have to have our motivators, right? I’m just sure that if paid by the month or year or whatever that I wouldn’t stay as committed as I do by taking specific classes at a specific time. Because, like I said, exercise isn’t always recreation for me.
Still, I don’t want you to think I don’t enjoy exercise—it’s just I don’t always enjoy all of the activities in my classes. I mean, I am never going to be a fan of the Pilates “100s” or that one particular yoga position that resembles being a prisoner chained to the wall in a castle dungeon (sorry, I don’t know the technical term for that one!) or even dancing to any country song routines in ZUMBA.
Yet if you look in my gratitude journal, my trips to the rec center are among my top entries. No, my local recreation center does not have a catchy (or annoying!) song such as the YMCA does, but I still think it’s fun to work out there anyway. After all, once I split the word “recreate” into re-create, I start to understand the term recreation center after all. There’s no denying that all those Downward Dogs and planks have re-created me into a much, much better version of me.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
As far as I know, that’s as scary as this story gets, but I don’t think that memory is ever very far from my consciousness. There’s not much to tell, really, except we both agree that it happened. One night, in the brief period when we lived in a rental house before moving to our own home, my brother stage-whispered to me from his twin bed, “Trina, there’s a man in the room. Hide under the covers.”
I hid and eventually fell back asleep. The next morning we both told the story to our mother, who doubted it until she discovered the cellar door unlocked. Though we had just moved to a town of no bigger than 600, apparently a man who was losing his battle with mental illness had a habit of entering peoples’ homes in the middle of the night. One resident woke to see a lit cigarette glowing in the kitchen and discovered the man relaxing at the table.
My brother Scott and I in 1964.
Put my early experience together with a vivid imagination and my quicksilver ADD mind, and you can guess that I didn’t really grow up falling asleep too well. My increasing levels of nearsightedness probably didn’t help either. Even though I lived in two more homes before I left for college and then again to strike out on my own for good, my insomnia never abated in my family’s homes.
Luckily, the worst of my insomnia ended with that final move. No idea why—I’ve lived in six places since—all different as far as I can tell.
Which is not to say I’ve made complete peace with the night.
First of all, let me say that I love staying up at night—it’s not just about avoiding falling asleep. I am the queen of getting a second wind around bedtime. However, I don’t really like mornings and I do “get” that if I stay up late all the time, then those mornings will feel even more unpleasant than they normally do.
Second of all, I know that sleeping with my husband makes a big difference. I’m lucky that I haven’t had to sleep alone much in past couple decades. Plus, he got me Lasik surgery which means I can see if any bad guys are in the house—haven’t seen any, thank you very much! Still, he’ll tell you that everyone in my family of origin—including my father, mother, and yes, my brother Scott, as well as our own two children—has or had some problems with sleep.
He likes to say something such as, “What do you people have against going to sleep? I like going to sleep—why don’t you?”
Good question. You see, I like sleep a lot—I just don’t like going to sleep.
After you go through all that sleeplessness when your kids are young—and then again when they’re teenagers and young adults—you really learn to like that sleep. Not waiting for someone to come home and/or living with someone on a vastly different time clock was one of the greatest benefits of our short empty nest period. Doesn’t it seem so ironic, though, that the time when my body slept best happened when I couldn’t sleep much because of my kids?
Let’s just say that lately we’ve been working on improving our sleep setting and our habits since these days it doesn’t seem to take much of a distraction to interrupt our sleep. First we had to deal with old dogs that had to go out in the middle of the night and who played musical dog beds all night—without the music, of course. Then we had to deal with a puppy—at the same time my back began hurting. Well, the puppy got older but then Sherman’s back started hurting, too.
(c) 2012 Trina Lambert
So our latest step in the quest for a good night’s sleep was saying goodbye to our waterbed (with much regret!) and hello to a new mattress, box springs, and bed-frame. The almost eight-week transitional process started when we put the mattress in the waterbed frame (can’t we ever pick anything not on back order??!!), then continued when we set up the new frame and added the box springs, and ended when I also got fitted sheets (never needed those before) and a new comforter.
Even if I’ll never quite forget my early experience, we are finally enjoying sweeter dreams.
Crescent moon on high.
Handful of stars in the sky.
Night—sweet guard of dreams.
by Trina (Lange) Lambert, Age 10
I am a woman who dances to live.
I wonder when my body will heal enough to jump back onto the stage.
I hear pulsating Latin rhythms.
I see women of all ages dancing with me.
I want to teach joy.
I am a woman who dances to live.
I pretend I am a sultry Salsa dancer.
I feel as if my feet have no choice but to dance.
I touch my toes to the floor in time to each beat.
I worry too much that my dancing days have been hobbled.
I cry when pain limits my steps.
I am a woman who dances to live.
I understand I grow stronger each day.
I say this year of injury has almost passed.
I dream of dancing through my last days.
I try to swing back into health through work and desire.
I hope this dancing intermission has ended and my beat will go on and on and on.
I am a woman who dances to live.
Note: Today’s post=an “I Am” poem.
Olé!
(c) 1992 Sherman Lambert
Well, I still thought pursuing the right timing was important for causing the least amount of disruption in my workplace. That’s when I started charting my cycles and noticing that some patterns didn’t seem right. While driving to work, I’d hear Bonnie Raitt singing “Baby Mine” on the radio, but I’d begun to wonder if there would be a baby mine.
Just under a year after the first time—with some additional help from the doctors—we’d merged back onto the road to parenthood. However, I’d stopped worrying about disrupting work—I was starting to understand that babies are disruptive—no matter what! But, we still experienced problems—which led to our discovering early on that I was carrying twins. I prayed at least one baby mine would make it. Through medical interventions, my focused behaviors, and the grace of God, those babies mine did arrive, just a little early but so healthy we only got to stay in the hospital one day.
Turns out that amateur who read my palm before I ever met my kids’ father had been right about a couple things: I did have twins and each was strong-willed, even if they weren’t both boys.
When your only two kids are twins, each developmental phase is new to you no matter what. If you are also blessed with strong-willed kids who also have ADD, you soon learn that helping to guide their individual development can be exhausting even as you love them. Add in advocating to schools and medical professionals and somehow life becomes so much more complicated than you ever expected.
Now those babies mine are legally adults in many ways—I can’t access their educational or medical records on my own—but they are learning about many of the difficulties associated with life after high school. The world doesn’t really care that kids with ADD are supposed to take longer to figure out how to manage many everyday daily tasks. In fact, the world doesn’t really care that science is showing that even the brains of people without ADD don’t really finish developing until they reach their mid-20s.
My son doesn’t know what exactly he wants, but he seems to be floating on, finding happy moments in each day. For him I worry that he doesn’t worry enough about figuring out how to find a place in this world. If college isn’t his thing now, what is?
And, my daughter—well, I mourn the happy-go-lucky child who brought sunshine into my life. I glimpse her and then she slides back into her worries and sadness. I’ve searched for solutions for her, but in the end that quest isn’t mine.
So we’ve reached the point when I can guide them to resources, but can’t make them access them. What a hard place along the parenting journey . . .
(c) 2010 Sherman Lambert
Though I don’t know the grand plans for them, Someone else does.
Trina, 1964 or 1965
Little girls with ADD can be chatterboxes or eerily silent—or both, as I was and am. What doesn’t come naturally to many of us is the give and take of conversation—which alternately leaves us staying away from social interactions or taking over the interactions. And, what we learn from an early age is that since we can’t quite trust ourselves to chime in at the right time, then we need to choose our social situations very carefully.
In school I felt very frightened about standing up in front of my classmates, even though I was at the top of my class. Just because I knew something didn’t mean it was going to come of my head in the way I knew it.
However, I had so many thoughts exploding in that head that I had a hard time keeping them in while in the classroom. I wanted to share them—not take over the conversation—but I didn’t always wait. If the teacher talked about something, I wanted to be discussing it. Those side comments I made weren’t to distract from the teacher but because what she said reminded me of something else.
But, I do know that I was distracting other people by keeping them from hearing the teacher. That shame was a constant companion throughout my school years. Sometimes it led to my silence, but other times it wasn’t enough to help me keep my thoughts in. Lucky me—I either got in trouble for not saying enough or for saying too much.
I didn’t know I had ADD back then. All I knew was that as one of the best students I was expected to know when to speak and when to keep silent—and I didn’t.
A lot of people with ADD just choose to live lives that allow them to avoid their areas of weakness. They don’t sit in church on Sunday where they’re expected to sit still and keep quiet—they do things, such as go hiking, where their movements and noise are expected and accepted. They especially don’t join group activities where they have a hard time listening and not talking—many will call such events too boring, but I bet some, like me, just don’t want to repeat their childhood shame.
Me, I just try to find places and groups where I can control my ADD enough not to get in trouble. See how juvenile that sounds? But we with ADD know that our weaknesses are often considered immature and inconsiderate—things we should have outgrown.
These times in which we live are full of constant noise, which makes everyone seem to have ADD. I find that more and more of the groups I’m in sound like Babel—we’re all talking at once. Half the time I can’t get a word in and the other half of the time I don’t let someone else get in that word. It’s not just me who doesn’t know how to interact anymore.
In each situation I keep trying to find that balance, but if I don’t, I can’t stay there—some situations just intensify my lifelong feelings of shame. Because I have to work so hard on knowing when to speak, I need to spend time with people who will allow me to be myself even if they have to remind me gently that I still have to let others speak. However, if I am considered disruptive for being myself, then I’m in the wrong place—I can’t afford feeling like that bad child again.
There’s a reason I like my keyboard so much—my internal editor knows not to speak impulsively through my fingers. I don’t send every message I’ve written nor publish everything else I’ve written. If I’m enthusiastic about what someone else is saying, I can share my thoughts without shutting out someone else’s thoughts.
Look, I’m all grown up, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be completely free from socially-awkward moments. Although I want to hear what others have to say, I’m pretty sure I’m still going talk when I’m not supposed to do so. The best I can do is to spend my time with those who will forgive me for the occasional gaffe just as I will forgive them. Otherwise, my retreat into silence will be no different than when that little girl hid behind her mother.
What I know now, though, is that I don’t really deserve to feel that small, no matter if I do make occasional mistakes.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
Since she watched me walk through my mother’s Alzheimer’s, she let me in on her news right away. I hope she sees me as a safe person who understands something of what she is going through. I don’t question her when I see tears in her eyes but let her decide if she wants to explain them.
Last night at church I ran into a woman I met in a grief support group last May. We know each other only because of our losses. She asked me if I had reached my mother’s anniversary date and then I asked about her anniversary, which is coming soon. The truth is I can only understand but a portion of her loss because she did not lose an elderly parent, but a son close in age to me.
Still, there is something about having walked through grief that opens our eyes to others’ pain—sometimes giving us insight into how others’ pain can be even greater than ours—which is something we so often doubt in the early hours of our own dark nights.
These days my bible study group is reading and thinking about the Beatitudes, through James C. Howell’s study, The Beatitudes For Today. This week we are studying “Blessed are those who mourn.” We wrestle with whether or not those words are about mourning deaths in our personal circles or if the mourning Jesus mentions is about grieving our sins or the harshness we see in this world or, who knows what else?
But the part of this lesson that speaks to me at this point in my life is that because I have suffered losses that I still mourn, I am able to see others’ losses. Might I be just another person my friend avoids in her time of loss if I hadn’t already taken the walk to the tomb?
It’s tough to feel blessed when in mourning, but then I look around at all the support I have received on this earth from other people and I know God has not forgotten me. Perhaps it is in my brokenness that I am learning to listen to other people’s stories instead of just telling my own.
I’m not so saintly that I’ll say I’m glad for my losses. However, I am grateful that at least they have grown me into a person who watches out for those who are also blessed in this way they never sought. I was blind, but now I see.
And that is a blessing in itself.
Elda Mae (Ritter) Lange
What a year it has been since I last sat by your bed, listening for the subtle changes as your breath weakened, holding your hand when you struggled and all the while knowing you were on your way back to yourself. In that room where our time together both slowed and sped up, I prayed that your final labors would soon lead you to fall asleep to pain and loss and wake to joy, renewal, and reunion.
Somehow I thought that because you were ready and we were ready—and because we had lost you so many years before—that our healing afterwards would go smoothly.
Not so true because it has been such a fight to forget those last years. Try as I can to remember you, round-faced and full-bodied with that smile that lit so many days in my life, I see you angular and receding, all but for your brown eyes that continued to speak when you could not.
That we all decline is no secret, but the extreme changes you and so many others—human and canine—experienced in these last few years—Marge, Uncle Carrell, Dick, and our pups Fordham and Abel—make me want to rage against time.
Yet, perhaps it is just that grief/anger that brought about my own physical decline—my body could not escape the pain in my heart that I would have liked to deny. If I would not sit into my grief, then my grief would sit me down.
And, so I sat.
It is only in these last few weeks in the midst of deepest winter that indeed I can stand again easily and begin, step by step, to run and dance once more. Perhaps, the timing is no coincidence.
Yesterday I saw a black hearse leading a long line of cars on an unseasonably balmy day—someone was going home with all the ceremony that helps us to understand our loss. Yet, we did not say “goodbye” to you in that time-honored way.
I insisted we wait—until the weather might allow a more joyful home-going. After all, so much of you had left so long before your final day—those black hearses had been taking parts of you home for too long. The long goodbye of Alzheimer’s meant I needed to remember you more than remember your physical presence. So I’m glad we had all the brightly-colored clothes, the music, and the orange balloons on a windy, prairie day full of the hope of spring.
Because it’s that hope of spring that gets me through missing you and reminds me that my mother will never again have to be less than she was created to be.
Forever loving you, I return to the dance of life.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
I just thought a lot of people were looking for a reason not to do an activity they didn’t like in the first place. You know, the kind of people who are always doing the latest thing whether or not they enjoy it and whether or not it’s good for their bodies. I think the media buzz is happening again with yoga (and like it did with aerobics and Pilates and . . .)
Yes, I learned the truth—at seventeen—that running could hurt me. I ended up getting fitted for orthotics which helped me recover my health long term. The podiatrist said that running didn’t cause my imbalance problems—it just accelerated how soon they showed up and began affecting my life. Never again did I have the same obsession with running nor was I as naïve about the helpfulness of running, but I didn’t stop for good—I liked running.
You see, I didn’t run because it was “in” or the cool thing to do. For the most part it was a lonely experience, except for when I could meet up with my friends to do it or be part of a track or cross country team. Yet running often soothed my soul. I truly believe this was how I managed my undiagnosed ADD for so many years.
Enter real life obligations, children, and another undiagnosed condition that worsened—asthma—and running became less frequent in my life. It got to the point where I knew my weight gain was a risk factor for running, yet I didn’t know how to keep down my weight without running. This time I ended up with an injury common to inflexible, heavier, long term runners of a certain age: plantar fasciitis.
After that injury healed enough that I could use my feet, I switched to walking. Didn’t “everyone” say that was healthier anyway? I walked and walked—and continued to gain weight. With my feet problems, I couldn’t do any hard core land-based aerobic activities. So . . . I signed up for my first yoga classes.
By that point my lower back was hurting so much that I couldn’t get out of my chair easily. While I did find that yoga was helping in so many ways, maybe it wasn’t enough or maybe it just wasn’t fast enough. When I told my doctor, she thought I ought to add Pilates classes first to see if I could avoid physical therapy.
Here’s the deal: with yoga, Pilates, and walking, I did start to feel better—everywhere, but especially with my back and feet—and that ADD mind. And then I started to lose weight which meant I could move more vigorously, enough so that I could return to running and begin doing ZUMBA dancing.
So are all those things to blame for my recent back injury? Well, maybe. However, I will point out that my injury surfaced after I took off a week from exercise while spending most of that time sitting in a car.
Now that yoga is the new evil activity, it must have been the real cause behind my injury, right?
Really, I think that living and aging are behind my recent physical woes. As far as I can tell, people can get injured by moving—or not moving—or both as they age. When my father needed back surgery, it was because he carried excess weight and did not move unless necessary.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather earn my badges of aging from activity versus inactivity.
So I’m not going to stop practicing yoga even if I am more likely to modify my poses now. I have always gone to restorative yoga classes led by mature instructors who aren’t fostering a competitive environment. And I will argue with a teacher if I think a pose goes against the advice I am receiving from the medical practioners treating my condition—if I’m not going to believe them and follow their advice, then I need to stop seeing them.
I guess I have to say that if people don’t like to do yoga, then they should not be doing yoga to please others. They can take their chances lifting weights, swimming laps, or sitting in their Easy Chairs while I’m holding a Downward Dog—or attempting to get back to running again.
Maybe we’re all just running against the wind trying to maintain our bodies in the face of time, but I’d rather move than sit down to wait for the Grim Reaper to find me.
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