Size Zero, Not Me

Why are all my pictures so blurry? Too much caffeine? My hands shake? Sarah and I had chugalugged lattes, Hazel grinning at us in church, three generations of attitude.

The Adoption Counselor is disgusted, while I'm simply shocked in the face of all evidence, that anyone would drink alcohol while pregnant. In today's information age, with nearly everyone having access via computers, print, TV or radio to a plethora of information, how can stupidity still dominate so heavily? I sigh and un-Christianly think, "The masses are asses."

Claudia tried yesterday, but doesn't like to garden. OK, she tried. I wanted to comment, but had nothing positive to say, astonished that she was not immediately swept up into an uncontrollable frenzy, a pull that would draw her outside each day to smolder in the sun, working feverishly for fresh food. Imagine Georgia gardening in August, a humid, sweltering, furnace blast of a day in which house flies are too lethargic to budge. We may have such a gorgeous spring and mild winter and fall, but summers are brutal for the uninitiated. Your lungs are seared, your skin is scorched, your fingers burn and your legs ache as potassium leaches away in your sweat...still I absolutely love it. Georgian by birth, Southern by the Grace of God. I was made to perspire and to slog away in the gardens, dirty and giddy.

I'm still, after all these decades, invigorated by the indescribable heat, sweating enough to need many quarts of well water just to keep going, guzzling while I work, stinking and dirty, but inexplicably happy.

My soil is so fertile, since I spend all non-gardening time adding wood chips, coffee grounds, compost, leaves, grass clippings, manure and anything else I can scrounge up, but the downside is weeds flourish as well, leaving me unable to ever catch up, but still ecstatic over my possibilities and certainly neither bored nor finished.

I have three sweet black hens and a pretty decent rooster with few mood swings. My garden shed is open-air with a tin roof, and last night, in the evening, I sat out there holding a docile, even-tempered hen, past her egg laying prime, listening to the rain, watching my plants grow, thinking I've got it made.

All my life, all I ever wanted was to work the land, to be as self-sufficient as possible, to live in a rural setting, and to be free to work hard. I need to remind myself often that I've accomplished so much of what I first set out to do a long time ago.

Sarah and her family are nearby, indeed all of the Fantastic Four and their families are living on this dirt road with most of my grown kids fairly close by except for my Navy man and his family.

I can be magnanimous in the early morning hours with everyone calm and quiet, a day stretching out before me with no meetings and hopefully few conflicts. Jonathan had melted down in a big way yesterday, refusing to attend church. Church included a sermon that blistered me with its unconditional love theme as I obviously struggle at times since the ones I need to show this to, so often have broken my windows, punched holes in the walls or caused massive problems for our family. JoJo was so difficult we nearly had to leave until one of the ushers whispered something in his ear. Whatever it was, it worked. I whispered my thank you and the boys settled down.

Following me around constantly, asking permission to do that which he knows he's not allowed to do, whining, bickering, fussing, nagging and irritating me so much I thought my head would explode - duh that's why I chose to sit with a hen, not a son - eventually since I'd not detonated, he surprisingly started crying, so we sat on the stairs leading up to my bedroom and talked for awhile.

I'd been dragging several dozen houseplants out on my deck to be soaked by the rain, a nitrogen-fixing moment, giving me a brief opportunity to dust where I'd been unable to reach due to a tangle of vines and leaves, figuring I'd at least be able to unearth a lizard or so. Jonathan sucked all the oxygen available on this end of the planet. He's a good-looking kid with such severe and sad issues.

Glad that he cried, rather than raged, I was able to talk to him and to listen to some lucid sentences, working through the evening with him by my side.

Realizing how close my life so often resembles an episode of AFV, I'd been the one to sneak up behind a trash-talking JoJo and flip him out of his chair, surprising him and succeeding in dethroning him, but at a price. Good thing I take so much calcium as I tripped backwards and landed on my expensive butt (as the donated Polo jeans did fit me), a serves you right moment, Martin laughing at me so hard, he could hardly contain himself, reaching a hand out to drag me back up for Round Two.

I do not wear size zero, nor were these jeans those. I have an issue with a size zero as that implies there's nothing there, so how could this size even exist? It didn't exist many years ago and clothes designers know they can snow the gullible with the false impression that they wear a smaller size as they've dumbed down sizes. What once was a ten is now a four or something, sizes that didn't even exist when I was a young bird. Chumping vulnerable women with body issues, this sucks.

I want to advise my strong and beautiful daughters to strive for health, not specific weight goals, or impossibly stupid zero sizes. I wish my children would never even touch alcohol, especially when we'd stop to consider the damage done to them by hard-drinking adults in their birth families. I'm as opinionated as any ole bossy older woman and I despise sodas, equating them with chemical poison, linked to diabetes and a host of other detrimental results. Deep, dark chocolate is the only way to go, and with all the delicious fruits and vegetables in the world, to choose to bite into cooked flesh makes me wanna hurl with pure revulsion.

I'm glad several of my children grow gardens, most of them do not touch alcohol, I might have one smoker in the entire bunch of 23 grown kids, so many are well-educated, they're all great parents, and most are law-abiding...several more are needing to learn things the hard way it would seem, but I do hold out hope.

I have a grown son today with a broken nose...a case of mistaken identity apparently...another son, or so, in jail. Things I can't blog, things I need to deal with. I blog a lot, it helps me to cope, yet what I don't blog is tremendous. I open a window to 10% of our complicated existence.

Gratefully knowing the depth and the width of our prayer covering, knowing details are unimportant as God's in control, He sees the bigger picture even though I constantly rail against what I see with my own human eyes, I know it'll all work out someday.

I truly know that to be true and I'm grateful for the prayers over my family.