You Have to Let This Happen

I'm doing this Stress Less thing with Oprah (yes, Oprah) because I think things have maybe been a little crazy.  I don't feel stressed, particularly, but often things creep up on me and next thing I know I'm having a total freakout, and it turns out I was really stressed.  I just get used to it.  Until I'm not.

First Stress Less challenge was to notice things you see that are beautiful--textures, shapes, colors.  Here are mine.

I love Kantha quilts, these hand-sewn quilts from India.  I can pick them up pretty cheap at a discount place near here (as opposed to from, say, Sundance Catalog, which wants to charge you a million dollars a piece.  Not that the Indian ladies who make these don't deserve a million dollars for them.  They do.  But I buy the cheap ones anyway.

There is a patch on this one, which I love:

I like the irregularity of it, the refusal to waste.

I also love the look of this little guy:

And the contrast between my two guys, who are best buds:

Nolie woke up at 4:30 this morning, barfing.  E. stayed home with her for a few hours so that I could go to the doctor, because I've been having a really sore jaw and my teeth aren't fitting together right.  Chewing sucks, as does yawning.  The doc takes one look at my throat and recoils at the ginormous "pus pocket" (her words, not mine) and asks if I've been feeling feverish and sick.  I did think I had a sinus infection for a while that wouldn't go away.  For, like, five weeks.  But I kind of thought I had kicked it.  I haven't been feeling that sick.  Tired, I think.  Just, from everything.

Turns out the pus is so big it has dislocated my jaw.

And there is the news that my mom is sick again.  Problems with blood cells.  Which could be very big problems, or not.  We won't know for a few weeks.  I don't know what this means.  "You have to just let this happen," E. tells me, to get me to stop crying enough so that I can sleep.

It is times like these that I think, my body is not my own.  This life is not my own.  This is all out of my control.

You have to just let this happen.  This is not your own.

But it is.  Nolie's snuggly body settling back into sleep after we got her cleaned up says it is.  Peanut's curled up body at the foot of my bed says it is.  These tiny Kantha stitches scream out that this is life.  My life.  Things just keep on coming, and I just keep on going.  The breath comes in, the breath comes out.