Guess, I better just focus on what I can change in my life, one year at a time, in a step by step, one day at a time, way. So, for 2011, I resolve to:
1. Stop drinking. Last drink was on New Year's Eve 2010.
I laid down whiskey, my favorite being Jack Daniels, on December 31, 1997. From there I would just drink wine, vodka or coffee and creme liqueurs until August 6, 2002, when I laid down all alcohol for a year. I wanted to go on a vision quest, similar to the Native American Vision Quests I had been researching for a few years after reading Rainbow Tribe. One had to deny themselves of something that could interfere with the focus of the vision quest. It took longer than a year to experience 'my' form of a vision quest, a story too long to relate at this writing, and I stayed away from alcohol until a trip, with Mom, four years later.
That trip, four years later, was when I took Mom to have major surgery done on her abdomen in Loveland, CO. Here, again, there is a long story behind this event, that I won't go into now, but I drank a glass of wine. I rationalized for the next 4 years that a periodic wine, beer or mild liqueur drink was not harmful. As long as I used alcohol in a moderate way and never got drunk, then things should be fine. Right?
Why quit drinking now? Because this last year I was drinking more than I knew was healthy for me. When I went through my severe back pain for 5 1/2 months last year, and refused to use morphine, oxycontin, darvoset, codeine (allergic to anyway), or any other major narcotic to deaden the pain, I used alcohol. I swore, to myself, if I started getting drunk that I would quit.
Well, I got drunk the night a well known local, native to Ogallala, shot himself. This man wasn't even related to me, or really that close to me, but the tragedy triggered some old tapes inside me and I escaped in my Copra De Ora! Did I quit drinking then? No. That was in September. By December, I was drinking nearly every day a drink or two, and even though I didn't get drunk again, my weight ballooned from 138 to 162 pounds. All this seemed to be in my stomach. I looked very pregnant.
I have a liver disease and the swelling indicated to me that my liver was enlarged again. If my health wasn't enough of a red flag, my budget was. I was ignoring how often I drank until the Holiday packaging of my favorite creme drinks included 2 cute glasses. After I had collected 10 glasses in less that a month, I became painfully aware that my drinking was not moderate.
From the years I've been involved in 12 step groups, I've learned that a person has a problem if, what they're doing, affects; family relationships, finances, health, work, or social relationships. If just one of these areas is notably affected, it is a red flag. I had three red flags waving.
So ... on New Year's Eve, I drank the last of my creme liqueur drinks and, one day at a time, I'm moving forward with this resolve. May the Lord bless my effort and help me keep this resolve strong.
2. Go on a sugar cleanse for at least 6 months.
I have targeted February 15, 2011, as my start date to withdraw from sugar. Why wait til then and why not do this in unison with not drinking alcohol? I don't deal well with change and to try this in stages, may help me succeed and accept these much needed changes. Besides, I so enjoy Valentines Day and look forward to my Hershey's Cherry Cordial Kisses!
I suffer as a sugaraholic! I believe it will be more of a challenge for me to go on this sugar cleanse than to not drink.
3. Go back to eating less red meat and eating more organic and healthy food.
Gona be much poorer, since to eat right is expensive, but I'm reaching an age that, to stick around, I better eat better. We are what we eat. Too many of us are committing a slow suicide by what we put in our mouths. Besides myself, another such person is my mother.
The pain my mother has experienced with her morbid obesity has been difficult to witness. Watching her yoyo over several years until she seemed to finally surrender and fight no more, was akin to the days she stood by, too frightened to protect her own children from her second husband as he nearly killed us all in his drunken rages.
Mom was never a skinny woman. She was a healthy Marilyn Monroe size until her third marriage. Maybe when that marriage began to crumble, Mom needed food to comfort her. Food for her was like alcohol is for me. Was this her way of covering feelings of guilt, of her own inadequacies, of her own private pain and trauma in three failed marriages? Answers to these questions, I guess, are between her and God. I just know, as her daughter, that her struggle was difficult to witness.
I also believe her struggles influenced my own eating issues. I've battled feelings of embarrassment when she reached her heaviest and then personal guilt when I would gorge myself in the ways I knew she did in secret. Secret? We would catch her, when we woke in the night to use the bathroom, eating loaves of white bread, smothered in margarine. Or we'd wake in the morning to find the leftovers, from the evening meal, gone.
Just as I use to swear I would never abuse my children the way her second husband traumatized us, I swore I would never be a big as my Mom. It wasn't until the eating disorders of anorexia and bulimia reached the headlines, that I recognized my own eating patterns in those disorders. I would gorge and then eat a package of EX-LAX, have a severe case of diarrhea and this would help me drop weight and/or keep it off. (Of course this was before they changed their original formula to prevent such abuse.) I couldn't make myself throw up but I would often starve myself for a several days with the help of speed (we called them white crosses back then) or, after I stopped using speed, I'd eat ridiculously small portions or I'd eat only one meal a day.
When I went through a counseling training program and was later hired at the Independence Center, I became aware of my eating disorder. It would be a couple more years before I faced my eating disorder in a treatment program in O'Neil, NE and it would take several more years learning about nutrition and trying to eat healthier before my body would finally eliminate properly. When you regularly abuse laxatives, the way I had for several years, the body depends on the laxative and falls out of balance. To put it bluntly ... I lost the ability to poop on my own for a while there. The healthier my thinking seemed to get, the healthier my eating habits became. And, yes, the healthier my ....
Anyway, at this time in my life, I tend to go in cycles. I guess you could call it yoyoing. I've yet to stabilize and maintain a steady, healthy weight. I have never been obese, or even overweight for more than a few months. But I yoyo from eating junk food, especially at night (like Mom) til I can't wear anything but my 'fat' pants, to eating healthy for me until some crisis takes me back to bingeing on junk food for months again. I want to change that. I can't do it alone anymore so this resolve will need God's help. Lord, will You help me? I pray I never give up trying to eat healthy.
4. Take up my Yoga again.
Actually any regular exercise will be good to incorporate into my life this year.
5. Reconnect with family.
I haven't been a very good wife, sister, aunt, daughter, niece. I've drifted away from family and I want to change that.
6. Reconnect with friends.
As with family, I've neglected my friends. The last few years I've isolated myself. Why?
7. Remember last year's resolution to sell most of my stuff and to clear out the clutter? Well, that resolution is continued into 2011.
8. Find a church home?
Church? Such a place was not important to my family. Nor was praying. In fact, the most I ever heard about God was when someone was swearing. Who was God and what did he mean to me? I wouldn't find out until I was in my early 20's.
I was baptised when I was 13 at the Church of Christ with one of my best friends back then, Sherrie Lee. I was set up by some other 'best friends' to be raped that same year. This broke me. I became a full fledged rebel and an atheist for years after. I was broken and I blamed God for my brokenness.
It would be another best friend, Coleen Sakurada, that would help me let go of my anger at God and open the door to Him again. And it would be a few more years, after that, before I would realize that it was my brokenness that allowed me to find God again. I was then re baptized in the Berean Fundamentalist Church in Lincoln, NE shortly after the birth of my daughter. From here I began a long, stumbling, walk in a quest to know my Lord and why He is so important to me. A quest that continues to this day. A quest that pivots around His Word which I've come to believe is Living. It has been a quest wrought with falling, getting back up, only to fall again and just believing, in the midst of all my unanswered whys.
My Bible has been my church for a long time now. I don't grow in organized religion. I don't grow in rituals. But I miss being with people who share this love and passion for the Lord and His Word and believe it is Living ... not just a book with guidelines and a history of miracles ... but a Living Being that speaks to my heart and in a most personal way. Like a love letter. That love makes me want to change and believe that I'm not alone, that I don't have the strength or power to succeed, alone. I have a Supernatural Helper, a Father that guides and protects me. He was there when I was in pain as a child, He's here in my pain as an adult. He is my reason I am.
I want to find a church that is growing and loving in His Word. I will know when I find it, just as I know when I read and feel His Shepherding, His love, His forgiveness, His Purpose for me. Is there that kind of home church out there?
I'm sure I have more resolutions and these all sound really generic. Maybe I'll return to add more, if needed. Or maybe this is enough, for the years are getting shorter. It is becoming more apparent to me that I will not make the transformation needed in this life time. I will forever fall short of what I need to be.
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