"Where is balance in your life?" the question is our homework assignment from the circus lessons coach.  I've considered my answer and I'm happy with it.

I am seen, known, and loved for who I am.  I dwell in my close relationships with my husband, son, and besties.  I enjoy my home.  My daily routine generates only a minimum of stress for me.  My life is safe, secure, and stable. 

Rooted in this place of comfort and warmth, I'm reaching out, stretching, and challenging myself. The vital tension between comfort and growth is how I'm balanced.

At 45 years old, my heaviest weight, and lowest level of physical fitness, I'm enrolled in circus lessons and enjoying them.  I just received my A1C (blood sugar) test results - my highest/worst numbers to date.  So, J and I have embarked on a focused and intentional diet to bring my blood sugar back within healthy boundaries and maybe shed some pounds in the process.  I'm walking in the evenings, inconsistently but persistently.  I'm tending to my body, my physical self care and presence, in new and supported ways.

I've planned a solo adventure.  In October, I'm attending the Evolving Faith conference in Denver. The ideas, experiences, and emotions of how one's spirituality and/or religion may change over time is one of my passionate interests. Ultimately, I'll be traveling alone to meet and engage with strangers, pushing through the membranes of my introversion.  

It's been almost a year since I created and hosted my first retreat.  It went smoothly yet it left me exhausted and sensitive to all the areas for improving the event.  It also reminded me of how much I value and enjoy small gatherings of women talking together about substantive, real-life, heartfelt topics. This year I'll host more of these group conversations in my home, starting with one this month.  And, I'm revising the retreat for a new participants.  

There are more ideas for stretching still percolating through my mind, but this is where I'm balancing, today.  It's a vibrant, creative, growing space between the comforts of home and the unknown out there.  

​Me, eating an egg McMuffin, at the beach, in my car, alone, on a Saturday afternoon.  This instance of peace and luxury thanks to a fine young man called The Babysitter.   

This is what 40-ish years of friendship looks like!

But what do I see?  In my vanity, I see me.  I see pudgy fingers, too full face-chin-neck, an oversize sweatshirt stretched over the too round belly.  I see fluffy white old lady hair.  This is not the me I want to see.  This me doesn't look like... me.

Little N picks on me mercilessly about my current weight and size.  He calls me "fatty" and criticizes my too big butt.  His father, L, didn't talk to me exactly that way, but he, too, made it clear to me that I didn't look the way that he wanted me to.  According to him, and to Little N, I used to be beautiful.  I must complete an ambitious series of changes in a short amount of time in order to be beautiful... and worthy, and not teased or criticized, and good enough, again.

Usually I can resist the harsh criticism of my appearance.  I can say back that I'm working on my health and that human bodies change with age.  I can tell myself that the ideal they are comparing me to is a societal norm and unrealistic.  But then I see a photo of myself and I'm startled and sad to see what I've become.

I don't like how I look.

I don't need to look young. Right?  I need to look like me.  So what does "me" look like at 40+?  What do I want my physical appearance to convey to my partner, my friends, my critics, and everyone else about myself?

I want to exude qualities like: capable, competent, strong, smart, creative, present, attentive, real, genuine.  Translating these things into cultural or societal parlance is tricky.  Because so often they are only seen as young and thin.  I'm not getting younger.  I may get thinner but I doubt I'll ever be thin again.  So how and where do I, as me, show up?

There's another piece to this besides how I look.  I'm 43 and a half.  My father was 44 when he died.  So I've set myself a goal of practicing good health habits in such as way that they're my baseline lifestyle by 44.  Roughly six months to adopt all the good information I've learned from the naturopath​ and therapist and make it mine. Make it me.  Six months to transform my body inside and out.  

It took years for my body to take on its current appearance.  Years of struggling with an unsupportive spouse.  Working dead end jobs.  Wrestling with my mental health.  Comforting myself with food.  Flailing in the absence of the skills and information necessary to make my body healthy.  

So I don't expect six months to return me to a lithe 120-ish pound size four with a lustrous bob and stylish clothes.  I do expect to improve my bloodwork for sugars and cholesterol.  Shed a few pounds.  Drop a size (or two...).  Decrease my windedness.  Increase my stamina.  Live a more active lifestyle.  And generally feel more like me.  ​

My hope is that when I feel more like me, then I'll look more like me.  A makeover from the inside out.  Where the inside is more important and urgent, and the outside is granted patience and grace.  From me, to me.  

I've been sick for about 2 weeks now.  I'm not as sick today as I was a week ago.  I'm back at the office.  I'm holding things together.  But weighing me down more than illness is Little N.

He's angry. Every evening after school.  Every morning when he wakes.  At me.

When I pick him up from school he swears at me and flips me off, calls me names, teases me about my weight, tells me that I'm dumb, erupts at anything I say, any move I make.  When he rises in the morning he bellows for me to get up and starts issuing demands.  It's near constant.  It's exhausting.  It's wrong.  

His anger is justified but misdirected and abusive.  He wants to be with his dad.  His dad has moved out of state.  He blames me.  For everything.  All day.  

I don't know how to correct him.  To let him feel his anger, get it out, and treat me with respect, all at the same time.  The questions stew and stir in my mind and my heart.  

There's a line in an Ani song, "We never see things changing, we only see them ending."  I hope that this is the pain of things changing.  And not the grief of an ending.  

Little N and I have been suffering a terrible cold. It's brutal - coughing up crud, oozing goo out the nose, headache and body aches, firey throat... But let me tell you, I like being sick.  Not the sickness part of it so much, but the permission to rest, to detach from the haste and obligations of daily life, to watch the light make its way around our rooms until darkness settles in.  The time and space to just be.

That is how we recover from illness - sleep and fluids.  It's one way that I recover from life.  A little respite from the requirements.  A little grace for something more real.

The dissonance is a kind of pressure on me.  What is real to me versus what is required.  The requirements get so much more time, attention, and money, than what is real.  And the pressure makes me so very tired.  It's hard to think, hard to make decisions, hard to create anything, to connect with people, hard to find any inspiration.  

My younger self, even up to a couple of years ago, rarely got sick but often took mental health days.  I would just get so fatigued... I'd check out for a day or a long weekend, recover myself, and return to work.  But since starting this job I've seen my sick days increase - to include actual illness.  I try to manage it pretty closely so that I'm not penalized for my days off, but between "reactivated mono" last year and this terrible cold this year, my data points aren't looking very good.  I care and I don't.  Because I know that I need the job to pay for my life.  Because the job is so stinking meaningless and gets in the way of what is meaningful to me. 

Meaningful is friendship, care-giving and care-receiving.  It's creating.  It's movement. Thinking.  Reading.  Sharing ideas, time, creations. Autonomy.  Interaction.  And in my current configuration of job, commute, parenting, money... I don't get to meaningful as often as I seem to want to... need to.  I suspect that if my job offered more meaning, or if my daily routine offered more time for what is meaningful to me, my body would be healthier, my immune system stronger.  

So I get sick.

Of course, sickness isn't actually a solution to the problems of meaning.  When I'm sick I can't actually do the things that are meaningful to me.  Sickness is a limbo space.  Where I float between rote obligation and meaningful connection.  Where I rest and regain the energy and perspective to continue to live in the tension between what affords my life and the little bit of life that I get to live genuinely.