Romancing Without Defiance

Maybe I, undeniably, am a peculiar person. I mean, how many people are passionately in love with their spouse after twenty years?

I, literally, cannot live with out Hubby. I’ve tried a few times. Each time I have ended up with emotional and physical problems. The emotional ones are easy to understand. A person gets use to having another person around, so when that other person is not there, there’s grieving and loneliness. Sometimes those emotions can get out of hand. There are drugs for things like this. The physical problems are what freak me out. I can’t sleep or eat. My body aches as if I have a cold. My hearing goes on the frits. I just know that someone is going to say it’s psychosomatic and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Admitting this doesn’t make the symptoms go away unfortunately.

My sister-in-law, Leanne (not her real name) thinks we’re dirty. . . filthy because Hubby and I express passion so much of the time. We aren’t obscene in any way. We are just publicly affectionate. I don’t see many couples who have been together twenty years or more behaving this way but we don’t see anything wrong with it. Both of us feel that many marriages would be better if the couples would behave more like we do.

When did people get to be so puritanical? I thought that type of behavior was done away with during the rebellion of the 1960s and early 1970s. You know, make love, not war. One of the main points of that era was to get some sensitivity back into the general character of human beings. Did society lose it again during the corporate years of the 1980s? Whatever has happened since the Viet Nam War has ended is disgusting.

My niece and her husband never even seem to exchange knowing looks. I see the husband trying to be more affectionate towards my niece but I see my niece brushing him off. Did she just marry him so that she wouldn’t have to work a fulltime job or live with her parents? It makes me sad when I look at these two because the husband so obviously loves her and she just does not seem to give a damn. Of course, my niece has not gotten a very good example from her parents. Although it seems to be fine to hug a parent, parents hugging each other in that household appear to be frowned upon. Leanne has gone so far as to ask Hubby and me to tune it down at their house. We don’t even feel that we can hold hands at their house now.

From what I have observed in everyday life, most of society is this way once again. Anything that was learned during the hippie era has been forgotten. Our world is in a bad state of affairs.

The Battle of Weight

I have been fighting my weight my entire life. It's exhausting to say the least. At the tender age of four, a photo was taken of me standing on the driveway with my duck-sunglasses on. I was trying to show off my sunglasses but what is obvious in the photo is my round little belly under the cotton top I was wearing. Nothing has ever changed.

When I was in high school, I teetered back and forth between a size eleven and thirteen. I know! There are girls out there now who say they feel skinny in a sixteen. Somehow it has become okay to be overweight. I never thought I looked as good as most of my classmates and yet, by today's standards, I would have been considered slim or at least okay. I know that this extra weight isn't good for general health, as if any teenager really cares about something like that. Actually a lot of them do care about their weight but are at a loss as to what to do about it. There's no one at home to moniter what they are eating because "mom" and "dad" both work. After all, what their child is wearing to school is more important that the child's health or well-being.

I made it all the way to obesity level topping out at 180 lb. Yes, I know. There are those who would love to be that weight. That does not make me feel any better. What is so strange is that when I stopped doing so much and not freaking out about the cookie I just ate, that is when I started losing some of that weight. Get this: I was living with my mother-in-law too. You would think that living with in-laws would create stress that would show up in weight. During that time, I did try to be more calm, easy-going because I knew that being a anxiety ridden lunatic would make things unbearable for everyone. There were days when I had to work doubly hard at it but there were also days that seemed to float as if they were silk. By the time two years had rolled by, I had lost 40 lb. without trying. I had gone down three dress sizes.

I still wasn't where I wanted to be but I was a hell of a lot closer. I needed to lose twenty more pounds. That's when hubby and I got our house. I thought maybe doing more around the house would shed some of those pounds but it didn't.

Then I went into a rehabilitation program for my disability to get some home exercises and some more adapted skills for the computer. I was hoping this would assist me in losing weight but it didn't. In fact, I have gained five pounds that will not come off.

I stayed home from the rehabilitation program this week because of a cold. Maybe I could have gone and learned something but I didn't want this cold to turn into a strep virus. Besides, I need some time to think, reflect, regroup.

One thing that I have thought about was that my eating habits have changed. I need to go back to what I was eating before. This means no more saltine crackers despite the fact that I get the ones without any salt. This means I start having yogurt every day. They come pre-measured so that I won't be as tempted to have more than one serving. In fact, I need to start watching my servings on everything including vegetables. Well -- maybe I can eat celery as much as I want. Yep, I will still be having desserts but I will be especially careful on the serving size. You know that big spoon in your silverware drawer? The one you rarely use because you have those nice plastic ones that you keep close to the stove? That's a serving size- - at least approximately. For food that needs to be served in a bowl, usually a serving size is 3/4 cup to one cup.

What changes do you make when you are fighting the battle of weight?

Maybe this will help --

I have a blog here at Bloggers already but it's a private one. . . at least for right now. I use it to write my stories which I'm not keeping up with right now because I'm spending 4 days a week at a rehab. center that is about 2 1/2 hours from where I live. I am currently blogging about it at Impressions of Life, my blog at Wordpress.Com.

Nonetheless, here I am starting another blog. Will I finally get the guts to really write what I feel and want to write? That's what I'm hoping for anyway.