Moving is an activity that will sure unearth memories. In the process of preparing to move, I have been going through stuff trying to throw or give away everything possible before the movers get here. I found a journal of things that happened when I was still married to a male and my boys were 2 and 4 years old. I will simply enter them here verbatim from my notes:

Family life just isn't what it's cracked up to be. Where's the deep and abiding sense of satisfaction? I have a deep and abiding sense of pain where Ben broke my ribs before he was even born. That was four and a half years ago. Arthritis has set in. Along with post-partum depression. I thought it would go away. Now I have Buster (not his real name, but it oughta be) and double depression. (Sort of like double pneumonia, you know?)

Trying to maintain the expressionless demeanor of the clinically depressed patient is hard with two criminally inclined children around. They keep doing things that force expressions onto my face. Like throwing kittens into the swimming pool. Or at each other. Kittens make effective weapons. Both children looked as if they'd been to war after the kitten battle. (The kittens looked ok though.)

Kids not only make me depressed, they make me feel stupid. One day I was chewing Ben out over some minor infraction or other when he suddenly cried out, as if in alarm, "Mom, you've got hair on your lip!" When I tried to brush the offending wisp away, he scornfully said, "Not a hair. HAIR! Like Dad. A moustache! The lecture was over. We had to make an emergency trip to WalMart for some moustache bleach.

Buster likes to hit people. I had told a friend how mean he was before she came to visit one day. She came for lunch and was utterly charmed by Buster. He told her she was pretty. He sat on her lap and said "I like you." He nestled his head into her shoulder and smiled a smile that would have made angels swoon. As my friend was leaving she commented how unjust I was to call this precious boy "mean." She spoke too soon. Buster had found a yardstick and whacked her across the butt with it right at THAT MOMENT. I was so vindicated!

I've tried many "techniques" on these guys. One that is frequently recommended is simply ignoring them. I've experienced little success with this. For example, recently Buster was whining "Mom, Mo-ooom, MOOOOOOOOOOOM." I ignored him. So he yells "CONNIE, I'M TALKING TO YOU!" How do you ignore that from a two-year-old??

I nursed my babies. Nursing is just wonderful. Wonderful until you're ready to wean the kid and he's old enough to say "NO WAY!" Ben was two and saying "tittie, I want tittie!" His sperm donor was saying the same thing. I finally yelled "they're MY titties and I don't want anyone to touch them EVER AGAIN!" Then everyone was depressed. Except me. No one touched me for two hours.

Pregnancy, oh pregnancy. Really depressing stuff. My first pregnancy, I was enormous. People would come up to me, this is true, and say "are you expecting?" "No" I'd say, patting my belly, "this is a tumor." Well, karma got me. My next pregnancy, my baby had a tumor. I was even more enormous than the first time, so now people came up to me and asked if I was having twins. "No," I'd say, I'm having a baby and a tumor." Thank god I've had a hysterectomy. I'd probably have twin tumors the next time.

Pregnancy destroys your sex life. You know how many sexual positions you can get into when your belly alone weighs sixty-seven pounds? Two. And one involves your mouth. Not that anyone WANTS to get into those positions with you. Pregnancy is a lonely time.

The bodily sensations engendered by pregnancy could have been invented by the Marquis himself. I did know ahead of time that my ligaments would loosen up as a result of hormonal activity. I didn't know that a result of that would be that whenever I moved, the place where my pelvic bones join in the front would grate together with a sensation that resembles the sound made by a fingernail on a chalkboard.

Bodily functions of other sorts take on a new importance with pregnancy. While pregnant I discovered where every bathroom was within a 250 mile radius of my home. I also found out all the places you can pee without a bathroom. I discovered new uses for ziplock bags. (After use they can be used as water balloons to throw at those annoying other drivers on the road.) No, I wouldn't really do that. I was a dignified pregnant lady, even if I did have to pee every six and a half minutes.

Babies can be loads of fun before they are born. If you scrunch your belly up real close to your significant other, baby will usually respond with some fairly potent kicks. You don't have to be the only one awake at 2:30 am. When the SO is thoroughly awake from the tattooing on his kidneys, you can innocently say, "Isn't it wonderful to feel our baby move!"

To be continued.....

For someone in the health field, I have always had a large antipathy toward healthy habits. I am fully aware that eating right, exercising, and refraining from smoking are far more effective ways of handling nearly all health problems than drugs, but I have never enjoyed doing those things. But lately my favorite ex-wife has bullied me into walking with her and though I hate to admit it, it feels GOOD. I have more energy. I am losing weight. My arthritis doesn't hurt as bad and I have less urge to smoke. I feel so *conventional*. But it is rather like starting a retirement account; conventional though it may be, it will serve to enhance my future. Hell, exercise is even enhancing my PRESENT.

So, I gripe and grumble, and I do it.

Charlotte and I take our dogs with us on these walks. They become ecstatic over "walkies.". I wish sometimes I could be more like a dog in my overall attitude toward life. Simple things like walks and rides in the car are sheer joy. Hurt feelings are forgotten immediately when something pleasant, like head patting or ear scratching, takes place. Finding the exact right spot to poop is cause for total contentment.

Dogs have what I think of as the Gomer Pyle philosophy of life. I used to love that show when I was a kid. Gomer always assumed the best of everyone, felt like life was good, and took everyone's intentions toward him to be good. And things worked out that way. As a natural-born moody, broody, depressive sort of person, it doesn't come naturally to me to behave like Gomer. But carefully titrated doses of anti-depressants, meditation, and years-long contemplation of Buddhist readings have convinced me that Gomer had the right idea. Being simple is the route to happiness.

I am moving in less than three weeks. I wish it were sooner. I am moving from a deeply rural area to a very small country town. It will be almost as different as moving to a real city in some ways. Water, for instance. For about the last 40 years the water I have consumed at home has come from a well on the land I lived on. Not that I had to draw it up in a bucket or anything, but I have never had to PAY for water. I will be living in a house that has "city" water. This wondrous new home will also have city sewage. Cable TV (and MODEM!) Modern amenities.... And I will not mind never needing to have a septic tank pumped again. That is a most unpleasant experience. People who drive those honey-bucket trucks tend to be inebriated much of the time. They come to your house, dig around to find the edges of the top of the septic tank, then they dig the dirt, grass, and flowers off the top, pry it up, and expose weeks worth of your family's offal to your amazed and deeply offended nostrils. A large bore bit of tubing is placed into the mess and a pump turned on. The honey-dipper (or, more accurately, pumper) then leans on his shovel and waxes loquacious. The alcohol fumes on his breath are pleasant compared to those emanating from the malfunctioning septic tank. Do not get me wrong here; I do not begrudge a few drinks to a person doing this sort of work. I have more than once topped off such a one with whatever spirits I happened to have on hand. It costs $150 to have your septic tank pumped where I live. Worth every penny too.

City water should be interesting. Living with a well and a pump means if your electricity goes out, so does your water. And the power goes off with distressing frequency out here. Like every time it rains or the wind blows. I can do without power, but I MUST have my shower! So methinks I will like living with city water.

I have lived in my present home for 10 years. I was married when I moved here, and have divorced that husband and been through two wives since then. It is time to live in a house without the ghosts of relationships past in it. And it will be the first time I ever selected and bought a house ALL BY MYSELF! I feel so empowered.

It is a small house. It has everything I need. Room for my sons and pets, a yard small enough to manage with a push mower and not a tractor, and best off all, it has a pool. Pisces that I am, I feel I need a pool. I have at times claimed that having a pool was for my kids, but it is really for me. I sincerely wanted to grow up to be a mermaid so I could stay in water all the time, but it didn't happen. So I just spend as much time in the shower, tub, and pool as I can.

and it is late, I am going to pack one more box and then lie in my bed and daydream about my new home.

A long long time ago, I wanted to save lives, help people, and generally be a hero. I became a nurse. What I found out is that sometimes it isn’t in a person’s best interest to save his/her life; that what I see as “help” is sometimes not at all what a person wants or needs; and that being a hero is vastly overrated.

However, I am still a nurse. In fact, I have been back to school enough times that I am now a nurse practitioner. I work in a rural practice in South Georgia where I have learned what I love best in my chosen profession: sewing people up.

On a typical day I may treat high blood pressure, innumerable runny noses, and explain to a diabetic that even though he eats no sugar at all, the gallons of sweet tea he is DRINKING affects his blood sugar adversely. I have had to discuss the possible source of a sexually transmitted disease with a woman who is having sex with only one man. (“He doesn’t have sex with anyone else either -- except his wife...”) I have had to deny a prescription for vicodin to an angry teen who wants the narcotic for the headaches he gets whenever he has to go to school, and doesn’t understand why he can’t have it. I have struggled to get a parent to understand that her smoking in the house in her child’s presence has a direct and causative effect on the child’s asthma attacks.

Then one of the medical assistants tells me I have a laceration in the treatment room. Oh joy! A gaping wound, bleeding, pain with an observable, obvious cause! Something I can actually fix!

I sew well. My sutures are neat and evenly spaced. My knots are a thing of art. My scars are minimal and inoffensive. This is satisfaction. There are no cross-purposes to deal with. I want to sew, and the person with an open wound almost invariably wants it sewn up. The years and years of education, experience, practice -- these have made it possible for me to do this one simple thing I love -- sewing people up.