One You

You only get one You. While I like to compare my body to a garden, a car, or a well-oiled machine, it’s not. The difference is, if I don’t take care of my car, I can get another one. If I let my garden go to weeds or find out that the soil is all rocks and salt- I can go and garden somewhere else. But my body? This is all I get.  It’s more like having one car all your life; only one garden in one place- and the climate that comes with it. There are no new car lots at which to cash in or trade up, no farmer’s market to substitute for the tilling and planting you have to do yourself. That’s the body. 

The View

I went in to work facing mountains of paper and lists of things to do. It was an avalanche waiting to crush me. I sat in a chair, staring straight ahead. I started to work on a small piece of it. It felt like trimming the toenail of a giant I could not conquer. 

I went home to another range of mountains. This time, many were posing as harmless crops and fields to be cultivated for the proverbial greater good or a seemingly worthy cause.  But, I thought, All of this is killing me, slowly, deliberately, one stressful toxin at a time. I could feel myself suffocating, sweating; headache and exhaustion from the thought of it; fear of a new mountain pushing its head up through a volcanic floor. I needed to move away from the mountains, or move the mountains away from me, or close the admissions window to all new mountain-creating customers.

Tree House: The Next Generation

How much of our stressful culture do we pass on to our children? I question that children always do what we say- but they definitely do what we do. I have often seen myself unintentionally following the patterns of my parents. I’m sure that I am passing information on to my own children as well, but I don’t know which messages are getting through.

In 2006, I built a tree house with my son. I did this because I traveled extensively and I wanted him to remember us doing something together. I also did this because I didn’t want him to perceive his mom as a mad woman who was forever stressed out, always running to save everyone’s world but her own.

At the time, he was about 9 or 10 and I was looking for a project that would engage us both. I have wanted a tree house since I was a girl. As an adult, I secretly bought a book, Tree Houses You Can Actually Build (by David and Jeanie Stiles, 1998). The most telling information it revealed was that tree houses are as unique as the trees they are built in and the people who build them. It was full of pictures. I dusted it off and handed the book to my son. He sounded like me 40 years ago. “Mom, these are sooo cool! Can we build one?” I told my husband that we were headed off to the hardware store to get materials. His response was brief: “I had a tree house once. It was a plank balanced on a couple of branches about 20 feet up in a tree that I climbed every day.” Back then there were no child safety laws; you just looked down and knew not to slip.