Teenagers, Broken Bodies, Goddess Within

Remember when a shower was refreshing?  It was a way to wake you up, make you feel clean and relaxed and ready for your day.  Now, it is a thing to be feared.  I want to take a shower every day, but I can barely remember when they felt good.  Now it is just fucking exhausting.  I hate taking a shower. 

However, a few handy tips I can give here are these..  First I live with boys and hesitate to lay down in my tub..  I have to trust them to scrub it out because fibromyalgia, scrubbing the tub was one of the first things to go.  Okay, I digress..  lay down in your tub, fill it with water and put Epsom salt in there.  Yes, I know that sounds like bullshit.  How could that work?  Well, I thought that forever and then I took one..  it works.  Don’t ask me how.. but it does.

                My kids are teenagers.  Both boys.  One is 18 and one is 16.  My older boy is hopefully going through a phase, because if he doesn’t shape up, there is no telling what I might do.  He is angry that I got sick when they were tweens and that I messed up a lot of years for them.  It took me a long time not to get mad at that fact.  I am suffering, how dare he chastise me for it?  Remember, your family suffers too, and there is very little they can do to help.

 

                Be prepared for a possibly difficult time when dealing with your kids and your illness.  I am able to talk to my husband, about my journey and the things I am learning.  My son, however, still asks every single time I tell him to do something because I can’t, he has the same reaction “huff puff, roll his eyes, then ask me why the hell I can’t do it”.  Now the real clincher here is that I swore I would stop talking about my fibro.  I rarely allow myself to say the word in the house.  So what to do?  For now I just walk away, this is another unsolved issue for me.

This is obviously one of those situations where I am between a rock and a hard place.  He wants to pick the fight and if my husband isn’t around he follows me if he is feeling extra nasty that day and it is easy to ignore, but my body can’t.  My mind is fine, but as I am wont to say to my husband “tell that to my nervous condition”.  It takes me hours to calm down.  I know that he is getting his teenage aggression out on me, but I swear I am THIS close to knocking his head off. 

If you are the parent of a teenager, one piece of advice I can give you is this one; when they are acting like little ass holes, they are venting.  Even if they are saying horrible things to you, or yelling at you, or showing you no respect, that is their way to process, try not to let it hurt your feelings… It’s all them.  It has nothing at all to do with you. 

Shower tips, I turned a 5 gallon bucket over and covered it with a towel and took a shower that way, easy to maneuver around and stand up, because you aren’t starting from a lay down position.  I have my hair in dread locks.  Not because I don’t want to wash it, I still have to and it is actually a bit more difficult, worth it.  I wanted them all my life, I started this new version of myself and I wanted dreads, so I have them.

Let people back into your life slowly.  Friends leave you, they think you are a spaz and don’t want to be around you.  You will find new ones.  There is something to be said for putting our visions for ourselves and our dreams in our minds, I promise you..  4 years spent in bed, 2 of them trying to stop my heart every day with my mind. 

I put on facebook that I needed a tie dyed Mary Poppins.  It came true thanks to my good friend, she knew exactly who I was looking for and we are now best friends on the internet.  Never met in person, but when you have fibro it is hard to get out, nice to have digital versions.  Also, I can keep up with my thoughts when I type, not so much when I am talking out loud.  I get all skippy and strange, then people look at me weird and I don’t want to tell them anything is wrong and it’s a horrible situation, one I am still working on a solution for.

I recommend that you get a letter from a doctor saying that you have fibro.  I don’t know if it will work with police, but we have to be careful.  Now I go out and I smile when I can’t walk, I laugh when I go down…  I look like a drunk person.  With the way police jump the gun we need to be very careful.  Let them know immediately that you have a nervous condition.  (It’s neurological, not nervous, but nervous is easier to remember).  Have the letter if you can.  I worry about my warriors..  be careful if this happens to you.

My husband took the dog for a walk today and I sat here while he was out and I got sad.  I want to take the dog for a walk.  Granted, the flare I am having today makes it tougher, but it is still out of the question.  It’s normal to still get sad.  It’s normal to want to kick something (I used to have dreams and I would wake myself up kicking), it’s normal to feel like you are broken..  You are broken.  It’s okay though, because broken things remake themselves into something new, stronger than you thought possible, and amazing…  even with all your quirks and shit you do.

Laugh it off and fight on....