Single Mom Gets New Roommate

In a single week this June, my daughter turned 18 and graduated high school. Now it’s September and the kids are shouldering their backpacks and sharpening their pencils, but in our house it’s still Summer Vacation. There are Back to School signs in the store windows, but instead of settling my girl into a tiny dorm room somewhere halfway across the country, I have a new roommate. In certain key ways, she’s very like my old roommate. Except she’s an adult! This is exciting!

She’s taking a gap year - a phenomenon that only seems to have sprung into existence in the last ten years. When I finished high school, it was called Not Going to College Yet. She launched into her year of adventure with a six-week backpacking trip around Europe and Morocco with her boyfriend. Now she is home and she is my new roommate.

It occurred to me shortly after her return from Europe that I was no longer the parent of a child and it was thus no longer my responsibility to keep the fridge stocked at all times with tasty, nutritious, affordable food. If you have read any of my former posts, you will know that I’ve never been any good at this anyway. But now it turns out I don’t have to be. Because I share my house with my adult daughter and she has a car and she knows where United Markets is!

There are other advantages to sharing my house with my adult child, if that is not a contradiction in terms. These are as follows: I don’t have to do laundry or clean or wash dishes. Because my roommate will be doing all of this. Soon. 

The other day, my new roommate informed me that our sheets smelled bad, and this was because I had left them in the washer too long. I tried explaining that I had not been home when the wash cycle finished, but this did not stand up in court. Apparently, I should not do laundry unless I am going to be home for the entirety of both cycles. Who knew?!

However, the problem of poor smelling sheets will soon be solved, because NR will be doing the laundry. I’m excited.

I threw a dinner party the other night. It was a complex meal, one that I love to make for dinner parties because it is very tasty (Irish cooking has two secrets to its success: butter and cream) but it sure uses a lot of dishes. Late that night when the guests left, the whole kitchen was hidden beneath piles of dirty dishes. Three days later this was still the case. I know, that’s really bad housekeeping and irresponsible and could invite cockroaches into our home. The only reason I am admitting to it is to explain that my new roommate’s powers of observation seem a bit sub-par. Of course, they were my dirty dishes and I should have washed them. But I was busy. And my roommate seemed just fine with living without a kitchen for a few days. The existing dirty dishes were added to by bowls of half-eaten cereal. I am not sure how this will play out.

The fridge also remained unchanged for a while. At first glance, it looked pretty full, but as my new roommate loves to point out, when our fridge is full its fullness consists mostly of a) condiments, b) bread in various stages of decay and c) cheese. This is because I love to cook elaborate meals for dinner parties but when I’m alone I like to dine on cheese sandwiches. It’s not that I’m lazy. Good grief. Just that by the time I notice I am hungry, I am way too hungry to endure the preparation time for a healthy nutritious meal. I must eat, immediately, and thus l make a cheese sandwich.

The other day NR informed me that she wished to go grocery shopping. I showered cash on her immediately. That night the fridge was full of tasty nutritious food. It felt great. Then both of us weren’t home much for a few days because we are busy and important. Some of the food went off. I threw it out, feeling terrible. Then our fridge was full mainly of condiments and the ingredients for cheese sandwiches.

I’m not saying anything. Really, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut. This is me, shutting up about it. As my eldest brother once ruefully commented on the subject of parenting, saying I told you so just isn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be. Plus the local Home Goods just reopened, after a 9-month closure following its roof falling in. We have decided we are going shopping for new bedding in order to solve the laundry problem at least for a few weeks. Turns out my new roommate thinks just like I do. I believe this is going to work!

Single Mom. Teen Daughter. Very Old Shoes. Ice Cubes.

Those things in the title may not seem like they have a whole lot of cohesion, as blog post titles go, apart from the fact that my teen daughter is clearly related to me by birth, I possess some very old shoes, and I sometimes manage to have ice cubes in my freezer for the formation of iced drinks as well as the healing of inflammatory injuries of the body. 

Actually, all four things have a sort of subtle relation to one another in terms of the fact that lately I have been feeling my age. My age is 52, and the sole reason I am feeling it, apart from insomnia, night sweats, mood swings, sudden irrational crying fits, and trouble getting up at 6:30am to go to the gym, is that I injured myself biking and it’s taking longer than anticipated to heal.

If you have read previous blog posts, you may have noticed that I rode 300 miles in early July to raise money for climate action. To keep things short, for those who did not read my ten thousand page post, I did an independent challenge Climate Ride and pedaled my road bike out my door, up to Mendocino, and back over four days to raise awareness of the perilous future facing our planet. The ride was epic, I had a fantastic time, and after I came home I discovered I could not really walk or even just lie down without pain.

For a while after the ride, I thought I had just stressed my body beyond the limits of normal endurance. It would soon go away, the pain, would it not? After all, I had done a 320-mile climate ride a year before without any bodily injury so I naturally assumed I could just keep doing these crazy things with no repercussions. I was, I confess, annoyed that my body had not fully cooperated with the insane task I had set it. Had I not trained for months? Was I not near peak fitness when I rode out my door? So why were there unidentified shooting pains all down both legs to my feet?

When the pain persisted for more than a week, I sprang into the kind of action that all nurses take when they are injured. I did nothing at all, soldiered on with daily life, and continued to hope it would all just go away. 

When this approach failed to work, I spent a few weeks not riding my bike (sensible) or doing much at the gym (also sensible) and failing to seek medical attention (not so sensible). Eventually, after an undisclosed amount of time and several trial bike rides that resulted in renewed pain, I made an appointment with Ron Solari.

Ron is a chiropractor and a healer of indescribable talent. As soon as I explained my issue to him, he knew a) exactly what was wrong, b) how to fix it, and c) when I could be back on my bike. And he was right. And this is why everyone who knows him, and all of you who do not yet know him, love Ron Solari.

Ron told me to do 20 pelvic tilts twice a day and a stretch he calls Number Four. If I were a yoga practitioner, Number Four might present me with no big issue, but as you may already know I’m not a yoga practitioner, nor do I stretch before or even after my epic bike rides, which may have something to do with why I got impacted vertebrae at the base of my spine after riding to Mendocino and back. Three hundred miles in four days: crazy. Not stretching before, after, or during: very crazy.

Now I have spent a week doing pelvic tilts BID (that’s nursing speak for twice a day, just thought I’d throw it in to give myself a shred of validity in the face of my gross failure to take care of the temple of my body) and the painful Number Four stretch. And Ron has adjusted my misaligned and impacted spine twice. And I really think I’m going to be ok. Tomorrow, I’m getting up at 6:15 and I’m going for a bike ride at 6:30. I cannot wait to tell you how pain free I will be afterwards. Do not go away.

The shoe thing: I’m going to skip over it to the ice cube thing because that is more related to Ron Solari and the age-related rubbishy nature of my body. As I left his office this afternoon, I remembered to mention to him that I also have acute tendonitis in my right elbow. I remembered to mention this to him at the very tail end of my treatment for vertebral compression, because it is so painful I can no longer lift my coffee cup without wincing. Ron asked whether I thought it was related to my bike riding? Or my job? Do you lift patients, he asked solicitously? I admitted that I was no longer able to lift a piece of paper without pain. Oh, he said knowingly yet completely without judgement, you’re there.

Long story short, and skipping over the part where you judge me because I’m lousy at self care and allow my body to become seriously debilitated before I consider it worth mentioning to a health professional, Ron’s immediate advice was succinct and focussed. Every night, he said with the intensity he reserves for his treatment instructions, I want you to hold an ice cube against your elbow until it melts. That will be long enough. Then, he continued, not letting up with the intensity, I want you to do these two exercises. He showed me the exercises. I committed them to memory, along with the ice cube instructions. My elbow has been hurting with gradually increasing hurtingness for months. Maybe a year. I knew that in two minutes, I was receiving the verbal cure. I was to do this for three days, Ron said, and then return to him for an ultrasound.

I left his office, after paying his ridiculously paltry fee, only just managing not to bow down to the ground to pay homage to him. He’d hate that. He just likes to fix people. 

Turns out it’s really difficult to hold an ice cube against your elbow until it melts. I imagined, what, a minute? Two? It’s longer than that, but it still shouldn’t really be that difficult. Unless you are someone like me who can’t just sit on the couch holding an ice cube against their elbow without a) emailing someone, b) changing the Spotify playlist, c) doing sit-ups or d) dusting the ceiling free of the spider webs noted while doing sit-ups. 

I held that ice cube against my swollen tendonitis-ridden elbow until it melted. But I dropped it a lot. It slipped out of my grasp while I was groping in the fridge for a La Croix. And it slid away from me while I texted with Jessie about her etsy store. It even went under the kitchen table as I was taking my bike out of the basement to prep for my ride at 6:30 tomorrow morning. Damn slippery little piece of ice, couldn’t you just melt already?

The shoe thing. If you aren’t convinced that I’m feeling my age from the compacted vertebrae or the tendonitis or the slippery ice cube, get this: I was walking downtown the other day to pick up the Jeep keys from Jessie. She was working at the Potting Shed, and a block away from there, I had the thought that the shoes I had chosen to wear were not only really old but had also never actually been comfortable. They looked good though, to me, and you know how that goes.

As I had that thought, the sole came completely off one of them. Just like when you get a flat tire on the freeway, it took me a couple of steps to realize that what felt really weird about my shoe was actually the fact that the sole had completely separated from the upper part and was flapping ridiculously. I took my shoes off so I could walk the block to the Potting Shed. It was Fairfax. A woman walking barefoot doesn’t exactly raise eyebrows.

When I got to her workplace, I told Jessie and her coworker about my shoe and we fell about laughing. I was laughing because of how I felt like a country and western song on legs. Turned out Jessie was laughing because it was so typical of stuff that would happen to her mom. Really? I am not sure why her coworker was laughing. But the belly laugh on a hot afternoon did us all good. And her industrious coworker glue-gunned the sole back on my shoe. 

Now I have perfectly serviceable shoes. I have a spine that is aligned and no longer features compacted vertebrae. And my chronic tendonitis is well on the way to being healed. I am a reasonably functional mother of a teen. And although I am fifty two years old, I only have insomnia, night sweats, mood swings, sudden irrational crying fits, and trouble getting up at 6:30am to go to the gym. So I figure I’m doing pretty good, considering.