Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 23

Thanksgiving gratefulness

And a few other things.

Lots O' Green

I'm wearing a vintage green dress and I have two fun bags that I made for today's video. And a little breeze to send the floats across the pool behind me.

Grief in Routine Loss...Again

Let me preface this blog with, there is much I am grateful for right now. The list is much longer than what is frustrating me. However, every few weeks my irritation bubbles up from a variety of things that have been affected by the pandemic. I also know that when I might be experiencing some feelings, others are out there might be, too, and so I believe it’s important for me to write about the variety of feelings and emotions I travel through.

When I took Lilly out to run at 4:15 this morning, the darkness felt a little more eerie than usual. We started a two-week shutdown today and one of the major pieces that’s affecting my life is that the gym is closed. Some people will say, “But you run every day! You can’t miss the pool!”

But what most people don’t know is how important swimming is to my mental health. My pool is open, however, there is no way we can heat it (or pay to heat it!) to get it warm enough for me to swim in right now. Just Friday morning when I got in the pool for my swim at the gym, we had an amazing sunrise. I actually thought about getting out to take a photo of the pink and orange colors that were bouncing off the surface of the water, but I thought, No, I’ll get it another day.

I didn’t know that by that afternoon, I’d only get to swim the weekend– when I usually don’t swim– and not until December 1 (hopefully it’s only two weeks!). Today I feel like a piece of my routine is missing.

For nearly two months, Greg and I have been going five days a week (four for him– he teaches live on Mondays so I go without him) to swim and we both were starting to feel the results of our efforts. But I also just need that time of letting my mind wander as I go back and forth. Some days I don’t want to get out of the pool because I feel so much peace there. I told someone recently that it’s like the outside world can’t hurt me when I’m in the pool.

Take it away though and I feel sad because part of my routine has been yanked away from me. Even though it’s hopefully only for a short time, I feel like something has been ripped away and it has left me sad, angry and depressed.

We all know I have plenty to do- the list is long, the piles are high. I will be busy for two weeks. But that doesn’t mean that change has been forced upon me in a way I don’t like. I’ll have to work extra hard this week to be productive to distract my mind from lamenting what I miss.

Life is a continued road of adaption and in the past nine months we’ve had more than we wanted. Yet we have to continue to figure it out because each adaption makes us stronger and gives more purpose and meaning to our lives.

Retro Orange

Two orange Take Everywhere Bags made from vintage curtains and one fun vintage dress.

Finding Peace

This photo says so much to me.

It’s about continuing to keep walking, to keep looking for what I want, what I believe I need, where I want to be.

Last week was a difficult week. While I know for many people, it was about the election, it wasn’t that for me. Two people I know here in New Mexico died from the coronavirus last week. And I two women I know who were recently diagnosed with breast cancer. I felt covered with sadness.

However, I was feeling fairly productive because I had so little on my calendar and I wanted to make sure I made the most of that time. I kept one eye out on the news for election results, but I didn’t feel caught up in it.

But somewhere toward the end of the week I began to feel a peace inside myself.

I have found that when I let myself get back to God, to prayer, to reminding myself that God is walking with me, I feel better. I pray daily, that’s not an issue with me. But it’s easy to move on with my day and start to fight with everything– mostly the thoughts in my head that take me down roads I don’t need to see because they are negative and unproductive.

Yesterday the Archbishop of Los Angeles Jose Gomez reminded us in his homily that prayer can “settle the mind.”

It’s been easy to get caught up in what’s going on outside of us, in the world, in places we can’t control. But what we can control is what happens in our minds. I’ve been letting myself be outside of myself too much. The journey within brought me peace I haven’t found in some time.

My Ode to TaB Bucket Bag...and the Story Behind it

Patience

When I went to see Fr. Gene at the abbey a few weeks ago, he asked me what Our Lady of Guadalupe has been telling me lately. While I’m not sure I had thought about it beforehand, it didn’t take me long to answer.

Patience, it has been all about patience recently.

I remember when I was working with Fr. Josh in Naperville on my annulment and one day– I don’t remember the conversation around it– he said that he was talking more with Mary because she was a patience person and that he needed help with his patience.

As the pandemic has dragged out (I thought we would long be past it by now– silly me) and my work in many ways continues to hang in the balance (at this point I’m hoping that we can make it back to LA in March, no later than summer for the events that were canceled this year), what could be more harder than having to be patient?

I have plenty to do and each day I keep myself busy with a list of things to do so long that I never complete them. By Friday I wonder where the week went. And yet there is a part of me that has to constantly stay the course and keep myself from being distracted. My self talk is at an all-time high.

There are no other messages right now. It’s all about continuing to make the most of this quirky time. For me, I’m thinking of what I’d like to know I accomplished by the time it’s over. And in that same vein, I want to walk away knowing that this time was not wasted, that I’m a better person.

And being a better person also means I’ve become a more patient person. Guadalupe keeps telling me this and while sometimes I don’t understand what she’s talking about, I do know that somewhere along the line I do realize she was right.

Fall Color and Pumpkins

Meet the Chelle Summer Videos!

We made a little video yesterday of me talking about some of the inspiration behind my items. And be sure to watch until the end so you can hear my flub– what's in my head isn't always what comes out of my mouth! But please don't give it away in the comments! Let everyone hear for themselves!

New Routines

As I write this, it’s not yet 7:00 am on Monday morning. I can see some light through the window as the sun is starting to rise over the Sandia Mountains. I have run, but not swum yet and, therefore, not showered. Normally, I run and then shower and start my day.

But Mondays have a new routine– for three weeks, Greg and I have been swimming at the gym four mornings a week at 6:30 am. However, on Mondays he teaches live remotely (or is that remotely live– or do we even know?!) so I go to the pool a bit later. It seems that 8:00 am is my new time although when it cools down, I’ll shift to more like 10:00 and swim in the warmth of the sun.

A sadness waves over me occasionally for my routines that have been disrupted and changed because of the pandemic. If Greg were at school teaching, I would swim later everyday. There’s a benefit that we get to go together four days a week, but I’m also still adjusting to running and swimming all in one shot rather than dividing them up into separate parts of the day.

The list is long of things that have changed: our favorite Vietnamese yesterday has closed, but she, thankfully, is waiting on her last inspections to open in a new location. I will miss the old location, not a great area of town, but as Greg said, “edgy.” Now she will be in something more like a strip mall of restaraurants, more central for people to find her and her wonderful food. I am happy for her. But I will miss the drive between church and her old location. Now it will be freeway to freeway.

In some ways our lives haven’t changed at Casa Solano mostly because I’ve worked at home the bulk of my career. However, what makes me unhappy are the changes that have been forced on me, like that I’m grounded for now from traveling. We can’t risk exposure for Greg as we await his return to the classroom and with so few hospital beds in the state, we also have to be cognizant of wondering “what if” one of us got sick. The flip side is that I don’t believe we will get sick, but I also don’t want to test that statement. So we aren’t traveling for now and instead focused on making home better and what projects travel sometimes puts a kink in.

There is a grief in all that we do when our routine changes, whether by choice or beyond our control. I have tried to embrace all these changes, but there have been many at once which makes it more challenging.

And somewhere deep inside of me, I do believe all will be great again. I hold onto that when the sadness blankets me as I watch things continue to change.

Grieving For What Never Was

My dad died on January 1, 2006, and my mom died in late March 2014. I’ve had plenty of time to not just incorporate their deaths into my life, but to turn around and examine what their lives meant to me.

Because of social media, we have more access to the events of each other’s lives and I it feels like more often than not, someone I know has had a parent die. I don’t often get to do more than tell someone I am sorry for what they’re going through and to let them know that I’m sending them healing energy.

That’s because I often have a different perspective on loss and I’m careful not to step on the toes of people’s pain. But there is something I see that others don’t because long ago someone told this:

When our parents die, we don’t necessarily grieve for what we have lost than we grieve for what we never had.

I believe that our parents have done the best they could. They made the decisions that they believed in that moment were the right ones to make (and, of course, we thought were totally wrong!). No one is perfect (sorry, to burst someone’s bubble today!) and when we look at the lives of others, sometimes we see what we didn’t get (usually emotionally) from our own parents, but someone else is. Maybe we were abused in some way. Or many our parents were simply emotionally distant. There are a list of things I could put here, but that’s not what this is about.

Instead, it’s about the acknowledge that we are grieving for what we never had, what they might not have ben capable of giving us. Just because people become parents doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what they really wanted, rather than what society said they should do. That might have left them resentful of having to raise these little people they didn’t want in the first place.

When people die, we often get caught on the train of how wonderful someone was. Sure, that’s great for the funeral and having something to discuss with all the people who contact us, but at someone point we need to round out that person to who they really were. Good, bad, and otherwise.

Just acknowledging that the challenges in the relationship open the door to making someone into the rounded character they really were in our lives. And it then that we can fully travel the grief journey that allows us to put that grief in its place so we can truly move forward.