Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 49

Thanks, Mom

My Mother's Days are not like the ones that I grew up with: picking up a Baker's Square pie and getting together with all the aunts, uncles and cousins on the north side of Chicago to see my Grandma Zurawski. Or the much quieter ones where we drove to the south side of the city to visit my father's mother. Nor am I making any tissue paper flowers for my mom.

While it's obvious that I remember the good times about my mom, this time of year hits close to home with her birthday on the 12th (and my dad's on the 4th, their wedding anniversary on April 27). But as we are inundated with messages about mom and the gifts we should buy mom, I have to work extra hard to focus on how she made me the person I am as I pass this second Mother's Day without her.

The more time that passes since her death in March 2014, I am seeing with better clarity the spiritual side she installed inside me, sometimes quietly, sometimes more obviously.

She insisted we go to Mass on Saturday evenings although as I got older this disappeared (particularly as she went back to work). Afterwards we stopped at Oswald's Pharmacy and picked up the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune and a box (yes, a box) of Jay's potato chips that she would open and eat as we all devoured the newspaper around the kitchen table (it wasn't more more than the comics for me in the those days though).

There were the sacraments and the big party with the family and the cake to celebrate the first communion. Mine included the first time she would curl my hair with a curling iron. And there were all the times we stopped at the church when we were in the area downtown Naperville and she would make us go in with her to light a candle.

I asked her about this a few years ago and she looked at me and wondered, "Don't you remember how I would tell you we were going for a visit?"

I didn't remember nor do I remember a lot of other things. But she carried a glass rosary in her purse, the same one that will be wrapped around my bouquet on my wedding day in June. And in the last year when she lived in Albuquerque with me, I would find her outside on a bench by the pool praying her turquoise rosary (her "Albuquerque beads" she called them), all four dogs sitting around her.

I don't know what she prayed for. I know many times she was disappointed because she had been raised to believe the Catholic church would be there for her. And then it wasn't.

But I do see now that she gave me a coping skill I didn't know I had. As I travel through life, continued to be faced with challenges, I see now how her faith was passed onto me and that has helped me cope. Without it, where would I have turned? While it was something I denied for a long time, it was always there waiting for me for the day when I realized I needed to use it.

All because Mom made sure it was there.

Thanks, Mom.

Something Borrowed

It was easy to come up with something new: my dress. Then something old: Mom's pearls. We bought something blue, a turquoise ring, at a shop in Gallup. But something borrowed? That one took a while.

I asked my future mother-in-law if I could borrow a pair of pearl earrings and when she came to visit last week she brought me something to similar that I will wear. But during that time, someone else asked me what I might need.

I have known Sharron and Denny since elementary school. Sharron was one of the moms who drove our CCD carpool to church, their middle daughter my age. I didn't see them after we graduated from high school but all these years I ran by their house and when I was back home during that year and a half I lived in my hometown.

It was my realtor who suggested Denny to help me ready my house to go on the market and it was good to get caught up with Sharron and Denny even in the last months I lived there. Denny painted my kitchen (while I painted the den) and helped me with some other assorted projects.

The night before Mom and I moved to Albuquerque, they had us over for what we all jokingly called "The Last Supper." And last summer when Greg and I were in town, they invited us to dinner so they could meet Greg.

However, they won't be at the wedding because Denny is weak from cancer and by asking me if I needed to borrow anything was Sharron's way of being at my wedding in some way. And with the energy of over forty years of a strong marriage, I am excited to wear her pearl bracelet. 

And each time I'll look at it, I'll know that Sharron and Denny are with us, rooting us on for our new journey together.

Look Forward, Not Back

Every morning when Gidget and I set out on our run-walk, she keeps looking back. It drives me crazy because we're trying to get through a route and her looking back keeps us from going forward. Running competitively, I was always taught to not look back because the energy invested in turning your head and torso would slow you down. 

This morning I finally asked her, "Why is it that you can't look forward, you have to look back?"

This is true for many people who get caught in the past that they can't look forward; all they can think about is what happened in the rearview mirror. And it can be especially true for people who have suffered losses because their energy is tuned into what they don't have anymore. Looking back means they don't lose hold of that person or the memories.

But what people fail to realize is that even when you go forward, you don't lose the past or anything in it. That's yours to keep. But by constantly looking back you're devoting your energy into something that already happened, that has already passed. And by doing that, you're missing out on the future.

Just like Gidget forgets that home will be there in twenty minutes when we return. 

Thanking Chaco

When Chaco is sleeping, I often walk up to him and make sure he's breathing. With all the loss in my life, especially in the past year and the many young deaths I've experienced, I am well aware that none of us is promised anything. In 2009, my German Shepherd Daisy died at 5 1/2 of an aggressive, terminal cancer.

Chaco is fourteen and it's clear he's slowing down. While there was a time when the neighbor next door joked that I should wear roller blades to run Chaco and Nestle (when it was only the two of them) because they could take me as far as I wanted to go, Chaco has recently developed breathing problems and he can't run like he used to. One day at the park last week he ran with some other dogs and then stopped and you could see he realized that was about all he could do.

This is the same dog who sent me flying around the neighborhood, chasing him when he saw a cat or got scared (all documented in my book, Ginger's Gift: Hope and Healing Through Dog Companionship). While he wants to go out for his daily walk (once his daily run), he slowly is deteriorating and now dragging behind me. 

Every day I tell him that I love him and I'm thankful he's been in my life. I realize he could live for years, sleeping most of the day away in the guest room down the hall (not hearing makes it easier to drown out the noise of the others barking and me coming and going in and out of the house). 

He is still alert when he's up despite the fact that he's turning into Helen Keller with his eyesight deteriorating as well. He stands and wags his tail, he loves to eat, and he especially loves to lay by the pool and warm himself in the sunshine.

There's a reason we don't know the day any of us will die: it's because we should make the most of each day we have, be present with those who are with us. And with Chaco I'm making sure that I don't miss anything.

He was my first dog and he changed my life in many ways (as well as inspiring my dissertation topic). I know that his life isn't going to be as long as mine. And so when I'm making sure he's still breathing, I'm also letting him know how grateful I am he came into my life that New Year's Day in 2001.

The Running Lessons

I didn't realize it in the years when I was training as a competitive junior high or high school [image error]runner but much of what I learned in training has application in my every day life.

This morning my run was a challenge. I had a long day yesterday and my body was physically and emotionally exhausted. When I was barely a quarter mile into my almost three-mile run, I realized it was going to be a long three miles because of the way I felt.

I remembered back to my coach freshman year of high school, Mark Guthrie, who once told us that if we were going to be good distance runners, we had to run through the discomfort and get used to it. I will admit that I have gotten lazy recently and sometimes when I'm tired I'll walk. But I am not feeling comfrortable with my physical body because of that laziness so this morning I vowed I would not stop. 

I tried to distract myself and think about other things and I managed to do it but then I came to the last block of my run and I had to keep myself going. Today was garbage day and I could see my garbage can in front of my house. That was my goal: to get to the garbage can so I could stop.

"My Story"

One of the things we did at the retreat I ran Saturday for my separated and divorced women's group was to make collages. While I made a bunch of collages in high school– ways I used to motivate myself– I wasn't the one who came up with or planned this activity for the group. One of the women in the group used to be an art teacher and it was her idea. 

I looked forward to creating a collage for my dreams on Saturday though although I had no idea what it would look like. However, that morning Mary Beth said she had tempura paint and said we could paint as well. I had an idea and planned to do some painting and then add some images or words that I would cut out of magazines.

Balancing All Sides

I spent Saturday with my group for divorced and separated women at a retreat center located in a [image error]Norbertine Abbey here in in the southwestern part of Albuquerque. I had never planned a retreat before but I was looking forward to some longer concentrated time with the women in my group. We have so much to talk about each time we meet, even over a year later, and there is never enough time to do all that I want with them. 

While we have spent a lot of time focusing on the emotional and spiritual sides of ourselves, the physical side fell out of the balance. On Saturday we spent time on each and I asked them to set a goal for each pieces that makes up every one of us: spiritual, emotional, and physical. This also gave us the chance to go more in depth about those the goals for the physical side.

Looking Back One Year: Darkness Before Light

I have heard many stories of people who remember the darkest moments before light emerged in their[image error] lives. They didn't know that light was around the corner, often feeling so beaten down that they let it go only because they felt like they had no other option. But after light emerges, they find that the moments of darkest aren't remembered the same way as when they traveled them.

As the calendar turns to August 1, I reminded of exactly what my life was like one year one ago.

There were some bad dates and some people giving me bad dating advice. Never having been one to date a lot, but being one who always has had many male friends, one person who didn't know me very well told me to date pretty much any man I came in contact with, even those whom I knew there was no future.

Keeping things out of their places

While I don't think I am obsessive (some people who know me might beg to differ), I like to have things in their places in my house. I do laundry on Sundays because I like to start the new work week with everything clean. I like to start my morning with everything taken care of: the garden watered, the dishwasher emptied, and the house vacuumed. Having everything in its place helps me to think more clearly.

However, unless I get up earlier it's not going to happen.

Those Patience Reminders

Every week at church, I have a routine. I set my things down and say hi to the woman who sits behind me and then I go light a candle. Yesterday was no different except that on my way to the candles, I stopped to say hi to our pastor who was greeting people. But right after he and I finished our greeting, I looked ahead of me and almost stopped my in my tracks: the lit candles were gone.

There was nothing in their place: just an open space. There has been some remodeling of sorts going on so I kept walking the open spot to see if I missed something. Off to the right, in their usual place, were the boxes of candles waiting to be lit. However, there was no place to light them and no rack to place them in.

When I looked to my left to the kneeler where I usually go to say a prayer and the rack of candles with it, that was missing as well. So I kept walking past that spot and out the door to the little room where a statue of Mary stands.

I was a little nervous, worrying, what if Mary wasn't there? Had she been removed, too? But she was there waiting for me. As I kneeled in front of her after I lit my candle and set it in the rack, I thought about what my priest friend Fr. Josh had said to me once: he said that he was working on praying to Mary because she was a patient woman and she could help us work on our patience.