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One of the tiny tomatoes on Matt's Wild ("[f]rom seed collected in the wild near Hidalgo in eastern Mexico") Cherry tomatoes is turning red. I've a cutting from a plant that i've nurtured in the "greenhouse" (currently covered with lattice work) -- it's sprawled everywhere and i hope i can keep it going once i put a cover over the structure when frosts begin. That would be nice. One of the pepper plants that has been browsed to death has a tiny pepper.
Also, exterminator whacked the paper wasp nest out of the fig tree with a stick. Note to self, all the internet advice about "after dark with red flashlights" and other caution is completely overkill. Apparently paper wasps are not the horror that, say, yellow jackets and hornets are.
I ran a tray and a half of okra and one try of figs overnight in the dehydrator. The malabar spinach took forever but it kept a lovely green in most cases, a characteristic i associate with lower temperature dehydration. If i could have lunches of okra-malabar spinach added to tomato paste soup all winter, it would be very satisfying.
Similarly, it's been satisfying to make mint ... tea? water? tisane? ... all summer: a milk bottle with a bundle of spearmint or tulsi suspended through the top and not quite boiling water poured over and left to steep and cool, and then consumed as part of my very frequent beverage breaks. For the winter i've some mint i dehydrated in May -- i will be even more aggressive, i think, next year -- and some stevia. Stevia the plant is stunning in its intensity. I'm hoping to keep the plant going over the winter inside along with a tulsi plant. My attempt to keep malabar spinach going was a waste -- it has self seeded....
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STOP
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What i really need to write about is that in therapy yesterday, my therapist said that she thinks i'm a "people pleaser." I immediately rejected it. Just a few narrative coincidences, i'm sure.
Yet, it's nagged at me.
And it's nagged because i asked myself, why did i reject that assessment?
And i realized it's because my mother told me over and over that i didn't care about others and i was only interested in my self, etc, over and over.
This is related to the "you will be a terrible mother" that led me to omit motherhood from my envisioned future. (Maybe adopt, maybe, i would think.) Years ago i realized that it was the messaging from Mom that had made me think that, and that i *could* be a good mother. (And then i reflected just because i realized i could be, still didn't mean i wanted to be a mother, and so, i'm still happily not a mother.)
So, i do need to understand what it may mean to be a "people pleaser" and not really reject that observation simply on "not possible" grounds.
Admitting that it's possible creates such a tender feeling in me. I so appreciate the work i did years ago, an appreciation all over again, that working through my bitterness and anger and grief about my childhood has me in a place where this realization only brings up the ghost of those feelings. A few very judgemental thoughts - "OF COURSE a child is self centered, that is part of how children develop" and "So wrong to tell children such messages." Grief over seeing my mother's so sweet and caring nature as the dementia ravaged away whatever horrors led her to be so angry, bitter, anxious, and demanding: what could our relationship have been had those horrors been dealt with before dementia? But there's another feeling -- maybe like the spot in my tooth that broke off a few weeks ago. With my tooth, there's no pain, no discomfort (so a dental visit is not necessary), but there's an awareness: "It's time to stop chewing ice and hard candy and maybe quit thinking of your teeth as strong as steel." An awareness of fragility.
Unlike with my teeth, though, i think it's OK that my understanding of my self be a little fragile. Unlike my teeth, rebuilding won't be annoyingly expensive -- i won't assume painless -- and unlike my teeth -- which are honest and true -- a foundation built on my mother's trauma (whatever it was) turned on me is not.
Also, exterminator whacked the paper wasp nest out of the fig tree with a stick. Note to self, all the internet advice about "after dark with red flashlights" and other caution is completely overkill. Apparently paper wasps are not the horror that, say, yellow jackets and hornets are.
I ran a tray and a half of okra and one try of figs overnight in the dehydrator. The malabar spinach took forever but it kept a lovely green in most cases, a characteristic i associate with lower temperature dehydration. If i could have lunches of okra-malabar spinach added to tomato paste soup all winter, it would be very satisfying.
Similarly, it's been satisfying to make mint ... tea? water? tisane? ... all summer: a milk bottle with a bundle of spearmint or tulsi suspended through the top and not quite boiling water poured over and left to steep and cool, and then consumed as part of my very frequent beverage breaks. For the winter i've some mint i dehydrated in May -- i will be even more aggressive, i think, next year -- and some stevia. Stevia the plant is stunning in its intensity. I'm hoping to keep the plant going over the winter inside along with a tulsi plant. My attempt to keep malabar spinach going was a waste -- it has self seeded....
--== ∞ ==--
STOP
--== ∞ ==--
What i really need to write about is that in therapy yesterday, my therapist said that she thinks i'm a "people pleaser." I immediately rejected it. Just a few narrative coincidences, i'm sure.
Yet, it's nagged at me.
And it's nagged because i asked myself, why did i reject that assessment?
And i realized it's because my mother told me over and over that i didn't care about others and i was only interested in my self, etc, over and over.
This is related to the "you will be a terrible mother" that led me to omit motherhood from my envisioned future. (Maybe adopt, maybe, i would think.) Years ago i realized that it was the messaging from Mom that had made me think that, and that i *could* be a good mother. (And then i reflected just because i realized i could be, still didn't mean i wanted to be a mother, and so, i'm still happily not a mother.)
So, i do need to understand what it may mean to be a "people pleaser" and not really reject that observation simply on "not possible" grounds.
Admitting that it's possible creates such a tender feeling in me. I so appreciate the work i did years ago, an appreciation all over again, that working through my bitterness and anger and grief about my childhood has me in a place where this realization only brings up the ghost of those feelings. A few very judgemental thoughts - "OF COURSE a child is self centered, that is part of how children develop" and "So wrong to tell children such messages." Grief over seeing my mother's so sweet and caring nature as the dementia ravaged away whatever horrors led her to be so angry, bitter, anxious, and demanding: what could our relationship have been had those horrors been dealt with before dementia? But there's another feeling -- maybe like the spot in my tooth that broke off a few weeks ago. With my tooth, there's no pain, no discomfort (so a dental visit is not necessary), but there's an awareness: "It's time to stop chewing ice and hard candy and maybe quit thinking of your teeth as strong as steel." An awareness of fragility.
Unlike with my teeth, though, i think it's OK that my understanding of my self be a little fragile. Unlike my teeth, rebuilding won't be annoyingly expensive -- i won't assume painless -- and unlike my teeth -- which are honest and true -- a foundation built on my mother's trauma (whatever it was) turned on me is not.
no subject
sometimes I know my time in therapy does the same type of things to me
this looking inward stuff is hard and I hope worth it in the end
no subject
Ah, my mother did that, too. In my mid-teens after years and years of trying to be more helpful and accommodating, I thought laboriously, "But I am inside* this body, looking out of it in roughly a sphere around me. hat other center could I have but myself?" And that was very helpful.
I think that my mother's generation of women (and more) were constantly expected and demanded to be human sacrifices, to have no self except in service. Just as Understood Zeitgeist. And I don't think that's an easy thing to handle well.
* I was a mind-body dualist then.