Snowsuit Safety

I keep thinking about this quote -it has popped up a few times on my newsfeed for different reasons.  An avid snowboarder posted it, taking it literally.  But it's hitting me on a non-literal level.  A few months ago, I listened to a podcast called The Life Beats Project.  They interviewed Hugh Vail, and he said something really similar and I haven't really stopped thinking about it.
He talked about the power of vulnerability, of being transparent with those we love intimately.  He noted that we can weather any kind of weather, so long as we know what to dress for.

YES.
And I think Betrayal Trauma feels a lot like wearing a blizzard in a bikini.  The scorch is real.

When my husband is open and honest -when he's transparent -I can dress for the weather.

The weather, the weather, the weather.
It's cold now, right?  Is it cold where you are?

It's two-blanket weather up here in northern AZ.  It's currently overcasty with winds teasing my windows and leaves scraping the walls of my rental.  We're moving out because we are buying our first house.
It's a big friggin' deal.  A big one for us.

I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but I'm 32 and my husband is that plus 5.  The chaos of addiction has kept us from something as simple as our own home... that's one way addiction has manifested in our lives.  We've spent so much time stuck in scarcity thinking.
Not enough money.
Not enough time.
Not enough worth.
Not enough, period.

I'm 7 years into actively seeking a better was of living, and it feels like some truths are starting to stick -like a really great snowstorm.
For 9 years, we've been driving an old Jeep Grand Cherokee.  Not all of the doors worked, and driving down the highway felt like a life-risk. No matter now many times we aligned her, she still shook like a maraca on Cinco de Mayo.  The upside being I couldn't hear the children fighting in the backseat, directly behind me.
Why?  Why did we do that?  Why did we stick with such an unsafe car for so long?
It's just the chaos thinking that comes with addiction -the sort of STUCK inability to care properly for myself and my surroundings.

We got a new car.  We finally just did it.  TWO DAYS LATER, the house across the street went up for sale.  We put in an offer and handed it to God.  He handed a house back.

Life feels abundant right now, and I feel the reality of what's happening.
Healing is happening.
It isn't clean and tidy like I thought it would be.  It's hard conversations and saying no to people I love.  It's saying no to food my body doesn't want but my mind does.  It's showing up for the dental appointments.  It's ordering new underwear and glasses when I need them and not two years later (seriously).  It's sticking to a budget.
It's also abundant freedom from bondage... I'm able to show up and take care of myself in the midst of one of the worst bouts of anxiety I've had in 10 years.

I've had anxiety since I was tiny.  I don't remember a life when I wasn't afraid of the future, afraid of destruction.  As a little girl, I lost sleep over the possibility of the house burning down and every night -religiously -I left my shoes next to my bed so I could flee the home when it burst into flames.

I still harbor those same fears.  Still keep my metaphorical shoes by my metaphorical bed for when the metaphorical flames hit the fan, or something.

In the midst of this anxiety, I am finding stillness and hope.  With my anxiety as high as it is, I find myself triggered more and more easily.
I take deep breaths and repeat to myself, "I have everything I need.  I have everything I need.  There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."

In order for me to "dress for the weather" as Hugh Vail and Alfred Wainwright encourage, I need to care for myself carefully. Rest, shower, food, fresh air... I need to take time for my ME things outside of my responsibilities as a wife and mom.
This means choosing to write before I do the dishes sometimes.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to do here is create a life I don't have to perpetually escape from in order to deal with it.
I want to live pliably -to let my guard down and feel the sun in when it's there and bask in peace and safety.
AND to put my snowsuit on and feel the snow fall when it's there and bask in peace and safety.

Over the long weekend, I was in a situation I would have deemed "bad weather" in the past.  But I went through it differently this time.  I had my snowsuit, so to speak, and I learned something pretty gorgeous which is this:

I equate chaotic circumstances with trauma.  When I sustained my deepest and truest trauma, I was in chaotic circumstances, and my body kept that score.
Heaven and Hell are earthly accessible states of mind, and my Hell is scarcity living.
Not enough money to fix broken things.
Not enough time to do it ourselves.
In a place where there is NOT ENOUGH OF ANYTHING, therein lies what I perceive to be impending and excruciating pain.

I feel so much fear in those circumstances, but with a snowsuit on, I was able to observe it... look it over, examine it, learn from it and then come home and REST while it sinks into my soul.

In the past, I'd come out of that kind of a chaotic situation and clean my house until my knuckles bled... just to PROVE to myself that I was SAFE.  I don't need to do that today.  I don't need to prove to anyone -including me-own self -that I'm safe.
I know I am.
Safe in God.
Safe with God.
Safe with tools that lead me to God within the confines of my sacred soul.

This is how I head into the holidays.
It's snowsuit time.

Foundations

My mom once fell off a horse and then fell into a coma for a few weeks.  As she woke up, she only wanted to listen to a few select albums including The Oak Ridge Boys Christmas album.  As I grew up, I found that Mom's penchant for listening to the same albums over and over and over was just... how she was.
How she is, brain damage or not.
There's still certain albums I won't touch with a ten-foot pole because it reminds me of that day in Elementary School where I took a bite of what was probably my 5,000th peanut butter and peach jam sandwich and had to run to the trash can because I almost puked.
So. literally. sick. of. them.

One of her favorites was the LDS Church Primary Songs -not the musical tracks, but the tracks with little kids singing.  There wasn't a single one I didn't come to have that sort of PB/Peach Reaction to.
But I gotta say.
Those lyrics, they do stick like peanut butter.
This morning, I keep thinking about this one: Where Love Is, There God is Also.

I've been thinking about how you could easily switch it up a bit to, "Where Chaos Is, There Addiction is Also."
I look at old family videos (from 2009) of my two oldest crawling around our floor in diapers and there is just stuff everywhere: old pizza boxes, piles of paper, clothes.
Some of that is because, yes, I had TWO KIDS IN DIAPERS.  But there's so much more to those videos.
We talk a lot about the chaos and disconnect that occurs with addiction, but there's also a sort of lethal form of SCARCITY that no one really openly talks about.
Our furniture was used and torn, but we were dead sure we couldn't afford anything else. Money was too scarce.
We would talk about how we needed new clothes but couldn't afford them, yet our house was strewn with clothing we only kind of liked but couldn't seem to part with.
We talked about how we didn't have enough time or money or or or...

In truth, at our cores, we believed that WE WERE NOT ENOUGH.  By the natural flow of the laws of the universe, because we believed in scarcity, scarcity showed up for us -ever constant, ever depressing.

I was so steeped in scarcity that I never EVER paid full price for anything, so I always ended up with 5 shirts on clearance that I wasn't ever sure I liked but thought I needed because my other shirts were getting too old or too small.
Scarcity brought on chaos the same way I push my babies in a stroller... they are beholden to one another.  And is it just me, or are they both wrapped up in a frigid layer of fear?

Rooting out scarcity and chaos hasn't been a quick fix.  No Condo Method or Fly Lady could have fixed my issues.
This has been a Jesus Fix, through and through.

Sometimes it got much worse before it got a smidge better.  For months at a time, I had to QUIT CLEANING altogether because of shame.  I found every time I did dishes, I was tense and stressed.  I had to finish them and be perfect about it.  I wanted to make my husband happy.  I HAD TO BE ENOUGH -clean enough!
It turns out, I never once did the dishes because I was grateful or felt true love for the offerings of food on my table.
I only did dishes because I was afraid of being messy, because I wanted others to be happy.

It was the same with laundry and vacuuming, with sweeping and dusting.  I was a homemaker, trapped in a hellish prison of workhouse shame.
Cleaning was -I thought -MY MAIN JOB and I was rendered paralyzed by shame.

So?
I quit.

I quit until I could wash with gratitude and love.  I quit exercising for the same reasons.

Those were hard days where I knew I was doing hard work but was frustrated because it wasn't the kind you could SEE.  My house was dirtier than ever and my body?  Sick and getting heavier each day.

It was like working Step 1 every durn day, "My life -my shame -has become unmanageable."

But gradually -GRADUALLY -good things came around.  Just as when I believed in scarcity and it showed up... as I believed in LOVE, it showed up!
Love.
Abundance.
God.

Pizza boxes started getting thrown away in a timely fashion.  Clothes started getting donated, and I found that I was worth paying full-price for clothing items that I genuinely loved.  I can actually have my laundry DONE sometimes for a few seconds... whereas even just last summer, I could do laundry all week and still be walking on clothes instead of my laundry room floor.
I began healthy, healing practices for my physical health.  I began walking without tension in my muscles, "How much weight am I losing?" slowly began to be replaced with a happy sort of presence where I just appreciated the place I was in -the fresh air and clouds, the birds and sunshine.
I began enjoying my time at the sink as I found appreciation for my dishes.  I recently rearranged my cupboards in a way that has substantially decreased the chaos.  I cleaned out my closet, and it's stayed clean because chaos and scarcity are starting to visit less and less and less and less.
I now keep freshly cut flowers and greens on my piano, and my house sports beautiful things from beautiful people: stained glass from a dear recovery sister hangs in the window over my sink, beautiful crystals from my brother are scattered here and there throughout my living room.  There's LOVE in my home and GRATITUDE and JOY.


Last year for Father's Day, I spent the day before cleaning my buns off.  I got armpits deep in the kind of sweat that they never talk about in Vogue, and mucked, mucked, mucked.
Then I went to the store.
I bought a bedspread, something I'd never done for the King-sized bed we'd bought YEARS earlier (because, as I said, I believed money was scarce).  I bought a new shower curtain (hadn't done that since we moved in -we'd just been living with the liner our landlord had put in).  I bought a matching bathmat and a few bathroom decorations.
I set everything up and then wrote a note to my husband, "Because you're worth it" and left it on the dusted, newly decorated headboard.

He still keeps that note where he can see it every morning, and a few months later, he returned the favor -cleaning our room and leaving me an answer "because you are too."

A few weeks ago, I noticed a thread-bare spot on our sheets, so I threw them out and bought new ones within the week.  In the last year, I've bought mascara TWICE instead of making one tube last for two or three years.

I realize these kinds of things come naturally for some -they certainly came more naturally for me before addiction and trauma took up cellular residency -but these things are now substantial miracles, folks.  Downright.

Anyway, last week I did The Awful Sweat thing again and mucked out my house.  Spring Cleaning is stupid, right?  It's a stupid farce.  It's like cleaning on Saturday.  Everyone talks about it like it's the NORMAL thing to do but everyone also knows that Sunday is the Great and Terrible Day where everyone trashes all the houses, so WHY?!  WHY do we clean on Saturday?!
I'll tell you what: I don't.  I hike on Saturdays now.  Or shop or play or whatever because CLEANING is for MONDAYS NOW.
And Spring Cleaning is now POST-SUMMER cleaning because who cleans at all during the summer time?  I don't really because there's swimming and hiking and sunshine and monsoons and mud and reunions, so why clean?
And let's start talking about how hiring cleaning help is one of the most beautiful ideas in the history of ideas.  I'm terrible at cleaning, and I appreciate that there's folks who aren't who I can pay to come work their mystical cleaning magic in my home.

Yesterday was Monday (cleaning day), and I made my bed.  I wore clean underwear and clean clothes, and I washed rugs and the 4 thick towels we bought to replace the 13 thin towels we'd been hoarding for ten years.  A few months ago, Danny and I bought a repo'd Kirby at a discount, and because our house is cozy (read: small), I can plug that thing in a central outlet and clean the whole house.  I run over all the carpets and then I switch out attachments and dust everything.  I go over our hard-surface flooring with the special hard-floor attachment.  Our ceiling fan gets a once-over... and I apologize to the spiders before demolishing and swiping their homes.

As I worked, I kept hitting on this idea of foundations.
My buddy Taura is a yoga instructor who now lives in the South and sometimes visits with her children who are so cute I almost forget that mine are cuter.  A few years ago, I was doing yoga in her backyard during the time in my life where I wasn't doing dishes and I was trying to figure out how to do yoga without hating my body.
Everyone around me was flowing and glowing, and I was weary and wobbling.
I'm all legs.  Did you know that about me?  Percentage wise, I'm 70% legs, 20% torso and 10% head n' hair.
It is never more apparent than when I'm trying to Zumba and can't make my legs move like the shorter folks move theirs -OR when I'm trying to make downward dog work like the girls next to me.
Comparison truly is the thief of joy.
"If you're falling, check your foundation."
That's What Taura Said.  Someday I'll write a book and call it What Taura Said and fill it full of quotes Taura probably had no idea she said.
I've never been able to forget that one.

If anything feels like falling, scarcity and chaos and fear feel that way.
So what, then, are my foundations?
Christ. Yes.
BUT
I'm realizing it goes a bit more shallow than that.
It's my undies, really.  And my made bed.  It's my dishes.  It's my Basic Human Foundations: the first thing I put on that send a message one way or the other.
Clean, crisp underwear let me know I'm worthy of a clean foundation.
Clean, orderly clothes let me know I'm worth the time and the money.
A nice, lovely bed makes for better sleep -sleep is a huge part of the foundation of my mental, spiritual and physical health.  So much healing happens in that sacred rest -even God shuts off the light in order for sleep to move in.
Pretty, clean plates are the welcoming mat for good, solid food.  I'm not just talking about green and clean -I'm talking about cream and oats, butter and bread, meat and potatoes!

Yes, Christ is THE FOUNDATION.
But where LOVE is, There God is.  And LOVE, my dear sweet healing sisters, can be found in a made bed.
Which thing I never before had supposed.