Yo Yo Ma, Lectio Devina, American Violets...

48, 64, 179, 2, 22, 12, 6, 10, 5, 3, 2, 1.. These are some of my numbers. Meaningless to you, they reflect some of the parameters of my reality. They are a very few facts that tell you nothing about who I am, how I experience life and the quality of woman I am. We can not know each other through our statistics and we can not know God by the numbers.

What do Yo Yo Ma, Lectio Devina and American Violets have in common? Last Tuesday, still early in withdrawal from Effexor, my blessed mother held her breath and her tongue as I drove us downtown to see the cellist Yo Yo Ma in concert with the Houston Symphony. Most of us live our lives as an obligation or trial. Yo Yo Ma lived every measure, felt every note. When others were playing he moved to their music, encouraged them smiling, nodding, swaying. His passion for the music brought the entire symphony to a higher level.

Life must be lived as a prayer and beauty appreciated where we find it. I have always tried to be good, to do the right thing. My life, my children do not fit into the narrow definition we have accepted of success. I think we lose our divinity in our quest for conformance. Maybe that is what makes medicating ourselves and our sons acceptable. We are all unique, special and individual. God did not make us to conform to the world.

Excuses, excuses, excuses (or) Holy Crap Batman

One in three American women are taking anti-depressants. If it isn't you, it is someone you know. If your doctor tells you need one of the anti-anxiety or anti-depressant drugs, ask lots of questions, do your research and then talk to someone who has taken them AND stopped.

I'm way off topic but I need to share what has been going on. I've been writing much, much less often than I had promised myself and feel like I've let myself and you down. It seems to me like I offer many, many excuses for not being or doing what I had promised or what you, quite possibly, expected. My dad teases me with the line, "excuses, excuses, excuses" when I explain why things didn't go as planned. I feel like I've been making a lot of excuses by way of explanation.

Last month, I had my first appointment with my new physician. She read my list of symptoms and said, "one word: menopause." Oh, yippee! Not like it was a big suprise but it was startling to have my new state of being confirmed so abruptly. I can't take hormones to soften the symptoms so when I was offered an anti-depressant I thought, "why not?"

It took me weeks to adjust to the meds. I won't go into the full side show of symptoms I wandered through. If you were to search on Effexor side effects you'd have a pretty good picture of what I experienced. It occurred to me somewhere in the midst of this symptom odyssey that I hadn't asked the plan to come off medication.

If you don't read Olive Branch Bloggings I suggest you start. Sara has saved my ass more than once. This time, by sharing her own struggles, she pulled my tit out of the wringer. That's an Okie-ism: doing laundry used to be hot, sweaty business so women wore house dresses and little underneath. As the repetitive work of pulling the clothes out of the washer and putting them into the wringer wore on through the day, minds began to drift and if the house dress was pulled with the wet clothes into the wringer, so also the bare breast underneath. Old wringer washers could only be turned off by unplugging them. If you aren't paying attention you might get your tit caught in the wringer. If you get your tit caught in the wringer you are in an embarrassing, painful situation... unless you have a good friend to pull the plug. Sara pulled the plug.

In my teens and early 20's I stopped and started many mind/mood altering chemicals. I would have never believed anyone who claimed that at 48 I would deal with the kind of soul wrenching, debilitating drug effects I have wrestled with recently. I am angry. Really, really pissed. I did not know that by trying to relieve normal symptoms of life change I could traumatize myself and my family in this way.

I have only taken the stuff for a few weeks. My heart breaks for all who were not warned. The only reason I knew to stop, was because Sara threw a flag up. We are medicating our kids for ADD and women for depression. Why? Isn't what we have a cultural problem?