Okey dokey. I got myself a blog and now I'm tryin' to figure out what to write about. This is harder than you might think. I live a pretty uneventful life out here on the bayou. Oh, right...I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Melanie (mel to most everybody who knows me) and I'm a 53 year old woman. I am mother to one grown son, Sebe (short for Sebastian), and fostermom to 3 dogs and 2 cats. I am a polymer clay/mixed media artist, collector of many things, avid reader, puzzle worker, amateur photographer and, now, blogger! Heh, heh. I guess that last one will soon be proved or disproved! I have multiple sclerosis...diagnosed in 1989...so my life is different from most of ya'll's. Slower, for sure. I live in the Mississippi Delta with my parents and son. Yes, we all share one house and, no, we don't drive each other crazy. We actually enjoy livin' together. ;o) I am truly so very thankful to be able to live this slower kind of life where I get to know the people that I love the most! This wasn't the life I envisioned for myself when I was growin' up...I lived in books and saw myself as the heroine of most of them. I guess I've always lived in my own world...I don't fit in very well to the "real world". Bein' disabled...now, that's a misnomer if I've ever heard one because most of us can do lots of stuff, just not the stuff that let's us hold down a 9 to 5 job...has given me many advantages, along with the obvious disadvantages. It has allowed me to concentrate on my art, to explore it as much as I care to, to use it as therapy and recreation rather than a means of makin' money (altho I'm not averse to makin' money!). It has allowed me to spend more time with my immediate family because there are things that I need help with, things I couldn't do if I were out on my own. It has given me an excuse to live with my parents long past the time that most folks leave the nest which, in our society, is frowned upon. I have learned to adapt to the circumstances that this illness places upon me and actually enjoy them. Up until 2 months ago, I was walkin' a mile a day and playin' ball with Sebe whenever we felt like it and was feelin' healthier than I had in years. Then I started havin' arm problems...I won't go into all that now...and that ended up throwin' me into an exacerbation. Well, I got 4 days of intravenous treatment with a steroid and then was to be weaned off with prednisone...this gave me almost constant reflux and I ended up stoppin' the prednisone cold turkey. This, of course, threw me into another exacerbation...sometimes you really can't win for losin' !! Anyway, that was a couple of months ago and I'm beginnin' to feel better! Woohooo!!
You know, sometimes your prayers get answered in the weirdest ways. I always pray for humility...it seems so easy (and almost harmless) to become smug about yourself in relation to others. It's so easy to utter platitudes and believe that you are livin' what you're preachin' when you're really not. I always say to people that you only have 2 choices in life...you can either be happy or unhappy and I really do believe that. What I didn't realize is how hard it can be to choose to be happy when your circumstances change or aren't what you can easily adapt to. Durin' this time of the exacerbations, almost all I could do was read. Now, I love to read but everything gets old when you can do nothin' else. I got bored. I found myself gettin' cranky and takin' it out on my family and I was forced to reevaluate some of those platitudes I'd uttered so unthinkingly to others. I had to choose to make myself happy and, in this choice, I felt God's hand. I'm just tellin' ya'll this so you can see that often the things we need come from the things that we don't want. And, I'm extremely thankful that it seems to be comin' to an end!