Day: June 19, 2019

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Bowtieful Baby Contest

Here’s Grace Anne Blackwelder in her church clothes on Father’s Day. She sported a formal, black and white frock. At one-month-old, she is already a classy dame. Her acre of hair is topped off with that colorful and bigly Hair Bow o’ Gracie’s Day. She is following in my bow tie steps already. Bishop Travis and Bishopette Collette better like her style or learn to hunker down and deal with it, cuz my bow tie influence on Gracie isn’t going anywhere. [Here, my Bow Tie o’ Father’s Day is the closest in fabric design I could find to one of Dad’s red hankies (sometimes blue), which he always carried. I never once caught Dad hanky-less, even when he was in the hospital having heart surgery.]

I promise I won’t continue to inundate y’all with pix o’ Amazing Grace forever. Over the years, one of the things I’ve learned is that we each feel like the babies in our families are the absolute cutest, and we are certain everyone else wants to see dozens of pictures of them. Guess what?! They don’t. They might wanna see a couple of pix of your babies; but after looking at a few photos of the family babies you love, they’re saying to themselves, “MY baby is cuter than your baby. Your baby looks like a chimpanzee. MY baby never looked like a chimpanzee. I hope your baby outgrows its chimp face.” And on and on.

I’m utterly intrigued by Miss Grace Anne, but TIE O’ THE DAY posts must continue to honor neckwear. Gracie’s parents can let her star regularly on THEIR social media pages. She is theirs, after all. If they want to, they can bombard others with pix of Grace to the point of others’ silent chimpanzee comparisons.

But for right now, permit me to be crazy about this wee mammal who we never thought would find her way into Bishop Travis’ and Bishopette Collette’s life. I think we had all given up on that possibility years ago. And suddenly, Gracie sauntered into their lives– and our lives– like she owns the place, like she was just taking her sweet time to get here. And now that she’s here, it’s like she wants us to put on our bow ties and party– complete with Funeral Potatoes. Or, at least, put on our bow ties and go to Sacrament Meeting. Smart chick.

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If You Think Nobody’s Given You A Gift, You’re Just Plain Wrong: Part 2

Skitter is like Mom: Her eyes are sensitive to light, so she tends to wear sunglasses indoors quite often. Skitter is wearing Bow Tie o’ the Day shades this morning. You’ve seen these sunglasses on Mom, on me, and now on The Skit. We share well.

All the gifts in all the universes can’t save you from a mental illness like bipolar depression. Depression doesn’t care what material gifts you have been given. It doesn’t care about the gift you’ve received of being loved and wanted. It does what it wants to your head and, therefore, to your life.

I have mentioned before that I decided to do TMS to jump start my depressed feelers and level my mood. I had been “not feeling” for a while. Simultaneous to my “not feeling,” I was in a crippling depression. It might seem like a contradiction to “not feel” while also drowning in depression, but I assure you it’s possible. I have been there more times in my life than I’d like to count. This time was significantly more debilitating and dark. I honestly believe my mental illness was getting close to being terminal, if you get my drift: Bye, bye, Helen Jr.

Anyhoo… It’s been two weeks since I completed TMS, and I want to tell you what I’ve noticed. There’s been no bigly cookie at the end of the TMS rainbow for me, but I see and “feel” a trail of crumbs which will add up to at least half a cookie when I gather them and put them all together. As I wrote yesterday, TMS has been a smallish welcome gift– despite 36 treatments that felt like a woodpecker beak knocking at my skull.

I got part of my appetite back, which is probably good cuz my weight went down to 7th-grade level. I have been unable to focus my attention enough to read for the last year, and I didn’t even care about it. Not reading is sooooo not me. But I’ve been back to reading for the last month. My moods are back to being lighter, though not as light as my usual, weird “normal.”

I can’t say my “feelers” are back to feeling, but I get little bursts of feeling, so I’m confident TMS has helped to get that coming back to me. Until feeling shows up more often, I’ll stick to knowing what I anticipate I will feel in the future. Suzanne says I am talking more, which is a bigly change back to my true self– since I am a chatter-er like Mom. I’ll let you know when/if I notice other changes I think are TMS-related. TMS wasn’t magic for me, but it helped pull me up a couple of rungs on the slippery ladder in my depression pit.

Before TMS, aside from thinking it would be best for everyone if I jumped off the planet, the worst idea I ruminated over was…. hold on to your bike helmets…. are you sitting down?…. I told Suzanne I was going to shut down TIE O’ THE DAY. Forever. No more website. No more Facebook posts. I didn’t care about it or my stoopid neckwear anymore.

And I ranted to Suzanne about how I’m too old to write these stoopid posts about my stoopid, uninteresting life. And I ranted about how this stoopid tie/bow tie thing makes me look like a stoopid fool, and I should feel embarrassed. And I ranted about how nobody cares about my stoopid ideas about living better lives. And nobody thinks my writing is funny. Blah, blah, blah. You know… all that prattle, which is kinda true.

The tragedy! The tragedy! Junking TIE O’ THE DAY might have actually thrown me off the runaway train. Sticking with writing my posts– despite not caring about the venture for a while– anchored my depressed and sunken days with a purpose. I somehow convinced myself my readers would miss TIE O’ THE DAY to the extent that their souls would lose a wee bit of joy forever. Oh, if I were to quit writing and posting, it would destroy y’all’s lives! I told myself I had to keep TIE O’ THE DAY up and running, for the good of all mankind. I’m SuperBowTieLady, patron superhero of all neckwear!

Seriously, TMS has helped. Mostly, I am still here, and here is where I want to be. I’m not positive I would be here on this blue-skied day in June if I had decided against doing TMS.