It's My Choice

It's time to concentrate on the things which make me smile.  Without too much effort, I could list a dozen or more things which make me grimace. I wish I didn't have to look beneath them to find the happy places.  I wondered aloud, hobbling up the small step in the garage, the one that tripped G'ma and left me wondering how such a small obstacle could cause such a huge calamity, the one that had both TBG and me stopped in our tracks right then, just for a moment, considering which leg might be better suited for weight bearing, "Why did this have to happen to me?"

I don't go there very often. It's not very useful nor enlightening nor uplifting.  It certainly does not make me smile. But my migraine was still roaring away in the background and my gait was more roiling than rolling and I was tired of it all. The words didn't sound right, hanging there above the cars and my two healthy feet and my husband who loves me and I felt an electric shock up my spine as I channeled Rocky:

Attitude is the ONLY thing you can control.

She was right in front of me, up close and personal in the way that only a friend of four decades can be, and she was annoyed with me.

You have a choice every morning when you wake up.  That's a gift.

We were much younger when I first heard her say these things.  Becoming perforated was not something either of us imagined, but neither were most of the other challenges life threw our way. Still, when I think of the renewal she promises with every morning, I know now in a way I did not then that tomorrow is not promised and that today, by virtue of the fact that I am here to see it, is a good day. Not only the choice, but the day itself is a gift.

Look around you - you don't usually have a choice.

These were words of wisdom offered to her children, a demographic of necessarily limited choices. I wonder if Big Cuter remembers himself at eight, longing to be a grown up, knowing with absolute certainty that "things are so much easier when you're an adult."

I laughed to myself then as I am laughing to myself now. Yes, adulthood brings more choices, but fewer of them are good ones. There are so many constraints, from areas which continue to surprise me.  I never thought that my body would betray me. I did everything I could to insure that. And then I got shot. As she says, you usually don't have a choice.

You can be pissy - you have every right to be - it's your choice.

The fact that everyone agrees that I am allowed to gripe - on occasion - is perfect. I can't wallow (cf. on occasion) but I can move on and annoy someone else with the same whingeing. I can take their sympathy and add it to the pile of Poor Me and be pissy all day, If I choose.

But remember, it's your choice.

And that's what stops me, each and every time. I have control over the most important part of myself; I operate the keyboard. I can play minor chords or bounce along in C Major and it's my choice. I can close my eyes and straighten my hips and shoulders and engage my fourth quadrant and upper magnets and bend my ankle and lift my knee and get up that step and into the house.

Or, I could curl up into a little ball on the unswept floor and cry.

It's my choice.