I don't want to be grout!

Today's post is a little different, in that I'm hoping to inspire you with someone else's words instead of my own.  Why reinvent the wheel...

The following excerpt deals with beginning a career well after everyone else has left the starting line, but in just about every way could also be talking about starting to take care of yourself after many years of taking care of others.  Please.  It's important.  Keep reading.

Before I forget, I have to let you know: this is from the incomparable Erma Bombeck, in her book If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries... I think that's all I need to cover myself legally.   (In school I always did well in punctuation, grammar, and spelling, but boy, did I suck lemons at Works Cited.)

My Turn

For years, you've watched everyone else do it.

The children who sat on the curb eating their lunches while waiting for the bus.

The husband you put through school who drank coffee standing up and who slept with his hand on the alarm.

And you envied them and said, "Maybe next year I'll go back to school."  And the years went by and this morning you looked into the mirror and said, "You blew it.  You're too old to pick it up and start a new career."

This column is for you.

Margaret Mitchell won her first Pulitzer Prize for Gone With the Wind in 1937.  She was thirty-seven years old at the time.

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of fifty-one.

Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary's Baby.  She was seventy-two years old.

Billie Jean King took the battle of women's worth to a tennis court in Houston's Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs.  She was thirty-one years of age.

Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of seventy-six.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of her own existence.  She published her thoughts in A Gift from the Sea in 1955, in her forty-ninth year.

Shirley Temple Black was named Ambassador to Ghana at the age of forty-seven.

Golda Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel.  She had just passed her seventy-first birthday.

You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional.  You can tell yourself they had influence before they started.  You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours.

Or you can be like the woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it.  Then one day she said, "I do not feel fulfilled cleaning chrome faucets with a toothbrush.  It's my turn."

I was thirty-seven years old at the time.

Now, to be perfectly honest, although I am a stay-at-home mom I haven't cleaned my faucets, chrome or otherwise, since the day my daughter got tall enough to reach them.  (It's good to teach kids housework at an early age.)  But the point of all this is that I have spent years and years taking care of other people and I used that as my excuse - among others - for not taking care of myself.  I remember my 20's but my 30's are a toddler-filled blur.  I know there were diapers and bottles and I think somewhere around spring 2002 I got a full night's sleep, but otherwise...it was gone.  It's like I went to sleep at 29 and woke up at 43.  How did that happen?!?  My health was a wreck but everyone else in my family was healthy as a horse.  They were happy.  They were fulfilled.  They had futures that excited them (unless you count my son, who had left rocks in his jeans pockets one too many times, making the inside of my dryer look like a missile test site).  I had taken good care of them, very good care.  And I...I had a rapidly aging body that wasn't taking kindly to my total lack of care.  But I'm 44, I whined.  I'm too old, I don't know how to do this.  And then I was 45.  I made a few sporadic attempts at taking care of myself, but all the important things - the know-how and the fire within - were missing.  Then I was 46.  Two out of three members in my family, besides me, were now theoretically capable of providing life-sustaining functions in case I got hit by a bus, and they loved each other enough to take care of the third member (aka Short Stuff). Everyone was taking care of each other and themselves except me.  And then one day I found it.  I found what made sense, what lit the fire, what changed everything:

You cannot take care of others if you are having trouble taking care of yourself.

I found that quote on ENP's website (www.elitenutritionandperformance.com).  It hit me between the eyes like a boulder.  I actually had trouble breathing for a few minutes because I was so stunned.  It was a complete paradigm shift, and I called for an appointment that day.

The more I thought about that quote, the further I took it.  Sure, absolutely, I love my family and I want to take care of them, but is that enough?  Every part of my life was devoted to holding them together, making something out of their lives.  But I've got a life, too!  What about me?  It's like I was the grout between tiles.  Tell me this:  who on earth walks into a well-decorated kitchen or bath and exclaims, "Oh my God, look at that gorgeous grout!"  No, they're talking about the floors, that tile design, that granite or marble or whatever.  I want to be more than just a filler between other people's lives!  Have I left it too long, is it even possible?  I can't change my age but can I change my health?  Can I make what I've got left really great?

Am I too late?

Hell, no.