My daughter tells me, “I feel like I have been pummeled all over. My butt feels battered. I bet no one mentions a battered butt as a symptom of this cold-flu thing.”

I’m in sympathy as I too feel pretty wretched.

I baby-sat my 2 grandkids recently and apparently Lexi was incubating the latest strain of raging influenza. Shortly, we all go down like 9 pins; Lexi, her mother Summer, her brother Loch and me. Her dad falls head first into the mess with us a day or two, later.

Have you noticed how kid’s germs are so much more potent then that of adults? Lexi’s latest preschool is larger by far then her previous one. This means a more generous patter of germs are brought home and passed around like peppermints in a candy dish.

My sister Polly is a grandmother, too. Her fortune, (and her misfortune,) is that two of her little kids live next door to her.

Polly used to have a debilitating phobia; a fear of vomiting. Vomiting freaked her out but she seemed to attract it. Wherever she went, people would throw up around her.

Somehow, through strength of will, she had not allowed herself to vomit in thirty years!
That all changed when she got grandkids. She threw up so many times that she finally got over the phobia. She had to unwillingly face the toilet so often that the immersion therapy cured her.

I’m telling Summer that I’ve had to throw my latest medicinal nasal oil away.
Summer knows that I believe if you stuff oil up your nose it keeps the bugs out and you are immune to colds and flu.

She’s here the day I grab my little jar of sesame oil off the bathroom counter and jab globs of it up my nose, way into my sinuses.
I happen to put my glasses on after the fact and look down into the oil. I start screaming and moaning. There in the oil, float gobs of black mold and balls of fuzzy white growths.

“Oh no!! I’ve jammed mold and fungus up my nose and into my head! Oh my God, I have mold and fungus in my sinuses!”

“Geez Mother, I’ve told you, putting all that oil up your nose is a dumb idea,” Summer says sympathetically.

……

Now, with the latest mixed herbal oil, hoping to feel better with this cold, I’ve been shoving an eyedropper of the stuff up my nose.
Today, this morning, I feel better. I even feel great. In fact, the cold didn’t go into my nose and sinus. It stayed in my throat and punched my body up for awhile, then left. What a lucky break.

‘Good job Oil,’ I think as I get ready for bed. ‘In fact, let’s put some more oil up the nose for prevention purposes!’

I suck up some oil with the dropper and shoot it up both nostrils.

Arrrgh. Big mistake and too late!

Immediately, my sinuses start to sting and burn. ‘Oh no,’ I realize. ‘I’ve just inoculated myself with those flu germs, again!’

Bright me. Keep stuffing the dropper up your nose when you’re sick and put it back in the bottle. Then, when you’re mainly well, re-infect yourself, again, with the germs your body just beat back. Very clever.

I have a terrible night with my nose and sinus and a terrible 3 and 4 days after. The germs proliferate and move back into my throat and into my chest. They run rampant, bolder then ever.

“So,” Summer asks me later when she hears about what I have done to myself, “are you through putting oil up your nose?”

Of course not!! I’ll just refrigerate it from now on, and won’t let the dropper touch my nose.

Summer thinks I’m a slow learner and a bit daft, but I know that once I perfect my oil treatment, I won’t be getting anymore colds or flu or battered butt syndromes.
And, just who will be laughing then?

It’s 6PM and it’s dark outside when the phone rings.

“I can’t find your mother!” Sharon says breathlessly. “Is she with you?”

Sharon is one of mother’s tenants. She sleeps in mom’s trailer in the second bedroom so she can get some space from all her kids and grandkids, who live in the Big White House.

She’s also at my mom’s at night to keep an eye on her.

“Did you call Polly?” I ask. “Polly might have taken her to her house for dinner?”

“I called Polly. She doesn’t know where your mom is.”

“Maybe she’s at Candy’s house,” I say.

“Your mom’s car is here, but she isn’t,” Sharon says. “I’ve looked all through the place, even in her bathroom, and I can’t find her. Even her dog is gone. If she has gone off with someone she wouldn’t take the dog; Becky isn’t a good car rider.”

“I’ll call Candy,” I say. “Mother is usually off with one of us sisters if she’s out at night. The brothers don’t come by this late.”

“I’m going back over to the trailer and look for her, again,” Sharon says. “Call me if you find her!”

I’m nervous. My sister Barbara lives down the mountain so she wouldn’t have Mother at this hour. If Mother isn’t with Candy, we’re in trouble.

I call Candy and tell her Mother is missing and is she with her?

“No,” Candy says. “She’s not with me.”

There is a sucking kind of silence on the line. We are both thinking the same thing. Mother took Becky the Dog out in the fields after dark because she doesn’t want Becky out there by herself with all the coyotes and the mountain lions. Mother has tripped over a stone-hard giant dirt clod, rocketed onto the ground and shattered her hip. ……She’s out there…..Somewhere on 13 acres.

“I’ll call Jim!” I say. “You call Arthur. If they don’t have her we’ll need to run over to Mom’s and start hunting for her.”

Both of us know she won’t be with one of the ‘boys.’

I dial Jim. He answers on the 5th ring and says, “What’s up?”

“Mother’s missing!” I shout. “Do you have her?”

“She must have run off,” Jim says and laughs.

“Why would she do that!?” I demand. “What’s the matter with you? Mother’s missing!”

Jim’s laughing.

Then I hear this little tiny, tinny sounding voice; “Honey? Honey? Venus, is that you Honey?”

It’s my mother!

“Jim! Jim!” I’m yelling, “Where is that voice coming from? How did Mother’s voice get on the line? Where are you?”

“I’m driving on Hwy 67,” he says.

Eeeh gads.
I’m thinking, ‘did the phone lines cross from her house to his car and cell phone? Or, more likely, is Mother calling from the dead?’

I’m completely confused but then I hear my mother saying, “Jim, I can’t hear her. Here, you take the line.”

Now, I’m not confused, I’m pissed off.

“YOU have mother!” I holler.

Jim thinks it’s so funny.
He tells me he took her to a board meeting.

Mom is a small investor in his new restaurant and he says he felt she should meet the other investors.
He tells me she couldn’t hear a thing at the meeting but that she had a good time.

My phone rings as I hang up. It’s my sister Polly.

“I forgot that Mother told me she was going with Jim,” she says. “I just remembered.

“How could you forget? I demand to know.

Polly doesn’t know how she could have forgotten and she doesn’t even know how she managed to finally remember.

Now, I have to call Sharon and the family and tell them we’ve found mother. As I finish doing that, the phone rings. It’s Mother.

“Hi Honey,” she says. “I’m home.”

“Well, thank God,” I say. “And where is Becky?”

“She’s right here with me.”

“Sharon said she was missing. Where was she?”

“She’s right here with me,” my mother repeats.
“I couldn’t hear a thing at Jim’s meeting,” she adds, “but I had a good time.”

I tell my Mother that I am really glad she had fun and to please leave a note on the kitchen table when she goes out at night.

“I told your sister, Polly, where I was going,” she says.

“That’s not good enough,” I say. “At this age we all need notes.”

After we hang up I sit and rest for a moment.
I am never going to know where Becky was and why she is now at home with Mother, but that’s OK. Mother disappeared, but now she has re-appeared and all is well in the world.

Hello my friends, it’s good to be back.
Back from what?

Back from the big flap I have been having in my emotional and physical life. When I said at the first of the year, “I am going to face my fears, oust any blocked emotions that are harming me and I am going to take care of all the physical problems in my body,” I unleashed a fire storm in my life and in my mind.

Since we ’spoke’ last I have had some ‘revelations.’

I realized My Big Phobia From Childhood is not about disease and dying. That was simply a safe place to put my real fear. My real fear was fear of my father; who because of his own ‘disastrous’ up bringing was always very emotionally and verbally abusive to me.

(The details don’t matter. You can find them in any soap opera, newspaper or therapist’s office.)

I woke up one morning last week and it was all laid out, clear in my mind, like a dark pond that had stretched across my life.

As you may know, I believe that we are all God having experiences. Because of this, I blame my father only at a people kind of level. I know the truth about what IS and why my childhood happened the way it did, and it is true, that the truth will set you free.

I feel my father who has passed, was behind my getting the clarity I have needed and the freedom and releif from pain that I had stated I wanted. The process of removal started with Dr. Daisy and her work. In fact, haven’t seen Daddy’s Old Red Cadillac since I had my ‘revelation’.

Right at this moment I am now having another Huge and Great and Startling….but HAPPY……Adventure! I will be sharing it next time I blog. I can’t do it now, because I am off to experience part of it.

But, attesting to my recovery from my last Difficult Adventure, I can say that I saw a friend in the bank today and she said, “Wow! You look fabulous. You’re just sparkling, Venus.”

Wheew. Thank goodness. I was knocked to my knobby knees for three weeks and battered by this Circus of a Life.

I just wanted to check in with you and say that all is well and all is better then well and I am thinking good thoughts for all of you, too!
And, I do thank you for being my friends.

See you soon.
X Venus

I had a hell of a week.

Dr. Daisy tells me as I leave her office, “Because of this cranial treatment, expect to feel various physical and emotional disturbances this week.”

Two days later I wake up with a throbbing pain in a molar and swollen and painful gums. It is New year’s Eve Day. The area in question in my mouth has been bothering me off and on for several years, or more, but nothing can be found. But, here it is, it’s shown itself, bright and bloody, at the start of the Holiday!

Now, I’m freaking out. My personal phobia, my only phobia, comes at me in a rush:

I’m a little kid, again, going through massive dental work. I’m a little kid, again, when my sister Polly is dying, my mother is dying and my grandmother is dying.
Nobody actually dies, but we don’t know that outcome.

Polio is rampant and we kids can’t swim in swimming pools and we have to stay away from crowds.
The elementary school shows us a black and white movie with Polio as a Giant Shadow moving over a little boy in a striped tee shirt who is standing happily unaware in front of a barn. He dies. We children shriek, start crying and hide our heads in our laps.

Nuclear testing is happening in the state next to us and that’s only the testing that we know about. Nuclear bomb siren test warnings go off every day at noon. We children fling ourselves under our desks as practice to protect ourselves from the blast. Then, we go home, take up shovels and dig deeper into the earth, helping our parents build our bomb shelters.

Teachers spray DDT, the poison fly spray, in the rooms around us kids as we do our math.

I get a bad kidney infection and the sulfa drug to cure it gives me raging hives. My parents tell the doctor how looney I’m getting with fear of disease and death and he tells them to get a big stick and beat me when I express my fears.

I am a wreck of a child. Death is everywhere and out to get all of us. I become so terrified that I can’t even eat, as I think I will choke to death. I am locked in dread but I can’t tell anyone or out comes the fat stick.

I become a silent, fear-filled ninny.

And later, as I grow older I find that traumas you experience as a child, that you stuff inside and live with….well, they stick and stay with you your entire life, no matter how illogical they may be in your current life as a rather sane, grown-up person.

And, so, the tooth episode sets me off.

After the Holiday when I finally get to see the dentist, he takes one look at my digital X-rays and says, “You have a cracked root. There’s lots of infection. That tooth has to come out and right now.”

It has to come out?

The dentist sets me up with an oral surgeon for the next day.

As I drive down the mountain for surgery, I am in such a state of phobic dread and terror that I scream and sob all the way down the hill.

What has Dr. Daisy unleashed?

She has set loose the child within. The hidden, screaming, terrified child within.

Oh well and oh good. This little child needs her say. She never got to say it. She needs to be listened to, taken care of and looked after.

A few days later, I see Dr. Daisy, again.

A bit toothless, I tumble out the story of my distress, mentioning that she, Dr. Daisy, sure made some big stuff happen. Like my tooth blew up, finally, and that’s good because now the poison is finally out of me, but she also blew the lid off my only fear, which is a frenzied, fear filled, irrational, illogical and highly embarrassing phobia. I tell her I am suffering mightily in my mind.

Dr. Daisy works on my face some more. And, then she works on my belly. She feels her way along and says what comes to her.
She tells me that I am very forthright, that I am very strong, deeply rooted, very grounded and hugely courageous. She laughs a gentle laugh and says that the phobia is just a teensy, tiny part of me.

As I leave I say warily, “So, what can I expect to have happen to me this time?”

Dr. Daisy looks at me and says calmly, “You’re going to cry a lot. Your eyes tell me they are ready to do that.”

So. I’m having another Adventure. And, I do love adventure, don’t I!
Gee…What will tomorrow bring?
Eeeeh gads!

I’m going out right now to cruise the streets in town, looking for my Dad in his Old Red Caddie. Looking for a Dead Man Driving a Red Cadillac will get my mind off myself, don’t you think??