I am ready to receive, I need to nurture myself. I can’t worry about other people anymore, not for a while. Now is not the time. I need to protect myself first, to take care of Jack and Fiona and Billy. To be here for Alan, Danny, and my good friends. I need my energy for painting and writing. I don’t have energy for fixing, creating, spending time with people or family who drain me, who ZAP my energy, who take and take and take as much as they can get. I am liberated from that now.

I decide my Dad and Betty cannot stay at our house, don’t want them contaminating it, don’t feel comfortable with them staying here. My Dad and Betty need to gain my trust first. I owe them nothing. Our dad helped take care of us the first six years, but we were on Welfare and food stamps. How can I calculate what I owe him? He left me three messages the other day. “Yeah this is Dad, Please give us a call when you get a chance. We love you.” Then a few more asking if I was going to be able to make it to the TOPS International Recognition Day. The night they honor my Dad for being runner up for the State of New Hampshire. I still don’t understand because my Dads never had a weight problem. I called him back, 9:00pm our time, 12:00 am their time. They talk together on the phone, meaning I can’t talk to my Dad without Betty on the line too. They are so excited about TOPS. Betty is so proud of my Dad. They sound like they are on speed. Or like they are getting ready to pull off a heist and they’ve got it all figured out. It starts stressing me out. I tell them “I have to go, I have to go to bed now”.

I take ½ a klonopin. Don’t want to think about them, just wanted to sleep.

“A lot of us find it easy to give.” Says Grace, the Yoga teacher. “It’s much harder to receive, to be receptive”. We begin our practice, breathing in, breathing out, flowing, meditating, releasing, opening and receiving.

I’m having a quiet moment. Thursday morning, 9:30 am. The babies are sound asleep. Everything is a huge mess but I don’t care. I hear birds singing, the hum of my lap top and the refrigerator, and every so often the chimes ringing.