Gardening

Honestly, if you would have asked me a few years ago if I would ever see myself in shorts and a shirt, all sweaty and dirty, crouching under a tree removing weeds or moving the lawn or cutting back bushes I would have laughed at you so hard I probably wuld have fallen off my chair.

Gardening, that means digging up dirt, watering plants, having all kinds of creepy bugs lazily crawl over your feet, mosquito bites, dark rims on your fingernails and lots more...never in a million years would I have imagined I would actually think that is fun, or relaxing, or something I look forward too.

Last Summer, having just gotten over my first bad episode of depression, I found that doing work in our backyard, removing all the weeds that had been annoying me ever since the first few sunny days had started, was actually something that I liked. While doing that you can either think about everything going on in your head, debating pros and cons while violently yanking out those pesky dandelions growing in between the cobblestones on the walkway to your front door, or you can just not think about anything at all, humming the melody to the last song you heard and getting a tan, or more likely in my case, sunburned.

While growing up I never really had to do any gardening. I grew up in a house with a yard in the front and a yard in the back, it was the middle one in a row of Town Houses. The yard in the front had a lawn, some bushes, trees and flowers and a small Hedge in the front so strangers couldn't easily see anything going on in our yard. The back was paved and we had a table tennis table there. My parents didn't believe in doing any work except maybe mowing the lawn. For cutting back trees or bushes and planting flowers the would hire someone. My dad owns his own law firm and therefore worked a lot, around 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.To compensate all the hard work we spend every vacation going to some (far away) place to relax on the beach. Not one vacation was spend at home, so we basically never used our yard.

My husband grew up totally different. His parents lived in a small apartment and owned a "Schrebergarten" (Leo.Org translates it with Garden Plot). I don't really know how common that concept is in other countries but in Germany it is very popular. People living in apartments (some even without a balcony or in the downtown areas) rent small areas on the outskirts of the city as their own yard. These yards are actually quite big and almost everyone has a small Cabin on it, complete with a camping toilet and a small kitchen. Some only have a huge lawn, a small pool, swings and sandbox for the kids or a pond for fishes, some also have plot to grow vegetables and trees to grow fruits. People go there every weekend for barbeques or to relax in the sun. A lot of them have a middle class or lower class income so spending your days in the Schrebergarten is their kind of vacation because they might not be able to afford going somwhere.

My Parents-in-Law grow their own Tomatoes, Potatoes, Asparagus, they have an Apple tree and I think a Cherry Tree too. My husband learned very early on to help with gardening, planting stuff and harvesting it later. So when we were looking for a house to rent he insisted on a yard, the bigger, the better. The place that we live in right now has a small yard, too small for him so he is constantly complaining. In the beginning I didn't really care, I never thought I would every help him do anything and basically didn't care how it looked, if the grass was too long or green enough and if there were weeds and leafs everywhere. During the really hot summer days I preferred to spend my time inside, drinking Iced Coffee and reading.

To me it is kind of amazing how I have changed in the last year, I have started liking things I never would have thought possible.

So what do you do when you need time to think about stuff. And do hey have the concept of Garden Plots where you live. Did your parents have one if you are from Germany?

Irene

It's been a while

So...this blog was kinda quite for the last...ummm...8 months. On the one hand it is not really tragic because, to be honest, one like 2 or 3 people actually read it currently. On the other hand I am mad at myself for not writing more because every once in a while I have caught myself thinking "hey it would be helpful to write/talk about your problems/ideas/opinions and maybe someone will have an advice." When I started blogging it was for fun, I wanted to do it on a regular basis, I love blogs and enjoy reading those that I read a lot. I am fascinated by being able to take a sneak-peak into the life of other people around the globe. And I thought if I keep this up and running regularly, maybe someone might enjoy sneak-peaking into my life.

But like someone, apparently John Lennon, once said (it's one of my favourite quotes)

"life is what is happening while you are busy making other plans"

So life has been busy, hectic and stressful in the last few months. I have been sick a lot and had to stay in bed a lot and basically was unhappy with myself, my health and my life. I'll spare anyone reading this the details, first of all they are personal, second of all I don't want to remember it and start dwelling on it again and third I don't want to sound like I am whining about stuff that I can't change anyways.

I have been seeing a therapist once a week since September last year because I have been suffering from depression and anxiety attacks regularly. I had been sick and in the hospital for a lot of different reasons almost every 6 months since October 2010 and at some point I started to feel so insecure about myself and my health that even thinking about leaving my house and doing something outside of my routine scared the shit out of me because I knew/thought/feared I would become sick again. In reality this wasn't true, no one has to go to the hospital because they don't follow their daily routine of getting up, going to work, cleaning and doing laundry. But my immune system was so weak that I got a flu as soon as some sneezed next to me and I just didn't dare do anything out of the ordinary. Being faced with challenges scared the hell out of me and led to panic attacks making it impossible to do anything on my own.

Those weeks and months were challenging because the job my hubby has usually requires him to go on business trips overnight almost every week. Not being able to deal with stuff on my own made it impossible for him to leave me and our kids home alone and so he only left us alone if he really couldn't avoid it. I became more and more dependant on him and felt like I couldn't do anything alone anymore. Needless to say that led to lots of fighting because he just didn't understand (he'd never been in a situation that scared him so much that he couldn't face it alone or had felt sick and weak as much as I did). He felt like "I should just get my shit together" and I felt like he is not supporting me and leaving me alone (after once promising me "in sickness and in health"). To sum it up, the last 6 months basically sucked!!

But somehow through a lot of talking, analyzing, and also asking my hubby to come to my therapist with me we sorted out the fears I had and found some solutions we both could live with. I learned a lot about myself and had the change to realize some things that happened in the past which probably led to me being the way I am today. I learned to live with the fact that I can't change the past and I can't change the way people are and how they treat me. I have learned (but still struggle with actually following through with it) that I can't and don't have to please everyone and be nice to people that don't give a shit. My health is a bit better, not perfect and I am still facing a huge surgery in September (maybe even two). But I have learned to cope with my problems by myself and so two weeks ago my threapist and I agreed that we think I made so much progress that we will stop the weekly meetings, I will come one more time right before the summer vacation starts and then we will see how it goes when we come back in September. I am really really proud of myself for reaching that point.

I would say I am far from being perfect, flawless and totally content but I am far more happy with myself and my life that I was a year ago. Now out of 7 days a week I am happy on 4 or 5 out of them, a few months ago it was the other way around.

Let's hope I will get back into the routine of writing about some more or less interesting things that happen in my crazy yet kinda boring life. If you read this (and maybe go back through the bits I have written before disappearing from the blogosphere) and like it come back and maybe tell your friends, I'd love it if someone will give me feedback.

Irene