STUBBORN AS A MULE

Her stubborn streak freaks me out. She’s the fourth member of a small motley group of ladies who regularly meet for lunch to indulge in ‘girl talk’. Teenagers? 20somethings? Far from it. We’re certified grown-ups living lives crazy as it can be and got married to men who turned out to be much crazier than we could ever be. Happy or not with that will make out another story. Mia-- she stands out stubborn as a mule. She wails and moans that she’s fat, so lonely now that the children are gone to living their own separate lives, and that everything about her is losing to gravity.

She a joke talking that way and she’s only just about 50?! while I’m almost down the other door of 60. If there’s anyone who has a long list of complaints, it’s me. Consider these -- silver streaks sitting alongside vanishing dark tresses, wrinkles boldly inching their way to my face, super dry skin smothered with jars of moisturizers, reading glasses claiming the bridge of my nose for its permanent home, shadows comfortably settled around the eyes day and night, and yes I’m losing much to gravity. But this story is about our friend, Mia.

Anyway, we told Mia that she should do something -- not just mope and sulk. And that these things are within her power and control-- all she has to do is will herself to act on it. She countered with a ready litany of ‘her favorite things’-- she loves pizza, cakes, pastries, ice cream, chocolate bars, Coke, and the television. Her favorite places are pastry shops and candy stores. Comfort zones, nothing we ever say or do could extricate her from that -- just one big stubborn streak that won’t budge— that’s Mia.

Finally on our last wit’s end, we took the argument to a different front – health. We piled on all the health scares we could think of about fat people and the health risks of sedentary lives. We harped on the issues of high cholesterol, triglycerides, heart ailments, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, melancholia and chronic depression. One of us even went further to say that if she didn’t shape up —she might soon find her husband shipping out with somebody else. Well, it did seem to have done the trick because she wailed horrified (much to our delight) at the thought that her man would do that to her. But that lasted only a day. Unfortunately! The next day when we returned to her house to pick up the palm pilot one of us left behind, we saw her back to her favorite things—ice cream, cake, and coke. She grinned sheepishly and said “Ladies, life is too short to worry about philandering spouses and diseases.” There you go, that’s Mia, stubborn Mia—one of a kind, gosh! :-)

posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 5:45 PM