Sister Stuff

I don't know why, but meditation has been difficult lately, almost as if the well has gone dry.  I keep thinking that maybe it is because I am happy enough right now, I don't have as much stress as usual, I am even a few days ahead on my homework this week.  My mood has improved so much since the end of October and I'm back to the warm, friendly optician my customers expect me to be.  I am not on a diet or any specific eating plan, I'm not thinking about it at all.  Diets don't work for me because sooner or later the restrictions feel like a noose around my neck and I rebel way too hard.  I can only be disciplined for so long before I 'lose it'and binge on crap.  I lost 10 pounds last month on South Beach Diet and started feeling really good.  Then excuses came via needing to be on steroids and my period starting at the same time.  Oh, and the dreaded snow and slippery roads.  I made a conscious decision to stop watching (read:caring) what I ate while I got my wits about me.  It's like I'm waiting to care enough about myself.  Then I thought to myself, maybe how much we care about ourselves is directly linked to how WE THINK our mother felt about us.  For me, it fits the puzzle, my mother cared about me sometimes, loved me deeply sometimes, but didn't want to think about or be bothered by me others.  That's how I feel about me, sometimes I feel so great about myself and sometimes I don't want to think about me.  In weight-loss/gain world it equates to the flux of being committed to making my body a healthy place for calm and wisdom to live, and not giving a f#%} about myself or my weight.  

I wasn't able to come up with any good parent stuff from meditation so I focused on my sister.  She's my only sibling, about 1 1/2 years older.  We are not particularly close.  Tonight I got the image of us as young girls, having a sister was like having a built-in friend.  Sure, we fought awefully, and have the scars to prove it, but we did have a lot of fun too. As I was flipping through some memories of her and I, my mind went to the time when she started making friends and going off to see them without me.  Sure, sometimes my parents forced her to bring me, but she didn't want to.  And sometimes shed ride her bike so fast that I couldn't keep up and I'd arrive at her friend's house in tears.  She didn't want me, and the more times she tried to make me feel bad for wanting to tag along, the less I wanted to.  So eventually I gave up and she went everywhere without me.  And my parents had stuff to do too.  And my meditative mind cried, "She didn't want me, she left me behind with them, trapped."  In my mind it felt like my mother abandoned me.  I never would have connected these thoughts together without meditation.  My sister and I are not close, as I've said, but it hasn't always been like that.  I always attributed it the the fact that she is a know-it-all who always offers unsolicited advice when sometimes I just want to vent without being offered advice.  But little things that get under our skin don't add up to an awkward relationship we have even though she only lives 100 miles away, I've never met her two year old daughter and only seen her other two kids a handful of times.  I know I need to fix my relationship with her and maybe this meditation is a really good inspiration for doing that.