Burnt Toast

My morning ritual before I tackle my daily writing project is to read a couple chapters from the top book on my ‘waiting to be read’ stack. With coffee close by and husband off to work I slip between the pages and escape. But never without interruption. This morning my orange demon, Opie, insisted the blinds in my geriatric tabby's room had to be open, so he rattled them with annoying persistence until I got up and opened them.




When I returned to the couch I spied the Scentsy fragrance I'd recently purchased: Fresh mowed grass. I almost didn't turn it on because I was the only one home. Why waste fragrance on just me, especially when I would be in the room for less than an hour? 

Then I recalled Teri Hatchers’ book, Burnt Toast, about how women unconsciously deny themselves. "Burnt Toast," is Teri’s metaphor for women who too often take the leftovers for themselves.

It is my opinion that always giving the best to someone else leads to a chronic lifestyle of putting yourself last in every aspect of your life. While admirable in that it showcases your loving, giving spirit, I feel it will eventually backfire and lead to personal discontent and perhaps a wee bit resentment toward those you've given first best to all these years.

One thing I've observed about cats is, with true feline instinct they will commandeer the best seat in the house. They rise as high off the ground as possible to a perch enabling them to look down on both fellow feline and human servants. From this perspective their omnipotent attitude is: Me first.

Me first. For most women this attitude is nearly impossible. Most likely we learned from our moms and grandmoms the art of sacrifice. The Baby Boomer’s parent culture had mom at home tending to the family while dad worked. Dad rarely set foot in the grocery store; laundry mat, or shopped for back-to-school clothes—or even bought his own boxer shorts! Wife-Mom did all that.

In Christine Northrup’s book, The Wisdom of Menopause, she says in gist, men’s brains use one hemisphere at a time, usually the left, which is associated with linear, logical thinking. Women, on the other hand, use both hemispheres simultaneously. 

The right hemisphere is associated with emotion. So, when women are created with a greater neurological and emotional connection to her heart than men, suffice to say, we are screwed. We will always give the best to our loved ones because it is physically impossible not to want the best for them…even if that means eating the burnt toast ourselves.

However, Dr. Northrup also said women use both hemispheres simultaneously. To me that means I need to consciously, deliberately override my right hemisphere on occasion and give myself what I want.

So, I turned on the Scentsy warmer and enjoyed fresh mowed grass.

Welcome to my world - humor author + cat magnet = writer inpurr-rupted. If you are here for the first time you may notice my website is kinda bare. Mostly because I'm a full-time meowmy to The Wonderpurr Gang and devote my hyper-creativity to their social media worlds.