How relaxed would you like to be? I'd like to be so relaxed I could be in the same room with a spider without it freaking me out. Although my husband has repeatedly suggested I try aversion therapy, allowing spiders to crawl on me sounds like a "Survivor" episode I wouldn't survive. My husband also tries reminding me that spiders are God's creatures too. Then I remind him that female spiders eat their mates.



Learning to relax takes practice. Whenever I get ready to curl up on the couch with a good book, a little voice in my head tells me I should be balancing my checkbook or cleaning out the hall closet. That little voice is so rude it keeps talking even when I have food in my mouth.

Some doctors say relaxing in the morning gives us energy to handle the rest of the day. Other doctors say relaxing at night helps us to let go of the stress we've built up during the day. What these doctors are actually saying is that the time you should relax is when you don't have the time.

I don't have time for messages. I know messages would relax my muscles and remove my tension, but my tension comes right back. Message treats the symptoms of tension. It doesn't cure it. Life causes tension - and there's no cure for life that I can live with.

Yoga is another popular form of relaxation, but being one with my body wasn't easy. The cat pose, the child pose, the sphinx pose - although I practiced for fifteen minutes every morning, it wasn't enough. That's when I invented a new pose. The harried housewife pose is to be practiced at night. You put one hand on a takeout menu and the other hand on a martini shaker.

When yoga didn't work, I decided to try meditation; but deciding isn't doing. It's not easy to become one with mind, body and spirit. In fact, I think it's much easier to become one with that martini. That's mind, body and two spirits.

For me, however, a thirty-minute nap works best. It revitalizes me. When I was explaining this to my son, he wanted to know why his childhood naps had to be sixty minutes. To avoid a long explanation I simply told him that thirty minutes had been for him and thirty minutes had been for me.