About this Yoga Thing

That's not me, it need hardly be said. What it is, is a slightly imperfect triangle pose (really, her top hip could roll back a smidge), and it's one of my favorites. And it was lost in the great life-changing debacle. I'm too old to be sedentary for two years, apparently. Bad things happen -and losing triangle pose isn't the worst of it, of course. But it bugged me.

You would think this posture would be simple, to look at it, but there's a lot to think about and explore. It's one of those postures that is available to most yoga practitioners (possibly modified, but still an authentic pose)on day one, and remains interesting across a lifetime's practice. And it feels really good, to boot.

It's a yoga belief (in some schools of yoga, anyway) that there is always a modification to make many postures available to everyone. Believe me when I tell you that the modification of triangle pose that I was doing is the one reserved for little old ladies in the nursing home. My knees were the problem -which seems a little odd. Your hips, or back, or neck, or balance.... those are the obvious challenge points in this posture; but for me it was my knees. I lock them, and it hurts.

So, ummmm, "stop locking your knees" comes to mind as a solution.

Therapeutically, locked joints are a (potential) indicator of over-discipline and a distorted need for control. Believe me when I tell you that knowing this doesn't help. Ceding control got me where I was 18 months ago, and that will never again happen to me. Heartache may well be out there for me again, but it won't be because I turned my life over to someone else.

But there's power and a certain kind of healthy mastery -and there's grasping control. As usual, I'm seeking a balance that is elusive. This morning, I gave triangle pose another shot -and fell over backwards. Given my current weight and fitness level, the thud shook the entire house; I wasn't sure the roof wasn't going to cave in ;) The situation was so ridiculous, the only available path was to laugh. Do you suppose the right path through this grasping-letting go quagmire is to let go, laughing?

Women in Black

In an on-line support group I'm in (all women, but not by design), we have a running joke about donning our black pants, black turtlenecks and black sunglasses, grabbing absurdly large and destructive armaments of some kind, and avenging any wrongs perpetrated on one of our members. We are the Women in Black, setting out to make a more perfect universe, and Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones should quake at the mention of our name. Hell hath no fury, indeed.

The thing is.... it's hard not to notice that most of the wrongs are perpetrated against women by men. I am not a man-hating feminist. Moreover, I think that's largely a myth. All feminists come with fathers, most with brothers (I imagine), and certainly some with male partners. Some feminists ARE men, forcryingoutloud. But, for the love of Mike, it's sort of hard not to notice the pattern.

Certainly, you all know that I believe I was treated very ill by a man I trusted. I imagine that trust issues will now haunt me for a good long while, possibly forever. His actions were brutal. He knows that. He knew that when he was doing it, but felt entitled to act that way anyway.

FOUR women who are dear to me are in relationship-drama. The drama ranges from dire to worrying-but-probably-nothing. And it is all perpetrated by men thinking (apparently) that they can have bloody well whatever they want. I've had it.

Men who are dear to me and men who are not, these are the rules.

You don't have to go all Promise Keepers on me, but if you made a promise, keep it. If you must break a promise because the keeping of it is more destructive than the breaking of it, do that with as much gentleness and integrity as you can find.

YOU are not the center of the universe. Sorry. Your mother didn't lie, exactly. You were the center of HER universe, but she sort of thought you'd figure out that you weren't the center of the whole bloody thing. Work on that for me, would you?

Treating your wife as a partner and a friend is not some post-apocalyptic violation of all that is true and holy. Grow up. You can't be all things to all people. Honor your wife's giftedness. Respect that she can do plenty of things you can't do -and let's discount the obvious stuff like have a baby. She has talents and gifts and wisdom you don't have. This fact does not threaten your virility.

And about that virilty. We like it, true enough. But it's not the only reason we love you. Seducing a 22-year-old won't help you relocate it. She doesn't think you're hot; she wants a father figure. Give it up and come home.

We will warn you a few times when you break these rules. But there is an end-point. After that, I'm calling my friends. We're getting our black turtlenecks out of the laundry basket and getting to work. Don't say I didn't warn you.

This is America

Let me preface this by saying that I am emphatically a patriot. The thing is, there's a slight difference of opinion about that. Many of the people who are out there describing themselves as patriots wouldn't consider me to be one. I think dissent can be patriotic. I don't think waving a flag around is enough. And I really, really don't think either of the wars we are involved in has anything whatever to do with patriotism. I think they are monstrous disasters.

So that's the background.

Yesterday was an amazing day. I got called to serve on a jury. As with many people, when the time came for me to put my patriotic beliefs into actual, inconvenient action, I had to heave a sigh and make myself act appropriately. But I got through it and drove to Sycamore to our beautiful old courthouse (last seen by our heroine on the day of her divorce).

I hadn't realized that on that very same morning, a Sycamore-based unit of the National Guard was scheduled to return from Afghanistan. There was to be a parade in their honor at the exact time court was supposed to start. Instead, the courthouse was (temporarily) closed, and the streets were lined with flags and people. The Boy Scouts were out. The high school band was there. People I know -at least one whose son was in the unit- and people I didn't. One little girl on a teensy pink bicycle was riding next to the soldiers, yelling "Look Daddy, I can ride my bike!!" There were babies and strollers and old people in wheel chairs. Judges and jurors and police officers lined the streets.

And there was not a a dry eye to be seen. Seriously, it was a picture right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Or a country music song. Honestly, if it were in a movie, you would have thought it was too sweet to be believable. But there it was.

I hate these wars. But it's also true that I have a brother who is in the Air Force. He's safely state-side at the moment, but I want it to be true that there are parades in his honor and people saying thank you, and (rather dreadful) bands doing their best to celebrate his heroism. I want the town to temporarily stop to say "oh my goodness, we are so glad you're back," and to take a moment of silence for the ones who can't come back. He deserves it; he really does.

And so... I'll stand with the other patriots. For a minute, we'll make room for each other, and celebrate other patriots who express their beliefs differently. They'll go home and, God willing, watch their children ride pink bicycles for a while. I went to the courthouse and did a different kind of duty.

Lucky, Happy Mom

That would be me. This is a photo from Mothers' Day. We went rock climbing and then out for beer and chicken wings. Flowers are for other moms. This is what I wanted. I am lucky and blessed. (And aren't they just the most gorgeous kids ever???)

Return to Sender

A while back I posted about returning Dave's mail and trying to stop acting like his wife. So, I returned some mail. I marked the letter "not at this address" and tossed it back in my mailbox.

You know the old kid's song "the cat came back"? Yeah. The next day, the mail was back, marked with a question mark by the letter carrier. So, on the same letter, I wrote "Really. He's not here." And I put it back into the mail box. You guessed it. It came back. So today, I wrote "Honest. I've looked everywhere. I'm pretty sure he's not here."

We'll see what happens next.

Wanna See?

Progress. I'm making progress.

I didn't get the chairs or the rug. They're just not right for my dining room. And no way my dining room is that airy and light; I wish it were. But that's my table. It'll be delivered in a few days.

If you're not scared, you're not paying attention

Is that even true? It's something I'm thinking about lately.

The last semester -particularly the last month- has been difficult. It's not Math-Fink's doing this time. No, this time, it was all me. This semester was pretty close to grace-less. I stumbled and bumbled and dropped balls I was trying to juggle, and generally made a mess.

Yes, I can come up with rational explanations as to WHY that happened. Yes, I know I can get better at all the things I screwed up. Yes, I know I'm being impatient with myself and expecting quite a lot.

The thing is.... other people expect quite a lot of me, too. And they have no reason or inclination to cut me any slack. In fact, for them to do so would be inappropriate. Employers, children, people whose job it is to enforce standards.... those people. They have very right to expect me to step up and get it done. Whatever "it" is, in their particular case.

So, I face again -anew- more things that scare me. Resentment builds up that I have to do this alone. And then I think, no... I GET to do this alone. What do I want? How will I organize this? And I cycle back and forth -like a person with a particularly rapid-cycling bipolar disorder- between panic and courage. So, is everybody afraid, and some people just figure out a path through the fear? Maybe some people are too naive or too young to be afraid. Maybe it's only smart adults who are afraid. Great.

Or maybe those people who seem to be serene AND high-achieving really are both. How do they do that? I have learned that I can't muscle my way through this. Rock climbing should have told me that. Muscle power never gets me anywhere; I have to rely on flexibility and coordination.

So, I tried will power, and I didn't have enough. I tried brute force, and I guess I'm insufficiently brutish because that didn't work either. But I have a life to get organized here. What is going to work? Is there a way to lead with MY strengths -flexibility and coordination and maybe a smidge of creativity? Would that work? Would that keep the fear at bay?

Or is fear just part of the human condition?

Mothers' Day Declaration

I know I post this every year, but I'll just keep doing it until people start paying attention.... Oh wait, that's a different "momily". Read this one instead.

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!


Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."


From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.


Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.


In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870

Does this just say it all???

For well over a week now, my glasses have been lost. I knew they had to be in the house because I got home;I wouldn't drive without them. But darn if I could find them. What's worse is that I remembered that tragic thought of "You're putting your glasses somewhere weird. This is gonna come back to bite you in the patootie." Did I actually act on that thought? Don't be silly.

And, being me, I had paid-for contacts. At the eye doctor's office. For six months, because he's never open when I'm available. Literally, they've been there for six months. No exaggerating, for once. It's time for my next appointment, and I haven't picked up the contacts from the last appointment.

So I had no glasses or contacts at all for a few days. Then I snuck out of work for a "lunch hour" at about 10:00 one morning (because the eye doctor is closed over the noon hour) and got my contacts. I was about ready to figure that I'd find my glasses one day a year from now when I rearrange the furniture, or clean out the freezer, or who knows what.

Today, I stumbled into my little workout area, thinking I'd blow off a little steam by doing some cardio, and .... there they are. If I'd been exercising the way I should, I would have found them 10 days ago. So I'm blind AND fat AND disorganized.

Forcryingoutloud. Pull yourself together, woman.

Meet Elite Mature Singles

I love facebook. I think it's not much shy of world-changing, this social networking stuff. I'll probably write about that at some point. But for now, I'm just frustrated at what happens every time I sign on to facebook.

I'm greeted by this handsome man, about my age, under the caption "meet elite mature singles." Doubtless this is because I've indicated that I'm single. I've ALSO indicated that I am interested in friendship and networking, rather than -I suppose- trolling for a new partner. Yet that seems not to matter quite so much.

First of all, who are the guys who sign up to have their picture splashed around on facebook? It's either narcissistic or desperate, I can't decide which. And WHAT is an elite single? It's probably meant to imply wealth. Or maybe it's code for "we know there are loser single guys our age out there, but we are not those guys." And I should believe this why? You're the one who paid to have your picture on facebook, after all. And "mature" is surely code for "old", in this case, and that kind of stinks. I certainly don't want an immature partner. Been there; done that. But jsut ick, that I'm in that category where it's considered impolite -or unmarketable- to use the accurate word. And how do we REALLY know that they are single at all? Math-Fink was playing around on matchmaking sites long before he was single. I've had women he was "dating" contact me through this blog, for heaven's sake.

I know plenty of people who've found partners -life-long (apparently) as well as just-for-now- - on social networking sites. To me, it feels soul-stealing. How can it be true that I feel this way, when I increasingly make no distinction between cyberspace and "real" space? My cyber-friends ARE my friends. I've "met" them in that loopy, roundabout way that we meet anyone. Someone knows someone who invites them into a group and we click -or not. We take care of each other. We challenge each other. We worry. We celebrate. It's real friendship.

And yet, I don't want to find a partner that way. More to the point, I don't want a life partner at all right now. Among other things, it's a time management problem. There are no minutes in my day into which to put a partner -which tells me I'm not ready to work very hard at it. There's no particular sadness in considering the possibility that I might always feel this way. It's not that a partner is not coming to me; it's that I'm not interested.

So, stop offering me "elite mature singles" for heaven's sake.

Safe Haven? Shipwreck Cove??

I'm not sure what the right metaphor is. But here's my thinking....

My 27 year old daughter lives with me. Neither of us ever thought this would happen, but it is so very working -for both of us, I think.

My thinking goes like this. When I was in college, many of my friends were told by their parents that from this point forward they were visitors in their parents' home. This wasn't seen as harsh, at all. It was more of a statement that they were fully launched now. Then, a few years later, kids were coming home after college to re-group and think. Parents -those parents who themselves had been told that to come home was only for emergencies- didn't know quite what to make of this. They certainly didn't want to define their children to be failing, but this situation wasn't good. The economy was hard. Suddenly a Master's degree was essential where before a Bachelor's degree had been sufficient.... A rationale for this situation was created.

But now, I think we're in a different place yet again. I really do. I'm not rationalizing here, at all. I think we're redefining family and adulthood to be less about independence and more about inter-dependence. This house, this big old falling-down barn, was a place of respite when I needed one. It's weird to think that a place -nothing more than boards and nails when you get right down to it- could be a sanctuary. Don't people, after all, consecrate a people to make it a sanctuary?? But... whatever the reason, I needed to be here while I healed and regrouped.

So, what's the problem if I share that space? Isn't there something wonderful happening if I can share that space with someone else, and have it offer that same sanctuary? Or the sanctuary they need? Family can look different at different times. I am so grateful to have another person in the house -another person whose life occasionally intersects with mine. In a real way, she's babysitting me. But it's not only that. I have space and resources and mom-stuff that she needs right now, too. And together, we can do things that we can't do alone.

I don't think this is a forever-type situation. I think she ought to live independently before (or whether or not) she lives with a family of her own making. For that matter, I think I ought to have done that. But, I also think we're re-conceiving family. On so many levels, we've defined it too narrowly for too long. It's so much more than a mommy and a daddy and a baby and a puppy. That can be a wonderful family. But it's also a middle-aged mom and an adult daughter and maybe a friend who needs a little more care and structure. Or a mom and several children and no daddy. Or two mommies and a baby. Those might all be wonderful families too.

We all need a safe haven.

Rumors of my demise, and all that...

My inbox is full of concerned messages. Bless your hearts, the dear ones in my life are afraid I may have fallen back into the black pit of despair. No, it's not that.

I've been thinking of all of you -worried that you might be worried. Every once in a while, a blog post would pop into my head. There was the one about being an ally to my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered friends, family, and co-inhabitors of the planet. It was going to be brilliant, I'm quite sure. See? I even had a picture.






Then there was the one about the ongoing home repairs, trying to make this house into the functional, warm, welcoming place I know it could be. I'm not quite sure how I was going to make fixing the toilet brilliant, but funny was probably within reach. If Victoria and I can't figure it out -which we couldn't quite- then she invites people over to help her. They are apparently so smitten with her that they will even do this. There must be a joke here somewhere.












Then there are dear friends who dropped by and seem not to worry too much that I still don't have furniture. That one was going to be touching and heart-warming. Trust me.



And in other news.... I'm going to tear down the garage. Well, I'm going to have the garage torn down. And rebuilt. And I have a new personal trainer. Something has to be done about my physical health. I think this is going to be good. She's very gentle and attentive and supportive -with no tone of "For crying out loud, how did you let this happen???!". What else? Well, maybe I shouldn't tell you everything in one post. There could be more blogging left to be done.

Of course, none of those posts made it from fleeting thought to the keyboard. Work, research, writing, trying to keep myself pulled together... it's taking all I have and a little more. So, every day I get a smidge more behind. It's not a pretty sight around here, but it's not darkness and despair. Very far from that.

I think at some point I may have publicly said that I wanted to be really, really busy, because I didn't want to sit home alone and brood. OK, be very careful what you tell the universe you want. This is perhaps just a smidge more than I had in mind. Perhaps balance is the next lesson in the queue.

I'm Not Your Wife

I feel like a huge cranky-pants bitch, but I think -for once- I'm actually not. Cue the stunned silence, I know!

Mail for Dave periodically comes to the house. If it's not clearly junk, I forward it or arrange for one of the kids to deliver it. But really.... he hasn't lived in this house for two and half years. YEARS!! I'm thinking that he could have filed a change of address form by now.

And today I got a phone call on my cell phone -a reminder call from the dentist that he has an appointment tomorrow. I was reaching for the computer to send him e-mail, and then I thought.... "for the love of Mike, I'm not his wife. Stop acting like it."

I'm throwing away the mail, and I'm ignoring the phone call. I'm not going out of my way to block his forward motion, but I don't have to do his work for him. He either needs to get another wife or do the work himself.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

God's Nightgown!!!*

* It's a "literary" allusion. It's the curse that Scarlett O'Hara would use when she was ROYALLY pissed. And so is this southerner!

Just LOOK what I woke up to -in almost-April!! This is ridiculous. I, of course, left my car out in the driveway, because I'm smart that way. So it's encrusted in a case of ice. I need to traipse out into this mess and make sure there's bird seed in the feeder (which I know there isn't at the moment).

And what about my pretty purple crocuses?? Will they be ok?

Tip for surviving my temper today: Don't start with the "it looks pretty" thing. We know that drill. We say that to endure, and it might even be true in November. Now, this weather is just an affront to good manners.

Spring Forward

My sister has been lamenting about the lack of spring over at her blog. Winter can be a hard slog for relocated southern belles, and you'll just have to hold tight while we stomp our little feet and act generally put-out that it's not the weather we were brought up to expect.

But I'm here to tell you that there's hope. I own my very own house now:

And it comes with its very own gardens:






And there's this big mysterious thing that gardeners talk knowingly about: "putting your garden to bed." Last fall, when it was apparently time to do this -whatever it is- I nodded knowingly. "I KNOW!!!" I said. "Isn't it just too sad to be finished with the garden for the year." Heave a big sigh... and whew. I got away with it again. I didn't have the slightest idea what that meant. Put the garden to bed, indeed. Put myself to bed, with a nice hot toddy. THAT I can handle.

But I think it must have something to do with all those leaves and dead stalks and weird things that are covering the bright green things that are trying to grow. I think I was supposed to get rid of those things. (going out on a limb here!) So I told myself "never give up; never surrender" and that any forward progress is still forward and that I don't have to do everything today. And I went out there with one yard waste bag and the rake and the intention of cleaning out one -and only one- bed. I actually thought there wasn't enough stuff there to fill the bag, but I was so very wrong.

Anyway, in the course of cleaning, here's what I found.


And here's the big ol' yard being used for a hardly-any-planning, bonfire party -which is the kind of entertaining a girl can do when she doesn't have any furniture in the public parts of the house ;)




This whole thing is coming together. I'm stepping into my new life. The house and gardens are taking on a new vitality. Spring is just around the corner.

Well, what do you know!!

For several reasons (trying to get my groove back...trying to step into my dreams....) I've been getting up early in the morning to write. Sometimes, I sit at my desk or the table in the coffee shop, and nothing happens. At all. So rather than not write, I just write any old thing. Whatever spills out the other end of my pen is acceptable. As an antidote to yesterday's whiny post about not doing everything I want to be doing, this morning I started listing things in my life that I'm grateful for.

The first thing on the list was that I was grateful to be divorced. WHAT???? Not always. Not fully. But still. It was full-stop amazement when I realized that I had written something monumentally, unbelievably true. I never, ever believed this moment would come.

It's still new and tentative and odd-feeling. I can locate the familiar reasons to be sad with very little trouble. But it's time (and past time) to start rehearsing the newly-true thing. I am freed from being subtly belittled every single day. I am so happy that the people remaining in my life don't punish me by withholding. I am glad that I can begin to make my own way.

In an effort (a successful effort, by the way) to actually make myself plunk down the wad o' cash necessary to get myself and the purple luggage to Tuscany this summer, I watched Under the Tuscan Sun last night. Diane Lane says this, "Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid."

It is surprising. I thought it would kill me. And there are still days, as you know, when I don't feel quite this confident that it won't. But I need to shine the light (the Tuscan sun?) on these days rather than the bad ones. It's that new focus that makes all the difference in the world.

Re-Grooving

I was going to call this post "dumb-fuckery" but decided that my life coach would not be proud of me if I did that.

Last weekend, I was in Alabama to see my mom and my sister. It was wonderful. And I couldn't help but notice how much better this trip was than my list trip there. I was happier, more centered, more sure of who I am. I could get out of my own head enough to truly love seeing other people and how they are doing in their lives.

And then I proceeded to come home and screw everything up that I even looked at, much less touched. The Engineering Building has this place where that scary-grate-stuff covers a large walkway. I had my keys in my hand. You know what happened next. Of COURSE, I dropped my keys down there and the campus police had to rescue them -and me. I missed a meeting and almost missed a few others. I left my phone charger in another state. I am so behind at work that I might seriously pass myself. I got yelled at by not one, but two, faculty members this week -and neither one was anyone I had babies with. (Both were totally unwarranted, as it happens, but it still rattles a person. Besides, two other people could quite legitimately have yelled at me. They just don't know it yet, or they're too polite to say so. So probably it all comes out in the wash.)

So, there's clearly work to be done here. How do I get my groove back? (Not THAT groove. While I wouldn't rule out going to Jamaica and having a fling with a sweet young thing named Shakespeare, that does seem like, well, someone else's groove.)

As I have daily proof, one can lose track of one's personal power through nothing more earth-shattering than a series of really tiny decisions to accept less and less. And one day, you wake up and you don't recognize your life anymore. So, I suppose the converse (inverse? contrapostive?) is true as well. Perhaps nothing more important than doing -again and again and again- the small things that help me to live the dream will, in fact, lead me toward the dream.

So, what's the next right thing?????

Range of Motion

Sunday at rock climbing my hands were doing this weird thing they do -not closing around the thing I'm trying to grasp. And it's easy to see how that would be un-helpful in a rock climbing context. It does make an interesting metaphor, but we'll leave that for another day. I realized I had been neglecting yoga the week before, so I'm back to a regular practice this week.

As I work my way back to yoga this year, I'm having a hard time finding guided practices that are easy enough. I have a few, but mostly the ones I have are from a different time in my life. Last night I tried Shiva Rea's lunar practice from the Yoga Shakti DVD. I had to laugh; after an hour pretty much all I had done was the same posture over and over.

She wants me to do this.
My knees won't do that. I'll just modify like this.

.... over and over and over. But I almost always modified the same way, so I did the same posture again and again and again. Is this even doing any good??

I used to think, while doing yoga as a hyper-flexible person, that I simply wouldn't tolerate an inflexible body. I modified postures, but mostly based on things that will never change -like my height or arm length. My limber muscles allowed for a complete range of motion in almost any direction (my upper back has always been a holdout), and I wondered why one would accept anything less. Well, the Greek myths were right; hubris had the result it usually does.

But the opposing questions of hubris or being satisfied with too little are still around. Some limitations I can confront head-on. I have a working sense of how far I can nudge myself forward in uppavista konasana, for example. I'm not as flexible as I used to be, but I sense it's all still there waiting for me. It feels good to work my intelligent edge. Do I do the same thing with my knees, though? It doesn't feel right, so I don't.

If we let this process become a metaphor, it's not hard to see where it's going. Given my previous life experience with making myself small and still -which on some level led to these limitations- I am disinclined to limit my range of motion, ever again. I would prefer to work muscles and joints and life-skills, even if it hurts. Limiting myself taught me not to even notice anger, to accept very little from my life partner, to think that very little was all I deserved, and to step back from risk because certain humiliation awaited. None of that led to a life anyone would want to claim. My place in the world became tinier and tinier. At at least one point, I thought I would literally vanish. Not that I had a plan for doing anything to end my life; I just thought it would happen. I would disappear.

But when do I, both physically and metaphorically, extend and when do I hold back? How do I assess the difference? I'm afraid, now, of risking too little -of treating myself too gently. I'm deeply suspicious when someone suggests that I'm too old or too...something else... to even expect to be able to do something-or-other now. But I would also like to avoid ending up in a body cast or permanently injured.

Or maybe fragile knees aren't a metaphor at all and this whole thing is becoming needlessly tortured. Just haul yourself to a physical therapist and stop whining????

Learning to Listen

Let's just be clear. Two things are true here. One is that learning to listen to people takes a life-time and constant practice. And two, if I absolutely NEVER EVER go to another "listening skills" workshop, it will be totally fine with me.

But I'm not talking about that kind of listening. In the never-ending quest to become the grown-up in my own story, I am learning to listen to my house. I have lived in this house for 22 years, minus some travel time here and there, but I never listened to it. I relied on someone else to do that. Yet, without noticing the development, I realize now when the sump pump kicks in, or when the refrigerator starts humming, what the water sounds like in the pipes, when the furnace turns on, and a whole host of other noises that happen around a house. I'm not consciously attending to those noises, but when I heard an unusual sound last night I realized that I must have a sense of what "usual" is.

The sound I heard was nothing important. Thank goodness, because I don't know what I would have done about it if it had been important. I would tell you -and I would be right- that I have two black holes of intellectual disability -finding my way somewhere and figuring out how mechanical things work. But part of owning this house, and I do own it now, is figuring out how it works. I'm getting there.

And there's the parallel question of what do I want it to sound like. Gentle sounds, happy sounds, occasionally rowdy party sounds, a balance between people-around and solitude sounds... I need to think about this some more.

I Want to Be in Charge of Karma

I'm a despicable person.

I don't want to be the Executive Director of Universal Karma. I'm willing to be reasonable, here. I just want to be in charge of one person's karma, and you won't have much trouble guessing whose. I don't wish horrible, terrible, no good, very bad things upon his head. I don't want him to get hit by a bus; I don't want the people he loves to suffer -unless they're Argentinian and bottled blondes. (Whoops.... that just slipped out.)

I realized today, though, that I want him to regret the divorce. I want him to think it was a bad idea, and wish he'd never started down that path. I want him to suffer, for crying out loud. And he's really not. He's not looking back at all.

It feeds his ego for me to suffer, which is only one more of a million reasons why I should stop. Every once in a while, when it's been too long since the old ego had a snack, he tosses some trouble my way. But I'm only useful as a tool; he doesn't care about me as a person. Why doesn't that make it easier to let go, I wonder?

Beginner's Mind

I haven't read Suzuki's Zen Mind; Beginner's Mind since college. But I was clearing off a bookshelf (in the apparently endless process of freeing my life from furniture) and saw the book again. It rocked my world the first time I encountered it, and it has been on my mind again for the last few days.

The general idea is that beginner's mind is all about possibilities; the expert's mind isn't really closed but is decided. Think about a toddler playing in the Tupperware drawer. I can tell her "that's Tupperware. We use it for storing leftover food so that we don't waste it." She gives me a pitying look (in my imagination) and goes on to play with the Tupperware as though it were a drum, a ball, a storage device for Mommy's keys, an artistic medium for creating stacks and sculptures.... And it is all of those things, too.

I have made the mistake of being certain that my life was one thing -was going along a particular path- when, in fact, I could not have been more wrong. I cried, and argued, and suffered when that life was taken away from me -and I'm not so far from that possibility still, at least from time to time. But in a way, I had made the expert-mind mistake. I had chosen the path I wanted and closed my mind to other possibilities.

A beginner -and a child is the easiest embodiment of that mindset to examine- looks at the world as possibility and as an apparently endless series of amazements. People find two-year-olds trying, but I never did. I recall saying that it was exhausting, certainly, but amazing to have them around, because you never again engage the world with such a relentless need to examine and know and understand.

Well, why the heck not?? Why did I decide that, developmentally, that curiosity had to subside? I can get in the Walter Mitty-like thing of getting up, going to work, coming home and half-heartedly poking around with house projects, studying, reading, exercising, going to bed and getting up tomorrow to do it again. But that life is grey and small.

The same life can be described entirely differently. I am at the beginning of a new job. I am making this house a home newly and uniquely mine. I am learning new things and engaging with ideas, and little else on the planet gives me that much pleasure. I am finding healing and comfort in exercise. Things -all things- can be different now, and I don't have to understand at the outset how that's going to look. To borrow Mary Oliver's spectacular line, "I want to be a bride married to amazement." It's the same life -just looked at differently.

Writing the True Things

I have PLENTY of writing to do. There's my work, my research, my classes, this blog.... plenty to do. So, naturally, I want to write something else ;)

OK, that's just flippant. What's really true? What's really true is that writing this blog for over two years has invited writing back into my life. There is nothing spectacular about my writing or my thinking; I have no pretensions there. Nonetheless, people have been supportive and encouraging. And blogging has kept the writing muscles toned, as it were, and has helped me find my voice -and has not taught me to avoid mixing metaphors, apparently. Sigh....

Another true thing is that my family has pretty much cornered the market, I sometimes think, on premature babies. Still another true thing is that I knit. One more true thing is that my long-suffering life coach is encouraging (think "boot to the butt" here) me to do the things I've long talked about doing -writing being one of those things.

So, what's a writing, knitting, auntie to premature babies to do? Well, duh. Write a book with knitting patterns for preemies, that also has essays about what those babies have taught us and invited into our lives, that's what.

I finally have an outline. Well, you know.... I'm not promising that it will stay this way forever. But for now, it looks like nine patterns and nine essays. Something like this:

Essay #1 -teaching gentleness -a really soft blanket, with a satin binding, which is what babies like about blankets, anyway
Essay #2 –Shaking my fist at God –what would an angry knitting pattern look like? Bright colors, edgy designs…. For a baby?
Essay #3 –the courage to be fool-hardy
Why try again when you know this can happen?
Crazy-ass lace shawl for kangaroo days!
Essay #4 –for Thomas –here’s what triumph looks like
A sweater for Thomas
Essay #5 –preventing prematurity is more about women than babies
A sweater for mom
Essay #7 –getting by with a little help from technology
Pattern that allows for the machines to be attached
Essay #8 –getting by with a little help from my friends
Pattern –a gift for the nurses
Essay #9 –when prematurity stops defining you
A pattern for a bigger girl

This will be Rachel's and Thomas's -the most recent preemies in my life- book. I'll figure out what to do with it once it's written, but I do plan on posting the patterns and essays here, as well, since it was practically your idea in the first place.

Integrity in the Little Moments

OK, we have to talk.

I was chatting with my mother the other day. She too, once upon a time, was married to a, shall we say, problematic man. He was my dad (and not just mine, of course... I shared him with all my siblings. Big of me, I know.) He was charming and handsome and absolutely, fundamentally, deep in his soul, unreliable. She later remarried, and to another handsome and charming man -who was absolutely reliable and true. She led him a merry chase, my mom did -mostly because she couldn't believe that anyone was as reliable as she needed a person to be.

I thought for years that I had done the Freudian thing of letting one's father define one's marriage partner- only in reverse. I had married, I thought, someone the exact opposite of my father (although the physical similarities are striking). Of course, that's not what happened at all.

I'm not at all interested in beginning another relationship. In fact, with no sadness (ok, not much) I think it's going to be my vocation, if you will, to be single. (This is about to segue into another blog post about how we need to re-think families and partnering and all sorts of things... reining myself in, you'll be glad to know.) But, as always, I am interested in learning from what's gone before.

I have these two spectacular examples of how to mess things up. OK, universe, I get it. I'm thinking about it. Neither one of them just decided (I'm guessing) to do one spectacularly deal-breaking wrong thing one day. Rather, they did little bitty wrong things again and again and again, until that stopped feeling weird or wrong. When the time came to make a bigger decision, the line one isn't supposed to cross was so far behind them that it no longer mattered. They may even have felt trapped and as though doing the hugely wrong thing was the only choice available.

The thing is, I have those choices to make every day too, and -like all of us- I don't always make the right choice. Those of us with problematic fathers and ex-husbands, though, get to lash ourselves with the "Oh no, I'm becoming my father" scourge. As my life gets busier and busier, I'm making more compromises. Mostly, I'm only breaking promises to myself.

The thing is, I don't think 'only' goes in that sentence. For one thing, I've now learned that I'm important enough that I deserve to have promises kept -even if I'm the one who made them. And secondly, breaking trust with anyone gets you to the point of feeling comfortable with that process.

I'm slipping in the integrity department, and I need to call the question. I need to do the things I said I was going to do. And if I can not humanly do them, then I need to say that in the first place. It's just the little things -like going to the gym and writing and studying and....

... at the moment, getting off my sorry backside and getting to work ;)

Inhabiting my Kitchen

Where's Mary???? I want her to see this! Largely thanks to her, and to the fact that I now have someone to feed, I'm relocating my kitchen. I made bread today. THIS is what a kitchen is supposed to smell like. Once upon a time the fresh bread perfume was absolutely unremarkable around here; I made bread almost every day in those days. Of course, these days are not those days. It was a delight to smell fresh bread again.

But I didn't just make bread. No sirree, Bob. I was on a roll. I made snickerdoodles for the boy-child -his favorite. That dough is chilling in the fridge. And I made chicken salad to go on the new bread. And... ummm.... I made a little bit of mess. But the days when you have to run the dishwasher twice really are good days.

And, of course, to me all of this is more important than bread or cookies or chicken salad. It's all about grace and welcome and feeding people in ways that make restaurants superfluous. It's about making a life for myself.

Oh yeah, I'm on a roll!

Life Awakening Yoga -Maybe

I said I would muse periodically about my path back to yoga, so I'm musing... I'm not concluding anything yet. Just musing. I've been back to a regular (although not yet daily) yoga practice since the first of the year and it's starting to feel like it belongs to me again. Parts of my body have sprung right back into life, and I honestly thought they wouldn't.

I no longer need pain medicine for my arthritis. My hands, in particular, literally came back to life. For a while, after rock climbing, I was not only taking pain medicine but having to ice my hands for hours to reduce the swelling and bruising. I considered abandoning rock climbing as too abusive to my body. (I concede that there's a case to be made there. But it's my time with the boy-child -and besides, it's fun.) But by adding yoga, rather than subtracting rock climbing, my hands are healthy again.

Other parts of my body have that "I'm still stiff but I'll get over it if you just don't give up" feeling. My never-cooperative upper back, shoulders, and neck have not had a change of heart and decided to become pliable. My knees are still occasionally excruciating. Whole categories of poses are not yet available to me. I haven't quite been able to define which ones are wrong for me... something about a particular kind of bend to the knee or pressure on the knee. I can do cat/cow, if I'm careful, but I wouldn't consider vajrasana. Even cobbler's pose has its difficulties. I'm not at all sorry about losing ustrasana ;) And I'm not sure how to re-enliven my knees if I can't even approximate those poses.

But even I, Queen of Impatient Life ReBuilders Anonymous, know that the thing about yoga is that you just keep inviting change into your life. You keep on doing a posture... same old, same old. It feels the same every day. You go as far as you can, and then you confront the limit of the pose for you. It's a wall; there is no further progress. So you hang out at the wall for a while, chatting away about the annoyance of barriers and limitations until you remember to shut up and invite change in.

It doesn't come right away, and you may not notice it when it does. But one day, your teacher says "you know... that posture didn't look like that a year ago." The wall had been moving back all along, and you couldn't see it because you were so close. Because my hands have responded so miraculously, I'm hopeful that eventually the rest of me will follow suit. Right now, it's just an assertion and a hope rather than an actual belief, but I'm getting there.

And taking my yoga off the mat.... Well, there's something about adding rather than subtracting being the effective life-awakening strategy. And remembering to shut up and invite change in.

NIU Remembers

Today is the one-year marker of the shootings at NIU, and it was a wrenching day of hope and care and thought (this is a university, after all). I only have my perspective, and I wasn't on campus at the time of the shootings. My son was, though, and I never EVER want to relive the hour when I couldn't get through to him. But he was fine, and I was a little removed from the intensity of the drama.

But my take-home message from being back on campus and from attending parts of the memorial day is that I'm proud of us. I'm proud of the university and the town. We have done all right, we really have. I did see some jumpiness this past week in the lead-up to this day, but mostly I saw calm hope and strength. I've been struck by how changed President Peters seems. His leadership has really changed -not that it was bad before- but that's helped to change the feel on campus. The town has changed in relationship to the university. And staff and students have changed towards each other.

I'm not much of a "yeay, rah... team spirit" kind of girl, and we're still an imperfect messy place (witness the recent fights in the residence halls) but it was touching to see the Convo Center full-ish (not as many people as I expected) of people wearing red and black. The speeches were thoughtful and not at all the shallow sentimentality I was afraid of. The music, the visuals, the memorials themselves... the whole thing was stunningly done.

Of course all of that must barely, barely touch the pain of the families of the slain students. I know from my own experiences of psychic pain that friends can hold part of the burden for a time. I hope we collectively held some of their pain for them today. Senator Durbin said something like (and this isn't an exact quote so don't blame him if this isn't quite right) we now have to make room in our hearts for their (meaning the five students') dreams.

I'll do my best for Julianna Gehant, Daniel Parmenter, Ryanne Mace, Catalina Garcia and Gayle Dubowski. Godspeed, young ones. We'll try to make you proud.

(And if we could do something about getting a decent school song, that would be progress indeed.)

Going to Ground

Just a bit... and just for a few days. Tomorrow is divorce-day. I've seen the judgment; it makes me gasp with pain even after all this time. At some moment, of course, the contract between the two of us must be over. That single moment is tomorrow.

The lies and even the self-deception he's indulging in haven't stopped, even now, so I know this is the right thing. But it still hurts. I know I'll be fine. I know this will work out for the best for me. I know, on a day-to-day level, nothing about my life will change. I haven't been in the same room with him for more than a year. How can a divorce really change that?

And on Monday I will legally begin the process of resuming my birth name. I've been using it everywhere that it didn't seem like a legal thing for a while now. But I'll set about changing all the official records. Which means that this blog will change its location a smidge. I'll give you lots of warning, if it turns out the changes will confuse you. I don't want to lose you guys not even for a minute.

And remember... PJ's at 4:30. I don't know how I'll be feeling, but I know that friendly faces will be welcome. If it turns out that there are too many of us -improbable, I know- then we'll just reconvene at my house. There's no furniture, but there's lots of space.

Live Imperfectly -With Great Delight

Well, okay... It's a goal. You know and I know that I get impatient with myself when I can't fix things, make them right, in the time frame I believe to be appropriate -typically about 1/2 the time more rational minds believe is required. I look at things and see the undone and the not-yet-done, rather than the things I've accomplished.

I promise a complete life overhaul in this department. By tomorrow at 4, I will stop beating myself up.

No wait.... that's not right ;) It'll probably take until Thursday afternoon, anyway ;)

The truth is, I'm hanging on by my fingernails. But another true thing, that I've learned only in the last year, is that so is everyone else. They may look perfect, and their kitchens may be clean, but there's brokenness and need somewhere, because the human psyche is a fragile thing.

My list is long. The kitchen ceiling is in DIRE need of attention. I'm deeply afraid that my upstairs bathtub is going to fall through the ceiling, and I'll find myself bathing in the kitchen one fine day. I'm behind in my school reading. I haven't been getting to the gym as often as I would like. I have a sad, sad list of undone tasks.

Oh, whatEVER. There has to be a way to both be open to the possibility of fixing these life snarls while still being okay right now. I WILL fix these things. I will find a rhythm to my days and weeks. But honestly, I need to make my peace with the imperfect. I can dance with delight when small things go well. I can learn to let up with the abusive self-talk. I'm no worse off than everybody else, and there is still much at which to marvel.

I'm going to give it all a shot, anyway. I'll report back on Thursday ;)

It's My Turn

When I pointed my little car back towards DeKalb in October, 2007, I had no home. A loyal friend didn't even have to think twice; she just opened her door and put fresh sheets on a bed. Soon enough, of course, the housing thing was sorted out, and I didn't need her hospitality. But I will never ever forget the generosity.

Everybody knows this, but it's the background of my argument, so hang on... Hospitality is derived from the words for "love" and "stranger." It's about inviting someone over the threshold, making room, making space. And the thing, of course, is that everyone changes in the process. Seeing someone across the threshold is no small thing, it turns out.

And now it's my turn. A certain child of mine, whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, is suffering and reorienting herself after ending a relationship. Minutes after I had gone to bed the other night, I heard the door open -clearly someone with a key, I figured- and I saw her at the door with her suitcase. Uh oh. I put fresh sheets on her bed, poured us both a glass of wine, and we set about the business of getting on with it.

And this morning, I picked up a sock off the floor and smiled. There are socks on my floor again! That part will probably lose its charm fairly quickly. Remember those empty rooms I showed you? Now look.

We'll see how this changes us both. My heart is broken that she's sad, but not-so-secretly I'm delighted that I have company (and this company). That's why I kept this house!

A "Baby, Be Brave" playlist?

I have wasted this day. I have an astonishing capacity to do that. What the HECK??? One ought not simultaneously claim to be too busy and then squander entire days; it isn't seemly ;) On the other hand, I try to give myself permission to just sit and grieve when it's necessary. Since grief no longer consumes me, I figure when it does take over, it's probably just as well not to resist.

However... reality rears its ugly head. The weekend is over, and I squeaked by last week without actually wearing my pink flamingo pajamas to work because there were no clean clothes. But it was a near thing. There is still a pile of remodeling trash in my house. It's smaller, but not gone. Sigh...

Music... music... that's the ticket. I need some fun, get off your butt, you can do this music.

Baby, Be Brave by The Corrs comes to mind.
What if it All Goes Right? by Melissa Lawson (in the roll the windows up and sing in the car department)
Bless the Broken Road -Selah
Dancing Queen -ABBA (channeling Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia)
Ten Thousand Angels (??? probably not)
Reflection (It's a Disney song, I admit. But listen to it. Disney is coming along.)
Big Dream -Chyi Yu ("makes me think maybe God's a woman too" -worth it for that alone!)
I Will Survive -for a total guilty pleasure flashback
Except for Mondays -Lorrie Morgan

What else? We need some tunes around here!

Friday the 13th

That's the day. At roughly 3:00, I'll be officially divorced. It's been just over a year of mostly-laconic litigation. The end has been a bit fraught, but... here we are. If I had fantasies that he was going to come to his senses -and I did, in the very beginning- they're long over. And not what I want any longer, anyway. If I had even wilder fantasies that somehow this would all come to an end without me having to take any more terrifying risks, I know better now. And maybe it's all worth more if I had to take risks to get whatever it is I end up developing from my life and my potential.

Anyway... if you're in the area, let's meet at PJ's (the bar across from the Sycamore Court House) at 4:30-ish. I figure if I get a little over my limit (my 2 beer sternly-enforced limit) an array of good friends will confiscate my car keys, take me home, and dump me in my bed.

More Room to Grow

I really hope we're finished with this horrifying asset-division. It's time and past time for our interactions with each other to be over. As best I can tell, Dave and I will meet two more times: once to give him a check and again at divorce court. My guess is that both will occur in the next week or so, but scheduling is out of my hands in both cases.

Here's my dining room.
If you want to come over, you should bring a chair. Or be prepared for a picnic on the floor. I know the dining room furniture I want -at least part of it. But it's not as though the table I want exists at a furniture store. It will involve a crawl through antique stores, which is fun but time consuming.

It feels a little (but only a little) like the beginning of this process, when everything familiar and known was stripped away. This is not that kind of violation; I wanted the "stuff" of our married life to go away. But still... there's nothing in my dining room! That table where I fed babies and friends, where I cut out countless yards of fabric, and helped children learn to read... it's gone. The memories weren't in the table, for heaven's sake. And yet...

The disorienting dilemma of being suddenly and ruthlessly single led to this - a life that scares me frequently, challenges me always, and that I am learning to love. I'm starting to fly. I think I fret and muse about my house, my furniture, and my food because they ground me. They root me in a particular place and identify me in time. Without them, I am a little less clear who I am.

Which leads to kind of a lot of pressure to choose the right dining room table ;) What if I get somebody else's table by mistake? Here's the general idea.



It's not quite this, but the idea is a round table, with a pedestal, that has leaves so that it expands to seat more than four people. So I guess it would go from a circle to an oval. Questions? Comments?

Proof That I Still Have a Kitchen

...and I know how to use it. This being alone thing is hard to get organized when it comes to cooking and eating gracefully. I've struggled. I've ranted. And I've gained a boatload of weight from eating poorly. OK, we tried that. It didn't work. Let's move along.

With Mary's help, I've gradually re-located my kitchen and started to actually use it. More importantly, I've started to enjoy using it. I still prefer to cook for other people, but I'm even getting the hang of cooking for one.

But today, I got to bake for other people. Happy birthday to my co-workers, Donna and Melissa. And here are your cakes! The real things will be at work in about 45 minutes!!

Now I've Really Lost My Mind ;)

I signed up for a kayaking class. The last time I went kayaking I ended up on a river with monster rapids, where I had no business being, and fell out of the kayak and had to be driven back to my car in disgrace. And with some pretty impressive bruises, to boot. The kids and Dave, it need hardly be said, made it down the river without incident. Such is my life.

I like doing athletic things. (I can hear my sisters laughing in derision. No really, I do.) It's just that I don't learn them quickly. I took the belay class for rock climbing twice. I didn't fail the test the first time -although I probably should have. But I was NOT a competent belayer until I'd taken the class more than once AND practiced with a back-up belayer. I was just so nervous. Believe me when I tell you that this is not false modesty. I was a dangerous belayer until I had taken the class a second time.

I'm not exactly sure how that metaphor is going to extend itself to kayaking, but I'm sure that it will. I'll roll over and not be able to roll back up. I'll roll over and not be able to wet-exit. I'll.... screw up in some monumental way. I'm okay with this, as long as I'm making progress and not holding the class back.

Moreover, I have extended myself forty ways from Sunday this semester. I have observed that I am better when I'm busy. I may well have crossed the line to stupid-busy. First clue... my house is an ASTONISHING mess... between a remodeling project, packing Dave's stuff up, and having no time to clean. Let's see.... dust? Nah, I think I'll sign up for kayaking. Perhaps I'm not firing on all cylinders here.

But the class is here, and hasn't been offered for six years. It's an opportunity and I'm through with missing opportunities. And I have a thing about water. Oceans, rapidly flowing rivers... they soothe me. I can literally feel my blood pressure lower. So I'm going to be stupid-busy for five weeks. I'll get it all done. And I'll have another option for fitness and fun when I'm finished.

Assuming I don't crack my stupid-busy head open, that is!

Making Space

This is my living room, all packed up and ready to go to Dave's house. I'm keeping the picture on the wall and possibly the floor lamp. That's it.

And I'm okay with this. Other things are disappearing too, but this and the dining room are the only rooms being completely emptied. I realized several months ago that I almost never ventured into these two rooms. Only when talking about it did I also realize that everything here was a gift or a hand-me-down from Dave's family. Coincidence? I doubt it. I have absolutely nothing against Dave's family -quite the contrary, actually. But the gifts have a weight. They belong to the couple that doesn't exist, and barring that, they belong back in the family.

Moreover, with them still in my house there was no space for the new things. The...ummm... new things I haven't quite figured out what they are yet. But the right things will come along, I'm sure. I can start with repairing the floor and the walls and then painting. All of that will be easier to do when the room is empty. Then new curtains.



OK, I get it. Objectively speaking, it looks more than a little dismal. But it feels more like a weight being lifted. I am really okay with this part. Stuff I've never liked is being eliminated, pushing me gently (because the pacing is of my own choosing) toward making what I do want actually happen.

ACK!

No, no... this is good.

ACK!

It really is good, actually :)

The Tomes of Our Lives

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. ~ Dr. Seuss

I'm old enough -or of such an inclination, perhaps- that books are almost sacred things. I am insulted by the suggestion that I might learn from bouncing powerpoint displays. I can be introduced to something by video -have my interest piqued, perhaps- but to really learn something, I need to read about it. And then, I keep the books in case I need to refer back to them. I have books from my childhood. I have books from high school and college. I have books given to my by earnest boyfriends, inscribed with youthfully (painfully) intellectual declarations of undying love.... I even have a few books that I so inscribed for another person. One doesn't get rid of books. It simply isn't done.

Except of course one does, and it is. As I've said, we're dividing the marital property. Of course, even John Ruskin (surely a bigger book fanatic than I am) agrees that there are books of the moment and books for all time. It hasn't been hard to part with the Physician's Desk Reference from 1982 or the beach-reading books. But, sometimes the weirdest stuff is wrenching. Is this my copy of Thucydides or yours? Who gets the battered copy of The Poky Little Puppy, without which Victoria could not sleep when she was a toddler?

And, oh dear heavens, who gets the photo albums -quite literally the tomes of our lives? Here's the thing. It's written into the settlement that they would be copied, Dave would get the digital copies, and I would get the originals back. We would share the expenses so that we could each have a complete set. Perfectly rational and sensible. I thought I wanted that.

Books are things of incredible power. They can make you laugh and cry. They can blow your head apart by exposing you to new ideas. And they can -apparently- slice your heart right open and leave it bleeding on the floor. I can't look at those books. How far back do I have to go to be sure he wasn't lying then? How can I look at pictures where I was having a good time -and thought he was too- but now know that he was definitely lying?

I have proposed that he take the photo albums. I'll want it in writing that he will preserve them for the children. Perhaps I'll ask that we keep the possibility of digital copying available into the future. But if I know they're safe, I think that's enough for me.

Dr. Suess is certainly right. There's something to be learned from almost any book ("learned", as distinct from "believed" to make a quibbly point). I just don't think I can endure the lessons in these books. I need to keep the covers closed on that record of fractured dreams.

Unless you tell me I'm acting like a deranged person again, that is.

Sleeping Around -Making Room for Adventure

I'll just sit here for a minute and let the picture that's in your head settle in ;)

Okay... what I'm really talking about is something a little different. A while ago, Michael posted a meme about where you rested your little head last year. Sleeping around, get it? My list is pretty lame:

Birmingham, Alabama
Hummelstown, Pennsylvania
Porter, Indiana
Chicago, Illinois

I think that's it.

Next year will be better. I'm trying really hard to make room for small affordable adventures. In two weeks, I will be going to Orlando. OK, it's for work, but there's an ocean close by, and I intend to see it. The kids and I are going to the Wisconsin Dells in February. In March, I'll be heading back to Alabama. In September, the sibs are going to Tallahatchie Flats in Mississippi to commune with our Delta roots. I'm going to camp a few times this summer; there's the Tuscany trip. I'm taking a kayaking class starting on Monday, and another small trip will probably result from that. I might get to do some traveling to present a paper -cross your fingers about that one.

I don't want to do frantic "get on the bus" traveling, but I do want to stretch my boundaries. I think people travel in order to get lost -to feel what it feels like to be "not at home". By doing that, you learn what's important about home. Or possibly, you learn what's not serving you at home.

A Rose by Any Other Name

I hate to disagree with the bard, but...well... I do. Names are important and here's how I know. (Settle in for a story. It's always a story with me.)

I know I've been quiet lately, and my mother will tell you that when I disappear, it's not usually because there's good news. As I approach the actual, legal, sign-here, end of my marriage, the tasks become difficult again -and scary -and feel like a violation. As at the beginning of the process, though, when everything was terrifying and disorienting, the only thing to do is the next thing. Take the small step. Just keep moving. Perhaps because each step is so overwhelming, you can only realize that you have learned something important when you have a minute to look back. Or when something happens to cause you to turn around and look at what has happened without your paying a lot of attention. The situation is at least an order of magnitude less terrifying than those early days, but the process seems similar.

I've mentioned that I'm changing my name back to my birth name. It's not legal yet, so sometimes I get mail or must identify myself with my married name. Most people, though, have switched to using my birth name. I realized the other day that, without my paying attention really, hearing myself called by my married name felt really odd. Wrong. There was no sadness about not having that name any longer. Quite the contrary, I wanted that person to get with the program and call me the right thing. I've stepped into my new skin, apparently, and I want people to recognize that. This development feels very healthy. (Of course, it also means that pretty soon I will need to detach this blog from that name, and I don't want to lose you guys, even temporarily, so I'm dragging my heels about that.

The second thing is that I've been rethinking my house, as you also know. Rooms will be "re-purposed", re-thought, and re-decorated. It's no longer a house that needs to be child-centered; it's no longer a house that needs to be couple-centered. It's my house. It can be changed whenever and however and towards whatever end I like. At first I felt awkward calling, say, my son's old bedroom my office. It's Nicholas's room, for goodness sakes. But soon now it will be my office. (The new floor is being installed next week!!!) The former music room (where the piano and V's harp live) is now oh-so-pretentiously the morning room. It's really only habitable in the mornings, so that's where I sit for my morning reflection and write in my journal, channeling Jane Austen all the while ;) The former office will be.... something; for now I'm calling it the family room.

I realized that this naming of rooms was more than simple identification when I needed to communicate with Math-Fink about the division of the marital property. To facilitate accurate communication I needed to identify pieces of furniture as located in a room whose name he knew. It felt awkward and wrong and like I was referring to some almost-forgotten time and place. Even the house is stepping into its new skin ;)

So what, you ask? (And one could hardly blame you.) I'm starting to think that the outside is a manifestation of the inside. I've commented that things become easy to do when the time is right. But it's also true that simply sitting around waiting for the time to be right is a poor strategy. Rather, the interior work has to be completed, and then the exterior changes. When I really believed myself to be a new person, then a new name was gladly accepted and felt comfortable. When I believed that I could maintain, tend -and afford- this house, then changing it to reflect my needs and hopes simply made sense. Any reference to the old way just felt dated and clunky to my ear.

What's next? Andrea as for-real participating scholar? Andrea as healthy, fit person? Andrea as ..something I haven't even named yet??? I can't wait to find out. Naturally, I'll only recognize whatever it turns out to be three months after the fact, while accidentally looking backwards. Oh well.

I can't breathe

These past two years have taken a toll on my body. It's stiff. It aches. It is significantly heavier than it ought to be and than I would like. I've done my share of whining and fretting about all of that. Yet, at the same time, I clearly wasn't ready to do anything about it. I cop to never having had a healthy body image. Never. But really, even by my standards, things have been pretty dim around here. It sounds facile -and maybe it is- but I wonder if I just figured I WAS unlovable so I might as well look that way.

The thing is I've watched myself start to heal from other aspects of the demise of my marriage. What I've learned through that is that my path is the only one I can walk. Things happen -even become easy- when the time is right. That path has been slower and quirkier than I would have predicted and has taken longer than I could EVER have imagined. But I've learned that the next-right-thing is all I can do. It doesn't matter if I go slowly or stay longer at one point or if my recovery looks very different from someone else's. After all, I have to grow my own life, not someone else's.

And in that spirit and for whatever reason, it now seems possible that I will start exercising again. Why now and not two months ago? I really couldn't say. I figure, though, that it might make some sense to chronicle my return to fitness in general, and yoga in particular. I know it will happen. My muscle cells aren't any different from anyone else's. They will get stronger when they are repeatedly asked to work hard. My connective tissue works just like other people's; it will eventually give way when invited to and will allow for the return of some lost yoga postures. It will all take longer than I will like, because I'm that kind of girl. But it will happen.

So here's the baseline. I can't breathe. I did the easiest of the easy yoga videos last night: Barbara Benagh's Power Yoga for Every Body. There is no reason for it to be called power yoga, so let's just dispense with that right away. Rather, it is slow and precise and very gentle. In the old days, I used this DVD on rest days or when recuperating from an injury. Last night I couldn't even get the breath right. My breath would literally get stuck in my chest and then I would start little non-scary gasps. I was lying on my back at the time, so exhaustion is probably not the explanation ;)

So, forget the fact that I can no longer -for now- tangle myself up in fun pretzel-y knots. I can't even breathe. But I'm starting from here, and walking my path.

Just when you think...

... you've made your peace with not going to church, along comes a counter-experience.

This weekend, I snuck away for an overnight at the Beloit Spa and Retreat House. OK, it's really my friends' house, but between their welcome and my tiredness, I treated it as though it were a spa and retreat house. You have to love friends who will let you impose like that. On Sunday morning, we took their three grandchildren to Mass at the local parish.

It's just a parish. It's lovely, but it's none of the things you would think I'd crave. It's not particularly liberal. It's not particularly intellectual. It's just a parish -a community of people who care about each other and try to live out the good news. But that little glimpse of what church can be rekindled all my "should I go back to church" angst.

I respect -and certainly believe- that church is, for some people, a repository of painful memories and nothing more. And sometimes even these people, with every justification in the world for leaving, miss church when they have walked away. But for me, church is mostly about happy memories.

There's the austerly lovely chapel at my old elementary and high school. I can remember how it smelled and how it sounded when one was alone in there. I can remember the vibrant (if somewhat self-important)campus ministry at my college. I can remember the "gym Mass" for Catholics who weren't quite sure they wanted to be there and who wanted to be sure their voices were heard at my first real parish in Chicago.

All positive memories.

And then there was Fr. M.A.P. (Misogynist Asshole Priest -notice the lack of a link. Oh MAN, was I tempted.) as we took to calling him, because we didn't want the children of the parish to start calling him that too. I eventually stopped going to church when he became the pastor. The hatred that he had for women and plenty of other groups of people(and no, I'm not exaggerating) poisoned the place and the experience for me and many others. And the parish hasn't recovered, even though he's gone. There are three qualified and rational, if somewhat uninspiring, priests there now. Compared to Fr. MAP, they are a godsend. Literally. But for some of us, the pain is still there. I can't quite figure out how that pitiful excuse for a man and a priest could overwhelm all the happy experiences I've had of church, but such is the power of hatred. It just exhausted my inner resources for hope of a better day.

I was fine with using Sunday mornings as family time and as personal retreat time. I was using that time to identify my core beliefs, to set boundaries between me and painful experiences that can teach me nothing new or important, and learning to cultivate sacred space where I find it. And then there was the Beloit Spa and Retreat House ;)

Darn it. Church can be wonderful. And it's just too, too painful when it's not.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

There is a time to dance. It's good to be reminded that there are good churches, where the members work to be authentic church for each other.