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.