Though she managed to pick
plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by,
there was always a more lovely one
that she couldn’t reach.
“The prettiest are always further!”
she said at last,
with a sigh at the obstinacy of the rushes
in growing so far off.
lewis carroll
Try me on, I'm very you.
Deee-lite
there. I said it. don’t know why I’m so hesitant to admit it. perhaps I don’t want to jinx it. or maybe to say it out loud makes it irreversibly true, and then I’m responsible for it. it’s scary to get what you want, what you’ve been searching for. and after years of trying to find my “thing”, stumbling across it, the ease of sliding into it, is surprising.
I like taking pictures.
I love taking pictures.
I’m obsessed with taking pictures.
I (crossed-fingers) may even have the potential, given enough knowledge and practice, to be (gulp) good at it.
I’ve been trying to find my creative outlet for years. jewelry making, pottery. sketching, painting, drawing. graphics, singing. and I’m varying levels of good at most of those things. but none of those things were mine. then one day at my friend’s home, her father allowed me to take some pictures with his new canon. I heard that little ka-chunk, and that was all it took. the heavens opened. light poured out of the sky. colors were brighter, sounds sweeter. burning bush. the whole bit.
so now my goal is to learn everything I can about my camera, and photography. to be able to capture with my camera what I see in my head. eventually, instinctively. to take my photos and manipulate and create using my graphic skills. to bring life to art. the potential of it all thrills me.
I’m going to try to balance all that with being IN the moments, not just chronicling them. get in some of the pictures myself so the kids can look back and see I was there, too.
so…finally. my missing piece. how great is that?!
well, the mantle of motherhood is once again upon me.
but oh, it was a glorious week and a half. late-night R-rated movies, spontaneous meals out, sleeping in, lounging at the pool. by the deep end! simple, uninterrupted conversations. amazing how much gets shunted aside or lost in the chaos.
it was wonderful to miss them. to not have the immediacy of their reality for just a little while. to just be a couple, husband and wife. us. to sit down and say “hi, I remember you.”
and sometimes, I got to be just me.
and now I’m back with them. they just overflow with life and enthusiasm; childhood oozes out of them. and with my batteries recharged, I am better able to keep up and appreciate it all. for a little while, anyway. because, let’s be honest. I was with them for an hour and I had to go to bed early. need to learn to pace myself again.
been thinking about religion lately. and spirituality, which is not necessarily the same thing. oft times, not at all.
I was raised catholic. still try to attend church. much I don’t agree with, some aspects I love. many things already have me tagged to go to hell.
but still, I like that the kids have a starting point. information. when the time comes, they can choose whichever paths they’d like.
as for me, I have recently given myself permission to no longer feel the need to explain or apologize to those who are more religiously structured for not believing or conforming enough, nor to those who don’t believe at all for feeling that there is more than what our senses and our minds take in.
do things happen for a reason, or do we find meaning in what happens to keep us sane? there are so many things that I’m unable to explain. and yes, perhaps smarter people, given endless amounts of time, could explain everything. but I don’t think it’s that simple. I am a skeptic, but I am also gullible. or surprisingly naive in some things. I am an optimist. I see patterns, micro and macro. and beauty. scientific and spiritual all entwined.
here’s what I know I believe:
- whether these divinities existed or not, whether they were actually divine or not, there are lessons to be learned, good and bad.
- there is something beyond what we can see and touch. art and beauty and kindness and thought IS divine.
- focusing so much on the next life, or an afterlife, that you miss out on appreciating and living in the here and now is completely missing the point.
that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in living a good life. being kind and generous. choosing right over wrong. knowing the difference.
my point, I suppose, is that I respect that everyone’s has opinion. and I think that ultimately, regardless of those opinions, what happens afterward, whether nothing or everything, is still going to happen.
so keep questioning. always. but also spread a little love and acceptance every day.
here’s what I have learned:
for me, everyday-to-extreme stress leads to mindless, comforting eating. despair, on the otherhand, leads to loss of appetite and a need to physically vent.
so while I looked fabulous all heartbroken, happiness, on the flip side, has its price.
sometimes there’s so much to say that there comes an inability to say anything at all.
so I will put that big old chunk of verbage to the side, and speak of other things. one more week of school left for the boys. next week off for me. birthday and a family vacation coming up. the promise of summer stretching out before us.
flux, in many and varying forms, occurring. the life spiral seems to have currently slowed and plateaued, but seems to have decided to head in the direction of upward. I look forward to the climb.
this whole facebook thing has been fascinating. forcing me to revisit myself. and apparently I had sectioned time periods off into phases. high school me, college me, ...all the way up to now. high school me and college me were two distinctly different girls. women. females, whatever. and here I am confronted by people who knew me in each of those environments, and others. what I’m discovering is that both those girls were me, as were the subsequent ones. as much as I wanted to block them off into easily defined hairstyles and mindsets and actions, it’s really been a continuum. and I find myself slowly, mentally integrating all my disparate selves. no more excuses about age or setting or circumstance, and a surprising side-effect of a minimization of the cringe-factor when remembering.
just me. brilliant, beautiful. mean, cold-hearted, hurtful. kind and funny. loving and compassionate. a stranger, a friend. a lover, an enemy. all of it. all in me. all okay.
I’ve been organizing my own mind attic. no fecal-throwing monkeys in mine. not right now anyway. not for a while. but I know they know how to get up here.
anyway, all these people reintroduced into my life, suddenly and simply by clicking “Add as Friend”. there are people whom I vaguely remember—the simple satisfaction knowing the answer to “wonder what happened to him/her.” others whom I considered friends—and realizing either we were friends for a reason, or we stopped being friends for a reason. often both feelings at the same time. then there are people I lost, though I don’t remember why or how—and I find that I missed them in their absence.
most of these people have file folders or stray note pages, snapshots, or a playbill lying around, scattered ticket stubs, all spilling out of the many mind bins. others have their own individual boxes. male. female. people with whom there was no closure. or who made enough of an impression on my not-easily-shared heart that they needed their own box to hold all of the residuals. I’ve been surprised that, for example, upon opening a substantial-sized box, I find it to be quite light, with only a few things rattling around. dessicated, unidentifiable, innocuous things. not much to it at all. then there are other boxes. small, sealed, all wrapped up and self-contained and put away nicely. barely noticed in all the clutter. I hold one in my hand and it springs open like a jack-in-the-box, inflating and expanding and filling my mindspace suddenly and completely, like a life raft after its cord has been pulled. and I have to work to get it back down to a managable size so that I’m able to maneuver around the rest of my brain.
things aren’t as we remembered them. sometimes they were more than. or less than.
we aren’t as we remember ourselves. or at least others’ perceptions are not always equal to our own. I wasn’t as bad as I thought. I wasn’t as wonderful. but I was still me. just as I am now.
facebook as therapy. who knew?
hey blog! what’s up?
how’ve you been?
what? what happened? why are you looking at me like that?
c’mon, don’t be that way.
where have I been? I’ve been out. around. nowhere.
yeah, so what, I was just with some friends. it was no big deal, just a little twittering.
just a few people. weez, bob.
what about facebook? how do you know about that?
I do not spend all hours there.
hey, everyone’s doing it. and it’s free.
of course I still care about you. it’s just that over there, it’s all fun. there’s always someone there, no matter when I show up. I don’t have to think so much like I do here. sometimes I don’t want to think about every little thing that I say and how to say it. it’s a lot of pressure.
no, it’s not you, it’s me. you’re wonderful.
I’m sorry. yes. yes, I’ll try harder. I promise.
better? good.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
this family that we know…the father died in a car crash this past sunday. not even mid-30s. a really nice man. his son is maybe 6 or 7. the wife is now a single mother. the son who has never known anything else will now begin the struggle to remember what life was life Before. just like that.
I’ve thought of them all week, inexpressibly sorry. what were you doing on sunday? staggeringly significant events happening all the time. birth, rape, epiphanies, death. marriage, first kisses, accidents, moves, jobs. divorce, conception, loss of virginity. horror and beauty, revelation and joy.
all of it. right now.
I wonder how would I handle such a thing, the loss of curt. the house, the school, cars, work, the kids, tuition. and that’s just the practical side of it. that you can think about, plan for. the rest—the emotional abyss—I can’t fathom, nor can I prepare.
right now, grateful.
curt and I both got our annual ikea gift cards from mom and dad (but really, mom). we bought evan a big boy bed, and the crib/toddler bed is no more. well, empty, anyway, and awaiting tear down. no more putting it into storage, it’s just barely holding on as it is. so no more crib. no more babies. done.
I’ve been mourning that choice since I had my remaining tube tied after we had evan. with my history, I shouldn’t have even tried for evan (not that we tried, he was more of an oops kind of thing). so I thought it would be greedy, push our luck to risk getting pregnant again. and evan was a wonderful oops.
but now that he’s 3, I’m not just accepting of being physically done, I am emotionally, mentally, whole-heartedly done. he is slowly driving me and curt insane. all three of them are. they’re chipping away at us bit by bit by bit. we used to be young and beautiful and full of energy. we are not now. we are worn out, lifeless shells of the people we used to be. or the people we thought we were, anyway. or the people we should have been while we had the chance.
and yet…today I held a new baby. a girl. light in my arms. familiar. all the things you imagine and yearn for when it’s not your reality. suddenly, I want to be pregnant. I want those double lines to show up on a pee stick. I want the attention and the surprise and the excitement. to see the look on curt’s face when I tell him. I want the physical change, an acceptable excuse for a poochie belly. I want to not know what we’re having, though secretly hoping for a girl. I want all those things, but not really. I want a baby, but I don’t want another child. don’t think I could handle it. though I’m sure I could if I had to.
I think I’m in the last throes of the death of this idea, this blocked path. I know I’ve mentally turned the corner. I don’t feel sad anymore thinking about not having another one. I don’t ache. I don’t feel that anything is missing. and I think the gods knew I couldn’t handle a girl. I think I’m just feeling older. feeling 40. feeling non-child bearing-ish. feeling as if I’m exiting this stage of my life. temporally exiting the spotlight as the children grow and enter it themselves.
I dunno. today I held a baby. it was nice. that’s all I’m really saying.
I babysat for some friends over the weekend. bedtime for the kids, then almost 5 hours of uninterrupted tv gluttony.
I watched pieces-parts of 13 Going on 30, Frequency, High Fidelity. I realized while driving the half mile home that all those movies had themes of past and present. ripples of consequences. taking the knowledge of now back into the past to fix outcomes. hell, even the little I watched of Weird Science that night has that part at the end when kelly lebrock makes time go backwards to fix all the damage done to the house. then yesterday I watched Sliding Doors, based on the choose-your-own-adventure book premise that one decision, one incident can make your life path diverge. in one reality she caught the train, in the other, she didn’t. all this after recently reading The Time Traveler’s Wife.
maybe because I just read the book, I’m just more aware of those themes—time, consequence, decisions. happiness, or not—but I don’t really believe that. I think that there are signs and signposts and cosmic messages and lessons out there to be discovered. and some days we are more receptive to acknowledge their existence than others. though knowing there is a message doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m able to decipher it.
so while I go about my day-to-day, my little hamster is running in his wheel in the back of my mind, trying to make the connections. waiting for that moment of clarity when the message is received. if I figure out what whomever is trying to tell me, I’ll let you know.
at what age does what we do become our responsibility instead of some by-product of our age?
evan does things, gets in trouble, but…”he’s only 3.” he still has to deal with the repercussions of his actions because that’s what has to happen. but still. yes, he knows better, but not really.
the boys are 7. they get in trouble, and again, have to take responsibility for the fallout of their actions, because they know what’s right and wrong. but still. they’re only 7. what do they really know of the effects of hurt feelings or not following through. of being unkind or dismissive.
when we’re little we throw toys, don’t share, don’t include everyone, are bossy and mean. we kick and hit and punch. we grow older. we act superior, we judge, comment, hurt. wound. we play with hearts and people’s heads. but we were just kids, just teenagers, just in college.
I always loved curt, could never really give my heart to anyone else. tried to tell them—those boys, those men—show them. but still. I hurt people, unintentionally or not. even my honesty was hurtful. maybe most especially. I was a teenager, a young woman. I didn’t know any better, really. not the way I know things now.
but when does not knowing any better stop being an acceptable excuse. and is it ever really acceptable to the one who has been hurt?
evan touches my face. looks in my eyes. tells me I’m beautiful.
and so, in that instant, I am.
I read The Time Traveler’s Wife for the third time this week. The first two times for the absolute pleasure, the third time for bookclub (though still for pleasure). It’s one of my favorite books, definitely in the top 10. I passed on my spare copy to Elouise, because I love sharing books that bring me joy, even joy that may stem from the intense feeling of sadness that it creates. Books that submerge me in feeling, good or bad. Books that move me.
I’ve come away with different things each reading, but always, the book resonates, stays with me. This time, I’m mulling over the me of now, and the me before. Henry visiting Clare. The wife of now, the girl back then. How have the years marked me? What would Curt see if he were to re-see me as the 17 year-old girl he met versus the 40 year-old woman I’ve become. And how would the knowledge of what’s happened since color what he would see?
He met me through a 16 year-old’s mind and eyes. The same girl, seen through the filters of life and awareness of what’s to be…what would be different? I guess I’m really contemplating how I’ve changed. Is the younger me happier, lighter? Unaware of how beautiful she was in her energy and firmness and hope for things to come? I picture that me as almost floating, leaping, bounding through every day. Playing with friends and siblings. Summer vacations, books to be read, experiences yet to come. Falling in love.
I picture the me of now as grounded, more firmly weighted down. There is a gravitas to my existence that didn’t exist before life, marriage, children. Battle scars of miscarriages and pregnancies, clutziness and sun. Loss and living. I’m more in the now instead of waiting for the things to come. For those things are finally here.
I don’t want to be that girl again. Not really. But I want to go back and hold her. Pass on to her the love I feel for her for who she is, who she will be. Let her know, without telling. Cherish. Unspoken, but hopefully felt.
Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I’ve made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home’s traffic so that one day I’ll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he’ll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.
*re-reads