Because Tuesday's one of my trigger words too

Today I'm feeling less torn and more here. In part thanks to Lindsey, who shared this song. I played it this morning while I made the sandwiches. And then I played it again while I sliced the apples.

Today is play practice, and tomorrow is the Valentine's party, and I'm trying to be grateful that this life makes me available to help with both. Trying not to caveat to myself and to anyone who cares (no one) that this isn't my thing, my "core competency" as we used to say in the consulting world. As supporting evidence that this isn't my thing, I spent no less than two hours last night trying to pull together and print out a Valentine's bingo game. In the age of Google and Pinterest, where it's literally spelled right out for crafty illiterates such as myself, this sort of thing should take about 10 minutes.

What's really maddening about it is that I was holed in the office printing pink swirly bingo cards when I could have been laughing at Portlandia with my husband or penning a moving literary essay or writing a song on my guitar (or learning how to actually play the guitar).

I've decided that there is a way I've always wanted to define myself, and there is a way that I actually am. And the actually am way is significantly less interesting. I am going to have to make peace with that fact, but not until after I learn the guitar.

::

In a very last minute, claustrophobia-induced move, Larry and I took the kids to dinner and to see The Muppets movie at the cheap seats this weekend. We wanted to go out by ourselves, but the kids are still in that clingy stage of needing supervision for trivial things such as dinner and getting themselves tucked into bed. So between going out with the kids or not at all, we chose out with the kids.

I laughed my way through the movie, because yes, I still love the muppets after all these years. Like, totally, a lot. My kids have already put in a request that I stop shouting "maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh, maaaniacal laaaaugh!" after I deny their requests for such things as leaving their fort up for one more night.

::

I just got back from my non-paying night job as play practice monitor. Three point five hours supervising up to 87 children, most of them second graders. The word "fried" comes to mind. It will quite possibly be the only word that comes to mind for the next 24 hours.

This post has been brought to you by the brilliant Just Write movement, brainchild of the lovely Heather of the Extraordinary Ordinary. So if it seems rambling and pointless, you can blame Heather. Totally all her fault. (Maniacal laugh...maniacal laugh....MANIACAL LAUGH!!) Also? Tuesday seems to be my trigger word, at least when it comes to writing.

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Remember When and Maybe Then

We walk in a loop, gravel beneath our shoes, trees looking over our shoulders. We huff up hills and smile our way down them. Our voices carry. You'd never guess we met only months ago, that this is but the second time we've talked for more than five minutes. We are mothers, lonely and tired of feeling like strangers in the place we live.  She moved here last summer, and I, a year before that. We nod our heads at the mention of sidewalks, how we miss having them, how this small, sprawled out town makes it too easy for us to disappear. Will this ever feel like home?

::

I walk up the stairs from the dingy basement, past the silted bootprints on the blue tiled stairs, remnants of the recent flood. I hand them the toys I discovered in the mislabeled storage box, the one I only unpacked because water seeped through cardboard. They squeal, delighted. "Oh this one! I LOVE this one! Look, these are the puzzles we had in Maine! Do you remember, Dani?"

He walks to the kitchen, tugs on my sweater. "Mom, where did you even find these?! Playing with all these toys makes me feel like I'm back in Maine again, like we're playing in our old house." He turns to his sister. "Don't you feel so happy, Dani, when you remember Maine?"

::

My sister texts me that the orders are in. She's moving to Germany. My very first thought is to hope I can follow her there.

I thirst equally for adventure and community, knowing how slim the chances are of ever finding them in the same glass. I'm overcome with wanderlust one moment, aching for roots the next. Sometimes over pancakes on Saturday, we ask each other, "Where would you go, if you could live anywhere?"  The kids always answer without hesitation: "Maine!" But my husband and I just stare into our coffee, thumbing through a mental rolodex of possibility. The answer is always, "I don't know..."


I'm realizing even as I type this out that when I feel most torn between the lure of possibility and the pull of the past, it is when I'm feeling most disconnected in the present. These notions that things will be better when..., that things were better back then..., they loop together as a noose around the neck of this moment, choking joy. How quickly I forget that life is right now, not last year in Maine, not next year in Germany, or DC or Dayton.

The contented, wiser version of myself shakes the shoulders of the restless, foolish me, holds this present life high in front of my face, points to it and says cherish this. Sometimes I listen and obey. But not today. Today I rebel like a melancholy teenager and stay lost in daydreams about Germany, adrift in memories of Maine. Today I sit idly as the remember whens and maybe thens take my present life captive. Today I don't even try to escape.

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Then & Now: A Dental Retrospective

 

There was a time, not so long ago, when all he had were two front teeth.

And now, that's all he's missing.

 

(If you'd asked me back then, I'd have said his smile couldn't possibly be cuter. 

But if you asked me now, I'd say anything's possible.)

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To my boy, on the eve of your Irish ancestry presentation (Just Write)

It's 11:11, and I just put the loaves in the oven. He went to bed begging to bring Irish soda bread to school tomorrow, to pass out to his class during his ancestry presentation. I told him no. Too crumbly. Too messy. Too delicate to transport in his backpack. And besides, I didn't have any buttermilk.

But then his teacher emailed back an hour ago, said he was welcome to bring even a crumbly messy treat. And I remembered how to make buttermilk with a bit of lemon juice. And then I thought of his face in the morning when he would discover the loaves, and well, I got straight to work.

Every day he grows further and further into unfamiliar territory, stretching beyond the ages I've imagined him to be, spelling words like "hygiene" and "posture" without help (though I still have to remind him to wash his hair when he showers). Sometimes I don't know what to make of it all, how this little man came to live here, and whatever happened to the baby boy who used to sleep in the crook of my arm.

I hope when he's a teenager, when perhaps he's feeling stifled or misunderstood or anxious or disconnected, I hope he remembers the morning when he was seven and in the second grade, the morning when he woke up to the sight and smell of soda bread, and to the feeling of being loved, always.

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Brevity and levity

A couple of quick things:

1. I'm still writing regularly over at Run for their Lives, and there's a new post up today about a magical way to lose 25 pounds while consuming unlimited amounts of dark chocolate peanut M&Ms and Chick-Fila. Okay, not really. It's just a post about running gear and apps and stuff. But if you want to humor me and pretend that it's something magical and exciting and click on over, I'd be much obliged.

2. Also at Run for their Lives, we're hosting a give away of a super cool Run for their Lives long-sleeved tech tee. To enter to win, just support Love146 with a small donation. Every little bit helps as we partner with Love146 in their efforts to end child sex slavery and exploitation.

3. And because things have been a bit deep and heavy on the old blog lately, I thought I would mix it up a bit with these sage words from Jack Handey: "Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.”

4. And since we're talking about shoes, you should know that I love this song.


(Hello new shoes, buh-bye bye blues.)

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Five Minute Friday: Real

I'm a phony and a fake. It's the one line that stayed with me long after I finished Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. The line Sarah Miles writes in her diary, the words I wish didn't resonate, but do.

I want to tell this fictional Sarah that we all feel that way, maybe not always, but often. If I am honest at least with myself, I see how I walk around in an invisible bubble of pretense. I want to smile real at the PTO meeting, but I don't feel the slightest bit happy. So I force my lips to each corner and say hello. And if there's time only for a one word answer, then of course I'll say "fine" or "great" or "good." Fine is never enough to be the truth. More than half of the time, I'm not sure what the truth even is, what is buried beneath the fine, the artificial sweet, the have-it-all-togetherness.

My dearest, deepest friends tell me I'm authentic, that I don't hide the mess, that it's refreshing. And I tell them the same. This is probably why they are my dearest deepest friends. But even to them, have I ever told the whole truth? I'm afraid I haven't. I'm afraid I don't know the whole truth.

Like Sarah, the place where I feel most phony is when I talk or write of spiritual things. What business do I have acting as if I understand any of this? What business do I have to speak of grace, when I know full well how I've trampled it with covert rebellion and quiet conceit?

But I'll tell you, the only place I have ever felt like something other than a complete fraud--it is when my heart breaks in front of Him. He sees through me like the woman at the well. He tells me He is the Truth, and that this Truth is enough for the both of us. It only lasts for minutes at a time, this stillness where I feel completely seen and forgiven and loved and real. But I like to imagine it is a foretaste, that heaven is a thousand years and then more of this feeling. For real.

(Full disclosure--this started out as the write-your-heart-out-for-five-minutes drill. And then continued for about 25 minutes. So more like five times five minute Friday.) :-)

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On why I choose(ded) to keep writing

She tries on my hairband, the one she sees me wear running. She tells me she isn't sure who she is going to marry yet. "You're five, silly." I tell her. "There's plenty of time."
She switches out my plain black band for her frilly pink crown and asks, "You choose-ded Daddy because he is your best, best friend, right Mama?" I tell her yes, that's exactly right.
::

We're sitting on the couch in the first quiet moments of evening. He opens the laptop and starts reading the blog. "Just skip over that first one," I tell him. "It's me droning on being all deep and contemplative. BOOOR-ing..."


"Yeah, I started reading it," he says, "but then I nodded off." He fake snores, and I laugh for real.

"This one's good," he says, "and look at all the comments."

"Yeah, I usually don't get very many comments anymore," I admit.

He grins. "Well, maybe if you would just write better--"

I laugh again, take a swipe at his head.

He ducks.

Yes, this is exactly why I choose-ded him. 


::


Sometimes I question what it is I have to say, and why anyone would care to hear it. There's something so audacious about art of any kind, something so assumptive. I don't think I have the chops to write in that brave and daring way, the way that asserts I am worth your time. It probably says something about me that I'd rather write in oblivion than be labeled a narcissist.

Yet when I read back over the blog--which I do when I'm feeling particularly uninspired--which is often--I slowly return to the belief that I'm writing primarily for my own good. To remember, to remind, to speak truth to myself.

It might be the sort of truth and memory that only applies to me, or it might stretch universal.  It might be the sort of post that my husband mocks (reading it aloud in his high-pitched voice with his chin thrust forward and his head tilted to the right). Or it might be the sort of post that makes us both weep when we read it 15 years later. I'm realizing that whether it's worth the time of anyone else is irrelevant, as long as it's worth mine.

And I think it is.

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slow thaw {just write}

There was a hardness, my heart caged heavy in ice. And I'd secretly wished for a shattering rescue, a cracking apart, an exaggerated transformation, something to startle me out of this numb, dreamless stare.

But what He's doing now, it's nothing spectacular, just a bit of warmth here and there, the breath of truth telling friends. And I feel the slow melt, the drip, drip, drip, until my heart lays bare and beating.

It took months, not minutes.

I know it's time to lay down arms, to call an end to this subtle rebellion of seeking Him second or third or not at all. So I do, knowing full well this truce might not last till Thursday.

And I begin again to believe, not just on paper but in life. To believe that even just for one minute out of one day out of one year, He could be enough to satisfy, to temper the ache, to feed the desperate hunger.

There are puddles now where the ice was once thick enough to walk across, and a faint smell of spring. Maybe what He's doing now, maybe it's spectacular, after all.

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To love them toward the horizon

Every morning they measure taller, yet no amount of height minifies this urge to reach and clutch with both hands, to shout "careful" when they dart ahead even by an inch.

It is impulse, reflex, the tick of a lovesick mother.

But I have been careful my whole life, perhaps too careful, and do I want them to dwell in this chest-tight caution, or do I want them to move beyond me with open lungs and palms? Would I ask them to settle for a safe ceiling when infinite sky waits just outside these walls?

I don't yet know how to let go, how to stop my mouth from saying "slow down, you might fall", how to model something other than playing it safe. I don't yet know how to love them toward the horizon.

But I know I must learn.



Linking up with Emily today for Imperfect Prose.

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I will keep building castles

My five year old sang the clean up song for the entirety of the drive to the gym. There are four lines in the clean up song and eight miles to the gym. If she sang the song on repeat, how many times did her mother have to listen to it?  (Write a number model and show your work.)

If only there was a positive correlation between the number of times Dani sang the clean up song and the number of minutes in a month that my house could pass as "clean."

"Don't get me wrong. I'm not glorifying the days of working full time," I told my friend today. "I haven't forgotten how the stress impacted me and how poorly I handled it. But I also haven't forgotten that someone else used to clean the entire house every two weeks."


We joked about the monotony, how our long gone days of donning suits and boarding the metro have been replaced by groundhog days of breakfast, carpool, laundry, lunch, groceries, dinner, dishes. (Notice how cleaning no longer makes the monotony list? Oh, it's still monotonous all right. I've just given up on doing it over and over. Cleaning has been bumped down to a special-occasion-only activity, like when company comes or when Dani spills what appears to be 78 ounces of hot cocoa onto every last crevice of the table, chairs and kitchen floor.)

I wouldn't trade these groundhog days for anything, not for weeks on end of a sparkling, spotless house, and I certainly won't wish them away. I love this small life, really I do. However. (There is always a however, isn't there?) I feel worn down and nearly washed away in the futility of my over-and-over-again life. Every morning at low tide I build castles on the shore, and every evening at high tide, I have nothing to show for my art.

And I know this isn't a feeling exclusive to a stay at home mom. Or a working mom. Or an any-kind-of-mom. This struggle against atrophy, the way the world eventually unravels everything we weave, this is an every person sort of struggle. 

Yes, I am weary. Yes, I look around and see greener grass (and cleaner houses). And yes, I am irritated and ruffled and uninspired and desperate for praise and love and satisfaction.

But no, I won't stop building castles. I won't stop scrubbing dishes and folding laundry and supervising play practice and driving the pot-holed path to school. All evidence of progress, every trace of my art may be washed away by evening, but I won't be swept away along with it to be drowned in my own insignificance.

I will choose to believe that the most mundane of moments can add up to a beautiful lifetime, that the tedious can turn inspirational, that a trickle of grace in the everyday can pour out a powerful white-capped legacy.

I will keep building castles.

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