Right now:

Through the thin wall: his palm hits the glass of his desktop. And again in frustration. “Why, why? These damn program trades." On Pandora: “You are my sweetest downfall…” ("Samson" ~ Regina Spektor, from Begin To Hope)

Under the stools at the kitchen counter: Sprout picking up crumbs off the floor, babbling to himself.

On the floor: the sun makes broken squares of gold where it falls, and the shadow of the forsythia in the window is lace across the floorboards.

And I am here, trying to hold these things together. Trying, with a thousand hopes, a hundred bigger fears; sand at the backdoor from Bean’s boots; bits of bark around the wood stove; things everywhere, always underfoot.

identity::being a mother

To be a mother means to kneel a hundred times a day; to kiss a damp and tousled head after a nap, or to rub away some sticky mark upon an upturned cheek (and to wonder, was that oatmeal, or something worse?) It means pressing my knees into the floor, so I can look into the wide eyes of a small person who knows how to press all of my buttons and also how to unlock inexplicable emotions in heart, and to explain where people go when they die, or about the tooth fairy, or that no, the lollypop displayed alluringly at checkout is not an option. Being a mother means perpetually navigating a fine line between the profound and the mundane—a line I’ve discovered is often at floor level… and it’s there where the tantrums get thrown.

To be a mother means that my hands are always full: with the soft-jelly limbs of my baby Sprout, or with the eager sweaty palms of my Bean, bigger now, perpetually on the brink of dashing out into traffic, or climbing over fences, or scrambling down rock strewn ravines. And just as it means that I am carrying things, it means that my hands magic. With my hands, I accept imaginary cups of tea, paint dozens of pictures, rinse a thousand dishes, type a hundred thousand words.

But maybe it’s really about this: being a mother means becoming adept at the imaginary; at telling stories about monsters, or fairies, or of mice that drive dump trucks.... and its this capacity to imagine that makes enormous, extraordinary, things possible for my children, because I dare to dream them. Just as it’s this same capacity that allows me to imagine a time in the future without sleep deprivation…when my short-term memory will return… (it will, right?) and I'll have just a little more time.

a work in progress

It's been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year. I've been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I've had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.

(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)

I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.) Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we've forgotten about or haven't been aware existed. How spot-on is that?

I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.

It's made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.

But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.

And.

And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.

Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…

How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?

Before you knew what your life was like

Flipping through a book of poems by e.e. cummings I found flower petals by the dozens from a time in my life when love was a dreamy and girlish thing (embodied by the poem, above--one of my favorites.)

I wanted to be loved the way e.e. loved his women in his poems. I understood little, if anything at all about how love endures and changes; how things get messy and slip; how you become soft in the middle, or are caught like plastic bag rustling and rustling in the bare branches of a tree before spring comes to mask it with blossoms and green.

I haven't seen flowers for months (it's still winter here, for another month at least.) And I think about the girl I was then; how I I had a crush on everything beautiful; how my life orbited around boys and their attention (specific boys, and also the general boy populous); how I had abundant energy and time, but no certainty or focus.

I wonder if I would have believed me--describing who I am today? I still have a crush on everything beautiful. And my life still orbits around boys--three, specifically; the biggest of whom still brings me flowers. Somethings stay the same.

What were you like then? Before you knew what your life would be like?

A list for Wednesday

What is your greatest human intent? Where we are and where we've been Cherry blossoms One year ago, today

What are you up to today?

hello, Monday

Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, too early and too late for more or better sleep.

I lie awake, face in the pillows, the thudding of my heart reverberates in my head. My breath moves my ribs up and down, up and down, but I am not here, not all of me, not yet.

Under the weight and softness of my stomach my wrist bones, carpals and metacarpals, are crumpled like soft bits of clay and as I flex my fingers, pins-and-needles set in.

Somehow our boys, both of them, are already in bed between us.

This morning I can feel the way I’m sort of pushing around at the outline of myself with my mind. Hello, day. Hello, memory. Hello, this life of mine. I feel myself begin, reluctantly to inhabit my vertebrae, lungs, buttocks, thighs; in the nick of time I roll out of the way. Bean’s at it already: making a pirate ship out of the covers. Sprout, miraculously stays asleep (of course, now after a night of it) and he is perfect, perfect, perfect here beside me. Rosy, tousled. His hair smells sweet like only him.

The day comes fast then: wooden slats of window shades pulled up; snowmelt; shower steam; the fragrant bar of French lemon soap slipping from my still slack-fingered grip; coffee. The boys are both underfoot (vacation until Wednesday) which gives new meaning to the phrase “work from home,” which is what I try valiantly to do, meeting four deadlines, non-stop screen time, CS4, phone calls, 37 emails, everything interrupted by the repetitive cacophony of BOY.

The day is gray, and the is light translucent and dull, but I like the way the thermometer climbs to 38 before 11am, and how on the south facing fields I can see bare patches where the grass pokes up. I’ve been looking at the trees for signs every day now: the buds are swelling with the secret lives of leaves that wait for chlorophyll, for sun.

Inside, the boys and I are barefoot, and I look at them and feel the fragile container of my ribs nearly snap open with the thunk-thunk-thunking of my little hammer dulcimer heart. Bean with his thin arms and messy hair and growing-in-crooked teeth and ski-jump nose, and Sprout, who has been trying to run from the minute he learned to walk and whose gait looks a wee bit like a cross between a high stepping horse and Frankenstein. Some days I hardly have words. I have two sons. I don’t think this wonder ever goes away.

And so without stopping it’s night already. We visit friends after work and arrive home late. The sink is crowded; the cat wants fresh water; the refrigerator needs to be cleaned. Instead I let the boys stay up another minute. Bean and I eat toast with cloudberry jam.  Sprout carries pot lids around the room. Nonstop, there went Monday.

How was your day?

PS--I have a super-duper exciting giveaway for tomorrow, that I can’t wait to share!

PPS--Did you see? I made some pretty Field Guide To Now blog buttons. Please grab one, if you'd like & spread the word. 30% funding tonight is awesome. Who want's to be the one to push it to 3K? Just $35 away...THANK YOU Tahereh! What a great way to start TUESDAY.

Sometimes it'ts like this

Nearly two feet of snow tonight, and the plow truck is in the shop (timing is everything.)

Shoveling snow in the gathering dark, the fat flakes melted on my cheeks, still hot from crying.

Sometimes it’s like this, and today it was (although tonight we’re better.)

It felt good to throw my body into the rhythm of pitching wet snow, after arguing (sometimes we’re in direct competition for the same things: time, mostly.)

And I have begun to be aware of how everything is always close, always just under the skin of the moment. Starts. Finishes. Hurts. Exhaustion. Glee. Laughter. Eggs cracked in a skillet. Post-it notes rumpled and forgotten. Self sabotage. Determination. Making it through the day.

The snow, tossed to the side of the path was aqua blue beneath each nook and chink, where the chunks would fall and align, making shapes, silhouettes of other-worldly castles in the dark. Today it was like this. Some tears. Some self doubt. Some frustration. And snow. (It’s still falling.)

When things get messy, what do they look like for you?

The way we dance

Little Sprout: We danced today, you and I.

You wound your way between my knees, around my swivel chair, across my studio floor scattering things about, mouthing everything, drooling, laughing. And I, well, I was busy dreaming; stringing words together, watching sunlight, reading things and feeling hopeful. I was also trying to get just about a hundred things done. Eighty nine still wait, but so? We danced.

You unwound spools of thread and uncased CDs and pulled the contents of every low opening drawer onto the floor: mostly paper, some postcards, a pile of forgotten wallpaper from when we first staked a claim here, in this house. I watched. I reached for you. I picked you up. We twirled. You laughed.

I watched the havoc gathering on my floor and let it gather. I made paragraphs, and sought after things; I discovered, replied, and tried to cover my ears so that the simultaneous voices of optimism and fear would drown each other out. All day I kept going after the things that beg for words and time.

So much is happening right now, and it feels like the moment a crow lifts dark and sudden from a quiet branch, and all around it the air is filled with the sudden, invisible eddies of movement. That is what the moments are like right now. Like flight. Or perhaps the moments just before, when the bird is neither on the branch, or off it, but in motion, lifting off.

We saw a crow like this, later, running. We startled it from a pine; its feathers black and glossy in the sun. You wore a red fleece snowsuit, and hugged a raggedy stuffed moose in the stroller. I ran hard, feeling resistance from thighs that skied all yesterday afternoon. I almost quit a dozen times. The road was mud and slush, and you weigh no small amount, but instead I began to tell you how things go.

In panted breaths I told you how there is always this resistance; how there is always a whispered voice that taunts give up, and you might just fail. And how the only answer is so what?

So I ran until I could feel my heart thunking hard in my chest, and my hands were numb and my cheeks flushed bright red with cold and exertion, and I finished.

By then you were asleep, your head tilting, slack against your shoulder. I carried you inside, and in the sudden warmth you woke, eyes still dreamy, and looked about—smiling ever so slightly when your gaze landed on my face. And so we danced. I held you close, breathing in the fragrance of your warm, rumpled hair. You pressed your cheek against my shoulder, and pulled your knees up and tucked close as though your body still remembers when you grew below my heart, tucked just so.

And so the day went by. Things happened, things got done, your brother came home from his grandparents, the sun set, and dishes accumulated in the sink. And in between we shared the succulent sections of a ruby grapefruit.

You liked each wobbly gem colored morsel, the bitter skin removed, and mushed them in your little hands before sticking them into your mouth. I learned about clipping paths on Illustrator. You pushed a ball around the floor. And today, like every other day, we danced. You are one year old. I love you so.

More than this

The world is white this morning: the sky, the trees, the ground. The pair of crows in the dying maple are cinder stark. The contrast is so abrupt, I almost want to cry. This is what waking up tired feels like now: I am overcome by everything. By the sooty feathers of crows as they lift, circle, fly of cawing. By the way everything starts up again each morning. The washing machine is on the spin cycle. The woodstove is hot with embers. Sprout is fussing in his crib, just frequently enough to let me know he is still awake, between longer stretches of quiet where I forget for a moment where I am, who I am, and feel the way tiredness lifts me outside myself again and then yanks me back, as though today my arms and legs are really the finely wrought pieces of a elaborate marionette doll with someone unskilled and abrupt pulling at the strings.

This is the way the day begins. This is the first day I have to myself in the cycle of the week. The first three are crowded now with work and meeting deadlines, and I always feel a little in shambles by Thursday, here, but not entirely, somehow trailing myself.

Good things.

Sprout took his first steps on my birthday! He's been venturing out into the wide expanse of floor ever since and it melts me every single time I plunk him down on his little feet and he makes his way towards me hesitantly, grinning ear to ear. I wish you could all meet this kid. I am so smitten with him. I know that's all I ever say about him--but it's so true. He's so easy going and funny and laid back. When he makes it all the way to me he throws his arms around my neck and practically gnaws my cheeks off with drooly kisses and seriously: MELT.

Also: in the middle of making carrot muffins yesterday afternoon as a snow whirled past the windows the phone rang and it was the Red Hen Press calling! To tell me I won the June 09 Short Fiction Contest judged by Judith Freeman . AWESOME.

And: I am thisclose to launching my KICKSTARTER project. It's so exciting. I'm up to the gills in creativity, which makes me very happy indeed. My only barrier: TIME. I'm hoping I'll have it up tomorrow. Stay tuned.

+ + + Tomorrow I want to share a bunch of links with you of beautiful blogs and good things I've been eating & reading and enjoying for the past couple of days... And I'd love to hear about your favorites right now: what magazine do you love to read? What do you love to have for breakfast? What is one thing you're going to do this week that you're a little scared of doing? (That's right. Commit to that last one.)

xoxo!

Hindsight and then some

Where have I been? To be honest, I’ve been busy taking myself too seriously, with an enormous cold sore on my lip, that’s where I’ve been. I’ve discovered that I’m quite prone to becoming rather preoccupied with the outcome of my life and days. It’s foolishly easy to sit in the dark in a rocking chair with my baby attached to my breast, wondering, is this the sum of now? Is this what I intended when I was twenty-one, more sleek, more plump, more inflamed with ideals?

The truth is also that the cold sore on my lip caused quite a rash of vanity. I didn’t want to go out of the house, stupid as it is. I could feel it prickling up on my face last Friday night, the irritation starting at the thin pale line between pink and cheek. It bristled, as cold sores are wont to do, into an enormous festering thing and quickly I felt felled by my lot. Seriously. All week I’ve had this thing on my face and I had to go about my life driving Bean to and from school, attending meetings, meeting deadlines. A friend said, unthinking, “Oh my god what happened to you?” and I wanted at once to weep with self pity and also to laugh hysterically because dear lord, it’s just a fucking cold sore and I should get over myself. I almost have.

And also: how seriously we take ourselves in our small lives. And still there is a wild striped stampede in my heart rocketing towards whatever is still out there to be mine.

Even in the dark I feel it as I am rocking my second baby, my last one, who is nursing with gusto, his little hands moving about, clutching at my skin, my shirt, my hair, my lips. There is something utterly elemental and mammalian about these moments that we share. He’s drinking me in, his hands memorizing my soul, my teeth, the slack skin at the backs of my elbows, my hair which has grown long now, down below shoulders. I need to remember to sink into this, to let go, to let things be more. The imperfect has never been something I sought after; now it is always mine. Each day bridled with the bittersweet of knowing all that my heart knows.

Life is the wild startling flight of chickadees, the softness of my boy’s cheeks, the salty smell of my husband’s skin against my lips, the dishes in the sink, bread dough soft and punchy in a bowl rising by the wood stove, icicles, each one sharp and glittering, dripping as the temperature warms. And life is also knowing that I have this while someone else is hungry; and also that I long for things I do not have; and also that each day is short, too short, and sleep still consist of fragments torn from the blurry cloth of night.

Someone said in the comments awhile back that I don’t seem to be happy, and when I read this I was struck by how narrow the perimeter of that word is. Happy. It feels neither big enough, or small enough to contain all that is in my heart.

Still, its true that it’s been one of those weeks, and in fact it’s been one of those years—and by that I mean that I’ve been preoccupied a great deal here with the day to day, and also with a pervasive feeling of not getting as far as I need to with my life; not doing as much as I should or whatever. The thing I kind of keep forgetting and then bumping into again and again is the fact that I had a baby this year, and really, that is a big fucking deal even though its something that happens all the time to nearly every woman, and most of them are not nearly as lucky as I am with their lot, if you think of all the women in Iraq or in the Indian slums or in China or Sudan. Having a baby is derailing in the best and worst ways. It splinters your heart and your objectives. It makes you become, and also destroys small (and possibly shallow) parts of who you once were. (Who was I at twenty-one anyway? What did I want?)

How we measure our lives is so strangely, imperfectly, foolishly, relative. My life this year has seemed particularly small to me some days, and sometimes I want to sob because of its smallness. On these days my dreams become thunderous and sharp against my ribs inside my heart. But who am I, really, to feel anything beyond the gift of this life? So I have a fucking cold sore and spent a year raising young boys under significant financial stress. So. Fucking. What. It all seems small when you think of Haiti. Or Afghanistan. Or what life must look like behind the crazy political and literal barbed wire curtain of North Korea.

So that’s where I’ve been: feeling kind of sorry for myself because I’m turning thirty-two in another week and I’m not sure about the whole success bit—what it means, or if I’ve achieved it, or if it even matters.

I know I get caught up in this a lot—even with just simply posting here. I trick myself into this mindset that I always have to write something relevant, and this year has been one of many quiet moments and a lot of angst about making ends meet, and so without meaning to I’ve stopped noticing the small things, stopped writing about how the world makes me feel full to the brim with it’s beauty, always, nearly every day.

This makes me sad: I’ve recorded less about Sprout by a long shot than I did about Bean, and I wish that it weren’t the case since I’ve loved his babyhood so entirely—even more, in a way than I did Bean’s because it wasn’t fraught with the same angst about each phase of babyhood. I want to get back to writing down the simple things because for one, my short-term memory is shot, and also, because it locates me in my life in a simple and wholesome way that I love. Writing down the day is like finding myself on a You Are Here map, even if the map is small and crumpled and only consists of a few shaky lines delineating the floor plan of my kitchen.

When the decade started I was twenty-one and eager and I didn’t actually put much thought towards concrete goals. What did I expect? If I were really honest, I’d have to say that I didn’t have a fucking clue what I to expect from my twenties. And in the end, maybe it doesn’t matter much at all, because as Kurt Vonnegut says, “Be patient. Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.”

And also, even if I did have expectations, they wouldn’t have included heartbreak or shock (expectations never do account for such things.)

I couldn’t have imagined how aching and pell-mell and urgent my twenties would be. How life would hit hard and fast, with loss and surprise, each event following closely upon the heels of the last. I became a teacher. My father died (as I sat with him.) I had a baby boy (unplanned.) I got married. I helped to gut and rebuild a house in a unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar state. I was in a school related shooting. I began working with an author I admire immensely. I was nominated for a pushcart prize. I was accepted to graduate school twice and derailed both times because of topsy-turvy life events. I had another baby boy (unplanned.) I quit teaching. I couldn’t have put my finger on any of it, really, which leaves me reeling. Bracing. Shit. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and be forty-two and what will I be saying then?

Now I feel wide-eyed and tenuous. This is my life. These moments, fragrant and tender with my baby’s soft head against my breast. He slips into sleep, and I look into the dark towards the pale outline of the window where snow falls outside.

+++ PS: I'm having fun painting the zebras. (This painting is for sale, by the way...) PPS: What did you expect? How has your life measured up?

2010

I like the way the world looks now: tender, undercover, monochrome. I like the way this month starts off in sleep: the longest nights, the shortest days. I like the way we hurtle down hillsides on sleds; the way driving home from a New Year’s Day party with friends we saw five trees illuminated by the light of a car dealership, each branch crowded with the black silhouettes of sleeping crows.

I like how anything can happen before it does, now, at the beginning of a new year; and also looking back, considering the pulse and tremolo of the year gone by.

I like how it’s always possible to feel at the cusp of something grand at the start of a new year. Like there’s a chance for anything to happen, and everywhere all over the world people are throwing themselves towards their lives with renewed gusto.

People are picking words, and I like that. Looking back, I’d like to say that last year’s word was cocoon, because it was a dreamy, blurry, nestled year of slow motion, present tense stumbling; of new baby love and making ends meet. It was a domestic year. A quiet year. A year of sustaining; of inward growing. Now I'm ready for real action.

I want accomplishment and tangible returns. I want the satisfaction of crossing things off my list. Some years I've had heady, dreamy goals. This year it’s all about the down-to-earth and practical. It’s about getting things done. Enough of next year and sometime and when the time is right.

It’s the beginning of a decade. Time to get things started off on the right foot.

Non-negotiable: Financial stability, daily joy, and finishing my novel manuscript. The rest I'll put up on this year's list at the end of the month.

What is non-negotiable for you this year?

all I have

Tonight the air was still, snow fell, the fire burned, and I felt utterly small and stupid in the narrow little cocoon of my life. Tonight the sum of all my efforts thus far are two boys who wont shut up and a husband who has his own issues and a job I don’t (mostly) know how to do. The novel waits. The dreams wait. And already, I am half way through my life. This breaks my heart.

And then.

I go out with leftover noodles for the chickens. The air is biting, and the fresh snow clings to my boots. When I push open the coop door the light is on. The chickens are all on their roosts, bodies pressed together for warmth. I dump the pasta and watch. One by one they fly down. Awkwardly. Heavily. They thud to floor until they're all there and in a moment all the noodles are gone and they busy themselves drinking and idly scratching. The rooster, ever randy, seizes the opportunity, and the docile hens buckle beneath his weight. Everything simply is. The night. The cold. This small insignificant act of procreation. All of it.

One by one they return to roost. Each flying up to the lower roost first, then the higher one. They find their spot, hunker down, preen, tuck their heads beneath their wings. Gradually each chicken finds her place, and the rooster too. Finally they’re all there, on the roost, and suddenly in the cold quiet air I can hear them breathing.

Softly, rhythmically. Unexpected.

Inhale, exhale. I find my own breath rising up in a cloud on the cold air; synchronizing as I sit in the corner, and for a moment I am away from the noise of my boys, my house, the constant forceful repetition of the same small daily tasks. I wait, listening to them breathe until I can return to my life.

Then I do.

This is all I have.

Timing is everything

Hi Monday. Apparently I hit publish last night before bed, and this odd collection of urls and lines of text went live yesterday night sometime. Oy. ( I'm glad you liked my 'experiment,' Denise.)

I did want to share all sorts of things I've been crushing on lately though, including these poems, and enough gorgeous pink blooms here to almost make me weep. Also, this inspiration to play around with some stenciling. (I've always had a crush on Banksy.) And this artist's interpretation of the "Missed Connections" section in the paper, which is where I go, too, when I'm looking for a new story.

Speaking of a new story, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. You all remember my failed attempt in August, I am sure (which was kiboshed by a heaping helping of freelance copy-editing.) This time? No excuses. I need to get this story out of my system. I need to get this story on the page. I need to see my words accumulate following NaNoWriMo's instructions:

"Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it's hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn't. Every book you've ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you."

So basically, it's ON, November.

Also, I got a part time job at a place that is very close to my heart--doing something I've never done before, with lots of opportunities to learn new creative things like In Design which will, in part, help to pay for my writing habit. So this coming month it's all about time management and balance. A week or so ago, at the suggestion of my very dear and very organized friend, I watched this lecture on time management, and I'm inspired to try to keep a time log this week to attempt to become more aware of how I spend my time. I'll likely be posting more on this at the end of the week..

This week is all about getting ready for Halloween around our house. Carving pumpkins. An obscene amount of foil tape and a pretty cool robot costume in the works. It's also about finishing two short stories and getting an essay submitted so that I have a clean plate for November's novel insanity.

What are you up to? Where do you think you spend your time? Have you ever kept a time log? Where do you know you need to become more efficient?

Endpoint + Ladybugs

The ladybugs have arrived. They come every October, en masse through the slanting autumn light, their small vermilion exoskeletons plunking into the window panes, flitting through briefly opened doors, gathering at the corners of the ceilings in every room. They come like clockwork, when the days are short and the light is like amber in a jar, before the hard cold. They bring promises, nostalgia, delight. Bean bursts into laughter as they land on his pants, his hands, his shoulders. He extends his arms carefully, watching them crawl about then lift off, their small buzzing wings carrying them in drunken zig-zags towards the house, where they seek dark nooks to overwinter. Their arrival marks the end of autumn and the beginning of the long season of snow and cold and boots and socks at the door.

Things are ending now, and beginning. When I wake up the valleys are blue and soft with mist, and the last yellow poplar leaves twirling to the ground make my heart ache: such a certain, gorgeous loss. Which is how I feel now, at the brink of things: new community, new friends, new work.

I want to say that it feels like the end of an era, but I’m not sure what I mean. Just that things feel like they are starting to be different. And it's good. But also, change is always awkward and slightly devastating, even if its just something temporary (a trench coat left hanging at by the door after the wearer has gone ahead wearing something startlingly bright and full of promise.)

There's always that moment of hesitation, a glance backward, even as I'm plunging on ahead.

I miss, for example, the days when I was new here, when I had such a voracious voyeuristic enthusiasm for sharing my life and reading about other peoples lives. Those were the days when this blog was my lifeline to a reality I'd thought I'd maybe lost, having just had Bean and moved north to a place where I didn't know a soul. But now, four, almost five years later, every day is filled with little boys and writing, work, and new friendships, and life has somehow begun to shift more and more off the screen and back into the three dimensions of day-to-day.

And somehow this feels bittersweet.

How do you make these things coexist, reconcile, balance in your life?

Not a morning poem at all

So. I think my short-term memory and my general ability to hold my shit together may be forever altered by the permanent lack of sleep that has become a fixture in my life, post babies. Exhibit A:Last week I left my cell phone on the roof of my car and drove away. I watched as it flew off and did a lovely flip in the air before landing on the road behind me. I pulled to the side, cursing, with Bean wide eyed in the back seat, and threw on my emergency blinkers (do they have some other word? I'm sure they do, but I cannot remember it. See--shit has been lost, people.) I then dashed back to retrieve it, hoping that at the worst it would be scratched but still functional. But of course, it landed in the effing middle of the road and an SUV ran it over just before I was able to dash out into two-way traffic to rescue it. SMASHED beyond repair.

Bean kept muttering, "This is terrible. This is soo terrible." All the way home.

Maybe this happens to everyone, and perhaps it is what some people gently refer to as GETTING OLD, but I'm only THIRTY ONE, people, and I and should have more of a capacity to remember things and generally keep my shit together than I have recently demonstrated.

Exhibit B: This morning I put my coffee cup on the roof of my car.

You'd think I would have learned, right?

Nooo. I drove off in oblivion only to slam on the breaks and come to a lurching stop at the bottom of our rather steep driveway as my coffee cup hurtled down my windshield. What the eff? Then I had to listen to Bean mutter about how his view was ruined by my frozen coffee splattered across his window.

It's a little bit more than my view that's been affected, BUDDY.

Exhibit C: While I remembered HIS jacket and hat and mittens for school this morning, I somehow managed to leave the house without so much as a vest, and it was COLD this morning. As in the first frost of the season happened last night. This situation was then made worse when I went to buy bagels and proceeded to spill the entire contents of the worst latte of my life (from here--don't ask me why I even ordered one!) onto my lap.

Cold? Check. Wet? Check. Shit completely lost? CHECK.

Please tell me this changes. Please.

Another image poem

anatomy of my heart today: PS--Your comments on my post earlier meant the world to me today. Really. xoxox! C.

Drawing blanks

And I can't find the words to write about it. Dislocated. Nostalgic. Missing the way I used to be, as irrational as that seems. Feeling anxious about the future. What if I'll never be the things I dream of? Shit. Even I know that sounds ridiculous, and yet that voice is there in my head. A rejection letter in the mail. Not enough sleep. Whatever.

I am missing the connections I've made here, Internets. I know it's my fault that they've dwindled as I've been caught in this weird place of cat-got-your-tongue moodiness that is my present. Damn. I want to share my life with you more, again. I just don't know how to put words around it. What if this lasts? What if nothing turns out? This is the voice in my head today. Even with sun, even with coffee, even with sitting alone upstairs in a cafe.

Do you ever feel like this? Like there are no words?

What are you afraid of? What will you regret, if you never do it or become it?

At it again

Today I felt like maybe, finally, I might be making progress. I can't really describe the way I've felt for the past couple of weeks, other than to say that I've felt like I've been drifting somewhere above myself, above my life. Out of touch, maybe, or tangled. Desultory. Haphazard. And this week has been all about coming down to earth. Getting on top of things. Organizing. It was a busy month, and maybe that is my excuse. Introverted by nature, non-stop wedding parties and a week long visit with my dearest of dear friends, and a weekend visit from my sister and her husband, packed my September to it's gills. Not to mention freelance work was eating up all my spare moments. The result: dislocation, distraction, doubt, disillusion, despondency. (Okay, so I'm suddenly alliteration drunk. But you get the idea.)

Either way, for the past couple of days since all the fun ended I've been moping about the house, doing heaps of laundry. SIDE NOTE: I kind of want to write another entire post about laundry, actually. How I had this groundbreaking moment watching my friend fold my laundry precisely, neatly, into these perfectly stacked rectangular piles of shirts and jeans and sweaters. Groundbreaking as in: it never occurred to me that the purpose of folding the damn laundry might be expanded to a) fitting more in one's drawers neatly and b) to reduce the amount of wrinkles in any given garment. I honestly have been folding laundry all these years because it's what you're supposed do with laundry, right? I mean, who doesn't fold laundry? But truthfully, I never put thought into it. Now, I am reformed. See? I simply must post more about this (with pictures!)--it's become a new obsession.

It's taken all week to sort myself out. But finally I'm starting to get the hang of my life again. I have my submissions calendar sorted out and some clear-cut goals, and some long term novel goals (40k words by the end of October) and some maybe sort of plans for an autumn party with the community of friends I am gradually starting to make here, and it all feels good.

It kind of astounds me how easily I got knocked off kilter in the past two months. I've felt so alarmingly fragile, up to my neck in angst and uncertainty that I've had hardly anything to post. Things have felt tenuous and flimsy around here financially lately, and that too adds to my apparent state of internal vertigo. My mind has been twirling all day long, but when I've come up for air, there has been nothing to put on the page. No way to capture the tightly wound, tugged-at feeling that's lodged itself in the pit of my stomach except maybe to say that a part of me has been feeling a little like a kite caught up in a tree, thrashing about in the wind. But less so today after eight loads of laundry, and listening to Selected Shorts while making apple sauce.

So. Hmmm. All this brings me to October.

I have plans for October. Real, practical, concrete plans to disentangle and make things happen around here, including more organization and less stress.

And I'm thinking of doing morning poems again, as a way to slip back into writing for real. I have done morning poems in the past, and have loved it when you have joined me. I've gotten so much this exchange. These small scraps of joy and arc and moment that we capture, first thing, before the blur of the day takes over; before the laundry piles up.

Are you in? The rules are really simple. Show up at the page every morning and write a poem. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be much of anything. All it needs to be is a small handful of words tossed up to the gods; an offering, a gift, a start to the day.

Happily ever after...

...And now all three of my dearest girlfriends are married. The four of us climbed trees and talked Rilke and Kant in college. We ate ice cream by the pint, barefoot on the fire escape; skinny dipped, hiked to an island with swans, cried, laughed, and cooked and shared endless meals together. The end of an era. The start of another.

Glad to be back home. This month was non-stop. I spent the day folding laundry, setting goals and writing to-do. Bean has an ear infection. Sprout has two teeth. I have a lot of things to get done. Tomorrow it's go time.