I'm pretty much just muttering now

Am packing for our trip to Spain. In the process I've discovered: dear god in a housedress, I live under a rock. I haven't gone "out" in oh, over a year I imagine. I no longer know how to wear lipstick. My feet, my barefoot garden loving feet, are in desperate need of a pedicure. And I threw a load of whites in the wash with a delicate, silky PINK wrap. And now everything is pink. Everything. I have never, ever done that before. Love how I saved that up for right now. So I'm a bit muddled. Thank you all for your love from my last post. Some days parenting just knocks my socks off. Today, Bean was still sleeping when I was getting ready to leave--so I smooched him and sort of nudged him awake and he opened his eyes, reached out and climbed into my arms for the world's most perfect snuggle ever. I'm gonna miss him like crazy. Even though we'll be soaking in Old World charm, and having drinks with some of our best friends ever, and generally having a blast.

I'll try to update when I'm there, but I can't be sure of the Internet connection I will have. Don't think I've forgotten you. I'll be taking lots and lots of pictures.

growing pains

One Scooby Doo bandaid and a glass of wine later, this is what heartache feels like. He comes home from the day with his Gram and Gramps who indulge his every wish: playground visits, popsicles, escaping from naps, trips to the hardware store, the library, the moon… When he gets here, he’s asleep and the rain has rinsed the heat out of the day. He’s in his car seat when they bring him, in his underpants, hair curling with sweat.

We carry him inside where he sleeps on DH the way he used to before his legs were long and his knees were scraped and his heart belonged only to us. Then he wakes, and all he wants is her, his Gram, who smells like sweet perfume and has soft hugs and buys him cookies whenever they go out.

He starts to cry for her. His eyes get red and puffy and he runs away and hides in corners, sobbing. Inconsolable, he doesn’t want either one of us, only her. Snot runs from his nose in a trail, and we offer peanut butter cookies and milk and he eats them and then starts to cry again; his smile as temporary as the thunderstorm earlier today that brought nickel-sized hail and a tornado warning while I was at school.

DH and I go outside onto the lawn. We check on the baby chicks, their beaks and yellow and sharp and their eyes round and dark. The grass is wet from the rain. We hold hands. Neither of us has any fucking idea what to do with our small boy who is standing in the doorway sobbing, not wanting to be with us but not wanting to be left alone either.

My heart feels like the tangled strings of a marionette; like prongs in a splintered music box; like the quarters that fall under couch cushions and are forgotten. We go back inside, agreeing to ignore him for a while. Surely this has gone on long enough, this wailing, this utter ridiculousness. He’s clutching the phone. “I want to call Gram,” he says each word punctuated with a gasping sob.

I put on Jack Johnson. DH grills chicken. I make potato salad. Bean sobs, clutching the phone.

Finally we cave, after forty five minutes of sobbing. When she answers, her first words are stupid and they make my heart feel like bits of broken glass. “I’ll be right over,” she says. DH intervenes. She’s his mom, so he can say it like it is. Not what we’re looking for here. Just say hi to him, calm him down. So she starts in, planning tomorrow with him: a trip to the café for milk and cookies, returning library books, a bike ride, a trip to the playground.

Smiles flutter on his face like the little blue moths that kept landing on the kids hands and arms at school while we were walking in the tall grass. They’d alight, then stick their tongues out, licking the salt from the kid’s sweaty palms, everyone watching in wonderment. My little boy didn’t want anything to do with me, and now he’s sitting there at the counter, elbows up, talking on the phone like a teenager, his face wide with grins. I can only listen for a while, before I feel like I can’t breathe.

I go to the wine rack, reach for the first bottle, grapple with the cork screw. Except for with dinner sometimes I never drink, but it seems like the only thing that makes any sense: in that it doesn’t at all. The cork breaks, and the sharp tip of the corkscrew gashes across my index finger. When I hold my finger up to my mouth and my blood tastes coppery. I pour a glass and take a sip. He’s still talking to her and her voice is a cloying sing-song of sweetness.. My heart feels like a bit of clay, drying in the sun, a hundred little fissures forming on the surface. Damn. No one told me told me about this. No one warned me that they stop loving only you. That you stop being everything, that a day comes when your kiss no longer makes it better.

I take the red metal colander to the garden with a sharp knife and cut the outer leaves of lettuce heads, all curly and green. Walking across the wet grass to the garden I cry. Then while I’m cutting the salad greens he calls for me, “Mommy, where are you?” and my heart is a trout flip flopping about with a wild helpless kind of love. He’s standing at the top of the garden path waiting for me, and I pick him a wild daisy from among the tall grasses and he grins when I hand it to him. “I love you, Mommy,” he says.

We eat dinner and finally, he’s all mine again. I feed him buttered noodles with peas and carrots and then we sit on stools by the window watching the storm move towards us across the mountain. We count bolts of lightening and he grins, eyes still red, eyelashes tangled. Then the sky changes fast from light to metallic gray. The leaves on the trees are tossed belly side up, like a thousand darting minnows caught between here and the storm tossed sky. Rain chases the wind, and DH goes about shutting windows and nursing his own form of heartache.

Bean wanted neither of us; and while he’s climbing back and forth now between our laps sharing an ice cream sandwich and watching the storm dwindle, his small betrayal still stings like salt in a cut.

So this is watching your kid grow up; becoming someone separate, like one Jupiter’s moons. We fall into each other in a tight embrace and I feel the muscles in DH’s chest bunch against my cheek. He’s holding me the way we used to, like it’s just us again, before Bean, though it’s different of course. Three years, and suddenly he’s clamoring for independence at the threshold of our hearts. All we can do is stand in the doorway watching the storm approach. Then suddenly, rain is pelting our skin.

Heat dumb

So my sister has shamed me into blogging, telling me I suck at updating and that I'm basically a miserable failure in the regular posting department. Yeah. Well. Not much to update about due to the fact that I'm MELTING. It's suddenly summer here. The grass is knee high and I seem to have allergies. It is 90 degrees and humid and my brain feels too large for my skull. See aren't you glad I'm updating?

At night when Bean invariably crawls into bed he very much resembles a cross between a hot water bottle and a colt: all legs and heat. Typically I take a knee or a foot to the eye at least once a night. He seems to think sleeping perpendicular to me is fun.

Other than heat and sleep deprivation, I'm limping my way through my last full week of school. We're doing everything we can to keep cool, but thanks to 1970s inspired public school architecture, my classroom is south facing and flat roofed. By mid-afternoon the classroom thermomiter read 92 degrees. Yeah. So. Where was I? Melting brain? How can anyone possibly expect anyone to accomplish anything in such conditions? Much less seven year olds who are hankering to be outdoors. They look at me with hot cheeks and sweat on their upper lips, and I can tell that all the words I'm saying about place value are just floating somewhere between us in litte clouds of moisture and heat. They nod, but they don't hear me.

I'm still crossing my fingers; trying to remember that everything is good right now. Spain in a week. A gorgeous dress. Pretty shoes. Friends I haven't seen in so long. INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL. Then graduate school. Life is good. But still, I can't help wanting what I don't have. More on that when I'm feeling like being less mysterious. And less melty-brain like.

Oh, and does anyone have any recommendations for making sleep more tolorable in the heat? We have a fan, but being all prissy and noise sensitive, it basically is sound torture all night long for me to listen to it whirr back and forth. I try sleeping with a pillow over my head, but then the heat, well. You get the idea. Anyone know some really good earplugs?

Enough. Hope everyone is happy and well and lovely and possibly less heat-stupored than I.

glimmer

In the cool dark of the bedroom, afternoon, after work, after many hours awake and fragmented by the needs of the day, push-pull, ache in the throat, thirsty for quiet, and now I’m face down among the bedclothes and the cat comes up and brushes against my foot. Just this. Fur on skin. I take a breath.

Right now, right here

At school, the days are spiraling down. We make space mud and go outside for extra recess where I sit on the grass and they crowd around me, suddenly towering tall, every single one yelling for my attention. “Teacher! Teacher! Look at this!” “Teacher can we race?” “Teacher! Watch me!” I close my eyes and feel the sun on my eyelids and my pulse in my chest. The backs of my eyelids are sunbursts of red and shade. The world is simpler this way, eyes closed. Immediately I turn inward, feel my breath, remember to breathe. Eventually they stop yelling. One persistent voice keeps at it, softer now, “Teacher, teacher!”

Above us there is a sun dog in the sky. I tell them the weather will change. I tell them rain is coming, and later it does.

At home the road is slick with mud. The chickens come out from the coop and ruffle their feathers. The sky is the color of paper. Lilacs lean towards the ground, heavy with rain. Bean wakes up from his late nap grouchy, and grouchy by three year old standards seems to mean nonstop howling in indignation for a half an hour. No he doesn’t want a snack, or a snuggle, or a walk, or some milk. But then two seconds later he’ll maybe change his mind.

When he’s asleep, he looks little to me still. I see in his face the tiny baby’s face I stared at for hours, when he still made dolphin noises and his whole body could rest snuggly against my torso. But then he awakens and the turbulence childhood is there like a weather map, hovering. He looks boyish, lanky, bright-eyed, determined.

When he was two, I could distract him. “Look at the moon!” I’d say eagerly, or “Let’s go get some mango for snack,” and any consternation would melt like a popsicle on a warm day. “Okay,” he’d nod agreeably, smudging tears with the back of his hand. But three? Three is entirely different. He holds on to things. Dwells on them. And his emotions sweep over him like waves.

I remember going to the beach when I was a kid, growing up in Los Angeles. The sand was often oil specked, and the waves hit hard. If you turned your back when you were building sand castles, you’d get smacked down, spun under, your t-shirt or bathing suit twisted and wrung out. Bean’s moods hit him like that now. Everything is full throttle. Urgent delight. Intense frustration. Utter grief.

On walks I’ve started sharing my big Cannon EOS 20-D with him. It’s probably not advisable. I’m likely courting disaster, a broken lens, worse. But he has an eye for framing the most beautiful shots. He takes the camera so earnestly, the strap slung over his shoulder. And I love the way his pictures are—kid level, slightly askew.

It is hard to resist the urge to tell him how to do things. “Take a picture of this, point the lens this way, no that’s too dark,” and just see what he comes up with. But I realize right away that I’m pushing the river when I do. The kid’s got his own eye.

On a different note: I’m on the brink of something. Tilting. Can’t say yet what, but things are afoot. Possibly. Maybe. Good things. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Hating the way I feel right now

It’s completely kicking my butt, this parenting thing. Right now, I feel like a crappy mom. I wonder how on earth I could ever, really, be the parent to two kids when this one is driving me bananas. He’s three, and that has made everything more complicated. And tonight bedtime was a crappy overblown push-pull of him wanting more of me, and me wanting to give less. One of those nights where I’m beyond tired and the laundry is everywhere (in the drier, in the washing machine, on the chair in the bedroom in heaps, in the hallway in heaps) and my last nerve has already been used up. And then he starts.

“I need milk, mommy!” he starts to whine. We’ve already done stories and we’re past the step where warm milk was an option, but it’s only been recently that he’s been forgoing it at bedtime, and really, I should have offered it to him at the appropriate time. And I didn’t. So here we are.

I’m lying on his bed with him watching how the shadows make the yellow of his walls almost gray. The light out the window is dusk. The last of the robins are singing from the tops of the trees, but the sun has already sunk below the horizon and the sky is the pale afterthought pink of post-sunset. I want to cry.

I’m not sure why I want to cry except I feel like I’ve been giving everything all day long to other people’s kids and now here I am with my own, the kid I love more than anything, and I don’t have an ounce of wiggle room left to give him.

“Fine,” I say. “But if I get you milk then I am not going to lie here and snuggle with you. You can have the milk but then it’s a hug and a kiss and we’re done tonight. Got it.”

“Noo!” He whimpers indignantly. His lower lip is protruding and he sounds particularly pathetic because he’s just getting over a cold. This makes matters worse. The fact that I know he’s been sick. That his behavior has always been worse when he’s sick: more erratic with bouts of energy and lulls.

But damn, I just want to be sitting on the couch with the cat wedged up against me, without anyone needing anything for eight point five seconds. That would be really great.

But somehow there is never enough time, at the end of the day. I crave energy and time and have neither by 8 p.m. So I go downstairs and get milk and bring it up to him and he’s already bawling.

“I want snuggles Mommy, I just want you to snuggle with me.”

I hand him the milk. I sit in the rocking chair near his bed. In my head I can see myself and I can see that I'm being stubborn and unreasonable and in general totally suck as a mom. I even think to myself why the hell can’t you just go cuddle with him, what’s the big deal? But the big deal is that since he’s turned three he has started to make bedtime into something momentous again, every night more negotiations, more extra steps and little details as he tries to control more and more of his world. And I picked tonight of all effing nights to curtail this trend.

What was I thinking?

So now he’s balling into his milk and snuffeling and needs a tissue. “I just love you Mommy. I love you Mommy. I love you Mommy. Are you happy Mommy?”

Damn it. Is parenting this hard for anyone else?

We somehow muddled through. I explained that I wasn’t happy with his behavior but that I loved him and loved him some more. And now he’s tucked into his beanbag ‘nest’ in our room where he has very contentedly slept for the past few weeks. And the cat is by my shoulder, and outside the trees look like the outlines of giants huddled together having tea, and the house is quiet.

But I hate not having patience. I hate feeling like I’m totally not cut out for this. ARGH.

A fun weekend

New baby chicks & new bantam chickens from a neighbor (we named the rooster Guisseppe!)

A new bike for Bean.

New plants in the garden.

Sore muscles.

A night with just DH.

And only four three weeks left of school.

I know I promised I'd write more

But it's been sunny and I've been outdoors in the garden. I've decided I want to keep a garden journal here--but I'm afraid if I say so, I'll surely sabatoge my entire attempt. Everything I seem to say I want to do I immediately lose all interest in following through on. Why is that? Anway, I've double dug three long beds--and am currently in the midst of digging mounds for squash, watermellons and pumpkins. My legs itch from using the weed-wacker to cut down tall grass at the edges of the garden, and I'm wearing a big floppy white hat. Why am I posting then, when I claim to be in the midst of gardening? Bean is taking a poop. And dear lord, I still can't figure out how to teach the boy to wipe himself. So I was summoned from the garden with yells echoing from the bathroom. "Mama! I need to be wiped." I am sure the neighbors love that.

How do you wear this?

So, in a month we'll be heading to Spain for a friend's wedding. Have I told you that? I'm so excited. It will be my first time since 1997 being overseas. Holy shit. I was 19 when I left, after having spent a year in Germany (also the year I set my hair on fire on my birthday.)

Anyhoo, I'm trying to find a dress for a very formal, large, Spanish wedding. I like dresses like these, that are halter tops--like this one. But I can never figure out how the hell I'm supposed to wear them, really. I mean come on, only perky 19 year olds, can go without support in such a dress. And if you beg to differ, let me just say one word: breastfeeding.

Okay, so now that we're on the same page, how does one go about wearing such a dress? What secret undergarments actually work with an open backed sheer-fabric dress?

I know, not my typical post. But see, I promised, I'm going to try to post more, so this is what you get. Run-ons and random clothing questions.

Also, on an entirely other note:

Bean is cureently asleep on one of those giant beanbags in our bedroom (which, by the way, are way flatter and less poufy than they appear in the picture.) I'm trying to get him to stop sneaking into our room the minute we say goodnight and come downstairs--because, though I don't mind him coming into our room in the middle of the night, I do rather mind not being able to go to sleep spooning with DH. So my newest plan is to get him to at least sleep in his own space--in our room. He seems happy as a clam. Sound asleep, tucked under a comforter, and snoring away.

Weekend snapshots

(Bean took this one.)

The world has turned green. Less than a month left of school. The morning sun is waking me up, and I've been heading out to run more. Still not feeling totally in harmony with myself yet: still too much on my plate. But more days and more moments where the the orbit of things aligns with my own twirling self.

(Btw: The Cure was a wild, loud adventure that included getting lost when leaving Montreal--4o miles east, before we realized we were supposed to be going south. Oy. And the next day was a blur of tiredness.)

I am hoping to update here every day this week. I have a thing with perfection. I don't like writing here unless I have long moments to spend, delving into the deeper fabric of my thoughts. But I miss the daily practice. The flawed jotting of notes, of small moments, of daily life. When I first wrote here, I wrote all the time... but somehow I seem to have upped the standard on myself, and now I'm dragging my feet, feeling like if I can't post a brilliant post, I should'nt post anything at all. What is with that?

Nerdyness

We are going to The Cure tomorrow, up across the border. I’m not sure if this is cool. DH thinks it is, but he’s the kind of guy who can sing the lyrics to EVERY SINGLE SONG on the face of the earth. Really. His favorite genre: every song from the ‘80s. Thus, when I found out that that The Cure would be near here, I knew we had to get tickets: just so I could go and watch him sing along to every word. True love, baby.

However, he's returning the affection:

In late summer A Prairie Home Companion is happening my town, and this made me so excited I may have even equated Garrison Keillor with The Cure: as in, the Keillor is as cool in my mind as the Cure is in DH's. Basically I'm an NPR addict all the way. Other shows that make me swoon/giggle hysterically: Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, or Say’s You.

Now that I've posted this DH is learning how to hide his head hole in the ground from an ostrich.*

Alas, I cannot stop.

What kinds of wine come to mind when you read the following clues: (snagged from Say’s You—which I had to listen to in the driveway, until it ended because I could not stop laughing):

1) Fake window glass

2) A deer in the doldrums

3) The tide’s out at Mer San Michelle

Oh, I am such a nerd. It’s spring, I met my deadline, and I get to go somewhere international tomorrow to eat yummy food and listen to music I’m unsure about with my long-eyelashed guy. Life is good.

*See? Even my jokes are nerdy.

It figures...

...that the day I've set aside (taking full advantage of it being Mother's Day so I can totally claim several back to back hours) for finishing up my two manuscripts (which incidentally are DUE tonight) is GLORIOUS. Apple blossoms, a perfect breeze, seedlings to plant in the garden. Sigh. And here I am in my shady studio, clacking away on the keyboard. It is nearly impossible not to procrastinate now, when I'm working on revisions (which I hate) and a honey cheeked little boy comes running upstairs clutching a piece of bread and butter with the sole purpose of giving me kisses.

Anyway. Happy Mother's day to all of you mamas out there. I'm so lucky to know so many of you.

Glimpse

He’s there on the couch playing guitar and the notes are doing things for him that make my breath catch. Not perfect, but strings of notes in a minor chord from the sun-faded couch where he’s sitting barefoot. Outside the lilacs are just beginning to bloom. It’s Saturday again and I can’t seem to manage to put in more than a post a week right now, or get enough sleep.

Saturday in reverse

Eating Nutella out of the jar and writing. A two hour nap with Bean, our noses pressed into nooks amongst the pillows, rain falling outside.

Buying seedlings: artichokes (the love affair continues), lettuces, swiss chard.

Following a dashing Bean around the Aquarium, checking out turtles stacked like pancakes, and sea stars and frogs. "Let's be sturgeons," he said tonight after dinner.

Blueberry pancakes, made my DH, smothered in maple syrup (the only way to eat them.) Outside the azaleas are blooming.

A three mile run first thing this morning, on the treadmill, while Bean ate banana bread and butter and played with "Big Orange" the tractor.

Scraps

It is somehow already Thursday. I am like salt in a shaker, scattered haphazardly over the things of my days. Small scraps that I want to remember. ***

Coming back to the classroom I put a jar full of tulips by my desk, and smiled when it was the boys who noticed. A little girl came in with a Tupperware of salamanders for our terrarium. A boy who constantly pushes my buttons looked like he was up to no good, so I swung by his table and discovered he was writing: You are the best teacher in the world on a heart he’d drawn in marker.

Also: we’re studying matter, and we’ve been having the best conversations.

Me: What do you think matter is? Kid: Maybe whatever it is, the person who invented it is named Matt?

Me: Matter is anything you can touch or feel. Kid: If it’s anything we can touch or feel, do we eat matter? Kid: Do we breath matter? We can feel air, so we must! Kid: Matter is ANYTHING. Kid: If matter is EVERYTHING, is there anything that ISN’T MATTER? Kid: If matter is everything, then is God matter?

*** Yesterday we went to a two-bit circus with Bean. It’s a tiny family circus that seems to tour the country—360 shows per year. What a life. All the clowns and acrobats and jugglers were either too young or too old to make a crack at it anywhere else, and the ponies napped between rides when everyone was taking a break to buy popcorn and bright bobbing star-specked balloons and sparkling wands. But it still had magic. There were moments when I gasped. And Bean, big eyed from his daddy’s lap, his face sticky with cotton candy, could not take his eyes off everything that was going on.

I always remember loving the circus. As in: I wanted to run away and join.

Now I’m bitten with the peculiar desire to follow a troupe around and write their story. I often wonder if anyone else is curious about this? How these people live, all year, in trailers, going from place to place, performing, practicing, always on the road. How does the 12 year old Peruvian juggling marvel (who dropped his props) go to school? Or his sister, the contortionist who could twirl her entire body bent over backwards by holding onto a swivel with her mouth. But I can’t imagine they’d want me there, poking into the private corners of their lives, after fake eyelashes have been removed and the ponies are bedded down for the night.

*** Today I came home from work nearly staggering. Tired. I buried my head under pillows. I’ve always loved my bed, wherever it’s been. It’s the thing I think of when I think of home. Soft sheets, the window open just a sliver, light falling golden through the big-leafed tree in the blue bowl by the bed. Without intending to, I was asleep. Not slumber, but black out sleep, that when I awakened I could not recall. The kind of sleep where you’re not sure if you were asleep at all, yet the shadows are longer.

Bean and DH let me sleep until dinner time, at which point I emerged like a baby raccoon. Clumsily and disoriented, at the very least.

Onwards.

Happy heart

A weekend trip south, to Blue Poppy's, to spend time with wonderful Lizardek and her lovely mom, and Elizabeth and her T. Ambling walks in the sunshine with a crowd of golden pups. Every moment filled up with wonder and delight and gratitude: these women come from my planet.

Some days I feel entirely alien to the orbit of people I'm surrounded with at work. People who aren't apt to contemplate karma, or Annie Dillard, or gel matte transfers, or the way light falls on a row of golden gourds on a vintage chest of drawers. But these women, they are brilliant, insightful, generous, and beautiful. They make my heart sing. (BP and I were mistaken for sisters several times, and it delighted me to no end. She is absolutely gorgeous. Inside and out.)

Not to mention is was lovely to sip wine until late and then slumber late without anyone to coax me awake (save for an invitation to see a moose). And also to be fed perfect blueberry pancakes with warm maple syrup and blueberries.

A post in pictures

Artichokes for dinner: a Bean favorite. Mine too. We eat all the way to the heart, dipping each leaf in lemon butter; then wonder at the purple and pale green thistle center.

It's suddenly warm here. Days perfect for drinking fizzy water and limes. Days for getting first sunburns, working in the garden. A week of vacation: to catch up on writing and sleep and time with my boys.

Bean and I spend every second outdoors in the afternoons, ambling through our meadows, taking stock of everything that is new and green and budding. He found these old baskets from last autumn's crysanthemums on the brush pile we're preparing to burn. Natraully, they offered endless entertainment.

Made the first batch of sun tea this week. The temperature has hit 80, and it's almost soporific. Just two weeks ago I was wearing down and socks, now I'm barefoot, my toes badly in need of a pedicure.

Writing, upstairs, alone in the house, I heard a thud. Unmistakable, reminding me of a childhood in the Rocky Mountains in a big-windowed cabin and my dad, holding stunned birds in his quiet palms. They always flew away, and compelled, I went downstairs and out the screen door looking. It was there, below the frong windows, wings spread wide, eyes closed. But I scooped it up gently, and held it. (My dad always said holding the birds helped them with the shock.) And eventually, he started to blink, and move about, then perched for a while on my thumb before flying off. A small blessing.

Wildflowers suddenly everywhere, and insects. I'm so damn grateful to be through with winter.

We hung Bean's first tree swing yesterday. So much nostalgia from childhood: my feet scraping the blue bowl of sky.

I found two today, the first of the year. I think of them as my writing talismans. Last year they brough so much: my writing group, Pam, a piece to be published this summer in the Sun. I've pressed them in my new Molskine.

He's just so beautiful. Yesterday in the garden he was stomping about. "I'm going to get the moon," he said, and then wandered off, gesturing that he'd gotten it and was holding it and bringing it back. "I brought you the moon, Mommy," he said, beaming.

A Mighty* Life List

A list of things I hope to do in my lifetime.
Occasionally I go back to it to add a new goal, or mark something as accomplished. Both are incredibly satisfying.
1. Write and publish a book. 2. Take a roadtrip across the US in a camper. 3. Live in Europe for a year; preferably Paris. 4. Drink mint tea in Morocco. 5. Speak fluent French. 6. Learn to dance. 7. Grow a garden. 8. Hanglide or paraglide. 9. Keep bees. 10. Learn to surf. 11. Take a photography class. 12. Write regularly for a magazine. 13. Buy a potters wheel & kiln and throw pots in the garage. 14. Teach creative writing. 15. Complete a sport triathlon. 16. Own a tiny apartment in a big city to sneak away to. 17. Meditate. 18. Learn to kayak. 20. Take a trip to India. 21. Learn to sail. 22. Travel somewhere every year. 23. Grow a rose garden. 25. See the northern lights. 26. Go on a multi-day biking trip with just my guy (again.) 27. Ski Snowboard black diamonds. 28. Go camping in the summer. 29. See the monarch migration in Mexico. 30. Visit Prague. 31. Re-read the great American novels I never read in high school. 32. Build Bean a tree house. 33. Host a dinner party. 34. Find more close friends nearby. 35. Own horses. 36. Speak at TED. 37. Meet as many of my writing heroes as possible (Isabelle Illende, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Strout, Tim Winton, Alice Munro...) 38. Spend a winter in New Zealand or Australia. 39. Make small + smart investments. 40. Visit the Galapagos. 41. Lead life-changing creative spirit workshops. 42. Live on the ocean. 43. Meet Ira Glass or be interviewed by Terri Gross. 44. Live in a house with painted white floors. 45. Get a Round The World ticket and spend 1 year traveling 46. Live in the Pacific Northwest 47. Learn to develop film in a dark room. 48. Go fly fishing. 49. Learn to fish-tail braid my hair. 50. Take a paragliding lesson. 51. Host an interview series on my blog. 52. 
Host a monthly dinner party for friends. 53. Learn to screen print. 54. Paint with encaustic. 55. Spend a week in Iceland

  * Inspired by Mighty Girl I always an on-going list of the big (and sometimes small) things I want to do before I die, tucked into the back of a notebook.

As Tim Brown puts it: "Believing that something is possible, will somehow make it so."

---

What's on your list?

From here

Standing at the kitchen sink this morning rinsing a glass, I was thinking about blogging. About this blog, about how I started it for one reason, and have continued it for another entirely.

The sunlight in the morning has made all the difference lately, and this morning you could see new grass on the lawn, bright green, almost transparent in the light. I made a double shot of espresso for an iced latte to-go, and thought about how my life is different now than one year ago, or two. This blog has become a record for me, of small things. I go back and look at what the weather was like two seasons ago. My mind, full with the present, is fickle in the light of the past.

When I started to write, I was a new mama and every single aspect of parenting felt like fraud to me. It took me more than a year to wrap my head around the idea of being someone’s mother. My heart on the other hand, only required a nanosecond of adjustment: when he was first there in my arms, warm and wet and wide-eyed, he was instantly mine.

Still, I started this blog because I felt some urgency to document the affect becoming a mother had on my life, as though it had been tucked precariously into the nook of a slingshot and then launched, suddenly, all of a stumbled moment. For the first year I diligently wrote letters to my small boy, a baby yet, whose miraculous feats of sitting up, crawling, and walking became also benchmarks for my own life.

Then gradually I stopped feeling that raw ‘new mama’ status. I went from being a ‘first time mom’ to just a mother. My baby was suddenly a kid who could talk and was potty trained and climbed trees. I stopped recording the little things. Each day, exponentially, the things he says astounds me: so much so that at the end I can hardly remember all the delight of talking to him about the way he sees his world. He has become someone that I want to know; someone I love to lie with in the newly growing grass on the back lawn drinking fizzy grapefruit soda and eating blue corn chips.

Now when I write it’s hardly ever about Bean, not really intentionally, but just because my focus has shifted: towards writing and work and the multifaceted inner topography of emotion I’ve been exploring this year.

But oh, he’s a love. He’s SO BIG now, you would hardly believe it. So articulate and observing and funny. It’s like his personality can no longer be contained on the page: I sit down to try to capture a few phrases that he’s said to me, and my mind is instantly crowded like a sky full fluttering parrots. One thing I do know: he still sucks at sleeping through the night.

Really annoying strange stuff is happening in blogland

I don't get it. My blog has disappeared several times ENTIRELY in the past twenty-four hours. WTF?