chakra chakra chakra

so i had my meet-up with carol today,or back on thursday depending on when I post this... chakra carol that is... i told her about the blog and she laughed and thought 'chakra carol' was allright... and that now my husband greeting her as 'chakra carol' suddenly made more sense.

righty-ho.

I was there so she could practice, sort of, integrating the Byron Katie stuff into her healing of people. She believes in it, wants to use it to help her clients but it is not as integrated into her being as all the bodywork she does... so she wants to roll it around a little.

the meeting was fine, but i'm left feeling sort of raw, impressionable, lump of uncolored playdough on the table-ish and where i go from here is anybody's guess. i think D, who was there too, really loves me and that is sort of awe-inspiring because i mostly feel like a big turdy fake. . . on the inside. I'm not actually fake, I don't tell lies and don't manipulate information, but somehow I still identify myself as turdy fake. take that home and cook it. turdy fake.

anyhow. vulnerable, raw, that is me .

i'm always working on it, and sometimes its just too much and I'm tired and I need a break and that is what this week has been for me. Time to think before I write. think about who I am RIGHT NOW because that is where I am at and spending all my time waiting for some other moment is a colossal waste.

and i do, spend a lot of time waiting. I just spent two nights away, at a hotel with my husband while my in-laws moved in to take care of the kids. I spent a hell of a lot of time talking myself into relaxing. All that hurry up stuff that I say to the kids has actually infiltrated my skin and I can't even get myself to chill anymore. its really quite remarkable. Two years ago right now, I went away for two nights by myself, after losing my hearing and I loved it a whole lot, but was really escaping from the difficulties of not being able to receive communications and the fear that I would always be struggling with people and their talk, language, laughter... I don't know what to do with my self these days.. but I'm going to 'not' wait for anything today. thats my plan.

* by the way, when I got home this morning, Sunday, the kids had markered their faces blue so they look like braveheart for children...

fabulous...

no no nannette

my teeth haven't killed me, nor my head but i think i'm getting carpal tunnel and oh, the suffering.
heh.
i think i am going to take the next week off. nothing dire but just regular for our household and i need to spend time doing it and not doing this.
we're off to play knights and naps.
i'm sure i'll check in and see how everyone else is doing so for godssakes, write something!

helpful helpful hippo

i've eaten so much today i couldn't even type 'hungry' without feeling guilt. in the morning, i go to visit my first kindergarten classroom in hopes of finding out what my son's future will look like.
heavy, right?
so ridiculous! dude. i am crazed with headache again and don't know what for... except maybe a tooth infection on its way to my brain and so if i don't write for a few days somebody should notify my next of kin. really.

anyhow. our kid will most likely go to public school around the corner but i'm looking tomorrow at a charter school nearby. the other anal parents around me have done this about a year ago so suddenly i'm feeling sort of rushed and wasn't really expecting an appt so soon after calling this morning and while weeks and weeks go by wherein I have absolutley nothing to do- suddenly this week is packed and i'm losing my throbbing mind.

the whole point of this post was to talk about what i do feel to be helpful about the byron katie thing and that is this: it didn't happen the way you think it did.
as a broad brushstroke against the insanity of our own memories, i've been finding it very helpful. that girl i was horribly mean to in high school? it didn't happen the way i think it did.
(probably did. i was a horrid bitch.) but because i don't know her or who she was then, or how she felt or how much she heard, i really don't know anything about that situation, so i should just stop thinking of it. (facebook has been bringing up a lot of things i had forgotten entirely about lately)
it didn't happen the way you think it did.
old boyfriend jason was a hotass mofo who treated me like crap. it didn't happen the way you think it did means, maybe he didn't... maybe i was ready to move on and chose to interpret things like i did. maybe i remember it wrong.. perhaps i jumped to a wrong conclusion because i wanted to...
that friend who betrayed me?
maybe i remember it wrong...

it didn't happen the way you think it did.
in memory, you can change it to what you'd like it to be, its all fantasy anyhow... glowing orbs in the past and so on... what were you wearing? what was the weather like? what'd you do afterwards? things have changed since then.
anyhow. thats what i think is helpful... inserting maybes into my memories, allowing some flexibility to jump on in to things that don't really exist anymore.
so there.

suffering: about it, not having it.

fair warning... indiscriminate dashes ahead-- oh yes.

i'm definitely a suffer in silence person, until i reach the point where i can't handle that anymore and then i'm NOT silent, and things are very messy at that point.

(and, by the by, i'm immensely private and so the real stuff doesn't even make it here. the mostly real, the day to day, but not the most real, most scary .... are you the same way ?)

right now things are not messy mostly and i think any suffering that I am doing is just everyday situational anomaly stuff.

but i've been thinking a lot about suffering and about buddhism and this byron katie stuff that i have to talk to chakra carol about this THURSDAY morning... cripes.

i can't seem to get my mind/heart/walnut around the idea that suffering is all in your mind...byron katie says so and lots of buddhist teaching seems to point that way, if i'm not mistaken. you know, the idea that if you accept what is, you will not struggle against what is, making your suffering dissipate. ya dig?

so. i can't get my body wrapped around that because it is somehow incomplete. its like those people who 'seem' to have charmed lives, when they finally encounter something difficult or even horrible, just can't handle it the things and it blows their world apart because they'd assumed that their charmed lives were somehow their own doing...

i'm trying not to throw my judgements all around here. but still,- looks like a tornado passed through.- I am NOT saying that my life has been so tough. there is a lot of tough that has passed me by and I am fine with that. but i didn't DO anything to make that happen. its just luck of the bloody draw.
if my kid gets leukemia, how is that in my head? How does acceptance make it easier? I don't mean to be glib, but even papercuts ACTUALLY hurt. If I Want to have faith, but don't most of the time, what then? Do i just -sit back and wait ? accepting that I don't have it? If everything is meant to be as it is, what does this say for all those emotions we try to teach our kids about? fear, disappointment, anger, aggression, joy, patience, etc. How does this work? How does acceptance make it easier? What do we do with resentment? when that one passes, it leaves a smear... whats the suffering for? if i think it is NOT all in my head, some fabrication of my overly active ego intellect, then what is suffering's role? do we learn? figure out our directions? get led? just, feel something?

this is timely in the whole priviledge of time and space that enables me to debate in my head with the jackass preacher who somehow thinks that a natural disaster is punishment. Isn't he so lucky that he's never been in one? hm, must be a really good man... i mean, REALLY good. maybe he's jesus? hm. maybe? could be. hm.
i'm not a hellfire and brimstone sort of girl but that man is going DOWN. no question. who the hell is he to judge?
yes, i see the irony in my type. yes, i do.
***EDIT: I went to youtube to see the pat robertson statements for myself. there is a lot of 'interpretation' out there and some of it, mine. i think he is less 'the devil' and more a confused person who believes that haiti's problems stem from a pact they made with the devil. true story.
sorry.


Maybe the rub is that nothing makes these things easier.
all part of the grocery store of life, you pick what you want to eat and what you pass by.
and sometimes you read a trashy mag on your way out...

officially...i got nothing.

nothing. just thought it'd get somebody to read this, comment, and give me something to do with myself. honestly, i'm bored out of my crackin' mind. i'm also depressed about our whole country, the supreme court idiocy and the whole system of checks and balances which i think, in theory, is fantastic, but in reality is playing a crap hand right now. and i know, that because i love my president (didn't we all used to say that?) its easier to believe he should just be given free reign... rein... i mean, can i even imagine if any of his past two predeccesors had been given that?! holy shit. and i did it, i said TWO. probably should have said THREE. or FOUR...
damng.
my friend pam is my dearest closest. i rely on her very heavily in times of stress. but i hate to do that to her so sometimes when things are really crappy, i don't call her. i think she can tell and she is someone who says things like, ' i think maybe you should think less about the future...'
and then cackles .
boy, i love her.
i spent two whole naptime hours yesterday trying to patch my pants. now, fine. i am practicing doing this sort of thing but let me tell you... they make my ass look good. and its too early to make them into shorts and i am just too ridiculously old to wear jeans with torn up knees. but patches? I am JUST old enough to make it look like the beginning of peculiar stylechoice and not wierdo. i think. but anyhow, two hours. two different experiments with patch. one that looks good and one, not so much. but you still should see my ass. looks great. worth the work and the questionable kneepatching... yep. ask around. they'll tell you.
so the world is falling apart, preachers are saying out loud that haitians are cursed by god... and i just want you to know that my ass, my ass looks fucking great.

me and my sugar high

it has happened again. a love affair of the red sort. although i have successfully (lying now) eschewed the juju fish, i have discovered the ninetynine cent bliss of the fruitslice which has no relationship to fruit and probably not even to slice. i want you to go find 'sugar high' from empire records on youtube and watch it. i don't know how to make you do it. I can't MAKE you do it, but you have to. you HAVE To....

I don't know what it is, I'm drinking tons of coffee and back on the smack. I still am off the cigarettes which is rather amazing but last night was my first real bout with desire, so I'm mostly untested in my committment.

I am having headaches more frequently lately and I think thats part of my need for speed. My glasses, which are so cool you could just drool, were given to me by a lovely optician friend nearly four years ago. . . we finally had the money and i got to use them and my kids kicked them askew almost immediately and now i'm getting some rather hellacious visiting headaches. I am going to flatout NOT blame the kids but blame my own damn self for thinking i could wear something so damn cool. do they make frames out of wood? We live in a rather aggressively boyish household and I need something that will stand up to the flying feet of my kungfu masters. Maybe sports goggles?

Yeah, my vanity be damned. I need to see and I need to not have a headache and it would help if my kids would just be quiet without being dead. I've stopped with the parentheses because its just too much work and I'm not sure things don't sound utterly insane without them. maybe more dashes? -- yes?

ark. more ibuprofen. now.

questions about blogging and randomness

so. if i comment on my own blog, to answer comments from other people... does it automatically go to them - or - is there a way I can email them? how ?

and how often do you check your blogs ? i'm getting a bit obsessive and have to counsel myself out of leaving the kids in front of boobytube all day. sort of. i miss me some athena, but can't get to her anymore.

my kids might get stupid from all this tv, but at least they'll be cute.

ha. (that was said with extreme bitterness as day four of the two year old waking for 2-3 hours in the middle of the night proceedes..)

although today we spent the morning at the best kids museum ever, and if you live in new england with at least a couple kids under 10, you should make an effort to get here: children's museum in easton, ma...

we get there every couple months and every time I walk in I say something to myself like: why the hell aren't i coming here every week? its six bucks to get in per person and everything is geared towards smaller kids and they have an entire room just for art and one just for hammering things. (real hammers. wood. nails. hoo . boy. )

i'm feeling very frustrated by the world these days, both within my walls and without. i happen to be on the lefthand side of things politically but am feeling more and more defeated by big money and big corporations and small ideas. i don't blame any party really, i think the ideas about 'pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps' are outmoded and used by people who got help all along the way... and trickle down don't work here. not that i can see.

why aren't any new businesses opening? the only things opening are fastfood places and coffee shops...
guess which wealthy people shop there? thats right. no trickle. maybe when whole foods gets a drive-thru...
oh boy.

privacy

about half the people who read this thing know exactly who i am, where i live, who i live with and probably, what my last haircut looked like... the other half can make good guesses.. so what is with my belief that i am still maintaining some anonymity? its very strange and at first, i thought that i would not put photos of my kids faces up because some wacko would fall in love with them and of course, that is no good. but then, i've done it. i've put their faces on. this wacko loves them. so then, not their names? but, of course, i probably have said their names somewhere back in time... so what the hell? in the wierdo wackjob world of the internet, i am completely exposed and have managed to wildly showcase my wily nutjob children in type.
i suppose i should be more worried about my own exposure as nutjob. but, aren't moms all selfless and shit?... haeh. so -

what now? how to top the badmom job? hm. well. that bears some thought.


so, clearly, it will have to be left to linger in the virtual... evidently, i don't have the time...

i'm certain there is something that needs to be done.

jehosophat

whatever. it took me so long to fill in the blank next to the title prompt that now i'm fresh out of what i was going to say. i have no idea where my brain has been this last week, i cannot even begin to whip up anything witty. i'm dealing with my pre-teen four year old boy a lot, wondering where the hell he got the ideas he's got about how to talk to me. trying to balance between my dad's ex-military stance on childrearing and something more akin to what i may have become as i've grown up a bit. just a little bit.
like, i'm trying not to insist on quiet obedience to orders, as i remember how successful that was during my own childhood and i'm thinking i am not sure i want to enter into that kind of battle with my own spawn. but really, there are times i want to throw the kid through the window and it has something to do with his 'attitude'... and i think i must be carrying my dad's wackonavylifekiller on my back in some unreachable place...
its so so strange how we carry these things on... but the idea of no discipline clearly cracks me up. it is just as wrong as me carrying on like i'm some navy seal when i've seen my first 'eye roll'... c'mon, what am i going to do... wire him? string him up and attach him to the ceiling fan?

seriously though, if he hits me one more time because i say no more television, i'm mailing him to my sister. . .
i have the box. i'm ready. mama militario meets friendly postal workers... for the betterment of society. . .

me and them

so now the hearing story is out there, in its most cut and dry form... a relief as I can't really think of anything more prone to make me experience fear and dread than that particular column in my lifefile.


so here's another column. me and the hubby's family.

they: sososo drama oriented, full of passion for so many things, full of argument and debate and intellectual curiosity and self-motivation, sososo dramaoriented. some of it comes from the irish geneology that they all carry, but i put the weight of most of it on the fact that the Motha of them all is a new yorker.
new yorka.
yep. motha of them all.

and i love her dearly and anything you have heard about new yorkers is true. and its wrong, too.

its just not enough, ever.

they may be the best people of us all.

HOWEVER. that is not what this is all about. its all about the drama. darling hubby(the king of all drama, really.) likes to process things out loud. so, sometimes he will say things that are clearly (to me) deranged and wildly provocative. and I, because I am serious in most things, listen and take him seriously and react with a fervor that is unmatched to that which I am approached with.


like this:


hub: I don't know why I am even applying for this grant*... I'm not going to get it, we are going to move to Bridgton (Maine). It will take care of everything.

me: What? !

hub: We both love Bridgton. (true) and it'll take care of everything and it'll just be for four or five years.

me: Why are you being so negative about the grant?(desparate avoidance) Why would we just move for four or five years?(don't make us move often!!) The money we owe enabled us to live while we got you through school...(its okay, no government plot to keep us down...) why are you being so negative about the grant? (oh my god, we're going to move.) You want to move our family to Maine. when?

then he gets ticked off slightly that I am reacting the way i am. he is just processing after all.
i like to call it.. taking me up to the top of the mountain and throwing me off.

and it happens multiple times a day. I'm up.... wow, look at the views... boy its windy up here....geez, a bald eagle.... wow.

oh god, i'm falling....ow, ouch.owh oh. ow.

in truth, i'm the gibbering idiot, because I react too seriously, every time... why do i let him lead me up the mountain path? gibbering idiot, at your service. every household needs one..evidently.

*grant will pay off 80K of student loan debt. very wonderful potential for our life. might enable us to move... say your prayers...can you imagine? 1. that such things are available? 2. that amount will not even pay off all our debt?! 3. that you just fill in an application and someone gets that money? 4. can you imagine again?

Saga of the hearing loss..pigs ear long...

so, my second anniversary of total deafness is coming up and i'm beginning to consciously cull the stress right out of my life because i am not going to lose it again because of something as stupid as being worried about what time bedtime occurs or if the kid wears clean socks to school. i have quit the cigarettes because it is too goddamned cold to waste my time in a huddle doing something that will slowly kill me...

and so...

when i was around four years old my mom's mother, who died that year... and was a primo elementary school teacher, noticed that i was not responding to normally volume-d stimuli... like i was sitting too close to the tv to hear it and not responding if she was behind me and so on and so forth... so they had my hearing tested and i got my first set of hearing aides... behind the ear big ones that little kids still wear today... my dr. was Dr. Golden, if you can believe it and he was perpetually tanned with blond hair and i thought very clearly that his name was also his embodiment..

they thought at the time that maybe a childhood fever had knocked the hearing down.

When I was around 24 or so, living in Florida, I was on my bike riding to the beach and got hit by a car and broke all the bones in my right ear (so freaking crazy, but true) . We completely lied to my employer and told him that the fan in the stockroom had cracked my head so he would pay for the emergency room visit. but ! because i didn't have insurance they didn't do a catscan and sent me home. (its one of the only downfalls of the Keys, you never know what you're going to get with the 'professionals' you are dealing with... are they high?) the hearing didn't come back and i moved back home with my folks to await state health insurance, which i got... then had a surgery to fix those broken bones which did not work.

seriously, the surgery just didn't work. i was that thirty percent that they talk about... i do have to say it was the worst surgery i have ever had because it really messed with equilibrium and i felt nausea for a long time when i opened my eyes. That part was over pretty quick though. I had to wait five weeks with my ear all packed up to find out it hadn't worked. that was sort of depressing . ah. anyhow, then i moved back out and within six months or so, caught a cold and was compleetely deafened. (for the first time) i was so young. my god. i was so young and i just moved back home again with pammylove driving me up the coast and got a job loading boxes in a winery and gradually my hearing just came back. in that one good ear...

anyhow, at this point i had insurance and i got all checked out. turns out that i have malformed cochlea - from birth. no fever. no nothing. mondini malformations.

and everytime i get beaned on the head i risk losing it all again. still nothing in my right ear. THEN.

two years ago, feb 4, day after the superbowl. i woke up to no sound. checked my hearing aide battery downstairs but already knew. nothing. no sound. had a two month old baby in bed with me and my husband was in a 100 hr a week residency . he took the day off.

we got to an audiologist and an ear doc within a few hours. benefit of medical connections. they shot steroids through my eardrum into the canal and told me to sit tight. what i learned later was that they had very little hope.

shure thing.

six weeks later, it gradually began to come back. heard my kid cry again. was able to sleep without keeping my hand on his chest in case he cried.

could hear my son's stories about what he spent the day doing.

totally blurry picture of my family below... favorite horse in wild action...no sound neccessary to enjoy...

maybe another time i'll write about how that all felt. but for now, its history.

good mom, before the handprint on the sofa...

I am sorry, this post does not contain words because i am feeling much too grumpy to get any out. you are forewarned. above is my attempt at keeping winter outside and not in my soul. down there are my kids, painting... and thats all. i finally got my camera attached to the computer and so there. so. there.

this is not all

you know, i have to say it. i'm scared of Haiti. I find it terrifying to look at pictures or hear the news. Its the current desolation, the scary idea that an earthquake can just wipe everything out, take you out, kill your kids , leave your body in a pile in front of the morgues, and remove your home from existence. I'm scared that my life is so complacent, that I waste my time and everyone else's by blogging and kvetching and that none of it really matters . I felt the same way about Katrina and Louisiana and Mississippi and I am sure I will feel the same for the foreseeable future. I don't feel sure that my twenty dollars is going to help anyone. I give it anyhow, but I don't have faith that all the prayers I send will make anyone feel any better or give them some kind of sustenance for finding their baby dead or for the horrors of not getting any answers at all, ever.

Getting Lit

Yeah, great title. and no, i haven't been lit for ages and ages. except in the following legal ways,
read a couple of wonderful books .
Help by so and so... the characters really stick with you. you care for them and there is no very great trauma to have to get through except womanly ones... , so you will cry but you don't have to rip your own heart out.
Garner by another so and so which is really spectacular. really . very new england wintery but the writing is just wonderful. i keep thinking dappled sunlight and wispy fog amongst trees and oh brother, there's even a dead body, and the mystery of what happened but my goodness, the writing...
wish I could give you more ..
i'm going to hang more christmas lights to try and cheer myself out of believing winter will never end.
the house is already glowing.

miscommunication

woke up this morning with the headache to end the world. had the babysitter coming and was up early with the baby three hours early, early on the early train, in the early morning sun, in the EARLY. with the headache and the soon-up four year old we were all just peachy. and then big C begins his weekly panic/whine about how he hates said babysitter and 'she is NOT coming'... over and over and over again. I want to honor my kid, I do. But I cannot handle this . So, she arrives, I am still cringing in corners from the light, but she arrives and all hell comes roiling in with her, the C. starts yelling how he doesn't like her, being a monumental brat and full of bull over and over. I mean, a g'damned primadonna and I grabbed what I could and beat it out the door, limping and moaning along like a crazybaglady. again with baglady crazy motif? yes.
By the time I got back, four hours later, the kids were all fine and happy but C had pooped in his pants. POOOOOOP in his pants!? It has been several years since that has happened. Forget this. I sacked the babysitter in a very friendly way and am moving on. I don't know what it is, why the kid is so uncomfortable but it is over. but here I am . back to 24/7/365. no four hours off a week for me.
AND i still have the fucking headache.

narnian by nature

okay, i admit it, again, i am a tremendous nerd. not in a cool way, like i know everything about an arcane subject or about how to get free cable or how to boost your ram. boosting your ram sounds like something masturbatory, frankly. but! in this following post, i need to share my most eternal love.
EDIT: i apologize for always talking about what a dork i am. i am just normal.
and somewhat repetitive.

when i was a girl, i read all of the chronicles of narnia books. when I say that I read them, I mean to say, that I have read each and every of the books at least a dozen times apiece. (and i really think by now its over 20 but i'm hiding the dorky truth) When J. and I were courting and driving long distances together, I read all of the books aloud to him. And yes, even when reading aloud, I cry. I cry because it is such a beautiful vision of the world. all of it. children vanquishing badguys through wild lion love and sacrifice of self for another is the most powerful magic there is. and children love their mothers and horses, too. and bears and beavers and fauns. Good wins! always and with hard work and perserverance, GOOD WINS... In my next life, I will be a tree spirit. Last year for Christmas Eve, my whole little family was recovering from some serious vomit problem, and while everything planned had to be cancelled, we all of us piled into the sofa bed and turned on the television. Lion sighting. I sobbed throughout the entire movie and found myself out of body in trying to explain the sacrifice to my then three year old boy. not easy, but very powerful for me as I began to understand it from an adult perspective for the first time.
I'm not going to get into the sacrifice of Christ here. EDIT; it is much more about a belief that i had when I was 12 before i hit the teenage years of cynicism, sarcasm and denial... and then there were the twenties...and thirties...
And so, the whole point of the post? I LOVE to remember the girl before it all, LOVE THAT. . . and The boy is four now, we've read the Lion Witch Wardrobe book as a bedtime book, without pictures, if you can believe that... and it was on tv last night. so we watched it again and I sobbed again and I think C actually got it, why Aslan was so magical for choosing to 'get pain' as he put it, in order to save someone (Edmund) who needed saving. He's a 'superhero lion'.
Crazy.
I cry an awful lot these days. Beauty is just overwhelming.

Martha

SO, Friday night we spent at a house relatively nearby but hundreds of years away and I am flummoxed by how plastickyandoverloadedandtrite my childrearing has become, not to mention my life. my god, don't mention my life. (i mistakenly typed lie instead of life and am choosing not to leave it there but my god!)


The mother of the family of five, four boys and an almost 4 year old girl, all of whom were born at home, is named Martha. She is Brazilian and German and smackdab beautiful . She is 45 and showed me what she remembered of her capoeira dancing in the kitchen and then proceeded to do a full split. yes, she did. She is going through menopause and told me she'd been hiding in the basement all week crying uncontrolably but had to come up for the school lessons. Yes, th
+
+

.
ats right. She has homeschooled all those kids. The oldest is 16 and is in Brazil currently living with friends. And by friends, I mean, community brothers and sisters. And by 'community' I mean the sort of community that people in the community are slightly scared of. yes, i did say that.


I think the people in the community who are afraid of the community are misguided, but it is definitely an alternative lifestyle. She currently shares her house with another family, and all their food is shared with all of the community houses in the surrounding states. seriously. AND, for all those kids, ALL those kids, there was one, ONE, box of toys, almost all of which Martha had made herself, WITH the kids. YES. They had balls and instruments and puzzles and drawing materials and so on. did i mention its four boys and the OLDEST is 16? There were no weapons in the toybin...and they don't actually beat the crap out of Martha or out of each other.


I am not making this up.


I came home today and literally unplugged the television. and I'm looking at our hundreds and hundreds of figures and organizing bins which are never organized and I'm embarassed. I'm embarassed that my four year old did not recognize the question, 'who's your favorite hero?' because it did not include the word 'super'...

and so I have some work to do.

those kids lead a lifestyle which few would even believe exists anymore. They spent all day in the frigid weather on saturday camping outside, making a fire without firestarter and skating on a local frozen pond and trying to ice fish. all day, the whole family, planned by said Martha.

and I like her, a lot. she does not judge my life and also made me the best lasagna of my life when baby E was born. I could still drool over it, now.
and so I have some re-assessing to do. and maybe a run to the salvation army with a BIG donation bag of toys. you want some?

stalker-y

I am a bit concerned about my wild and crazy needs here in the blogging world. I am bereft because I don't get a comment instantaneously with a posting. that is nutso. but true. There must be something big going on in my insides to be so content to while away my hours in type and in virtuality. Today I had my boys painting and I was THRILLED. boys ... painting, and I felt like an absolute BANG-UP of a mother... only some of it ended up on the sofa -great smudgy green handprint- and I realized that a GOOD mother would have foreseen that and covered the whole house in plastic. or some biodegradeable burlap or some shit. . .
once i find my burlap-wrapped camera, i'll show you something of it all.. .
welcome to mediocre motherhood. I have decided to just make my attempt to get by.
really. what is important to me is completely befuddling me these days. I actually don't know the answers to most of my most primal questions. I don't freaking know. My purpose is here and now and how I am getting sore muscles from typing. thats it. The kids are fine, happy to watch the night at the museum movie because it is so thrilling. though, honestly, i think the two year old just likes all the animal sightings. arghk.
so I am a bad mother again because they are watching tv instead of learing about organic broccoli. And I am a good mother because i do screen what they watch and they are well fed and they are loved. and what else is there? so the ying and the yang and the just get us all by.... wonder if god takes prayers online? this was mine for today. this afternoon.

endearments

there's a love.
sweetheart.
dear.
lovey.
all the old ladies of the world and the peaceniks and the others i've not yet pigeonholed...
i love you too.
i love being loved.
i do.
I am married. I like being married most of the time but I love my husband all of the time, even when I want to kill him. and I do, sometimes... but I love him. and marriage, for me, was actually a sacred moment of time and space where I stood in front of God and my whole world of community and pledged myself to him, and took his pledge to me.
There has been blood shed since then, hearts broken and repaired, terrible wounds inflicted and moments that are happily passed. . .and children, there are children.
there's a love, my sweetheart, angel dear, lovey.
we call him J.

flattered and nervous

hey. get this... Chakra Carol wants to talk to me, ME. like, in an investigative, discussion sort of way, about the whole Byron Katie shebang of selfhelp and actualization... me.
Okay, so the whole 'byron Katie shebang' is one for which I am full of arguements and man, the power of my intellect to avoid the work of self-truth and all that is ... pretty damn impressive... so.
go look her up if you'd like.
chakra carol wants to talk to ME. (and my friend D, with whom she has a much longer, more personal relationship) but damn, I am flattered and completely nervous like some wierd big test is coming down the path and I know I should just stick with flattered but what the hell, I am not any zen master mojo swinger... as if you didn't know that...
and IF you didn't know that,
I had pink glasses from the time i was four until i was like 14. and they were not cool. and then, my favorite pants were kelly green cords, with grey zips as sneakers. and i think there was a kangaroo involved. Right, and I had a bowlcut of blond pinstraight hair. When I lost the glasses at 14, I also got a poodleperm and went to New Kids on the Block... I have always been a slight worrier, but now am amping up greatly, to those things which I have absolutely no control over. Anyone else worried about how badly Barack is being treated by the press and the minions ? hm. wonder if his feelings have been hurt. Wonder if he's going to age too quickly. . . also, this week, for the first time, I turned down a meal out because there was snow on the ground and falling... WHAT THE HELL KIND OF NEW ENGLANDER DOES THAT?! so
no zen master mojo swinger, here- just the awkward dork master of all time(although my one saving grace is that i never became an addict of dungeons and dragons) and there it is.

love love love love crazy love

So I have this heart chakra walnut problem, but I am working on it...( a year later, into the game... ) trying to work on it... at least talking about it here. (but I am doing more than that.) I am not a particularly trusting person when it comes to intimacy of the love sort. And I do not mean physically, I'm talking about the much riskier notion of exposure, glimmering passions, laughing and being part of the laughtrack for someone else... its a tough sell for me to think of friends as people who can do for 'me'... I love people, like them at the least and yet, don't think there are so many out there who I would like to spend time with, that I would rely on in a pinch..(there are some, and i LOVE them, for real, for sure). I feel like its taken me at least two years to grow into admitting that I love my kids, not just 'am neccessary to..' my kids... you see the walnut? complex brainy thing with a very tough shell that actually requires a 'tool' to expose? yeah, thats me. I am what I am, popeye style.
I think I'm one of the good guys in the world, but mostly get by on what people assume I am , as I don't really show that much.
I do a lot of scary waiting... waiting to lose my hearing again, waiting to have a crohn's meltdown, waiting for this marriage thing to explode... and I can't bear to add more things (more love) to wait for or fear for... all these possibilities weigh me down sometimes.
My goal for the year is to cut down on my stress, let things go that I cannot change and so on. Do you know anyone who does NOT have that goal? At least I am in a familiar crowd there.
I think. I can't get Paul Simon out of my head. Maybe I love him. maybe. :)

new day, new year, ten years ago...

happy new year. 10 years ago, this week, i was taken to the hospital with a 'mass' the size of a grapefruit somewhere in the cavern of my abdomen.
wahoo....
it was just crohn's disease .
hallelujah. sing hallelujah.
as ten years have passed and I haven't been in the hospital since except to birth babies, we can all sing hallelujah. waking up after a surgery like that and being told it was just crohn's was absolutely wonderful.
reallly.
so happy new decade to us all, we've had a good run and ended up where we are because of choices that we've made and the luck that we've had. not so bad.
some of us have gotten married, had babies, lost babies, gotten divorced, gotten married again... or at least allowed ourselves to fall back in love. good for us, we've made it, survived the glory trip that is Life.
ah.