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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

what i miss, and why it doesn't matter. in hope.

i'm starting this post christmas eve, as we prepare the big meal to be eaten before we hopefully saunter over to Meeting for the Christmas Eve Service... this year my parents aren't coming to Meeting, as they found themselves missing their own church too much last year... so we go it with the in-laws who have no church and we will be fine, though i will miss giggling with my sister and tearing up when we sing 'o come let us adore him'... which is adorable in its own way, as we are 38 and 41 and can't stop giggling in public, with each other, and its been that way forever and ever.
and i miss it too, the masses of people in darkness and candlelight singing out to the skies our adoration and wonder at the birth of a KING in a humble stable.  ahg. beauty.
and our Meeting is so wonderful but so small, the congregation's tiny voices mass together, still managing to sound tiny, though they are a mass straining towards the skylight, for sure. the children will surge to the middle for their christmas story, their 'all things bright and beautiful'... and their families will look on ... we will look on.
there will be ancient lightbulbs on high, tall windows of wavy glass,  whitewashed walls without adornment, and we will sit together in community on Christmas Eve, waiting, waiting. 


what it looked like, two years ago.
and
now it is the 26th...
and we are so lucky, who get to wait and wait and are given the Grace of time to figure it out, hard as it may seem, long as the hours of wrapping and recriminations may be.  we are so lucky to have repreives from griefs, mistrusts and need.  we get to watch our kids struggle against exhaustion and excitement, overstimulation and more overstimulation, diets based on sugars alone... we are so lucky.
we struggle all that ourselves, all our dreams and wishes for our kids being almost inextricable with our dreams and wishes for ourselves, our own struggles and weaknesses coming to the fore... if we are able to see them. these kids are separate and not separate, all at once. and we are so lucky in this struggle, in this god-given time that we have. we are so lucky.

i'm off in my luck, to read a gigantic stack of books while the kids roll in their toy-wrapper-refuse piles, to nurse, to occasionally flinch at the sounds from the 'play area', which used to be my house...
we are so lucky. 

happy new year.  bless us all...

Friday, December 21, 2012

How'd you sleep? the cruelest question.

Most mornings, I can't remember what the story of the night has been.  How often did we wake? did we nurse for a long time? how was the return to sleep? did i lie awake in tears of utterly empty exhaustion? the long dark timmy-fell-in-the-well of an episode with no Lassie?
aoye.

fine, fine, i slept fine.
you?

Monday, December 17, 2012

St. Francis, with his dogs and all...

Seems so easy to get stuck in a place of righteous anger and blame when we are scared so deeply. laws, guns, illness, parenting...blame someone, something, to make it all more manageable. we are So scared and so fundamentally shaken.
So in my every-minute prayers for the families jolted into hell I am going to add this, that I might be a force fighting towards the light and in my very small existence, a proof of the Light itself.


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

Sunday, December 16, 2012

theres just nothing

if adults can't understand, can't wrap their brains around it in any way, how can we make it a topic of conversation with our kids?
sharing my own grief and my own confusion is the only way i can think of, but i want them to have an answer, a sense of safety that lingers on and on and on. . . this is their childhood, for Christ's sake.

maybe in the profanity, lies the answer.  the light.  go towards the Light. go.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Opposites suck. Title eliminated because the world is too violent ..


what is the opposite of cold? hmm? well, if its the cold that hurts your face and makes you cry tears that freeze, then the opposite might be 'scorched'...
the opposite of black? well, do you mean the color of the darkest night? because that 'opposite' might be 'relief for the mother of a newborn' or... 'dazedly dawn'... or 'sherbert in the trees'... but white? i don't think so really. not even on the spectrum of light because frankly, its a circle. spectrum, linear, whats the opposite of linear? fog-ular? planar? blaroahgogular.
really.
peace? war? my ass.  tentative peace? no such game with tentative war? no such game.
right? wrong?  again, no dice. we're all too old for this frippery. you know it.  why are we getting our kids all fucked up at such an early age? shoot.
i want my kids to stretch and leap out.  with words, colors, ideas... not a rigidity that is easier than all the rest.  i want me to do that too.
we'll see. 

my middle one turns five tomorrow, goes off to his grandparents for a sleepover tonight and comes back a whole new being. 
boy, it is exciting.  I'm glad i'm not missing this because i'm hung up on up and down, or he and she.  hoowee, how do the nurseryschool teachers handle transgender identification?  HOLY LORD.  how do they handle that one?  heh. may they all get an extra shot of espresso in their cup when that one comes up.

AND, that cute little first trip to the dentist set us back a cool six hundred dollars.  OH YEAH, did i mention that my kids may never see a dentist again, ever.  way to go, doc... their rotten and dysfunctional mouths are forever in your debt, from here on in. 

i need a booklist, buds.  I'm thinking of making a sojourn to the library but I need there to be a pile of worthies sitting there with my name on them, to make this trip worthwhile.   tell me. tell me.  nonfiction, fiction, fine.  i'm not superhigh with needing to read a book that rips my heart out, but I do like the well-written of all genres. i do.

one last time, opposites are killing your babies... let them run free, mamas... let them run free. 

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Yesterday, bulletry

the baby hit the month mark yesterday.  it is amazing how sentimentally i feel about everything now that we are filled with 'lasts' and 'firsts' in a more tangible, easily remembered fashion. . . its easy to be mindful of how fast they grow when they grow so fast RIGHT IN DAMN FRONT OF YOU!
shoot.


*tonight we go to the second parent teacher night of the fortnight and this one will be less smooth but I may be imagining... we'll see.  i'm planning on having a hamburger and fries beforehand so i'll let you know how both go down. 

---
well, it was smooth as silk, and much more so than the tepid hamburger and the waitlisted-under-the- warmer french fries, but i'll take it.  my kids are deleriously good with school and the curiousity factor and i love that and i'll take it every day . every day. 
*i had to go out into the darkness to find this spark of goodness, which always sets me off in a funk of 'i think i should live in a cave, i need to go to bed because it is dark and/or i need to fight off the wildbeasts at the edge of my fire.'
right? who's with me?!

yeah, i know. alone by the fire, i am...
*the baby has hit her first real fussy time and i'm sort of wonky with it.
*carol came here, i got my therapy, did not lose my serenity but also in the wonky, didn't find my answers ...
*the kids are going to the dentist today for their first visit, 7 and almost-5.  hubsJ is here to take them as i've got the wonk-maker and claim defeat already. can't wait to hear how much they like the whirrrr .  oye.

thats all i've got .  and score one for keeping-up-with-the-jones' on dentistry and posting per week. 

Friday, December 7, 2012

In which I am reminded

this is the post of the unslept unkept mother. the one whose husband has the carseat base in his car dis-enabling the run to the bank and the almost five year olds special food/lunch treat.  this is the mother who spent time in a Target and a Toys R US yesterday, who came out of that experience like a bat on fire. yes, i did type that... bat on fire.  imagine those swoops and loops all alit with excruciating burn. BURN.
please please, remind me, next year, how overstimulating and heartaching and painful i actually find the shopping madness that befalls me ... the certainty i feel in disappointment... yes, that is a certainty that drives me completely insane.  and i look at all the other shoppers and what they have in their carts and how much i wonder about their money life, their consumption, their wildly Enormous boxes.  Is this their only shop of the season? is it? are they done now?  Are their kids more happy then mine? If i get them an enormous box, will they be safe and happy for the rest of their lives?  I'm not even being smarmy or sarcastic here... I want these things for them, and I want the box it comes in, no matter how much money or space it takes.

I've done more this year online, because of the baby and things like the carseat- which, if it had been filmed, would have sent all sorts of doctors running to my door, i am a loose cannon of disastrous weep. -  i barely kept it together for the almost-five sentient being who lives here, explaining terms like frustrated to his vocab-loving self.   learning learning, always learning... these spongy chillins.

i like the mom and pop experiences of shopping much better but i'm clearly having a difficult time getting out of the house.  there is a birthday here before the big fat redman makes his way to emasculate the tiny boy Savior.  and i am upset over so many things and today is just a lot of fucking weep to handle.  so i am working on it, and reminded of my need to seek out quietude and calm and maybe expect less and get my mind out for a cold and long walk, even if my body and mothering self cannot.

chakra carol wants to come to my house. do you think she saw the video? maybe the weep went viral.
maybe she heard that we're going to chuck e cheese next weekend and she needs to save me from myself.  maybe she doesn't really work that way, but I think I'll take her up on her visit, so I can save myself from me.  the work is always mine, and i'm just fucking tired of it today.  

wmx

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Oh CANADA!!

to the beach!!! must go.
 
 
unwittingly i have collected some Canadians in my 'stuff of legends' following.  and i have followed them, as well... enough to recognize that I don't know all that I'm talking about, really.  I don't know what a toque is, for goodness sake.  I get that it goes on your head, but really? toque? fill me in.
One of the things I have done during this pre-winter time of expectancy and delivered goodness and respite and refusal to get up for anything is,  read.  I have read most of an entire series of mysteries of Louise Penny, set in Quebec.  and as I understand it, Quebec is iffily Canadian, and eerily, tenuously connected to earth as a whole- in its beauty, its darkness, its winterly chill.  is it so, my canadians?
The series is fantastic, written by a person with skill and an eye for beauty, literature, poetry and the complexity of people.  and the endings are not pat, not easy and not formulaic.  what connects them is the Inspector, and a continual revisiting of a small town nestled in idealia amongst the regular mayhem of dirty life, a brigadoon of sorts, although it does not do the disappearing act.   go look up the series if you don't know it already, the first one is called... Still Life... you should read them in order to get the nibbles on the characters you will want to know, i wish i did... really.... although my rooms are crowded with the people i wish i knew, i wish i could see. . .

so that is where i am at, my mom gave me a copy of the latest and last of the series so far and i am nibbling so as not to have it end... like the last good cookie, dipping into the tea, morsel becoming the biggest word of the day.  morsel, please, morsel.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Oh, good goddamned. . .

so, there is this here blog that I don't really write in anymore, right here.  and i am constantly wondering why the blogworld has suddenly all slowed down and most of who i read when i began are not writing anymore, and boy, do i judge? yes, yes i do, in  that sort of middling way of not much but a little judging, you see? just a smidge.
and then i look around and see how much i don't do it anymore me'self and while there is a not crying baby in the other room and my boys are wound up and doing crack with their cousins, i am here to tell you that i am committing to a month of twice weekly postings, just sos i can see if i can still do it... and i am trying to give myself something i can achieve with the two a week strategem, because my heart doesn't feel that into it, but my brain certainly remembers liking the sensations of expression, connectivity and so on and so forth. plus, there is a reason to the season wherein i can take pictures and make someone look at them, you dig?  so, thats my one post for DUODICIEMBRE.  I don't think my catchy name is really going to catch on but maybe if i give everyone a free gelato with each post they read, (in spirit), we can all feel mildly italian together... si?
Andiamo!!