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Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Single mama goes hippy. Not hipster, hippy.

In this, my first summer of single parenting, I've got a long list of things to do. Today it is raining, so all bets are off and I'm hoping everyone sleeps real late, and gets ready to color and do play dough. Think my eleven elven will do this? Heh.

While our list has a lot of kid-driven choices, there are also some of mine. few, but some. And I'm always so happy when we accomplish our things, I'm feeling proud for the experiences and happiness that I'm gifting my kids.

There is this small part of me, though, that is curious about how much I am gifting to others all the time, and wonders about gifting myself. It is true that I often have fun on these outings, almost always really, and watching them have fun is a gift in and of itself. But since I spent so much of my failed marriage arranging and easing and enabling, I am finding myself in a large query about it all.
and my job as housewife-notwife and stay at home mom is basically about constantly gifting others, in its very essence.

It wasn't the way to go in the marriage, for me, and what if there is something more that I am overlooking in the new relationship I've got with my kids? What if my gifting them these times is somehow missing some component that has to do with my own gifts? Does this make sense?

Last night was a new moon, the Fourth of July, and a first night home all-together, all-alone in a few days. Sleepover party, sleepover with dad, sleepover for fireworks... Now, just us. I made a fire for us, and we wrote our wishes on paper and sent them to the sky. My wish for more openness and magic and a more fluid relationship to the time that I need for all this processing was made more palpable by the focus I put on the process. I found it very powerful. The kids were drawn in, away from the television, towards the fire, the yard, the play, the focus. I've got to figure out how to draw them into my own inner life, not 'into' maybe, but shared, seeing what is increasingly important to me, the intangibles, the hopes, the fireflies against the darkness...

the lense is blurred, but there has to be a sparkle, there has to be.

1 comments:

MotherOfGooses said...

We've had a fire ban on in these parts for more than a week, and I was so happy to see rain this morning, as the chance of campfire on the horizon makes me very happy indeed. I feel like it will fix so much.