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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Fluidity in Mothering (single style)

Some of this is blather, and I know it. So listen up.
There is a lot of learning about mothering going on here, as I do it by myself with these kids, and it's all on my curve, and at my pace.  It helps really, when I think of the kids themselves, in their individuality, that much hasn't changed in their understanding of their parents, whether in shared home, or not. I'm still and forever THE MOM (as J is their Dad, blaghblah) and what I have to give them is the very best that I can.  And the very best that I can is me in my fullest iteration.

This may sound like hooey, and I get it. But do you get me in this?


IN the space I have now, I have this immediate sense, when I do something I don't like with them, this sense of 'wrongness' in my own action, that I can ACT upon, that I can do something about.
And I do.  Which is different than before, when I was just awash in disappointment in all the adults of the world, and I would just drop back, and acquiesce, and feel bad.  Now THere is a real fluidity to my parenting that could only happen in my case, when there wasn't this large elephant of an unhappy marriage in the way, a constant resistance and 'try try try' and oh, that poor battle-wearied woman...
So the fluidity, the engagement in relationship is making a whole new understanding of mother-child, and it's pretty damn amazing.
Most of the time.

This isn't really to say that J was the reason I was unsatisfied in my skills as a mother.  He was just full of his own struggles and it took over my inner world, to the detriment of all, and I allowed it to happen. Me.
It's just that now I have space and consciousness and awareness in a new way, because I have shed some of that strain and disappointment.  I have discovered the lion's share of my own pride. (Again, so pun-ny and unintentional, you see it?)

Pride is a cocksucker, really, in a bad way, and makes people take actions against the better instincts they may have.  In my case, I think a healthy dose might balance out all the shame I carried during my marriage, so I am reveling in it for the moment. I have faith that I'll keep it from taking over and being a primary force as I move around in this world.

Friday, September 23, 2016

The ball rolling. . .

Lots of thinking about home lately. . . Working on feeling good about my financial life, recognizing yet another shift and change in my expectations involving money.
When I set out to write about home, just now!,  I wasn't thinking about money at all. At all. The damn fingers have a mind of their own I suppose.
Candles, small corners of curation,  snack platters, loud declarations that love still lives here, and always has, pestilence and boils aside, amongst the pandemonium of kid life, and unformed mom-life.
And a shift in focus, and it's fall, and I can feel myself roiling in the need to prepare for the winter, the inside time, the hours of looking at the same spaces... The way the light falls when the leaves are leaving. The 'facts' of having hours per week when all three kids are in some kind of school and I am still in the house.  Not still, but still.  (See what I did there?  A lot of possibility inside of it all. And, again, depth in small sentences.) and hope. And curiosity. And fear, Trepidation, and longing.
Read it slow. Read between the lines. Hear what there is.

I am trying to catapult my ideas into action, and have painted this on the side of the windmill. I'll show you later. 
I have been in love with Instagram, and have heard from Corinne( @crnnoel ) something that caught me up, and reminded me, in parallel with some of my complicated feelings about the photos I am seeing of my own old house. I can see the old place getting filled up on instagram and in a blog, and each time I see it, the breath catches in my throat.  that place. The love lost, the love that may have been still real in that  place, the mess the clutter the unbelievable spontaneity which precludes curation in a family vignette. Here, and there,  I have so many plastic toys, and a dress up box which hardly closes, and underneath the sofa lives an entire family of misfits, toys, socks, trash, yesterday I found a half eaten roll... And the bitemarks were not human. I don't even remember the last time we had rolls.  I mean, seriously, who has rolls in summertime? Uh, not me.

And so it is real, and messy and my youngest is in a purple tutu that doesn't match her classmates, and her sneakers, which rest next to me, smell of the boys, and wet dogs and there ain't nothing which will make her more a princess ... Like mother, like daughter, the mess is the truth of it, but it's a lot and it's exhausting. And in the challenge, is the joy.
Which is something to remember as I embark on this loneliest and most challenging of times.  In the challenge is the joy.

BUT boy, sometimes challenge is FUCKING messy. And smelly, and full of snot and stumbles. And sometimes I hide out in my house for entire days, and don't call anyone and don't engage in any 'self-care' because I am basically punishing myself some more. which is terrible, and true.
And there is little on Instagram which catches the light of the mess, the unpretty. When the light is just right is not all the time, and sometimes my piles topple and fall, and the sparkle doesn't
Look good, but green and LED'd and the dog chewed off the plug.


There is a lot.  I haven't even been writing in my journal these past weeks, I can't.  I spend my time alone shifting furniture, adding paint to already done paintings, and staring into space while I try to read books.  And yet I can't seem to write anything down.  I am far too internal, and I am struggling to get it out of my brain. And here, what should be two or three posts, I spill and spit and learn to identify myself as a dance mom on top of everything else.  I am writing this while the purplest one in the family dances her way to more stank.  Although, frankly, I think it's more an activity right now, than a lifetime commitment.  I certainly won't make this my reality show.
But then again, it seems the world is topsy turvy, and you get what you get and you don't get upset...
right?

Friday, September 2, 2016

Touching base. Beauty, some.



I am really starting to like my kitchen, getting rid of what doesn't bring me joy, realizing that the sense of chaos that it holds is an impeccable sort of beauty.
I had to cut another photo, because I didn't want you to see my anti-depressant medicinal collection, but then I realized that the bowls are doing as much work as anything else, and nearly as much as I am doing, just being what they are, feeling the wealth of their purpose, and the sly beauty of a curve doing what it was meant to do.