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Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Social Experiment

I'm up at two this morning, evening, and was sitting on the porch with a cigarette thinking how i'd probably get a headache when i realized that was just a wrong way to approach the day.

so tomorrow morning, this morning, when i wake again, with all the kids, i'm going to say aloud, 'today is going to be a really good day.' and mean it, and share it with the kids, this hope, this certainty that the day will hold something special, something life-affirming... as all days actually do.

i'll let you know how it goes...


Wednesday, May 25, 2016

I met a man.

and what I am here to tell you, is that I am not ready to meet a man.  I was hardly able to make eye contact, was flooded with relief when I saw him in the room, and otherwise spent a lot of time avoiding being in his presence.

This is the era I find myself in.

so, just so you know.  I am not ready for this era, but am trying to do what some may call 'flow' and I call freaking out at multiple levels.

It is part of all that I am trying to accept these days. The whammy of j's new love, and utter quit of me. The creation of an intimacy-less relationship?

I don't know, man.

Evidently, I am much slower to move than I had thought.

Call me slug.

Friday, May 20, 2016

Afraid.

Today I head off to a hippy-dippy Quaker retreat with the boys, for the weekend.  The theme has to do with God's sense of humor.  I have a quote on my wall by the computer which says"humor is an affirmation of dignity",  and its a fortune cookie fortune.  And I think I'm a pretty funny girl, really, though these days have been pretty trying, and I only laugh with my kids.

It will be a place with calm, placid, loving adults and thirty or so rambunctious 8-10 year olds. And I am afraid.

I am afraid to be in a place of support and goodness for I fear I will be seen in my hot mess. And, as my friend Pam tried to counsel me, the worst case scenario is that someone would hold my hand and rub my back as I broke into a million pieces.

Vulnerability is risk and exposure. And when it is purposeful, it is brave. When it takes you over, frightening.

So I'm scared of the peace, contentment and guidance of Quaker compassion.

This retreat is for kids, not for me.
This makes me both a turd, and a woman who has a lot on her plate. And I'm grappling.

Fingers crossed that I am able to access Light during my time of shadow.

Fingers crossed.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Acceptance: divorce style.

There is a lot that I am being asked to accept these days.  And it is tough, especially when the heart rails against it all.

But I am working on it, because, as I am being told again and again, it is what it is...

what a flavorless sentence.

I am working on a post I'll put in the garden.  I think the boys may revolt.

The garden may also revolt if I don't tidy her up.

Womanhood and Motherhood have been strong with me lately, a real appreciation of how distinct they are, how freaking beautiful... I'm using gray, which is not a color I hold dear...

but it is a blending of the black and white world I find myself in...

a space wherein one can search out flavor, while waiting for dissolve... cracked and knotted but still holding...


Monday, May 16, 2016

What's your name?

Well. that's easy, right? Except when the first page of your mediation paperwork asks you, and you have to spend time thinking about whether you want to keep the name of your former husband, or revert back to a name that is full of love and trust and strength... but having a different name from the children?!

Is this a connection that I can let go of?
And if He is letting it go, can I hold on to it?  Will the kids even notice? Would I really tell people that I have changed my name? Or, for the schools, would I even notify them? Should I talk to the kids about this? Would this wound them, my asking? The thought that Mom might not have the same name? Would it make them feel more connected to their Dad than to me? (i know, i know, i know that is not so, but what am I staking my claim to, them? the name? what?)
Also, I happen to have the same name as my mother-in-law and now that, too, would be another severed connection.

What the fuck do I do, to answer the simplest of questions?




Photo Credit: ----screenname---- via Compfight cc

Sunday, May 15, 2016

I admire...

I admire all little girls.  The shy, the heavy, the thin, the loud, the quiet.  But I confess to the largest admiration of all, the strong.  Long, lanky, stocky, sticky... the muscles within and the confidence of body to know that it can do whatever one asks of it.

The surety of the body of these little ones, I am in love.

I chaperoned a school dance for fifth and sixth grade kids this weekend, and I found myself staring at these fawns in the woods of their pre-teen years... They were so graceful, and so unsure, covered with gobs of blue eyeshadow, and shoes that hurt, and sometimes, winter boots and sweat.   It was a menagerie of girlhood, all the stages of awkwardness and grace that exist, were in the woods that night.

The boys are wild boar, rushing about with smiles and glee and little notice of all that goes and grows on around them.

It was just awesome.

And while you would think it would provoke some memory or time of my own, it was sheer delight to watch a new herd of ladies make their way into the world.

this dance had few cryings in the corner, and no slow dances, so the challenge of that growth is still in the future.

There is so much to love and cherish.

also: Click on the also to see photographer Kate Parker talk about 'strong is the new pretty'...

Friday, May 13, 2016

Divorce Mediation

Prayers for me as I go into my first mediation meeting with J.  Let my strength and clarity of purpose shine forth, without rancor.


Let my belief in myself and what I want for my children be the greatest Light in the room.  Help me to turn from 'making things easy' to 'making things right'. 


Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Dead Chickens

My chickens were all killed on Friday night, sometime.  I was unable to close the door on their coop because J had an emergency and needed me to process it with,  and to watch the kids while he processed it.

Dead chickens.

I would do it again, if the kids needed me there, and even if J did. Supporting him is something I have done for most of my life, it feels.They needed an adult there to be consistent and safe. I slept on the couch.


But my chickens died for it, and in that, I see something.  Doesn't everyone?


Monday, May 9, 2016

Divorce, Mother's Day style.

I made my first big dinner as the head of my household. It was a hit with the kids and the adults ate it too. Rocked the first fried chicken dinner, as these things go. My in-laws were there, and will be there with me forever, whether the law says so or no. I love them to bits and pieces, and in their eyes and hearts, I will never be replaced, nor will they, for me.

It is hard to match that with how I feel about J. and his visions for his own future, which do not include me, except as the caretaker of the children.

Steel has no place in me. It is not the same for other people. J.'s hardness can be unbearable. But it is good to recognize that my porousness, if that be such a word, is also soft, and full of love and possibility.

These are tough days, and I am swamped by the reverberations of everything that I am hearing and doing and feeling.  I am just trying to find my clarity, but this is pretty swampy land, and I have no guide posts to feel my way along.

As my mother-in-law says to me often, 'it is what it is.' and while that is not particularly comforting, which is not in her demeanor, it is true.

But I get to choose what is next, and 'what will be'.  thats a whole different ballgame.

*and the day ended magically, with the kids playing outside while i was wrapped in a blanket on the porch. so there is MAGIC. and her name is MOTHER.

Friday, May 6, 2016

Calling all SuperReaders...

the littlest has been watching a lot of pbs while i take bath after bath to calm my heartbreak. so SuperReaders, answering the call, being a special agent for the toddler set, these are my soundtracks lately.
wonderful. maddening.




but really, i am in need of the pen and paper set. Please send me your address, because i need to write letters.  you can email me your address if you click my profile pic, and I'll write...


I WILL WRITE.


Thursday, May 5, 2016

Listening

Listening to the Stones'  Wild Horses is actually making me feel incredibly strong. I completely go away when I hear it. away, moongirl, away.

Listening to all my instincts having a war with each other: STOP! GO! all the time, and deciding to stay quiet to them, give myself more time before I speak, look around more often...

I think I'm going into a hibernation of sorts. Giving myself some time off from the rollercoaster.

Anything could happen tomorrow. Anything.


Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Oh MY, Ms. Truitt.. Logos and Flux.

SO, I haven't been reading that much lately, and its a bummer. But the weekends wherein I am 'free' have been taken up with sports and I do this very willingly (so much so that i question why anyone would question such.) because my boys do love their running soccer games and do detest their stultifying baseball games... but I am the mom, and the moon,  so I attend, no matter what 'custody/emotionally self-sabotaging' situations may be interfering in my life. MOM, of the roar variety.  I attend.

SO, what i have been doing is going extremely slowly through one specific book, Prospect by Anne Truitt.  IF you don't know who she is, that is expected, as she was a sculptor in the 60s through the 90s and not that many people are all up on the sculptors. yah. Her work was abstract, wood and layers upon layers of slightly differentiated colors... GO look her work up at www.annetruitt.org ... She was born in 1921 and died 2004, so she is contemporary, but not of my generation.

What this is, is a memoir of her year of turning 70, having a lifetime retrospective of her work in New York, and writing it all down as she goes.  She is extremely well-read, and writes with a gift.

I'm not done with it yet, but it is DEEPLY overdue at the library so i want to share it, finish the reading and then return it before they come after me. There is so much in here for me.  It reminds me a lot of Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Circle of Quiet', which I felt compelled to own, I loved it so.

What I've been grooving on?

Learning about Heraclitus and his views on Logos, the law that nothing changes and the Flux, the law that everything is always changing.
"He conceived of these laws as at once opposite and identical, as the convex and concave of a curving line are at once opposite and identical."

She believes herself to do her best work, when she, herself, grooves on in this space, the apparent discordance, the vibration of the betwixt and between and the space held there. the apart and the together.

I love this.

Throughout my journal of the past month, there are her quotes interspersed something fierce, She teaches about Hermes Trismegistis in the first pages, 'as above, so below'... and this, my favorite when I'm feeling the need to remind myself of my humanity, not just my bath-needing emotional wreckedness...

Homo sum: humani mil a me alienum puto.   I am human: nothing human is alien to me.

This: "a line of meaning was intermittently intersecting the line of our trajectory".   So graphic, so large.


I don't know if the richness of this read is coming across in my scattered way, but she is all of these:  artistic mentor, a mothering mentor and a grandmotherly mentor.

"The phrase 'Oh, it was you.' used to come into my mind when I first beheld my babies."...

Do you remember that moment?  It was exactly in my experience of the births of my children.  A recognition, deep and warm as the womb.


GO, find this at your library, or click the links.  She has two other books of memoir and I will be reading them... GO.

Monday, May 2, 2016

Hope. lost and found, and changed.

I had a nice day on Saturday, until i went awry.
I was channeling Skunk energy, if you know about animal medicine cards, and it was great.  I talked to the mediator, arrived in a sunny breezy spring day to the first soccer game, enjoyed... lay on a blanket with my three and watched play in uniform unfold.

Then traveled an hour with J and kids to the next game, also lovely.  felt almost normal, which is the trick on me I have to watch for more closely.

The ride home wherein I would be dropped off and the kids would go elsewhere really got me blue. The thinking ahead, the reality falling into my passenger seat. and the sadness and confusion.  And so i snapped a few times.  and i'm sorry for the snaps, because it is a tourettes of my emotional world.

I had been trying to ask J, in the car, about whether he was getting good support, who he was talking to, imagining that dating is not the time that emotional vulnerabilities about a failed marriage are discussed.  wanting to know which friends were bolstering him.  There is so much longterm intimacy that doesn't go away.  or, hasn't yet.

 and i have so much hope for him still, and worry and all those things I've done for so long, because he was my husband, and I thought our lives were connected forever, all the way down the lifelines.

One of my snaps was that I asked him to get me my weekly powerball ticket when he bought the kids donuts, and he joked that the law will say he gets half.  and it popped my hope bubble.

I've been buying the tickets to give myself a tangible, silly proof that having hope is not supposed to hurt. and in that moment, it hurt again.

I still have hope, and its pretty amorphous, and I don't even know what it IS that I'm hoping for, anymore.  but i'm going to buy my two dollar lottery ticket, because hope should not hurt, it is HOPE, for chrissakes.  and i am exercising my right to frivolous HOPE, whatever the odds.

Is there a point at which there is no turning back? or is there ever a point at which turning back is really an option? are we facing forwards no matter which way our head is turned? where our feet are pointed is our direction and the like?