365 DAYS

As I sit here in nothing but the glow of the Christmas tree lights and the computer screen, staring at the ornaments that have been collected to be brought out and admired for only a handful of weeks out of the year and then tucked away, safe in their packings until Christmas rolls around again, when another few ornaments will be added to the collection and the process repeats itself, I wonder what milestones will have come and gone when I next look at them.  When I looked at them last, I was not quite the person that I am sitting here tonight and I marvel at how much can change in just 365 days; how many ways a person can evolve day by day as events unfold that no one can know until the moment they happen, or even, perhaps, until they've already passed, the change as yet unperceived, but there nonetheless.

I used to be terrified of death, and of dying.  I have never felt that feeling of invincibility others talk of feeling in their youths - I spent far too many hours and days surrounded by sickness and death as a child to ever feel as though I had the power to laugh in death's face.  I saw him early, and he terrified me.  It is only as an adult that I have managed to conquer that terror, consigning death to an immutable and unavoidable truth that may never bring me peace, but is not something that haunts my nights with its presence.  What terrifies me now, as I look at each ornament, some marking my birth, some made by a Carrie long-changed by days and years of accumulated events, some made by the kids I could never quite imagine but desperately wanted, is uncertainty.  Uncertainty destabilizes me; knocks me from my center into a freefall of unknown variables and onto a path around which I stumble, not knowing what I might find around any corner.  Not that any of us ever know, really, but if I can at least have a vision of what I hope to find at the end of the path, I can walk it; can handle the odd twists and turns when I know that there are a few constants upon which I can ground myself.  It is when you have no constants that the algebra problem becomes unsolvable, no matter how many ways you rearrange the equation.  And this terrifies me.

I feel my constants slipping into a place of mutability, where change becomes possible, and the goals are no longer clearly seen on the path ahead.  I am forced into a state of becoming, once again, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that, or the 365 days that will mark the time that passes when I once again sit in front of these lights, looking at these ornaments, wondering where I might find myself another 365 days gone by.

Just Breathe

My sister asked me, upon finding out that I managed not to fail out this semester, if it meant that I could breathe now.  And I don't think that there is a more apt question that could have been asked.  It seems that I have been in a state of breathlessness since the semester began and when I look back on it, it is a miracle that I managed to do as well as I did (even with the medication...).

Somehow, between the end of last semester and the end of this semester I managed to get married, sit at my mom's bedside in her final days, start class days after her death, deal with K jumping from a moving car to escape going to school, find and close on a house, move, put a house together, handle E's severely damaged knee and subsequent wheelchair, try to deal with the holidays and actually pass the semester.  Not extremely well, but not horribly, either. I DID manage to kill my 4.0, but hey, everyone is entitled to one bum semester, aren't they?

In the last weeks of the semester, I found something curious happening to me.  I had this overwhelming urge to create.  Something.  Anything.  (Please do not mistake this for PROcreate... I've had my fair share of THAT, thanks.  There will be no making of live things in THIS household.)  I think that my brain has been so immersed in left-sided thinking that the right side of my brain has been feeling a bit neglected.  I have this overwhelming desire to learn how to paint with watercolors (oils were always my thing... always did want to learn how to do watercolors successfully), set up my jewelry bench, seriously get creative with my new camera, write, anything that feeds my poor, depleted right side.  But oddly, the things that inspire most of those activities (with the exception of the jewelry), are the things feeding my left brain - the beauty of the cells and neurons that fill my head.  Is that slightly weird?  Of course, we all know that I'm slightly weird anyway.

So now I'm sitting here, trying to ignore the cool neuroscience book that I got for my class next semester to do some light reading as I head off down to Florida over the holidays, and trying to sort out what I need to do first: the mountains of laundry that managed to pile up over dead week and finals week, clean, grocery shop, christmas shop, or bathe.  After the blogging, of course.  And the deep breath.  Strangely enough, that is the thing that comes the hardest.  Remembering how to do that.

4 Little Blue Monsters, A Hallow's Eve Poem

Oh curse the dawn, with its
black skies and heat-seeking winds
when all else sleeps on this Hallow's Eve
and I stumble madly in the cold,
hair wild and crushed beneath hat,
heedless of pajamas and slippers
peeking out from my coat like a homeless child
through the desolate lot of a half-lit gas station
in desperate search of 4 little blue monsters.

Funny the things that can make me wax poetic.

Mini-Respite

What heavy things weigh on my mind at 5:30 in the morning as I roll out of bed to take my newly minted freshman, O, to 6:00 a.m. swim practice?  Honestly?  I wish I could say I was having profound thoughts, bringing with them clarity and a sagacity that I seem to have sought all of my life.  But really what I'm thinking is, "Oh God, do I have an energy drink in the refrigerator? NO? Do I have enough time to stop BEFORE I drop him off?" and "should I shower after I pack Roy's food, do some math, and then take E to school or should I shower after I drop her off, before I have to make it to class?"  And all the while I'm distracted by the 3 boxes and downed whiteboard in our study, calling to me like the ghosts of abandoned children; I can hardly shut my mind off to their whispers to even begin studying. So what do I do?

Well, isn't it obvious?  D: None of the above (except the food - already packed the food).  And 6:30 hits, alarm goes off (again), I hear the stirrings of E's alarm signalling shower time and it is time to start the ball rolling, my tiny bit of calm and quiet before the storm of the morning ritual ends almost quicker than it began.  I'm sure I will sit down again today and breathe.  Maybe.

A Hundred Years of Solitude...

...would not be enough, if you were to ask me at the moment.  But that is just this very moment, when the sky is still dark with cold, late fall, morning rain, and I am the only one awake, procrastinating that daily ritual I call personal hygiene.  We all have our lows, I suspect, at least once in our lives.  While I'm far too superstitious to say that I have hit mine, I'm pretty damn sure that this is as close as I ever want to be to it and still be conscious.  I'm sure that deciding to buy a house directly on the heels of those little things like marriage and death and the beginning of what has become the Semester of Unfortunate Events has not helped the situation at all.  Not that I regret the house - in fact, I don't think that I have ever been so in love with a home before; it just has that kind of energy to it.  But it has been overwhelming.  In fact, if I could sum up the way I feel with one image, it would most likely be something like this:

And I'm sorry, but if you feel like that, there is something definitely not going right in your life.  A hundred years of solitude seems awfully nice at the moment, in the quiet, semi-darkness of my study (yes, I actually have a study... a REAL study, to do some serious studying in) and if you were to ask me right now, I might actually take you up on it.  But I have a feeling that tomorrow I would wake missing all the people that have become so important to me in my life and want to click my heels together and go home.  Because even if home means that I'm taking 5 different kinds of medication just to keep my shit together, it still contains the only thing (aside from aforementioned medications) in my life that gets me through the days at all.  The love of the people who hold me up through it all and don't complain about my sweaty armpits around their shoulders or the deodorant stains I leave behind. And that is surely what love is all about.

I AM MY MOTHER'S KEEPER

Ever beautiful.

Not in the way that I ever thought I would be - not sandwiched between my mom and my daughter for a day of shopping, or for a baby shower, or any of the number of things that I was fortunate enough to do with my mother and her mother, or that she was fortunate enough to do with her mother and grandmother. 

Love notes to Mom, 1988

But I keep her in so many other ways.   I am blessed that I was given an acute sense of mortality at a very young age because I keep finding her everywhere I turn.  Much like when I left on my exchange to Venezuela for a year and hid small notes all over the house for her to find as a reminder of my love for her while I was gone (seriously, I thought it was a good idea - it never dawned on me that instead of making her smile, it would make her cry every time she found one), as I pack up my house and get ready to move into our new home, I am surrounded by little reminders that she is with me always in spirit. And now I understand exactly how she felt as she came across one of my little love notes randomly. 

Autograph album, 1979 Mom and my Mamaw.

    I am her keeper and it feels right.

Feeling Horribly Optimistic About Life at the Moment

Need I say more?