Holding Time

Another month is ending, not quite soon enough, another month I wouldn't choose to relive if given the choice.  Not horrible, but a struggle almost every day, just to get through.  I remember from Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter that her father strung a rope from the house to the barn and used it to guide him through blizzards, so he wouldn't get blown off course and freeze to death feet from his house, walking in circles.  I string myself a similar rope of small happinesses to guide me back to a place where living is, if not a constant joy, at least not a constant effort. 

My rope is made up, in large part, of the fresh smell and soft cheeks of my children, of their sweet small hands around my neck and their squeaky small voices in my ear.  Of my pride in the big boy for always pursuing justice and trying so hard to do the right thing.  The smaller boy fighting his own emotional roller coaster but trying hard, so hard, not to lose his temper.  The twins' enviable love for each other, their long periods of play divided by small bursts of ridiculous fighting.  My guiderope is also made of friends and family and even the structure of school, helping me put one foot in front of the other when it is all too tempting to just stand in the blizzard and let it have me.  It is the promise of the future, in small things as well as large - a trip, a graduation, a change in weather.  It's not a bad rope, actually.  I think it will do.

And when I reach the end of this rope (not the end of MY rope, that's an entirely different thing), I know life will still have challenges.  I know I will still have days that are hard to wade through.  But, hopefully, there will again be times that I would capture if I could, times sweet enough that I will wish I could relive them again and again.  Times I want to hold in my hands and keep safe.

American highway

I drive home late, so very tired, and the sound and fury of tires on pavement lull me into a peaceful reverie.  Time out of time, time and place suspended as I listen to bad pop music and have four full lanes all to myself.  This freeway, ubiquitous product of American rushing and sprawling, could be anywhere.  I imagine myself on I-10 in LA, on I-5 in Seattle, on I-40 in Tennesee.  I am anywhere and everywhere, and for these moments I am alone in the best sense of the word.  I can imagine my mistakes yet unmade, my challenges far in the future, and feel only the love and the goodness that surrounds me, often hard to find under the competing noise of my life's current upheaval.  The motion of the car soothes me, and although I yearn for home and bed and rest, I don't really want to take my exit.  I want to wrap myself up in this moment and this feeling for just a little longer.

House of Cards

One bad day makes everything feel so untenable.  I feel like a big mistake I made a while back may color everything forever.  I do feel remorse, but I don't know if or how to express it.  I can't think of any way to make amends.  I try to live right, to be good now, to not make more mistakes.  I know that doesn't repair anything, but I can't think what else to do.  I'm afraid, I'm so angry with myself, and I don't know what to do with any of it.  It gets harder and harder to hold everything up.

Balancing act, redux

I live a dual life, forgoing sleep to be mom by day and me by night.  It seems untenable and yet I am happy, happier than I have been in a long long while.  At home, I play with the kids and listen to songs that wrench my heart.  When out, I let my hair down, play the fool without guilt or fear, and it feels good to be myself.  Home again, home again, and still alone, I don't feel lonely but instead revel in the freedom of doing what I want, when I want.  Is it so awful?  I know there's something broken, something I'm not sure I care to fix.  I don't understand, literally can not relate to people caring about each other in the way I'm supposed to want to, the way I once did.  But I don't feel the lack, I don't yearn any more.  I don't miss it.  I don't want it.

Absence Really Does Make the Heart Grow Fonder

I have never been happier to say goodbye to my kids than I was this morning when I dropped them off at school.  It's been 17 days of snow and sniffles and too much sugar and not enough listening and way way too much fighting.  I came home and lazed decadently around the house.  Paid some bills, took a nap, curled up with several blankets since my ancient house lets in more air than a tent.  It was slightly-boring heaven.  The big surprise was that when the kids came home, only a few hours later, I was absolutely delighted to see them.  It was straight out of an airport scene from Love, Actually.  I felt like it had been years.  They really are amazing little people.  I guess I just haven't had enough distance to see it clearly for a while.

The Eye of the Storm

The boy has taken up screaming at bedtime again.  I'm sure it's related to the many recent upheavals in his life, but I had so hoped this was behind us.  Tonight, he screamed for two and a half hours before finally collapsing into sleep, and the silence he left behind is deafening me with recrimination.  There must be something wrong with him, but even so it's my fault - I made him, and I haven't been able to figure out WHY he is like this, despite many a doctor's trip over the years.  How can anything ever feel like a success when this child so often feels like my worst failure.  I feel out of ideas and out of hope, and yet I was already so close to the bone, hopewise, that I can't feel the pain quite as much as usual.  Maybe hopelessness is the answer and not the question, something to be dealt with, not solved.

Shut up already

Why can't I just BE unhappy and shut up about it?  It doesn't make it better to blab, just gives temporary not-quite-relief that ends up being more shame, more humiliation, and a deep desire to have not spoken.  It hurts too much to stay quiet, but just like crying about physical pain, the pain isn't really affected by the noise.  I'm afraid if I'm quiet I'll slip slide surrender to the deeper quiet and get lost for good.  So I make a string of pointless words and hopeless queries and hold myself up on it like the magic feather or the emperor's clothes, trying not to look hard enough to see that nothing is holding me up at all, that I'm already falling.

Finding joy in the slow lane

We're snowed in, the house insulated and muzzled inside a snowglobe.  My daughter is fighting a cold and passed out on the couch.  I hear her snoring on one side and the little boys playing nicely for once on the other.  It is peaceful, quiet, Christmassy.  I have good friends, good kids, a good life.  The enforced slowness of the storm makes me realize that I need to slow down myself, need to not borrow trouble, need to not give so much attention to the ache in my chest that says I will always be alone, that I will never be understood.  The ache is real but it isn't everything, and it doesn't deserve the space it takes up in my head.  I will wrap it in cotton and shove it into a corner and take the good in what comes my way, even if it doesn't always come in the shape I think I want.

Floating

Things got worse but may be getting better, at least in some ways.  The semester is over, my mother's out of the hospital, other big bads seem to be taking at least a hiatus.  I feel like I've taken off too-tight pants, like I can breathe a little easier.  I'm trying to cultivate positive thinking, to hoarde a pile of reasons this struggle is worth it like nuts against the possibility of a long winter.  Perversely, I've found something new and utterly unnecessary to also fret about, but I'm trying to zen-think it out of the mainstream of negative thought.  I need to feng shui my brain, clear the clutter and let in the light.  I practice letting go and feel like I may be floating, however briefly, instead of exhaustingly treading water.

Realism

I feel the inexorable tug of depression, the dark promise it holds to wrap me up in warm darkness.  I fight it by inches, never gaining on it but keeping it from swallowing me whole.  The hardest times are when I can't remember why the fight is worth it, when it seems that depression is not the pathology it has become but another word for realism.  This is my life.  There's no reason to expect it to get better, and it could certainly be worse.  Maybe the idea that happiness is achievable, even an entitlement, is the real pathology.  Why should I get happiness?  The biggest mistakes I've made were things I did in an effort to push back the bleakness and grab my piece of joy.  I think the better option may be to strive for acceptance rather than happiness.  This is it, this is all there is; and yet, I watch the people around me live their lives with passion and energy.  In my lighter moments, I look for hope in their example, but right now their efforts seem futile, their hopes sad in light of their inevitable frustration.

Bitch, bitch, bitch

I am so over myself.  All I do is complain, and when I get tired of hearing myself whine out loud and bite my tongue, I still hear the litany in my head.  I don't even know what I want, what I expect to be different, what end I want to have in sight.  I need a lobotomy, or a week in a hotel with bad pay per view, or a winning lottery ticket, or a padded soundproof room.  I think I need a hiatus, but really?  That couldn't end well.  The last thing I need is the company of my own thoughts.

Gratitude

It's easier to walk the line today, when my only responsibility is to cook and eat ridiculous amounts of food. Even so, the trap in my brain has its hair trigger, ready to snap shut at every argument between the kids, every misplaced shoe or coat. I napped after dinner and dreamed of horror, of fear and malignancy and dark things hunting, and woke up sweating and scared.

I cast my net for a stable support, someone or something to prop me up and make the charade easier to maintain. That kind of weakness is dangerous, though; I know I should be trying to strengthen my own legs instead of damsel-in-distressing.

Of course, I am lucky, I do know that. Today is a day for gratitude, and there is much to be thankful for. My children, most of all - so much tougher and more resilient than I am, thank goodness, and so creative and spirited and beautiful. My mother, who makes it possible for me to move toward that so-far-away light at the end of this tunnel. Even the lessons, so painfully learned, that I should have known by instinct or common sense - even those are worth gratitude. Better late than never and all that. And so I will finish my day with my thanks in mind, for these things and for so much more. I will try to remember my luck and let go of my worries and hopes, at least when they become too heavy to hold.

Hollow

I spend every day on a tightrope, desperately seeking balance. When it comes, in brief pulses, it is such a relief that the euphoria sets me back off-kilter, flailing around with my balancing bar and scanning the horizon for the rope's end.

How many mistakes is too many? I dream of clean slates, yearn for fresh starts. I try to be all good things, hoping that living well will pave a firmer path. But trying to be good at everything, I fail at it all. I end each day with regrets, new on top of old, and a need to talk, to talk and talk and talk, as if it would help. As if anyone would listen. As if I would know what to say. The words are in my chest, weighing me down, pressing out my breath.

I am annoyed. A pencil falls, is replaced on the table, falls again, and I can hardly keep from screaming my frustration. It never stops raining, it drizzles and mists and damps all over splat squish squeak. I am contradictions - bored but too busy, sad but giddy, lonely but craving solitude. I am procrastination. I am lack of motivation. I am remorse.

Words can't express the depths of my loathing

I am 10 days away from my physics final, after which I will never have to take another physics class, ever. You'd think that having the end in sight would alleviate some of my chronic hatred for this class/professor/subject, but sadly such is not the case. I have never worked so hard for so little - no sense of satisfaction, no idea what my grade is (because this teacher, among his many other crimes against education, lost all of our homework grades, hasn't graded any labs, and added a few random quizzes that aren't represented in the grade formula in the syllabus). Hate hate hate. I have a test tomorrow, on chapters were were supposed to cover the last week of October but just completed last Tuesday, and which I still don't begin to understand. We will not be covering anything at all about optics, and while god knows I don't want to be responsible for even more information in this awful class, I need to know optics for the MCAT, so it would have been nice to at least see something about it.

I signed up for the MCAT last night - $225 for a sure-to-be miserable experience. It's like spending money on a root canal, or a new tire (oh, yeah, just did that too - stupid flat tire last week). I guess I'd better start putting together my study plan for that. As for now, I have to get back to studying for my craptastic test tomorrow, or there won't be much point in the MCAT.

Did you know I'm from Forks, Washington?

That ought to bring in the page-hits, too bad I don't have google ads. It's so beyond weird that my crappy small hopeless poor dying hometown is now world famous. For those of you who don't have preteens (or don't admit to reading preteen literature even though I know you totally do), the hit book series (and upcoming movie) Twilight takes place in Forks, Washington. For those of you who have never been there, and I'm guessing that's just about everyone in the whole world, statistically speaking, it's a really really REALLY small logging town in the middle of nowhere in Washington state, about 4 hours west of Seattle (no, Seattle is not on the ocean, I swear easterners never look at a map west of the Mississippi).

When I graduated from high school (oh, about 58 years ago), there were only about 2500 residents in town. Logging had pretty much dried up and even liquor had stopped being profitable, to the point that the last solvent bar literally burned to the ground a couple years ago (the rumor is that the owners burned it up for the insurance money, but I can't confirm). The town is about 5 miles from a Native American reservation, and although I spent my whole painfully long high school tenure in town, I couldn't tell you anything about the rez, because PC or not, the twain just ain't meetin'. Don't buy everything you read in novels written by a woman who's never been there.

Our sports teams had to be bused up to 12 hours (no exaggeration) for meets, our homecoming dances and proms were held in not just a gym but the old gym, there is no fast food or movie theater within 60 miles, and (this is coming from a 1st generation Forks resident) the gene pool isn't all that deep, if you know what I mean. My close friends and I spent nearly every day that I remember dreaming of the day we could leave town without looking back. There's really nothing to do in Forks, and that is also not an exaggeration.

So it's something of a surprise to hear that people are choosing Forks as a vacation hotspot based on the Twilight books. Don't get me wrong, I love the books, but most of the excitement in them is caused by the proximity to vampires, not the proximity to mind-numbingly dull nothingness and constant rain. I guess it's just sour grapes - I wish I'd bought real estate when it was still about $2.50/acre.

A weird holiday feeling

My emotions don't seem to know where to settle. I'm tired, after a long day, but it was good to keep busy while my nerves were fraying. I took my oldest boy with me to vote, and I hope he remembers this when he's older, the way our parents remember Kennedy (though hopefully with less death and horror). I start to get excited and hopeful, then dampen my enthusiasm with anxious watching, as if my own optimism could jinx the election. In short, I'm all over the damn place. I don't like that the first states to close polls are almost all too close to call - I want this to be decisive. I love that the voter turnout was huge. I want more sugar but I am already down to like 2 pairs of pants because of all the nervous eating I've been doing this week between school and the election.

PleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasewinOBAMA!

Ooo, champagne.

Toddler Talk

I'm supposed to be studying for a test in, oh crap, 2 hours, and I'm sure no one's even checking this sad excuse for a blog any more, but hi! The inmates currently in the asylum are being ever so amusing and distracting me from memorizing one more boring-ass fact about cellular respiration.

I love this stage of talking, where you can mostly understand their babbling but can choose not to at will, and where every somewhat intelligent sentence seems like a huge and surprising accomplishment, not so much different than if one of the dogs sat up and asked for his dinner in English. It's even more fun with twins, because they've started to supplement their just-us-two crazy twinspeak with real words, so we can follow along for the first time. The dialog tends to go something like this:

Thing 1: Heah go, Bean! (offering some partly chewed cracker or a toy she does not want)
Thing 2: Go a-WAY! (haughtily turning face away)
Thing 1: HEAH GO, BEAN! (now shoving offering in her face)
Thing 2: Fank oo. (resigned, accepting unwanted object and immediately chucking it)
Thing 1: Weccome.
Thing 2: Let's go, Sibee!!!!! (jumping up, inspired by alien baby forces, and launching into a full-out run around the house)
Both: TEEHEEHEEHEEHEE (until they collide, trip, or otherwise harm themselves or others)

So you can see why I can not, CAN NOT, focus for one more second on the stupid Krebs cycle or photosystems I and II or the phases of mitosis. I much prefer the multicellular activity right here at home.

Here I am!

I know, I know, it's been a really long time. The thing is, once more than a week or so has passed, I feel like whatever I post next has to be really good, either funny or meaningful or at least newsworthy, but of course I have nothing funny or meaningful or newsworthy to share, and so the time continues to pass unannotated and the pressure mounts until finally, I break it with just such a boring update post as this. And so on to the updates!

Kids - except for the cold that we've all been passing around for the past 2-3 weeks (we should have bought stock in Kleenex, that's got to be recession-proof), all the kids are doing well. Twins are chattering up a storm and thinking they're actual people. Big boys are both doing really well in school, better than I'd hoped. Biggest kids are, I think, also well, although I haven't seen much of them since school started.

School - if you'd asked me yesterday morning, I'd have said school was going well. Unfortunately, I got back my first physics test yesterday, so that appraisal is no longer exactly valid. Words just can't express how bad this teacher is, or the depths of my frustration at the very real possibility that his incompetence is going to keep me out of med school. It gives me a headache just thinking of it, so I'll move on.

Not much else to move on to, actually, my life mostly consists of kids and school. Speaking of which - the twins are trying to slam each other in a door and I have to get ready for school. And this is why I never finish a coherent sentence, much less a post.

Crazy neighbors

I (mostly) like my house, I even like my city, and the neighborhood is much better than it used to be, but my immediate neighbors are almost all completely fucking insane. Today I will focus on the next-door neighbors, who resemble George and Barbara Bush in relative ages if not in politics (I don't know their politics or care to). When I brought my now-5-year-old home from the hospital, the husband saw us in the yard with the baby and said "I don't like kids." They both work from home and must have their groceries delivered, because I don't think I've ever seen them leave.

They must get bored living Boo-Radley-style, because they seem to spend most of their time looking out their windows and into my yard. We have a pretty big yard, and so do they, and our yards are separated by a fence, so they really could just choose to ignore us. God knows I try to ignore them. They collect feral cats by leaving food out on their porch, then complain when my dogs go eat it (the city rats, apparently, are welcome to the buffet). They collected OUR cat one day, after he had gotten out of the house, and kept him for a month without our knowledge, having him neutered and his ear notched before my mother rescued him. Ever since, they have insisted on returning the cat to us every time he gets outside, even though he rarely leaves our yard - they actually come into our yard to get the cat and bring him back. All. The. Time.

I just got involved in a pointless political debate (is there any other kind) with a friend from school and now dinner is cold and I've had more beer than I meant to and I have no time/energy to wrap this up gracefully. So, as my son would say, the end.

Shameless Substitution of Pictures for Actual Posting

I'd like to say I haven't been posting because school is keeping me busy, but let's be honest - I'm always a slacker. So here, in lieu of really dull updates about my school, the kids' school, my recent alarming weight gain, my exhaustion, the increasingly shrill and incredulous voice in my head every time I see or think of either McCain or (especially) Palin, are two brief stories told in pictures.

Story 1 - Seven-year-old gets glasses (poor kid needs not only glasses but bifocals, but mercifully is too young to feel the dorkiness):

He wanted these:

But fortunately, the bifocal lenses didn't fit those frames, so he got these instead:

Isn't he cute?

Story 2 - A day at the zoo with the twins

Twins brushing a goat:

Pretending to be baby birds:

Girly in awe of swimming polar bear (it really was kind of awesome, was playing and swimming and by the way absolutely freaking enormous and also isn't this just a great pic? Can't believe I got a picture of her face and the bear, I suck at photography):

Boy twin was also fascinated - although the bear was off-camera at this point, can't you just feel the enthusiasm?

That is all, I'm sure I'll post again sometime in 2008.