Its been over a month since my last post. I’d apologize but its been out of my control because my brain has been entirely on strike.
My friends, do you know what a demogorgon is? Its a thing from greek mythology really but has been popularized on the Stranger Things series. It’s a monster. A monster.
It is what my brain has been like this month. Just flayed, spread out and incapable. (looks like a flower, but carries a whole lot of teeth) while my body does all the things necessary: kids are mostly fed, laundry is done and even folded, sports are attended, jobs are attended, my brain has been uninvolved.
its spring, the things are growing, the work is much more, the chickens are big now, the graduation is looming, there is a man in town who is dear and domestic and sexy, and all the things that are exploding my brain and that i talk a lot to my therapist about, are having me walk around in a bit of a daze.
i’ve been sashaying my way around the place, not knowing which way i’m going, not knowing anything but what is on the sport schedule for the day and if i need to provide food. thats it, thats the sum total of my brain’s abilities. still with the sashay.
some might call it a drunken stagger. but whatever.
I just finished a therapy session, and haven’t had one in quite a while, so there was a lot to go through and I did all the talking, believe you me.
my kid is a senior, and there is slow and steady shift in dynamics, beginning deep in my insides, about how to let go of control of the lives of my children. and clearly, there are still two that i will devastatingly control, but having a kid lean into adulthood is really something.
I have this before-school school job that is really pushing me in terms of my hearing. I’ve gone and had an appointment with a doctor in boston who does cochlear implants to see if i can improve my hearing, because it sucks to miss so much when its kids. With adults I can get things repeated but kids often think they’ve done something wrong if you ask them to repeat themselves and the original impulse is lost. (Sidebar, today boy B was upset because his boogers were wet. I caught that one.) Generally though, I feel upset a little most days. I also have to be there at 7. Have I mentioned that? So early. So early. I do not enjoy.
music is back and around again. I’m talking Wil Varley, Alexi Murdoch, the Cure. You dig? I’m enjoying.
4. I’m still outside and at work, and I still love it. Its hard and fairly gross at times but when I think about the most beautiful place in the world, it involves me standing empty-handed outside the coop, looking up at the sky. I wonder if my farmer knows that? I bet she does. 5. I’m still at a loss how to handle the many changes that are settling in on me here, changing familes, changing realities of finances, ears maybe, and love and tidbits of change in all the ways. the one thing i’ve let go of for these next few months is planning. I’m just going to ride the waters, whether it be wavy or calm, I’m just along for the float. Will see which shore we wash up on, I guess. 6. I’m not writing nearly enough. Not here, not anywhere. And I feel it. But today I have lunch with Robert, my writing partner, and that’ll be cool. He’s moving in May to be with a long-distance love affair. Can you believe things like that still happen? I am astonished. Perhaps I am too careful, practical. Someone make those into romantic things… Hmm.
In years past, I would be almost truly dead at this point, just scraping my way along to the dream of Monday morning when routine returns, and the kids climb on a bus.
This year, I’ve got an entirely different feeling, and there is a very real and visceral awareness of the end of things. one child will be exploring the world next year, however that looks. the dynamics of the home front will change radically and become something new.
they’ve all been so busy this week that my rushing to get home for them was moot. I’ve barely seen them, any of them, and they’re all okay with that, and so am I, mostly. It feels like an adult household somehow, even though the youngest is still just ten. We’re morphing before my eyes.
we will re-form. and celebrate the reformation.
Beauty bits.
-i’m sitting in an empty house, listening to laundry and dishes being washed by machines. the spin and whirl of both machines meaning I have almost completed my job for the day. Tonight is bolognese, and I’m thrilled just thinking about it. These are the things in my mind. The cleaning, the food.
First time I had bolognese was in a student flat in Glasgow, Scotland. How’s that for an interesting tidbit? My flatmate was an excellent cook. Rachael Rose. I’ve lost touch with her but she was a lovely lovely one. And such an English beauty, cheeks flushed with pink all the time.
The no-winter season is winding down, I’m worrying less about the early crocii. they never do learn, do they? Or maybe I’m the stubborn one, insisting on worry in the face of their resilience.
I’m gearing up for the summer, trying to figure out how to strengthen up for the planting and the harvesting to come. My sister brought me some ranunculus and my love of flower is unabated.
UN-ABATED.
what a delerious thing language is.
Sigh. My goodness peoples, what a post. Would love to apologize, but know you’ll make the best of it. Much love,
I was sitting to do my meditation this morning, and had to talk to myself the whole way through, again and again. . . which is not really the ideal meditative state, just in case you were unclear.
usually, I listen to a guided meditation which quiets all the chatter, but today my phone is charging in a room far away. its a nice break, but my brain. good lord, my brain, was knocked loose from its chassis.
i did get the chatter of my bits to subside for just a few minutes, and “I” was able to float around in there, telling all my bits how much I am grateful for them. The old ladies by the fence, who protect and guard me from the past? They’re not old really, just bitter and loud about it. They have good hearts though, very good ones. Yeah, I waved. (they can be a little toxic, as they make opening their gate a bit less enticing than anywhere else.)
They come from a lady named Jackie that I worked with when I was a teenager. Big woman with her tissues tucked in her sleeve or into her bra. Tough. Not blown away by my whimsy or my lovely smile, I’ll tell you that much. She was one of the first times I really had to work for someone’s favor, not by being a tool, but by working hard and not acting like a highschool flippant little girl. I’m not sure I ever fully got her approval but then she was a grown woman and I was just the high schooler working at her side. I do think she knew I could work hard though. ANd honestly, the way it mattered so much what she thought, and still does, even though she is long off this earth, it really shakes me how much value I place in what other people think, even though it is clearly about them, and not me. When does it become the kate show, all about me? my decisions my own, my actions for me?
And yes, this is where my brain was, drifting onto people from the past, despite the women at the gate…, onto the ways in which I’ve always spent my life living for others, living on their praises and critiques like butter on bread. . . the layers upon layers of story I’ve got floating around in there! Some of the bits are pretty seriously anchored in, some want to be, and some are blissfully unmoored.
And it made me think some more about the newfound interest I have in being unmoored. Its been a constant in these last few weeks, and I wonder if its just dreamtalk (the no-action-intended dream talking) or no. I feel like no.
What if I get my last child through to graduation from high school and then just take off?
What if I do that? And I don’t even mind it….
what if that is REALLY who i am, not this domesticated mom-type figure who does laundry every day and is constantly sweeping? or am i both, the dedicated and devoted mom, but unmoored… what if that is me?
What if I just take off?
(the kids can have my phone number, i promise.)
All me.
un
moored.
huh.
i can live on toast and beans. maybe even on a dinghy. Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com
This: The constancy with which my brain flits around?, when I want to staple it to one particular subject? damnit.
I don’t have adhd or anything even close. But man, the way my brain skitters from the things I must think, or do. Reptilian, arachnid. Disgusting and in my own flipping head. The car certainly took over great swathes of field for the past few weeks, but I’ve got work to do, and tv to avoid.
also this:
I really want to be away, in isolation someplace, and I even want it to be something I have to stretch through, struggle with. I think I need to face myself. Label the parts of me that flit and merge and morph. I think the slips of paper will coalesce into something I can understand more.
me. yesterday, 12/6/22
I’m grateful for woodstoves. Coffee. Soft clothing.
I’m grateful that I’ve started to hold real boundaries. That I can see that they are good for me, that they hold me to the standard of protecting myself, in a healthy way. I’m grateful that I can rely on my sense of humor, even when I don’t know how I can possibly be accessing it. I’m just glad that I can walk through the world like I can.
I’m grateful for the time and the space I’ve had these last 7 years. This ability to ‘not work’, pay my bills and watch the kids grow, all because I married someone who now makes a lot of money. How ’bout that. I suppose I am supposed to stretch and say I’m glad I married him. Sigh. Working on it.
So glad of them, though, so unblemished a gratitude… so grateful that they exist, so proud that I find them so interesting and funny and full of heart.
