and I am all that’s left.

It’s sunny again lately and the autumn chill can’t quite catch hold. The colors, usually so quick to drop from the trees in this part of the country, are staying and stunning and everything backed by the bluest of sky. Spiders in festive colors decorate my front porch for the holiday. (I am the Disney princess that no one talks about.) Last week the air was heavy with unspoken things and undelivered rain, it was an effort just to walk through it. I chose to be buoyant. I danced through Fry’s and Best Buy. I twirled through Target and Freddy’s. I made IKEA my new god. It was fun. But this week my pretensions are showing. I am lagging and sagging despite the sparkle of sunlight. I wake up sad, missing something I can’t completely remember.

I’m not so very okay as I pretend. I was so happy to be released from sick bed that I’ve been running ever since. Swallowing projects whole. Filling up the empty spaces with things bought and paid for. (Things that won’t love me but won’t leave me or let me down in a crisis, either.) In fact, I am mourning my mother in her own best style: track shoes, a bank card and denial.

Mourning my father’s death was complicated by the equal grief I felt at the loss of a mother I recognized, and the stress of the madwoman left behind to wear her face. Mourning the ragged pieces of what was left of my mother is, at least, a simpler thing. Straightforward. Without my father, my foundations were crumbs, I had to cobble my whole world back together with duct tape and chewing gum and papier mache. Without my mother it is a subtler collapse. Interior, like the cotton batting of an old stuffed bear. I am a little floppier than before. Worn and weary. It occurs to me that my mother took up so much space inside me for the last 7 years that I will have to be very careful and watchful about what I allow to fill me back up now.

But on the other side is an interesting truth – I have no more obligations left that I did not choose for myself. I am truly my very own woman. Most days I feel lighter.

Halloween is bearing down with Christmas as a caboose. NaNo next month, and before that, another bloggy move to my very own domain. Pillows to sew to match the changes in the boys’ room, a turn toward manlier style and something a little more sophisticated than mattresses on a floor. My amazing new camera comes at the end of the week. I had so much I wanted to say but my brain keeps resolving into static and nonsense. Maybe I’ll take my daughter shopping instead.

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