It was absolutely hands down the craziest July I have ever lived through, and seeing as how I generally whimper and cower under the bed at the mere mention of “July” on an ordinary day, you know I usually expect them to be rather eventful. But I think it might even be the craziest -any- month I’ve ever lived through, and that counts births (which are high on the change-your-life scale, but at least I was expecting those by the time there was actual baby) and deaths (these top out the world-topsy-turvy meter, but because the immediate pain is so sharp and the ripples so long lasting, they can’t really be confined to within the boundaries of the month that they happened); injury and illness; and that summer when my best friend’s boyfriend ran off with my other best friend’s girlfriend to Los Angeles to become movie stars and we actually chased them down there to say “WTF?” and somehow it all ended in a trip to Disneyland. That was actually kind of an awesome month, really, at least for me because I wasn’t in a relationship with any of the wayward parties involved and I’d never been to Disneyland. But I digress.

Here we are, in about the space of a month, all moved in and unpacked and living in a whole new place. Actually, I’m sort of laughing at myself because of course I’ve lived in this same damn city since I was 15 years old – never thought I’d be the one that stayed behind while everyone else left to go live their lives – and this is really the first time I’ve lived on this side of town. I remember my Dad talking somewhat regretfully about how he had lived in all sorts of different places and traveled all over the world and then would wind up dying in a city just 20 miles from where he was born. I just move across town and I act like it’s some exotic new place. It surprises me, though, how different life already feels here. The side of town I come from just felt like one big Land of Suburbia. I like the diversity in people and places here, I like the older houses with the varying degrees of upkeep and the varying sized lots and the yards that are each intent on doing their own thing without worrying too much about what the house next door might be up to.

Everything about the move was a blur, and everything that went wrong was made right so quickly – I can’t believe how fast and how beautifully things came together. I can’t believe how many people turned up to help. It leaves me feeling a bit strangely, though, because I think in my head it felt like a very intimate, personal thing that I shared with these people – mostly my husband’s friends from work – and to them, of course, it was just some heavy lifting. They’ve all gone back to their lives while I’m still stuck with an element of feeling like we should be planning Thanksgiving together or something. I’m sure I’ll be back to my hermit-y ways soon enough and be grateful that no blood oaths were actually exchanged, but for the moment it feels peculiar.

And I’m still thrilled with the space, but it isn’t home quite yet. There are moments of home, here and there, like when it’s late at night and I come to sit out at the dining table which used to be in the biggest traffic flow of the old house and is now back in this quiet corner, right by the sliding glass door whose curtains I keep open all the time. At night I can see the lights of the city and the traffic and it gives me this bittersweet feeling right in the gut of being set slightly apart from the world, which is so familiar and natural to my being that it feels peaceful and almost like home.

Or when I wake up in the morning, every morning, to the light streaming beautifully through the autumn colored sheers on my bedroom windows, and a smile curves my lips before I’m even entirely awake, which is a minor miracle right there. Me smiling in the morning. We’d used the sheers as accents to the brown curtains in the living room of the old house, while the bedroom window was completely closed over by a gorgeous old wall hanging that kept the room dark all day long. I needed it then, the cozy darkness, the facade of safety and complete isolation. Here, up one level from the street, I feel set apart enough – and also ready enough in my life in general – to let some light in and enjoy my piece of the sky. So I have a lot more open curtains here, and that feels right and good.

But when I’m sick – and the lot of us have been passing around a nasty summer virus or three in the last week – or sad, or stressed, my instinct is still to go to ground, and in the back of my head it’s my bedroom on Davidson street that I want to retreat to. It doesn’t smell like home here yet, the carpet doesn’t feel quite right beneath my feet. It still sort of feels like we found this amazing new place to vacation, one of those once in a lifetime hotels that almost feels like home, but not quite, and you go around saying, “I could live here.”

That’s where I am now. I could live here.

Dear 2903 Davidson,

No one needs twelve rosebushes. No one. You bled heat in the winter and in the summer you clutched it so tight that it felt as though you were built on a vent of Hell, itself. Your windows were stupid and in all the wrong places. Your backyard was eternally unruly and unmanageable, and I think that secretly you laughed at our pitiful efforts to tame it.

I held a memorial for my father within a month of moving in. I placed my mother’s ashes next to his 9 months before moving out. In between my children grew mostly up, we marked their progress on your kitchen wall. I grew mostly up there, too, my progress was marked in subtler ways – an endless number of sleepless nights, of watching the world dawn morning through your kitchen window, of occasional refuge taken in your back bathroom. Sometimes it was the only place in the world where I felt safe.

We went from homeschoolers to public schoolers to unschoolers, mostly in your dining room. The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and even the Great Pumpkin were frequent visitors, until they weren’t anymore. I spent one summer sending the kids out front to play so I could sneak cigarettes around back. Every May people would stop their cars out front to take pictures of the clematis vine. (It was fucking gorgeous.)

Nicky got a fork stuck in the bottom of his foot once, while carrying his dinner dish from living room to kitchen. (“Stick a fork in it, it’s done” will never have quite the same meaning.) Khy grew up across the street from his best friend. Stormy never wanted to live there in the first place, but she eventually came around.

They all three gave up their training wheels, eventually.

Your deck was the perfect place for that above ground pool we finally bought, and in that way we made our truce, you and I, over the summer heat. I miss your soft carpet. I miss the Lazy Susan style cupboard for canned goods. I miss the black linoleum in the kitchen that never, ever looked dirty. I miss the smell and feel of home.

But I won’t miss the rosebushes. Not at all.

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
by Portia Nelson

Chapter 1: I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost—I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2: I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place, but it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I still fall in . . . . it’s a habit. My eyes open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5: I walk down another street.

#garage sale: some1 just bought one of my UV “happy lites” for her plants. about 16 hours ago via txt

Two weeks is how long it’s been from the moment when Shane and I heard the first rumblings that it just might be a good idea to look for a new place to live. Two weeks and tonight I started unpacking things into my new kitchen. I would say that my head is spinning, but I think I’m still in the stage just before that one, where I’m not even entirely sure what the hell just happened. Is happening.

I have WAY more cupboard space now.

#garagesale – was afraid books wouldn’t sell, but half r already gone. pagan books went 1st. pity, i wanted them 2 freak out my neighbors. about 16 hours ago via txt

The first day of garage sale was a roaring success. It was really hard for me and I ducked in and out the door a lot, but Shane was amazing. Giving deals, loading cars, helping little old ladies cross the street. When the potting stand priced at $20 and then sold at $15 wouldn’t fit in a woman’s car, he took her address and delivered it to her later. In the hubbub she’d forgotten to actually pay for it. He and I both draw a hard line on people actively trying to take advantage of us (cause that’s just yucky and not to be gotten away with) but we agreed beforehand that this garage sale was first about getting rid of stuff and second about making a little money. So neither of us were sad that a potting stand, 8 years untouched in the back of a shed, had been inadvertently donated to a good home.

#garagesale – lots of comments & general enjoyment of the atari 2600. some1 finally bought it for $20. about 16 hours ago via txt

And when there were two kids bikes priced at $30 each, the one with the flames being purchased by a grandma for her grandson when little sister, so adorable and wee, begged for the other boys bike (equally fierce in black and red) Shane gave them 2 for the price of one. This is why I love the man.

#garagesale – lots of people laughing at our CD collection, apparently garage-salers don’t take metalheads very seriously. about 16 hours ago via txt

And at the end of the day we still made enough to buy a new toaster, new coffee maker and new microwave for my new kitchen. (You can find the old ones at our sale tomorrow!) I LOVE the feeling of turning old things into new.

#garagesale – some1 just bought the dress I wore onstage as Agnes in Shadow Box. about 16 hours ago via txt

But no one would be terribly surprised to know that working a garage sale isn’t my favorite thing, ever. My home is my sanctuary and strangers give me hives on the best day, so inviting them to descend en masse and pick through my things doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice for me. And then you have the emotional factors – while I swear I was very good about not putting anything out for sale that I wasn’t able to honestly detach from, it was still oddly emotional at times.

#garagesale – day 1, made a killing, even with husband giving tons of deals. My hatred for garage sales might be upgraded to love/hate.

The worn out dresser that my Grandpa made himself – the one my mother painted blue to match my bedroom when I was 13 – now falling to pieces but bought for $5 by a fellow who looked like he would know how to fix it up nice. The woman who was so thrilled to find such nice yarn at such a good price – every skein chosen by my mother, some used to make afghans that I now own. So many yard tools that had belonged to my father and had already seen a lot of use when they were passed on to me when I was first starting a household of my own.

FEET HURT. But made enough in the garage sale to buy new toaster, new coffee maker and new microwave for the new place. Woot. about 2 hours ago via web

Onward and upward. And honestly, my spirits have been buoyed by the amazing people I’ve been lucky enough to have around me these days. There hasn’t been a day in the last two weeks that I haven’t been touched by someone’s kindness, a thoughtful gesture, an unexpected connection. I think, just lately, I’ve begun to realize what had always before been only the ghost of a suspicion – that I am a very lucky woman.

And OMG, the space I have in my new kitchen. about 2 hours ago via web

Another day of garage sale tomorrow, the kids will be off to Bend with my best friend, and on Sunday we move all the big stuff with the help of a lot of really generous people who weren’t smart enough to pretend to have other plans. And that will, for all intents and purposes, mark the beginning of life in a new home.

Two weeks later.

Because, you know, with two major deaths in my life in less than a year, life was beginning to feel sort of stagnant around here. Okay, snark out of the way. Things are happening. Fast, even. And not entirely by choice, either, which is always one of those things I’ve found most irritating about life – it’s resistance to my control or, sometimes, consent. But the point is that something is brewing, maybe not something that seems like a big change to a lot of people (look at me getting all defensive already, what is that about?), but is still sudden enough to feel pretty freaking huge to us. Blind-sided, we were.

If you’re sick of me talking so cryptically, though, and want me to get to the point, I hope that isn’t your breath that you’re holding. I don’t feel like I can come right out with it yet. So I’ve decided, in the interest of always looking on the bright side of life, (because that, my friends, is so very me) that I will try to make it fun by posting clues.

So here is today’s:

My burst of forced optimism only lasted about a minute. Now to even say I’m barely keeping my head above water would be misleading – it’s more like I’m still managing to come up for the occasional gasping lungful of air before being dragged back down into the depths by the oogie seamonster of the moment. (Today his name is Grog, he’s sort of gooey gray and his fingers are icy wrapped tight around my ankles and when he grins you can see the black rot of his teeth.)

While Grog is distracted, here’s what’s been stuck inside my head:

Dad was my foundation, after his death I was rebuilding from the rubble for years. But Mom was something very different, once such an integral piece, she worked hard in her remaining years to separate herself from my structure. I had no idea what to expect from her death except, perhaps, bloody carnage, but that was only out of habit. I see now what it is that she did, though – I see that she took up such a large space inside of me and I was so terrified to fill it with the wrong thing that I kept it gaping open instead. Eventually gravity did its gravity thing and everything began to slide downward. Now I walk around with my heart in my toes and my brain wedged into my left shoulder. On the surface I’m unchanged, but my insides are lumpy and displaced and nothing works quite the way I expect it to.

Meanwhile, conversations veer unexpectedly into strange territory, I find myself agreeing with things that don’t even make sense, what I mean to be heartfelt gets interpreted as sarcasm, potayto potahto. The words I once used to rely on get stuck in my throat because I can’t trust them any more. Not one. I lose more of them every day, I watch them breaking off and washing out to sea.

Who would I be without the purple in my prose?

You don’t have to watch Doctor Who to have picked up the basic premise – the Doctor, a bit mad, travels around through time and space in a little blue box that’s always bigger on the inside. Often, he saves the planet. Every once in a while the actor who plays the Doctor moves on to other things and a new actor takes his place, but it isn’t like soap operas where as long as both the old actor and the new one are vaguely blonde, we all pretend it’s the same person. Instead, there is death and rebirth, there is transformation, a regeneration. And the Doctor remains the Doctor but no one disputes the fact that he’s altogether different from what he was before, nonetheless. And in between more running and more world saving in that first episode back, as we’re getting to know him, he’s still getting to know himself.

“I don’t know yet. I’m still cooking,” he says, and he’s spitting out yogurt because it’s a new mouth and everything tastes wrong, he’s trying out new ties and not recognizing his own reflection and when someone says, “You’re funny” he says, “Am I? Well, that’s good then. Still not ginger, though.”

When a timelord changes, he gets a new wardrobe, a new sonic screwdriver, a new interior design to his Tardis, and if he should chance upon some old companion, one that once stood arm in arm with him against a Cybermen invasion, they would have no trouble understanding that this is the Doctor, but not their Doctor, not quite.

And I am so envious! I wish everyone who looks at me would see these changes, too. It would save me the trouble of having to explain myself over and over again with words that no longer fit and a voice that doesn’t sound like my own.

We mere mortals, earthbound and saggy, we don’t have such a clear delineation between our regenerations. The changes, the deep ones, take so much longer to show in our faces. The pain that I’m feeling today will express itself in the wrinkles and gray hairs of ten years from now, twenty. No one will remember and connect it back by then but me. I feel like I’ll know the origin of every mark. I’ll have earned each and every one.

I suppose I’m still cooking.

Po-tay-to.

The Doctor: You know when grown ups tell you everything’s gonna be fine, but you think that they’re probably lying to you to make you feel better?
Amelia: [rolls eyes] Yes.
The Doctor: Everything’s gonna be fine.

Who will I be, then? And will you know me? Will you try?

“You’ll be alright,” he says to me.
“No,” I tell him. “I won’t. I won’t be okay just for the sake of it. Not anymore.”
It’s true. If I’m ever going to be okay, I’ll have to earn it.
- Markus Zusak

March is dead and buried and I say hallelujah. I am a mold, normally I flourish in the darkness, or at the very least, I abide. This has been something much blacker than I’m used to, though, and I can’t help but keep glancing over my shoulder, making sure that it isn’t still back there somewhere creeping, getting ready to pounce.

No, that isn’t quite true. The fact is I know it’s back there, trailing me, a step behind at most. I can feel it in the prickle along my neck, in the heaviness that presses hard against my chest several times a day with no discernible trigger, in the way that the same people and conversations that once used to fill me up now deplete me utterly. I feel it there in the way words no longer behave themselves in my possession and I just can’t seem to make myself understood no matter how many of them I use and in what order. I’ve spent a long time feeling like everyone has changed, I guess, let me down or left me behind, but the one that’s different now is me. I see that now. I feel myself a stranger living in this skin and I can’t figure out why everyone keeps acting as though I’m who I was before. I don’t even remember her, most days.

So the truth is I don’t know if I’ve come out of it as much as I’ve decided to pretend my way out. Fake a little optimism back into my life. It’s funny really, the things that can inspire us, especially when we’re feeling well beyond the reach of the inspirational. I think the thing that finally penetrated the fog, my own private call to arms, was a song by Frank Turner called “Love Ire & Song.” I’d been wallowing musically until that point, of course, as one does when in the darkness. I’d heard the song before, though, enjoyed it without feeling a personal connection, but then one day it seemed to play at the exact right time with my head tilted just so and the lyrics went:

“Well we’ve been a good few hours drinking
So I’m going to say what everyone’s thinking
If we’re stuck on this ship and it’s sinking
Then we might as well have a parade
’cause if it’s still going to hurt in the morning
And a better plan’s yet to get forming
Then where’s the harm spending an evening
In manning the old barricades?”

I don’t know from barricades, of course, and I sense there’s something rather shameful and maybe even bourgeois in taking an anthem written by a folk/punk singer-songwriter about idealism in the face of aging cynicism and making it all about me and my personal journey.

But it is still going to hurt in the morning. Every morning. For the foreseeable future. And it’s time for me to go ahead and live on anyway. Whoever the hell I am.

So April. I begin with optimism, even knowing that my Dad’s death day anniversary is just over there, on Easter Sunday. Knowing that this is most likely the Easter Bunny’s last hurrah as well.

And knowing that this weekend is the unveiling of the Eleventh doctor, which I’m finding myself really nervous about.

Of course, beginning April at the dentist didn’t seem the most auspicious of starts. New insurance, new dentist – leaving behind the drive-thru dentistry we’d been utilizing, the kind of place where young dentists are just passing through on their way to something better and where old dentists come to die. A place where there is no rhyme or reason or plan to your care, just some vague tooth cleaning and a little glue for any that fall out when duct tape just won’t do the trick.

It got us by, but simply holding steady and maintaining wasn’t quite cutting it any longer and besides, on the last visit they were mean to my son (age 14 and never had a cavity, you should talk to him with respect, old woman) so now we’re back to higher prices and – one hopes – higher class. This was my getting-to-know-you visit, the first date. (New place, new people, with dental themed instruments of torture thrown into the mix I would call it the perfect circle of hell in which to serve time for my sins, whatever those turn out to be at the end of the day.)

And it wasn’t terrible, but first impressions were inconclusive. To be fair, if you wait until I’ve been leaned back at a 45 degree angle for the last fifteen minutes, blood pooling at the top of my brain while someone who looks about the right age to date my son pokes at my gums with some sharp poking thing, all while deconstructing the sorry state of my dental history over her shoulder to the new girl who, poor dear, gets lost from time to time and needs us to start over on that last bit – you know, the poking part – and then you breeze into the room to introduce yourself and shake my hand, I’m not always going to be at my most receptive to your charms in that moment. (There’s free advice for anyone wishing to befriend me. Try, at the very least, not to slice up my gums first.)

But so far I can say with confidence that my new dentist seems to be bald and enthusiastic, the latter of which would normally make me suspicious, but I’ll reserve judgment until after our second date in May. The rumor is that he’s generous with the nitrous, if this is true I won’t even make him buy me dinner first.

By the way, generally when I choose to wax a bit tragic about my dental travails, someone will pop up at about this point and say, “I’ve actually never minded the dentist” or even “I LOVE the dentist!” And I’d like to take a minute to address this person, whoever it might turn out to be this time. I say this with kindness. No one likes you.

What else? I’m doing Script Frenzy this year, which also started up on April 1 though I have yet to technically jump into the fray with actual writing. I’ve dropped out halfway through for the last two years running, but I have high hopes for this year. I’m going to write another stage play, I think, and I’m going to make it another silly one, I think, and I really hope it catches hold of me and takes off this time because I feel like I could really use that right now.

I’d thought that since a lot of my inner editor was put in place by my mother, by her deep-seated need to keep everything private, that maybe her death would set me free to do the kind of writing I’ve always thought that I wanted to do. I still think that, actually, but I also think it’s going to take some time and practice to get there. Right now I don’t seem able to write in the voice of anyone but a motherless child, I can’t picture life from any other perspective. I relate to no one beyond this nose. Still, it would be nice to take a small vacation from that world, and that’s what I’m hoping Script Frenzy will enable me to do.

Oh, and I finished the first Level of Rosetta Stone German, and I’m seriously proud! I still have absolutely no confidence in the speaking part of things – just yet – but I’m enjoying the code breaking aspects of learning a new language and I’m doing well at the reading and and general comprehension. Of course the three genders of nouns are still giving me fits. To augment my lessons I’ve been listening to German music (2raumwohnung, Panik, but my favorite is Oomph! – they’re like Rammstein except sexy) and watching Germany’s Next Top Model without any kind of subtitling. From this I’ve learned “links,” “rechts,” “gradeaus,” “du bist im Labyrinth” and that Heidi Klum doesn’t actually stop to breathe when she speaks in her native language.

In lieu of an elegant ending (endings are my weakness, in more than one way) I’ll show you a picture of the books I won’t have time to read this month, but got at the library anyway:

Pieces from emails written in December of 2008.

My daughter’s hamster died in my hands at 2:30 this morning.

I really hate Christmas. Admitting that I hated Thanksgiving seemed to go a long way toward enabling me to finally embrace that holiday, but I think Christmas is just too big for reverse psychology. I’ve been wallowing, truthfully. And trying to deny it and act like nothing’s wrong, and getting frustrated when I make all the right moves and do everything correctly and it still can’t make this holiday feel good.

Maybe you’re right, about Christmas being melancholy to anyone over 15. It sure sounds right. But I’d really convinced myself otherwise for a few years, there, I thought it was stressful and overly full but a good time, I thought I’d made it my own. This year my heart just hasn’t been in it, though, it’s all been one long stretch of going through the motions and even the thought of having to sit through two movies tomorrow seems more then I have in me.

It’s been a long fucking year and I think I’m just kind of over it, you know?

But then I made the real fatal error of the conversation and mentioned how negative she’s gotten, how she’s isolated out there on the river and she has way too much time on her hands to pick over things (yes, as a matter of fact I was speaking from experience) and make things seem worse than they are and I knew it couldn’t be good for her health. It’s all true, and she ate it up, glommed onto it like a lifeline, the one thing she thought she could do to win me or something, and then in true mother fashion twisted and perverted it. The last two times I’ve seen her she’s been aggressively, psychotically cheerful, she’s been trying so hard to prove to me that she’s turned over a new leaf and is never negative about ANYTHING that it makes my teeth hurt. It’s so fucking fake, I can’t stomach it. I don’t even know how to interact with it. It brings back nightmares of my childhood where she would pull this whole Jekyll/Hyde act, transforming in an instant whenever company came over into this sort of Mom-bot, this perfect hostess that I guess people bought into but to me it was just so very not real, and scarily so.

If you ask me, when it comes to Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll is far more evil and terrifying to me because he’s hiding the bad stuff, he knows it exists and he just thinks he can pretend it away and not be sullied by it. Hyde might be loathsome and evil but at least he’s honest about what he is. I preferred my mother negative, at least it was real.

Is it bad that I’ve single-handedly drank an entire bottle of Dark Rum this holiday season? And bought more?

Well I’ve felt trapped in a loop of questioning years for ages now, easily since my Dad died but possibly even before that when my life path changed drastically from student and theatre major to married mother-cum-housewife. There have been answers in places, growth and movement but just in pieces, in moments, and so often not the kind of lessons that stick. Usually the kind that come in the form of a realization that you’ve struggled toward and suffered into and finally reached that golden “Aha! Now I get it!” And six months down the road you’ve panted and struggled some more on something that is certainly altogether different only to reach the end and discover it’s the same damn golden Aha that you’ve already handled, still has your fingerprints, you thought it had changed your whole life view but you forgot it and had to live toward it all over again from another goddamn angle. Those are the answers I was mostly getting, the one step forward two steps back variety. So this year has been really different for me, there have been shifts inside of me, really profound, solid shifts. Those realizations haven’t just been dried leaves on the wind, they’ve been marble, carved to fit inside me and stay.

And most of them have been positive, they’ve been necessary, they’ve been answers I’ve been waiting a very long time for, and I can feel them settling into me and assuming my shape, I can feel how real they are. And that’s good, right? It’s nice to have some answers finally, it’s nice to feel all of these sudden strides. But on the other hand, I’ve just been pummeled. It’s been never ending. And I am just exhausted.

It’s been a long fucking year.

A Year in Email Blurbs, August 2008 – This is a selection of blurbage pulled from emails written and sent in August 2008.

I swear it’s been the most peculiar year. Such a crummy year, really, but at the same time I feel so much revelation and growth and movement happening, that I know it’s been an important year. I’m just really tired out from it. Remember that quote I found once that you liked that said something about there being years that ask questions and years that give answers? Well, this has been a big fat answer year for sure. And it’s all been immensely good in that way, I can’t even tell you how much fear I’ve lost with the coming of these answers, and how much more comfortable I’ve been feeling in my own skin, bit by bit – well, okay, depending on the day – but in another way it’s been kind of exhausting, this unending battery of revelation.

Stormy, not inclined toward the silly or corny without a little nudge, was half charmed and half horrified by Mamma Mia. Musicals are not her natural element. She still got a little extra gooey when Colin Firth was on screen, though, which just delights and amazes me. Anyway, Meryl Streep plays a character named Donna, and her daughter (played by the painfully adorable Amanda Seyfried) is getting married. At the bachelorette party, Donna and her two friends (who used to make up Donna and the Dynamos) show up on stage totally decked out ridiculous and sing Super Trouper. (A song that I myself once sang into a hairbrush in the privacy of my bedroom.) As they sing and dance and pull faces and it’s all very wonderful, Stormy tugs me down and whispers in my ear, “You’re not going to do that at my party, right?” I replied immediately, “Of course I am. Jacqui’s going to sing it with me, too.” And without hesitation (I would almost think she had planned it this way all along, if it weren’t for the mixed tone of satisfaction and horror in her voice) she said, “And Kristy, too.” As though it was settled.

I think today I’m mostly feeling bummed because my daughter is gone for the week and I miss her. I really thought I’d be the Mom who was all, “la-de-dah, my daughter is off on an adventure, isn’t it thrilling?” and I am, but I’m feeling sort of wretched about it, too. I don’t remember being this bereft on her last trip without me. You know what it is, though? It’s because right before this trip I actually saw her grow up in one of those all-at-once bursts, I got one of those brief but clear glimpses of the future where you can see your daughter’s path stretch ahead of her, shining and exciting and wonderful and pointed in the opposite direction from you.

I thought maybe part of it was the way I’d french braided her hair – she hadn’t let me do that in years. But later, sitting in McDonald’s having breakfast, she pulled the braid out and her hair fell to her shoulders, long and full. I nearly gasped aloud at the newest – just another in a series, I suppose, best get used to it – instant transformation. She said, “What?” as I snapped a few more pictures, and when I showed her she said, only slightly surprised and generally pleased, “Oh. I’m pretty.” Later that afternoon I trailed behind on purpose as we meandered through the park, staying in the shade and waiting for the meeting time. I watched her moving with that awkward self assurance – the cocky self consciousness – of a girl just discovering her own feminine power. Her walk changed slightly from moment to moment as she tried out different steps, she casually pulled her hair into a pony tail and secured it with the white band she wore around her wrist, a few minutes later she took it back down again.

She’s so young and fresh my heart could break, but at the same time I recognize that this isn’t about sexuality, it’s about confidence. If she can learn now that she can be attractive and lovable without having to dress in skimpy clothes, simper or preen, if she can learn now that she’s the one with the power until she gives it away – wouldn’t that be amazing?

So this week I miss her and I mourn a little, not just because she isn’t with me just now, but because I can feel her moving away in a bigger sense. But what a glorious thing it is, to watch her walk!

Things here are good. Well… No, they’re good. We’ll call it good. Reasonably good. At least, not bad, anyway. It’s just… You know how you can have years at a time where, looking back, nothing much happened? I mean, lots could have happened, but you’re still in the same skin and on the same path and there are no big surprises so without calling it boring – I’m not saying boring – it’s just predictable and familiar and days sort of blend in to one another (I know I’m mostly alone with this, but those days that blend into each other because the moments are so small and close are some of my favorites. Those lay by the pool days or the watch Doctor Who marathon days, the ones that aren’t flashy and no one will write poetry about them but they make up a string that when all viewed together gives you a warm fuzzy feeling and makes you feel like life ain’t so bad or hard after all). And then there are those years that happen that when you wake up on the other side of them you think, “How did I get here? To THIS place? When did this happen?”

The last time I had a year (or several, tied together) like that was probably when I went from one day being a slacker college drop out with aspirations for the stage and plans to have a long string of hopeless and doomed love affairs to write poetry about while living in my small but hip apartment in the middle of Big City, Somewhere to being a married mother on the precipice of owning a minivan living next to people who put Bush signs in their perfectly manicured lawns, stranded not completely willingly in Heart of Suburbia. In some ways I’m not sure even my Dad’s death shook me up to that same extent, as much as it most certainly did make me rethink every single thing in my life to be sure of it (Do I still believe in God in the same way? Is it the same God? Does green still look the same to me? Do I still hate spinach, or love the smell of coffee? Are my eyes the same shade of brown?) and it most certainly transformed my inner landscape in a profound way that nothing, not even motherhood, – well, maybe motherhood – ever has, but when the dust settled it was still the same life and I was still the same me. Just a little sadder and a lot more lost, but I still didn’t like spinach and I still avoided driving the minivan, so… But now, I think I might be having one of THOSE years, the one that hits you in hindsight with the force of a steamroller, and when I get to the other side of it I will be the mother of teenagers. (Cue threatening music of doom.)

No, really – I don’t mean it in the way that most people mean it. I’m a little nervous about the teen years, sure, but I’m still optimistic that we’ll get through it more or less intact. I think it might even be ridiculously fun. It’s just that it draws on such different skills as a parent, and it’s happening so fast that my head is spinning. I mean, we grew out of diapers slowly. We grew out of tantrums by microscopic increments. (Are they even over? I’m not sure.) So I guess I started thinking the teen years would give some warning, some time to adjust. But no, it really is more like waking up one day and suddenly your son speaks three octaves lower when you look up at him and he owns an electric razor and has inexplicable mood swings and your daughter is wearing a bra and shaving her armpits and debating the merit of various brands of feminine hygiene products. And all I can think is, “Am I qualified for this?” I’m not altogether sure. I passed my baby exam – squeaked by toddler mom-hood just barely, and have (in my own humble opinion) excelled the hell out of being a mother of kids. But teens? We’ll just have to see.

So things are good, but changing, and doing so in a rather shockingly abrupt manner, and I’m trying like hell to roll with the punches but that’s not a quality that has ever been part of my nature. So I’m faking it.

Springtime for Hitler – or – Where the Hell Have You Been?

Several years ago it occurred to me that February was a problem. Okay, well, it didn’t actually occur to me personally – I was too busy gazing into the abyss of it all and moaning.

Me: Baa! Mphlr pflrya yell maud ihth ee!
Wise Friend: I can’t understand you with that pillow over your head.
Me without a pillow over my head: GAH! I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me!
Wise Friend: It’s February again.
Me: Oh. Huh.

It happened in nearly that very same way for a few years before I began to sense the pattern at work.

Me: GAAAAH! I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me!!!
Wise and patient friend with a calendar: It’s February again.
Me: Oh. Huh.

Me again: Hey – do you think there’s a connection?

So once I’d embraced the obvious, logicking it out – yes, logicking is a word. It’s my word. Stop interrupting. When I logicked (there, is that better?) it out I assumed that the real problem of February for me – like half the people I know – is its association with winter. But not like the other months that share that season. November, crackling around the edges with the last bits of Autumn, and so full of family and feasting and football. Nor does February ever glisten with color and sparkle, with party and people the way that December does, while January is filled with the freshness and potential of another something new in a way that February could never equal with it’s also-ran timing.

No, poor little February, winter lackey – the only holidays that associate with it tend to incorporate rodents and often, heartbreak. (Occasionally in connection.) The shortest month on the calendar, it’s often the longest in our hearts. It’s the month when winter becomes the guest that stays too long – the one that eats all of your favorite cereal and hijacks your television to watch hours of The Rock of Love Bus. It’s the month when snow turns to slush and suddenly everything and everyone is gray and slightly soggy.

And so I prepared for it, the way that you do. UV lights and goals and plans and exercise and vitamins. And it came and it brought it’s misery right on cue; stole my voice and left me feeling pitiful. But I began to notice that for me the worst days by far were the ones full of sunshine.

Well, that didn’t make sense at all.

The sunny days always seemed to remind me of the day after my father died – not coincidentally, I think, in the spring. Memory of waking up to that moment of blissful ignorance that anyone who has lost someone is familiar with – that split second before the reality of a world turned inside-out crashes down around your ears again. I remember crawling out of bed and moving – raw and sore all over but on the inside – to the bathroom window and opening it to see sun shining in all it’s glory and bright indifference. Maybe some would find its presence comforting, but not me. It was a betrayal. Not only did life go on, it said, it did so cheerfully and even rubbing it in my face a little, too.

Nanny nanny boo boo.

Of course now that my father is no longer freshly dead, I take things like the weather a little less personally. Mostly. But the sunshine continues to rub me the wrong way sometimes, bright and judgmental and up in my business uninvited when all I want to do is wallow in my personal darkness. I mean really, is it so much to ask? And in February, when I’m still personally feeling pretty gray and soggy, the sun feels out of place. Or maybe it just makes me feel out of place.

So it’s really not February as winter that is a problem for me – it’s February as harbinger of Spring that’s the trouble. But saying you dislike springtime is kind of like saying you hate trees and flowers. You hate love, you hate oxygen and rebirth and you really, really hate hope. And you probably also kick puppies when no one is looking. But there it is – I don’t like springtime. Or maybe more correctly, I don’t like waking up to it.

In fact, if you think of Spring as something like the morning of the seasons, my aversion makes some sense. I actually like morning very much, I’m just not so great at getting up for it. In fact if it’s early and you didn’t issue directly from my womb (and therefore I’m honor bound not to kill you without some serious consideration first), you’d best not try to talk to me for at least an hour. Possibly two. With spring, as with morning, I’m like a bear blinking herself unwillingly out of hibernation, hungry and full of growl for a while.

Next time – The Problem of Blog. (And when, exactly, is next time? Gosh, I don’t know. I’ll be around.)