With Thanks

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Dear, Reader. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? My absence has not been due to lack of material, I assure you.  It could best be attributed to equal parts contented laziness and schizophrenic bewilderment.

I remember writing my last post – I was blissfully post-run, but also blissfully ignorant about the state of my future. We were getting ready to move into a new house in a new town, all of us … together. I could not anticipate the incredible difficulty and joy about to come my way. I could have written so very much, like about any of the following:

Maine Marathon Relay with my lil' brother, Jeremy, and friends Martin and Stefano

-first race report!!!

-moving for those who hate change

Colby's First 5k!

-learning to be soccer mom

-cohabitation

-pre-adolescent dating protocol

-pre-adolescent anything protocol

-why the world stops for soccer season (alternately titled “Yes, we are eating cereal for supper again. Do we have a problem with this?”)

-failure

-acts of friendship

-faith

-power of silence

-balance

You get my drift. While I try to embrace the journey of each day, I don’t always succeed, and I seem to have better luck doing this when the outcome is positive. Fall has been full, and the deeper I get into this parenting business the more I recognize the responsibility I have to reconcile all pieces of myself, both for myself and my family. In that spirit, I am back.

Regardless of what you celebrate this week, I hope you all take a moment to recognize your own journeys. I have so many tangible things to be thankful for (health, home, warmth, food), but the knowledge that I am a work-in-progress, that my journey continues, sustains me today.

The last car load - from Milo to Bangor.

August Flashback

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*This is a post from August 18th, the last day I had reliable internet access at home. Since then I’ve moved, started school, contracted the worst case of adult thrush the nurse at the walk-in clinic had ever seen, and danced through another wedding. I’m significantly less cheery at the moment. Word has it that my house will be back on-line tomorrow. More soon.

 

These August days are bittersweet. While I prefer July for beach-going (I got there once this year), August is better for everything else. Mornings tend to be bright and cool. Afternoons bring a surprising heat that is more bearable, less intense than that of July. Evenings warp time in such a way that, mid-stroll, you realize that it is nearly 9 o’clock and you haven’t started dinner.
This morning I’m at my computer, gulping coffee and allergy medicine in an attempt to get myself in working order. The siren call of my canoe distracts me from what needs to be done: packing and school work. In fact, I may soon leave my obligations for that same canoe, but we’ll talk about my lack self –control and focus some other day.
Back to August. For example, I packed up C and Sam-dog last night and drove out to the farm. For those of you who don’t know, ‘The Farm’ is the expanse of land I grew up on; the earth that holds my parent’s house, my grandparent’s house, one rock wall, a red barn, a frog pond, a gravel pit, and a ½ mile track formerly used to train horses on. Whenever C or I have a writing prompt about “home” or “your childhood” or “family” we are on fire. We can’t talk about it enough.
Anyway, we got out there, let the dog roam freely, ate our pizza and hung out on the porch. After supper C announced that he was going up to Gram’s (to read in the new, purple hammock chair suspended from a tree by their house), threw on his backpack, and rode his little bike up the dirt road. I ran up and down the driveway so my father could diagnose my stride, the reason for a recent injury, and decided to take a walk around the track with the dogs. We walked up past my grandparent’s house, past Colby hanging from a giant tree in the purple chair, past two tractors and my grandfather picking rocks in his newly furrowed fields.

As I made my way into the first turn, all I could think of was this seemed like a scene from a movie, I just couldn’t believe it was mine! The track was overgrown from many years without horses, and the dogs moved through the grass, only the bronze and black tail tips visible above the overgrowth. They dodged in and out of clearings in what must have been a game of doggie hide ‘n seek. I picked up my pace at the thought of snakes underfoot and gave up swatting the dragonflies whose peace we disrupted. I ran, the dogs played, the clouds allowed just enough sunlight to stream through. It was easily the most beautiful run of the year, and without ipod or timer, just what I needed.
And now, I am leaving my computer behind to see what kind of trouble I can stir up on a day like today.

Bug Soup

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I’ve been sitting here, for the past two days, stewing over the minutia of partnered communication. We’re still trying to sell my house, have found yet another property we’re interested in, and I find myself stuck in the “I’m willing to give so much but you’re giving nothing” mindset. Yesterday I actually had a mental list going. Not my proudest moment. This is not good. Now I’m easily peeved these days, and any aspect of Matt’s demeanor (body language, facial movements, exhalations for God’s sake) is fodder for my brain, which is already stoked with residual low self-esteem and general feelings of inadequacy. So I interpret every frown or deep breath as his super-secret-deep-dark-feeling-of-I-don’t-wanna-live-with-this crazy-bitch. It’s almost like, maybe, if I spend enough time trying to psychoanalyze the frequency of his eye blinks I won’t have to figure out what I think about our impending cohabitation. Um, yeah.

The funny thing is, in the middle of this general pissfest, I realized that this guy has loved me out of nothing. Okay, not nothing because I’m wonderful and beautiful and strong and all that shit. But he loved me out of my two-sizes-too-big jeans and out of the giant black hole I was in. One night when I inevitably began cooking dinner around the time it should have been on the table, I was rushing along peeling and chopping and measuring. I was getting a Russian Vegetable Soup facial as the steam enveloped us both, if only to remind us that we were all ravenous at 9 o’clock on a school night. One of us grabbed the canister of dill, and even though it looked off while I was measuring, I threw it in and stirred and stirred, happy with the addition and the prospect of dinner. Not long after,  I spied many, many specks that were not dill. I fished a few out and confirmed my suspicions; there were bugs in my soup. For the next 30 minutes we stirred the succulent soup and picked. Stir, pick. Stir, pick. Stir, pick. You want to know what we did next? Probably not, but I’m going to tell you anyway. We ate it, steamy and delicious, with hot buttered biscuits and tall glasses of iced water. Matt and I glanced at each other (when we stopped to breathe), complicit in the decision to not tell C about the guests-who-shall-not-be-named who briefly resided in our soup.

So you all want to know what real love looks like? A man happily eating the bug soup.

one lonely email

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Because I have so very much to say, but such little time to say it in. Here’s an email to let you know what’s going on ’round here:

Dear…

I looooooooooove you and am so excited to see you tomorrow. 🙂

Do you miss me? Here are 5 random facts to help you miss me less:

1. I am wearing dirty sweatpants, but clean underwear.
2. We ate a homemade dinner once this week…
3. Sam has slept in the bed all week. It now smells like dog ass and corn chips.
4. I’ve spent all my free time looking at puppies, baby stuff, or houses.
5. I hadn’t shaved since Friday until this morning, when I shaved the bottom half of each leg. Me thinks I have some cleaning up to do before ‘date night’ :/

I’m missing you, friend.

Hopefully I don’t need any prescription medication to make it through this one. What else is going on? I’ll tell you in June when I can sleep again.

It’s Just A Movie

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“Heather- it’s just a movie”. Thwap. Impending doom music fades out, I extricate my scarf-covered face out of Matt’s armpit, and lift my eyes. Approximately sixty seconds later I’m smelling Old Spice again. “Heather- it’s just a movie”. Thwap. This was the general play-by-play for date night.

Earlier in the afternoon we were lying around checking the movie listings. While there were other movies I wanted to see, Matt opened the link for Sanctum . It didn’t look terrible and because I was so grateful for a willing movie date,  I said yes. Mere hours later I was sweating in front of the water fountain trying to swallow half a Xanax. It’s not that I’m a total pansy. I slept with the lights on for a month after watching Silence of the Lambs, but whatever. I’m sensitive, yes. Anxiety prone, maybe absolutely. I could feel  cortisol ripping through my body with each scene. It could have been the result of idiot-proof foreshadowing since I never doubted that as the music reached crescendo SOMEONE was going to audibly, vividly, die (which would then take three minutes- gurgle, gurgle); but more likely my fight-or-flight response was triggered by the plot- people stuck in a deep, unexplored, inescapable, quickly-flooding cave. It hit ALL of my triggers. A week later, I can barely write about it now.

When I’m in teacher land, a perennial topic of conversation is: What makes readers readers? And this is it. For some people, it really is just a movie. For others, though, it is a story, and the thing about us is, stories are alive. When we read, view, listen to, tell, or talk about a story- we become part of its web as it becomes part of us. This movie, it wasn’t just a movie. It was a story that teased out events I didn’t want to remember, deep fears, connections to relationships and events… I can’t understand it, but some people can just watch the goddamn movie. It’s just a movie. They move about their lives and do not have any significant psychological trauma as a result. They watch a film and see a singular thing, they read a book and see inventions. I’ve cried at the end of books because they were over and I had to return to reality (even if my father tells me I’ve constructed my own).

Now when I lay this line on Matt (in response to “it’s just a movie”), he thinks I’m totally full of shit. “But Matt,” I say, “it’s just a movie for you but for ME it’s a STORY. It’s ALIVE! This is what makes ME a reader and YOU the guy who remembers to pay the bills”. He, my father, my mother, and both dogs roll their eyes at me. And while my credibility may be marred my a recent defense, a good one if I may say so, of the existence of unicorns, I’m still right. But that’s another story.

Sweet Solitude?

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We all arrived home late last evening, following what may have been my worst professional week ever. It was one of those weeks that made me question my career, values, and general worth. I was the worst version of myself on all fronts and could feel my sanity flaking away like old paint on a seaside house.

So very many things went wrong, and on any given week I may have been able to deal, just not this week. We are preparing to make an offer on a house. It is terrifying for many more reasons than I have time to explain. I am a hormonal hurricane, most realistically attributed to my birth control, age, and reproductive ambivalence. January and February are just plain hard. The student who taught me most about teaching (and living) died unexpectedly early one February. Another student, sweet and eager and wonderful, fell ill at school and died later that day. We were just back from Christmas break. And maybe I didn’t learn how to deal with this because I didn’t study to be a teacher, but it haunts me now. The memories of these students and the unfairness of it all, and the knowing that nothing really is ever within our control.

By Friday I was emotionally overdrawn. I let C stay late at aftercare and did 2 miles at the gym. Matt had been to the bank and because I am such a wonderful partner, I immediately began to question his financial judgement. An argument (during which I loudly threw a spoon at his face, told him to go fuck himself and make his own fucking dinner) immediately ensued and I spent the rest of the evening alternately laughing at the “family” movie we were watching and giving him the stink eye from my perch on the couch.

No wonder. He crept in this morning with coffee and gently sat down on the bed. He asked “are you going to have a little break down?” I nodded in affirmation and grabbed the box of tissues. So, post-little-breakdown, we spent the entire morning snowshoeing with the dogs. He’s off to do more side-work and I am home alone, not enjoying my quiet time. It turns out that my silence is most enjoyed (and efficient) when all of my people are here and asleep.

30

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Long story short. I’m dragging laundry up the stairs at 10:30 p.m. while the rest of my house is asleep. I have a thought about this birthday of mine, set down the laundry and head to the computer. Between frigging with the computer, attempting to locate my blog (similar to loosing your car in a parking lot? maybe), and loosing two attempted entries. I have no clue what I was going to say. But I guess that is it.

Write shit down, because you are going to forget everything.

I am covered in Post-Its of various colors, and have cryptic notes scrawled on both hands and up one forearm. While in the aisle at Target today, I wrote down the date of an appointment with a half-inked pen on the cover of my checkbook (while watching my son systematically pull the knobs off all of the cute kid’s humidifiers, probably positioning them all as little humidifier animal penises). I went to Target to get a humidifier, but left with a headache, a coffee, and some paper towels. I hadn’t written it down. I remembered thirty minutes into my drive home. Shit.

But that is it. If we don’t write it down, it’s gone. The subtext to this post is my constant fixation on language and text and how we use it and Are we all going to die in some textless, glam-ignorance-fueled apocalypse? A fear that is fanned by the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords among other things. Regardless of the motive or influence that drove the shooter, language is powerful; the sooner we recognize that we are responsible for what comes out of our mouths, pens, and keyboards, the sooner we can get about this growing up business.

Caution!

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But welcome!

This blog could be equated to a DIY attempt to build-a-cabin-for-under-$100. It inevitably will end up looking nothing like the picture and overdrawing my bank account. In the end, though, I hope that it provides a space for my “real person” (opposed to my teacher/mama person) to be. I’ve been able to take shelter and entertainment from various blogs over the last ten years, and have seen many of them outgrow themselves or their purposes. Currently I am mourning the end of my all-time-favorite blog. Farewell, Bitch! Concurrently, am also mourning my sex life, mental capacity and academic values.

The site will be under construction for a bit. I have some significant technological (and sleep) deficits, and am steadily working toward a functioning space.

Until then, enter at your own risk!