There

I wonder sometimes if you can long for something so ardently, and for such an extended period of time, that the longing becomes part of your everyday self, a vein of discontent threading your days.

I would so love to live where I was born, and it is more than likely that I never will.   That desire, unfulfilled, is with me always, so that I can never go anywhere without some part of me wishing I were elsewhere.

The love of place, stymied, is not unlike a haunting.  Flashes of the place I love visit me at least once a day, bubbling up from wherever they've been hiding, expanding until they burst.  

If I moved back, would I cease to be possessed?  Sometimes I think yes; sometimes I think no.  Most of the time, I know it doesn't matter.  

Six Words

Six hard boiled eggs becoming themselves.

Anxiety

Work seems to have tipped me over the edge into a vortex of anxiety, and that anxiety has kicked up some voilent and debilitating insomnia, which has in turn rendered me spectacularly and endemically anxious.  At least I'll probably lose weight?

Now I'm struggling against a cycle in which I'm terrified not to sleep, so I watch myself trying, so I don't sleep, etc.

But honestly I think this began as dread of the kind of busy I've been for the past few years, then busy in which there is no mental space to write or think, and in which I react to any interruption or thieving of my time with the viciousness of a cornered ferret.  (Why are vicious and viscous so close in spelling?  It's like a booby trap for tired writers.)

In heading back to my speech job, plus another child, I worry I'm headed there again, and it appears to have tipped me over a particularly nasty edge.

Nevertheless, life goes on.  

Suit Up

I'm back to work full time next week.  I've been back part time for about six weeks, and, truth be told, it's lovely.  I wish everyone had the means to work 20 or 25 hours a week- it's the sweet spot in which I feel most like a human being.  But few people are able to afford that kind of schedule. And, alas, I'm not one of them, at least not long-term.

 So Hi Ho, Hi Ho, etc.  I remember how strapped for time I felt in the spring (and, to be honest, for at least half a decade prior), and anticipate how strapped I'll feel soon. Being short on time makes me jealous of it, and exceptionally angry at people and tasks who take up mine.  That's not the happiest place to live, though it is (I speak from experience) better than having nothing to do.

Back on the horse.

Om Nom Nom

I have fallen in love.  The object of my affection is, I'll grant you, a trifle more cerulean than my usual crushes.  He's got more fur and fewer pronouns.  His sock puppet physique and lurching gait  distinguish him in the panoply of my unrequited tendres.

Oh, Cookie Monster.  It's you.  

As a child, I found Cookie Monster terrifying.  I much preferred Big Bird, whose dutiful monologues mirrored my own conscientiousness, or Bert and Ernie, whose gentle yet unremitting conflict, as eternal as the tangling of night and day, echoed my family life.

Cookie monster's untrammeled appetite disturbed me.  His frenzy was too close to my experience of childhood, the way feelings like sadness and fear and especially rage would devour me, roaring and gobbling, until there were only crumbs.

As a preschooler, you struggle to control your emotions.  As an adult, loss of control is a luxury you cannot afford.

I think this is why, as I approach middle age, I find Cookie Monster thrilling.  He arrives.  He eats.  He vamooses.  His life is a paean to unchecked desire at a time when my own life, as working parent of small children, is a giant to-do list.  Cookie monster does not interrogate or modulate or dissemble or temper or reflect.  He does not take deep breaths or put on his game face or do what he has to do. He simply shows up and eats all the cookies. It's dynamite!

In my real life, I'm on a diet.  No cookies or alcohol or sweets of any kind as I attempt to shed post-pregnancy weight.  But in my heart- oh, in my heart, I'm devouring.

Grind

I've learned I'm grinding my teeth at night.  The behavior has consequences- the tension in my jaw radiates down my neck and back and up into my forehead, and apparently my teeth are slowly being destroyed.

I'd get more worked up about this if I weren't generally hurtling toward death and debility at an ever-increasing rate.

Still, I wish there were some way we could excise the parts of ourselves that do us no good, cutting away the rot so the rest could heal. 

Oof

You really can't ever rest.  Yesterday was puke and mold and wet carpet and snot, and this will cost me worry and cash, outlays I don't particularly wish to afford.

On the other hand, the sky is a deep, autumnal blue.

Weather

Rain coming, buckets and basins and bathtubs full.  I vacillate, as I always do, between excitement and dread.  There's a piquancy to experiencing adverse weather from within the shelter of human habitation- it's a manageable thrill like, a mystery novel or a defanged snake.  But there's also the grind of being penned in with small and busy children when all you want to do is adjourn to bed with coffee and a book.

Someday.

Six Words

One of the last slow days.

Keys

I spent a good two hours looking for my keys today.

This is how my life drains away.

Whoosh

I number among the small wounds of adulthood its purposelessness.  Your youth is a high-speed train ride, a terrifying hurtle through country you don't understand toward a destination of which you've only seen mock-ups, dioramas of what might be.   But in adulthood, you have arrived.

Inevitably, in the manner of destinations, it is not what you imagined.  But this is a secondary affront. 

The real loss is motion, the way the world rushed by, your sense of yourself on your way.

Shots

It's a lousy business: watching your kid get hurt, knowing it's coming, and knowing you've permitted it.  I understand the beneficence that is vaccination, but it doesn't shield me from the pain of subjecting my child to pain. 

Labor Day

This is the part of summer in which you come to believe the earth has stopped turning.  It took long enough, billions of years of revolving, a time scale so vast that the year, as a unit of measurement, seems presumptuous, like telling the Queen of England to step up to the yardstick before she can ride the throne.

But it's happened at long last, in just these past few weeks, the ancient gyre of our planet shuddering to a stop, heat like a record stuck in its groove.

We go out walking, my son and my daughter and I.  Sweat gilds us, dampens our clothes, makes  laundry piles bloom. My daughter in her moist onesie probably shouldn't be out in this weather; we take her anyway, and the heat swaddles her to sleep.  My son complains, but desultorily; he's still the age at which it feels so good to move, all other considerations are chimeric, dissolving as he strides.

We seek shade.  Shade is our drug, our sweet, sweet high.  We crisscross the street for it, changing our route.  New to eternity, the sun is not kind.  It dogs us through the neighborhood.  It barks and bites.

September: the whole world holding its breath.

Weekend (Long): Redux

On the other hand, there was a moment this morning in which one child lay grizzling happily while the other child helped me extract a startling variety of objects from underneath his bed, and was so thrilled by the physical act of this, in the wedging of his small body under the mattress until he became, to the watcher, little more than a pair of wriggling legs, that he continued until we'd amassed a small army of forgotten toys -two lost bus passengers, a wooden stove, a small, incomplete family of penguins, three discarded stickers- while outside the window, despite the morning heat, the sky turned infinitesimally bluer, darkening one jot further toward September's slate, and I thought: 

OK.

Weekend (long)

Nothing strikes fear into a parent's heart like hearing your daycare is closed for a long weekend.  Having to entertain a preschooler for days at a time while sustaining the life of an infant, attempting to accomplish work, and keeping the household afloat amidst the tide of chaos is like running a marathon along a fault line.

I'm on Day Two.  I feel like long weekends used to be a good thing?