Saturday

Saturdays are for snoozing and schlepping, but also for the staging of pocket-sized rebellions.

It begins with the 5:40 AM alarm, which I do not set.  The absence of this alarm makes my morning a spitball, a wandering pitch I must keep in view.  Sometimes I wake up at 4:00 and read novels in bed.  Sometimes I wake up at 7:00 and roll back over until 7:15.  And sometimes I wake up precisely at 5:40 AM, my brief flicker of insurrection drowned in the dark sea of routine.  (Add one baby and there's no telling.)

My next mutiny comes when I divagate from my usual running route.  (Yes, I still run; I am unable or unwilling to mount any serious challenge to the incumbency of exercise.). I still begin by running South on Oakland.  But then (SHOCKER), instead of turning West on Zephyr,  I continue South, following Oakland all the way down to where it fetches up agains the train tracks.

For a block or two, no more, I run parallel to the tracks, and this is it, my treat, because I have loved train tracks for at least decade, and there is something about being in motion alongside the possibility of motion, the long secret snake of journeys past and future, that is almost unbearably sweet.

Today I saw a train.  Only four cars, but they thundered so satisfyingly, steaming and screeching, a blue, train-shaped silence in their wake.

Six Words

Slipper season.  Too cold to wake.

The Heart Is a Scheming Traitor

Before I had my second child, one of the anchors of my "pro only child" list was the fact that, if I limited myself the child I already had, I could enjoy the relief of a hard demarcation, a resolute squashing of the lid onto that particular Tupperware container of my life.

(You know you were tired of book and door metaphors.)

Now that I have a second child, and am at liberty to luxuriate in the closure of receptacles, I am, naturally, besieged by regret.

Fun times.

Saturday Morning

Your husband and your son making pancakes in the kitchen; the baby asleep; a novel on your knees.  The sky lapping up against the walls of your house.

In It

I am having so much trouble reacclimatizing to full-time work.  I don't remember this much trouble the first time around....I think with my son, parenting was more stressful than work, whereas this time around, it's the reverse.

It makes me sad.  I don't want to be a stay-at-home parent, but on many days I barely see my daughter.  And when I do, for an hour or two in the evenings, she's tired and glazed.

I miss having slack time.  Not feeling like every moment is stretched thin.

Scraps

I have so much more empathy for my parents now than I did before I had children. Too late, I feel the weight of the things they did for me, the heaviness of ringing a dinner bell and packing a lunch and schlepping me here and there and everywhere.

***

Going back to work full time, my days have a headlong, breakneck quality, as if I'm tied to the back of a stampeding horse. Those few moments I do have downtime, I feel confused and unsteady, as if, after so many hours in the saddle, I've lost the knack of walking on solid ground.

***

I hate the hands into which our country is fallen, but I'm tired of expressing outrage about it, because I can't see how stoking my own pain and sorrow and anger does any practical good.  We've fetishized outrage, on the right and, to a lesser but no less pernicious extent, the left, and it's made us sick.

***

Spring died in utero.  Fall is rotting on the vine.  The Game of Thrones tagline should be Summer Is Coming.