sisters

Clean House

Normally I am working today but for reasons I will not go into I am here for several hours this afternoon on a Wed afternoon. Most Weds I work this crazy all day and night shift and come home to what seems like a motionless house, clean dishes, folded laundry and schoolwork all spread out of the table for me to see, drawings left out of Nora's and a pot of something left on the oven.
Yeah, my husband is the man.
Today I had to come home mid day and there lay every toy I think we own all spread out through our playroom. Toys I hadn't even realized that we still owned were there in some sort of a homemade town. Blocks and legos created the structures and all sorts of figures were used as people. It was a truly fun scene......... but far from clean.
The upstairs featured a similar situation and I sighed a loud sigh resigned to exist in this way for how much longer??
When we moved in to this new house I got white carpets for my bedroom. We were going to have a bedroom I told my husband, one all to ourselves where only adult things would be featured and having the white carpet would drill the point home.......
WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING!?
Our room is a toy room filled with everything from headless Barbie to siren screaming fire truck. Every kids book is of course in our room because that is where my children always end up reading in our bed because, well frankly Gary and I have the best bed in the house.
And the carpet........... (insert wild laughter here)
Well it's not white anymore, more like a dull gray with dribbles from nightly drinking of both children's concoctions and I am sure a few adult beverages as well.
Someday I will have a fancy house. My house will have oak thick paneled wood flooring and beautifully painted bedrooms with plants that stay alive and smudge free windows.
I will have curtains that actually match and stay on their rods for more than a week at a time. I will have a yard that is not filled with toys and riding apparatuses. And it will be quiet............
And then I will remember these days and long for them back and be willing to trade it all for my peanut butter bandit son who smudged his hands and face all on my brand new Chicos jacket that cost $88 today. Why I was wearing a Chicos jacket that cost $88...........well that is a story for another day.

My musical husband recently was flown out to NYC to perform in front of some big shot in the "industry." This was all very exciting for our house, Daddy had to get up at 4 in the morning and take the early flight and get driven around all day and play fancy guitars and all that cool stuff. But then he came home and well you know, settled back in to life here with us. He played his local gigs and goofed off with the Folk Chorale and Jonah downstairs in the basement and we all went about life.
That was last month and today he got another call. They are going to have him to NYC again and play a show at the Knitting Factory and so off he will go again.
Being married to a musician means a lot of different things to me. It means never being bored and always having a house full of music. It means having songs written about me and taking pictures of our lives together through lyrics that he has written. It means waking up at 3 am to this man playing "Sunshine of My Life" next to our bed. It means being able to request pretty much any song out there at any time and having it played right there in our kitchen for me, for us.
It also means late nights and waking up at 4am wondering if he is dead on the road. It means sharing him with the rest of the world and being really ok with myself and who I am at all times. It means really busy schedules, many weekend nights alone and not a lot of money. It means having to deal with the inevitable frustration and despair that comes hand in hand with loving someone who has been given such an amazing gift.
It also means deferring. This means that in my mind no matter what happens I have made this commitment to him and if he gets a call that there is a possible break for him I will succumb and our lives will revolve around this dream. It is difficult at times but in doing this I am always reminded in a visceral kind of way what my love for him is all about. If I asked him to stop he would but I won't and I can't because I really want him to always play the guitar because he really loves to do this and if I took that away from him it would be like taking a paint brush away from Picasso or taking Jonah's guitar away from him.

Starting Again

Jonah is in the bath in the other room and I can hear him from here. He is in the tiny bath with his two sisters playing with a bath full of toys while I type away. They are playing these games with these toys that I consider crap and if I had the choice would throw away in the blink of an eye. They however make worlds out of these toys and create scenarios all their own with the legless Barbie and the various mismatched legos and blocks and the caps from various Dora the Explorer bubble bath bottles that we just had to buy for a ridiculous price because it had a gigantic Dora head on it. Jonah is singing a song to himself in the bath about going to school. I am not sure why he is singing this song or where he has gotten this idea but there he is in the bath singing away, "I'm on my way to school, time to go to school, here I am at school." Of course Nora and Sadie are oblivious about this, in their own worlds dreaming big dreams.
Jonah works things out through his play in such a cool way. He is terrified of the dryer and washing machine and so in his play he features these machines prominently all the time. Today at the park he played washing machine and insisted that I be the dryer with all the appropriate sounds. He asks if there will be a watching machine at pretty much any location that we go to.
I am listening to this band "The Ryan Montbleau Band which I have been listening to a lot lately. Ryan is a guy that used to come out and see Gary all the time at places like the Paradise and Harpers Ferry. He used to come out with these little CDs that he had made himself on his computer or something and ask us all to take one. He loved to come out and see Gary play and he was just the cutest kid. So he grew up a lot and started this great band and they are amazing and really popular now which is so cool for him. Gary sat in with him at a festival this weekend and it was really sweet.
I feel like right now in my life at my age or at this point I am going through some sort of metamorphosis and in order to fully get wherever it is that I am headed I come to conflict a lot with the people I love. I have always been kind of a placid character always averting conflict and needing to please everyone and I am walking away from that but it's unsettling and frankly, it's isolating. I'm not sure where it is taking me and I am not sure how I got here.

Here among this wooden life and the stacks of unending paper,
People are starting to scare me and my insides are feeling safer
Than the outside world and the people I no longer comprehend.
I've been thinking about starting over
I've been thinking about starting again.
Starting again.

It's another adventure for the massive understanding,
Only time to think about the towns that we are passing.
We could read the signs and feel the blood in our bones,
And anywhere our hearts are beating we could call our home,
And we could start again.
We could start again.

We could throw it all away and laugh into the light of a new dawn.
Laughing at anything, we could grow new eyes and sing new songs.
And we don't ever have to keep it on the inside,
Once we get in the car and drive.
Starting again.

Divorce and other ramblings .................

We found out this week that two really good friends of ours will be splitting up, divorce is inevitable. Gary and I talked and talked about this reality, realizing that in our small wedding four of our closest married couple friends have divorced in that short nine year span. Our friend LJ not only divorced his wife but then went on to kill himself shortly after.
Things like this make me so confused about life and all sorts of things. I begin to wonder does this happen to everyone and am I just living in some sort of illusion that will inevitably be shattered when I realize that my own life was not what I had thought to begin with. I am still stuck to Gary like glue. I still feel the same way I did when I was a little kid, 21 years old, when I see him or hear his voice or watch him play the guitar. My whole world is completely and utterly wrapped up in him and his being. I can't imagine walking away.
And yet people do.
For whatever reason, people get up and walk away from the whole thing.
I think of this couple in particular a lot lately. I remember their wedding like it was yesterday. It was the same fall that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, the same season Gary and I decided to try for a son and I am almost sure that we conceived that son at their wedding. Another life, some more happiness for us, but not for them.
That makes me sad.
The world moves on here at our house. The kids are in a really good space and it feels like almost blissful here lately. Sadie is so interested in all sorts of things these days and we talk and talk for hours about so many neat things like friendship and God and death and family. She is so interested in learning new things and so excited about some of the classes I have enrolled her in. On Saturdays we have this really busy day where Jonah has a dance class at 9 and then the girls are both taking gymnastics at 103o and then we eat lunch together and Sadie swims for the swim team. I worried that this would be too much but my kids really love this type of day and I realize that I compare myself to other people too much. My family is different and all their own and we are definitely people who like to be out and about. Jonah talked and talked about his dance class and the girls were just thrilled with all the things that they learned today. Sadie loves the swim team and is so incredibly athletically talented. It is such a joy to watch her striving for something and then just full out laughing when she gets it.
Fall is here and with it I have been thinking a lot about my career and my future. I interviewed this week for a position at Hospice of the North Shore and that was really exciting for me to dream about. John is in my thoughts a lot these days as I think about the possibility of working with the terminally ill for a living. Fortunately John is doing very well these days. There are still those days though where I can hear him in the other house coughing and I wonder what is really going on in his body. It's such a blessing to have him here with us for all this time. He and my mother will be going camping again next week and I am just filled with hope for John and wonder and this process that we go through, life death, happiness grief, marriage divorce, endings and beginnings and then endings again.......

Labor Day

Today is Labor Day and as with most holidays of this nature one of us was working, this time it was Gary. It felt like an everyday and that was sort of ok with me until the neighbors went off to the beach and I started to feel yukky, fevery and tired then I began to wonder about what I was missing. All around me today people were headed to the beach and headed to something fun and cool and me and the kids were stuck hanging around the house. Jonah ran a fever which lead me to think less that I have Lyme Disease and more that he and I have a virus, we slept together for three hours while Molly listened for the girls and the girls watched an enormous amount of TV.
This is all ok, right?
I hate TV. I hate the thought of TV and my children sitting in front of the TV even once in a while and then I hate that I hate it that much........
ugh, I can't win!
So the next door neighbors are back and it is almost 7 and the kids are all outside playing like crazy. In two days they will go back to school and although I am relieved for the peace, there is another thing that the world is doing and we are not. The idea of picking out a cute outfit and getting new notebooks and having that first week is somehow appealing to me today. Definitely not appealing enough to actually go through with it all but you know kind of appealing.
Sadie just got off the phone with her friend Sophie. They talked about some of the homeschool kids that they know that will be going to school this year and when I asked her if she thought about it she looked at me bewildered.
She told me that this new friend that she made from down the road told her she was the luckiest person in the whole world, in the whole world. When she asked him why he told her because she lived in a place like a fairies house and because she never had to go to school.
I did buy them all some new outfits and some new notebooks but my kids don't really care about those things, they are way too busy playing.