Storms

Today is the day when I woke up to go to the gym like normal at 6 am and got dressed and ready and looked out the window and was trapped again by the formidable foreboding hill and a whole bunch of snow. Today is a day when I can't fit in to anything right and the way that the house looks is large and evasive and endlessly dirty. Today is a day when my children seem to be walking around in a daze bored with the snow day stuff, how many times can one child make cookies and roast marshmallows by the fire?
Luckily Sadie has the piano and Nora has her dolls and Molly has her laptop and well Jonah has a stick. Gary is happy to make 25 rounds of cookies. It is mostly me in the way here today.
Today I had a disagreement with a sort of friend and I can't let it go and I am muddling over what I should of said and what I could still say.
I am sad because my favorite boss is leaving our site and going to pursue other goals, good for him, bad for me.
The snow is inching its way around me, encircling me, drowning me in cold and slippery slopes ahead.
It's only one day out of many days to come. The feeling will change and warmer weather will come. Riding out these feelings is like riding out a storm. I wonder where Nora and Jonah came from with their intermittent explosions and then I remember, they are me. I gave them the blessings of strong love, crazy laughter and mad unpredictable disposition. I gave them the abilities to make someone stand up tall or shrink down to earth with a few sentences uttered from my ever flapping mouth.
As I get older these things get easier. The waves are calming and life is out there more and less in here.
I get to watch them and maybe their storms will be less intense. Maybe not.
Tomorrow I will get up and go to the gym at 6. There is no storm predicted.

The Symphony

Last night Gary and I rode the commuter rail in to Symphony Hall to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This is not a regular occasion for Gary and I and it was nice to get away from our normal routine and do something different. We talked a lot about how we would get there because it would mean taking the commuter rail and then a green line T ride. We would have to be in and out of there dependent on someone else's schedule and it would be a long ride. However we chose to go this way and I am glad that we did.
Now that I live up on the hill here in West Gloucester, sometimes I can spend days on end in my own head, which is never a good place to be. Lately with all of the snow I have been stuck up here for long periods of time. Time in which I literally don't see anyone but my own family. Some people might love this experience but I am a person who really needs to be around people. I am not a person that necessarily needs to talk to people all the time or anything like that. I just really like the idea that there are other people around, in this world with me.
On the commuter rail there was a scruffy looking man who got on with back pack on back and two small boys, also sporting back packs. I was dying to know what they were doing there and I loved listening to this man with these boys on the way in. I imagined that they were running away from something or that he was recently divorced and had no car and so he had to shuttle his boys to his ex's house via the commuter rail. I imagined that they were recently homeless and trying to find a place to live. I imagined all sorts of things. It turns out that one of the boys was his son, another was his nephew and he was taking them for a sleepover at the Museum of Science yesterday.
People got on the train with their instruments and I thought about Gary as a younger man traveling around with his guitar on his back and I thought about the time when I left my mothers house at the age of 22 in search of my own situation. It was in a huff and a long time coming and when I left I, too carried a guitar on my back. Somehow it signified something to me at the time. Gary had been teaching me to play and although I never did anything with it music and Gary have followed me around ever since.
I saw people come on alone and people come in groups. I saw black people and white people and Spanish speaking people and people speaking languages I don't know.
When we got in to North Station Gary and I had some time to kill so we ate a sandwich at this little pub and that also was really interesting to me. We talked about what it must be like to work in a place like this where everything is so transient, so changing and ebbing and flowing. There was a man next to me who looked as if he may be a regular but that was more of a sad looking story than anything. The young female bartender was describing a patron to her coworker and she said, "you know him, he is like, well a little older like 30 or 40." and I made fun of Gary for this the rest of the night and he smiled with me a lot.
On the green line we were squished together like sardines but I didn't mind. I loved listening to different conversations. There was a really uptight young man sitting with his girlfriend and I felt so sad for her. I kept wanting to reach over and tell her how many other guys there were out there and that she shouldn't waste her life with such a stuffy guy. And then there was this adorable young couple goofing off together and I held all the hope in the world for their future. There was a group of drunk 20 something girls half dressed and obnoxious and I prayed none of my daughters would act like that one day and there was this little old lady clutching her bag, worried.
I stared at them all and I got to know them.
And then just like that they were gone and we were out on the street walking toward Symphony Hall.
The Symphony was magical and my brain and ears are still swimming.
On the train ride home I slept on Gary's lap and we arrived quicker through my sleep.
When we got off the train there was a guy limping and he asked us for a ride in to Gloucester and I thought, "no you can't give him a ride, he could have a gun or a knife, get in the car." But instead we opened the car and let him in and I learned that sometimes believing in people is enough.

A Piano

I hear a soft symbol of song singing to me.
When you put a key down
you hear a depth of eerie song.
Its song revolves on me.
Its song can make me sing "La La."
When I hear its song so beautiful
it makes me want to sing along.
It makes me quiet when I am loud.
It makes me calm when I sing along.

Sadie Marie Backstrom age 8

River River

River River
I love you.
River River
Come see me.
Upon the ocean
I will bring
some nice fluffy roses
I will bring.
River River
Be happy forever
And River River
I love you!

Eleanor Grace Backstrom age 6

me and Gary 9 years

Gary and I have been married for 9 years today. Nine years ago today I woke up and took a long walk around our neighborhood and had lots of thoughts to myself. I don't often get too many thoughts to myself these days so it is nice to reflect and think back on those times. I remember thinking about the actual event itself and what it would be like and my beautiful dress and all of that stuff. I also remember thinking about our life together.
I remember when I had Molly, I was 20 years old and I had no future thoughts. It was like, wow here is this baby and it will be me and this baby forever. It wasn't until she was like 4 that I started to really think about her as an individual, that she would be a teenager, an adult, an older person someday.
I think it was a little like that nine years ago, like I was thinking, "I really love this guy, we are in love and now we will be married in love and stay 27 and 32 forever. " Now we are 36 and 41 and someday hopefully we will be 51 and 56 and 72 and 77 and maybe even more. My face gets a little more laugh lines and I actually need to spend money on coloring my hair, its not just for fun anymore. Gary looks great, he has aged wonderfully, solid as a rock, never changing.
We are different together though. I never dreamed Gary would be the parent that he has turned out to be. I never dreamed we would buy one house and then another, that Gary would route me on to finish my graduate degree and we would be content to be together in this crazy town of Gloucester for this long.
I am reading this book about this woman who ends up leaving her husband after many years together, after raising a family and becoming old together. It is so sad and depressing to watch her as she just walks away from this man and to read about this loveless life that they had together. I adore Gary. I really do.
Some people grow together, some people grow apart.
I also look forward to our later years. I am not wishing our children older or any of that but I also relish my time with Gary alone. I crave it all the time and I look forward to it at the end of the day.
Gary and I are going to North Hampton for the weekend. Grandparents are watching children and we are free to be together for three days and reconnect.

having a teenager in our house makes life interesting

Thoughts on tomorrow

If there is such a thing as reincarnation I wonder what I may have been doing in previous times. I carry with me a great sense of humor, a morbid sense of melancholy and an aching bit of uncomfortableness in my own skin. What could I have been facing in other times? I think that maybe I may have died in a really horrible way, the way that I fear airplanes and fires and overall general catastrophe. I think that I may have starved and been really poor at one time with all of my anxiety about money and food. I know that I have traveled this road before with these characters in my life. In some of my relationships it is like a glove that I put on and it fits perfect every time, so warm and inviting and easy to slip in and out of. In other relationships it is like those jeans that I ached to get on after I had all of my babies, lying on the bedroom floor, sucking in and pulling at the zipper until I could feel my body beg for relief, such a struggle to feel right, to fit. I wonder am I here to battle it out with certain characters again and again in to infinity and what will break these cycles anyway? The holidays are over and for the first time since I met Gary, Mr. Christmas as we affectionately call him, I have admitted to myself that these are not easy times for me. Phew, thank God that's over is my general feeling this year. I feel like in my late twenties and early thirties I spent so much time looking around me at the way that other people feel and do things that it was hard to really get to what it was that I was feeling, my experience. My experience in the holidays is never really an accurate healthy one. I am usually in some state of anxiety and dismay and guilt because of my anxiety and dismay. I want to get back to the routine. I am a creature of habit. I like to know what to expect. I embrace the new week and the start up of the routine tomorrow. Although I homeschool and do all of these alternative cool things with my children and overall adore them, I can say that parenting has been the most blessed and most challenging thing in my life. It is with relief this year that I come to realize that it is ok to feel overwhelmed by the holidays, by my young children and by all sorts of things. My children are doing so well despite me and all of my shortcomings and we continue to move in our own directions, sometimes together in a music room in a zone all our own and sometimes separate in our own rooms reading or writing or dreaming very separate dreams. It's all the same, it's all good.

Beginning of the Year

1. The world is shifting changing and emerging all the time.

2. "Nora, do you need some toilet paper?" was the last thing I said.

3. I wonder what the next chapter in my life will look like.

4. A beginning is at the end of all things.
5. There's something to be said for time spent together.

6. Grateful is where I want to be.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to tomorrow my plans include playing music with my familycleaning and reading Grapes of Wrath (which I have never read before now!) and Sunday, I want to enjoy the last day before Gary goes back to the old grind!