The maze

Time alone is an interesting and different phenomenon in my life. As a child who spent days alone, it was my biggest fear for adulthood. The perfect solution, of course was to fill my house with a flock of the most wonderful kindhearted little people I could create and its been busy work ever since. Work I am so grateful for.
I have a new apartment that I am sharing with a friend and we both work so when I am here and not at home with the kids there are many moments like this where I am sitting in this peaceful feng shuied simple little place with the cutest little furniture and some artwork that I splurged on this week having all this quiet swim around me and in me and through me. And the most surprisiest of things is that I am not afraid of this silence at all.
I fnished my work week and the kids are still down at the Cape with Gary. I miss them like an organ or a part of my soul that is sleeping.
I talked to them last night and laughed and smiled for 45 minutes listening to all of their adventures and the traditions that we had created as a family. They went to the Canal after the beach, they went to Perry's for ice cream, they went to the 99 Restaurant, they watched  a movie. Sounds so great. I'm so glad for them. And yet, I don't miss these things at all. These were not my childhood traditions. I had borrowed them for years, thinking I could make them all my own and then realizing so quickly and suddenly that these were not things that I really enjoyed doing at all.
Next week, I get to take my little chicks to the middle of the white mountains, 4 hours away, by a lake in a cabin. No internet, no regular television. Just me, the kids, a full kitchen, a DVD player, and the mountains, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, birds, bears and deer that I can take in for six days. That is my idea of a vacation. That is a tradition seeped in my soul from years of walking through the woods or finding my place next to a tree as a child.
Yesterday I had some down town and went to a yoga class down the road and laughed through it with a dear friend of mine who happened to be there too. I went to my new local grocery store and bought spices and created this exotic halibut and lentil dish and as it turns out after all of my life of being terrified of food and worrying about my body and my weight, I am in love with the things that I can create from food. And I am really good at it. I made dinner for Jeremiah who ate it like a starving child and then chased him through Beverly listening to him talk and talk about his life, me twelve years his junior, huffing and puffing along side him.
And then more quiet.
A book, my iphone playing Ella Fitzgerald and the night air.

I have no idea what comes next. After all my my plotting and planning and mapping out my life, it's a maze right now. I think I'm up for the challenge. 

MUSSELS

 

The boy played a game

tussled tracked walking back

Smiling and carrying my abiding care

heart tears

in a cup

I gave to him three years ago.

It was a Tuesday.

It’s raining and then it’s sunny

the river flows with god

Or something you promised me yesterday

And I don’t remember is it summer

Is it nighttime?

What is the forecast?

How am I supposed to be?

How am I supposed to be?

You tell me

I’ll read it in the manual

Sam gave to me

twenty years ago

drugged out from the marsh where we wake up

You

Tall and silent chattering meek me

Jumping to greet you

It was a steady stream

and then it was drugs and dreams

And I couldn’t believe

you gave me away.

And now here you go again,

the boy on my porch

playing games again

so much older now

So much more tacit

flying words with meaning out of my faucet

and then a drip drip

and it’s hush

hush.

And so I’ll touch you carefully

And I won’t speak loudly

How am I supposed to be?

fearful frightened child like again

Or risen like the small careful mussel shells that we found along the marsh

all those years ago.

You asked me to eat them

And I swallowed them whole

in front of you

And then

for the world

in front of the mirror

with the sign that says “Stay Out”

Don’t touch talk look scream rave

I will

I will

I will.

May 17, 2015

Sadie looks a million miles away as I glance back at her, so steady and strong and old. How did she get so old so quickly. She has taken on the task of reading this blog now and its fun for her, to look back and revisit and to remember things she didn't even think she remembered until now. I have also been revisiting. Thinking about John, and then thinking about homeschooling, young childhood and now this, this new stage, adolescents, tweens and of course Molly is 22 with a child of her own (how did that happen).
It's a miracle and a curse how quickly these last few years have blown by and what happened and what will happen and what is clear and what is so unbelievably unclear. I write these words from an apartment I have rented and things are changing

at a neck breaking pace. And yet there are these slow moments where everything seems to stand still, like now, in this apartment, in the middle of my work day, having an unexpected break, eating my sandwich and listening to the turkeys outside my window. My friend Jeremiah calls them dangerous dinosaurs and has threatened to punch them if they approach him and I know he will if I don't intervene but I think they are sweet today, gazing up at me like they know me, like maybe they could give me some advise but for that tiny pea sized brain.
Sadie, Nora, Jonah and Gary are going to the beach house for the first time without me and I can't believe it. I can't believe my children are ever anywhere without me.
But they are.
And they have their own angels and their own ideas and hopes and dreams that sustain them and welcome them even when it is rainy out and there are no friends to play with. I'm so glad they have each other. This week I am working and have some easy plans to see Ashley tonight for coffee and to ride my bike a lot and to have lunch with my maid of honor at my wedding and this weekend to go to Maine to participate in a triathlon. Scary stuff, easy stuff, good stuff, different stuff.
I have hung a picture in my apartment of the three little kids and I at the Museum of Science from 7 years ago. Jonah was around three and needy and appears to be demanding something of me as I gaze in to the camera with the biggest mommy smile ever. I remember that day so well. Sadie was in her Red Sox shirt, short haircut pretending to swing a bat in the picture and Nora was looking away from the camera probably caught up in something much more interesting like a painting on the wall or a family walking a dog outside.
I love this picture.
The only other picture I have on the refrigerator is of Jonah and I at Justin Timberlake last year. We got second row tickets thanks so my dear friend Jimmy. He and I are sporting a really "cool" look and ready to rock. It's a younger version of me which is weird because it is also an older version of me. And this is what I am learning today, that with age and wisdom also comes this surprising innocence and humility and wonder as if all those things I knew when I was 30 have completely been knocked off the kitchen table, swept up and thrown outside along with all sorts of other crazy notions like predictability, self will and the fact that I have so very very little control over my spinning life. And yet, like a child, I awake everyday before the sun, excited to start again. I've been waking up like this for years but recently its with hope and kid like expectation. Last winter I awoke early to an unbelievable heaviness weighted down with age and something I can't quite put my finger on but it doesn't really matter right now anyhow.
I spent four days with these kids, now 15, 12 and 10 running around to movies, the ocean and around our community. They are my greatest joy. I am glad I can bring a joyful mother to them again.