Sleep
2:30 am is starting to feel like an ok time to get up. This is what all of those menopausal women talked about years ago in that yoga class when I was just 25 thinking they were exaggerating, maybe even crazy, too much time on their hands, rich, home all day, of course they were awake all night. Now I arise like so many night animals on the search for something and yet I almost know what it is but then I forget by the time I get downstairs and start the day's cleaning. The dog again accusingly looking up at me and then back down to sleep. Animals can sleep their whole lives away.
I have never been a big fan of sleep, seems such a waste of time with so much left to do and this is the season when I get most things done so mind as well take advantage. Those long dark cold days of winter and dread and achiness and slothfulness are over. Bring on the spring with new hopes and dreams and energy and with it sleeplessness.
I wish I still had some of the dreams I had in those younger versions of myself. Now when I start a dreamed up dream I quickly dismiss it, too old, too settled, too expensive. Why can't I just settle in to mid life? I look around at all of my mid life friends and they are happy to clean the house and grocery shop and stay still. My ex husband was so happy to stay still. I never want to stand still, I am always restless, ready to go, on your mark, get set, GO.
Jay likes to race me in the pool and all the observers around us must think that we are 25 the way that we laugh and carry on about it. Until they look closely and see the creases in our faces from a lot of worry, and sleepless nights and hard living and laughter and life because Jay likes to live like I like to live and when we were younger that was not so pretty.
Now we both kick each other at night with restlessness, wake each other up gently and then not so gently with, "Are you awake?..." "ARE you AWAKE?" until the other stirs. We wander around and think of things to do and talk and talk and talk.
I met myself in him.
It's 6:10am now and the house is still so silent. The kids will sing in their concert with Gary today and I will watch in the audience and it still makes me sad. I miss the community of singing with the folk chorale. One of the many loses to my divorce and choosing this life over the other. It's true what so many people told me a year ago, I might suffer this lose and so many others that I could not understand by leaving my marriage and I have and I continue to realize and recognize new and sadder loses.
Sometimes I mourn these things and then sometimes I tuck them away somewhere dark and out of view that maybe I'll come back to tomorrow or when I'm 90 or maybe never.
I watched Nora teach Jay how to use apps on his phone yesterday in the dark of our living room while we were watching a movie and it touched me, their friendship. They are like two peas in a pod, both a little funny, a little dark and awkward with each other and the world. She's his favorite and everyone knows it and we are all ok with it. She can get him to give her money, treats, rides, smiles and time. Mostly he gives her a lot of time. He tells me she reminds him of his twin sister, the middle one. Sometimes when we are all bunched up talking at the dinner table or in the car Jay will say, "wait, what Nora? What did you say?" As if he is the only one that can hear her to begin with, so stuck in that role of the middle child in between the overachieving older sister and the only boy. The boy, as Jay calls him.
I wouldn't trade anything for this life, not the wretched year I had, the money I lost, the home I lost, the community, the singing, the lawyers or court time. I could almost say, it happened for a reason... if I believed crap like that.