I have gone on and on through my blogs about my music ho days, back when I was trailing all over the southeast from St. Louis to ATL to Nashville to The Ham to see so many amazing independent bands, people who knew how to play, how to produce, and were FOR REAL. I’ve watched one or two go from nobodies, who actually knew me by name, to disillusioned acts with immense talent who got screwed by their labels, to big shots who didn’t even know me any more. I’m happy for them. I just feel smug that I know how to pick them.

Five years after having my baby I am finally at a place where I can start touching on that part of my life again. I fell out of the scene — was only able to make it to a few treasured shows over the years, Rush, Driveby Truckers, My Morning Jacket, but not nearly the number of places I wanted to be.

I don’t trust anyone with my baby except my mama, and all my friends have babies of their own, so they don’t take to kindly to keeping mine til two or four am so I can go bring the rock. And as much as I’d like to bring her wtih me to bars, I don’t think that’s allowed.

I believe in starting them young– her Daddy plays screaming guitar, my best girlfriend is a former struggling Queen of Rock and Roll, and music is always present in our house, from Common to Tool to Joni Mitchell to Dan Zanes. But I can’t take her to bars, and we’re not in one of those big cities like Houston that has huge outdoor festivals where you can bring your baby to absorb all that world of goodness.

So… I’ve been sitting it out. But I know it’s here. Or it used to be here, back when I was all over the Southeast following truly heartfelt, original, kick your ass music. All those real musicians, paying their dues, traveling, making no money and doing it for love (and probably for the beer and the chicks, get real, I certainly threw myself at a musician or two, and wish I’d thrown myself at a couple of others but I was too shy or too busy ‘making good choices’), were telling me, yeah, Montgomery actually is the rap capital right now, at least for the true, real, roots rap/hiphop.

And I’m all about the rawk, and the alt. country, but I’m all about true heartfelt rap and hiphop too. I love the sampling and scratching and the truly good spontaneous poetry and realism of the lyrics. PE and Wu Tang always blew me away. Listen, really listen. If you have any sort of literary sensibility at all you can hear it.

And then I got pregnant and didn’t ever get around to checking it out.

I LOVE music. It is not about genre. I have everything in my collection from Wu Tang and PE to The Smiths to the Meat Puppets to System of a Down to Swingshot.

It is about the music, the art, the lyrics, the feelings, the connections, the shared experiences played out in the music, and the people. Music transforms us. Someone puts their heart and soul, the harsh and the triumphant, out there through creative expression. A good rap IS fucking poetry.

And then I went to work where I work and the kids are all about this. They sit for hours and look at videos online. They have big dreams– can you tell me how to copyright my song?  So I responded, because these are three things that matter so much to me– libraries actually serving people’s actual needs/interests, music, and kids.

I had the privilege tonight of meeting Queazy and Li’l Chappy. They generously gave me their CD’s which I already love and will enjoy more than I’ve enjoyed anything since my last Wu Tang purchase. They are also *fine*. And Lil Chappy whipped out his LIBRARY CARD! That was like the biggest thrill of the evening.

I’ve listened to the hip hop stations around town, and heard things I like, but wondered how to cross over from big radio (cumulus) to the real thing. I know it’s here but I don’t know where.

Thanks to Queazy’s and Li’l Chappy’s generous donation of their time and thought and energy at the program tonight… maybe a few young people got some ideas. Maybe the kids will come to the library and let me teach them to blog and podcast and get them started creating their own work through audacity or acid.

And maybe I can crawl back to music, in what time I have left after working and loving my little girl, and maybe music will take me back.

It’s a big lovely room. That also means it’s got room for a LOT of crap.

It has been a horror since Christmas. Which was FOUR MONTHS AGO.

I can’t remember what the argument right around Christmas time was about, probably division of housekeeping labor (the fact that there is none, but we’ve settled that reasonably happily now), but I remember crying and telling my husband- – I think I’m going to start abbreviating his name CKK (Curt Kirkwood Kinda)– anyway I remember crying and saying ‘That room is ME!’

Sure, it was theatrical. But it was also true. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Good old mommy, just throw it in her room, she’ll sort it out. Or, I am the only person in this house who can POSSIBLY take care of this. I’d better put it up in my study, on top of all the other crap nobody can possibly take care of but me. I’ll get to it some day.

Since Christmas this room has been at its absolute height of representing me, I’ll tell ya. It was full of globs of wrapping paper, shipping boxes, packing materials, gifts yet unwrapped, and just shit that the entire family figured I could somehow find a good place for. My healing table (like a massage table) had turned into a work surface/catchall/hidey hole for more shit. You could not see the floor in here.

Then, obscured behind Christmas, was all of my hoarded craft stuff. I have gotten so much better over the years, but… when it comes to crafts and paper products, I am a hoarder. I cannot, cannot cannot organize or let go of fabrics, old diaries/notebooks, items that need mending that I should really just THROW AWAY, unfinished craft projects, scrapbooking stuff… It’s a horror.

Everything I keep, you see, I have to organize.

This room represents me because it takes on everything, and everything never gets finished or processed. I just say, sure! And I take on another task, or pick up another item or commitment whether emotional or physical and figure I’ll get it sorted out somehow and then stow it in my room or in my consciousness until I can’t even think. It’s very sad.

I think of this when I’m in my office, too. I am a stickler about keeping public areas of my workplace clean– tables, dusting, bathrooms– but my office is a piled up mess. My file me pile takes up a table that is, I promise you, a square yard. I’m so busy taking care of my staff and my patrons that my office never gets clean.

I threw away and put away so much. I could just about vacuum up here now.

I have two attic storage areas. My back aches from stooping to come in and out of the mini doors to those dark, miserable little rooms. When I go in there I see all the crap I have still managed to hoard, for years and years and years through over a dozen moves.

I have thrown away so much at every stop, and still here I am. I have boxes and boxes of books, diaries, photos, fancy and expensive clothes that will never, ever, ever fit me again even if they were to be in style ever ever again, holiday decorations… to me that unwillingness to throw away symbolizes fear and denial.

If I could just throw (most of it) away, that would be the energy of a person who is ready to accept and embrace abundance. The more we accept or retain crap, the more we attract it. I believe that with all my heart.

When I shut the sweetly painted doors of my attic storage, I can try to pretend all that stuff isn’t there. But I know it is, and there is going to have to be a reckoning.

What book did I just read that in? “There will be a reckoning.” That echoes in my mind– I think it was kind of comic, but WHAT BOOK WAS IT?

Ah!! Wee Free Men. One of my girlfriends put me onto Terry Pratchett for my stepdaughter and I really liked that book meself. I need to go dig up the next one.

What do you think… is taking care of me first, even when it means that something for others will not get done, still best? We said at healing school that when we show up authentically– which includes setting boundaries and caring for ourselves first– it frees others to show up authentically. But what if I don’t get my goals met at work, or what if something doesn’t get done at home? What if?

This is at the very core of one of my greatest lifetasks, I believe. We just finished Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed in my women’s book group, and it’s such a witty, insightful book. The insight comes from the main character’s sense that she doesn’t deserve– anything. It traces back to her relationship with her dad, and impacts her dating choices as well as how she takes care of herself and creates incredible self blame and psychotic post partum depression when her baby experiences problems at birth. It is just ingrained in her that she doesn’t deserve these blessings. I think that’s the spiritual root of my miscarriage a few years ago. Somehow I didn’t deserve that blessing. I’m not saying it’s my ‘fault’– I’m saying I need somehow to get in touch with that essential worthiness that is in every single human being except, it seems, me. Somehow I’ve got to part that veil.

It’s actually a species of insane egomania… it brings everything back to oneself. If you’re religious, this conviction is a sinful denial of the nature of your loving higher power and it’s holding you back from your higher power’s ultimate plan of joy for you. If you’re not religious, well, this conviction is just– a species of insane egomania that’s holding you back from joy and growth.

But it is so easy to know intellectually that one has a problem with thinking they aren’t deserving, and another thing completely to say, oh, yes I am, and in fact if I care for myself I’ll be there for my family and friends and coworkers more than ever.

What if?

There’s no answer. It’s just something to think about.

And… I can reckon, I can shift my energy to the kind that accepts abundance, some other day. I’m just glad to be able to see the floor, and I’m hungry.

I wish I could put the song on constant play, but I don’t know how and don’t have time to find out.

Maybe we have something to talk about…

I have six little moonflower seedlings in big pots downstairs. They’re destined for the northwest fence in my back yard, if they’ll ’make’ there. I haven’t had moonflowers in years. I hoarded some seeds many years ago, either from my mom or some very dear elderly friends, and planted them at my little shack down in the holler. But my boyfriend’s fat silver doberman dug up and ate the precious seeds and spent days after hallucinating on the couch. Who knew dogs could have drug problems? Needless to say I am tickled, tickled to finally be headed back in the moonflower direction. I have no fat silver hallucinogen-seeking doberman, and I think my dogs’ drug addictions are limited to chocolate and whatever’s fermenting in the compost pile or kitchen garbage can.

That two weeks each spring when I am actually thrilled that I live here in Alabama has stretched out for several weeks already. I got my grocery shopping done at lunch. I got the really ugly patches of my yard mowed after work, before the rain. I have a book club meeting at my house tomorrow. Shaky baby is snoring on the floor because she had such a big day today. I didn’t get to read to her, but I did yoga with her AND read to her last night, and I need the mommy time.

My Curt Kirkwood-looking husband is in California for his grandma’s funeral, so shaky baby spent the day with a wonderful friend of mine so I could work. I didn’t even have to take any time off. I’ve been giving, giving, giving lately, feeling very depleted/hard done by, and even though I paid my friend, I still feel like she pampered and nutured me– she picked up my baby at the library, brought her back to me shortly before quitting time, said so many nice things… Shaky baby appeared to have had a wonderful day– outside constantly wedged with her friends into the teeny tiny baby pool or playing at the water table, providing a bridge between the two boys, ages three and six. My friend said good things about the day, and sent me home with dinner. I’m not sure if the dozen or so insanely delicious falafel I ate were vegan, but I know the chocolate chip cookies I made this morning are, so that balances out, right?

I have two friends who really know how to mother girls. I mean, it’s not that I’m not feminine. I am, at least in many, many ways that matter. I am a feeler and a perceiver and very sensitive to others’ moods and prone to try to see both sides as best I can. I cry about really good, and sometimes even about really tacky, literary or cinematic emotional situations. I sometimes find upsetting situations hilariously absurd, and can’t stop myself from giggling, which pisses my husband off no end. I know how to love babies, at least other people’s babies, now that I’m no longer in the throes of lost sleep or soaked in breastmilk and spitup with my own any more, I really, really do know how. I have the magic touch, I swear, and babies give me so much joy. If those things aren’t feminine, I don’t know what is.

But I’m sort of, well, girly impaired. I’m a hippie. I don’t even wear makeup, although I’d like to, but I’m such a snob I’m waiting til I can afford vegan cruelty free expensive stuff. I am too tight and too busy to go look for girly clothes for work. I absolutely cannot, cannot accessorize. I wear a ton of rings, and a particular necklace that is very, very precious to me, but pearls? Scarves? Forget it.

I can’t remember the last time I purchased perfume, probably ten years ago. I finally, FINALLY got me some wonderful hippie smelling shampoo and deodorant from Lush… smelling good is so important, but I have just bypassed it for so long. I hope I don’t stink, I do strive to be hygienic… but smelling good (well, good to me, hippie good, or Clinique Aromatics good)– no brainspace for that, lately. I used to pride myself on it.

My other closest girlfriend C is a TOTAL hippie. That’s why I like her so much. She wears no makeup, never smells of anything whatsoever except maybe baby wash, wears a dorag on her head like a Swiss Miss or a Mammy, has prominent tattoos, says what she thinks, is very difficult to piss off (which isn’t to say she isn’t nurturing, sensitive or anxious, because she is as much so as any of us, perhaps more) and she is totally no nonsense, and it is so relaxing and freeing.

I have to add here that we’re all more or less hippies in my set– extended breast feeders (at least a year if not longer), cosleepers, organic food buyers, attachment parenters… so it’s just degrees of hippie, not whether we are or not.

H, the hippie friend who kept shaky baby today, always sends her home with her hair done in such a girly way. She looks like a different child– a little girl. She said to me, do I look seven? That comes from when I told her her Easter dress looked older, and she said, you mean, seven? So now I guess seven is the pinnacle of ladyship to her.

I do her hair, too, but I either jam a stylin’ hat on her curly mop head, do two (or more) spiky pigtails that look zany rather than girly– and that truly fits a pretty substantial side of her personality– or I do the southern smock and monogram pull to the side with a fat cloth bow. I’m pretty utilitarian, a one or two trick pony. I hate it that she prefers dresses… I put her in these Prince or Adam Ant or Liberace or Nancy Griffith-esque, late eighties-early nineties 18thC or froufrou military or psychedelic clothes that seem to demand those stylin’ hats or zany spiky pony tails. My friend just pulls shaky baby’s ponytail back a different way, and she looks… just like a little girl.

My other friend K got shaky baby truly girly stuff for her birthday– a tea set, a tiny cubic zirconia and sterling butterfly necklace, little Chinese stamps for her scrapbooking. This is the same friend who remembers hostess gifts, thank you notes, all the sweet little things.

My husband and I got shaky baby an automated baseball batting practice machine.

Both these particular girlfriends put on their makeup every day and look so lovely. I just don’t know how to do that!

I finally see the effects of age in my face… or I finally admit it to myself. I see where a little facelift would come in right handy. Wouldn’t it be better to get it now, instead of waiting til later when it was real bad? I think losing 30 pounds or so has contributed to the breakdown of my facial flesh… I’m sure it wasn’t hard living or stress or actual chronological years. It sure would be nice to have my high smooth cheekbone look back. Wonder what that would cost?? Is there any truly vegan, cruelty free product that will push and plump the crepey flesh back up? How much time would I have to spend with my legs in the air (yoga! duh!) to remedy this? Probably the next hundred years. I was looking over a slideshow today of 5 hair makeup and clothing makeovers that ’took years off’ the subjects’ look. H’mmm…

One of my glamorous girlfriends is slightly older and one is slightly younger, and they both look lovely all the time. So I know, at the bottom of it, it isn’t about age at all. Now that I’m pushing forty I’m just going to have to sit at their feet and learn.

If you see it closer then the finer points will show…

Not too much more/Too much more…

I am forgetting everything. I am forgetting tasks at work. I am forgetting to tell people things. I forgot to leave shaky baby’s car seat at her school so my friend could take her home from school tonight. What an inconvenience for my friend! I pretty much throw my hands up. I never used to forget shit. One of the banners of righteous anger I used to wave in my husband’s face is that I never forget anything. NOTHING. Kids’ lunches, paying bills, social engagements– never.  Nothing. So when was someone going to nurture me, remember for me, like I was doing for them?

So, here I am. It’s another message from the universe– just ease up, for Christ’s sake, it will be okay. There’s no way you will ever be able to remember it all, don’t be so hard on yourself. Or, if you can’t bring it to mind on demand, it’s probably because it’s completely fucking unimportant compared to the bigger fish you have to fry.

I used to know every ten digit phone number for every friend and loved one, often more than one per person, and just carry those around in my brain to call up at will. That’s no longer the case, you can bet. I know my mom’s just barely, my marrige counselor’s, my husband’s cell, and the eternal numbers for my best friend in library school and her mom’s. And that is it. Oh and my phone number from very, very early childhood– 229-3397. Right? That’s useful.

And I can’t remember the last names of people I see daily.

Who cares?

I don’t know why I have to quantify myself like this. Why can’t I just have pms, which is what I have?

But I hear those ugly words parents say to their children all around the globe and their children internalize– she’d forget her head if it wasn’t screwed on. I remember the words of friends when I in my preteen/tween/teen years growing up– you’re super smart, but you just don’t have any sense!

Oy, it drives me to drink. Let me go get a glass of wine. And turn on my Meat Puppets playlist.

And before someone who doesn’t know me goes judging… don’t tell me every thinking person doesn’t have these moments, especially every thinking mother. However embarassed I might be to be where I am and being honest about it, I know I’m not alone, so I’m not that embarassed. Sorry.

Where was I?

I also remember a particular epoch in my wine-soaked early twenties. I was telling my girlfriend about this really, really, really cool guy I lived next door to for a time, Dave. I know he thought he hit the jackpot, living next door to these two cute girls who always had a party on their front porch. He was one of the coolest dudes I had ever met and he was a wonderful combination of good values, good engineering student grades, and a little dash of bad boy within reasonable limits. He played guitar a little. He had huge brown eyes with thick black lashes. He was always trying to tell me about fractals, and Foucault’s Pendulum.

And the other day I was telling my friend about Dave, Dave of over fifteen years ago, because our book group is reading Foucault’s Pendulum now. And of course I picked the penniless musician and the redneck pothead mechanic/chef over Dave and never saw him again.

Or maybe Dave had a girlfriend and wasn’t strictly into me, that could be too. He was one of the dear, faceless many who got me home when I was too messed up to get myself home, one of the graces of God– you know, the there but fors go I? Well… all he had to do was carry me down his fire escape and up to the front door of my house. Still, I could have broken my skinny drunk little neck on those stairs, right? Or fallen asleep in my yard and fallen prey to who knew what.

Anyway, I was telling my friend about Dave trying to tell me about fractals and Foucault’s Pendulum. I told her I’m pretty sure I just looked deep between his thick black lashes into his big brown eyes and… glazed over. I probably nodded slowly, and then asked for another mason jar full of wine. The nice way to put it is, I was a party girl. I loved to dress up and entertain — such as entertaining is for impoverished college students with part time jobs.

In every arena of my life, I was coasting on being dumb and pretty and drunk.

Why can’t I do that now?

Because I’m almost forty, that’s why, I weigh 145 not 120, I’m too old for the flowing mane of my college days, I don’t live with my friend Missy any more so I can’t borrow her incredibly chic– I mean CHIC– clothes and pretend I am as wonderful as she is any more. Smoking isn’t something a cute bad girl does any more, it’s just cancer in a stick. I have to take care of my family and go to work each day so I can’t drink, and even if I could I don’t have a host of cool people to get drunk with like I did back then. Outside of a college campus, or over a certain age, people who get drunk regularly are just, well, they must not have anything to lose, you know? Or, the alcoholics in my neck of the woods just aren’t as cool– or just not as good at posing– as others I have encountered over the years. I  have a home and a family which, as much as I bitch, I dearly, dearly love.

I guess I could coast again. It took me a while to get into the crisis of guilt and self loathing that led to easing up on the drinking, shacking up, working hard at my job, going back to grad school and getting a life. I could probably get back there, with just a bit of effort and rationalization.

But… if I was drunk all the time, or even very often, I would not have the energy to keep up this elaborate fiction that is my life. It’s not even a very good fiction. The reality– my forgetfulness, my anxiety attacks, my disordered thought patterns and existence and shaggy yard — peers through the thin spots and around the shaggy edges… but I still have to knock myself out to try to keep it together. Nothing but Gymboree clothes for shaky baby… big house and big car payment… smart cool hippie mommy friends… giving too much at work, at  home, and to friends (I just accepted a nomination to run for vice presidency of a citywide organization, can you imagine that?)… healing school, vegan, yoga… but what would I be if, at 38, I just decided to revert to dozy, party girl me? I thought that ditzy, irresponsible little cutie was the fiction, that I would grow out of her some day and become successful, responsible and happy. But what if responsible, educated, bright, manager,  mentor, mother, hausfrau is the real fiction?

Bears thinking about, I guess. Putting aside the fiction is always a good idea. If one can just figure out which is which.

If you see it closer then the finer points will show…Not too much more, too much more/Not too much more, too much more.

I have some time before bed and I have no idea what I even want to do. What’s my passion? My passion is overeating and smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap merlot.

But it’s time to rescue shaky baby from an evening made up exclusively of watching Noggin– noggin is late night now, isn’t that cool? Now I can ignore her at night as well as all day!

The Meat Puppets helps a lot.

You are my daughter.

Maybe we got something to talk about…

“when you’re finished with the mop then you can stop
and look at what you’ve done the plateau’s clean,
no dirt to be seen and the work it took was fun
well the many hands began to scan around for the next
plateau some said it was greenland some said
mexico others decided it was nowhere except for
where they stood but those were all just guesses,
wouldn’t help you if they could”

Meat Puppets Plateau

I rediscovered the Meat Puppets because I was trying to explain to my husband that he looks like Curt Kirkwood when he just lets his hair get all long and raggy and goes unshaved. He really does, too. Kinda.

Staring at photos of longhaired, five o’clock shadowed Curt Kirkwood, preferably in a pink gingham dress, was my greatest comfort during a particularly uhappy moment in my romantic life twelve or so years ago. And at almost fifty he’s still pretty damn delicious. And he’s in Austin, where all good rockers go when they die (oh or Nashville, not sure which is better, Austin by a hair, though Steely Dan had been working out of Nashville for a while, and Bon Jovi’s there now right???). And lo and behold! They just put out a new album! And Curt is spewing his abrasive, probably aspbergers, nobody’s going to impose their agenda on me language– yum.

Anyway.

Top down is just not me.

For a long time I’ve been trying to get on top of my life by doing the Flylady thing– flylady.net, you know. I have tried so hard to impose easy, one-size-fits-all, brief, doable routines on my life that could be accomplished in a small amount of work each day, as opposed to either major disgusting house or major housework misery all day on a weekend day, which I just refuse to do, routines which would make it all come together with a minimum of misery, angst and resentment.

Don’t get me wrong– it has helped. A lot. I throw away a lot of crap, and then I no longer have to organize, put away, or dust it. I try to go by the handle everything once rule- go ahead and decide if it’s junk mail or important and file it, whether in the circular file or the important file, right away instead of having to touch it once when I get it out of the mail box and again weeks later when I finally get around to organizing the mail pile. I keep certain surfaces clear or easy to clear so that they can be easily and quickly disinfected often so I don’t have to get out the flamethrower because I haven’t cleaned them since last year. My house is in much better shape (at least I think it is???) than it was before Flylady.

But as a general rule, no matter how well it works, no matter how much sense it makes, top down is just not me.

There was a study in the late 70’s-early 80’s about programming styles of boys and girls using logo. In a nutshell, probably the nutshell of warped memory because I haven’t looked at the thing in twelve years, the study differentiated boys and girls like so. The boys decided what they wanted to do and then attempted to cram the reality of the programming language into the desired result– top down. The girls looked at the reality of the programming language and used that as a jumping off point to create from there– bottom up.

I see this in my life every day. Husbands relax after work (imposing desired result, regardless of reality all around them) while wives bust their asses, becoming resentful and too tired for sex, parenting, housecleaning, working full time (embracing external reality and starting at the bottom). As my brother says, men just don’t have that take on too much gene.

Managers strive to bring together reality and top down desired result, attempting to encapsulate and convey the desired outcome to staff, who relax and don’t concern themselves with the desired outcome because they aren’t paid to and they just want to deal with their own little fiefdom. My best friend’s husband keeps putting glass in the city recycle bin because it makes no sense to him that they don’t recycle glass. I don’t guess I’ll ever be a process engineer or computer programmer, but my husband can’t build a fire for shit or string a kite that will actually fly. I can, as I demonstrated beautifully on cold, clear, windy Easter night after his kite kept diving earthward and his knots popped off.

When I load the dishwasher the dishes almost always come out sparkling. My husband loads the dishwasher chock full, even though when he does that half the dishes come out dirty. He says, I refuse to be held hostage by my dishwasher.

Held hostage by your dishwasher?

How about tuned in to reality so that you can be effective, so that your kite will fly and your fire will burn?

Is my friend’s husband’s stubborn refusal to embrace the recycling reality a stupid refusal to see reality, or a thoughtful protest? I mean, it is truly wrong that our city does not recycle glass. I get that.

Some see at what is and ask why. Others see what isn’t and ask why not?

Or something.

This is a very, very basic difference. It would be unproductive to say one approach is better than the other. Even if bottom up is better (and I believe, know, that it is), never, ever the twain shall meet. I can knock my head against my husband’s reality all day long but it will only piss us both off– me because he isn’t doing it ’right’ and him because I am helping him and that pisses dudes off.

Sometimes top down is even useful. I find that at work, dealing with the folks I supervise, top down is sometimes needed or else anarchy will prevail. Anarchy isn’t such a bad thing… unless it is accompanied by people forgetting why we’re there and failing/just not bothering to serve the folks whose tax dollars pay our salaries. So, sometimes I do have to go all top down on ’em.

But at home…

It just came over me Monday when I was off and home alone.

This constant attempt to impose routine, and the consequent unhappiness because I can’t/don’t want to do it and so my life is still in disorder because I failed to tick off the items on my to do list, isn’t helping. It just isn’t.

I’m knocking my head against some basic realities.

I’m struggling to find the right simile or metaphor for this. I haven’t yet, sorry.

These realities are just not going anywhere. We have so much time and so much money. We have certain needs– food, sleep, shelter, transportation, paycheck, emotional and physical and social comforts. My husband sees things a certain way. All of these are realities I can knock my forehead against until it bleeds. I stretch and stretch, trying to manage both ends. At the front end I impose a top down strategy involving lots of proactive things like buying in bulk and routine– and still find myself stuck on the other end, out of money and out of energy, with needs unmet.

I can make running up the slide a way of life if I want to. And I have.

The endless to do list, the daily and weekly attempts to finally game the system, hit the sweet spot, make routine work for me, just wear me out and make me feel like a failure.

So it came to me Monday to try something different.

How about just being where I am and paying tender attention to that particular thing? How about setting down all the balls I am just barely managing to juggle — work, home, my own mental and physical health, parenting, marriage– and giving whatever single thing I am doing my full attention.

Instead of doing fifteen minutes in each room in the house, changing rooms each time the timer goes off, how about cleaning the kitchen for a while, as long as I want, and then going into my room and cleaning there as long as I want?

How about going to bed when I’m tired?

How about being off ADD meds which help me be supermom and just being scattered me for a while?

I gave this a shot Monday. I felt like I was in some kind of superconnected state. I say this because healing school work is the only thing I can compare it to. I was flowing through my day, and it was sweet. It made me nervous, like the first time without training wheels or water wings… but I am convinced of the essential rightness of it.

Those realities were still there… I could stop any time I wanted and try to claw my way up the flinty perpendicular bank of that flow– not enough time, not enough money, day slipping by, have to go back to work tomorrow, must be proactive, must impose routine, must go work on my budget and short and long range forecasts and plans, must accomplish this and this and this in order to create this outcome, must convince husband to save time and aggravation by finally succumbing to the reality of our dishwasher, or our dogs or child or… but why?

I might even make some progress scrambling up the bank. But all those loose ends would still be waving sweetly at me in the breeze– my failure at top down, my reality at bottom up… scrambling up the bank would probably just make my fingers bleed.

I thought, you know, this shit is all going to be there. Why don’t I just do what I want to do right now, and later I’ll probably want to do something else, and it will all get done, or it will still be there.

I didn’t check email. I didn’t budget. I didn’t create a list or calendar of things that must be done on or by certain days in order for my life to work out. I was just … there. I did some dishes. I folded some laundry. I did some writing. I printed some photos. I did some reading. I ate. I just was.

I’m not describing it very well. It really was a moment of zen, though. I haven’t had one this big since I read Haruki Murakami’s Windup Bird Chronicle. Not that I can remember anyway. It’s so funny how a truly useful paradigm shift just sneaks up on you slowly and silently.

One more listen to Plateau… who needs action when you’ve got words?

Good night!

So my huge, beautiful friend used to tell her teeny weeny older sister ‘shutup or I’ll sit on you!’ I thought that was sooooo funny on so many levels. Like, if I have to be this big I am going to own it, and take advantage of it. And since she was so much bigger than her teeny weeny older sister, it would have been bad news for teeny weeny, too.

So I was cleaning up the mess from my new mania tonight– lemon cutout cookies from the Vegan with a Vengeance cookbook, covered in a mixture of 1/4 c each vegan butter and soymilk, 2 c flour, and a bit of almond flavoring and food color. The colors of the frosting are so deep and so beautiful, and I bought all these beautiful sanding sugars too, and the worst part is, the cookies are so damn good that I have to eat them as soon as I frost them.  They are gorgeous, but nobody will ever know because I can’t stop eating them. I’ve made four batches of these cookies since Sunday or Monday. I simply can’t stop.

Tonight I frosted another batch and then finally got a grip and put it all away. I was finally able to do so without having an anxiety attack. I promised myself I can get them out again, any time I need them. I hated to throw the last of the frosting away. I almost couldn’t do it. I could make just one more batch…

So as I cleaned I picked up and brandished my little cheapie frosting squisher  from the dollar rack at Tarjay (I need to break down and get a real pastry bag) and thought of all the things I could frost. I could frost my furniture, appliances, walls and floors, my dogs…

Consider yourself warned.

And shutup or you’ll be next.

I can’t believe I didn’t have a religion category for this blog before now. Crazy! I think about religion, and pray, all the time. What the hell, how did I avoid giving it a tag here all these two years I’ve been doing this blog?

Tell me spirit, what has not been done? I’ll rush out and do it… or are we doin’ it now? I’m so behind on my contemporary independent music. But this My Morning Jacket song just sticks so sweetly in my head, and it’s so right.

What I have on my mind is something I’ve been thinking about for a good month, but haven’t been able to sit down to write about it for various reasons. Tonight I’m so tired… but I’m going to try to knock it out quickly.

My women’s book group read a book called Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. There were so many transcendent moments, and so many laugh out loud moments. She writes in a clean, self deprecating style that, if you’re not careful, will slip the profound sweetness of her experiences right past you. She had me from the first sentence, where she is lying on the floor in her bathroom at two a.m. in a pool of tears and snot, bawling because she doesn’t want to be married any more. She doesn’t want babies… she is depressed… she has always looked outside of herself to figure out who she is and what she should do… she is at an all time lifetime low and she has no idea what to do with herself. Somehow, though, doors open and she travels to Italy to eat for three months, to India to an ashram to pray for three months, and to Bali to learn from an old medicine man and find balance.

I’m calling this a three meeting book. I have only been able to meet once, but there was a meeting about it before that, and we need to have one more because some of us still couldn’t make it and I know so many of us have so much more to say. We read Shirley McClaine’s Out on a Limb in January, too. With both of those books, I just want someone to tell me– is there or isn’t there? Within us, or outside of us? And I just want to share it with the girls as much as I can.

Then around that same time I watched one of my husband’s Penn and Teller Bullshit dvd’s with him. It was about the funeral industry, life after death, twelve stepping, and a wonderful trick on bottled water drinkers– they filled different fancy bottles from a hose in the back of a restaurant in LA, and had people saying all kinds of ridiculous shit about the different kinds of water that had supposedly come from raindrops collected in the rainforest or whatever.

So to sum up, Penn and Teller said you need to live now, and be cognizant of the bullshit  you or your family will face from the funeral industry when you or they are vulnerable when a loved one dies, and if you are fortunate enough to be able to do so, call your mother.

They also said that the bad thing about twelve stepping was that it forces people to admit that they are unable to handle addiction or its effects alone and must call on a higher power to help them out. Now, is there anything wrong with that, really? Not for me to say. I think their beef was more that folks are forced to go to AA meetings and espouse some kind of religoius belief whether it’s right for them or not, when twelve stepping isn’t the be all to end all in recovering from addiction, their success rate is no higher than any other method, that such meetings reinforce one’s sense of one’s own inadequacy, weakness and helplessness which helps to create the addiction in the first place, and that the slogans and rules and sense that you can’t kick it alone and you must continue to come to meetings smack of cult.

I dunno… I kinda like my twelve step stuff. But the bit about how the power of positive change– or negative choices– resides firmly within oneself is pretty important to me, as well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I turn outward to see if I am okay, look for reinforcement as to who I am and whether I am good enough or ’doing it right’. I bust my ass, throwing parties, cooking dinners, helping others, serving, in my career and in my family and in my social life. Am I okay? Dunno, let me look at my paycheck, or around my house, or ask my husband, or my best girlfriend, or my mother, or God, but God doesn’t usually answer (or does s/he? that was one of the discussion questions for Eat Pray Love, and I am just not sure, in the context of her story, or in real life.). The greatest source of my okayness is actually my daughter, and that has got to be fucked up. Or is it? I think the love of a parent or a truly loving caregiver for a child (or other helpless entity) is the closest we get to God in this world– and all of us have experienced it, whether as a child or as a parent, no matter how briefly or how it is manifested.

But I’m so drained. My happiness, or sense that I’m doing it right, come from things I have to work really hard for, things I never can get quite right, not from some certainty within me. I’m spread so thin, and while I haven’t had the breakdown or the opportunities Elizabeth Gilbert describes, I think I recognize her crisis as my own, and as one every thinking person must go through, and as the nature of coming of age in our society.

And I’m still working on that. Stay tuned.

Well, I don’t have the answer to is or isn’t, within or without, angels and heavenly fire or spaceships and aliens or– just ravings written down long long ago to try to get people to act right. I think a lot of thinking people don’t honestly know for sure, either. It’s not that I don’t worship, or find happiness… my garden, my child, vegan cooking, literature or art that touches me, certain friendships or moments with family… so many things are both idols and sources of true understanding of the goodness in this universe.

But I do, at least, have an answer when people push me to go to church.

My marriage counselor encouraged me to go to church on Easter. She turned the knife by telling me to take my baby– I’m a bad mother if I deny her that comfort. I tried saying my husband is a bit of an atheist, and she said, well you go, because it nourishes you. I tried saying, I hate church in this town because church is segregated and she said, well mine isn’t. Sigh.

I feel like such a dumbass, going only at Christmas and Easter, although I have to admit it did my heart good to go to the Unitarian church Christmas Eve this year. The message was right up my alley, if you’ve read my annual post about the true meaning of Christmas–every time a baby is born it is a holy night.  But…

I didn’t have time to, or didn’t feel she had the time for me to, explain. Three years of healing school… many years more of study in various religious traditions, not to mention feminism, marxism, and historicism… I actually embrace my husband’s atheism, at least for him, although my spiritual life has had a bit more dimension than his… hell, the hand of God has reached down and literally touched me a time or two. It was unmistakable. But… healing school… Jewish and Sikh friends… Penn and Teller… But now I think– well I can’t explain my whole belief system right here and now. But at least for that case, I think I have a pat answer that will shut most people up.

Don’t get me wrong. I love church. I miss it. I am telling you, I can spout random scripture for any situation. But…

So here’s my pat answer.

I’m actually ordained to minister by the Estuary in Nashville. I am my own church. Sometimes I worship by doing yardwork. Sometimes I worship by being the best parent, librarian, or social activist I possibly can be. Sometimes I worship through delicious vegan cooking, or through tending to relationships. Sometimes I worship through my healing work or consumption of literature or through my own writing or through spiritual study.

I don’t have my liturgy and apologetics quite written down yet– but I am my own church and I am pretty solid in a lot of my beliefs. I  am ordained. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And that’s a key part of my beliefs.

As my dear friend Annie Pearl said to me when we were both working in a terribly dysfunctional, abusive office (that’s not her real name, but I call her a pearl because she is just so amazing, one of my dearest mentors)– when you are a leader, it is just you and the lord. You can’t go giving your power away. You have to suck it up and stand up straight and do the work.

But it’s not just when you are a manager of a large agency or business. It is when you are trying to figure out what do do about your marriage. It is when you are suffering from loss, grief, illness, or paralytic anxiety. It is when you are biting your tongue when you are at your wit’s end with your child, or trying to figure out what do do with your life, or what you have done when it’s too late to change. It is just you and the lord. But really, it’s just you, and, well, you.

It’s just me. That’s not hubris talking. That’s humanity, humility, anxiety, and doing the best I can. That’s an open mind, an open heart, and some serious imperfections and knee jerk psychological defenses talking. I don’t know. But I do know it’s me, and me.

And I don’t need to go to church. Well, maybe I do, but not for that reason. I am my own church. And it’s just me and the Lord.

I’ve spent the last two weeks and way too much money sweating over trying to have a great birthday party for shaky baby yesterday. I am an extremely ambitious party planner, but I am not a top down person, and my husband figures if you can’t get it done the day before or the day of it’s not worth it so… you can imagine the chaos and mass of half done tasks all through the house and yard. I really need to call up my inner military strategist.

I also really need to be more consistent about all those things most of the time so I don’t have to panic when it’s time to have folks over. Or throw away all my stuff so dusting is not a major project. Or, just get over it. Why can’t I just say, fuck no I don’t dust, ever, why would I? My life would be so much easier.

I can’t believe how much I stress. I just want so badly to have people over, and I forget between times just how badly I can screw it up. I never hit the right stride of preparation and relaxation. Or else, I need a maid/server.

We spent her birthday with a dear friend of hers from school… then I had a cold and stayed home with her Wednesday as well, then our baby sitter had a terribly contagious issue at her place so we didn’t have child care Thursday so I split my day up between having her all day and working the evening 1/2 day… then back to work in earnest Friday, half a day Saturday and that insane party.

I think the kids had a good time, truly, and I hope the parents did too. We did manage the pinata of course, and to decorate cookies. A couple of friends brought very nice additions to help out. The weed flowers which make our back yard look so ragged, but which are so beloved of shaky baby, were a huge hit, they were scattered everywhere like fresh rushes for us to tread upon. Thoughtful parents took all the dangerous implements of destruction or bodily harm that I thought I’d adequately stowed away and truly adequately stowed them away. I am trying not to think about anything except the positive– like, after everyone left, my weekend still had two days left in it.

I took her to get her hair cut Thursday, and washed her hair in real shampoo tonight– we usually do water only, or Tate’s Natural Miracle. Her little curls came right out. They are tighter than botticelli but looser than corkscrew, but cut so close to her head they just tighten right up. When you look at the back of her head you can almost hear ’sproingggg’. I need to get her one of those silky mob caps women used to wear to keep their hairdos pretty as they slept, or just a satin pillow case.

As I kissed her good night I realized I’ve spent most of the last week simply celebrating her existence. That is entirely appropriate. She’s an amazing little girl and she is an amazing blessing. I wished her happy birthday again. She said, am I six now? I said no, 359 more days. And we need to think of something special for when you’re six, like going to New York or Paris like Eloise. She said, will Eloise be there? I said no, but we can go to the same places, right? But we need to save our pennies.

My step daughter is here– my stepson had to stay home so he could be in a robotics competition. Today we went to the park in the morning and ate McDonalds breakfast (I know, not vegan, but a girl’s got to eat) picnic style, flew kites, talked to one of my girlfriends who was there too, went to Lowe’s for garden plants, kept a friend’s children for several hours while she’s in the hospital so her exhausted husband could clean and nap, decorated more cookies, and when he took the little ones home, worked a bit in our raised beds and planted some of what we bought today.

You should have seen my little 1.08 year old out in the four o’clock sun and breeze. She would lay on the beach towel, butt in the air and face to the ground, kicking her legs out– just luxuriating in the fresh air and the loving earth under her cheek. It was a beautiful thing. I love all of the kids but they mostly entertain themselves– the 1.08 year old is usually stuck with me. I did take about ten minutes or more with each child especially to do something with them, though. I’d envisioned their visit as a structured repeat of the birthday party, or actually as a chance to do the birthday party right in all the ways I’d failed yesterday… but they arrived just as we got back from Lowe’s so I couldn’t prepare, so nothin’ doin’. They were a bit bratty, but shoot. Their mom’s in the hospital, I had not sorted anything out for them to do– it was fine. I know that even when one of them (including mine) is crying or tattling every five minutes they’d still rather be together. I sure wish shaky baby had let me play the ’whoever pops their balloon first wins’ game though.

Have most of my herbs planted, the ones I spend a fortune buying at the supermarket anyway, and some flowers… husband working on strawberries, peppers, tomatoes, onions… have no idea whatever what to do with the rest of the yard. I got an extra azalea, some Spanish lavender and a gorgeous blue (really purple) hybrid tea rose. I did not get the hydrangea… I thought about how much space it would need in full sun, which would be exactly the area that I’d prefer to keep open at least until I plan my yard a bit better.

The places I want to fill up with lovely fragrant blooms are in shade to semi shade. For the rest of the yard I have in mind these woodland/cottage/formal gone wild curving vistas stretching away, leaving plenty of lawn for play and leading the eye or the walker back toward a couple of different seating areas among the trees and flowers, plus a butterfly garden… curving vistas really take up a lot of space, and a lot of planning, and a lot of money. Too much is not enough when it comes to putting plants in, and it looks shabby to just put in a bit here and a bit there, especially on that endless east fence line. Trees always look so much more stately in threes or rows, and I don’t know how I’ll work it out and stay within my budget and get much done during each planting season, and the more I think about all we want to do the smaller my yard looks! We can always move our raised beds, of course… We’ll see.

I did realize that I want only green foliage and purple, white, lavendar to gray, and variations on blue and fuchsia that appear purple in my vistas. That was a HUGE step forward. Knocked out the Carolina jasmine (jessamine) I wanted for the scent but… wrong color!! Fringe flower is the right color and it smells lovely… but it was seventeen dollars. Next time. The pale purple hybrid tea smelled delightful so that was my splurge.

And so… off to clean party mess for a time before bed. One more lovely weekend day to go for me before back to work!

August usually sucks, the holidays are often kind of hard, and then one of these transitional spring months usually does too. I know the saddest day of my life occurred in March 2005– though if that’s as harshly as tragedy brushes my life I’ll be a lucky woman.

Maybe the alignment of the planets just made the spring transitional suckiness a bit earlier this year.

My friend who kept shaky baby from 5 months to one year so that I could go back to work has been caregiving and ministering to the needs of the little family in the trailer across the road from hers. The grandmother’s been desperately ill for a long time, but she was the sole guardian of three little girls, her granddaughters, ages 5-11. The mother’s in prison.

My friend’s entire church and neighborhood family has been knocking themselves out to keep that little family cared for and together. The old lady probably didn’t have access to care and resources that might have postponed her death. The girls in my friend’s community got together to clean the trailer once while she was hospitalized. They said it was nightmarish.

Once she broke her back a year or so ago, it’s been downhill from there. But she fought it every step of the way. The hospital finally sent her home with hospice care to die in dignity and comfort (such as it was) surrounded by loved ones. Liver failure finally got her– maybe hepatitis from a blood transfusion?

The Sunday night before President’s day they sent the girls to church so they wouldn’t be there for ‘the end.’ My friend walked across the road to say goodbye– she could only stay gone for a minute. She gave her two little boys popsicles and told them to stand in the window and watch mommy till mommy came back across, and they did. My friend was thoroughly heartbroken and shaken by the sound of what must have been the death rattle, and sickened with sadness and pity by her physical condition.

She said goodbye, and said she loved her and they would watch out for the girls, and went home, and it was only a short time after that. The girls are destined for adoption, everyone prays by a good family who will keep them together. My friend’s best friend took the girls to buy new dresses for the funeral and jewelry for Nanny to wear in the coffin… the youngest was still asking ‘but who will stay with Nanny?’ because someone had stayed with Nanny at all times through these bad days… and a chapter everyone fought so hard for so long to keep open, has closed.

Civil Rights hero Johnnie Carr had a stroke in February. I just couldn’t even think about her dying, even though she was 97. When these old ladies go on and on, with such perseverance and dignity and loveliness, you don’t think about them going on finally.

She has been a fixture, all these many years, at every charity or organization dedicated to creating a better community and social justice, probably right up until the day before the stroke. I saw her out and about one year and heard her speak in a voice that was still strong, clear and lovely. But she did give up the ghost, and we listened to her funeral some — 10 am until –? over the internet, until the signal got bad and wouldn’t stream any more.

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King. I am okay with death, especially when it’s someone who has lived a long and fruitful life. I just hurt a little, selfishly, for the gap left in our community– or at least, what I perceive as a gap. But more on that some other time.

Then last week my mother wrote to tell me our beloved old neighbor up in Virginia where they all live had died. Sitte (Lebanese for grandmother) was born in 1916, and so would have been 92 this May. For me, this was sudden. I know she was almomst 92, but again, when you see an old lady persevere with dignity, strength, and loveliness– and perhaps when she’s not strictly family– you just don’t see it coming.

Sitte was also a fixture. She raised three children by herself, cutting hair, and had to continue raising them and their own children, and now she had great grandchildren. She was about 4 and a half feet tall. Her wit and observation was greater than that of most folks 1/3 her age. She was never without her gold bangle bracelets, and her hair was thick and curled so beautifully. She wore it 80’s style, layered and curled away from her face and a little poofy. Well, because she could, right?

She trudged around visiting the neighborhood in bootee slippers. She worried that people had enough to eat and a warmup for their coffee or tea. She smoked about 5 cigarettes a day, sitting on her picnic table with her feet on the bench, and avoided the neighbor who always bummed Sitte’s cigarettes because his wife wouldn’t let him smoke. She had lung disease, and that’s what killed her, but at 92 who’s going to quibble over 5 cigarettes a day? At least she still got outside. She was notoriously private and denied any health problems at all, but she was also marvelously open and asked the hilariously honest questions and made the tricky observations most people were still too foolishly delicate to address.

I got to know her because her son, who’s just younger than my parents, moved in across the street and began to take care of my grandparents during my Grampy’s decline. My parents didn’t move up there til my Grampy passed away (In the shitty month of August, 1998). Before that, Jok cleaned their pool, mowed their lawn, hung their Christmas lights, fought with the recalcitrant shades that were supposed to roll down over their screened in porch, did anything they needed.

When I went back up there the final very difficult time, for Grampy’s funeral, Sitte looked hard at me and said can I make you a sa-alid? You need a sa-alid. She spoke slowly and sweetly but it was not because she was any less sharp– I think it was a combination of a very faint Arabic accent and the Virginia drawl.

She trudged back across the street to her house and then trudged back over to Grammy’s with the most delightful salad I have ever, ever tasted. It was shredded, not torn or even worse in big nasty un torn leaves. It had mint, peanuts, vinegar and who knew what else in the sweet, spicy, sour dressing. Texture and flavor were perfect, just perfect, and that small thing just broke my heart — just the right small thing, at just the right time. It was so healing and comforting.

Cooking is one of my modes of worship, or one of my idols more like, but I have never tried to duplicate that ‘saalid.’ I did try a couple of times to duplicate her baklava– nothing doing. I’ve never had baklava as ambrosial, either. It was so good it was impossible not to eat, and eat, and eat, even though it was drenched in sugar, just drenched and you knew as you ate it that you were headed for stuffed misery and then sugar crash blackout. Oh my goodness.

Ten years later, my parents have been living up there for almost ten years, and I’ve had the delightful experience of getting to know Sitte and sharing shaky baby with her. She truly was family. I don’t know how I’m going to tell shaky baby, but maybe she knows.

My mother made her a rag doll the size of a five year old, with black hair and flirty pink kissy lips and huge brown eyes and named it Lillian– that’s Sitte’s real name. Shaky baby taken back up — as we used to say in East Tennessee– taken back up with Lillian the Sunday before Sitte’s death. She dressed Lillian and talked to me at length about what Lillian was into. I didn’t really think about it much. Lillian had a date, but I told shaky baby we had to go to gymnastics but Lillian could still have her date when we got back.

Shaky baby told me the next day that Lillian’s date had been ruined. That was the day my mother and grandmother woke at 2.30 am, unable to sleep, and peered across the street but did not want to intrude, and got ‘the call’ at about 3.30.

Mother never called me when Sitte was in the hospital or when they sent her home also to die in dignity and comfort. She never called me the day Sitte died– she apologized and said she was too upset. I think my mother had been consumed with Sitte’s comfort at the end. The last night of her life my mother was across the street taking care of Sitte’s physical comforts, and I am sure she just didn’t want to think beyond that moment of communion. Then that sleeplessness at 2.30 am, probably moments of recognition and farewell she didn’t realize, and then the call.

I talked to my grandmother and she said ‘that’s the way I want to go.’ I said yes, but please give me some more time! She said I don’t have any control over that. I said I know. But please give me some more time.

That was wrong of me. I need to tell my grandmother how she has been a crucial anchor for me to who I am and who I want to be for so many years. The many kindnesses she shows are precious. The fact that she’s simply my grandmother ties us together. But what really quickens my heart is the blessing that extended family is. We were talking in counseling the other day about what a heartbreak it is not to know who you are. I am so blessed. It’s not that I know who I am, exactly– it’s that I know where I came from. I need to stop being so desperately grateful. I need to appreciate her, and tell her she can do whatever is right for her, whenever she and the Lord are ready.

With my Grampy it was different– he was in terrible pain and in the hospital at the last. We were close, but not ‘like that’. His solitary habits and occasionally hurtful words and old school maleness kept us wedged apart. I knew very well I was loved, very well. We just weren’t close ‘like that.’

He looked at me with those huge brown eyes from that hospital bed– I always wondered if my slightly dandified Grampy, with his long pretty fingers and nails and his fancy leather slippers over dark socks, might be of some Middle Eastern extraction himself– anyway he looked deep into my eyes with his big brown ones and said, I’m so tired. My desperation that he not leave me was matched by my desperate desire that he not suffer. I went away, he died in the night, alone in the kind of dignity that was right for him. I still have his huge Navy issue glasses that he wore to read the paper til the very end, and a tiny, hugely overpriced teddy bear I gave him when I left, to be with him when I could not. And I left, and went home and told my parents this was it and to get up there NOW, and they did, and that chapter was closed.

But my grandmother is a vital, independent lady, ten years younger than Sitte, but in a similar place of perseverance and dignity. I’ll likely get a nasty surprise from her some day, too. I think, pray, she will be healthy til a sudden end. That’s what Sitte always said– I hope I drop in my tracks.

With any luck I’ll get to see her again and tell her face to face how much I bless her presence in my life and how I want to get out of this selfish place and into a more adult place with her. It doesn’t seem like something you’d say in writing or on the phone, could get completely lost in the translation. Of course we’ve always been oddly linked across time and space. So if I’m thinking it she probably already knows. Still, I need to get up there. And I will.

I have some low level angst about (among many, many other things) raising my child and stepkids living here in the Dixie Burbs because I feel strongly that children need unstructured outdoor time in order to thrive, preferably in the country. We live on a busy street, our land is stripped of topsoil and floral or animal diversity, and there’s no f-ing way I would let my kids out of my sight for any amount of time *at all* even in our spacious fenced in back yard. I’m terrified  they’ll wander away and get hit by a car or that someone will entice them with candy or just snatch them.

As a child I spent hours alone doing things I would never let my child do alone at the same age, ever. I spent hours outdoors by myself. I walked for hours in the woods, sometimes in charge of my much younger brother, and played at the edge of ponds and creeks.

My husband grew up in Napa CA but it was a different place then. Starting from about the age of eight he and his ragtag band of friends stayed out on their bicycles all day long. They could safely pedal all over town, and wild, undeveloped land was just around most any corner. He never heard of any strangers abducting or trusted adults molesting kids left alone in this way, and nor did I.

I couldn’t let my child or stepkids do that, I’d be panicking the whole time.

Too, I wish my childhood had been a bit more balanced. I wouldn’t take anything for those long hours of freedom in the woods but my family always lived in pretty isolated spots. Social support really helps a child make sense of and heal from trauma.

For me and for my husband both I think the long, long hours out in the fresh air in all weathers was a blessed refuge from unhappy (or worse) home lives.

But looking back on it I can’t imagine much that is more precious. The fantasies spun– everything from Narnia or Tolkien style epics to Little House in the Big Woods-style survival on my own in the snowbound woods– the serenity found, the difficult situations that began to heal in those hours outdoors– there is just nothing better. I think a lack of nature– wide open space, freedom to navigate as one pleases, fresh air, sunshine, cold or heat, mud, dirt, plants, insects– makes a healthy child, emotionally and physically, and I think lack of those things is at the heart of many so-called ills for today’s kids, no matter how loving and present their parents are.

Unstructured time outdoors instils a contact so desperately needed –with basic physical realities, with one’s physical self and one’s inner resources– and so painfully absent. I know I certainly am missing it ever since I became a creature of cerebral pursuits, by turns plodding and suffering incredibly through educational, professional, romantic, financial and parenting experiences.

I’ve always felt a faint-to-painful unease living in urban / suburban situations but over time I’ve just learned to make do, as we all do. Having a baby brought me closer than I’d been in years to the pleasures and boundaries of being a truly physical being again… but that was only the tip of the iceberg of what I did not even know I’d lost.

So at our place we have these crappy scrubby trees that are probably just weeds nobody ever cut down and then it was too late and they were trees.

We spent several hours working in our yard this weekend. (I asked my husband if he remembers trying to throw away the kindling wood, and told him I’d blogged about the whole tree/fire saga. he just made a ‘nyah’ face at me. Haha!) Anyway, darned if she didn’t climb those crappy trees and just love it. It was the first time I’ve ever seen her do such a thing. My ass squinched up real tight, reflexively and painfully, in the way that it does when I’m afraid something will happen to her– I had visions of falls, like in Bridge to Terabithia, wasn’t that it? or of her getting hooked or cut or worse on some jutting branch or the chain link fence next to the trees on her way down. I had to control my urge to hustle her down out of that tree, and reduce my admonitions to her to be careful and hold on tight to only once every other minute.

And it was pretty darn neat. She was so happy.  She climbed over, and over, and over. She installed herself in one of them and just stayed up there, peering at us through the leaves like a gorilla in the mist and saying mom, dad, look at me! Look how high I am (about four feet). She sang, and sang, and sang, Winnie the Pooh style, little made up songs about how she felt up in that tree. She got stuck over and over and went from asking us to get her down to navigating her own way down. She begged to climb the tree one more time when, hours later, it was finally time go go in

I suddenly remembered something I’d long forgotten.

Tree says climb.

I remembered at least cerebrally even if I couldn’t really bring it back, the compulsion of childhood to climb any and everything vertical. Because it’s there! What a wonderful mindset to be in– tree says climb. I climb. Why can’t we live our entire lives that way?

Of course my angst kicked in– I can’t give my baby real nature, she has to climb these crappy scrubby weed trees.

I realized that to a child a tree is a tree, whether it’s an ancient crab apple tree with limbs broad enough for me to lie down on and stuff myself on crab apples, or a scrubby little crap tree in the Dixie Burbs. I always got in trouble because I could not control my longing to climb a small young ornamental tree in my grandmother’s tiny suburban back yard (it’s huge, now, in spite of all the abuse it took from little me). She’s just four, almost five. So many mundane, substandard things are full of wonder to her.

What a lesson. I feel even more grateful for our yard, such as it is. I realize that she has the faculties to create a precious experience of fresh air and connection with her physical body, of challenges to her strength and bravery, right where she is.

Tree says climb.