:::::

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.

“Pooh?” he whispered.

“Yes, Piglet?”

“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

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I miss Ellie. I want to rent an RV and travel to her. I want to pick up our friends and get off the RV like we’re Ty Pennington.  I want to pull up to Ellie’s house and jump out the door of the RV and yell in that air horn (is that what it’s called?) GOOOOOD MORNING, ELLIIIIIIE!!!! And then stampede to her and hold her hand.

That’s my wish these days and I can be found standing in the kitchen staring off into space while I pretend. I’m a kid when it comes to daydreaming and Winnie the Pooh.

Happy weekend, friends.

{a big thank you to the lovely Karla of There’s Beauty in the Chaos for the quote}

In case you’re new here, that’s Ellie there, on the right. She’s currently kicking cancer’s ass via courage, radiation, chemo and the strength of her ever-growing more beautiful spirit.

WE

{a blog might say}

I am a journal for you or for them

and always for both
pulled out from under the mattress
seen.

I am not taken seriously

until I slap faces with perspective and the resounding gong of the universal human experience,

pain-joy.

I am a chameleon or a snowflake
and always both.

I will make you drop your fork to grab a pen to note the story for later’s keyboard.

I tell that story,
a pixel web vessel
for the heart or mind or skill
and for all of that and

more and

for the song to be heard.

Behind me is a story-teller
a person behind a screen
fingers tapping.

I am a mouth
and an ear,

I am the pretty things
or the ugly things
and always both.

opinions
words
stories
quotes
voices
platforms
speaking out
pissing off
saying it gently
like it is
loudly
like it isn’t
anything
needing out
everyone
everywhere
anyone.

I wish I had a better name but here I am, The Blog.

Changing
perspectives and revealing
lies
and
spurning compassion
because of the truth or all or some of the truths.

I will make you feel big
and then make you feel small
and I can question your ego
until you stop
or find your place in the middle.

I can send your words out the door
and bring the world to your door
and you will find yourself in a coffee shop or bar
because of me,
waiting to meet someone for the first time
that you’ve known your whole life
and found through the clicking of mice.

I am your way to say it your own way,

visible.

I can show you how your children or your life grow

or both

or freeze you in time day after day
for when you forget
who you were,
like all the things on the Internet
I am a blip
demanding to be remembered.

I pen a love story
or rewrite a tragedy
or humor
inspire

connect.

I just tell.

I make you question
community reality
because it is here
and it is out there
without me,
don’t forget.

I am a journal
not under your mattress
but all over
anyone’s eyes
to resonate or
scoff,
they get to choose
so let it go.

I am a tool to everything and
nothing
and always both.
You know
if you see me as everything
you are adding nothing to your life.

I am a pen pal platform.

I am a tool
a stepping stone
to the creative whole
and a money-maker with
sponsors and ads
and most times I am not.

I am your whole story
or parts
and always both.

you don’t know all of exactly who you are anyway
but I’ll show you more.
I am not here to make you big
or small
but to help you find your middle.

I am a web canvas
internet connection
wi-fi
art

behind me,
THE BLOG,
is a person
messy and good and not like anyone else
but like so many coming through to stay
and
my person is
showing,
vulnerable,
and it all counts.

I woke in computers and work

my way across keyboards and wires or wireless invisibles,

but I was born in stone and paper and souls
for telling.

{There. A blog has answered the questions, What’s a blog? What’s a blogger? Why do you blog? I’m sure it all makes perfect sense now.}

{photo credit}

Everything was too hard yesterday. Like how the dish rag was in the bottom of the sink under all the dishes that were filled with water. Uncovering it and rinsing it out and ringing it out would just be too hard so I walked away and left it all there.

By three o’clock I was so tired of my own tired with pressure behind the eyes, so I decided to be good and cheerful by making cookies. Except by making cookies I mean the pull apart kind but even then, they kept pulling apart not along the lines so there were big and small ones after baking even though they were supposed to be all one square-gone-round size.

Miles thought they were taking too long. Ten minutes from start to finish. Cookies. Done. Not too long. But I understand, I want start to finish now now now, too.

We can’t have that.

These are the small things that don’t bother me on a good day. I mean, the dish rag and the pulling apart wrong. These things bother me when my insides feel like electric butterflies. Everything is too loud and frustrating when your insides are plugged in to some unseen socket of nerve endings. And then to mother? Oh my heart. The noise and the not listening the first time and how I can’t take it. I hate that part of this so much. I just don’t want to be ruled by something ugly that makes me ugly. I’m not ugly, but when I feel this way I feel very alone and that can make a person think they’re ugly.

I can surrender and give it up and let go of control and be kind to myself and still it sneaks up

because what-a-ya-know, I’m human. A human with a body that thinks it should leave a whole lot of space for the kind of anxiety that leaves a person standing still and trying to remember how to breathe, even though she’s been thinking happy thoughts all morning and is terribly in love with her life and has faith and all that. It is anxiety that provokes depression and anger and too much self focus and I’m so exhausted.

You see. I’m in here, I’m all covered up. I thought it was sleep-deprivation and the typical postpartum stuff, but I see it over my whole life when I look back. I see a girl with electric butterflies, biting her nails and feeling on edge almost all the time.

The edge is something like a constant ache that can sometimes boil.

Ryan made The Phone Call for me and I don’t want to feel ridiculous or needy or weak. Those are lies. So I took a deep breath and said thank you and then felt relief because getting help is the opposite of weak. 

I saw myself the last time I got help, after I quit drinking. I was more even and peaceful and it took on-going help. I want to go back to myself again because it was so good to meet the real me and I am so sad that she’s always acting like someone else. This is not beating myself up. This is me beating up anxiety because it is not who I am.

I stood up in the balcony and watched my boys below, in the gym with all the other kids. I held Elsie on my hip and she watched with me. Miles was way off to the side, away from the other kids and I couldn’t see Asher. My heart dropped to my toes because Miles is always nervous in new places and around other people. He bites his nails like it’s his job and he stands alone while everyone else does what Simon Says.

Then Asher came out of nowhere and Miles’ hands dropped to his sides and they moved closer to the other kids, together. They laughed and bounced and started running around when the game ended, Asher yelling, I’m chasing my bra-wer!! (brother)

My heart lifted back up.

The man who was trying to keep control asked the kids to sit in a circle. They were loud and everywhere. Miles sat down, resting on his legs, knees to the floor, making a shelf. So his brother got in his bench-lap. He pulled him close and held him there.

This lasted maybe thirty seconds and then he threw him off and they rollled around because they’re braw-ers.

I looked at Elsie and she was still watching and she was smiling.

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This is the 20th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

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I was talking to my friend Ann and she described the boost we get from creativity and connecting as a spiritual airlift and I was all,

YES. That’s the best thing to say and yes.

Then one night I was mixing baby cereal and Elsie didn’t think I was doing it fast enough, and with her teething fuss fussing she was MAD. So while I stirred I started lip-syncing and dancing to the music that was playing in the kitchen. She stopped crying and started watching, wide-eyed and smiling.

I said to myself, Ellie would love this, because I think about Ellie and her struggle with cancer all the time. I think about how she’s too far away. And I know how much she loves it when I do weird things, so I knew that if she was there in the kitchen, she’d be dancing and laughing with us.

Ellie and Elsie have this connection that can’t be explained in any other way than something that is born in heart and soul. (Remember how Ellie is the person who received Elsie Jane’s first real smiles? Like upon meeting her?) So I just love how this idea was born out of a moment with Elsie Jane, with Ellie on my heart.

I knew Ellie could obviously use a spiritual airlift (or many), so I asked some friends to help me make it come to life. The result is what came together through our silly and Ellie-loving hearts.

Ellie,

The way we care about you is proof that we can live a hundreds of miles away and have most of our communication and connection online, and still come to know and love someone in a very real way. So. Here’s the ridiculous and heartfelt video born out of a moment with EJ.

Your friends? We’re with you…

(if you have trouble with this stalling, it may play better if you push play and then push pause and let it buffer up a little bit and then push play again)

Operation Spiritual Airlift from Heather King on Vimeo.

{Featuring: Jessica Bern~Ann Imig~Maggie~Eileen~Becky~Smacksy and Lee and family}

This was totally not possible without the editing skills and immeasurable patience of someone who shall remain nameless because his humility will not allow the praise. {No, it is not my husband. Although, he was also supportive by listening to me constantly talk about this. ahem.}

How do you do this?

I am on week three of four of solo parenting.
I’ve hit that wall in which I can still kind of handle it but I can’t handle the waffle getting stuck in the toaster.

Right now
the teething sleep deprivation
is so severe I’m not sure at all ever what I’m doing exactly.

Just getting him to school and then him to school and feeding and wiping and trying.

Then I want to throw the toaster and I follow that I’m losing it feeling with
guilt
of course
because look…

Just LOOK at what I have…

They are sooooo…

THEM, you know?

When I am solo, we all move down the totem pole, so to speak. No time for all of our needs or for the family utopia in my head to even come close to existing and I suppose this is good in the grander scheme of things

but it is still a constant tug at my heart.

I mean, the more the merrier and the more the less of me to go around
into all the many spaces in home and hearts.

Even when we grown ups are both here
it feels a little like being tied up
spinning ’round with rope wrapping

and tightening.

Just trying to get it all done, meet the needs inside too few hours that feel so long. I love them so much and I just can’t keep up.

I cried hard into my bed last night, harder than in a very long time and I swore at God like He was punishing me by way of Awake. I am only one me, I told Him. I cannot do this!

and then I picked up the crying baby and found calm and peace in her settling again and I had no choice but surrender. Absolutely no choice. I have been awake 44 hours of the last 48 and there is no other choice.

Is this what you know, Single Mother? Is your wisdom born in letting go?  In the acceptance that you are only one you and what you do is good?  I am astounded (ASTOUNDED) by the way you keep going.

{Just to be totally clear: I’m in no way saying that my life situation is the same as a single parent. I just so often think of single parents when my husband travels. I think of single parents with awe and complete respect, whether they are parenting alone by choice or not.}

It’s a coffee shop made from an old house with hidden nooks and rooms. It’s cold up here in the middle room. I can hear a boy and his mother in the next space. The walls are thin and I am always tuned into a child’s voice.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that they don’t just struggle here but everywhere. The mother’s voice is well-versed in soothing responses, trying to calm the boy who cannot leave the rigid confines of his concrete mind. She is kind and she sighs when he repeats over and over and over that she sucks because she won’t take him home right this second for video games. He’s loud. Louder and louder as he repeats and repeats and does not get the answer that is the only one he wants. Someone comes to close the door from another room and awkwardly explains why she’s closing the door.

It’s not just because you’re loud, we just don’t want to bother you. Her voice is all shaky with discomfort and annoyance held behind a passive-aggresive lilt.

The mother is silent to this and I hear the door close and the boy starts to say, over and over, You were loud and I am not, it’s you that’s loud, I am not being loud this is stupid stupid stupid…He pounds on the table, over and over.

I want to hug her. She has to sit there and wait it out and be quiet with no quiet, so much of the time. All I can think about are my freezing feet and her days and how she probably doesn’t even notice when her feet are cold. She is a mother of the strongest kind, because of the boy who is a gift.

{Mother Marathoners of kids with special needs–I want to hold you up.}

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This is the 18th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

Before Asher and Elsie Jane came along, I was out with some friends and I was venting about a hard day with Miles. I was surrounded by mothers with more than one child and they rolled their eyes and sighed and looked at each other and started laughing. One of them said something to the other like, Do you remember the last time you even showered alone?

Their reaction hurt a lot, as unintentional as that may have been. I got a message–they had it harder than I did–and in that moment I felt foolish for feeling tired or maybe even for having feelings.

Today, just like that day around five years ago, two more kiddos later, I am exceptionally tired.  Is it different than it was back then? Yes. Do I look back and see how much “easier” it was when there was Miles and Miles alone? Sure.

Does that change the hard day with the hard feelings as a mother of one five years ago? Not a bit.

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Going from two to three children has been a difficult transition for me, so lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what a mother means by hard and how that’s perceived and internalized by other mothers. It so often feels like a competition and so I notice that I stop myself from talking about Hard when I’m talking to mothers with one or two children because I don’t want them to think I’m telling them I have  it harder. Then I don’t want to vent to mothers with more than three children or with older children because I’m expecting the sigh or eye roll or the, just you wait or the, you’ll want these days back.

I hesitate in venting because when I’m doing that it so often seems that other mothers assume I’m saying I win the Hardest Award, or that I’m wishing away my life. But I’m not. I’m just talking. I’m seeking validation and there is nothing more refreshing than another mother who simply sees me and acknowledges The Hard and nods and says, Yes, it’s so hard, isn’t it? The End.

Why is she so rare?

It’s so inspiring when that fellow mother keeps it at that, but it’s like we’re afraid if we do that it’s going to steal something from us, when actually it’s just like anything else–if you want something, you must give it away. That is what this wise mother knows. It fills her up to show compassion to another mother, whatever their differences.

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Being a part of the online mom space has made it very clear to me that motherhood often becomes a competition born out of this need for validation, one in which the goal is to win some kind of internal reward that can never be won this way. We wouldn’t have The (ridiculous) Mommy Wars that are always playing out if this weren’t true. It’s there. Validation is so hard to come by and then we get desparate for it and shake our fists at each other in false comparisons, forgetting that comparing always ends as a loss.

Lose-lose.

I don’t care if you work at home all day or work out of the home or if you do or don’t co-sleep or breastfeed or attachment parent or helicopter parent or have 1 child or 17 or have teens or grown children…mothering is hard, and when we look at each other with that in mind and with compassion at heart we win-win. It seems simple but we get all tripped up by our need to be seen. Look at me running, look at how it never stops, please say you see me.

Motherhood is a (terribly repetitive and grueling and absolutely beautiful) race with a photo finish tie and we all end up at the same place. With all of our heart’s desires for our kids and the pressure and the heavy weight of responsibility and all of its grown-up things. The reality for all of us, every single one, is that we fall through the finish line and then we get up and start over again. We are mother marathoners.

This kind of hard that is equal is a result of a love we never could have expected and that is how we tie.  I am running this marathon with all mothers and I look around and I see that all of you are carrying some enormous things on top of simply running which is hard enough on its own and I see you.

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A few days ago, Miles brought what is in the picture below home from school. Even though it was most likely a mistake, for him to write both SEE and LAV (love) spoke everything to my heart:

Because he does, even when it seems he does not. And so do I, when I set aside my insecurity and give myself the credit I deserve and the validation I’m seeking. It’s in there already. I don’t need to try to steal yours. This is what will make me into one of those refreshing mother-friends, one who says I see you and I hear you and this is hard and you are good. The End.

{Edited to add: In writing this I was so aware of those Mamas with More Hard in the way of special needs or grief or infertility or single parenting, etc. Please see the comment conversation with the lovely Cheairs below for more on that.}

It’s been 2 years.

2 years
365 days
plus 365 days
or
24 hours
strung together
730
times.

I suppose I could go on with all kinds of numbers, but I’m terrible at math and the day must go on. That’s what they do, you know. The days go on, sometimes walking and sometimes running and sometimes marching. Oh the ones that march, they are the stompy and defiant ones, annoying and hard but entirely necessary.

This morning I woke up to Elsie Talk, crackling at me over the monitor.  I went to get her and nursed her in bed and when she was done she looked up at me and made the silliest face you’ve ever seen. Then Miles came in and sniffed her head and sniffed her head some more. It’s his favorite thing to do. We got up, we three early risers and I made coffee and thought my thinks about being sober for two years. Or, I sort of thought about it momentarily because there was spit up and Nutella and the answering of questions. That’s how it is, I suppose. I don’t get a lot of time to think about much, but when I do think about how many days have been pulled together with no alcohol, I’m still astonished.

While I still struggle with so many of the same old things so much of the time, everything is different. My brain constantly wants to fall back into its ‘isms’ and I get very little time or energy to fight that, and yet, glorious grace abounds in the way that I am still sitting her un-hung-over. It is there in the face of a baby I have no idea if I would have had if I were still consuming copious amounts of red wine and tequila and whiskey, and my heart implodes at the thought of not knowing Elsie Jane. Then Grace h0vers around the way that I can pull it together for these children, to make it just a few more hours with some semblance of patience intact in a way I never could before. And it is there when I totally don’t have patience and I’m able to forgive myself.

It is there in the way that I’m learning to accept myself just exactly as I messy am every once and a while, and it is there in the hope that I can do more of that, as more days pull together.

Here we are, two years later and one recent night I was driving home and it had been a hard day with Big Things in it and I thought, I don’t have to drink. I used to think something akin to, I don’t get to drink, maybe like I felt sorry for myself for not being like normal drinkers. But it hit me, I was a person driven to booze like a moth to a flame, one who could not focus on much other than the carrot at the end of the stick and now, even on that not-so-good day that would have driven me straight to a bottle, I could drive along and not be driven.

That’s a miracle.

{If you’re new-ish here and want to read more about motherhood and addiction, hit up the search box and type ‘sobriety’ or ‘addiction’}

I came across this:

No one else will ever know the strength of my love for you. After all, you’re the only one who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside.

ba boom ba boom ba boom…

I guess I’d change that to, you’re one of the only ones who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside. Since there are three children that have been there. Putting it that way makes three sound like not very many at all. Just three people, the only ones who will ever know my heart this way. Only three, on all the planet in all my days.

So I have three to think of, as I sit here and listen to their sounds all around me. The boys discussing a made-up game of cars that race in just this way and in just this time. And Elsie rolling around me in her little baby walker, garbly-gooking her infant language. I think of them all the time, if I can hear them or not and my anxiety wants me to believe it’s all too much. Too much to do, to much to say, too much to stay awake for, to much to do.

But there are only three. Even when there is too much, there are just these few. These few are the only ones and I can’t try to describe the strength of this love ever again without thinking of my heart beating for them now and back inside. They are the only ones that know and I want to keep telling them and that’s enough.

ba boom ba boom ba boom…

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This is the 18th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?