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Learning and trying to be kind and living my life as fully as I can stand it.

Friday, March 1, 2019

42

I am going to write a book. It will be the story of the last five years and for it I will take this blog and fill in the holes, draw in the landscape. I don't know how long it will take but I am going to do it. Today on my 42nd birthday I set this intention here.

Two months ago if you had asked me when I started writing this blog I would not have been able to tell you. I knew it started in my motherhood but I couldn't remember specifically when. That is how I feel about most things lately. Did that happen a year ago? A month?  Four years? I have to sit down and sift through memories, finding lamp posts of certainty--these kids were born in this year so that means this other thing happened after that year so that means. . .it's a funny reconstruction. Cleo laughed with me yesterday morning as I turned back and forth from kitchen sink to kitchen table saying out loud "You're so funny Mommy. You don't remember anything."

That's right I said, in between pouring a glass of orange juice and then a glass of ice water and then making a waffle and then pouring a different glass of orange juice.

"What am I doing?" I ask myself aloud many times a day.

I started this blog in April five years ago. I was hugely pregnant with Cleo and Daphne. Lily and Cyrus were ten months old. I'd just met and hired Stephanie, the woman who was immediately to begin saving my life. Because of her I had a little space in my day, in my mind. I had time. I was desperately afraid and nuts because of all the babies and the exhaustion and the back-to-back pregnancies and the identity changing and the self-doubt and my life-long Observer self, trying to take in all of the life that was crashing down around me and through me. At the time I didn't know how else to keep myself in the world, alive, so I poured words out onto a page in a torrent, an exorcism, a plea, to have people see me and tell me I would be okay and to get the teeth-humming madness out of my body. Writing was survival. Raw and scary and desperate and necessary.

Last year I hardly wrote here at all. I was changing and healing and noticing and for the first time in my life had the tools and the community and the wisdom and the loving arms to hold me and keep me safe as I started letting myself feel all the feelings. Feel the pain. Feel the fear. Feel the love. Be in it as it happened. Not write about it but feel it and take care of myself through the feelings. Feel it in my body, not just observe it with my mind. I got to do that for so many reasons, not the least of which is having a doctor who also is a mother of many, who had been treating me for over a decade and finally sat me down and said "You can not survive like this." She gave me the space and the freedom and the support to treat myself more gently. I got to do it because I had found a yoga community of women who were interested in and committed to showing up, listening to our sacred intuitive voices and letting our bodies guide us. And a teacher who showed us how. I got to do it because I had found a recovery community, roomfuls of people who have years of coping mechanisms that no longer serve us. Years of coping because we needed habits and skills to feel safe when we knew we weren't. Tools and books and understanding and hope and serenity because we found our way to one another and saw with gratitude and fear and trembling what healing could mean. I got to do it because when I finally started being brave enough to really show up as my whole, real self I found that I was somehow surrounded by the sweetest love I had ever felt--from all sorts of people. Somehow they knew me and loved me anyway. And I got to do it because of these four children who came into the world and broke up into pieces and who keep holding up a mirror for me even as they forge their own paths.

All of this was happening and is still happening and it has changed my relationship with writing. It has changed and is changing my relationship with my mind. With Knowing. With Figuring Things Out. It is changing my relationship with myself and even as the unwritten words call me to because I know and they know that there are other people who want to hear these stories, when I check in with myself to hear what I need and what I want my Self says "Not yet". I want to share them because I know that is what I'm here to do--take this funny, wild, difficult, unusual life and this mind that watches myself and the world like a movie and these words that make a connection between what I see and what other people are wondering about and spins them into thread that other people can sometimes grab onto. But not yet. Because the healing and the unlearning and the feeling have had to be first.

When I was in high school, maybe even as young as middle school, I remember adults or magazines giving me the absolutely useless and infuriating advice to "Just be yourself" And I felt rage and hopelessness as I inwardly screamed "What the fuck does that mean??? I need more help than that!"

When I was a young adult I remember hearing other older adults telling me "Your 40's are great! You finally really know who you are!" and thinking "Ugh! I will be so old in my 40's. I hope I figure things out way before then when I'm still young enough to enjoy it."

Imagine my surprise to be learning that my Self has been here all along. That She is here and has been here and will be here no matter how many birthdays I have. Happy Birth Day to me.

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