You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself
how easily it gathers them,
powers and people.
And it is possible a great energy is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
―Rainer Maria Rilke
I hope that I remember this January of 2012, and its predecessor, December 2011, as That Time We Had An Unseasonably Warm and Tolerable Winter. Kind of like the Chicago summer a couple years ago, when temps hovered in the low seventies instead of the upper eighties, with bright blue skies nearly the entire season, and my children wept from their souls about not being able to swim. It was like living in Tahiti. If Tahiti had more smog. And Italian Beef sandwiches, dipped in juice.
What I am saying is, it hasn't snowed very much, and I believe today is the first day I've noticed the thermometer dip below ten degrees. I feel so very alive, still, this Winter.
(Okay, so today we had a homeschool class at the Shedd Aquarium, and parked our car way back at Soldier Field and walked all the way from one to the other, and back, in the nine degree wind. I am officially sporting my Winter in the Midwest Tan, which involves bright red frostbitten cheeks and chin. Thank you, icy wind, for avoiding my still-pale, chalkboard sized forehead. Nothing like keeping things interesting. Ahem.)
But last week we spent a day at the zoo, and it was perfect.
Perfect enough to get a really good look at the Winter color palette.
This is the Winter I figured out what was going on with our girl. Sensory Processing Disorder-- Tactile Defensiveness, specifically. An over-responsiveness of the protective responses of the nervous system. I have now read through no fewer than four thousand web pages recommended to me by Dr. Google, and the descriptions of other children struggling with these same issues are just uncanny. I had no idea that other families were going through the same things, and I am both relieved and completely overwhelmed with all of this new information. Furthermore, with all of this reading comes new understandings about myself in relation-- my absolute inability to tolerate crumbs, chalk dust, newsprint, the fine dust left on skin by sand, anything sticky on any surface and most especially my hands-- all the damn hand washing, and my absurd aversions to toothpaste, hand lotion, sunscreen...
Apologizes sincerely to girl child, for handing down disorder undetected.
I thought these were...oddities? Quirks? Regardless, I have figured out how to navigate my days in spite of whatever all of that relates to, and Marin will, too. I am anxious to meet with her occupational therapist again, to ask eleventy million more questions. We're going to get this thing figured out.
This Winter also gets to go down, so far, as The One We Did School Really Well. Above, winter insect homes, as per the monthly outdoor Science class we attend. Who knew? I feel like I have learned so much, right along with my kids, and there have been a variety of topics that I was a bit unsure of as we got started (I am looking at you, Light and Heat) but we jumped in with both feet anyway, and have come away with great experiences.
The two quiet hours we spend each morning now, while Marin is at her preschool, have truly revolutionized our homeschool process. We've got better schedule structure, less distraction, and perfect reason to tackle the big stuff first, and save the story reading and art projects for the afternoon when we are all back home together. Jack's reading gets better each day, KJ has conquered ridiculously long division, and the history of North America is behind us. The boys are currently attending a weekly Gym & Swim program for homeschoolers through the YMCA, Jack is taking a theater class and KJ a fun Science class (he dissected cow eyeballs tonight) and basketball begins in a few weeks. We pick up our chick eggs and incubator next month, already.
This also gets to be the Fall and Winter that I loved these guys best of all. These Canadian Geese with their smooth black heads and their rounded brown bodies, following the leader in v-formation in search of warmth and food. I have been watching them for months, and stopping to listen to their honks as they sit along our lake on chilly nights.
I love them every time I see them. They're really incredible, aren't they?
These get to be the days I play my favorite music on repeat. The time I rediscovered Jewel. The weekend I purchased enough fabric to make a queen-sized quilt-- my first ever so large. And the time I discovered Pinterest, for the first time.
Let us skip the polling for who hasn't slept in a week, with all of that pinning, m'kay?
The grey clouds up above have been toying with the notion of snow, now. For Real snow, rather than the silly little dustings and meltings that have graced us occasionally. We might just put our new snow blower to use, yet.
I am brave. I can take it.
(Future Self punches Overconfident Present Self in the kidneys, imaginably.)
Initially I thought to comment, Well that went fast, when I realized it was time to recap the year that just started five minutes ago. But then as the past year came into better focus, I knew that the quickness of its passage was less about its days and moments, and more about the fact that the years--they are really moving. I love growing, I love getting older, I love my grey hairs and tiny little wrinkles left from smiling, I love change. Bring it, 2012.
But first, for the short and sweet in the record book, allow me to recap 2011.
We began the year as we always do, on a ladder with paint brush in hand. (Myself, that is. Not my kids.) My kids were elbow deep in homeschool, and in a bin of dry rice and beans at the time, and we were eight months into our wait for our baby to be referred to us, from Africa.
This was a path that I somehow knew I would walk, at least in the years after I became a mom, though I never could have predicted our story thus far to present as it does in this moment. While waiting for our referral, we began learning of so much corruption surrounding the situation in that particular country, and eventually we made what felt like the only ethical choice to make, given the circumstances, and we brought our paperwork back home. I know with certainty that even now, had we stayed the course in spite of our concerns, we still would not have had our baby home today, and if we felt waist-deep in a terrible situation at the beginning of the year, without going into detail, we would have been up to our eyeballs by now. Even our own agency, who we once had so much faith in, has not emerged with clean hands, and it leaves me feeling just sick for the babies and children who are involuntarily growing up in the center of this cold and dirty hurricane. In this way the world appears uglier than ever to me, having joined the scene ready to help a child or children as we could, and then having witnessed such an unfolding. It left me feeling hopeless for the kids at the center, and so very sorry for the well-intentioned adoptive and birth families caught in the swirling periphery.
I am sorry to say that I came away from this once-exciting time to experience a grief I hadn't known before- a miscarriage of sorts, only for which there are no pre-determined parameters for how one should expect to feel after spending the better part of two years preparing for and dreaming about this very real baby that would join our family, only to walk away with empty arms. Adoption is not just a thing that people decide to get into, but something we get into with our whole hearts and with our kids and families and friends and finances. We create space in our homes and excitedly count down until this little person who already feels like one of us, comes along to finally be one of us. The process, then, of giving away the toys I had saved, the blankets and clothing I had collected and telling each and every person of our turn of events left me mournful and exhausted. The winter went long, and it felt dark and sometimes lonely.
I journaled a lot through that time, and searched to find the silver lining day after day, because it was the best of my options. And I opened myself up to the possibility that I could somehow come out of this experience with greater breadth, and build something from all the little pieces.
By the grace of God, I met a friend of a friend very soon after that, who somehow got me instantly, right where I was, and sat with me in the space where I chose to work through our adoption into its roots. My sadness for everything that had ever failed was palpable, then. I saw all of that emotion and heartache, some of which I had carried with me since I was my own little kid, and I picked it apart and allowed it to become something new when it was ready. I had grown into a better mother for all I had learned, and a better self for what I now understood. The process, the preparation, the loss and the disaster we witnessed was what we simply had to endure for all that could come out of it and still is yet to come.
And just like that, Spring arrived.
We were okay. We were all okay. We were built for these sorts of deep life lessons-- a whole Master's Degree, really, on what fear and disappointment and love are all about. How thankful I am to have come through all of this with a heart open to possibility, though it was no picnic at the time.
It was Mother's Day before I knew it and I was the mom of three amazing little kids, and we spent the morning on a hike, and laying in green grass, absorbing the sunshine. I will never forget that Sunday morning, because I think it was one of the most perfect, ever, in my book. I hired our wonderful babysitter for a few hours a week, beginning last Spring, to give me the occasional break that I didn't know I could (should!) grant myself and my kids. I became more familiar with poetry and bounced along on positive, super-fun music. We had kitchen dance parties in the afternoon and at night, just the kids and I, or the kids and I and Kevin and Sant and Leslie-- all through the house with the music blasting.
I threw caution to the wind and painted on all sorts of canvases, and put hardwood floors in our house and painted a few walls more.
We plastered art all over our walls, and we didn't apologize for the mess.
We hiked,
and we drove,
and we celebrated.
I felt that I should meet my inner perfectionist, somewhere in all that, and shake her up a little bit. The world was not perfect, and I was not perfect. The world was ugly and messy and dissapointing, and I needed to stare into all of that to understand that it was somehow part of something beautiful. And so with each opportunity, to this very moment, I am asking myself what I can do with the beautiful messiness, and who will still love and accept me should they walk right into it with me.
And the answer, of course, is this little, solid group of friends and family whom I have intentionally placed around myself, like a group of fluffy pillows to pad my falls. I am blessed. Not lucky, as I tossed out there in my last post. I believe, actually, in neither luck, nor coincidence, nor accidents. I am here and happy and more whole than ever because I chose to experience awe and gratitude, again and again, for all of the blessings that come my way. I am following my intuition as best I can, always chasing truth and what is real, and facing the hard work as it shows up, so that I can continue growing into the best version of myself-- all of those failings, and all of that messiness included. There is more work to be done.
I added to my inky collection last summer, the word that hums through the undertones of my life, and five little birds in flight, for the five of us- Kevin and the kids and I, making this journey together.
We traveled a good deal this year, down to Indianapolis to spend some days with these little buddies of ours while their Mama delivered their new baby,
and with these buddies of ours (also speaking of new, third babies) to Wisconsin Dells for a fun vacation.
We did the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee this year with family,
in a mountainside cabin with a view and a settling energy I will never forget,
and we found ourselves floating down a river in bright yellow innertubes.
Kevin and I took a trip to Vegas for our eleventh wedding anniversary,
and we experienced Utah and Arizona, where we hiked through quiet and still, rocky caverns.
I collected twenty-three pages of favorite quotes this year,
and finally figured out a layout and an atmosphere that is comfortable to me, here.
We saw the Dalai Lama speak in person over the summer, and I attended a fantastic monthly Buddhist meditation class. Each Kevin and I did something we said we would never do again, and spent the last six months settling into churches we both love, each of us supporting the other with where we need to be. We've gotten involved with a monthly soup kitchen, and we've met more new friends who have turned out to be icing on the cake.
We've created bonds with our homeschool buddies and taken lots of day-trips. I bought an iPhone, I conquered every version of Angry Birds, I took the kids to see lots of plays and musicals this year.
Kevin and I saw U2, which was hands-down, the best concert ever (even if I failed to bring my real camera).
I read this year. I read and read and read and read,
and it was one journey inward (and backwards and forwards) after the next.
We said good-bye to friends, both very real friends and quasi-real,
and we watched quietly the sun set,
the silkworm dangle,
and the Autumn breeze blow.
We hosted the holidays again,
and counted ourselves so blessed for full tables and full bellies.
We enjoyed the glow,
remain present,
and bring nothing but hope, bravery, possibility and love to the year ahead.
And also waiting for snow...
Some of us fondly remembering those post-Christmas days we've spent on sunny, sandy Florida beaches...
We build legos,
check out local lights,
drink coffee,
get goofy.
Create snowball art!
Which logically involves Storm Troopers in the snow.
Deer watching.
Deer adoring. They are so gentle and serene.
Playing excitedly in the half inch of snow that stuck around for three hours one morning.
We are kids sure that this magical time will last forever, and grown-ups remembering what it was like to experience this time of year as wide-eyed kids. A time that passed so quickly.
Our church Nativity play, at which Mary showed off her striped knee-highs, and took off with a shepherd just after the birth of her tiny soft-plastic baby. Thankfully, Joseph was willing to hold down the fort manger, and happily accepted gifts on behalf of the newborn king.
Having fun with gift wrapping,
and happily strolling to our mailbox each afternoon to open cards from friends we love.
New year vision-boarding,
favorite bracelet creating,
and adoring the early afternoon sunshine, while it lasts.
I hope you are breathing in the one-of-a-kind Christmas glow, as well.
You are what you learn. If all you know is how to be a gang member, that’s what you’ll be, at least until you learn something else. If you go to law school, you’ll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you’ll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking. A person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. There’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.
Images by Molly Ray, words by Scott Adams, Spider Ballet by A. Brave Spider.
Completely.
Totally.
I have done this on and off since these boys were babies. Not last year, yes the year before, yes some others before that. Almost always I am fully exhausted by the end of our session and weeping a thousand bitter tears for babies vomiting mid-shot (true story) and why they cannot just sit still and smile, just for five minutes.
I have been told that everything gets easier as we depart from the baby stage, and I have called every person who has imparted that wisdom upon me a stinking fool liar because it does not become easier, only different.
Christmas photos, thankfully, are somewhat easier.
So that's something.
Mostly something.
Sometimes we get nutty.
Super nutty.
And also theatrical.
Super theatrical.
Um. Forget everything I said up there. This is no easy task.
Shout the words stinky fart. That'll get them laughing.
...if not wrinkling their noses and excitedly waving hands near their faces.
Then I can pull something off.
Way back when we were childless and sleeping Saturdays until 10am, I never really thought about what my kids would look like. There was really no way of knowing who, or how many, or what their personalities would be like. At least, I guess I assumed that they would be very similar to Kevin and I, and each other.
This assumption was completely incorrect.
Each of my kids are competely different from each other, and deep and intelligent and observant.
And hilarious.
Yes, that.
Lose the glasses, add the scarf. A miracle of God, truly, that this child is clothed at all. She does not live like this. Hence, the brand new short haircut. More to come on all of this, later.
Also to come, the possibility of a post filled with Christmas pictures from the beginning of this blog. Set to Kenny Roger's Through the Years. Because I know Miranda Priestly up there (The Devil Wears Prada, and you're welcome) totally threw up in one of my kitchen floor shoots, and pitched a mad fit another year.
At least this year was smooth. Mostly.
I totally promised them ice cream. I won't lie.
Merry Christmas!
Sunrise on the California coast, March 2009
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doors where two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.
-Rumi
I keep thinking I want to post a spattering of pictures from our last few months of school. I will get to them, I think, and then the day goes long, long, long, and better luck tomorrow.
No luck.
Here's my quick blurb.
We have been spending time at the Indiana Dunes with some of our homeschool buddies, and our kids have taken well to to the art of the camp fire, and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. Above, Marin collecting long, thin sticks that can poke through our treats for the fire. Below, cold, bare grey and brown tree branches. Lots and lots of branches. We are again down to the blue sky for color, when we can see it.
We are hosting Thanksgiving at our house this week, with plans for a perfectly set table for twenty. My sister-in-law's family has flown in from across the country, for the week, and I sometimes marvel about how families are made. There was mine, and his, and hers, and ours, and some others here and there, and eventually we were planning Thanksgiving together as one big happy, and I love it. I would love for everyone to bring a friend, and another, and another, until we are all very comfortable and filled with stuffing and pie, and feeling well loved. I am so thankful for all of these people who walk our journey with us.
We are finishing up our unit on the Human Body in Science. Nerves, followed by muscles. Next we will delve into heat and its properties and producers and the way it travels. Conduction, convection, radiation. I need to order all those books from the library.
My kindergartner has become the king decoder of words that end in "silent e." One moment he was slowly decoding every letter of every word, and the next moment, it seems, he had turned the lock with a key, and got it. Magic.
He has also discovered the fine art of end punctuation. It lives everywhere.
The kids needed haircuts, so I plopped each one up on the bathroom counter tonight, and trimmed away before baths. Then I cleaned their ears and trimmed their nails and smelled their fresh little heads. I love it when everyone is all squeaky clean at once.
My oldest guy and I (much too old to have his nails trimmed and his hair washed by mom) sit on the couch for a small, quiet fraction of most afternoons and read US History together. We read from our Smithsonian History Encyclopedia, digging up the details on Anne Hutchinson and the Puritans and William Penn and his Pennsylvania colony, and all the others who braved their way over here for something so important as freedom to worship in whatever way they preferred. Sometimes when I think we have read enough for the day, I suggest we bookmark here, and then he asks for just a little more. This, too, feels magical to me.
The last time I steam cleaned our carpets, late at night, I woke up in the morning to find dog vomit right in the center of the hall floor. I cleaned them again last night, and would appreciate if they could remain clean for at least a few days. It's a shame that more of the various liquid-spilling individuals in this house cannot read. I might post an effective note.
I have cleared our calendar from this morning until Wednesday night, so that I can focus on school, and Thanksgiving, and a website project for a friend. This is equal parts exciting and red, bumpy hive inducing.
The kids are all sleeping, and Kevin just arrived home. He offered me his peanut butter and apricot jelly sandwich special, and now we commence watching The Fabric of the Cosmos. After that I will take out half of my new pile of reading material. Or at least, drift off to sleep trying.
Happy Monday, friends.
I read this last week, and loved it-- a quote from Louise Erdrich in The Painted Drum:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
...
Why hello, mid-November. It appears we have reached the end of all of these warm, colorful sunshine filled days and weeks and months. I've let it carry me all the way through from the Spring, and here we are. A good many of the leaves are now resting in the cold November puddles, having been blown off by the good wind that came through, or the rain. The so-often-lately rain.
The cold and darkness are here and I find myself feeling around with my fingertips and my hands, and listening, in that darkness, for the song of early Winter, and Christmas. I will need to join in, still remembering that while the days were sunny and warm and our shoulders were kissed with sun tans, we were tasting the apples. As many as we could. (Literally, sometimes.)
They were sweet.
I wondered what it would be like to quickly jump in here, when inspiration hit me late some random Saturday evening, and write. Without concerns for sentence structure or complete thoughts, without giving pause for who’s reading and what I am sharing, and just go. When I paint, I apply enormous, free range strokes or tiny, delicate ones- whatever moves me. When I take pictures I shoot what I experience and what I love, and don't give a second thought to who will critique...I just go from where I feel. But I have been stuck with blogging for a while, holding a nonsensical standard for how I come across and what my content should look like. And I have realized it is killing my creative process.
So this place becomes something new again. For just a while I am going to let myself off the hook, and write two lines on a Tuesday, and publish. And then post something that really inspired me on Wednesday. And a handful of shots from our adventure on Friday. Then I would be back to regular blogging.
This is that. Clicking refresh. Slightly redesigned, permission to just GO.
The archives of this website contain the story of transformation, documented moment by moment or week by week, depending, of course, on how busy these days get. Documentation of the world, on being a mom, on looking at one’s own life and choosing to see it for all of its beauty, and run with inspiration. Sometimes the stories complete themselves—there was a positive pregnancy test, and a beautiful baby girl nine months later. Sometimes they go on and on and on. There was a house. We just wanted to move. It failed to sell. We rented it. We saved it. We saved us. We sold it. Years, this one unfolded. And I know there are other story lines that are left dangling in the breeze, because I don’t know what to say publicly at the moment, or for a long time. Adoption, and deeply felt, unexplainable love for a far away place and its beautiful people. A treacherous, magnificent path to experience- to learn things one could never learn in any other way.
I was thinking about this path. I was thinking about all of these things documented here over nearly six years here, and I talked to a friend about the holes and the untold stories. I have been thinking for months now about my direction here and whether there even should be one, or if I continue on documenting here or elsewhere, or where I put my energy.
Do you overthink sometimes, too?
I don’t have a specific goal for this space right now, in spite of being such the goal-oriented person. I have dedicated years, now, to unearthing authenticity, and probably more in the last year than ever. I’ve been unsure as to whether this exists as the appropriate forum for sharing all of that or not, but at least for now, I am deciding that this space is going to contain anything I can give it.
I still want to write a book. I still want to homeschool three or four days each week, with those remaining one or two being the difficult ones, with three kids at home all day, every day, their educations and their upbringings (not to mention their meals and their playdates) completely my responsibility. I want to write openly again about food and struggle and creativity and home décor. I want to unapologetically contemplate the hell out of every good book, and all the trees and leaves on every hike, and share that here, even if clumsily and hurriedly some days, because that is just where I am. I am just going to show up more often, with whatever comes. And then one day again, I will bind it all into a book and keep it for myself and my growing family, knowing I once took an opportunity to throw perfection's silly constraints to the wind, and this is what it looked like.
Thanks for coming along.
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there.
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him.
I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? You want to screw up the works? You want to blow my book sales in Europe?
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too clever.
I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. Then I put him back.
But he's singing a little in there.
I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep.
But I don't weep. Do you?
(Bluebird by Charles Bukowski)
