11/4

I have had a backwards kind of day today
not ever knowing what to do or say.
I've twisted everything around
have YOU ever acted in this way?

Said, ' I would like a hup of cot chocolate'
'pace my capers on my desk'
I was trying not to backwards things
I was trying really to do my best!

I promise to turn this day around
but I can't seem to find my way.
For I've made a mess on my desk
in a backwards kind of way

-Linda Winchell

_____________________________________

Sometimes you start a blog when you’re 24, and you write entries about learning to parallel park and how you’ve just figured out how to make iced tea and how you threw up against the side of the Treasury Building after a drunken night with your other 24 year old friends. You write that blog sitting at a desktop computer that in tiny apartment—the first you’ve lived without roommates—and reruns of Dawson’s Creek are in the background and you’re lonely but you like it that way.

And then you close that blog, and move away. Then you move again, and you start a new blog. You’re 26 and sitting in the university library where you’re supposed to be studying for grad school. You meet all of you.

Then almost decade passes, and you’ve moved and moved on and your writing languishes because life overwhelms. You drive to work in the morning, swallowing the Zoloft at a stoplight and washing it down with a McDonalds Diet Coke because this is America, dammit. All you need is a cigarette to throw out the window.

You’re 34 and just were prescribed your first blood pressure medicine. HBP and it’s kissing cousin Anxiety are handed down your maternal family line as if we passed down a quilt that we sometimes like to throw over our heads.

______________________________ 

I accepted my current job from my office telephone, on November 4, 2014. 11/4/14. I’ve written here before about the significance of the numbers 4/11 in my life, and nearly everything about my move somehow incorporated those numbers. I felt like it was meant to be. Even if it’s still hard and strange (doing different kind of work completely) and nothing I really like enough to write home about, it’s a good job. I’m learning a lot. Yesterday, November 4, 2015, everything flipped. I woke up to find that my state had elected Matt Bevin (an uber right wing republican) who has vowed repeatedly to unroll elements of the Affordable Care Act. If those provisions go….well….I’m not sure what my future holds. Ironically, also yesterday, I met the woman who is going to become my new boss.

What’s she like? Oh, she’s exactly like me. Exactly. Personality, background, even looks. And we’re the same age. Naturally, my hackles went up immediately and they’re still up. I told a friend—I’m trying hard to avoid my natural tendency when encountering new people: eyeing them with suspicion. ;) 

It doesn't help that I've had a couple of fuck-up's this week too at work, which makes me feel about two inches tall. It's not like me. But it is on Backwards Day in Backwards Week.

So. That’s been my week. What’s the last year or so been like? Oh, you know, fine. Great at times, actually. I love being back closer to my family although of course a part of me misses DC. I’ll always miss that city the way I’ll always miss my hometown. It’s just part of me; my DNA. My mom was in a very serious car accident almost one year ago today. It was two days after I accepted this job, and she broke her pelvis, every rib and her collarbone. She’s made a pretty damn miraculous recovery, truly. I know she loves me being back. My nieces and nephews do too, although my two younger nephews and my sister moved to California earlier this year. I can’t believe they’re really gone—it is so strange to be in Kentucky, being left. I’m the one always doing the leaving in the family.

Hello from the Other Side. I’ll be back soon J

Mother, Mother

I’m at the beach where I’ve been lucky enough to go for the past three years, thanks to Maggie May Etheridge. No, not through her dollars or mad hook-ups, but for pointing me to a blog where I eventually met the blogger’s sister and then her friends and then, well, aren’t we all in this crazy thing together in our little blog-land? I’ve known some of you for longer than I’ve known very close friends in my day to day life.

Anyway. It’s become a tradition, and very much of a step-out of my real life since I meet friends that are in different states as we converge on this place. My friend Denise is generous beyond belief, and none of this would be possible without her. She grew up coming to this beach in Avalon New Jersey, and has passed this along to us and now it’s a part of our own histories and in our bones in the same way. Children have grown up here, and they’re not the only ones.

Avalon has become a safe place; a place where we can lay it all on the line. Our catch-up’s often cut close to the bone, and that’s taken some getting used to on my part. Now I come with the expectation that I’ll be asked “to the core” questions within minutes and as the week goes on and beach yoga is done and the conversations will deepen.

We have a yogi who comes to do beach yoga in the mornings, and yesterday she mentioned that she had an astrologist friend and the next thing I know I’m texting my date and time of birth and then this morning, the three of us gathered on the bed while a star chart is projected on the wall. Alexander stated “so everyone here is family, correct?” None of us are family except chosen and we gave permission to “go deep.” He began with me, and I was basically engaged only on a “this is interesting” level. I do but I don’t believe in this kind of thing. The yoga instructor doesn't really know me at all -I am sporadic at best in my yoga attendance. So I assumed that if he were able to peg me, it would be genuine and nothing that she could have "fed" him.

He nailed it. He pinned me against the wall with my character and past, and proceeded to the do the same with the rest of us. My star chart reflected that my parents were very loving when I came into the world. But that something happened in my third year, a financial crisis, and they were driven apart. I'm not sure what this was, but they were divorced by the time I was five. There were several other things he stated about my personality, my work demeanor, my ...well, my core.

It was casual, and we all felt free to ask the hard things.

The Hard Things.

Having a baby has been a thing for me for so many years. I’ve always wanted to mother and nurture and I do on a daily basis for the people (little, big and furry) in my life. I’m 34. 34 is young! Yes, I know this. But I have been building with the reality that if I’m going to go down this road of parenthood, it’s time to think about it. Adoption? Birth? Single parenting, or is there a spouse around the corner? Should I wait for that? Let go and let God? WWJD? And here comes the spiral.

On the bed, in the safe space, I wanted to ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. But then Alexander said - unprovoked - that beginning last summer, a deep deep aura of fertility was surrounding me. Beginning June/July and it was still very strong.

There’s a soul hovering.

I, stunned, said – yes, I can feel it. He said very seriously – of course you can. It is there. There’s free will involved, which he kept emphasizing. I said should I do this now? He demurred, and said that was something he could explore with me further if we wanted to go down that road. But he saw a partner for me in the future. I asked when? He got quiet and said “December 2016; no, Summer 2017.” And nodded a few times and I didn’t push this more. I had enough.

I don’t know what I believe sometimes.

But I do know that several weeks ago, I heard on the radio that someone had mentioned that she’d wished for her daughter her whole life. And that once she’d asked her daughter how she got to be her little girl. The little girl answered “I heard you call for me and I came to you.” Since then, I’ve noticed myself whispering…'baby girl, baby girl' and projecting this into the universe very quietly, and almost without notice by me.

Two nights ago, I stood at the beach, looked into the water and whispered “baby girl...baby girl..." into the swirling wind.

We had a late afternoon of processing, napping and thinking. The three of us went to yoga tonight and in hour two, I was feeling almost transcendent and I thought about the day. I said in my mind, to the soul hovering….baby, Mommy will get you here. Our lives, they will be extraordinary. I’ll see you soon.

I have no idea how and when and I ... I don't feel like I have to know. For the first time in a very long time. In my whole life?

This has certainly been a Monday. I feel very at peace.

vignette

Winter 2010

"Do you want to go home?" I whispered into his fur as we looked out the window at the winter snow coming down.

I remember feeling a little lonely, and he was my solid thing. Something that I could hug, even if he was reluctant about that whole deal. It was a scene that would repeat a handful of times throughout January and February, as I looked out of my basement apartment window at the worst winter DC would have on record in decades.

I moved New Years Eve 2009, and brought my kitten long for the ride. It was a rough adjustment. I'd come back, after four years, to a city where I didn't have intentions of returning--not because I didn't love it, but because it's hard.

Living in Washington, D.C. is no cakewalk. Nor is any major city, I imagine, but DC seems to expend a special brand of hell on its residents in the form of non-voting rights, impossible traffic and almost no ability to have a car without hundreds of dollars in fees and fines, and the reality of thousands of people living in a ten mile wide city that can't govern itself without Congress looking over its shoulder.

And god, I love it.

My second five years there were not without difficulty. That could be the biggest understatement I've uttered since 2015 began. But, it was mine. It became home because I kicked a home out of the rotting wood and packed ice, and started to root.

But, it was time for our life to change. The roots were not enough. I packed him up again, and off we went.

Winter 2015

Here we are. A bigger home, a new job, a new life. Close to home, but not home. The worst winter on the books in decades, just as the winter I made my last transition was. I begin kicking out a home in the rotting wood and the packed ice.

We are here.

 

Tonight, after they surveyed the falling snow, I picked Charlie up and walked around closing blinds. We stopped in front of the patio door and looked out. I was just a little bit lonely.

 

I hugged him close and we watched the snow fall. I whispered into his fur. "Do you want to go home?"