Friday, July 24, 2009

Vacating

I'm ready for a vacation. I know I just got home, haven't even finished the laundry! The car has lost 9 pounds of sand, the tent is finally dry, the towels are stacked; the camper is back in dry dock, the fridge and cupboards empty, the floor, well, the floor needs to be replaced (another story) but it's clean and everything has been tidied and dried and de-muddified. The trip to the Cape has come and gone, a beautiful trip, a sandy, muddy, cotton candy trip where the kids fished (and caught fish!), Jerry tanned (and burned), and mama read books, lots of good books!
It was a trip where we noticed the flowers,
rode bikes on dirt roads, and enjoyed the freedom of having vacated our lives - phones, jobs, bills, mail, all left 150 miles behind. I didn't think of writing, Rebecca didn't practice Hebrew, Orin left phonetics far behind. There were moments of hammock swinging for us all, finger smashes, bike crashes, jiffy popping, and lots of ice cream. SPF 85 became part of my vocabulary. We found starfish and many kinds of crabs, built/crusaded against/commandeered castles of sand, played games and waded through muddy rain shaped lakes. We ate wonderful food, met people who entertained and were so kind to us.

There were moments of angst, with 5 of us in the 114 sq foot trailer, but we came out of it having had a good time, and knowing ourselves and each other just that much better.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Cha cha cha changes!

I have been working on a written piece for about 9 years. It's big. Bigger than I am, most days. I keep trying to break it down, make it simpler, systematize the process to bring it into focus. It keeps growing, new characters who add life and color and depth keep popping into my head, out of my head (quite literally, and onto the pages before me). I can't even type-write this thing, it keeps morphing. It isn't ready to be born, obviously, and yet, the changes that it undergoes seem to be part of it's birth, part of the process of making it real.

When I was pregnant with Rebecca, even at the end of my pregnancy, even though I was HUGE, like apartment building huge, it still wasn't 'real'. We didn't HAVE a baby. There were kicks and pains, there was growth and change in my body, but the changes that have wrought the most significant scarring, that have left me shaken and disillusioned about who I was, let alone who I am, they were invisible at that time. And after she was born I was ... unreachable. I focused on her, from diaper to diaper. There were moments of loneliness, of disbelief, anger, frustration, of awe and there were moments I was right out of my mind with mama-lion hormones and insanity. But still it didn't FEEL real. I still felt like this was somehow NOW, not who I was for the rest of my life, Amen. There were moments when I would look at her, her sweaty curls plastered underneath a bucket hat, her fist tight around the handle of a sand shovel, or see the hummus smooshed all over her face and clothes and know, in my soul, that this was the most perfect creation I could ever imagine myself being a part of. But until recently, I don't think I'd matured into understanding that it IS for the rest of my life. I can't ever walk away from who she is, or where, or how. She is constantly with me, as is my little boikie. They are part of every breath, and that change is visceral. There is no going back. It makes the book look like playdough in an artists studio! But both are real to me, and this I take as a symbol of my own maturity. It's new to me (being the late bloomer that I am), but I hope to take it for a nice long ride.

How can I bring this writing into a place where I accept, unconditionally, it's nature. Where I understand that it will continue to change, as my children do, and I will not love it less for the pimples, mistakes, bad language, poor choice of friends, or bad co-ordination in the heat of the game? It's not real, it's not material, and yet...and yet it owns a place. It resides, it grows, it changes. Well, all deliberation on the topic aside, it is clear to me that (for me?) dealing with change is fucking hard.