in conversation.

photo credit:  fiji.islands-pictures.com

tonight was heavy in conversation.  the types of conversations that revolve around what life means to you and what it takes to have a meaningful life.  conversation on game changers and life alterers.  conversations that could go anywhere. conversations that take two people on opposite ends of everything and bring them closer.

they’re tough conversations, important but heavy with thought and consequences.

and through it all we keep smiling, and laughing, and loving each other.

and no one raises their voice or throws things.

we may just end up raising a family on a beach, wild unschooled children, cajoling the tourists for a living.

but i say fiji and he says belize.

so the discussions go on.

still waiting.

why does it seem that spring is so reluctant to make  her entrance this year?

easter is late and just two weeks away.  most of the earth here is still brown, the days still damp and chilly.

i long for warmth and color.

spring seems perched on the edge, just peeking around the corner, making me wait.

i myself perched and ready.

ready to jump, but not quite there.

there are climbing lessons, i haven’t dared to officially sign up for, scared my time won’t come through.

there are photos, to be reproduced, ideas floating in my head to be sold.

there is a book in progress, waiting for me to sit down and add another 3,o00 words to what is there.

there is a man, right now in Tennessee, who feels like family, but who is just out of my reach.

sometimes the waiting is the hardest part, when you feel greatness around the corner.

in time.  time is a teacher.

telling me, this is a path, but one with a direction.

giving me just a taste to hold on to, and keeps me thinking forward.

here

 

here is where he was standing, waiting for me to find the perfect shot.

again and again and again.

patient.

always waiting for me.  to find my way back again, to find my way across the mountains and plains, to find answers to the questions that hang there between us.

he is a patient man.

i never want to wait for anything.  impatient.

he says 58 days is not so long.

i roll my eyes.

here.

here is where he waits.

here is where i can’t stop thinking i want to be.

here is where i found bliss

in the feel of his hands stroking my hair,

in reaching out and having someone’s hand to hold,

in waking in the night assured he was there.

here.

in that one spot,

that spot where i rest my head

and know that everything is okay.

that place where my head fits into his neck

and i know i am safe.

and i know that here

is defined only as

this place,

this spot.

my safe place.

here,

this spot.

is where i can call home.

 

 

Processing

I’m still trying to take it all in.  It might be a bit before I have the words.  How wonderful it was to travel.  How amazing it was to be carefree, to rest, to relax into a slow pace.   How easy it was to be with him.  How beautiful it was there.  How much deeper things have gone.   How much I think I learned about myself and my life in just five days.  Each of these is a post in itself.  I’m sure it will be coming.

two weeks.

72 days down.  14 to go. 

 

the sounds of happiness.

{this morning, 6:00 a.m. just she and i surveying the snow}

Emily is in her room.  It’s bedtime.  She’s giggling like a fiend, then laughing until I swear she could split her seams.   I am two rooms down doing laundry and I can hear her as they video conference in her room before I tuck her in.  I don’t eavesdrop, but I catch bits and pieces.  Like him telling her, “I bet you could do anything if you really wanted to, even lift an elephant” and her saying “Do you want to see how big I can make my nostrils”?

This little (big) girl is unrecognizable from four years ago as the one who had panic attacks in the corners, the one from three years ago who refused to go to school, the one two years ago who had crazy attacks of anxiety over stomach woes.  We haven’t had a breakdown in months over feeling sick, the stomach aches just about gone, just a few bouts of gas attacks now and again.

I am taking credit for about all of this progress.  I deserve it.  It’s been a difficult journey and a lot of hard work, a lot of long days and nights, a lot of tears from her and me both as we’ve made our way together.

But she talks to him differently then she talks to me.  If I stand outside in the hallway, I find she tells him things I wouldn’t otherwise know.

I knew he was good for me.  I realize now how good he is for her too.  She has a happy giggle I never knew she had before.

 

 

an exercise in emotion.

{For a short while today, grief came to visit like an unwelcome friend}

This was my BAM self portrait this week.  I try not to duplicate things I’ve posted here, versus Flickr, versus Facebook, but I needed to acknowledge these feelings.   It seems part of this acceptance process is knowing discomfort, allowing it, and documenting it.  I have found as I take on this self-portrait exercise I want to capture all my emotions even the heavy ones like I had this weekend.

This portrait like so many of the others I have taken was done with the self-timer.  I was reading over some things that I had written that afternoon.  It appears Saturday has become my writing day and it appears I have some demons to work out of my system.

I had watched a movie that weighed heavily on grief and loss.  I have to be careful about what I surround myself with.   I seem to absorb so many of the emotions that occur around me.  This movie brought out so many of my own emotions about motherhood, about loss and regret.  I wrote for quite a while about my thoughts on my past.  On how my family that I created did not turn out to be the family I had wanted and envisioned.  The many years that were wasted in a  loveless marriage weighed heavily on my mind.  It hung with me somewhat even through today.

Sometimes I think that writing might be a sort of therapy.  Other times like right now, I think it’s best to let the past lie in the past.  I don’t want to go back there again.  I have a future to look forward to.  One I fought hard to get to.  And I cannot be so unfair to all that hard work.

be mine.

The first time we were together I broke up with him on Valentine’s day.

This year, I made a pretty package. Cut out confetti, glitter, red and white tissue paper, a mushy card and a big batch of chocolate chip cookies. Mailed it with a kiss and the promise of plenty of  embarrassment when it arrives at work.  Did I mention the box is pink?

Sometimes I am glad we get this chance.  Now older, we get to do this all the right way. More so, we get to really relish and appreciate it, and not take it for granted.

the second time.

the sound of his voice makes me crazy happy in a way i didn’t know existed.

he is my best friend,

the one i want to tell anything, everything to.

falling so in love with him was  a bonus.

he’s got my heart, my mind, my body, my soul.

his is the heart that sings a song only mine can understand

he might just look ordinary to you,

but he is the perfect match to me.

i can feel him even when he is not here, which these days is always.

i’m not sure of too many things……ever.

but i’m sure about this one.

sometimes falling in love the second time is even more brilliant than the first.

sleepovers make me want to cry

{my BAM, self portrait this week, between two worlds}

We had a sleepover this weekend.  The girls had their cousins come stay.  Their cousins from their father’s side.   I cannot explain about their father’s family here as it would take too many words.  They don’t see these cousins very often.  Things are distant at best on that side.  So time being what it is and schedules being what they are we don’t seem to find the time to get together, but every year at this time we do, every year in late January.  When the girls came I sat and talked with my old brother-in-law.  We caught up on our lives.  I was glad to report that life is going well for me.  That I am happy and that I am in love and that I am in the process of thinking about combining my life again with someone else and he, the brother of my old husband, was sincerely happy for me.  I miss these girls, my first nieces, both born within two months of each of my own daughters.  I remember being full and swollen, both my sister-in-law and I at the same time.  I remember joy as first one and then two and then three and four, made their ways into our lives  and I remember yearning for the feeling of family.  I remember holding these little babes as peanuts.  Now last night we did makeovers, rolled hair in curlers and  had dance parties in my living room, keeping it in check by punking out to Green Day.

Ed called.  The girls all took their turns talking to him on the laptop screen and then he watched them make me over, lipstick and blush and sparkly eyeshadow, so close but yet so far away.   We made bets on when they would go to sleep, me guessing around 12:30 or 1:00 a.m., him guessing closer to 2:00 a.m. and obviously even with no previous sleepover experience he was the better guesser because by 1:45 a.m. the little ones may have conked out, but the two older girls lay side by side in the covers talking quietly.  I remember those days.  I remember sleepovers and late nights and curling up next to a cousin or a friend and whispering those conversations you can’t whisper to your mother.  Telling them goodnight and heading to bed I had one last conversation with Ed, but I didn’t have much to say.   I always have so much to say to him and I felt guilty for keeping him tied to the laptop when he had a motorcycle to put back together instead of staring at the girl 2,000 miles away suffering with a weird twisted heart.

I think that maybe one day he may tire of my emotions. Of this up and down.  I don’t know sometimes what to think.  How my life keeps changing.  Most times I want to fast forward past all this tedious stuff, the long days and nights when we are apart.  I want to forego the questions of where and when and how we are going to pull our lives together and just be. I want to cast aside doubts that him coming here will ruin the life he loves so much out there or that my moving there will wreck my family who love me and who I love so much.

You cannot make time stay still. You cannot keep your babies young.  You cannot stop life from changing.  You cannot wish the miles to push together and you cannot ease a transition that is certain not to be easy.  Last night in a house that was  full I felt undeniably alone.  The realization that my children are growing and they will not always need me and the realization I have made everything about my life about them.  As much as I thought my life before would not change, or as much as I was pleased to see how I came into this life on my own, or as much as I believed in three girls taking on the world, I’ve finally gotten a taste of what it would feel like for us to be a real family, something I have always wanted  that has always seemed elusive.  So now it is taking everything I have to try to take this world of my past and this world of my future and try to make some sense of it.  To move past the uncertainty of the where’s and the when’s and the plans  because there will be no arrow in the sky or some figurehead to say, “you should do this”.

This is the hard stuff and it would be so much easier to do this wrapped up in his arms.  The problem is once I got there I might not be able to get back out because that is my safe zone. and that is why this is so hard.