this is how i process

a lot of stuff is coming together right now. there's lots of news to share but i'm too against repeating myself to say once again something along the lines of: i'm busy and emotionally drained. because, really, that's always how i feel when really big stuff is happening and sometimes, especially lately, lots of big good and big bad stuff has been happening at the same time. i never want to write when this is the case. not here.

and whatever.

things are good.

i've been contemplating changes this blog would undergo in the near future, to further define me because i feel that need. even still. then i read miss mindy lacefield's blog today. i love mindy in a way i can't explain. i feel like if we had gone to school together we would have been eating lunch, together, in the library. taking pictures of our feet with our polaroids to prove that we really here, grounded. i don't know how to explain it except to say that i immediately felt connected to her after she replied to the first email i ever sent her after i'd seen her first colorful cover of cloth paper scissors.

we could have been penpals or babysitter's club confidantes, not admitting we still read them in seventh grade. she's a little bit older than me but i imagine had we been the same age, then, we would have been friends. not the kind that said mean things behind each others' backs but the kind that cried at night after the other had moved away.

at first i felt that if i wrote a mindy-inspired blog it would look like i was copying her. then i thought i'd just say what everyone says and go with: she inspired me. then i thought i just wouldn't even write this at all and instead would share the fact that i knew things would fall into place and it did. we've had three offers on our old house. THREE. just earlier tonight i'd only known about two but by day's end there were three. and i totally did a happy dance! but then i was watching tangled with the kid that won't let me work on art and his older brother who's running a fever.

and i was like i could write my memoir fairy tale style and it would be way more twisted than grimm's. and (insert if you give a mouse a cookie tone of voice here) that made me think of a poem i wrote after thanksgiving, nine years ago. i came to look for it but found this one instead, written in the same class. fall 2003.



i would ask you out
but i'm a mother
everything about me screams mother

mom, mom, MOMMY!

i hate the sound of crickets
and pumping gas in inclement weather

actually, i always hate it

i would only ask you on a date
because you might pump my gas

but you would soon grow tired
of my impatience
you would say
he's just a child
even though he is not yours
you realize i am not the one
you would want to mother yours

eventually you would leave
i swear too much and love to shop
it wouldn't matter that it was my money i was spending
you would worry about the children
and their college educations

i would feel guilty and buy them more things
i would forget how you liked to be touched
i would forget how to talk to you

i am a mother
to a difficult child
i am a difficult person, myself

years later i might understand
and you might forgive me
but it wasn't me and it wasn't the children
it was you leaving the windows open
because you liked the sound of crickets



and. it was about no one in particular, a combination of my real life experience of the single mother to a seven year old and my cynical state of mind. it was written the summer i'd met awesome papa but it wasn't until the next summer we started dating. looking back it almost reads prophetically (um. my husband = so practical about money and future stuff. also? he likes the windows open and doesn't mind chirping.) true story but the rest of it is nothing like the real story.

and in the end, that's all this blog is.
a glimpse into the bits and pieces that make up a real story.
i think i'm okay with undefinable.