...come what May...

Sounds of exuberant play and gentle chastisement float in from behind the closed door where two of my brood are re-engineering a gear train...and I am...content.

The house is otherwise still and silent...household chores abandoned halfway through...and I've time to step away from the must-do's and make space for the want-to's.  

I've written here but a few times...no plan in place, or rather...no plan come to fruition.  Rather...the flow of discordant thought spilling onto the page.  Which is fine, and necessary on occasion, and...a release.
But my posts have been neither steady nor intentional, and I dislike that.
My gears are rusty...I think. The talent for word-wrangling gone to seed, from lack of use.

A funny observation here: of late, when I'm struggling to come up with the intended word, I find myself looking upward and squinting.  An action to attach to the search. 

I don't think I did that before.

Before.
When words came easily and I wasn't so wrung out.

At any rate, this little window of time is here and now, and as good a time as any to 'put in the practice'.

So...here I am...here I go...here I write...

There's been so much of May that went by unnoticed.  The soft, sweet moments of tangly-limbed book-nests and snuggle-in-mornings.  The peaks and valleys of day-to-day toddler temperament and young-adult catch-and-release.  Thrift trips and daytrips and down-the-stairs trips. New signs and new words (or...close approximations at least!) and fresh utilizations of signs and words and skills already learned.  Kitchen-craft and breakfast-failures...paint splotches and play-doh sculptures...cleanups and cleanouts and deep-cleansing-breaths.

Yes...there were bees.

And crises.

And emergencies.

But in between...there was just May.

And May was okay.

...may-bee, may-bee not...

Writing, like seemingly everything else in my life these days, comes in fits and spurts...

That previous post?
Was
Not
What I sat down to write.

Not at all.

But out the words tripped...fingers clicking away...mind swirling through memory...

It's fine.

I'm fine.

Sometimes the quiet words just write themselves out.

~~~

What I intended to sit down to write was this:

May has been full of bees.

And because May has been full of bees, I am on overwhelm.

Okay, may-bee not just bee-cause of the bees...

~~~

Spring sprang a leak this year...making a muddle...or should that be puddle...of all my 'big plans'.

Life, leaking out all over the place...one spill running into the next.

I've been jokingly referring to myself as a 'crisis manager' of late...because, seemingly, every day brings another to my doorstep.

And the bees are witness to it all...buzzing about each window and watching me unravel.

I'd like a redo...right about now...write about now...a rewrite of May.

One in which I can make plans and keep them.

One in which progress is both linear and exponential...and altogether measurable.

Instead of a maelstrom.

Instead of a meltdown.

Instead of a let-down.

~~~

May has been full of bees.

At the windows.

In the doorway.

Worse, yet, the ones who find their way in through some yet un-caulked crack.

From sunrise to sundown...a constant presence...a constant threat.

The "landlord" solution has been...less than ideal, so the swarm remains, having simply moved to higher ground and sworn on revenge.

They've kept us indoors, more often than not, and stalled our usual outward expansion of spring.

~~~

May has been full.

Of bees.

Of crises.

Of emergencies.

May has been full of effort and failure and things that just don't work.

~~~

I'm learning the hard way, I suppose, that the trauma-based coping mechanisms I've relied on for too much of my life really-truly aren't meant for long term sustained use.

It hasn't gone unnoticed...that the year in which I finally resolved to heal, has brought so much of the damage right back to the surface.

It's as though the calendar saw my resolution and said "I'll raise you...let's do it all at once!".

So rather than parsing things out...bit by bit...sitting with one wound or another and letting my inner child cry it out...May has been a "throw it all in a blender" month.

The therapeutic approach, of course, is to tackle one thing at a time.

But that doesn't account for the moments or weeks or Mays when it literally all hits at the same time.

~~~

This quote found its way to me recently.

“Break often - not like porcelain, but like waves.”

― Scherezade Siobhan

I read it...once, then again.  Clicked through to copy/paste/save.

And then promptly forgot about it.

But today I happened upon it again, and this time I really...really read it.

There's no doubt that this healing requires breaking...requires not only feeling the old wounds, but picking away at the scabs and scar tissue they've been covered in.

So if breaking is required, may-bee...

Maybe I'll break like waves...relentless, unceasing, changing the terrain with every move.

Maybe I'll break like waves and heal as I flood out all the wounds at the same time.

...phone a friend...

 Clarity, these days, seems hard to come by.

Whether it's the sleep deprivation or the 'crisis management mode'...or just the gears rusting in this brain of mine...the ability to step back and observe the whole has been lacking lately.
Tracking the unpredictable but perpetual motion of too many balls in the air has caused me to get stuck in laser-focus mode, and I've found myself floundering when it comes to big-picture planning.
Despite lists and calendars and planners and organization...I've been (poorly) jumping from one action task to another, with no attention for the outcome.  It's plugging one hole in a sieve, while the rest pour out unstopped.

Until right now. This very moment.

(Okay, truthfully, not THIS very moment...but a few moments ago, before I thought to write it out here.)

There's an annual phone call I make, to an old...friend.  Weird, that. Not sure what the label is.  Former boyfriend.  Of eons ago.  Long-distance by phone alone...but somehow, connection...to a previous iteration of me, to a shared past, to parts of my experience that only he could understand.  
Ugh...I digress...

(As I do...)

Every year, the birthday calls.  Mine, outgoing, at the end of May. Returned a week or so later when it's my turn to celebrate.  Always a moment of startle in my mind when he picks up and the voice is both familiar and stranger.
Every year a rushed recap...a few laughs...perhaps some insight shared in one direction or the other.
A feeling of normalcy, because so much of what formed me...he was present for.

~~~

The call was a few days late this year.  Belated...my doing.  The birthday fell on a Saturday. I didn't want to interrupt.  And then it was a holiday weekend, and...  So I called today.  And had that moment of familiar but strange all over again.  Always marveling at who we carry along with us.  Forever navigating the momentary discomfiture of...is it muscle memory...or auditory memory that stirs up emotion long passed...

Our conversation the standard sort of catch-up.  His successes and health.  My children.

And in the middle of all that back and forth, there it was:

A reminder of what I already know...but daily forget.

An outside voice...outside perspective...

An acknowledgement by someone so very far out of my focus...that my feelings of alone...solitary...at a loss...are, in their own way, both valid and not.  An understanding of the different path....different timeline...my eldest is on.  And the gift of encouragement by way of his experiential knowledge and singular path to success.  

I'm over here marveling at the 'weirdness' of that.  Once upon a time, I was in love.  Once upon a time, I was deeply hurt.  And here, in the present, we're...friends...of the genuine sort...  And of all the people who could have set me back on my feet in 'this moment in time'...

Weird.  Just...weird.

Thank goodness for the weirdness.

I'd almost called him, months ago, when life took an unexpected turn and the past 'knocked on the door'.  I almost picked up the phone then.  Because he alone knew the players of this particular game...he alone knew how I'd been changed in meeting them.  

But I didn't.

It felt...unfair to unload that particular emotional baggage on a once-a-year phone-a-friend.

I wanted insight...or, guidance...a pointed 'yes...throw in' or 'no, back away slowly'.

What I wanted in those early moments was to pull from the past and have a friend beside me who knew how emotionally attached I was to the idea of birth family...to feeling a part of something... and who knew equally how it nearly broke me. 

There she is...the me of that part of the timeline.  Gosh, she was young and naive.

But that isn't fair, is it?

To dredge up the old.

To call on a shared moment in the past as reason for interrupting the present.

So, I didn't call.

But it came up today.  Unfiltered.  Stream of consciousness...much like I write here.

And in me...a perceptible shift...a sigh of relief to hear a familiar-to-the-original-experience voice remark on the present.  A flickering of 'not alone' in this, too.

~~~

I isolate.

Not news...certainly not new news.

I batten the hatches and shore up the barriers.

I lockdown and work at the problems in solitary confinement...coming up to breathe only once I've found resolution or solution.

No one would accuse me of having healthy coping mechanisms.

I've always had this sense of needing to handle things on my own.

Not be a burden.

A disruption.

An interruption.

Not to cause worry to anyone else over what I might be struggling with.

~~~

But...

This year...

I'm working on healing...

And today, that meant a phone call to an old friend...and opening up...at a comfortable distance of both miles and years...just enough to receive a sprinkling of clarity atop a tangled mess of crises.

...oh happy day...

What a privilege it is.

What an honor it is.

What a making and breaking and refining it is.

Wishing each of you the day you deserve and desire.

...and taking a moment to remind so many of you, that you are doing

the important

 the impossible

the inspirational

work every single day.

The world is always becoming a better place because of you, mothers.

 

...May : The List...

I wish...I want

I will...I won't

I might...I MAY!

What's on your bucket list for this month ahead?  I find, after an April that went sideways more often than not, that I'm both tightening the straps and loosening the reigns as we head into May.

It's far too easy to get caught up in the rigidity of routine and leaving the checking in for the checklists...  Which, as I found last month, left little room for surprises, and none at all for self-reflection.  So as the calendar page turns, I'm trying to outline the month ahead in a solid but sparse frame, and leave lots of space for pivoting...growing...and rewrites!

With a focus on Re-Assessing and Re-Addressing:

❒ Empty out all the storage and make the hard decisions on what to keep vs. what to donate

❒ Schedule and plan out the summer workshops

❒ Plan an overnight trip with the boys

❒ Set up theme weeks for Henri’s lessons and therapy

❒ dinner with Johannes

❒ lunch with Henri

❒ Sunday drives and dines

❒ sea, sun and sand

❒ signs and socializing

❒ ath-leisure, park-play and car picnics

❒ create our family ‘guide book’ of favorite places 

❒ go wild…at the zoo

❒ hit the trails

❒ ride the rails

...may plans...