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watching the hawkeye shed his skin
I watch my children. I study them. Like it’s my job. Because, I think it is. For the past few years I’ve noticed a trait in my oldest son. Possibly it’s hereditary. Or circumstantial. Or both. I’m not sure that it matters which. I just know, I’ve seen it on my boy. I have seen it on him like you would see a heavy cloak – or a bathrobe – or if he decided to play dress up in a grown man’s oversized dress shirt. Fear. It’s dangly and uncomfortable and it doesn’t really fit his form. It’s hindering him at every single step and he is certainly…
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night …
And then there are some nights. Nights so long you’re nearly certain the dawn will never come. (Your only assurance being the fact that, thus far in your experience, it always has.) Nights filled with sick kids offering a play by play of their stomach aching misery from the bathroom. Nights when you are only certain of one thing – there will not be adequate sleep gained for you to operate as The Responsible Human life is guaranteed to expect of you the next morning. Nights when the dreams that greet your restless soul are so violently vivid and unexpected that your brain is literally reeling with the images come…
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on fear and back roads and what once was scary but now is not
This past weekend I was driving in the dark down some Virginia backroads. The dark in rural Virginia feels way more dark than the dark in South Carolina. There aren’t street lights or lamps or houses very close to the road. Neighborhoods aren’t dotting the path and the night seems more dark somehow. Driving the rural roads this weekend reminded me of driving those same familiar roads twenty years earlier. And twenty-five years earlier. And I could remember with painful clarity a feeling I used to have when driving those roads home from work – alone – late at night – on my way back to the farm. Or driving…
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All the Words We Don’t Say
In one of the many books I keep stacked beside my bed, the author talks about the value of talking through a problem. The value of naming a sadness. Which has me thinking. About that. About other places I’ve read similar ideas and thoughts. About processing and talking and sharing and explaining and All The Words We Say. The idea being that somehow talking about and giving verbal space for a sadness and a grief gives it both a reality and a vulnerability. A place to heal and a place to pass away from in the direction of moving on. Does that make sense? It really does to me. Why…
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here I am, son.
They sit on me. Lean against me. Wiggling. Twitching. Tapping. Head lolled against my shoulder. My boys. Some days I am struck by their vastly increased hands-on neediness. My sons are much touchier than my girls. They need me differently. Some days (all days) I am convinced that my ten year old would literally crawl into my skin and take up permanent residence if he was given the option. A steady question on his lips – “Where are you? What are you doing? Will you be here when I come back?” Listen to me, son. I’ll be here. Lean your head back on my shoulder. I’m not going anywhere.
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now starring …
Do you remember a boy named Bergen who was painfully shy in public? This kid who doesn’t even desire to read his poetry out loud to his classmates at the safety of his friend’s dining room table? Yes. That fella. Imagine this. Our co-op has been working on a simple play entitled How Birds Fly for the past term. At the beginning of the theatre class I asked all of the kids questions to gage their comfort level in being on stage for the performance. Every child except Bergen wanted a role – some wanted only minor speaking parts – but everyone wanted to participate on stage. I allowed the…
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reminded.
I abhor watching the news. Fear-based reporting. Sensationalizing the vulgar, the mediocre, the irreverent and the irrelevant. It’s a wasteland. Mostly I’d prefer to bury my head in the sand. Focus on the lives in the view finder of myself and ignore the rise and the fall of all that is outside of my realm or reality. However. I know this isn’t entirely wise. I know this isn’t holy. I know this isn’t living the command of loving your neighbor and loving the world. And so I catch a video of a current news story. I scan the headlines at CNN.com. I read the Sunday paper while the kids peruse…
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me. lately.
I thought I had worked so long at loosening fear’s grip at my throat that I shouldn’t have to fight so hard any longer. But isn’t that usually the way? When you think you’ve made it, you get a little sloppy. You get a little lazy. And you provide an opportunity to allow the exact thing you’ve been fighting to creep back into your mind. You unwittingly create this tiny sink hole. And because you’re so unprepared, so lacking in armor, you fall right in and risk being swallowed up by a monster you thought you’d already defeated. That’s where I’ve been this week. A little off-kilter. Sensitive to…
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this morning’s struggle.
Have you ever just woken up under? Feeling somehow less than ready? Not just for what the day demands, but for what life demands? For me, that’s today. That’s this morning. A combination of bad mojo stacked against me. A coughing, weird-breathing London crawled into bed beside me and I was still wide awake at one o’clock in the morning, sleeping on about six inches of bed and having to fight to recover my share of the blankets. Already dressed in my running gear, I had to bail out on my 6 a.m. running date with my group because I knew my fatigue was too great . Crawled back into my…
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uh-oh
Is that the problem entirely? Every dream we have for our children, every hope we place on their tiny backs, is actually all about us? Our idea for their future? Our idea for their life? Our hopes. Our dreams. What their life says about us? What their decisions reflect upon us? No wonder we raise such self-serving rebels. They are just like us. They are us.
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free. from the what ifs.
I don’t know if you have bad dreams any longer. Nightmares. But I still do. And a rotten one woke me up recently. And the remnants of it clung to my skin all morning. In the asleep version of my life I had left our children at some childcare facility. It was new to me. I was new to town. And when the time came to pick up the kids, I couldn’t find the building. I couldn’t find our children. It was just a dream but I woke up bogged down in the fear of it all. As a parent, are you ever overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the…
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I’ll go first . . .
There’s another way I’d like to be free. Free from fear of others’ opinions. Free from the temptation of trying to appear to be something I am not. I think we blog and facebook and tweet in a world that is far too easy to be fake. To be pretend. We write about the funniest moments. Or the sweetest moments. Our facebook albums are filled with the birthdays and the celebrations and the good times. We can morph ourselves into whatever shape we want in this digital pseudo-reality. And while it’s true that sometimes we are those people in the happy photographs, it seems to me that most often we…
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One Word.
I always find it sort of funny to write “I have a friend” when I have not met the person in real life. (Even though I do have friends whom I have never met in the flesh. Yet.) But I have met this person in real life. At Story. (Even if the meeting was short and I was afraid that Alece did not remember me from our e-mail exchanges. And I maybe acted a bit like a tongue-tied teenager. I mean, that might have been how it went down. Maybe. You know.) Ahem. Alece writes this beautiful raw and compelling blog, Grit & Glory. And she has this lovely idea.…
Keep Reading . . .
An Ode to EB White
parenting at the end of a school year. bless us all.
Snap.Shot.
