new year

It's been a strange year. Revelatory and trying. Restless and spiritual. I have more adjectives in me, but I am sitting upright, and they are lying down descriptives. Hold on. My stomach is settling. A low rumbling belch is working its way up.

HAAAAARD.

Right, and that too.

I wrote an awful lot and had an awful lot of it rejected. Not the same stuff, but still, there is some kind of cosmic balance of shit rejected to shit written. So much so that I didn't rightly have one acceptance letter, though I did publish some art here and there, and wrote stuff east and west, and felt accepted.  And that felt good. I kept blogging. And painting, and parenting, and staying sober. When the equation for poetry didn't quite add up to proper algebra (one rejection too many over work output divided by too many other projects subtracting passion for it from the whole thing), I decided to publish my own book. That felt an awful lot like giving up. Hell, it was giving up, or surrender, or acceptance. Giving up wasn't the most terrible thing I have ever done. It feels an awful lot like peace. I wanted an end to my poetry years--years marked by toiling at submissions and manuscripts and competitions simply to tear up rejection letters. I wanted the poems to go through their last edit--the interaction between the reader and the poem.  So, I put them out there. And now I have a wee little book with some of my poetry in it. I hadn't examined it too much when I decided to self-publish them, but once the proof came in the mail, and I held it, and read it, and smelled it, I knew it was the right and proper thing I did. It felt an awful lot like closure.

My goal for writing about Lucy's death was never to heal. It was not to be over it. I think my only goal, if there was a goal, was to integrate Lucia into our family and into my life, and I have. This space gave me the time and space to explore and examine my grief. You loved me when I couldn't love myself. You helped me more than I can ever repay. It is part of the reason I have continued to write about grief here, because when my milk came in, and I found blogs and this community, people who were three years out from the death of their child, were writing about their grief with such clarity and insight, I felt like they were looking into my soul. They had the distance to remember, make beautiful words, help me make sense.

I have been thinking a lot about this blog and the rest of my thousand projects. How busy I feel all the time. How unzenlike my day is mostly running, writing, driving, shopping, cleaning, mopping, sweeping and worrying.

I have a book in me.

It is stuck in all the worrying and sweeping, mopping and cleaning, shopping and driving, writing and running. It is lodged in the tread of my tires, smeared across the driveway. I hide it underneath blogs, and mix it up with some paint, drag it across the canvas. I stare at my day, draw it out on paper as a flow chart with arrows and question marks and what can give here and what can't. It all works. I am happy. Yet it is clunky and complicated. It is kinetic and unbalanced. And though I am happy, I am not complete. There are parts of my day missing, like the stretching and lifting weights part. And the sitting still with my children and husband part. I have three blogs, for example, as though I am three people. I tried to integrate everything once, but it was too soon, and I worried about my readers, and what they would think if I crafted here, or talked about parenting. Except that I am no longer tending to different parts of my life in different ways. I am just Angie, the grieving, artsy, craftsy, writery stretchmark bellied sneech.

What I am trying to say is that my passion is writing. I always wanted to be a writer, from the earliest memories of wanting to be something. I would want to be a doctor, so that I could write about doctoring. I wanted to be an architect, so I could paint houses. I wanted to be a cowboy because cowboys spin yarns around a campfire. I just want to spin a yarn or two. I can't write a book, and do all the other stuff I do. I can't work out without giving something up, because I have every little minute accounted for in my day.

I am thinking of maintaining one space. This one. still life with circles. Here I would publish a few times a week, and I would publish crafts, art and things I publish on my still life everyday blog, as well as talk about mindful parenting, buddhism, religion, recovery and of course, grief. I am handing over still life 365 to another editor, since that space has gone dormant because of my inability to give it the proper attention it deserves. It will be something like a one year sabbatical. (Baby steps.) I thought about focusing all my energy there, turning it into a book, making it monthly, or quarterly or yearly, but I want to write, and it keeps me from writing the book in me. The one I have to scrape off the bottom of my Docs.

I am giving up my Kenna Twins shop on Etsy, even though I love painting. It doesn't feel right anymore to paint in that way. Rather once, perhaps twice a year, I will ask for names here and on Facebook. I will sit in tonglen and paint mizuko jizos in a large session, like I did last year for the Kindness Project. That felt right to me. (So, buy on Kenna Twins now, before I close shop forever.)

I need to find that physical part of me--the one that chops wood for hours, and has a physical, brutish, fleshy understanding of the world. The person who picks it up, smells it, throws it. I feel disconnected from my body. I want to integrate me into me again. I am hoping that shedding some of my projects, focusing on writing in one space and then writing the books scattered all over my life, will help focus me. Last year, I wanted to make peace with my body. I quit drinking. It is all I focused on--quitting drinking. Now, I am bringing my body back to life, reminding it who it was, igniting the cellular memory of sweating. And I am writing a book, dammit.

What are you doing for the new year? Not resolutions as such, but do you have goals? A word to sum it all up?

To being on-line

Aaaaaaaaaah, I just feel like skipping down the street, pointing to random groups of people and gloating, "I'm back on-line, bitches!" Of course, that kind of hubris is probably what caused my computer issues to begin with. Still, my sweet laptop is back in my arms, and I feel much better. Last Wednesday, my computer just ceased being able to get on-line. The geek squad saved me from madness.

It was an incredibly powerful experience to be off-line for a week. I felt utterly bereft. I have set up such an amazingly wonderful community of mothers on-line through blogs, forums, email, facebook...I just felt so down, lonely and sad. A vital part of my support system was instantly gone. I really missed talking to Molly, whose son Colden died four days before Lucia. I can't even catalog the ways in which her emails soothe me. I missed reading everyone's blogs. I miss surfing ridiculously vacuous crap just to silence the inner voice during naptime. I missed Scrabble. I just didn't realize how important it has all been to my sanity. On top of that, being a stay at home mama can be a little alienating and lonely without staying connected to other big people throughout the day. [The only up side was that my house was much cleaner. (So very sad.)]

The day after I took my laptop into the shop, I had a sudden horrifying realization that I hadn't backed up any of my writing, or pictures. I began ticking down all the things I would lose. The only pictures that exist of Lucia were on my laptop. Lucy's birth story. Countless pieces I have written about this time of mourning, and the death of my daughter. I got seriously frantic. I cried on and off thinking of a world without these things. I called the geeks to ask if I could come and back everything up, and they assured me that it not would be necessary. They tried to convince me that they would take care of it, if it came to that. I simply wanted to yell, "But you don't understand, my baby died." In some situations, I would have completely said that, actually, but these are eighteen year old boys working as computer dudes for a while. I didn't want to scare them. I was already being an insane person calling every other day, even though they told me it would be a week. It was a difficult exercise in trying to shake those Type A, controlling parts of my brain. Because despite their assurances, I had strange fantasies of speeding towards the Best Buy, jumping the counter, pushing those black-tied geeks aside, grabbing my laptop, viruses and all, and running home, maniacally laughing. I didn't do that. I waited. Still, I couldn't exactly quiet the anxiety. I spent one naptime writing "lucia paz 12/22/08" sixteen hundred times on a sheet of paper in various hand writings. I just kept thinking about losing my pictures of Lucy. I'm not sure I would have recovered from that. Why do I keep thinking that one more thing will push me over the edge? When the next thing happens, I am still here. I am still surviving. You would think I would have more faith in myself by this point, but maybe subconsciously I realize that it is such a tenuous string that holds my sanity together, I can't imagine it being strong enough to endure any more loss.