Empty Stall

He's captive in this little box, tangled among all the little things that made me me.  Dew on the morning grass, wings to fly, easy laughter, innocence.  Where he has gone, my joy has followed.  Each day, I struggle to keep the lid shut tight, to hold too fiercely to something that has long since slipped away.  It's all changing--the light, the season, even me.  How can there be a spot of my heart that's left to split?

***

Tonight I fed the horses in the dark.  They were quiet, not hungry and frenzied as they usually are around dinnertime.  I found out that was because they'd already eaten dinner, so the hay I'd thrown out was a bonus feeding.  The sweet aroma of pine drifted to me, and I turned to see my mom had thrown some shavings in one of the stalls for the horses to enjoy.  The stall we'd kept locked since July 10th had been opened, an open invitation for the mares to come in and explore the straw bedding within.  That stall, that very straw was the last place my sweet boy laid his head before we put him down.  He groaned and stretched and closed his eyes almost happily, even though he was in unspeakable pain.  Even though minutes later he would stand, with my help, and be led from the barn for the very last time.

I never intended it to be a shrine to Moe.  It was a waste of straw to be used in the summer for my pasture-kept ladies.  I locked it up with a zip-tie that day, and there it's sat for all this time.  And, yet, a shrine is exactly what it became, in the end.  It was his stall, even though my horses don't have assigned stalls.  Every evening he would rush in there with a gruff nicker while I worked on scooping out his Equine Senior, so anxious to eat he would impatiently come back out of the stall and follow too closely behind me to make sure I was coming.  He'd been losing teeth in those last years, and gumming his dinner took forever, but I wish he was still here.... I'd let him take five times as long if he was just here again.  Soon, the straw will need to be removed, soiled and useless.  One more reminder he was here, that it all happened, will break down and disappear forever.

Tonight that open, empty stall peeled back the corner of the scab.  I know the wound will never fully heal, but I had hopes that, over time, it would become easier.  This is not easier.

Drop In the Bucket

Who am I, that You are mindful of me?

Who am I, that You care for me?

Who am I, that You allow my self-absorbed nonsense?

Day upon day upon day.

I am nothing, blank, zero.

And yet, You love me despite my faults.

***

I am feeling it today, the melancholy that visits me from time to time, even though my life is pretty fantastic.  I'm feeling silly, impetuous, and highly imperfect.  I'm thinking of these books I'm writing and chiding myself for considering people will ever give a flying Fig Newton what rattles around in my brain.  I fail as a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunt, a mother, a wife, and as a friend more often than I don't.  I probably need chocolate and a sappy chick flick.

Correction:  I need chocolate and a sappy chick flick.

The realization is that I am a drop in the bucket, a humming that is less than a disturbance in the symphony of life.  Insignificant.  No one cares--I'm not even sure if I care.  God cares, and it shouldn't matter beyond that.  I'll confess, it matters a little beyond that, but it shouldn't.

I'm sorry if I'm less than you expect.  I'm resigning myself to it, this less-ness.  For today, at least.

Higher

Yesterday, as I was on my way to dinner with my nephew and another of his cousins, we were catching up on life.  It's been a while since I've seen my nephew, and I very rarely see this other kid.  The one guy was telling me he was hoping to get into community college for forensic science.  When I asked him what campus, he named one I attended back in the day.

"Oh, yeah.  I went there."  I said.  "But that was back when I still wanted to be something.  So glad I got that out of my system!"

We laughed, but I've been thinking about it this morning.  The little ping of something when asked to indicate your highest level of education (especially when there is no option for "some college".  Oh, the humanity!).  The shame that accompanies being "just" a stay-at-home mom or a grocery bagger or what-have-you.  The expectation that higher learning somehow shapes you into more of a person.

My thought has always been that college degrees give you a few things us little people don't have:  A bigger vocabulary (bonus points if you know lots of words that deal with social injustice), and a debt to society.  Okay, so not really society.... But probably Sallie Mae.  That kind of burden means you've got to be really good at what you went to school for--or, at least, pretend--because it'll take your entire life to work that baby off.

What if you could be more of a person without a diploma being the end goal?  Because what happens when you get that diploma and there's nothing else to reach for?  Does life suddenly lose its meaning because you've "made it"?

The world needs people to love what they do--ditch diggers to rocket scientists.  People should pinpoint their passions and pursue them, absolutely!  But, also, we need to pursue living, even on the most hectic of days, to grasp at the threads of magic hidden in the drudgery of the day-to-day.  The day-to-day stuff is valuable, too.

Farewell

I'm freshly-back from the last installment of the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 2.  And I've got to say, I'm so conflicted.  Because so many have not yet seen the movie yet, I am not going to comment on specifics other than:  (a) why do I have to pick a "Team"?  I'm not that picky, and pretty much everyone on the cast is gorgeous; and (b) it was fan-flipping-tastic.  Now for a few random thoughts in no particular order....

I hate endings.  I want to grow old with these familiar friends.  Eventually Rob Pattinson will lose all of his hair and Taylor Lautner will pack on 80 pounds, so maybe it's better to remember them this way.  Still, I couldn't help feeling sad when the end credits rolled and the official good-byes (at least for now) were said.

When I'm feeling particularly low, I flip on New Moon, the second film in the saga.  I refer to it as my "comfort movie".  Some people have comfort food (okay, I have that, too) or a hideaway.  Me, I've got a somewhat-cheesy, totally depressing, co-dependent movie.  This goes back to a pivotal winter when this movie happened to be in the theaters.  Everything seemed to be changing, and the movie was so melancholy that it just fit.  I saw it eight times in the theater.  Maybe that's pathetic, but I am still here to tell the tale, and I am only a teensy bit more cynical about life in general.  So, well done, New Moon.

More than anything, it makes me long for a piece of what these literary series have done, and done so well:  Knitting together a community of dreamers.  When we are moved to dream, to imagine, we remember that we are surrounded by wonder.  Life is full of infinite possibilities, our own plot to advance and thicken.  I pray that someday I will stumble across the characters who will inspire others to create, to laugh, and to love.

Farewell, Twilight.  You weren't perfect, by any stretch of the word, but you reminded me that I still have stories left to tell.  I'm forever grateful.

Breathe.

My client sent me a text confessing she is scared to leave the hospital and the comfort of having a nurse or lactation consultant one button-press away.  I sent a text back to her to reassure her that we'd help her find support if it was needed.  What I was thinking at that moment was:

"Sometimes the most important thing you can do is take a deep breath, let go of the hands you've been holding, and trust your intuition."

It can apply to so many areas of our lives, can't it?  Along with being terrified of failing, are we also just as scared to succeed?

For me, this is significant because I've buried myself ridiculously deep, 8k-ish words, in my National Novel Writing Month word count deficit.  The words seem to be dammed up today, and I don't know why.  Is it fear?  The complete scariness of letting go of control?  Hushing the overbearing voice of that so-called "perfectionist" streak? 

I need to let go of those things that are holding me back, to trust I can do this because, deep within, I know how to do this... and I want it more than anything.    Just like this new mama, convinced she doesn't have the wisdom she needs to be the mother she was divinely designed to be.  We both need to stop and realize that God has not given us these gifts without the necessary tools to enjoy them.

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  

Perfectly Imperfect

I'm taking a break from writing about my writing to breathe my thoughts onto the screen about something that's been bothering me lately.  Forgive me if this is a rambling collection of nonsense.  I've been trying and failing to make it more cohesive, to narrow down a main point and stick to it, but apparently that's not my strong point.  Moving along....

As many of you know (and it so succinctly puts it in my "About Me" thingie over on the side of this page), one hat I wear is that of a doula.  No, it's not a part of the brain, the part that alligators are missing, according to Billy Madison's Mama.  It's not round and you don't have to gyrate to keep it from bouncing onto the ground.  Quite simply, I support a family as they prepare to give birth to their child, attend to their emotional and physical needs as the baby makes his or her way from the womb, and help ease them into the adjustment from couplehood to parenthood or from parenthood to three-ring-circushood.

This year has been trying for me in my doula practice.  It has been a series of strange events and decisions made based on poor or shaky information.  I have jokingly (and not-so-jokingly) referred to 2012 as "The Year of the Induction" because I've had more than I care to add up on my fingers and toes.  While most have been medically-indicated, at least a couple of those weren't.  This isn't judgement, it's just me hitting my head against the wall for the hours these families spent trying to make something happen when clearly no one was ready for that birth.  A stumbling heart rate, a failing organ, fear--those things were ready.  A mother's mind, her natural hormones, BIRTH--those things were missing.

I'm supposed to trust birth, and I want to, I do.  Where does that idealistic trust meet and meld into a healthy respect that things have changed in our bodies and our environments?  Perhaps it's not so much birth I distrust, but the myriad of factors that make up a perfectly imperfect individual, a pregnancy, a birth.  That fall she took off her bicycle at age 12; the chemical cocktail of convenience foods and sodas she's been ingesting for 30 years; the baby who has decided to run back and forth through his umbilical cord while doing laps in utero; the doctor who is weighing a recommendation on a borderline result, fearful of litigation.  We can't take our time machines back and make better choices or coax our baby into cord awareness.  All we can do is do the best we can with what we are presented with.... and it isn't perfect, and at the end of the day we're still left scratching our heads.

Is this talk of "your body was designed to birth this baby" and then women ending up with c-sections or without babies in their arms stealing away confidence and trust in themselves, in this process?  Women are walking away from birth feeling broken and inadequate, and fingers point in all directions.  Certainly, the medical model of care is to blame for much (not all), but at times, it is a mysterious recipe and maybe nobody's the clear culprit.

In the several years I have worked with families, I have been drastically altered as a person.  I can feel it deep inside, and I know that my closest friends can feel it, too.  Is it from the tears of frustration and heartbreak when plans slip from fingertips?  Is it the betrayal women sometimes feel from their own flesh, blood, and sinew?  I don't know.... but I wish I knew how to make it stop.  It is a heavy weight on my heart when I cannot save the world--and I usually can't.

Most of all, I wish I could shout out loud that you aren't broken, no matter what you've been told and what you've told yourself.  You are just an individual, perfectly imperfect, doing the best you can.

Day Five

I'm 5071 words in to book #2, cleverly titled "Hope Creek Book 2" until I come up with something better.

Nevermind that I should be 1500 words further.

Nevermind that I have no clue where I'm going in the immediate future with this.

Nevermind that the inner editor won't shut her yap because I'm still in editing mode.

Nevermind I shouldn't be blogging because there's a novel to be fleshed out.

I hate playing catch-up, but I love the feeling of that goal number.