Muchness and Light

Everything has changed. It's a different kind of Christmas.

The first year DH and I were separated, I couldn’t stand being at home for Christmas. The boys and I packed up all our gifts and drove three hours to Alabama, back to family and where DH and I had grown up and where the boys had been born, locking our jaws tightly on high-held heads and got through our first Christmas as a family of three. The second year, I couldn’t stand to drag out the Christmas ornaments we’d collected as a family for years, so the boys and I made our own decorations that year. The court-mandated visitation schedule had begun, and Max and Tricky spent the first half of their Christmas holiday with their dad and his then-girlfriend. When they came home on Christmas Eve, they were sugar-coated and excited, announcing that we would be doing Christmas Guatemalan-style! and opening gifts at midnight. I made breakfast at 2 a.m., and that was the last time both boys slept with me in my bed.

For the next three years, we incorporated Rango into our new tradition. He didn’t have fond Christmas memories from his own childhood, and he was amenable to adopting ours. The day of celebration and the celebratory menu changed, depending on the visitation schedule and on his food allergy. He refused to participate in our annual viewing of A Christmas Story, saying it reminded him of unhappy Christmases growing up in a dysfunctional family. He would game elsewhere, while Max, Tricky, and I piled on the couch and yelled lines at the television, like we’d created our own Rocky Horror Christmas Show.

This year, without Rango, we weren’t limited by his food allergies or his ghosts. When I casually asked the boys what they’d like to eat for middle-of-the-night breakfast, Max cried out and demanded Waffle House.

“It’s Christmas. They’ll be open.”

And this is how a new Christmas tradition was born.

Traditions are beautiful. They tie you to a shared past and anchor you in loving nostalgia. But they are not fully fixed and are open to adaptation, to making them contemporaneously cogent. Some changes are welcomed—a new baby, a new marriage, a new home—and some are not. Since my divorce, both of my grandmothers have passed away, and childhood memories of being at their houses for the holidays are forever frozen in time. While the respective families have worked to create new memories and new traditions, it is bittersweet to conjure those last Christmases with my grandmothers.

I know many families who are creating new traditions this year. New babies make the holidays seem so much brighter. The loss of mothers and children and beloved family members can blur the holiday lights with slow, hot tears. But another Christmas, another new year, is coming and going, and how it is marked is completely up to them.

This is the last Christmas I know for sure that Max will be home. My baby will be graduating high school soon, and he will begin the slow embark on his own adult life. Eventually he will establish his own traditions and schedule that may not include me or his dad or his brother, not in the ways it has through his childhood. He will always be here in some way, but I don’t know how many more times I will get to hear the cacophony of my little boys parading down the hall to open gifts, or the sound of wrapping paper being ripped and tossed at light speed, or the boyish squeal of delight at having received just what they wanted.

“I’ll always come home…. I have to get my presents!”

“But you may be at your girlfriend’s parents’ ski retreat in Aspen,” I retorted.

“Yay. More presents for me,” Tricky chimed in.

But even when they are grown and bringing their babies home to create new memories at Sass’s house (yes, we’ve already agreed that Sass is the likely grandma name), Christmas at midnight—even if it’s on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Day or by phone—is something the boys and I can always share. Waffle House is always open; middle-of-the-night hashbrowns can come any day we like.

We were surprised to find our local Waffle House half-filled with grown families, dressed in spirited dress wear, as if they’d come after midnight mass. Two were apparently regulars who’d come to share a meal and bring a gift for their regular server, who hugged each of them and wished them a merry Christmas. Our new tradition of leaving a generous tip for our 1 a.m. server wasn’t original, but it did help to anchor us in this time, when it is still just Sass and her boys, for the inevitable coming change.

To everyone who is living tradition-challenging change this year, go with it. No matter the reason, find something in the newness in which to anchor yourself, and make it your own. There may be laughter or tears, unequivocal joy or breath-stealing heartache. Make them into what you need. They are yours to do with as you wish.

I wish you all love, light, and peace in this holiday season.

 

 

In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I shall meet.

Since my thyroid radiation in July, I’ve been struggling with still feeling like general crap. Fatigue and brain fog have been intermittently worse. A pretty leisurely two-mile walk with Rango and the boys recently wiped me out for two days. My bloodwork shows wildly-swinging levels of thyroid hormones, indicating that the regrown tissue is indeed dying off, though it may be months before it normalizes.

With that has also come more weight regain and self-recrimination and outright self-loathing.

I have tried to get back into the gym even semi-regularly. It’s hard enough to juggle work and school and kids successfully, and trying to find even six hours a week for myself in that is sometimes unmanageable. Of course I know the exercise will actually help me to feel better, but the fatigue that comes with hypothyroidism can be unimaginably oppressive.

Recently I started a series of virtual races through Yes.Fit. Of course I chose the Alice in Wonderland themed races. After I complete so many miles, as tracked by my Misfit activity tracker, my medal is sent to me automatically. As of today, I’ve completed three of the six Alice races, totaling more than 60 miles.

As it does every day, Facebook was kind enough to remind me this morning of memories from this day in previous years. I find it interesting to see how life has changed over the last few years, but I tend to face those reminders with some trepidation. I love the pictures and funny quotes from my boys from their younger days. Sometimes the memories are useless or now meaningless, or sometimes even too painful, and I’ll delete them. Sometimes I leave the painful ones, knowing those ghosts will haunt me again next year, because I’m either not ready to deal with them or I know they’re so important that I will need the reminders again.

But today, there were two things, from 2010 and 2011. Not surprising, there were pictures from a 2010 concert, of a band I loved then and love now. It was the second in a series of shows that were seminal for the changes that would come over the following two years. A year later, it was the memory that was down 99 of the 115 pounds in total weight loss. Yet another year later, I’d just separated from my now-ex-husband.

All of that has fueled my writing since 2010, which began with the realization that I’d lost my muchness--just like Alice in Wonderland.

I have said repeatedly over the last year that, for a variety of reasons, I felt like I was back in 2010 and didn’t know why I was reliving such similar circumstances. Regardless of the logistical changes and strides I know I have made, I have replayed the past in tandem with the present and come up with only confusion and emotional failure. I have continually grappled with figuring out which choice I didn’t make or should’ve made differently. I’ve tried to re-learn whatever lesson I obviously needed to repeat.

But somehow, I keep sliding farther and farther into the past. Where 2010 may have felt like a rabbit hole, 2016 is feeling more and more like the other side of a looking glass. Where then felt new and exciting and rebellious, now feels reflective and reversed and exhausting.

What is it? What did I miss? What do I need now that can only be retrieved from then?

It just so happens that Alice Through the Looking Glass comes out on DVD this week. Of course I saw it in the theater when it opened--how could I not?--but I really didn’t love it as much as I did the first one. It was beautiful, and I looked for the clues to my missing lessons, but the torment of Time was unsettling to me. I could willingly believe in a lost young woman traveling to surreal place and conquering her fears, but it was almost impossible for me to suspend my disbelief as the same woman mended old wounds.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe my path has been a big circle, and maybe the obstacle is an unturned stone.

Certainly I can pinpoint errors and mistakes and regrettable decisions, but I feel like I have done everything in my power to apologize and make amends for those actions. I would say I have done my best to move on, but I damn well know there are frozen moments that continue to haunt me.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something. It is maddening, appearing and disappearing, always just out of my reach.

So I’m starting back at the beginning, at Alice. I am literally retracing my steps, one foot in front of the other, until I can find a way to the next landmark on this destination. I don’t want to believe that I am personally destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, that there is literally no way to avoid spiritual repetition. I’ve already seen the White Rabbit, I just passed the Cheshire Cat and am making my way toward the Mad Hatter. There is still the Caterpillar and the Queen of Hearts.

After that, I’m seriously considering the Pac-Man races, where I get to eat a series of brightly-colored ghosts.

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

Last week, I had this awkward moment of running into an ex (read: very brief fling) in an unexpected public place. We didn’t speak—just eye contact and awkward silence. The next morning, Facebook Memories reminded me that it was three years ago that day that the fling had happened. The next day (and for the next two) Facebook reminded me that it was a major milestone anniversary with a different ex, tossing pictures of Vodka-soaked memories at me like Molotov cocktails. Somewhere in the midst of that, yet another ex made his presence known.

The Parade of Ghosts has begun.

This time of year marks the beginning of a couple of months of incredibly difficult anniversaries, from multiple relationships. Some days are reminders of more than one relationship—sometimes more than two—and the memories are not always kind. Yes, it is reminders of the hurt from other people, but it is also riddled with reminders of the choices I made and their lasting impact.

But I’m also riddled with reminders of who I was, of the transformation that occurred over the course of two years. I am plagued by pictures of myself from those times, and then I see myself now.

And I weep.

I know. In the last three years, I finalized my divorced, worked three part-time jobs (and then no part-time job) while going to school full time, while finishing one degree and continuing to finish another, while now working full-time and schooling part-time, while winning a huge award, while establishing a new relationship, and while raising two sons with very little help from their absentee father.

And it turned out my body was revolting but I didn’t know it, hence the extreme fatigue and hormonal issues and weight gain. Followed by an injury that has kept me out of the gym since October and that culminated in surgery last week.

Reasons not excuses.

In my heart, I feel like a fucking fraud.

None of the other stuff matters, because I got fat again. Because I regained part of the weight I spent three hours a day, for fifteen months, fighting off. When I was a stay-at-home mom who had to rely on a distant and emotionally-inconsistent husband for everything.

So right now, I’m fighting not just the ghosts of my exes and my former life, I’m battling the ghosts of myself, and they are bitches.

They are snarky and blond, with thinner thighs and less sag and a tighter ass. They are unapologetic for their choices, even now when it’s me who has to face their implications. They remind me that they warned me, that I wrote openly about how I couldn’t relinquish control of my food and weight for the rest of my life, how exactly this would happen. (I told you so!)

How maybe if I hadn’t made some of those choices along the way, I wouldn’t be in this emotional predicament.

So for all of my talk then—hell, even this talk now!—who the hell am I to tell myself or anyone else anything??

In so many ways, it feels like I’m back in the summer of 2010, in chronic pain and uncomfortable in my own skin, struggling to keep the house and the kids together and still give Stephanie time to breathe and enjoy the things that make her soul feel not dead. Not even alive. Just not dead.

I have come to accept that things are often outside my control. Really, I’m good with that. This doesn’t even feel unmanageable, just unmanaged.

So I take a deep breath—I don’t have the luxury to get real high—and try to make the mental list of what needs to be done. I tally projects and plans and intentions and expectations in an ongoing psychic To Do list, and then I am overwhelmed by it all and I just want to crawl in my bed and go to sleep.

But I can’t. There’s too damn much to do.

And even if I could sleep, my goddamn ghosts are there, just waiting.

It’s like my own production of No Exit starring Stephanie as Garcin, Inez, and Estelle simultaneously.

Existential crisis, indeed.

Today, I have no swarthy internet wisdom. I have no words of encouragement or really anything else. I can’t find the out, not yet. I know I will eventually scratch my way through the dark, along the dank wall, and claw my way out if that’s what it takes. But there’s no door opening today.

Those most I’m getting today is dirty fingernails.

 

You were the promise at dawn, and I was the morning after.

My head is a little haunted sometimes.

Because I horde the memories, because I keep an extraordinary amount of minutiae in there, and because I'm an intensely emotional girl, there is a constant swirl of emotion in me. In a given moment, I will drive along a certain street or hear a specific song, and it will dredge up a memory—Oh, I talked to Absolem from that parking lot or That song was playing when Bounder and I <did whatever>--and then I will re-evaluate the entire relationship. It may take hours or it may happen in an instant, but every emotion I ever felt about that person will come in waves of good and bad, roiling over each other and crashing against the shores of my heart in quick succession.

Hurricane Sassafras can be an utter bitch sometimes.

But none of those emotions are happening now. I'm not living the event that led to the original emotion. It's just an echo, a ghost.

"Ghosts can't hurt you," Rango has reminded me a hundred times. "They're powerless."

Theoretically, they have the power I allow them to have, though I don't really know how to make them feel less important. Some have just taken time to fade. There are dozens of faceless, nameless shifting shapes that are little more than a murmur in my periphery.

But then there are the others.

My therapist said to me once that our bodies have a memory of their own, that our memories play out on a deep, cellular level because our bodies were physically present for the events that occurred. As she explained it, this is why anniversaries of powerful and vividly-remembered events can bring on the same emotions that were felt originally.

Right now, at this time of year, I am in a cycle of dozens of anniversaries. For whatever reason, the period from mid-April to the beginning of August is peppered with anniversaries like a minefield of memories. They run the gamut from wonderful to confusing to downright heartbreaking—and sometimes all three at once.

My therapist also had me work on sitting with my emotions, on allowing them to fall in and around me and just be, without reacting or overreacting to them, naming them and being aware of what they were and where they came from. But with emotions constantly on this rollercoaster down Memory Lane, it's too easy for me to become stuck in place, sitting, paralyzed in my useless fear.

And I do know that the fear is pointless and counterproductive. In my head, I am fully aware that what I'm feeling is wrapping its cold hand around my heart because I let it. I know that the ghosts are vaporous re-imaginings of what I remember, vacillating around my perspective at the moment that I am reminded of them.

But what is it about the others that I can't quite seem to escape them fully?

Absolem was both witness and accomplice to the inner transformations that were the cause of so much outer revolution. There are days I think of something that I should tell him and then remember that we no longer have that relationship, that I can't just message him and tell him to call me when he gets a chance. While I miss that friendship, I do not miss the emotional craziness that sometimes ensued because of it. I don't miss those tears, but I do sometimes change the route I drive just to avoid passing my own ghost.

Bounder was... Bounder. He was the one who broke my heart and wouldn't give me the closure I asked for. There was an ending—and one that took far longer to play out than we were actually a couple—but it didn't come how I felt like it should've, and it never will. Because he lives close by, I sometimes pass him on the street. It's not a ghost with him so much as a poltergeist, make me nauseated and ill from a sucker punch to the gut.

There are still some songs I just. can't. bear. to hear.

And with DH, it seems like there should be more than with the others, but there's not. In fact, it happens far less often than it used to. Yes, I've had almost three years to put that damage behind me. Yes, I still have to deal with his shit in my basement.

But I can also see the very best of him every single day in our boys. I chose to have two children with him for a reason, and Max and Tricky remind me all the time of how that decision was the best one I ever made. Somehow I've been able to unpack and repack all of that emotional baggage and keep only what mattered, and it's very rare that those memories have the power to upend me.

So I've been a bit on edge for the last few days. I told the Castration Committee that I felt like I was about to crawl out of my own damn skin again. Last night, the first good spring storm came, thunder like the laughter of those specters. I sat on my porch swing, feeling the cold spray of torrential rain on the breeze like phantasmal fingers stroking along my neck. I let the emotions come and swing with me until I thought I would choke on my own breath.

What was I feeling? Why was I feeling it?

I couldn't name it. I couldn't exorcise it.

One of Rango's superpowers is to be able to replace those memories with his own, our own. He is a Ghostslayer Extraordinaire.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. Just hold me."

Is it that you miss them? One of them?

No.

Is there something you're not getting that you need?

Not at all.

It wasn't that I was missing anyone else. I hate to compare old loves—each relationship was special for its own reason—but Rango is undeniably so much more than any of the others. There is nothing any of them was or has that he doesn't offer to me willingly and completely.

"Sometimes I just... hurt," I whispered to Rango.

It just hurts.

And there it was. Just hurt. Not grief or anger or longing or sorrow or love. Just hurt that hasn't fully healed. It doesn't feel like it did when the wounds were fresh, but it still aches sometimes when I twist just right or move too quickly in an unexpected direction. Sometimes I just bump the old wound.

And somehow, giving that to Rango makes the hurt fade.

He kisses me and makes me better.

Today, the ghosts are mostly quiet. They're just kind of hanging out and busying themselves with other things, playing quietly off in the distance. I can feel their presence, see them out of the corner of my eye, but I'm doing my best to stay out of their line of sight.

Somewhere between them and me is him, Rango, who will stand guard for as long as I need.

I'm not so scared anymore.

 

The chains that you break to be free, well they tear up the ground when you drag them around.

Oh, my heart is a brutal, tempestuous little bitch sometimes—trapped in the delicate, fragile teapot of my head.

I'm now three years into Muchness and Light—November 25^th will be three years exactly—and this forum has been as cathartic for me as my therapist's office, though substantially cheaper.  Sometimes I find myself covering old ground again, about love and those life lessons I have tackled so openly during this time.  When I realize I'm circling back to something I thought I'd exhausted before, I realize there's a reason, something I didn't get right the first time.

There's always some catalyst—a new drama or relationship or end of a relationship—that sends my heart reeling and bouncing around the confines of my head.  My dad would likely make the "bb in a box car" analogy.  The cacophony between my ears sounds like a thousand simultaneous, murmured conversations with the bells and whistles of a pinball machine dinging above the din. 

It's overwhelming to me sometimes.  How could it not be too much for anyone else?  How could it not exhaust someone else, to let them take a shot at the flippers?

It has become part of my established, public persona that I am a lot to handle.  My online dating profile even warned men that I can be intimidating, that I'm "loud and voracious and a ball of batshit blond energy."  I've received hundreds of messages, telling me how they appreciate my honesty and that they'd like a shot at channeling that energy.  Five minutes later, when it's clear that they assume it means I just want great, casual sex, I'm generally done with that conversation. 

It's not usually that much different in person. 

When someone takes the time to get to know me, though, they do get to see my softer side.  I'm really very sweet and incredibly affectionate, and I am fully capable of being quiet and still when the moment demands it. 

As confident as I am in who I am, though, I'm also very insecure in how other people deal with me.  I can get my feelings hurt far more easily (and often) than I'd like to admit.  In fact, I often hide that from the person who has lashed me, knowing it's usually not an intentional assault against my fragile façade.  I'm a lot of personality, which means my heart is a big, easy target.  It's that much harder to miss when I've taken it off my sleeve and am just carrying it openly in my hands, like a shield made from an oversized box of Valentine's chocolates.   

I'm not entirely fearless in my pursuit of love, no matter how brave I may be.  I'm not afraid to let people get close; I'm afraid to let them stay close.  I've been out with a lot of men in the last year.  Less than half of them have gotten a second date.  Of those that have, less than a quarter have gotten yet another shot.  I tend to throw myself out there and then yank myself back from the brink.  In all fairness, it has usually been because I could readily tell those men weren't for me, and I didn't want to waste my time on those fruitless endeavors. 

When I meet someone I truly like, someone for whom I develop feelings, it's very hard for me not to assume that they will disappoint me.  I have a definite pattern of finding emotionally unavailable men and trying my best to forge a relationship with them anyway.  It goes back to my childhood (What doesn't?  Ask my therapist.), and I can pinpoint the unavailability in each and every one of the men I've been attached to romantically.  All retrospectively, of course.

In my moving-into-the-new-year post from the end of 2012, I wrote this:

I do not want unavailable men.  Maybe that seems like a no-brainer, but I have this tendency to attract such beings into my life.  Whether logistically or emotionally, I am magnetically attracted to the men who are least likely to be able to share their life or mine.  Maybe it's something about their being inherently broken—a fragile cat.  They're soft and pretty and purr when I pet them, but they can't give what I need or want in return.  I don't want that anymore. 

So why the hell do I keep going back to that?

My heart knows better in theory but not in practice.  My head knows it's stupid to even glance at a fragile cat.  But I do it all the damn time, as if one day, just maybe one of them will break that pattern and not be quite like the rest. 

Hot Pocket chided me in her drawling, gentle way that I need to get it into my pretty, thick head that I deserve to be happy with good things.  I know this logically.  I am human.  I'm a good person.  I have done nothing so unredeemable that it makes me undeserving of love. 

But in my heart, I don't know that I'm worthy of the affection and attention of a man who truly loves me.  Everything in my past has shown me the opposite is true.  The people who love me most will disappoint me and hurt me more than I ever could imagine. 

It's unfair of me to have those expectations of a new person, and it runs the risk of becoming self-fulfilling prophecy.  If I am constantly waiting for them to back away, perpetually on the edge of heartbreak, I am much more likely to flinch and flee at the slightest provocation.  It also places an unfair strain on them, to be living under my super-observant, watchful eye. 

Somewhere along the way, I have to learn to be here now, to let the present be not only what matters most but what influences most.  I've let go of most of the hurt of the past, but it's impossible for me to forget about it all.  What I can't do is expect someone who has no ties to that to live in trepidation that one of my ghosts will haunt them. 

And every time I think I've laid those ghosts to rest, when I am finally able to rest, the rattling of their dragging chains clangs through the commotion in my head and sends me caroming toward the opposite wall of the teapot, where my heart dings against the crackleware and the echoes feel like a constant death knell. 

There's a comfort in seeking out what you know, in finding respite in what's familiar.  Maybe that's why I feel snug within the confines of unavailability.  I can rail against the men who compartmentalize me, who put me in the proverbial box that I purport to loathe, but I am all too willing to climb inside, crouching down excitedly until I can burst through the top like a girl in a giant cake.  I do love the anticipation, the waiting to see how they will react when I am suddenly and dramatically exposed.
 

In reality, they almost always freak the fuck out when it happens, when I am fully and completely me.  They make that face of surprise, with a glimmer of oh-my-god-it's-just-too-much before they wipe it blank and try to hide their apprehension.  That is the pinpoint of unavailability. 

I can't and won't change who I am to make them more comfortable.  I've discussed this many, many times—it's dishonest to me and to them.  I can adjust and hold back a little bit, trying not to inundate them with my muchness, but when my heart gets invested, the floodgates will part and set the deluge upon them. 

That's when it becomes sink or swim for us both.  I keep looking for the cat who can swim, who can disentangle me from the ghostly chains and bring me back to the surface, even when I know I'm the only one who can do it.  But somewhere there just has to be someone who thinks I'm worth that battle, doesn't there?  Doesn't everyone deserve a love that will fight for them, no matter what? 

So I keep fighting like that for the men I love, even when I know they won't fight back.  Maybe I'm hoping it's kind of like karma, that if I put enough out there that I will eventually have to get back what I've given.  Like a cosmic love dowry--it takes a huge investment to get what you want. 

Until in comes, I'll keep dancing and jumping around, waving my giant, red heart and offering my delicious confections to passers-by.  Surely one of them will appreciate it, someday. 

For your kindness, I'm in debt to you.

It's been a year, plus a few days, since DH moved out of the house.  That year has been an incredible experience for me, filled with both fulfilling and decimating experiences.  My primary objective has always been to be the best, most-supportive mother I could be to our two sons.  That had been my primary job for almost 12 years when we separated, though the logistics and the gravity of motherhood changed dramatically when I effectively became a single mom. 

Learning to live on my own has been eye-opening and sometimes difficult.  When I'm sick, there's rarely anyone there to help me out.  Each brother is dragged to the other's concerts and practices and competitions—often griping the entire time.  Gone are the days of anyone else getting up to feed the boys on a Sunday morning while I sleep in. 

You know what?  I'm okay with that.

It's hard sometimes, certainly, but I've also found an enormous amount of support from friends and family that I never could have anticipated.  When you're going through life-changing shit, people often say, "Let me know if I can do anything to help."

I have a circle of friends and family who will help, no matter what.

For me, it's incredibly difficult to ask for that help, though.  Historically, I've been let down by very important people in my life, left to fend for myself emotionally under the worst of circumstances.  I generally expect that people will disappoint me.  (I've had a lot of that this year, too.)  I tend to rely on what I can do for me, because people are usually unreliable.  Rather than be left with a half-finished mess than involves someone else, I would rather just do whatever my way and know it's done right from the beginning. 

But when I've had to open my mouth and ask, I've been surprised at the people who have stepped up.  It turns out that sometimes, when I let them know, they will actually come through for me.  Apparently some people really do want to be of assistance—they just don't know what you need. 

Letting someone else help carry my burdens, that's a hard lesson for me to learn.  But I'm doing it.  Slowly but surely, trepidatiously but grateful.

So to everyone who has offered their help this year, and to everyone who has graciously and selflessly given me or my boys something we really needed, thank you.  Sometimes it was babysitting or care after a surgery or money when I just didn't have any.  Sometimes it was nothing more than a kind word or patient ear.  All of it has mattered.  You matter to us. 

Now here I stand, one grain of sand inside this crazy life.

So today's the big day: 40. 

The first thing you should know is that I don't care about turning forty.  I'm not scared of it.  So please don't bother to lament my youth or future aging. 

When I turned thirty, everyone called me, encouraging me to freak out about it.  What was there to freak out about?  It's natural.  Everyone who lives past that certain point passes the milestone as they move toward the next one. 

Thirty was the age I didn't have to pretend to care what other people thought anymore.

Forty is the age I can afford not to pretend to care what other people think. 

I am who I am, and so much of that is because of the crazy and amazing experiences I've had since the hot summer day when I launched out of my mom, all six pounds and six ounces of me determined to get going, a month early. 

Good, bad, crazy, and boring—there have been a lot of laughs and tears and breathless giggles and blank stares of utter, incomprehensible disdain.  More of that than not has been spent with my BFFs, with the girlies who turned into women, right along with me.  This weekend I was blessed with the ability to go to my hometown of Birmingham and see these women, to spend the weekend with them while we ate and drank and cackled boisterously at each other, causing a raucous public scene.  (Turns out people are very forgiving of your obnoxious laughter when you're wearing a pink glittery hat and carrying a glowstick wand.)

There were moments when we were all sixteen again, giggling about some boy or some twenty-year-old memory.  But now we are wives and mothers and teachers and friends in ways we could never have imagined in our brash youth.  We are grown, and we are women who can own our lives, whether or not anyone else likes it. 

But being a grown-up doesn't mean we have to stop being who we are deep down.  There's no reason to suppress the essence of Me, just because society thinks we should act our age.  And that's just it—I will act my age, as I think it applies to me and regardless of what that means to anyone else. 

As we said all night for Pretty Pretty Princess Night, "Fuck 40!"

Thank you to everyone who has helped me to get here.  Thank you to everyone I've ever met or known, who took a moment to impact my life and my path, even if I didn't know or like how it was happening.  I wouldn't be in this place, in this Me, without your having touched me in some way. 

Now go find yourself a yummy delicious cupcake and make a wish—for you, for me, for world peace.  Whatever you choose, wish for it in your heart like you were a little kid again, and never, ever let go of how that feels.

And in that stillness, there was a freedom I'd never felt before.

I've been quiet for a couple of weeks, which is a little uncharacteristic of me.  I was really sick with a nasty upper respiratory thing, and I started a new job.  It's a part-time thing while the kids are in school, boring as hell, but it helps cover the cost of Muchness and Light.

There's also been a lot of emotional turmoil for several weeks.  There's a lot going on with me and in me and around me.  The first anniversary of Muchness and Light came and went on November 25th.  I intended to mark it with a special blog post, but I was caught up in the Thanksgiving holidays and all of the internal drama. 

I put away my fiction rewrites, again, until a better time and started on a much more personal project a few weeks ago.  I'd been writing a lot, consistently, through everything going on.  As is so often the case, writing is cathartic for me; I am sometimes surprised as what I find emblazoned across the screen while I'm trying to work through something.  Honestly, I've been afraid to write, fearful of the truths I might learn about myself and my situation, apprehensive of what choices it might lead me to make.

There have been so many ups and down over the last year, the last six months in particular, and I'm a little weary.  The scales have been swinging wildly from one heavy weight to another, and I needed some time to let them just stop, to find a balance and let that be.  I needed some time for everything to just be still, both in me and around me. 

It's incredibly difficult for me to be still.  I'm a kinetic person, and I like to be constantly moving forward.  Even if I'm in retrograde, I find comfort in knowing it's part of a longer-term forward motion.  And this stillness, this constant central balance, is the kind of happy medium that feels so impossible to me.  It usually takes me a long time to find what others call a happy place, where things are happening on both sides of the equation.  I know that's how life is supposed to be, in the end, but staying in check is boring and unnatural for me. 

So I had to make a conscious decision to be still.  I had to make the concerted effort not to tip the scales in one direction or the other.  I don't know how to do that.  I don't know how not to be in motion.  And writing felt like it might cause ripples and tremors that could ultimately undermine this effort, sending minute shockwaves down the beam and across the pans, shifting me one way or the other. 

Right now, I'm weighing my own trepidation against my deep, visceral need to write.  DH asked me recently what makes me happy, and I immediately answered, "Writing."  It's something I need to do, as much as I need to eat and sleep and breathe.  Even if no one else ever sees what I'm doing, it's something that just has to happen, regularly, for me to clear my own head and find my own insights. 

There's a book I've referenced before, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.  I go back to this book a lot when I'm questioning myself as a writer, uncertain as to whether or not what I'm doing is worthwhile--to me, to you, to anyone:

                In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy.  It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty.  And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

In the end, I know my scales won't be in balance for very long.  I have decisions to make and paths to forge.  I will almost certainly choose the path of uncertainty, finding some excitement in understanding the experience of the unknown.  Through all of that, I will write.  I will find my understandings by letting what's in my head come out through my fingertips.  I hope that I will be surprised by the things I find there, on the virtual page. 

I don't know if what I find will make me happy or unhappy, comfortable or discomfited.  I can't see that far ahead right now, I'm trying hard not to push past the fog and make inferences about the future.  But the process itself will bring its own comfort, its own sort of balance against my emotional upheavals. 

So I'm back, and I'm working.  A year later, I'm definitely a much more muchier version of myself.  I'm trying to let that muchness rest and regain its strength, to guide me forward toward the next phase of Stephanie.  I'm moving slowly, very carefully, so as not to tip my scales as dramatically as I have in recent months.  But even if I can't see the sights edging slowly past me, I can feel the kinesis of it all, reverberating gently inside me, pulsing deeply in time to my own heart. 

We long to be here by his resolve, alone in the church by and by.

There's been a lot of talk recently about anniversaries.  First, it was the 20^th anniversary of Pearl Jam's Ten, which also happened to be the 20^th anniversary of my legal entrance into Adulthood.  (Age of majority in Alabama is 19, in case you didn't know.)  That one just happened to be the 39^th anniversary of my mom's gruelingly long labor.  There's the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this weekend, of course.  (How the hell could I not remember where I was?) 

But there's a private one that's come and gone, one that's more significant in my own world.  It doesn't really matter to anyone but me, well, and this one other person.  It's been 25 years since I met, and fell in love with, my husband. 

I was a freshman in high school in 1986.  Back then, Southern schools started in late August, not this early August bullshit that happens now.  Summer was still substantial, mostly three months long.  I remember starting at the gifted magnet school on a terrible rainy day.  I knew three people, knew of a few more, and I was scared to death.  It was within days of my turning 14. 

On the Saturday after school started, a group of us met at the Village East shopping center in Crestwood, a suburb of Birmingham, to see Aliens.  I remember very distinctly how the girl who would become my BFF didn't want to see Sigourney Weaver do battle again with the acid-dripping Geiger monsters, so she went to see something else.  I seem to remember it was The Burning Bed with Farrah Fawcett, but I'm not sure it makes sense for that movie to have been in a movie theater.  (Tiff, do chime in here, okay?  The kids are going to bed, so I don't want to call you and ask.  Happy 25^th Friendiversary, btw.)

Anyway, one of the girls with us was in my classes, Amy.  She was hot, and all the guys liked her.  She was instantly kind of popular, which is weird to think back on.  RLC wasn't really a popular kind of high school.  I mean, we were all geeks in our own way—we were the gifted school, after all.  There were also only about 150 students across four grades; it was hard to miss anyone. 

After the movie was over, we were congregating in the parking lot, as we would be wont to do for the next four years.  (Honestly, Trees—the school mascot was a freaking tree—is there a parking lot in the 'ham that we didn't take over?)  Someone said something about "Amy's brother".  I remember looking up and asking, "Amy has a brother?"  As someone else said, "Yeah, him right there," I caught sight of this guy standing ten feet away.  He was about 6'2 and skinny.  Bad 80's haircut and acid washed denim, plus black Reebok high-tops.  (Remember, it was 1986.) 

I swear there was a freaking halo around the son of a bitch, and I knew in that moment that I would marry that guy. 

It wasn't that I thought, Hmmm, that's hot.  I really, truly knew that, one day, I would marry him.  We would be in each other's lives for a very, very long time.

Somehow I'd missed seeing him at school for a week.  We dated (in that non-driving, early teen way) for a few weeks before breaking up over some totally random, totally stupid shit.  He left school at the end of my first semester, when his grades dropped and he was choosing to maintain his subsequent girlfriend rather than his GPA.  I was heartbroken for months when we broke up.  (Tiff, keep your mouth shut.)

His then-girlfriend was one of my very best friends.  They were together for the next six years, during which time I dated a couple of people.  We spent those years in and out of each other's lives, mostly as friends but as hiding-in-dark-places-and-kissing friends a couple of times. 

I had a nasty early-summer break-up with an abusive boyfriend in 1992 and got my life back on track by fall.  During this time, DH and his girlfriend were headed for a break-up themselves.  I totally broke Girl Protocol and started a casual relationship with him.  I swore to my BFF that it would go nowhere, that I wouldn't let it go anywhere.  But what I knew after that first night together was that I loved him.  I always had.  And I always would.

I moved two hours from home in January of 1993 to be with him.  I moved into his apartment almost immediately, and we've been together ever since.  It's been an incredible journey, to say the least.  Looking back, I can see the hills and curves of the rollercoaster, but the truth is that I wouldn't trade a moment of that time with him.

This is the man I have loved my entire waking life.  Over half of this life has been spent with him.  We brought two amazing children into the world, together every step of the way.  We've been through some pretty crazy shit with each other—for and because of each other—but he's the man who absolutely knows me best.  He tries every day to accept me for who I am, no matter who that happens to be on any given day.  And I know damn well I make it really, really hard sometimes. 

But what I also know, no matter what, is that he loves me.  When I kiss him now, it's just like kissing him for the first time—my first real kiss, on the steps of the main high school, waiting for the shuttle bus to take us back to the annex building, in front of most of the freshman and sophomore classes.  He's the man who makes me laugh, breathless and giddy, in the middle of the night at nothing.  And he's the man whose touch can still make my heart race, whose hand on my hip in the middle of the night helps me settle back into sleep after a bout of insomnia. 

So, baby, happy twenty-five years, and I love you.  Remember that.  Forever and always and no matter what.