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Paul is at work and everyone else is sleeping.  Deep breath. Write, write, write.

I am always trying to capitalize on these moments of silence. I am not in that time and place in which the ideas come in the shower and then linger all day waiting for me to put them down.  Instead, I am trying to force the creativity to come in these patchwork moments that I try to collect.  Try to sew together.

Sadly, I’ll start a poem or a post or a piece of prose only to be interrupted and then to lose my momentum.   So, let’s get through this quickly, shall we.  (Should that have been a question mark?)

I started writing a post about pissing my pants on the streets of Italy.  It might have been a good post.  I don’t know.  But, it seemed so mundane.   Really.

Here I am again.  This same frozen feeling grabbing at my heart.  I started writing about me writing about the pissing of my pants and as soon as I felt a sense of direction this ugly halting feeling seized the ideas right from my brain.  And, now, again, I’m thinking “I have this insane case of writer’s block!  I could write about that!” and my fingers freeze on the keys.  I am silenced again.

What gives?

Outside of writing, I am experiencing much of the same issues.  I come home and am exhausted beyond belief.  I am living a life lately sans motivation.

I don’t think I’m depressed.

I don’t know what it is.

But, you probably don’t want to here about it either.  So, here’s my plan:

I am going to get up out of this seat.  I am going to put on some music.  I am going to sing along and clean my house and get everything all pretty and organized.

Then, if the space presents itself, I’m going to try this again.

I could write about pee pants, or summer, or Silas, or my recent experience jumping off meds and having to get back on, or the tea party that I’m attending this afternoon, or not being able to afford to have another baby (at least right away) and looking at life with a single child, or potty training, or preschool, or, or, or…

Anyhow, until then.  Thanks for the support.

I’m sitting in the garage.  A room that my husband converted into kind of a family play space. I am sitting here trying to escape the noise so that I can write about the silence.

Ah, the silence.

My boys are in the tub.  My sister is at work.  My brother-in-law and their two dogs are in the room that used to be our reading room and is now their bedroom.  The TV is off.  The radio too.  But still, I feel stifled.  I feel like there is no space to crawl into.  No space big enough to allow me to open up to myself.  To sing.

Laaaaaaaaa.

At one point, in the history of this blog, I wrote about the ways in which silence was chocolate.  The ways in which silence provided the space for a voice to carry its own tune.

But, alas, there are two types of silence.  The silence that pulls the throat open allowing it to sing and the kind that cuts the windpipe short like kudzu around the weak trunk of a uncertain tree.

It is this deadly silence that has been plaguing me.

That’s as far as I got before hearing the clamor of footsteps outside of the garage door and being summoned to help dry off our little beast.  We have no schedule for our passions around here and no space to experience them anyhow.   Even now, with no one home, I am stifled by dishes that need washing and clothes that need folding.  Before exiting the garage the other night, the night that I started this post, I scratched down on a piece of scrap paper:

Writing is frivolous.

It seems that the two silences needed for creativity are at war with each other in my life.  There is the silence that engulfs me.  The silence that keeps watering my ideas down to nothing but jibberish and a feeling of empty sadness.  Then there is the silence that is lacking.  The silence that fails to envelope me in its calm quietness.

I am having a serious problem with my creative cholesterol.  The good is markedly low and the bad is clogging the life out of my veins.

What is a passionate woman to do?

I guess do what I am doing right now.  Steal bits and pieces of silence when they occur– ignoring the dishes and the laundry and the noise and the telephone– and force out the silence in your mind by just writing anyway. Even if it’s no good, even if nothing is urging you to do so, even if you can hardly stand it.

Then congratulate yourself.

So, pat on my back.  I did it again.  And each time it will get easier.  (I hope.)

This fucker is my age.  And, thus proves, again, that cloud of mediocrity that is hanging, hanging, hanging over my life…

–found by my brother-in-law, in my handwriting, in my copy of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (the fucker) and Stephen J. Dubner (it’s been so long since I read it that I don’t remember who he is)

I like to write in my books.

I like to write on almost everything.

When something comes to mind.

Lately, nothing has been coming to mind.

That’s a lie.

Things have come to mind but they have come as little whisps of things.  Not fully formed.  They have come as ugly, hollowed-out shells of ideas, husked and already dry.  They have come as disappointments.  Some have come disguised as real ideas but when I try to get them down they dissipate like ugly poisoned fumes leaving me feeling cold and helpless. I’ve been nothing but a bum.

And that cloud of mediocrity…

Still, I’ve made the declaration today: the buck stops here.  (I had to ask my husband if that was the correct saying.  I thought maybe I was wrong and it was actually  “the bugs stop here” or “we all bunk here” and not a famous Trumanism…)

Still, yes, the buck.  The buck of mediocrity (or at least of silence) stops a-here-o.  Yes, folks, be they short, be they vial, I am pledging to blog again.  Not only blog but do all the creative other things that I did before I stopped doing them.

Behold:

If that cloud were a weed then I would be Rounding it Up right now.

Oh yes, I would be.

So be it.

And always, Amen.

Not that I have any readers left at this point, but I’ve finally finished my portfolio and am ready to return to the land of the living. See you soon!

One time I got a full body massage from a young male masseur who wouldn’t stop talking.  Not only did he state that it was obvious that this was my first massage by a man (it was) but he continued to jibber and jabber in the following fashion:

Do you have a garden?  I bet you do!  What do you grow?  Tomatoes.  Cucumbers.  Cute little clones of yourself?  Can you imagine if you cloned yourself?!?  You’d be in the grocery walking down your favorite aisle for that favorite food of yours, you know that food that you consider all your own, and you’d see yourself there buying out your favorite food and then you’d get in a fight with yourself.  It would be weird.  Would you mind turning over, under the sheet that is, I don’t look.

This is not a lie.

Is that light enough and funny enough for you?

That guy is probably a psycho-killer…

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I can be positive.  Yes, yes, I can.  Positive.  Happy.  Go lucky!  Cheerful!  Yippidee-do-dah-day!  There’s a bluebird on my shoulder and all that crap.

So, I mentioned to my mom and sister that I finished a post today and that it was dark.

“Big surprise,” they both commented and rolled their eyes.

Big-f-ing-surprise.

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Okay, I don’t have much time.  I woke up to an abandoned house.  (Hubby and sis are at work and visiting mom has taken Silas to Lake Lure to throw “rocks in the wana”.)  So, yeah, I should be working on my Boards.  But, I’m using the excuse that I’m still waking up even though I’ve finished my coffee.  (Yes, the sleeping angels let me sleep until a quarter til eleven!  Blessing or sin???)

I started this post last night until an aching stomach just forced me to lay down and watch the Olympics.  Oh, the torture.

Still, the post might have been better written in the post-sunshine hours.  Who knows?  Still, I must post something.

So, yesterday, while working on my Boards… (Yes, that’s a lot of all I do.  Remember those vagrants that used to squat here?  Yeah, they’re back.  Full force.)  So, yesterday, while working with a fellow candidate and friend, this other insane woman looking for a 12% pay hike shared with me the story of how she injured her finger.

Apparently, her basement is a scary place.

(Yes, I mean, Boogie, Goblin, Ghoul scary.)

And, she slammed her finger in the door trying to run away from it.

She told me this as if being afraid of her basement was something silly.   As if, perhaps, adults shouldn’t be running from their own imaginations.

Now, my sister often says that I take things a might too far.  That I cross the line.  That I’m a little too often a little too much information.

Anyhow, I think you’ve seen this quality in me before.

Still, when my friend, and I really don’t know her that well as of yet, shared with me her treacherous tale of Basement Boogie, I felt the need, as my mind always races to find personal connections, to talk about my very real fear of psycho-killers.  I went as far as to share the time when, after watching a clip of the trials of the BTK killer, I accused my own husband of serial-killing women when he was supposed to be at work.

Thankfully, she had the grace to laugh and smile and hold it together as if I were some kind-of normal.

Thank you!

Still, in the world of running-from-imaginary-things, accusing your husband of psycho-killing seems to be on the real thick edge of abnormal.

But, that has been, in years past, the full extent of my paranoia.

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I was listening to Fresh Air this afternoon.  An episode in which Terry Gross was interviewing late-in-life lesbian and comedian Carol Leifer.  (If you don’t know who Carol Leifer is, don’t feel bad, I didn’t either.  Perhaps I’m out of touch.)  And, I hate how I just prefaced Carol’s name by stating that she was a “late-in-life lesbian” but that’s what half the program was about.  Need I be ashamed?

Anyhow, this Ms. Leifer and her partner Lori, decided to become late-in-life mamas by adopting a little boy named Bruno.

I could go into the whole ain’t it neat that late-in-life women still have the opportunity to become mamas (as Leifer did) or into the whole this is a two-mama family raising a little boy thing (which Leifer did not).

But, I won’t.

I won’t because something more personal, maybe more profound, spoke to me about this conversation.  Leifer became, against all odds, a mama at 50.  And she commented that she is a better mama at 52 than she could have been at 22, 32, 42.  She explained how her place in life is so much more settled, more quiet, less go-go-go.  How now, as a 52 year old she is able to just slow-down, relax, and enjoy her son.

Hmm.

Now I’m kind-of wishing that my uterus would hang tough for another 20 years and allow me this revelation.

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While I was nearly crippled with anxiety this morning and acted all kinds of hyper and spazzy with the kids, I would now like to A.) Praise myself for getting through this day intact and in style (I really was pretty humorous with the kids.  We seemed to totally jive!) and B.) Praise the Klonopin gods for helping me enter a space of calm peace, confidence, and love.  (So, yeah, Mom, I’m popping pills this time.  I am not ashamed.)  Now for a glass of wine and a long spell staring out the window watching this beautiful snowfall.  I should be restored to all manner of normalcy in no time.

I teach middle school.  6th grade in fact.  That year in which each child sheds off their baby skin and somehow, often precariously, blossoms into a teenager.

I say “blossoms” cautiously.

Sometimes it’s not so beautiful.

Sometimes it’s really tough.

As a language arts teacher, I have the unique opportunity to pair students with art– in all it’s various forms– that speaks to these ‘tweens’, to their needs, to their hopes, to their vast insecurities.

As part of a science fiction unit, we recently watched the classic Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder”.

This is the episode in which a woman, wrapped in bandages and trying for the eleventh unsuccessful time to change her appearance so that she might look “normal” ends up being, after much suspense,  beautiful (by our standards) but is living in a society in which the norm is ugly (also by our standards).    The episode teaches all about suspense and climax and irony and resolution.  It is intriguing and almost dangerous and is a wonderful little teaching tool.

It also teaches a critical lesson about beauty and self-esteem:  beauty can be manifest in many ways and forms and is, like so many things, contingent upon the societal norms and cultural preferences and, of course, the times.

This is a lesson that I, unfortunately, am still learning.

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