Skate Away

So I mentioned in last week's post on The Joy Diet that what I really wanted to do was go rollerskating. I got lots of encouragement in the comments and decided I would go this week. I made a special point of telling my sister. She is my creative cohort and helps keep me accountable.

Can you guess what happened next?

I made plans to go on Tuesday night and then spent about 24 hours talking myself out of it. I would feel self-conscious and dorky. Max needed me. Who would do the dinner dishes? It's a giant hassle for such a silly whim. Which devolved into, who do you think you are? You'll look ridiculous. You will fall down and there will be no one there to laugh about it with. You will embarrass yourself.

Yes, gremlins working overtime. That got me thinking about resistance and why I was expending so much psychic energy trying to keep myself from doing something I really wanted to do. When my brain throws up that much clutter I try to sit up and pay attention.

So I did what I thought would help me over the hurdle of all that negative energy - called my sister and confessed, " I'm talking myself out of going." And she did what every caring sister would do, told me to go and that if I backed out she would give me a hard time.

So, I went and you know what? It was great. I didn't fall, not even once. I was, at moments, self conscious but I got over it. I let those wheels spin me around and around, let the adrenalin of feeling exposed and maybe a little foolish course through me and had a very good time.

The feelings I associate with skating are joy and an almost crazy sense of self confidence. In the crazy dark patches of my early teen years skating was something I was good at. At the rink things made sense - I knew exactly who I was.

Last night, I think I got a little piece of that back.

On My Mind

I have a lot of things on my mind these days.

I'm saddened by the whole Prop 8 fiasco in California. I believe in equality for everyone. Period.

I'm thrilled to announce that Lefty's research will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Bacteriology. (Don't worry, if you can't find it on the newsstand, I can get you a copy.) This takes a huge, crushing amount of pressure off for his tenure review in the Fall.

I'm happy that The Kid is sad that the school year is almost over. It has been a rough year for him socially, losing a best friend and grieving that loss. He has made new friends and is beginning, I think, to find his tribe.

I'm worried about my little sister who's having some health issues, has a lot of questions and the answers are slow in coming. Do me a favor. Light a candle or whisper a prayer. Send a good thought in her direction.

I'm shocked by the idea, but I think I'm training to run a 5K once the long long Texas summer is over. Running is still so new, such an alien concept to me, I still can hardly believe I'm doing it.

What's on your mind these days?

(A note on comments: I am eternally grateful for every single comment I receive here and do a little happy dance every time a new comment appears. I know you're out there. Won't you take a moment and say hi?!)

Happy Birthday Boots

My sister's birthday was yesterday. My littlest sister, the sister I still have dreams about as a baby, as a child. The sister who's the first person I call in a crisis. The sister with a limitless supply of good advice who will always tell me what will help when I'm frustrated or sad, when the fever won't go down or when The Kid's throwing up. She's an inspiring powerhouse of a mother – but there's a lot more to Boots than that.

We were talking this week about birthdays and how they dim when you're an adult and a parent. We agreed that keeping your expectations low and rolling with the punches are the best way to survive without ending up clutching a handful of disappointment on your big day, how magical birthdays are somehow behind us at this stage in our lives.

When Boots turned sixteen, she was living with me in Maine and I threw her a sweet sixteen party. A friend of ours cooked a huge Italian dinner and each participant brought a poem to read. After dinner, we sat in candlelight and read poem after poem. It was a truly magical evening and one that we will always remember. That's the kind of woman she is, someone who at sixteen wanted nothing more than poetry for her birthday.

Poetry and candlelight (and even on-time birthday wishes) can be hard to come by when you're raising kids and running a house but that's my wish for Boots, a little poetry on the day after her birthday.

Fresh

To move
cleanly.
Needing to be
nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
from any store.
To lift something
you already had
and set it down in
a new place.
Awakened eye
seeing freshly.
What does that do to
the old blood moving through
its channels?

Naomi Shihab Nye

A Little History

When I was in graduate school at the University of Maine, my little sister, who was in high school, lived with me for a while. There were things about this that were incredibly wonderful and, even in hindsight, I have to say almost magical. There were also things about this that weren't cool, mainly my lack of anything resembling parenting skills. I made some terrible choices and botched a lot of things but we came out of it still loving each other and we can both now remember the magical part of that time in our lives.

Yesterday, when I was writing about the doldrums I'm in and the sense that change is coming, it reminded me of something Boots and I used to do when we lived together (and if you check the comments you will see – it reminded her too). We often would get the sense that things were about to happen, something was about to change, and when we did we would sit together, sometimes on the cold back porch, more often in the kitchen at a rickety table, and we would wait. We'd just marinate in the feel of anticipation. On one particularly intense evening, my sister wrote the word WAITING in the condensation on the window beside us.

It was a time in our lives when we both felt intensely creative. It was a time that we have both, in motherhood, looked back on with pleasure, and wondered how and if we would ever feel that way again. We've gone through waves of this feeling of anticipation in the past few years (sometimes separately – sometimes together) and what appears at the end of them is more subtle and less clearly an answer than we had all those years ago. Back then it was a phone call, or the crunch of a certain set of tires on the driveway, or a song that would stop us both in our tracks. Now it's an hour to ourselves in a bookstore on some random Tuesday, or a day long argument that evaporates and leaves contentment in it's place. It's a recognition of oh, here I am. This is where I should be at this moment in time and sometimes, still, it's as simple as a song on the radio.