Oy! Motherhood.

a kaleidoscopic mind

on a good day that's the way i prefer to think of what is going on in my head--colorful, fluid, energetic, and whimsical. on bad days it's all spasmodic and unsteady. flipping and flitting hither and yon, unable to settle on anything engaging enough to offer a substantial foothold. my days fly by. i'm with the kids all day and yet their unflagging growth and changes are sneaking up on me, surprising me, daily. the boy seems suddenly so big. his grey blue eyes have gathered themselves into the most beautiful almond shapes. his nose is longer and straighter (as are his very sturdy legs) and his hair is thick and tousled. the girl is wild, sweet, funny, engaging, and at times, completely unhinged. her vocabulary is astonishing, her independence admirable. there is something about her that often causes me to stop what i'm doing and wonder who she will become.

tonight while we were eating dinner she sat there with her hair hanging in her face, slowly moving her arm in wide circles, saying, quietly to herself, "ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...." as if she were casting spells. a clairvoyant, perhaps? seriously, peeps, she freaks us out sometimes. she's not even two yet. i love it when she says, "me do it meself!!!!!" or when she yells, "no! don't talk me!" because she's tired and simply can't deal with even one more word.

every day we rush out the door to school. even the girl takes a backpack and lunchbox. she's not happy unless she eats half her lunch on the way there. sometimes she wears the boy's engineer's cap. backwards. she and the boy get right to work and i head upstairs to my office where i do administrative stuff--bills, letters, website maintenance, filing, paperwork, laminating, and paper cutting among other things. i'm also working on cooking lesson plans, art projects, the garden plan for the spring, fundraising, grant-writing, setting up a PTO, and trying to figure out how to squeeze in writing a chapter about the stuff in my latest book for some kind of academic encyclopedia. i watch my amazon.com sales rank wondering when/if there will be a royalty check because we could surely use one. between lunch and running home to put the girl down for a nap i worry about J because it's that time of year again when he could slip into darkness. the school has lots of bills. we have lots of bills. i get edgy.

the kids and their parents all seem to love the school, and in those moments when i can step back and look at everything it is incredibly satisfying to see how it is all coming together. the kids love their little cooking lessons and even though we still don't have a swing set they are finding the most wonderful ways to amuse themselves while outdoors. without the distraction of fighting over the swings they play the way we used to. they use their bodies and their imaginations to create games and put on little "shows." most of them cry when it's time to leave. even the ones who stay for after school care.

we don't get home most days until nearly 5pm. i race around making dinner, cleaning up the morning's mess, and throwing in loads of laundry. then it's dinner, baths, and kids to bed before i collapse in a heap to watch endless back episodes of Lost and 24 and knit a little. there hasn't been much time to relax, but on the days when things go smoothly it is satisfying. almost as satisfying as seeing the boy's latest artwork

(it was a shamelessly bad segue, i agree, but i'm so happy to see something other than trains in his drawings that i feel compelled to share them with the rest of the world.)

blogsonae

i'm in a bit of a quandary--i've allowed my blogsona (blog-persona) to be infiltrated by people in my everyday life, and although i never really expected it to, it's causing me to remain silent on just about every subject. it's not even really as though i have anything to hide, it's just that i'm not sure i feel like discussing it with my tangible friends. on top of that i don't want to jeopardize the school because someone gets the wrong (or even right) end of the stick.

i learned a lot about the people around me this summer. one of the most surprising things was that most people really aren't as up-front as they want everyone around them to believe. i know, i know, you're thinking, "duh. can you say naive?" yeah, but i'm not actually *that* naive, it's a bit more complex than that. self-protectionism is, apparently, the way of the world, even with something as seemingly innocuous (and, quite frankly, good for the community), as a new school. people don't generally like to stick their necks out. and i can see why. it's not an easy road. and see, now, just having dropped that tiny tidbit is going to make people wonder who, exactly, it is that i'm talking about. the truth is that whomever it is will know, and i'm not particularly secretive about my feelings on this subject, or any other, IRL either, so what's the problem? i'm just not sure. i think it makes my blog seem less like my blog somehow because i'm suddenly much more self-conscious about what's on here.

i've considered starting over. going over to another blog server and beginning again.

but then i can't take all of you with me (all two of you who are left, that is!!) and i like it here with my groovy mom masthead and all that. not to mention the fact that i've been moxiemomma for yeaaaaaaaaaaars now. before i even began the blog that was my internet persona. i just don't think i'm prepared to give it up. any thoughts? ideas? suggestions?

Labels: blogger's block, paranoia