the groove, she’s hard to get into.
it’s summer now, or feels like it. we planted sunny plants, the fans are blowing and blowing, the cold drinks are constant. the community pool opens in less than two weeks. cannonball!
i’m finding it hard to come here and write, to say anything more in this place. maybe my days are just taking too much of me, kids in full force and life, always here and there with a burning need to need their mother. maybe i’m tired, so tired, high on coffee speed and then crashing for the short, dark night.
the past year has been hard on me inside, though the last six months have been good ones. the loss of my beautiful, white haired grandma and my full-of-life pup took my breath away, took my words away. it’s hard to share the real and the raw sometimes. i never want to create a false ideal of life here, though i think that sometimes i do. who takes pictures of the corners and full sized rooms of mess and shame and a raging sorrow? i don’t, anyway. you know what i’m talking about, the unedited pictures of messy bathrooms and kids griming up the walls, the photo moms proclaiming a real sort of life that they’re proudly living. i have the bathrooms with bandaid wrappers on the counter and floor, the piles of shoes and peeled off socks, the mildewed toys needing bleaching. i have the grime on walls and fingerprinted windows. i just don’t want to talk about it, you know? it’s enough to have to get the things done in a day than to have to feel like i need to dwell on them.
maybe these are flaws, too much pride to say i’ve been sad and that i’m spent and that my faith is so weak and that church is routine. and it really may be too easy to talk instead about the heat, the cold blue of the swimming pool, the need for light sheets and the beautiful barefeet of a kid coming in for the night. easier to look for the the things that aren’t sad and tired, the things that are more easily fathomable than the speed of life that sends a grandma to Jesus and what that can possibly be or mean. there are easier things to say and write than how bad it feels to explain death to your kids when you don’t know what to do with the idea yourself. i cried every day for weeks over max, but it’s hard for me to say that, to admit that i stopped crying, to admit that i’ve moved on.
maybe it will help to say, “i’ve been having a hard time,” when i come to write. does it help to write it down that i am feeling faithless, worried, overwhelmed by mess and duty? what do i even mean by “help?” i just want to feel like i used to feel about this blog, about writing things down and being glad i saw things the way i saw them. maybe i’ve become old and curmudgeonly and it doesn’t feel authentic to take a long hard look at the beautiful life and write it down when the day feels like it’s been such a loss in every way. the beautiful life, i don’t want to lose it, but, oh, i just can’t keep it from slipping from my fingers into the waves below.
