Dragons!

When I was a little girl, I spent all of my time drawing and writing stories. My specialties were castles, and their blueprints (not kidding), and families. I would draw portraits of huge made-up families, everyone resembling each other. I was a strange kid.

I always thought I'd grow up to be a writer or an artist, but somehow in my mission to prove I could be "successful" I lost all that to practicality. It's a shame, really. I left high school thinking that people didn't really make a living writing or drawing, so I pursued the next best thing (?) - video. Now I manage people who write and draw and make better livings than I at it. Go figure.

But sometimes I still allow myself to write something or draw something, and it makes me happy to the core. Lately (as in the last couple of years lately), I've been enjoying drawing dragons from a kit that I bought at Fred Meyer for my nephew. I thought - wait a minute, this looks fun!! So I kept it. Sorry Blake.

Here are my masterpieces.

Water Dragon - drawn with pen.

This is a Wyvern. It's unfinished because the medium was watercolor, and I'm not very good at it, and I lost patience. I also had a baby the week after I started it so I lost interest too. Maybe I will finish him someday.

I am very proud of this wicked beast - the Fafnir in various stages.

After all that shading, I think I'll just dream up a nice poem or something next...

Heavy

I have been wanting to write about my weight, and how much it bothers me and how impossible it seems to change, but then I was thinking about weight in general, mental and physical. Really, it all starts in the mind.

If I am heavy mentally, everything bogs down and nothing moves. I can't make changes when there is an elephant sitting on my motivation, choking the life out of it. When I feel like I can't change, I feel impossible and I don't take very good care of the rest of me, because it feels like "why bother". I think we all get here from time to time. I have been here many times. It's upsetting.

Before I get into a huge spin about it, I try to stop the runaway train of thought and think back to times in my life when I was able to make big changes. What did I have then that I don't have now? How can I get that back?

I think my life is all about cycles, ebbs and flows, as a wise friend once told me. These stuck places are the in-between places, the place where all the processing happens. When I'm here, my subconcious is working very hard to put the blueprint together, working up the motivation. It appears that nothing is happening but I think this is where the important stuff develops. I know that I want to do something different. Sometimes I can even identify the area that needs changing (the weight, in this case) but I don't know exactly what to do about it. What has worked before is no longer working. I need to find a new way.

The new way will reveal itself. It always does. One day I wake up and the plan is there, clear as day. If I can see it and it makes sense to me, the effort is magically there too. It requires maddening patience because it never seems to show up right when I want it to. Once it shows up, though, it's never wrong and it always leads me right where I need to be. If I let it, sometimes the results are even better than I ever thought they could be. It is a perfectly balanced recipe of patience, trust and faith.

This weight I carry on my body represents my mental weight. I am in a place that seems so heavy, but I have a hunch that it's just perspective. I just need to see it a little bit differently and that energy can flow again. I feel the undercurrent, I just need to let go of the rock. I will know the right time. I trust myself.

You Can Have It All

When I was a girl in the '70s, the feminist media told me that I could do anything boys can do, that I can be anything I want to be in the world. And I believed it. I still believe it. I have to because I spent my entire adult life testing the theory, and it seems to have panned out. Sort of.

I don't need a man to support me, although I share a house with one. I am the breadwinner, the cook, the life organizer, the main housecleaner, and I have a busy social life as well as involving myself in lots of activities to improve the world. Even though it's not 50/50 in my house, I took a strange kind of pride in being able to do all of this. Because they told me I could and I actually can! I didn't have to just raise babies and stay at home. I can do anything!

Enter the baby.

Because if I can do all that at once, certainly I can have a child too right? I can be everything to her and still work full time and still have a decent marriage and still have friends and still actively benefit the world. This is the moment of my rude awakening. The moment that I realize that although it may look good on paper, that there is actually only so much of me to go around.

Who knew that my heart would do a 180 and want to stay home full time with that baby? That I would want to give it all up to change diapers and breastfeed and join mom's groups but would have no choice? What could have possibly prepared me for the guilt I would feel every time I dropped her off for someone else to take care of and drove away to work with a pit in my stomach? Or wonder how I got so off course, bought into all the hype so much, that I set myself up to be a breadwinner and a full time mommy?

And by the way, that is impossible. They lied to us big time. You cannot do all that 100%. Those of you who have kids and/or have careers - you already know this of course. I'm not sure why I was so blindsided, and so naive.

It took me at least six months to get past this fact, and to stop being incapacitated by it. I accept that this is how my life is, and I'm double-determined now to make a good life for my girl, to set a good example of a satisfying life, and set real expectations for her as she dreams of how she wants her life to be and what it means to be a woman.

I get up with the her, change her, feed her and get her ready for the day. At the same time I get myself ready for the day.  I have the great fortune to be able to work from home a couple of days a week, so I can be near her. While I'm working - email, phone calls, budgets, reviews, schedules, team meetings - I am also chasing a very busy and danger-loving toddler. I prepare homemade kid food at the same time I'm preparing dinner and doing the dishes, and sometimes, if I'm extra on top of it, laundry too. I do this all with a cluttered, scattered and fractured mind. I make lists to make lists of the things I need to do every day. I plan all the meals, do the shopping, clean the house and pay the bills. I orchestrate the schedule of her life too, to make sure she gets enough sleep time, eating time, play time and love.

I don't really like living this way, but it all needs to be done so I do it. I ask for help, and the husband does whatever I ask. And nothing more. He is admittedly overwhelmed by 10% of this. I don't want to be the boss of it all but I am. This is what I signed up for even if I didn't realize it at the time.

Another moment of realization - I am not super woman. There is no such thing as super woman, really, this is just what we do. Women have been functioning this way for millions of years. As sobering as it is, I can't help but feel a little bit of magic underlying it all. Yeah, we can do anything boys can do, and SO MUCH MORE. I send up an homage every single day to all the hard-working, magical and amazing women that make this world work. I get the whole feminist thing, now that I've come around to it in a very real way.

Special Requests

Since I last blogged almost two years ago, I had this baby. She's amazing in every way, and quite possibly the most incredible human who has ever been born. I don't know. Time will tell. She takes more out of me than I ever imagined I had to give. And you know what? I don't mind, not at all. It is all hers. I've been saving it up this whole life, maybe lifetimes, to give to her.

At the end of every day, I feel a little bit sad that our time together is just a little bit shorter. One of my favorite things is holding her, looking into her eyes until slowly, slowly she slips into sleep. I feel like I want to make every second of her existence safe and sweet. I know that's not realistic, but it is my new mission nonetheless. Even though the rest of my life is completely off the rails, I go to sleep every night feeling deeply content because she is finally here.

As for the rest of my life being completely off the rails, there are a few things that have been sacrificed that I would like back. Here are my humble requests:

1. I would like a moment to remember who I am. Maybe even an hour or two here and there. I miss my friends and I think some of them miss my undivided attention. I don't know if they will ever get it again, but I would like to try.

2. I would like to comb my hair, find some clean clothes that fit, and have it noted that it is still possible to do so. As a bonus, I'd love it if my husband could look at me and recognize me as an attractive female. I think this has happened before the baby, so it could possibly happen again. I'm not a show pony, but I am still a girl. I would just like that recognized.

3. Speaking of that, I would also like to be able to recognize my body again. What in the hell is this that I'm living in now? It jiggles and bulges in strange and unacceptable places. I have stretchmarks and scars now. It aches in my feet from the bulk. I didn't plan this and I don't like it. Please give me back just a little bit of mindfulness so that I can mindfully put effort into reducing it. I am headed for health problems and this is not acceptable.

4. I would like a few moments of focus so that I can still pretend I'm a productive and ambitious member of the work force. Sometimes I wish I didn't need this, but I do. We don't live all that high on the hog, but I would like to stay in a house, with heat and lights, and food in the cupboard, and the ability to go the doctor when we get sick every other week like we do now. In order to do this, I need to work. Work requires focus.

5. I would like some fucking sleep please. I don't really need to explain this one, as the equation is clear. Sleep deprivation = shorter fuse and shorter life.  I need to sleep more than 3 hours in a row or I'm going to crack up and you know I am not kidding.

If there's one thing that girl has taught me is that you can ask for whatever you want, as long as you are willing to accept it and willing to let it all go.