when you're gone i sense the lack of you. air fills the place you belong, following me around like a ghost. i lay in bed listening to the rise and fall of our sons breathing. i see their noses and brows outlined in the darkness. they look just like you, i think. you planted them in me and they grew from nothing. they are half you, and yet they cannot fill the hole you've left. i know this journey away is only temporary, but it occurs to me as i try to sleep here in my mother's house that this is my plan for the worst-case-scenario - to live here, sleep here with our sons and sense the lack of you surely more succinctly, more cuttingly than now. i imagine you gone forever and my shoulders shudder and quake with my weeping at the horror of it. it would be so impossible to breathe without you, let alone raise our boys, be strong, continue on. these days apart may be made worse by our struggling of late - the stress of your career on the line, the preschoolian's problems, my inability to dig myself out of myself at times, but it is a great reminder of how deep is our need for one another. this family we have created is a lifeline to the world and all my improbable, horrific imaginings simply underscore that fact, remind me of the strength of this blood that connects us, how important our flesh and our mutual struggle. we are molded of the same thing. we are one. i cannot forget. i love you. come back soon.

i am spinning my wheels. i am stuck in the mud. as much as i accomplish anything, move the slightest bit forward, i am being pushed back, seeming to stand ever still, yet flailing. there is so much mess about. so much eight arms swinging about, bringing things and little boys to and fro; constant madness and there is an inner turmoil to accompany the outer chaos. there is a sense of all this being unjustified, unfair, not right. there is a sense that i am under constant pressure and the slightest bit of anything pressing on me any further causes eruptions, spasms of profanity and gritted teeth. one day the car seat wouldn't go in and it was all tourette's and tmj - i was needing so badly for it all to stop. i hated the car seat, the car, the fact of the need to drive, this history that made me require this hunk of plastic that will surely be landfilled, this unnecessary mined ore and all the petroleum of the world - the arab oil dictatorships, this president and his saudi ties... the call for jihad seemed suddenly so reasonable as i was running late and the car seat still moved and bastian fell asleep between my purse and diaper bag in the front seat, waiting. jihad! fuck the car seat! that is the essence of the unreasonable erupting from me. that is the every day, these days. i cannot articulate anything and i cannot pinpoint what is wrong. i have been having a bad life and i am waiting for it to be spurred to improvement. i am trying to accomplish just that by the movement of any project in a forward direction, but my long-term destinations are insurmountable even in my dreams where i announce that the pursuit of midwifery is a decade away; and my short-term goals get buried by my sons spewing snot and making constant messes. even dusting the bookshelves becomes impossible as things are all drenched by the three year old in food bits, soap, and salt. he finds new concoctions for the things he drinks, eats, and eliminates with our floors and furniture. my life is the cup of tea made and forgotten as one child pees in his diaper while the other pees on the floor and i move from place to place, wiping and vinegaring, discovering peanuts in the plants or jam on the computer screen, hours later discovering the tea on the kitchen countertop, cold and unnecessary or unwanted with the lunch i must attempt to make. i am spinning in circles, looking for a pathway to release into and finding myself merely continuing to spiral. i cannot hold a thought and i am going nowhere.

the terrible truth about being so domestic and so nuclear as a stay-at-home mother is that i spend half of my life buying things. i am the stocker and i do the inventory of our home. i make lists and buy gifts and am drawn in by the secret drug in the air at target that tells me to consume. this all despite my urges and philosophy to be both frugal and to live simply. it seems nearly unavoidable. i hate it at the same time that i long for things. i am seduced by slick magazine spreads and by the well-researched product arrangement at the stores. i see things that i probably do not need but most certainly could use and i long, i lust, i do figuring rapidly in my head to determine the cost-benefit analysis on my bank account. i have no credit card debt. i am not gluttonous, yet i consume. i imbibe things. i am drunk on my own buying-power and i hate it. china is growing and manufacturing and polluting and violating the rights of their humans constantly that i might have shiny new canisters for my flour so the plastic that held my whole wheat stone-ground loveliness does not leach its toxins inward and onward to my breads and baked goods, toxifying the gastrointestinal tracts of my children where already surely there are pesticides and jet fuel from the air and water. the whole thing is disturbing, disgusting, depressing. i know that i have been duped into it by the big box marts, by the television and the pop-up ads. i know that the target is me. i am a part of one of the great markets of the modern era and it is delusional of me to think that i could escape it. i hate it. i hate it. i hate it.

perfection through planning. i am ever trying to do this life correctly, to make the appropriate choices at the appropriate times and do all the preparation for the future now. i find that i cannot know enough. there is no way, surely, to do it all right. there will always be struggle. but is it silly to be so planned about it? to try so hard at having such an organized and prepared little life when surely there will always be surprises and curve balls, accidents and mistakes made? it is stupid to presume that one can ever be truly prepared. we cannot predict one moment to the next or the years stretched before us. it is simply one foot in front of the other and one block built at a time and yet i try so hard to do and to be everything. is it a fruitless endeavor? is it wasting the precious time i have or making better use of it? will i fail? will i succeed? am i trying too hard, setting myself up? is it inevitable that i will make some mistakes and successfully avoid others? am i searching here for meaning and purpose, design and intent in a universe that is merely random? or is there some way to control it all? some way to set things in motion the way that i've decided they should be by choosing and acting in accordance with all the possibilities of the universe? can't i simply pick? or are the two issues not at all interrelated as i am making them out to be? am i being ridiculous? am i searching the crevices of my life for evidence of the divine, trying to instill a sense of karma where there is none? is it not just a story we tell ourselves that there is god and there is finite anything? am i here attempting in my own small ways to create a mythology that can deem my psychological processes appropriate or improper? sometimes i long for the had of god to part the clouds and point out all the answers to all my questions, namely that what i do is what i am supposed to do, that all i am is rightly me. it would be nice to expel self-doubt so neatly and finally with a flick of the divine wrist, but it seems ultimately a little stupid and counter to the point of all this, should there be, in fact, a point. the point is to get on with it all and of course to get it on. i can only endeavor to do my best whether by design or by accident. i can only endeavor to be purely me by listening to my own voice coming out in my questions and to create myself moment by moment in the image most desirable to me. it is whatever it is. questioning each tiny motivation is to but leave questions hanging about on the air like rhetoric. there is no design other than what i put forth and not everything is within my control. there are too many others wandering about sporadically and randomly colliding in a great waltz of chaos for any of this to even vaguely resemble preordination.

i have not the time to sit in constant contemplation of the meaning of things, of my life, of the infinite. i move back into the mode of planning and doing and feeling decent and have nothing to say about it. i started to see a therapist and just as i sit on her couch and begin to speak, my words feel so small, so unnecessary, so spent. i have already said it all in conversation and on paper and online. i have already cast out all the concepts and theories of my struggle and come oddly to the conclusion that i am not at all crazy, despite the intensity and frequency and tenor of my words, they are but evidence of such small, normal problems that are but the stuff of life and ebb and flow just like the weather. i am left with nothing more to work through at the moment, hardly anything at all to say. i can revisit all the issues i've expounded upon so clearly already and realize only that there must be ways to live in avoidance of the threshold where rage sets in, at least for the benefit of my children and then of course to funnel that energy elsewhere into more self-serving and restorative exercises. but of course there is no way to avoid yelling at my kids forever. bad days will surely come and i must simply work through it all as best i can. i will but move through my life and read and write and sort and sift as applicable as is my usual nature. it is so odd to sit on the other side of it and to realize that what in one moment feels so extraordinary is actually entirely mundane.

the words do not come out, they do not speak, they stay hidden, bottled within me. i have nothing but a need to speak this, to work it out somehow. instead i stack them up inside, reaching to my limits, building pressure. what will happen if the boundary is breached? will my heart stop? will a blood vessel in my brain burst, squirting fountains of red from out my nostrils? or will it all merely dissolve away eventually, the moments ticking a removal of each brick of pressure and anger from beneath the words in their ascent? will i simply write it out and lose the need? is this the funneling of energy elsewhere? or is it simply too tiring to keep up so that all that steam fizzes out through my ears, leaving me spent, exhausted? how do i do? how do i make use of all of this, find ways to not repeat all these mistakes that i make? anything i try to assign to this bad day to identify it, to map it and find the solution just turns to dust, slips through my fingers like so much sand. my brain turns into a muddle. the jigsaw puzzle pieces change shape as i go to fit them together; the colors blur. i cannot even see what i am doing or how i am thinking. what is this? i feel such guilt, such sadness all born from such outrage born from nothing. today we are all sick, except aleks who was sick yesterday, but is better today. somehow his vacation from mischief brought on by the illness must now be made up for, so he is exploring all crevices of things-he-need-not-touch while the rest of us try to just keep breathing as our nostrils close up and our throats swell and our brains fog. this has led to much frustration on my part as i try to care for the baby and jon sleeps on the couch. i tried to do nothing with him - watching a movie while the others slept - and it ended badly as he kept pulling my hair and the baby woke up. i went to lay down with sebastian who needed me beside him to get more sleep and left aleks with the movie. in this time he scaled heights of the closet never before scaled and got things down and cut things up. upon my discovery of this in my tired, lone-parent state, i acted in ways i should not have, accidentally bumping his head in the process and left in no shape to apologize. jon wakes to child screaming and rushes in to take aleks out, cuddling him and trying to make him better. this is fine except that i am left feeling so judged and in no place to heal my self and in no place to actually improve upon my behavior. so i am left with all the words in my head as i pick up and put away: i spend half my life organizing storage and putting things out of aleks' reach, it seems. things that do not belong to me and whose purpose and function is a mystery - boxes computer equipment came in and and millions of random cd-roms, the bicycle tire pump that's supposed to be in the basement, board games, bookbags, all manner of things that do not belong to me. and what happens to all of these things i have so carefully organized is that they get pulled out and put back in wrong places, only for me to organize again and still i have no idea what their use is and even as they are exposed to daylight by those who might in fact know if they are needed at all, they are ignored and jammed and packed away again and again. and i am judged for my frustration and my inability to keep it together just as i was judged for being the one who was sick just after christmas - when jon was the one taking care of both children (as i do every day) when he was well and had a house full of assistance and aleks was not on a well-again rampage. when i had the flu and could hardly move without aching and he was perfectly well, still he was angry and bitter, annoyed that he could not get back to his work and still i tried my best to accommodate him. it all feels so unfair. i don't get a day off from anything, certainly not without paying a heavy emotional toll. and now all i need is help. i need to not be this way, or to not be made to feel such guilt, such judgment cast my way for having a bad day. intervention is indeed needed, but only in the form of emotional support. because i have no one else. everyday i am fighting this battle alone. i am thinking all the thoughts and making the decisions by myself. there is hardly any aid and there is only my hand guiding both of us, trying to figure this out and find ways to be more effective and all that happens is that i become more and more of a failure.

i am, in some small and some not-so-small ways, doing better. i am not screaming. i am not descended into madness. i am interested and participating in the world around me. right now, i am really fine. why should there be times when i am crazy, when all the world seems dark and i am scared of the irreparable harm i may be inflicting on my son? most likely, the only person irrevocably scarred by my rage is me. it is the cycle of fury and guilt that makes the universe bleak. it is that my violent speech is so beyond my control - a monster springs forth from the pit of my belly with such inertia and so surprisingly, that i am stuck, powerless to stop it. there is a me that stands by watching, knowing all the correct ways to handle the situation and instead staring slack-jawed in helpless horror. all the guilt in the world does nothing to dissuade the rambling, ranting me, does nothing to reduce the monster's size. i do all this writing and considering in search of the magic bullet to slay the beast for good. i am forever searching for a way out of the mess, as though this were separate from my life, merely some temporary setback - as though i could distinguish between myself as i am and myself as this other. but where are the lines, the boundaries? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself?

how am i not myself? that's sort of the thing about me - i am always very much uniquely me. in all the messy, not-so-nice, aggressive, blunt, funny, sarcastic, down-to-earth-ishness ways that i am me and the me comes out in my speech and in my actions - i am me. i am often intensely me. i wear my heart on my sleeve. i literally broadcast my heart across the internet. i am loud and i am hyper. it is how i am organized and how i am capable of doing all the things i do. it is how i am creative and how i am insightful; how i am inventive, decisive, compassionate, cruel, empathetic. how i am positive is how i am negative. how i am perfect is how i am flawed. i try to separate the two sides out to leave nothing but the parts i like. i try to battle the me that is painful, but really i think the best i can hope for is to not rub the parts i don't like so much in trying to scrub me clean that i am left raw and unable to cope. there is a balance here in me, but it is far from perfect or exact. the sides are not prevalent in equal measure. the more i push and prod myself to do better, or more perfect, the more the stressed, angry, bitter me comes out to release the pent-up tension. i cannot be perfect. i cannot do everything. and it is okay to even not be okay. it is okay to feel sad and flawed or angry and bitter. it's just a part of the whole. i am ever trying to balance it out, however unconsciously. i am always in the act of doing more or less, working towards just being, towards just going towards. towards the future, towards an outcome, towards a resting point, towards an action or experience. i am a body in motion, in time and in circumstance. i must find a way to stop the battle. i cannot cut off the limb that holds the ax. it's all a part of the same thing and the key is to accept what is; to be who i am in all the ways that i am. in trying to escape the wrathful me, i deny the entire person and it only digs the hole deeper and makes my world feel bleak and hopeless. i must find ways to accept myself and not aggravate the aggravated by trying to push it away or cover it up. how i let these emotions out is of course important, but the way i try to escape my life is not the solution for moving through it.

excerpt of email.

it's three-forty-one in the morning and i can't sleep, so if you reply and it takes me awhile to get back to you, forgive me as the reason i'm able to write even this letter is that it's three-forty-one in the morning and i can't sleep. suddenly i recall overlooking dayton in your apartment, drunk on many bottles of red wine, smoking all the cigarettes in the world... what the fuck were we talking about? i just recall that it was monumentally important at the time and i kept asking all the difficult questions i could think of. i'm so sad these days. i keep trying to pin it on something, but can't sort the clues. regular hormones, postpartum hormones, anxiety from having had a truck fall out of the sky, winter, the scope and weight of my life, perfectionism ruining me, the history of everything weighing on me, the stress of every day - which is it? can't there be an answer so that at least there is something to blame or something specific to work against or towards?

i wake up and i am crazy. the bed is wet and i am yelling. i have no control and i just want to be left alone. the job i wanted is gone, but there is no space in my mess of a life for it anyway. i called a psychologist, but there was no person, just an answering machine. i started to say what was wrong after i'd explained why i had called and how to call me back, but all i could get out was "i would like to talk to someone about some...after an accident." what am i saying? i don't know what i even want to do. i know that screaming at my kids is the wrong choice, but in my brain i don't even care. i start to think we spend too much money and goddamn jon for putting the provider index in the basement and the cinnamon bread has molded and there goes all that organic flour down the drain. it's all my fault. i feel so completely numb. my throat hurts from yelling. i am being cruel. it is not their fault. i don't know what i want - if it's just an attempt at control or what. i feel so lost though, no need for things to be in my control. i am not power hungry. i want to shove these responsibilities away. i don't want to have to strip the beds and pour vinegar. i find myself wiping the counter as i think about not needing control, wiping every little smudge down and washing all the dishes, just to make breakfast. and instead of getting the other bread down and the eggs out, i am in the office, on the computer, typing. i don't want someone pulling on my leg or touching my breast. i scream and then feel so small, so incapable of trying harder. and i try to remember what it was about staying in the present and allowing even my negative emotions without judgment, but surely this is not that. this is the verge of places you should not go, ideas that should be left unexplored. i hold the phone in my hand, its buttons aching for pressing. but who do i call? all the names of all the people. i can hear the voices on the other line as i explain what is happening and the best i'll get is an "i'm sorry, honey." i don't want that. i don't want sympathy. i want someone to come take this away. i want to cut it out, dig the bullshit out of my brain. i want to be warm. i want to curl up. i want my legs to stop hurting. i want to be in a very hot bath. i want to fill my stomach just to stop its aching. otherwise i could care less. you should see me. i am so frail looking. i am thin beyond thin, my bones jut out in weird ways, like grotesque caricatures of supramodels all strung-out, sometimes lithe, but mostly awkward, mostly dangerous, sharp and pointy. i see it in the bones of my hip when i lay down. my skin looks translucent and so, so pale. my extremities are cold. there is no warm spot, no soft landing for such a fat baby to rest and be safe. and yet my breasts fill with milk and flow and i am fertile and apparently healthy. but the look of it is disturbing to me. the feel of it is shivery and empty. i feel like a shell i keep trying to fill with anything at all, and yet this hollow skeleton remains. this cackling, screaming banshee, all bones and dripping flesh. i pick up all the little pieces of myself and carry them around, trying to put them in some order. i start to think that i can be or do something and it amounts to so little. i feel like i am not going anywhere, but when i look in the mirror, i am looking so much older. finally my age is written on my face. i feel like the years keep happening so fast and every time i blink i am still no further than when i started yet all this time has passed. i do five hundred things daily and sense no change. the messes of my home are made and unmade, the surfaces and utensils cleaned and uncleaned. i watch it happen. one day i go to the grocery and come home feeling so bountiful and healthy and the next the refrigerator has been emptied and i am searching in its whiteness for something more to throw in the hole. i am lost and i am confused. i want to be away from all this. i want to be left alone, to rot on my own without having to be responsible for everything in the meantime. i am ruining it all anyway.

when i wake up every morning, i think about all the five million tiny little things i want to accomplish that day or that week. i plan them out and see my time stretching before me and i know i'll only finish a fraction of it. i consider how tired i am and how much of it i might actually have energy for. most of the five million tiny little tasks are mundane: clean the bathroom, dust, do the dishes - but some are creative: bake bread, finish crocheting the plant hanger - and still others will likely fall right off the priority list for lack of time (both to actually fit in and the quality of time it takes - uninterrupted, thoughtful): return all the emails and private messages sitting in all the varying inboxes of the world, waiting. this last one is of particular issue because often the messages i have received but not responded to are of actual importance to me - they bother me somehow, making me think of them both in waking and in dreaming, but sadly my brain and my hands cannot seem to find the space to set aside and create the interesting, thought-out responses i believe these messages deserve. also, most often the time that i might have spent doing that gets carved out instead for myself so that i can sit with my own issues and roll them around on my tongue, desperately trying to figure it all out. and there seems to be a never-ending supply of my own issues to be mulled over and dealt with. there is never enough time to put into having all the right relationships with everyone each day - my children, my husband, my immediate family, my close friends, my local friends and all those distant, far-off people (both in time and in space) whose emails i do not seem to return, but of whom thoughts invade my dreams. to those people whose messages i have yet to reply to, i offer an apology - i am sorry. there is so much i want to say, but never the time, it seems, to say it, and i am grateful that you thought of me and took the time to write. i did not forget you.

once i fully wake up and begin movement about the house to complete said five million tiny tasks (first change sebastian's diaper), my thoughts move elsewhere, in unexpected directions. i remember my dreams and think of things semi-related to other thoughts: ranting about cesarean sections to old college dorm mates in my dream reminds me of the midwifery meeting i have on wednesday and the mothering meeting on thursday and also of mothering and then of Mothering dot com and if the girl who messages me will circumcise her son and the argument yesterday with my father about why it's a human rights abuse and then how angry i get about so many things and remembering telling the other women jon's new year's resolution to eat organic and how i want to buy him new clothes but now he's insisting on fair trade and then class struggle and the need to support what we believe in with our dollars spent and how that supports actual people somewhere who pick grapes or harvest cotton or dye textiles or sew garments and how they have children to feed also and probably not the money to do a whole lot of family planning the way we can or maybe i'm making gross assumptions about what the lives of immigrant women and men are really like, but clearly being paid a fair wage is terribly important and jon wondered the other day what precisely a fair wage was and i think of our honeymoon since i was switching the wedding photos last night from one album to another and i remember standing on the pool deck of the holiday inn superdome watching the fourth of july fireworks and then wonder what standing on that pool deck would be like now with the ruins of new orleans below still rotting and stinking and there is the greatest modern american example of class struggle and institutionalized racism - that cesspool of the dead and dying stranded by the american government on television while their wealthier neighbors lounge in faraway hotel rooms or cities with family members or friends and i wonder how that could happen and if it could happen to me - what would it take and what could i possibly do to stop it, but i remember also that i am white and i am middle class and thus protected by my privilege, protected by my knowledge and my family, by my education and ownership of things, but still i do not feel immune, i do not feel precisely safe, which makes me think of all those voting mothers in the last presidential election who were terrified of terror and thought that this president would somehow protect them by cutting spending to his own programs and giving away no-bid rebuilding contracts in iraq to his friends and i think how not like them i am though i appear to be the same by demographic classification - instead i am young and well-beyond liberal, i think karl marx has taken up residence in my brain and he just keeps repeating how it all comes down to class struggle over and over and over again. i have not ever read more than an excerpt of marx. i don't have a university degree. i really am not a checklisted demographic, the sum of all i buy. am i in a struggle? i feel so outside of it, outside of the masses and their thoughts and purchasing tendencies and their voting tendencies and asinine human rights abuses and all the other crazed bullshit i imagine the whole of middle america participating in. as much as i am outside of it, however, i am apart of it with my own big box store purchases littering my house despite my efforts to curb such spending. i cannot eradicate these indiscretions from my history with this buying power and all these imagined needs filling me up. i am so much still a part of this culture in this era and i very much enjoy the comforts afforded me by this history and the industrialization of this land despite how it's left all the midwest a wasteland of empty warehouses and factories, the dirt and pollution still here, dotted with occasional still-belching smokestacks reflecting cumulus clouds of toxin in the dark water of the river, pigeons mumbling through and around... how do i stop these visions? these thoughts and images of all lain waste by the excesses of capitalism, by the omnipresent bottom line are juxtaposed in grotesque mad-house fashion with the clean white faces of my children playing with curious george blocks in their new christmas clothes and i sipping organic, fair-trade coffee, eating free-range eggs from brown shells, surfing the internet or writing in my new journal whose cover celebrates art history which i studied in college and my husband reading obsessively thousands upon thousands of pages trying frantically to retain everything to pass his comprehensive exams in april so he can finish his phd and we can continue this middle class wet dream... how do i reconcile my ideals and my reality, my fears and my anxiety with the truth of my daily life? how do i come to understand what i do and who and what i am in the context of a world gone mad on the one hand and a world nestled comfortably in this old house in this old neighborhood on the other? how can i be what i am and know that it all rests on the backs of the poor? how can i want to give my children every opportunity and yet know that it may very well be at the expense of the children of others who are less white, less rich, less privileged? how can this not drive me mad? what is my role in the world? which world do i exist in? what i am actually witness to is so opposed to what i know to actually exist. the worlds of the rich and the white are so insulated from so many others - how can i let this be? i feel so small and so vulnerable. i feel - so helpless and scared and angry. and yet i go about my life and complete the five million tiny tasks in mundane repetition and revolving absurdity.

"everything is the same even if it's different. but our everyday mind forgets this. we think everything is separate. limited. i'm over here. you're over there. which is true, but it's not the whole truth because we're all connected." when i get that, i can relax "because everything you could ever want or be, you already have and are. "

wary of hope. with all the urge in the air to be rebirthed, to become new with the changing of the calendar, i find myself wary of 2006, wary of hope, wary of the tendency to plan out my new self and all the activities or changes i expect to occur in the coming weeks and months. after all that has happened in the last twelve months, i cannot convince myself that striding forward with arms full of designs for the new year is really the best way to approach the matter. better to use caution. after all, it was but a year ago that i decided to join life here, high as i was on newfound second-trimester energy. i decided to get out and commune with the people i'd met here by going to meetings and talking about that which interested me most; that which at the time most consumed and troubled me - birth. so it was in january last that i attended five different local birth meetings and the night after the fifth and final meeting, as i was driving home late at night from the restaurant we'd regrouped at to be the chatty, judgmental bunch we were - as my car rounded a curve, the clouds parted and a great godly hand dropped a semi on me. it is because of that turn of events that my every move through this life, it seems, is filled now with great anxiety and trepidation and why i find myself yet making "to do" lists out for the month of january yet feeling ever hesitant about finding joy and confidence in my steps. i find myself feeling quite nervous about having hopes that they might soon enough be dashed, and i wonder how much heavier a weight might it take to do all that smashing of confidence.

in the meantime, my children march forward without a hint of my anxiety or hesitation. sebastian is spending all of his days absorbed in trying to move about and will, i am sure, in one of these early days of january succeed in crawling, causing me all sorts of unforeseen headaches. aleksander too moves onward, readying himself to actually understand numbers and their values, having already counted a number of objects at least once in recent days. he's also taken to tacking the word "remember" onto anything he wants to tell me about whether grammatically appropriate or not: "heather has to stay here at my house; heather's not going to go bye-bye, remember?" oh yeah, i remember.

there is a frenzy in the air. people are rushing about, consumptively preparing for the holidays like they were storing nuts for winter. it is catching and it is adding to my already crazed and nervous state. i can feel the tension in my muscles. i am filled to overflowing with semi-conscious anxiety. i am twitching and i am fiddling. i am terrified of the improbable. my faith in my immunity to random bad things happening to me has been greatly diminished by the random bad things that have happened to me. i do not feel safe. i feel vulnerable, made so by the circumstances in the weather, by the political climate in this country, by the fact that bad shit happens to people more innocent than i every day all over the world. the hole that is new orleans makes me see the post-industrial wasteland that is this town where i live as potential fodder for some unintended apocalyptic consequences of a government overrun with greed. the near-empty streets in the early morning hours, snow falling in the darkness, are like visions of horror movies where dark men creep unexpectedly and zombies emerge silently from shadows. these are the irrational ramblings of someone half-crazy, and i am struggling against the impossibilities of my brain, those synapses have been so altered and the chemicals are mixing in weird ways. i feel not-myself, as though some thing has put a blockade inside my mind, making things twist and turn, making me foggy and confused. and yet there are new insights which feel like sudden lightbulbs sprung up, lightning flashed and abruptly illuminating the previously unseen, causing it to feel airy with obviousness. i am in constant confusion and my emotions are short-circuited so that rage erupts from nothingness and i go from calmly doing the mundane task before me to gnashing my teeth and snarling wildly in an instant. i am intoxicated by my hormones as they are all coming out in stupid, uneven amounts like the chemist who resides in my brain were clumsily spilling things all over, sloshing progesterone this way and that, noradrenaline careening over the edges of glass beakers, melatonin splashed on the floor and walls... i cannot put thoughts together in coherent sentences and then in an instant, i can. i feel muddled and groggy, yet on edge, flinching and itching, like there is something out to get me, some instant karma lurking just around the corner, ready to grab me and drain my life of all the good in it. but if i am sitting here, anxious and wondering of what is next, of what is yet to come, how can there be any good at all in my life? how can i let the happiness at all inoculate me against my madness when i cannot even sense the light pressing in on my darkness or when i am in constant expectation for it all to close off? how do i find me again amongst all this clutter of brain-damaged mumblings, the imagined corpses of my future selves sprawled out before me?

i am trying to be okay. i am attempting, in my own way, to overcome the challenges of my current hormonal makeup. in the anxiety of my thoughts, stillness does not arrive, but must be talked out, worked out, pulled out. i am trying to find a way through all this to that, from the question to be crazy to the answer to maintain. i don't know if i can do it. my body has dwindled to a sliver of what it should be and completely unintentionally at that. i am just moving through my life, every day a question on my lips, in my mind. i try to plan it, try to complete the mundane tasks of my domestic existence, try to do the dumb things i gotta do. and in all that i am not certain that there are answers for my son and his behavior or for me and mine. perhaps they are a mirror of each other, though i've sensed that before and denied it then too. maybe it just is what it is and we will live through this as we've lived through everything else - the surgeries and the accident and the continual upheaval dealt us by our destination. when we've finished transitioning from one thing to the next we may find ourselves built for transition though, and all the struggle will be but what we know and how we understand our life. maybe i will yet be able to do all the things i want to do and maybe yet i will not hate myself while trying. maybe we can accept this and be who we aspire to be even while everything is churned about, my chemicals raging, his urges immutable and somehow all this insanity will be the symphony of our days and will make sense and will not feel like such palpable craziness. maybe it will really be all right. maybe i am worrying about how i am the cause of all destruction around me for nothing, because maybe i'm not.

in the darkness of my days, i am all alone. it is just me. i do the caretaking. i pick up, i fold and i wash, i feed and i clothe. i make the lists. i plan the days. i think the thoughts and i do the dance. i do the communicating and i do the caring. i want nothing more than to be saved. it is what i have always wanted. someone merely to care enough to dig me out, to give me the love i need for myself to grow unweary and to rise. i just want someone else to come for once, to uncover me, take the initiative. i don't want to plan the plans. i don't want to be always and forever in my head, listless, bored, miserable. it is the hardest part - the solitude of my discontent. i open my phone and scan the contacts list for someone to call. there is no one close enough to my heart for me to step out of myself and make the leap. i cannot reach out of my darkness to find the words to say all that is wrong. it is too much. the words are too heavy on my tongue, the weight too heavy on my heart. tonight i am wandering around my house literally in the dark. i am lonely and i cannot think of what move to make. i am weeping constantly. i feel so lost. i feel so incapable of making any move towards the light. my body is cold. i can't identify all the parts well enough to say even what is so terrible. the desperation i feel is so palpable and yet so inarticulatable. how even to form my lips, to make sound pass through? the drafts in the house whistle in the silence. what do i do? which way do i go? my thoughts are full of all the horrible ways to move through this. to leave, to pack my bags, to chew gaping holes in my wrists, to merely sink to the floor and wait to be taken away. am i insane? the rational is there, in the background making comments now and then, but i keep burying her again. i am waiting to be loved. i am waiting, perhaps have been for a very long time, for someone to come and nurture me. i am the mother awaiting mothering. i feel so vulnerable and like such a child. tears streak my cheeks. i am stained by sorrow. and yet this is the same person who is supposed to appear on national television next week. is it some cry for attention? a truck fell on me! recognize me! tell me the world would be emptier without me! i am so stupid sometimes. i feel so utterly ridiculous.

the words i read reinforce the resentment i feel reinforces the misery that overpowers me. there are so many moments lately where i am falling deeply towards the choice to be crazy, i am beyond control, i have nothing, am nothing, want to do nothing. i think to take my kids and go, but i don't want to. i just want to disappear, sink, starve. and really all i want is to feel whole. i want to feel more than running on cycles of the trivial. i want to be committed to something beyond my small scope, beyond this viewpoint, this perspective, this history, this culture. i thought growing up that i would somehow live to see and help create some sort of utopia and now i am so resigned to the fact that things cannot get better than they are. i don't want to be like this. i don't want to feel so lost, so hopeless. the arguments that arise in my house feel so empty - "no, you can't have chocolate," "please pee in the potty, not on the floor," "don't lick/spit/hit me." what is the meaning? where is the fulfillment? i once felt so committed to motherhood. i am committed to motherhood. i know that, somewhere in here there is the sensation that this is a calling, but sometimes i think that really i just am too lazy and too defeated to attempt anything else. best to just forget about it and do what i am biologically destined for. i don't know how to reconcile the two sides of it - i am a mother, i love being a mother versus i am more than all of that. it seems so simple, but it is so complex. i just want to go away. i just want to get away. i just wish that i could have some sort of recognition that anything i do is at all worth anything. i want to know that i do anything exceptionally. i want to relax. i want to not be so hormonal, so out of control. i don't want to take zoloft. i just want to be happy. it is too familiar to feel this depth of despair. it's too comfortable and so so difficult. i am aching. i am - at a loss for how to move forward.

driving in darkness under bridges, there is a slowing, an easing of my foot upon the accelerator, and a quickening in my chest, the thud of my heart and the agony of my senses widening, drinking in ever more in anticipation. i am fixed with my hands clenched at "ten and two," my eyes open, my mouth secreting bile, my stomach cold. i am waiting. as i round the bend, my eyes turn instinctively heavenward. there is no enormous object, there are no sparks flying. there is only the crushing truth of having been here once before, of having survived my own death. and as i move away, i begin to sob. tears break the levees of my eyes. i have been taken back to the night of my accident and i realize that it was not at all my life that flashed before my eyes, but it was the possibility of my own death being revealed to me. i have been witness to my own end. it is nothing short of terrifying. all my logical conclusions about the preciousness of life, the fragility of it all, the delicate balance that my entire existence rests upon falls so short of the truth of it. the raw, unencumbered reality is that i did die somewhere, in some time and i saw it all in this existence for but a second. i have known my death and my natural reaction is to cling, ever desperately, to my life. there are no deep thoughts regarding my death. there is only the urge to not die.

thoughts on birth. just after i gave birth this last time, i was thinking about what birth is like, what birth feels like (emotionally) and i was wondering why anyone would want to not feel it. when we opt for the epidural, what exactly are we anesthetizing ourselves to? there are people though - lots of people - who anesthetize themselves to the way that they feel all the time. my upstairs neighbor for instance is a whirlwind of different artificial scents. her laundry reeks of petroleum-based cleansers and softeners, she has one of those little air fresheners in her car, and she herself leaves behind the scent of tammy-faye-having-exploded every time she passes through the hallway. and it begs the question - does she ever smell anything that isn't manufactured? why all the nose-blockers? what's the need? must be that the dirty, stinky, musky odor of everyday life is too much. a lot of people in this country don't want to smell, feel or experience anything too raw or real. they want it compartmentalized and pre-packaged - we get our adventure at theme parks, we package up our dead and dying, our food comes pre-processed looking nothing like its origins, our interactions are reduced to 1s and 0s or hi-fi, fiber optic connections - we do very little that's real. to get outside, we "pack up the jet skis and go up to the mountains" - it's all prepackaged, pre-ordained, ordered, compartmentalized. we try very hard to avoid too much reality at all costs. even our "reality" programming on television is devoid of reality. so when mainstream america thinks of having babies, they think of little packaged babies smelling of powder, all clean and all bright, being handed over from the doctor/nurse. that's the money shot of childbirth in all of our entertainment - that moment when the mother is sitting up in bed and is handed her little "bundle of joy", all wrapped and diapered and clean. someone this summer who was newly pregnant wanted to smell my baby, who was all of five weeks old at the time. she said she loved the smell of babies. she came and sniffed his head and wrinkled up her nose, confused. he didn't smell like a baby. i had to explain that we don't use baby powder or disposable diapers and he drinks breastmilk, so instead of smelling like a nursery, he smells like a human. personally, i love his smell. i love breastmilk-breath. i love the smell of his head, his little pheromones. i still sniff my three-year-old's head. they smell like mine. there is a disconnect somewhere between baby and pregnancy/birth in this culture. it's handled, it's manufactured, it's artificial. there's no ritual for getting the mother from here to there, and it's not talked about except in the terms and the language of the hospital. in order to get an experience out of it that is not handled by somebody else, you have to do a whole lotta thinking. you have to navigate it all yourself. that's not right. there need to be rituals for this. our rituals do not suffice. our rituals do not honor the mother or the baby. our rituals if anything, torture mothers and babies. women are not birthing in this country, they are being delivered. just as there is someone who takes away our waste, treats and bottles our water, and freshens our air, there is someone to deliver us to motherhood in the most brutal manner imaginable. who would not want to anesthetize themselves to the interventions thrown at you in the hospital - the strangers, the needles, the electronic beeping of monitors? the whole process requires that we dull our senses because there's no way being delivered feels like the impossible transformation birth really is and deserves to be. when we birth, we are bigger than ourselves. we are the beginning of the universe, the start of time and there is no way that the beginning of the universe is a clean, quiet ordeal. the beginning of the universe is an explosion, it is a swirling mass of cosmos. our hormones, the blood, the poop, the mucous, the grunting, moaning sounds that we make, the gush of fluids, the stretching wide of flesh, bone against bone - it's incredible, raw, messy stuff. i think the beginning of life deserves that. life is like that - it's a spiraling rush of energy in a perpetual forward motion, and damn if we don't constantly make messes of it.

fundamental differences in brain chemistry are at fault for the divide that exists between the perspectives of myself and my son. his testosterone-laden mind is aggressive and spacial where i am more empathetic and verbal. he needs to occupy a large amount of space, spilling each activity out onto the floor after brief encounters. he moves from place to place in the house, pulling costumes out of drawers, dumping blocks from baskets, crayons from boxes, searching out action figures he has hidden in the sofa (complaining loudly in unbearably whiny tones for hours about darth vader gone missing, only to abandon him again in some random locale). he is a sweet boy; a boy's boy. something i understand so little about despite having spent my formative years in a boy-crazed stupor, trying desperately either to attract them or fit in with them, trying to get them to understand and to love me. how self-centered and foolish it all was. it seems fitting payback that i should now be forced into the position of having to try to understand them. how else will i raise them but to uncover them at their roots, to understand what it is that makes boys boys. surely understanding will lend me the perspective necessary to stop from tearing out my hair when all that is necessary to them is chaos to me. surely insight will grant me the patience to wait through refusals to discuss one's feelings, or wall up my sanity against tidal waves of aggression, destruction, sudden outbursts of inarticulatable frustration. how i know love will have to be put aside for how i am able to receive it. one day soon enough my boys will push me away, will want to strike out on their own as men and i will not have the sobbing, screaming, hitting mess of a three year old clinging to my leg. certainly one day this will be but aching nostalgia. this will be what i miss most - the point in their lives when they needed me most. i am terribly saddened to confess that i badly wanted a daughter, that i might experience being needed forever and ever. i know that to say absolutely that i will not get the opportunity at the relationship i desire with my children just because i have boys is most likely a gross over-simplification of the matter, but i think it is highly more likely to be true than the alternative where my boys talk to me in ways that i understand and go on forever needing me to mother them. it is such a shame that i have the knack for empathy my mother never had and still no children to really offer it to in a reciprocal manner. as my sons are only three years and five months respectively, maybe i should lay off the future and deal with the current tugging on my arm.

house of girls, house of boys. having grown up surrounded by my own sex, i am now spending my adult life surrounded by the opposite. the change was slow and unnoticed at first. even now, i only quite realize the full scope of boy surrounding me in my eldest son, the tornado he is, the running, jumping, screaming, death-defying el chupacabra. he is so boy it is unfathomable. he plays with sticks and makes paper into light sabers. in fact, he makes everything into light sabers - food, cups, junk mail, crayons and colored pencils, cloth diapers and cloth wipes, blocks, the stuffed inchworm, silverware, pretty much anything remotely resembling a stick has the potential to become a light saber. i love that there is potential for play in everything around him at the same time i loathe being made to fight another round and of course the disaster left in his wake. but all his aggression is served up with a hearty amount of joy, something i find myself inadvertently trying to squash when the wreckage is just too much for me. there is such a tender side to him too - his need for me, his capacity to love and to snuggle. he is so surprisingly fragile at times, despite his whirlwind nature. he will crumble and cry at things that surprise me, and when i am angry and i am uncontrolled, he says, so sadly, fat tears upon his cheeks, "be nice to me." he is needy as often as he is independent. i want him to be who he is, i want him to be a whole person. i am learning daily how to recognize and appreciate all the parts of him - the flaws and the virtues, his varying capacities and talents, his strengths and weaknesses. it is all such a new journey for me, the everyday of living surrounded by all that is boy and ever realizing the complexities that entails. it is so easy from the other side of the gender pond to write boys off as one thing or another. in truth, there is much that they share in common with girls and much that makes them different. i am on the path of discovery everyday.

in need of a dose of surrender. in all the tiny instances of my daily life where i lose it and yell, where my patience has lost me and my child has inched his way into the cracks in my well being, i then hear my words in his, creeping back to me to tell me how wrong i was, what a sin it is i've committed. lately it has been so tiring. i cannot keep up with my life. i am not doing what i need to be doing. a reminder won't fix it, it's a matter of stress. and i haven't figured what it is i've got to be stressed about. there are the money issues. there was the fury building towards the unsurprising ineptitude of the government. there has been the husband going back to school, feeling incapable himself at fitting all the things he's gotta do in the time he's got to do them. but there's been something else. something i am unable to pinpoint. the coordinates remain a mystery. there has been a struggle between my child and myself - some mounting unease. we feel like my mother and me all those years ago, butting heads. we are just too much alike. and yet we don't see things the same way. we are both so selfish and so stubborn. and it is so hard for me to let go of my own desire to control things. i haven't yet found the secret password into the world of letting go. i thought it was one thing, but it turned out it wasn't. i just don't know where the answers lie. it seems for now i need to put things aside and let life happen a bit to try to not get too upset about it all. i escape daily in harry potter books. at the moment i have a cold and growing worries regardless, and it is too difficult to change our world completely and how i deal with things and how we cope when things are just so difficult right now. and it is hardly the actual. it is all simply the emotional. there is some bad aura in our house just now. something that makes breakfast a fight about brownies and eggs. there is something somewhere causing aleks to be having accidents like crazy and something too making me just totally incapable of dealing. i suppose i need to be taking my supplements again. there is that. but it hardly seems a solution. i have contemplated taking aleks off dairy. but he doesn't seem so crazy as to necessitate such a pain in the ass as that. he seems normal. he seems three. but right now, at this moment, he is more intensely three than usual and i am more unable to effectively allow it to be when it disrupts the natural flow of my life and my routines. i am fumbling over the problems turning each thing this way and that in search of a solution like my life were a rubik's cube, like my life had answers hidden amongst its infinite array of questions. parenting is hard. parenting is not only a challenge to my abilities and my sensibilities, but to my being, and it asks the most fundamental questions constantly about who i am and what i want and what i want to be. all i want is to find the joy in my constant sorrows. i want to sense the reward in my struggle.