I finished the first draft.

My husband defended his dissertation.

I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.

The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.

My marriage is better than it ever was.

There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.

Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.

Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.

Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.

We live in a lovely house.

Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.

I am a writer.

I can transcend.

I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Tags: Thanksgiving, luck, thankfulness, gratitude, Joan Armatrading, Pets

Dirk was the outlier. We hooked up on a sticky summer night, an inauspicious, fumbling beginning to a relationship that didn’t really take off for another two years. After that, love came on schedule, always in spring, with the first signs of life and greenery. It came with the tulips and the flaming branches of forsythia.

The daffodils were just starting to droop, to turn brown along the edges, when J, my second serious boyfriend, the one who still shows up in cruel attempts at seduction in my dreams, for whom no pseudonym works, asked me out. That first April date kicked off a sweet season of mixed drinks with cute but somewhat foreboding names – Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies – as well as watery draft beer. Sex took on a religious quality, became a sacrament. The chemistry kept us limping along as summer eroded into fall and the relationship thinned at the edges.

Impatiens on the front steps.

Then there was Mr. X, my future ex-husband, another April romance. After his estranged wife finally agreed to a divorce, we leapt into commitment. Mr. X brought me a bouquet of stolen lilacs, fragrant and in full bloom, along with a homemade tape of the band Squeeze. We ate thick chunks of asparagus over al dente pasta, moved on in summer to goat cheese, basil, and sundried tomatoes on seeded bread from Strawberry Fields. Those first six months were a bacchanalia of Berghoff bock and bacon, of homemade hollandaise, of chorizo burritos as big as our heads. Because he was not yet divorced, we tried to hide our relationship, played footsie under the table at the weekly library school happy hour. It only added to the excitement, to the feeling of being so lucky and in love. Chosen.

Mr. X is to blame for my love of gardening. After we moved to Ohio, he introduced me to seedlings and compost, to the pleasures of growing our own food. Our second spring together we planted a garden in the shared backyard of our downtown Columbus duplex. I couldn’t get enough of it, kept on putting flowers in here and there, wanted to grow eight different kinds of tomatoes. Unfortunately, our shaky relationship didn't survive past the fourth spring. After we moved to DC and his new job turned out to be untenable, he returned to Ohio State. He left six months after we moved, coincidentally on the weekend of our second anniversary, though it was not intended to be a separation. Distance brought perspective. One cold March day, I decided on divorce.

With that April came ... love. I'd been friends with D (now Mr. Writing to Survive), a coworker, for months, but suddenly our relationship shifted. It was a mixed-up, uncertain time. I was suspended between two lives. Mr. X and I had to come to an agreement over the house, divvy up our possessions, and fight over the dog and cats. D's mother, thousands of miles away in Southern California, was dying of cancer. My own mother, having left Kevin temporarily, was living with me.

But D and I were deep in the process of discovery, our minds tousled with passion. There were memorable evenings, late night dinners at Lebanese Taverna, sitting by the Lincoln Memorial in the pale pink of sunset watching the cherry trees turn into blurs of white, nights spent just hanging out talking, developing our shared sense of surreal humor. My mother liked him, too, and would smile when he told her "Goodbye, Mrs. Casey!" upon leaving the house. He was like the polite high school boyfriend I never had. One wind-whipped day, the weather damp and cold, D and I drove to Ocean City. We couldn't stop laughing, in part at ourselves for taking a beach trip on a day that was a holdover from winter.

It was the spring we started building the foundation for our lives. It was also a spring without a garden, when I let the lawn dry out and the dirt harden. Without water, the young azalea bushes that bordered the house died. I could barely cook a potato, let alone take care of plants.

Basil plants.

Spring returns, and with it the renewal of lust, the desire to stroke new greenery, run my fingers through the dirt. It is the beginning of love all over again, to join with my husband and make things anew.

It takes over everything, this garden lust, takes over my brain and my time, pushing everything else out. My writing has gone to seed and I haven't been visiting my blogging friends, choosing instead to sink my hands into the soil, to fill up pots with new seedlings, to transplant root-bound herbs. At my last count, we had over thirty pots filled with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. One plant remains, a sugar pumpkin that will go by the back fence, will eventually wrap its tendrils around a trellis, and that's that.

It is about time that I resisted temptation, maintained fidelity to the plants already in my life. I must avert my eyes from seductive seedlings.

Tags: gardening, optimism, spring, love, weeding, metaphor

Image courtesy of In Praise of Sardines

Last year this night bled into Sunday afternoon. Following a trail of crushed blackberries, I traced the stains with my fingers and watched as we went from mud to cracked glass to bruise. Late night notes, an errant bike ride, “drama at Inspiration Point.”

In a year, total turnaround, but, as always, I focus on dates.

Tonight’s bad mood explained.

Tags: forgiveness

Mary of Do You Digg It recently posted a review of my blog. It’s a positive review, though reading it unsettled me a bit.

Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.

So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.

Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.

There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.

This is writing to survive.

Tags: Reviews, existential angst, emotional striptease, housewife, family

no one read this blog. If I was still Anonmomous?

This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.

There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.

So. Maybe that's it.

(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'

There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)

"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:

Hwaet we Gar-Dena    in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga      prym gefrunon,

Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."

Tags: existential angst, forgiveness, Poetry, writing

I didn’t dream about him for months.

For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.

In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?

That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.

Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.

Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.

I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.

Tags: dreams, existential angst, crushes

I haven't quite gotten used to this land of mild winter, where the rains come and make the huge plants gargantuan, where things that should die over two dark seasons continue to grow.

Last fall, when home life was strained, I stopped regularly watering our outdoor plants. The dirt beneath the scrub grass cracked like a drought-choked riverbed. Herbs turned brown in their terra cotta pots and the stressed lemon tree in the backyard dropped withered leaves. Every time the lawn crew (another thing I haven't quite gotten used to here) finished its work I would come out and find a shallow hole where yet another plant had perished, removed by the efficient men with their thick gloves and weed whackers.

We spent the late fall and winter rebuilding, nurturing our family life in California. The rains came. The greenery was rejuvenated. Herbs mysteriously re-sprouted and the grass came back a patchy grey-green, though the lemon tree did not undergo a spontaneous rebirth.

Yesterday we celebrated spring by planting flowers and vegetables: three tomato plants, a tomatillo, a pumpkin vine, a melon plant, and six tiny swiss chards (too much, I'm sure, but spring calls for optimism). Sunburned, shining with sweat, arms smeared with compost, we linked our gritty fingers after the last plant was watered. One tough year down and a lifetime of growth ahead.

Tags: gardening, spring, california