Frabjous Day

See what happens when I break my stride? Off the wagon I fall, BAM! (Insert gnashing of teeth.)

Funny things happen to me sometimes. (Actually, I would postulate that funny things happen to everyone all the time, but that is not my point at the moment.) My top funny since my last post was that my little Jehovah's Witness friend showed up again. This is a young girl, earnest and naive, who does not truly know why she wants to keep coming back to my house again and again to witness to me. I can't decide what's funnier, my shapeshifting into someone she thinks she can relate to, or her blindness to the call of the Goddess she's hearing through me :) Hee hee, I do so love being eeeee-vil (use your best Doofenschmirtz voice there, please).

Alright, back in the game, I guess, and since it's 2AM I'll call it good enough. Goodnight!

Celebrate Yo'self!

I'm off today to celebrate a wonderful momma friend of mine who lives where I used to, which means a short road trip with the one-year-old. (Wish me luck.) I love that I am doing this, that I am able to, and what it means to celebrate a friend. Life is not easy (although the purveyors of antidepressants want you to believe it should be, so you'll feel shittier about your life when it's hard and buy their drugs) and we deserve to joyfully celebrate our very existence. Sometimes it feels fake, and when that happens, it just means we're doubting our worth, or celebrating falsely. If that's the case, fake it 'til ya make it, and trust that you really do deserve to be celebrated!

We each exist for a unique purpose in this world. Who is your unique, authentic self? Have you come out to play today? What would celebrate you the best today? My wish is for you to make that happen. Enjoy!

Random Nonsense

I'm wondering about this blog. Much can be said about "Hill Haven" morphing into "Hell Haven" or "Hill from Hell" or something, but at any rate, we're leaving in the fairly near future (hopefully, oh-so-hopefully AFTER the farmhouse has been gutted and restored) and I don't know what that means for this blog. Perhaps I'll write here until the nebulous move actually comes to pass... I really do like this blogging concept. I guess I'll figure this out as I go, just like I do everything else in life :)

Today's "shout it from the rooftops" discovery pertains to stomach acid, of all things. I first heard about low stomach acid on this fantabulous list I'm on about nutrition. Did you know that the symptoms of low stomach acid are the same as the symptoms for high stomach acid? Me neither! The medical history is a rather long and boring story, but suffice to say I concluded that low stomach acid was something I have going on. Today, I added ACV (that's apple cider vinegar to the uninitiated) with my meals and poof! No more heartburn! I am seriously impressed. This may be the root of my sensitivity to gluten, dairy, and who knows what else. I am so excited!

More to say, but duty calls...

Just a Footnote

Well, I promised myself to push through this hinderedness and post daily until I no longer feel it's necessary. Apparently it's still necessary :) I loaded the recycling this morning, got all the kids buckled in, then discovered my car wouldn't start. I'm hoping it's only the battery (it certainly should be, it's got 120K miles on it) and not anything else, but it didn't behave exactly like a dead battery should...

Niftily enough, a friend called and wanted to come up to visit. Her son is a great buddy of G's too, so we got to have a playday anyway, housebound and all. Now G is complaining about his nose being stuffy, though, and Iris is utterly whiny and wretched and needs to be in bed. And, my battery is about out. So, to bed!

It's Only Love...

Love keeps coming up in conversations all around me lately, and it has me thinking. One friend, in the context of a relationship that has ended, pondered whether it was better to be loved or needed. Another friend was asked by person B for childhood stories as a gift for person C, "so he can know how much he's loved." I asked my friend whether person C would even want that, and she said no (which I suspected). How, then, does this mechanism of knowing one is loved work? Clearly, different people have different ideas about this. We all use this four letter word, and we assume we mean the same thing, but do we? What does that word really mean?

I have read that in Sanskrit (I think, and I'm just mouthing off here so I could be wrong) there are many different words for the different kinds of love. In English, we use adjectives, but I'm not sure we don't fall terribly short in our lack of vocabulary for this emotion. We learn platitudes that love "never changes" or "is forever" but I'm not sure that's true. If it is, then every single relationship that ever ended has to say it wasn't love in the first place because it's gone now. How shitty is that?

For me, I think feeling love from another means feeling acceptance, non-judgment, and an embracing of all of who I am. While I'm sure some others would share my opinions, I by no means think this is what love means to everyone. Some might believe love is that fluttery excited feeling, which in my world is infatuation. Others might think of love as a more solid, constant caring, maybe something I would call friendship but maybe not love. The range of possibilities must be as varied as we individuals are. Then, if that is true, how in the world do two people ever come together in a relationship and manage to communicate at all?

The thing is, if I am going to feel loved, that is about me. I have to feel it. And in order for that to happen, I have to believe it. It's that simple, and that complicated. If I don't believe it then nothing anyone else can ever do for me will make me feel loved, because I believe I am not. I determine my reality. If, on the other hand, I do believe that someone loves me, they can actually do very little, and I will see it all through the lens of that person loving me because I believe it to be so. People in relationship may not like this-- often othey would rather keep score and cling to their version of the truth. They hold up their interpretation of experience as if it were solid fact: "See? She doesn't love me because she cheated on me!" "See? He loves me because he bought me flowers!" But these actions are only actions, and are not in fact fastened to any emotion on the part of the actor whatsoever. Maybe she doesn't love you because she cheated, or maybe she cheated for a million other reasons that people cheat. Maybe those flowers mean love, or maybe it means he hopes you won't notice how late he is or he'll get out of the doghouse or he'll get laid. People are very vested in believing what they want to believe about their experience, and they'll go to great lengths to justify their conclusions with so-called evidence. But my interpretation of reality does not constitute evidence of anything other than the interpretation itself.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. For now, I'm losing focus, so I'm calling this one done for tonight.

Not So Good

Here's what happened yesterday. Nice face plant, kid.

The best part of the story was how it all went down: baby is eating dog food. Three-year-old is pantless outside, screeching, "WIPE MY BUTT!" Almost eight-year-old is wailing at the top of his lungs, "WHY, WHY, WHY?!?!?!?!" over a dropped silly band that he can't find. Mom is valiantly resisting her impulse to curse at the big boy for flipping out over such a useless little shred of polymer, trying to be heard over the three-year-old, hands dirty now, when baby spins out and tumbles off the stoop, face first so he grinds it into the sidewalk really nicely. Thankfully his teeth are fine, and a bonus was that he spat the dog food out in the body roll rather than choking on it. Good grief.

Nonetheless, I had this half-composed post on love I was all ready to work on last night, but then the disasters of bedtime ensnared me and I surrendered. Since I've promised myself daily posts for a while to oil the writing joints, I'm going to attempt to post twice today. We'll see later if I follow through...

Wrong Way Around

So I homeschool, right? And I homebirthed, twice. And we homestead, sort-of. You might say I'm a homebody. You might expect that of me, you might think that's what I like best; after all, these are my lifestyle choices. But as it turns out, that's not exactly true for me. Most of my "mom friends" are stay-at-home moms. They seem content. They certainly seem happier than me. Maybe they're all on Prozac or Zoloft or whatever the latest generation of antidepressant is. Maybe I should be. But I'm not content. My kids piss me off frequently. I don't know if this is the right thing to do. And I know, beyond any doubt, that I want More out of my life. I even know some of what that looks like. But I can't see how to get there from here. My kids need me relentlessly. They are little, even the "big" one. They need, need, need, all the time. I am never "off." I hate my husband, not for doing anything especially wrong (which he sometimes does), not for being an insensitive jerk (which he sometimes is). I hate him because I resent him for not being my replacement. There is no way around this. Do I love my children? Hell fucking yes I love them, like stops-my-breath love them. Do I wish I hadn't had them? Don't be fucking stupid. But these constraints are real, and sometimes it just sucks.

After breaking my writing silence yesterday, and noticing how impressively ginormous was my writer's block, I have decided that it would probably be a good idea if I forced myself to write here daily, even if it's just two sentences of utter drivel. Hell, no one is reading this damn thing anyway, what difference does it make? I could say anything, who's going to see it? Sure, I secretly wish I could make a small living blogging, but how the hell could that happen when I go for more than a year without writing? Stupid. So I'm going to write crap into a vacuum and see how often I can manage to do it. Gah.

Once Upon A Time...

... there was a writer who became a mom. Then she became a mom again, and then again. Then a whole bunch of other shit happened and it seemed the writer disappeared. But the mom felt crazy without the writer, so she had to go looking for her. She looked in books, she looked in movies. She looked in her purse, her car, and her diaper bag. The mom couldn't find the writer anywhere, and without her she didn't quite know what to do with herself, or what to say. She kept looking. Eventually the mom found the writer, but she almost didn't recognize her, as she had been wandering penless and paperless for a really, really long time, and she was starving and thin (you might say paper thin) and exceedingly thirsty. In fact, at first the mom just saw a starving woman, and felt sorry for her, and offered her some water and a little bite to eat. But then, as the writer began to flesh out once again, the mom realized who she was. And so, the mom welcomed the writer back home, and sought to discover the ways in which she had gotten lost in the first place, in hopes that she wouldn't let it happen again...