Break over!

Six weeks is a long-enough break, don't you think? It's been wonderful, honestly, not to feel the pressure to blog when I just didn't want to. But I find myself wanting to again. So hurray! Break over.

But not here. This year, my word (finally!) is forward, despite what Ed said of the word making him think of fascist youth marches. Forward. Not looking back, not trying to be what I was, not trying to get back all the things I felt I was losing in the move, but going onwards, moving forwards and up and away. I might be about ready to do that.

And I'm going to do blog forward on a new and shiny blog I'm calling Making It Up and it's here, at my very own site: francescaamendolia.com/blog. Please come over. It's probably going to be almost exactly the same as it was. After all, it's still me.

But not Stuntmother any more. She's lovely and I adore her, that cupcake making, baby-rocking, play-dough rolling, half-smiling, half-screaming diaper juggling piece of me. But she belongs to something that's receding into the past. And I'm going forward. Making it up as I go along.

Where I'm going is not where I've been

I've been thinking a lot about what has changed for me about blogging. For two years, blogging here was something I did naturally, readily. It took no effort, gave me much pleasure. Here I thought things through, connected to others, made friends, shared stories and reached further into the virtual world than I ever had before. I loved that this was a diary I was keeping faithfully while I had failed at dozens of other diaries I had tried to keep throughout my life. I had always wanted to be a journaler -- like Madeleine L'Engle, like Anais Nin, like Boswell. For a while, here in this blog, I was. It was the most intensely satisfying activity. Then something changed.

For a long while I thought that the intense sadness I felt about leaving Philadelphia was interfering with my blogging mojo -- and all my other mojos for that matter. I tried to give myself space to be unhappy, to not blog if I couldn't manage to face yet another day of writing about the slough of despond I felt myself in. I tried not to mind that the magic was gone. But it was. And I began to feel like a liar, struggling to write what had once come so easily.

Recently I've had another thought. I have, all my life long, cared far far too much about what other people think of me. In fact, especially at times of great stress or unhappiness, there is a voice in my head which is something like the omniscient third-person narrator of a book. That voice is the voice of the "audience," the world out there watching me. It's no good telling me not to be so bloody self-centered. I'm not really, not that way. But I judge the value of what I do and who I am via the reactions of other people. Which is why, I think, blogging has been so successful for me while journaling was not. The audience made it real.

Well, it occurs to me that I am in the fix I am in (in short, that I am not sure where my life is in the midst of the lives around me) because I care more what and who are outside me, rather than what is inside. So I end up moving away from where I really wanted to be, because I had never managed to stand up and say -- not to myself, not to anyone -- this is what I want. Because I don't know what I want. I know far better what other people want from me.

So. As this new year comes and I emerge slowly from the cracking shell of unhappiness I have been in, I think it's time to try and change that. I will find out what I want. I will find out what my own voice says.

And to that end I have started keeping a journal. In a book. With a pen. I carry it around. I write weird things in it that I wouldn't write here. And things that I would. But then I can't check back to hear the love. To see my reflection in the mirror of this community. I have to be all right with there being no mirror. Only with myself. The book is quiet. It doesn't praise me, judge me, agree with me or pat my hand. It doesn't challenge me or push me. It waits for me to do all that for myself. Which considering how old I am, it's about time I did.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that, for now at least, I'm going away. I'd rather say that outright than just drift away. What I am going to regret most are the connections I have here. I will miss you very much. And you should email or, you know, visit! Or you can come over to the knitting blog (Two Sharp Sticks) which I share with a friend and which I have also been neglecting. I will be contributing over there a few times a week, because (I hope) that's a different type of blogging, one that won't twist its fingers into my hair and pull me away from what I need to be doing right now. I'm also Twittering every so often (link in the side bar: twitter. com and I'm stuntmother) which means if you're really keen to know where I'm at, you can check in on my 140 character summations of existence.

We'll see. I know other bloggers who have said sayonara and almost immediately come back. And I have this idea that maybe once a week I'll scan the weirdest page from my journal and post it here. Although isn't that frankly just the love-hungry faded star in me, longing for acknowledgment?

And since I don't exactly know how to close, I'm just going to fade to black.

She turns away from the camera (and now we can see she's wearing a snazzy new pink hat she just knitted because man, the house is cold). She opens a still new looking black book , thinks for a moment, then takes a pen and starts to write. The light fades.

All right, just stop.

So unfortunately feeding my sense of impending doom doom doom, with a capital D and a very loud OOOOOO, I've just learned that one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers. You can read his statement here, which, like so much of what he writes, is intelligent, phlegmatic, funny and cuttingly real.

I'm not sure how they diagnosed him, since a neurologist friend assures me that a true diagnosis for Alzheimers can only be done via autopsy, but still. And his optimism -- or determination -- to carry on for a long while yet exhorts me to adopt the same positive forward movement. And perhaps much of what could be hard and dooooom-riddled can be otherwise with a better attitude.

Still, I would really like the crap to stop and something very very nice and long-lasting to happen. Not just, you know, tickets to Spamalot or a nice sunny morning without too much work to do (although that would be nice too) but something big and nice. Daniel to stop fighting at school. Ed suddenly getting a to-die-for job in Philadelphia. My asthma improving. Friends moving in next door. An invitation to direct for the RSC.

My computer having not lost the last two days of work. Breakfast.

Only now

Part of the power of NaBloPoMo ending was to send me shrieking from the computer. It's a truly odd juxtaposition to last year's early December posting when the month of posting so energized me that I wanted to carry on and on. And it's a good reminder in how things change, even the things you think will always be the same.

This too shall pass, my mother used to say. This too shall pass. Sunny weather and rain, good times and bad. At first I found it a sterile saying. A platitude. And then I realized its power for hope and held it to myself when I felt lost and afraid. Much later I learned that it also holds within it a warning not to rely on the good moments remaining forever. They too are fleeting. This thought holds within it both halves of all possibility. All this shall pass. Someday, it will be different. Not good, not bad. Not worse, not better. Just different.

Things are so different now then they have ever been before that I am truly, for the first time in my life, fearing the future. I never did. The future always held promise and potential. Now I am scared of it, fearing it holds sadness and loss. Part of this is the slow evaporation of my mother. To watch her dying by infinitely small degrees (because Alzheimer's is a disease -- and one that will kill her eventually) and to not yet be free to talk about it, to look ahead and know that before this mourning can possibly end there will be terrible, terrible times, makes the future seem bleak beyond all description.

Yet this too shall pass. All things will. And I am both hopeful and afraid.

Only now, at the end, do you understand the power of the Blog

Another guest post from Stuntfather

Last day of the month of enforced daily posting. Since y'all (it would have been youse, but we left Philly and out here it's definitely y'all for the second person plural) gave me such good feedback on the last post, I've grabbed the wheel again and am steering this blog off down a different bumpy road.

November: one of the wackiest months in our married life, I'd say, certainly our parental life, with the hordes of visitors, me conferencing and burning non-existent candles at ends they didn't know they had to get the bloody dissertation revisions done, Stuntmother performing daily miracles and nightly collapses... I won't be sorry to see the back of this month. But it had its moments, and the struggle itself is worthwhile (insert Camus here? What? I have to do it for you? Eh bien, "La lutte elle-meme vers les sommets suffit a remplir un coeur d'homme" and if I've remembered that correctly at a distance of 20 years y'all owe me a beer). Thanksgiving brought happiness to our visitors, I think, and showed what this house can do when full. Christmas could be spectacular. Or just cozy. And either way it will be good.

Three generations of the family went to a planetarium show tonight and to look through a large telescope at a binary star system and massive globular cluster of 100,000 stars on the other side of the Milky Way. Daniel melted down when we had to leave, and that became the consuming thing in the moment. But I look back now at me, my parents, my children, and the big universe out there, and don't care whether it all makes sense or not. This messy November has been what it has been, every day is what it is, the world turns, and tomorrow there will be fresh coffee. And Stuntmother coming back to me from all youse guys in Philly who borrowed her for the evening.

Last year Stuntmother was musing on strategic undergarments for reptiles

Further aging

Further to the aging theme, I was watching a BBC Lord Peter Wimsey mystery from 1973 and there was a party scene and do you know, everyone at the party was over forty. And they were all having fun! Looking pretty! Chatting and flirting and drinking champagne.

Then this popped up over my Gmail:

Pablo Picasso - "It takes a long time to become young."

Well, yes, Pablo, as it happens, I agree. But something happened between the early seventies and now, or between the 1920s and now, depending on how you look at it -- the triumph of youth culture. The pressure on us to remain young despite the natural, and in some ways, welcome process of aging, maturing, growing up, is immense. Lord Peter Wimsey today would at the very most be a lusciously ripe thirty something, not a greying man in his late forties or early fifties. It's a shame.

Except for a few aches, you couldn't pay me to be twenty again. But I would like there to be a space in the world for fun, glamour, romance, high-jinks and long parties for those of us leaving all vestiges of youth behind. The space that there is, is shrinking. And it is time to resurrect it.

Last year I was both mother and motherless.

Aging

A while ago I went to the doctor because I thought my asthma was getting worse. And I had (or had just had) bursitis. What is wrong with me? I asked. The doctor shrugged. "You're just getting old," she said.

I have an aching wrist and a cut on my hand that is taking a long time to heal. I can no longer entwine my fingers and bend over and have my arms loop over my head. I used to be able to do that. I could do all sorts of things that I didn't think were hard at all that are now impossible. I can't hold my balance the way I once did. My neck gets sore. My eyes get tired. My lips crack.

I'm going to yoga and what I don't know is how much is recuperable. Can I reclaim the (limited by my basic structure) flexibility I tossed away through years of blind inactivity? Can I reclaim the lost lung power? Can I push away the pain in my wrists? Knit together the diastasis of my stomach muscles, long after birth? Or am I aging past these things?

Aging is not something I want to fear, but I want to balance what I should cling to with what I should gracefully surrender. What goes on each list? How can I decide? I suspect that the neck pain, a long term legacy of a car accident in my early twenties, is here to stay. Surrender headbanging gracefully. All right. The wrist pain is new, perhaps due to too much laptop use at a bad angle. Fight that! If I can choose well, I will have more energy to fight the good fight, rather than flinging myself against the brick wall of the inevitable.

But what about my dreams? Some dreams I think I do have to gracefully surrender. No chance I'll be in the RSC now. Nor will I dance. I am unlikely to live on a yacht or learn to speak fluent Dutch.

I can hear all your caring comments now, urging me to never give up on dreams, and you're quite right -- as far as it goes. But I think some must get cleared out of the way so that I can see the future spreading out before me, not cluttered with might-have-beens, but with maybes. If I can choose well, I will have more chance of fighting gracefully, rather than tripping over my somewhat wretched, aging feet.

Last year I was considering my place in the blogosphere.