Solo Time

Tomorrow my husband leaves for Michigan, to spend a week with his daughters. And his ex. His back is in spasm already. It's a longer trip than usual, and vaults me back to the ancient rhythms of single-mothering. My daughter's boyfriend just left for college and so maybe this will give us some grounding time, help her land back in this small environment (now that she's not constantly at his).
I have quite a list evolving, of how many ways I want to nest in my new space. I need to find my work neurons, to get the seminar paperwork and details going. Not too many patients scheduled after tomorrow, so I think I'll get that time. And I want girlfriend time too.
So here's to space and timelessness.

Landing again for the First Time

Home again, to hopefully the very last phase of our construction chaos. Home, we are changed in amorphous ways after our wedding appearance. Home, to the volatile teenager making huge transitions of her own, and projecting all that intensity in her very special way. All over me. Home, with a little better focus on work, a need now to catch up financially. Home that now holds very bold edges for me, so maybe I can leap bigger from here.

Home means maybe I can find the can opener to make tuna fish for my teenager to gulp between school and work (since I am the cruel master forcing her to work anyway).

Home, the fulcrum space between the absurd and the sublime.

HOME.... for a minute

Of course it was the right thing to do, going to Connecticut. Not that knowing that made it any easier. You just put your head down and plow through. This dear sweet elderly couple, so needy in that psycho-emotional way, I just snuggled into my space there and helped them navigate. And breathe a little bit deeper. All the while not necessarily breathing myself, carrying bad news from home and no space to deal with it.

Tomorrow my husband and I fly to North Carolina for his nephew's wedding. His sisters will be on full alert for the flashing neon "S" (for SATAN) beaming over my head. I am the homewrecker second wife and they are sisters in pathology with the ex. It will truly be a foreign affair. I decided we should call it "Operation: let's fuck with your mind, EH!!!"

Lost in Cyberspace

My website is temporarily lost due to server confusion. I feel like I'm spacewalking and my tether line has been cut. In fact, our entire household is untethered and spinning out into fractured orbits tonight. I'm sure we can absorb more absurdity that way.

Ok, ok I'm going.

As I was drifting back to consciousness this morning, I could feel the midline of ease deep beyond my brain and I knew that the truth was I had to go to Connecticut on Saturday. By the time I got to the shower I was framing it in terms of having 4 full days here at home, only working 2 of them, to settle in and get ready. And start the list of work I can do with the gift of all that solitary time. My clients sounded relieved.

So I let go, and will let myself be carried to the perfect place.

We'll Show You!!!

...that no good deed goes unpunished.

The trip from hell is over; we are finally delivered home. A hundred years ago last week, my husband and I flew to Connecticut, met with his daughter (my best friend, Lisa), and the three of us drove down to New Haven to visit with my mom and then have dinner with my aunt. My aunt is the last direct living link to my father, who died a yar ago. I see him in her face and hear him in her laugh, her protests, her disbelief, her stories.

It was really painful. but it felt like a sort of closure, to be there with my "new" family now, and so that same night the three of us headed north to Massachusetts where I was scheduled to teach my embryology class.

We stay with a colleague in a fairly uncomfortable situation. this visit proved to be the most difficult yet, with escalating tension between husband and wife leaving us battered between their two edges. That and no significant air conditioning, in the hottest stretch of summer western MA had seen all year. Teaching my most difficult class on no sleep or rest and indigestible food: now there's a combination.

Sometimes it's from this most battered and depleted state that the really good stuff emerges.

Class was amazing. I think we've broken new ground, seeing a new template for restoring health from the embryology maps. For the first time in 2 years, I'm feeling motivated to write a new class (that is, after I cut the next CD).

But back to this plane. I was supposed to be home last night. However, 9 times out of 10 you simply cannot fly from Hartford to Atlanta to make your connection home (due to nasty weather in Atlanta), and last night we hit the desperation jackpot: "There's no way we can get you home tonight." If my husband hadn't stepped in, I might have puked right there at the ticket counter. Five days on the road, no sleep, no AC, draining teaching experience, and I can't go home??? I have to cancel my Monday morning massage so I can spend another sleepless night in a hotel and get up at 4am to catch a 6am flight that will take me 600 miles in the wrong direction before we can head south to Florida??

But tonight I post this from the safe nook of my writing space, tucked in the corner of my living room. And my job tonight is to feel out the situation waiting for me next week: do I go to Connecticut to work on my clients for 5 days...... or do I take the extended offer to excuse myself from this insane commitment? Look a gift release in the mouth.... or stand by the plan? What happens when the higher good for the bigger picture overrules the personal higher good for me?

Guess we'll know come morning.

RUN AWAY

Is it really possible to blend a new husband into 10 years of solo mom-daughter dynamics? When the 17 year-old daughter thinks she has been the head of the household all that time? Why do I feel like that spike, driven with great ceremony, that joined the Union and Pacific Railroads? Holding two great opposing forces together with one small fulcrum of sanity. If a step-father train leaves the east coast heading west at 70 mph and the step-daughter train left the west coast 10 hours ago and is barreling at breakneck speed (oh, say 120 mph), where exactly on the map of my consciousness are they due to collide? Can I get the tarps down first to keep the mess off the new rugs?

Only one day back to my work schedule, and already there are many revelations.
1. This is crazy. I do not like opening the front door and letting clients in, they are needy and want to hear stories and want to sing their songs of dysfunction. They insist that their traumas and challenges are worse than mine. They've been waiting a whole month to recite their litanies, and by god, they're going to make me PAY for daring to desert them for a month.
2. Answering my work phone is bad for my mental health. So, as for those 10 messages waiting on the machine, we'll see who gets the lucky call back.
3. There is no way it is humanly possible to address the needs of all of those tugging on me: husband. daughter. step-kids. siblings. students. clients. I spent a month interacting with family, which took about all the energy I had. Now factor in the business, and I don't know where that's supposed to come from. I doesn't feel humanly possible. How did I used to do this? I have reached the brink of multi-tasking, and I'm too numb to leap into the abyss.
4. One half-hour in between clients is not enough. Not enough time to go pee, answer the phone, check email, stick my head out the door for a breath of congealed South Florida August "air."
5. Screw-up on seminar accomodations in October. If I cancelled my clients I could actually sit on the phone and come up with plan B. Instead, I explain the situation to my husband, give him the phone numbers and desperately try to engage him in problem-solving.
6. This whole situation is designed inefficiently. Can't make phone calls with clients coming in, can't talk with clients with phone business on my mind. My brain hurts.

And this was an "easy day."

Tomorrow brings my two most needy, pushy, rude, boundary-less challenges. Be forewarned; I have emerged from the underground. The rules are different now. Behave yourselves, or the green door will forever shut behind you!

Coming Back

There needs to be some commemoration of this moment, the eve of the beginning. After a month off from work, my first break in 26 years, the foundations have been ripped out and the new construction is in process. It is raw and new and incomplete and still forming. I suppose a bit of mirroring is in order to help the edges evolve. Tomorrow three of my "safe" patients will arrive to witness the newly constructed space and at the same time reach for the familiar in me. They want their safe space. It's not the same anymore, out there or in me. Where do we go from here? How do I open the door for the first time at 1pm? How do I hold space for the unknown in me without collapsing under the weight of their needs?

And so, this night before, I pray for the space to hold me. Help me find my way with those who have been waiting.