I thought it was a good idea…

I thought it would be a good idea to sit down and tackle some things. Just for this moment, while Ryan takes the constantly (not exaggerating) crying and sick Elsie Jane for a walk to distract her. (Thank the good Lord he came home to rescue us.) (Yes, I had her ears checked. They’re fine. She just has a big nasty green slime producing cold. She’s really mad about it.)

It wasn’t that good of an idea to sit down for the tackling of the things after all because they are growing around me, as I speak-type. Do you know that feeling like your eyes won’t ever stop reading over lists and lists and lists of things to do and so you just kind of freeze?

That’s when a lot of bloggers blog. Just so you know. I realize it makes no sense but it does something in which all the growing of piles and words in your head and thoughts scattered across the desk just kind of simmer down for a few minutes. My shoulders start to relax and I guess in a way this is a little like meditation. Sort of.

We’re having another garage sale tomorrow. I thought that was a good idea too but it’s funny how a parent’s life is never really on their terms, which can be really good for a person and also very tiring. Elsie got sick and for two days I’ve been walking around the house holding her because if I don’t, she scream-cries and throws herself on the hardwood floor and bangs her head. So I pick her up to stop that and I try all the things she loves and she bats them away, hard, which produces flying favorite crackers, flying favorite cups, flying favorite toys…

She even slapped me. Hard. On the chest. I have no idea what to do with her…pizzazz. Her fierceness. Her chutzpah. Her anger.

It took me a really long time to even start to figure out what to do with my own. And truth be told, this kind of feels like starting over and even though that’s good for a person, it’s also very tiring.

There is less than a week to BlogHer ’12 in New York. I can already feel the lifting off the ground feeling of not just the airplane, but my heart…me. I’ll be flying there and looking down like I’m not really there if I’m not careful. Then I’ll be home and wondering how it all went by and looked so far away. Maybe traveling without my kids will always feel like this because of the way motherhood defies the miles and keeps most of me at home. I mean, we are all mostly heart guts and the rest of ourselves is just a skin and bone on a tarmac. Ready to go but not even mostly there.

The quiet is over. The house is full of all the family parts again now. The crying started again. The garage is full of unmarked things and my email is full of unread messages. I am unwashed and so are the clothes and the floors. I was going to take care of all of these things but then Elsie got sick. And I was thinking, so what? It can’t all get done? So what? (A bit uncomfortably, but still meaning it.) Because what else is a girl to think when she is totally stuck? It’s really pointless to think anything other than so what, and the truth of the matter is, if these children were not here, gone for a few days or a week or for good, I wouldn’t have that tethered to home feeling and nothing would make sense. I’d stay floating above it all and myself without the right place to land.

They are my place to land and so tomorrow will happen and it won’t be just right and then I’ll go on this trip and if things aren’t just right here or there, they will be anyway.

Because loving my family just makes sense out of my nonsense.

All of this sense/nonsense of mine reminds me: My friend Morgan of The 818 wrote about being a traveling mother and she shared something she learned to do; that she sneaks in to kiss her sleeping babies before she leaves. She wears lots of bright red lipstick and when they wake up they find a temporary mother-kiss-lips tattoo on their cheeks. I want to do that. You know, that little thing that has them looking in the mirror and feeling their mother’s heart. That must be totally rad.

That said. This thing is really going down. I mean, the garage sale tomorrow freaking morning, of course. BUT ALSO, I am seeing some of my best friends in the universe in New York City and one of them is Ellie and after all of this year’s heavy heavy things, I don’t know…I just don’t know. I don’t know enough words for this kind of thing. She had cancer. I tried to go see her during all of that but then Asher got sick…

yeah, here we go again with the same story about how I planned something but then I couldn’t get it done and it’s okay now in the end…you hear me with this whole idea, right? Should I bring up grace and how much I love my kids even though today I thought I might explode? Or are we good? You got it already? That’s what I thought…

Okay then. I’ll stop.

Good thing I type as fast as a…

something really fast.

Have a good weekend, my friends.