Today my brain is divided—my head aches as though the connection between the two halves is stretched and tenuous. I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and this is a normal reaction to that. It is as though I can feel the lack of neuron (is there and adjective form of that?) firing.
I have a hard time remembering things lately. I have to rwrite everything down, and even then, I have to remember to look at the calendar, or it doesn’t happen. It seems like it didn’t used to be this way—I used to be able to hold things in my head, and calendars were a helpful organizational tool so I could see it (I’m a very visual learning) all at once. But now. . . even seeing it doesn’t seem to make it stick in my brain. I forget long-standing appointments (every Tuesday for the last 6 months—but today is Tuesday and it never occurred to my brain that something was going on.) What is the deal with that? Will I ever get it back, or is my brain permanently scarred? Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll get it back in the resurrection. . .
I happened to read a blog presented by Mamapedia yesterday, and it was amazingly like a blog post I wrote a year and a half ago—both about trying to run away from the dragon/demon of depression, and finally realizing that simply turning to face it and acknowledge it was more than half the battle. My blog is here: http://bravevibrations.blogspot.com/2010/07/no-man-is-island.html and the blog of the other woman is here: http://www.mommymanders.com/2012/02/19/my-dragon/#comment-453
I looked more into her blog and discovered that she is a family/parenting educator, too, and loves to write and suffers from depression and has two small kids and I thought it was so cool. It was like discovering a “friend” who doesn’t know you. I guess getting to know people on the internet has been a growing, more and more normal thing for many years, but it always seemed pretty sketchy to me. How can you really know what a person is like if all you have is what they say in a chat room? But maybe there is more to it. Anyway, that was a random side note.
I submitted a hymn for the Church Music Submission this year. It was a hymn that I’d originally written years ago—starting in 2005—and when Sam was called into the Stake Young Men’s presidency, I started thinking about it again for some reason, and decided it needed to be for the young men, so I made some changes/tweeks and asked a fabulously musical lady in our Stake (also Ethan and Dorothea’s piano teacher) to write some music for it, which she graciously did, and voila! a hymn to submit. I like it.
Thinking about what to write during these DEW times is exciting. Today my brain was too droopy to do any real, focused writing (hence the stream of consciousness), but yesterday I did update my personal and family blogs, and that was good. (I was really tired yesterday, too. I stayed up after midnight two nights in a row, working on a photo book for dad.) When I get my brain back together again, though, I would like to download scrivener and start on Grandpa Charlie’s biography/children’s book. I have a lot of good information (collected four years ago!!) but I need a really good way to organize it, and I think that program will be really helpful.
In the meantime, I still have ten minutes of writing. Let’s see—I have been thinking about things, but haven’t had any beautiful insights to share. When Sam quit several weeks ago, I felt like I’d just walked over the edge of a cliff, but not in a frightening sort of way. It was like I’d been learning and preparing a hang-glider for many years, and I’d tested it out a time or two, and was quite confident in it, but this was a chance to actually fly it, and to do that, you have to take a flying leap off a tall cliff. I had been looking forward to it, and preparing for it, but the moment of being airborn before the lift of the glider caught me was . . . momentarily heart stopping. Now, I feel like we are gliding along quite happily. This has actually been an easier transition into having Sam home that it was last time, as I recall. Then, I felt like our expectations of each other and ourselves were unclear, and we were constantly either stepping on each other’s toes or letting the other one down. This time, I have simply continued doing what I was doing before (and been grateful for Sam’s help, when he can give it) but not tried to mesh our schedules or work or anything like that. He does his thing, I do mine, we coordinate as needed, and help as needed, and it is working out pretty well. I really enjoy having him around, and he really has helped, but with me still in charge of my stuff and him of his stuff.
When we were still anticipating Sam’s resignation, I had a little window of poignancy (I finally got a chiropractic adjustment, and I think that helped open the window) in which I felt to mourn the ending of one chapter of our lives and the beginning of another (yet unknown) one. Bentonville has been a wonderful place for me. In fact, (now that I think about it) I started writing about it while we were on Spring Break, and then I never picked it back up again. DEW will be a great opportunity for me to do that.
I got to see my counselor, Dr. McKenna, the day Sam resigned, and I spoke with her about my feelings of poignancy, and how I wanted to explore them, but as soon as Sam resigned I girded up my loins wondered if I’d lost the chance to delve into the tenderness of my heart. She reminded me to write—said that I could probably re-invoke those feelings and have a space to ponder them through writing. So I will. And maybe I’ll get another adjustment too (the place didn’t take insurance—which we don’t have at the moment—anyway) to help open the door to the poignancy of my soul.
Well, time’s up! I’m going to go help Dorothea practice the piano, now.
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