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Monday, February 3, 2014

how to pretend that your heart's not got the feels

I had, here in this spot, a lengthy thing-of-a-poem, filled with honesty, some angst, and a little hope sprinkled throughout. After a few re-reads, I canned it. It's somewhere else now, and I'm sure I'll pull it out later, have another look. I'll turn it over and see how it feels, with a bit of distance between me & the markings. Really, this is life at current: I have to hide things. I've got this step-mom thing going on, and much of this requires the ability to mask myself from time to time. Despite my efforts to the contrary, she's all I want to write about. But it's not fair to her, while I'm still navigating, to make her the subject of my public meanders. So, I digress, and try to write about something else.

Kids are all consuming. People with kids told me this before, but I turned up my nose to the idea. Surely, I can still maintain my independence. Surely, I'll still think about other things. And I do. But I think about them in spurts - in the quiet moment between waking up and waking her up, or for an hour past my own bedtime so I, for the love of God, have just a little time to have some independent thoughts. Even then, I'm mulling over the stuff of her life, our relationship, what she learned today, what I hope she learned today. I'm reading a book now - the brilliant and devastating A Thousand Splendid Suns - it makes me feel learned, socially conscious, grateful. But even when I put it down I'm thinking about the book in our context, mine and hers: how we fit, where we'll be in ten years, how lucky she is, and doesn't she know how lucky she is? No she doesn't, and I can't really tell her the extent of it, because she is still innocent and I'm trying to keep her that way.

So there you have it - even my attempts at maintaining a bit of emotional polarity aren't working. And as much as I appreciate all those mommy blogs and those few step-mommy blogs (seriously, where are the rest of them!?), I do not want to become one. I'm not entirely sure why; perhaps I feel completely useless in the parenting arena. Perhaps the snobbiness from my single days still lingers. But now, I have a kid and she's awesome and interesting, and I want to write about her. And don't even get me started on my wonder of a man; I could go on for pages and pages, and pages, and then you'd all barf, or think I was stealing lines from Nicolas Sparks but I'm telling you, his wonder is not fictional. Until I'm fascinated with something else as much as I am these people, I'm sorry, but it's got to leak through from time to time. But not too much, because reasons.

Back and forth we go.

Anyway, I saved the poem, may post it on some other date when the conversations aren't as fresh, when I've figured out how not to make a mess of this thing I'm trying to build - wherein I have intresting things to say that aren't all about one subject (no matter how captivating).

a.


and then there's this.







1 comment:

JoyceHomes said...

"his wonder is not fictional"

sigh.

I love this.