I have trouble going to bed. I like this time of night because everything is still and peaceful. But I pay for this pleasure every morning. I am trying hard to sleep at a reasonable hour, but not doing it. My busy mind will not let me stop. I imagine that if I bring the day to a halt that I have somehow missed out on all that is tranquil. I would like to find that tranquility at a different hour, but my waking moments are filled with medical management, putting on my "work face" and finding clothes that feel right for the day's meetings and current state of my body. Lately my sartorial abilities have been limited by the giant knee brace I've been wearing, hoping to avoid the orthopaedic doc's office. I am short, so I get crabby about being limited to flat shoes. The weather outside demands boots and tights under layers to keep me warm. I am also busty, so this is not a good combination. I like my toes to be free; I like sweatshirts and blue jeans; I like the warmth to come from sunshine, not heaters, wool and down coats with sensible boots. I compensate for this discomfort with hats. I have acquired a tan wool cap, a black velvet beret and one the same style in red.
My hats make all that is under those layers me. It's good to have one little signature that carries me through slushy snow. Having grown up in California, I still cannot abide by wintertime's demands. It does not agree with me or the blood running through my veins, my soul or trite preferences. Yet this season of indoor self-protection is a good time to work, nest, think and write. When the clock changes and the collective activity that echoes until the sun goes down, I will have to find my bicycle, my rock at Lake Michigan, a good book and seek out that quiet I have right now.
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Ventures into virtual land
I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.
Oh boy can I relate to this post. I too am in love with staying up late- basking in the warm tranquility of house-to-myself. As for the wintertime...hang in there. Spring is finally around the corner. Love, me.
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