It snowed in Chicago last week. The last two days have been hot enough to open windows and sport flip flops down the sidewalk. I still am not walking well, but my pink painted toes will be free for a few days.
Working for a Jesuit institution means that Good Friday and Easter Monday are official holidays. It is remarkable what two extra days can mean in the life of a nine to fiver when there is no division of labor. Today I made health care rounds, getting routine but necessary blood tests and scheduling physical therapy appointments. I gambled on some nine dollar hair spray--it's the sort of thing I use rarely, but this brand's claim to fame is "brushable, flexible hold". I hope that doesn't mean it won't work. I found a ten dollar cute slouchy cotton bag for the no-show socks and yoga knickers I will wear to knee "rehab". I should have had the blood draw in February and had I started physical therapy six weeks ago, I might be done with it. I am still wrapping this knee each morning and wearing flats for office days.
This spring rehab goes well beyond my knee and this new blog template, which is lighter than the last one that looked like the pages of a dark, dusty book, which it probably is. If anyone's been reading, I have more than a couple unarticulated experiences in me, but like this new template, they will come in dots, light and dark placed gently around these pages.
I am still struggling with disorganization of time. It is a tranquil hour, four in the morning and I haven't been to bed yet. I watched a cute but meaningful "coming of age" movie and an indie film that was a lot like watching a bad accident that you can't take your eyes off of. Sometimes I feel that if I sleep I will never wake up. That is how tired everything inside me is. A sensible person would say, then "go to bed!" In some things I am sensible, but "doing" time is a gritty challenge. If I don't feel I've accomplished much during the day, I think if I just stay up late enough, I will do so in the wee hours of the night. Sometimes I am successful in that, and it is a learned habit that is dying hard.
I spent much of my life doing homework, studying for Ph.D exams and wirting my dissertation after the babies, then kids were in bed. I wrote papers, graded papers, prepared classes and worked on my tenure portfolio after teenage phones and doorbells had stopped ringing and I found a quiet time and place to think. They went to bed later, which meant I was up later. Doing so has meant eighteen years of employment security. I never knew how much that would mean in unstable times, but I do now.
I do not keep my own calendar anymore. Doretha does it for me and I look at four hour increments to see where I need to be for the next meeting, classroom observation, lecture, gentle finger wagging with a student or "sit-down" to discuss next semester's schedules--all thirty teachers, prerequisites, classrooms, and some hundred and fifty classes. The coordination that calls for is an exercise in gymnastics or completing a Rubic's cube. Fall 2010 is already here and I am barely into my second day of a free pink toes spring.
Easter has always signalled the beginning of warmer, longer days and my new bathing suit for the year (which went by the wayside about the time I stopped wearing bikinis). It also often meant a family camping trip to get some fresh air and forget about everything. My heart is in too many places right now, so that, this exceedingly busy end of semester crunch and my bum knee lead to travel paralysis. It's a mild version of Sophie's choice. I did have a good conversation with someone who's important to me and felt a weight lifted for now that everything is as it should be, and I am happy about it.
It is now five a.m. and I will set the alarm for noon. Heaven forbid I should be lazy on what is supposed to be a lazy weekend. So I will allow myself those seven hours of sleep and see if I can get "it" done tomorrow.
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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.
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