back to beats

I have made it back to the hot room for ye ol 26&2 for 3 weeks running. Once a week. The first time was while I was in Tucson, nudged on by Christina’s enthusiasm to drop in to the only class we would be able to make all weekend. A Friday night class called “Bikram Beats”. It was simultaneously laugh out loud and perfect. For real. And I know I have been over and over and round and round in this space that I am a slow learner and that the revelations I have are generally recycled from somewhere in my history, but wow, I am good for it tell you what.

It had been a long ass time since I had found myself wearing next to nothing in a sweaty room making shapes on a wet towel. Since March 7th 2020 to be precise. I knew that I liked this practice, but I had also mostly forgotten. And the thing that I had forgotten was in part how incredibly familiar I am with it. Despite feeling like very much a visitor in the land of 26&2 it is nonetheless a practice that I have been engaging off and on with varying consistency for the past decade. I am not sure how that measure of time has elapsed, but it has. I first began showing up in a hot room in Milwaukee in the summer of 2012, right after we sold our first family home in Viroqua and then spent the subsequent season living with my mom. I kept it up from the very start in Madison as soon as we landed at our sweet little postage stamp in Mount Horeb just before Halloween.

That practice carried me through all measure of life events. Like, for real. I sweated out a lot of shit on that little space of yoga towel. I stared myself right more than once in that mirror. I came to terms with my own fidgeting and its function or lack thereof. I bargained with myself and made more than one deal with my past/present/future. I wrote endless lines of prose. I learned how to finally and repeatedly practice forgiving myself. All the way fighting the heat to stay in the room and staring my own self down like a one woman wrestling act until I could finally feel that sweet softening inside. The letting go that became a reclamation that became a revelation. And THANK GOD for those second sets. For everything. For real.

I have let that practice inform me as a wife, a mama, a friend, a student, and as a teacher. It has been huge for me this past decade (minus the past two years) and I am ready ready ready to restore some rhythm and cadence into the fabric of my weeks with it restored. I mean, not that it hasn’t been happening. I just haven’t been going. Covid and all the rest. And all of those reasons still stand. But I am going to choose this for a bit and see what shakes out. It feels like an imperative after a rocky season of living through much of 2021. And this mama needs a minute to stare her own self down and get right with herself. Ya know?

It was a lot, right? I mean, I know it still is and I know we will keep going but I have such a big desire to take a step back for a hot second and reassess, redefine, and redetermine what works and what doesn’t and move forward from there. The time in Tucson was extra good for me. A lot of it is still landing and still being digested for sure, but there was also a way in which it really affirmed what I had been leaning into already and served up a hefty helping of remembering who I am, what I know, what I value, and the relevance of all of the work and study and consideration that has been a part of the last 20 years of my life.

For one thing, it helped me think that maybe I am not so ready to throw in the towel teaching yoga. And that maybe I am ready to find my footing locally in in-person settings. There is still something very real there for me, some aspect of my identity threaded with the gift of getting to offer support and guidance to others in their practices. I am not done yet. Even if I am ready to fade to grey with everything online. For real. I mean, its great and all and I am not going anywhere any time soon, as a student or as a teacher, but I need some seriously precise parameters within the etheric context of neither here nor there. It is one of the central reasons that sheep beat grad school, and kids win over work, at least in my world as it is right now.

Anyhow, I am ready to teach some classes to people in the same space. And I really think that it may be on the very near horizon in the new year and I am thankful for that. I am interested in what is here and now. How I can best show up to serve what is instead of continuing to steer towards a more opaque abstract. I want to take it slow and easy and relax my edges as best I can. For myself. For my people. For whatever moment is unfolding. I want to make choices and practice the behaviors that are in alignment with the identity I want. Daily. Weekly. Monthly. Yearly. But mostly, right here right now. Starting small and being consistent and showing up for the moment to moment choices in the form of writing and reading and meditating and making. And all the rest of everything that lands me right here. Right now. As I choose to be.

some bits

Today is my birthday. I took Wilfred to a new play group at the pool in Johnson and snuggled him to sleep for nap and bedtime. I chatted with maple and eider and made food and hauled wood. I made some shapes and took a bath and read a book. Mostly, the day was all of the normal mama things, especially after a long weekend away and Chris gone now for work. Thankfully, it feels like the season is given to celebration and if I get to fold myself in to that mix for a stretch of days, I’ll take it. I am guessing we Newlins will have a bit of merry making ahead of us this weekend in the form of cake making and finding our tree and doing a little bit of elfing. I will knit too. And read. And write. And eat. And do some yoga. Basically, a perfect story.

Mostly, I opened this space up tonight to deposit a bit of my writing from the past weekend with Christina and Mary Angelon. It was rich for me in all sorts of ways and I imagine I will process that more in the days to come. But for now, just these few snips.

***

For the last two decades the ma in me has been in suspended relief, stuck in the goo of everything that leaks, seeps, and oozes through all the stages of longing, conception, gestation, birth, and early rearing. And right now, sitting here with these heavy breasts away from my final baby for the first time, I can feel that life bit by bit drying up, dissolving into dust, nudging closed a door long wedged open. I held on to a hope for so long that I am over-conditioned to the act and even after having gotten what I wanted my hand still think they need to grip. Even now. Empty Space.

When my milk is gone this time the door will close and not reopen. The time of the Maiden is done and now I am the Ma that makes her way god willing to the Crone. If there were a key now might be the time to remake it, forge a new one for a new lock, for a next passage.

This hurts and is harder than I want it to be maybe because I am so happy to have what I do but good grief I am so nostalgic all the time for the early days- even as I am in them. Again. The loss of this time has been something I’ve denied and fought against for so long and now that its finally time I am at once ok, excited even, and utterly shattered. I am shattered.

***

Even though it is so cold now and the ground is frozen, deeper every day, I see small green leafy shoots push up everywhere I step my feet. Something is rising, fresh and new, from far beneath the ice and snow, where the earth is dark and loamy. My eyes are still so tired but the light that’s coming in around the edges now is bright and clear and so full of something more solid than hope. It is so good to be away for a few days. To sleep long and easy in a bed made sweet for me by old friends. It is good to get some distance. From here, today, I can look back on my people and see them as they are, free from the up-close residue of our perpetual proximity. And great news! They are ok! They are more than ok, they are excellent. Of course they are. Beautiful and fine. So fine.

Chris keeps sending me all of these pictures of the kids and finally I had to say hey just send me a picture of your face. I just wanna see your face. He helps make so much possible for me. Help me remember me. This morning in the shower I thought again that I should write him a letter. I should write him a letter. I want to write him a letter. I never do. I put so many words together all the time and launch them into the ethers and I am pretty sure he reads them all. But none are ever just for him. I mean, they are all meant for him but none ever just. I think its time. He’s so many things. My fellow torch bearer. We take turns but almost always walk together. Different but never really separate. Not anymore. And As I was showering and being with me and remembering to remember- I just once again thought good grief, I got it good. My presence is the ground of being. But his is too. His is too. And in that remembering, small green shoots, pushing up from under my feet.

alcohol, instagram, anxiety

I am at the end of what is hands down the most difficult day that I have ever had with Wilfred. He is a force. Which I am sure is excellent, but in this moment, all of me feels drained and hollow. Taxed to the max. However. I have had something that I have wanted to spend a little time processing through writing for a while and I will give it a start now. Who knows how long I’ll last.

I have never been a big drinker. There have certainly been periods where I drink more than others but for me drinking regularly generally equates to 2-4 drinks in a week. And never, save once in a very blue moon, more than a drink or two in a day. That is just how I generally always am. And ok yeah if you can remember me at some wedding where I threw more back than that you are probably correct and I can assure you that I paid the price for that the next day and then some.

Cuz here is the real deal: I always pay the price for it. I feel like crap whenever I have anything to drink. And if I am doing that with some regularity, not only do I feel like shit bodily, but I also am most likely experiencing heightened anxiety and nudging my way toward depression. Alcohol does not seem to agree with me. And that is ok but also a little sad. I like a beautiful wine and dark beer. I like most types of Scotch and a number of other interesting whiskeys.

And I am not a purist. It is not moral for me. I am not generally, with anything, much of a this or that kind of a person. I don’t know if it is my high-ish blood sugar or my low blood pressure or a combination of the two or just simply my preferences when it comes to my biochemistry, but it seems like I am not a person who does well with even very occasional alcohol consumption. That is not to say that this is some declaration about whether I do or do not drink. I can guarantee you that I am going to enjoy some lovely wine with family later this week. And I can also be pretty positive that next week I am going to have to pay some extra attention to my personal care as I walk myself back from mixed and uncomfortable states of being. I am ok with that. So long as it is not a regular walk back I have to do and so long as I can keep the whole thing in perspective and not spiral needlessly about any of it.

This is not a post about sobriety. Like I said, it is not moral. This is me getting clear about my own relationship to how I feel and how I function. And while it is difficult sometimes to not cue off of others I have found in this instance that how I feel is not, and really need not be, how others feel in relationship to alcohol. Some folks are fine drinking regularly and experience very little to no downside to that other than maybe an extra couple pounds of weight, and that may or may not be an actual downside. For some folks it is best to avoid alcohol altogether, whether because it is a trigger that could provoke a landslide of substance abuse, or because it simply works best for them to choose a lane: yes or no. For me, it is something in between. Something that I am ok with being a little gray about. A little variable about. In fact for me to take a firm yes or no stance would most likely be more unnecessarily provocative than working to trust my internal wisdom about what is best.

As with many things, I am working on building up this sort of trust. Early on in the pandemic, I leaned into alcohol to meet the stress of the endless all the same days unending and forever way that I think maybe many people did. I had a beer most evenings and just gave up a certain part of myself that perhaps was the governor of my better interests. And it was actually excellent in terms of building up some very lived data around how much that really does not work for me and jettisons me into malaise coupled with hopelessness coupled with restlessness coupled with depression. I mean, I really know now. And in the year and a half since those early months, I have played a couple of games with myself to see what the levels are in terms of provoking my discomfort. Turns out none. The level is none. Not without any price to pay. So now I know that. Which is honestly, a pretty massive relief. Maybe it will be different when I once again sleep through the night. But maybe not.

I have also learned something quite similar in terms of how I interact with social media in general, and instagram is specific. For a month or so this past summer, I put down the app to see how I fared without it and to sort out its role in how shitty I was feeling. It was significant. And when I came back I knew I needed to shift the way in which I engage in that space. For me, that meant not sharing other people’s posts, especially ones that expressed any kind of political or social opinion or dictate. I needed to have nothing preachy that wasn’t just me in my particular bubble. Like my brand, my life, my lane. That is not to say that I do not value the way in which IG can function as an educational platform, and I utilize it in many of these ways. What my personal stance is on it, for myself, is that I have nothing to prove in that space. I do not need to prove my politics or my wokeness. IG is not the means by which I declare or affirm my social action. It simply need not be that for me.

It might even be right for me to say that for the most part, at this place in time, I am not so interested in “re-posting” or sharing others people’s content in general. I am here to be me and see you as you are and forge awkward and clunky friendships together, albeit virtual. As much as the space of Instagram is statistically not the healthiest or even safest space, I have met folks here that have informed my life for the better and relationships that have sustained me during the long and lonely seasons.

But, I gotta say this again. My perspective is not moral. It isn’t. It is just personal. I am paying attention to what serves my mental wellness and culling or moderating the actions and behaviors that do not. I do not have any issue with the choices that you make that work well for you and your personal wellness. I really do not. I just need to manage my energy to the best of my ability and these are my findings in relation to being in study and service to that energy. When I am living in anxiety I am not the best version of myself. Not personally, not relationally, not socially, etc…

So, like that. I am not sure what I am aiming to do here, save maybe clarify a few things for myself simply by putting them out there. I tend toward being incredibly impressionable and am able to adapt and adjust quite a bit to what is happening around me and I think maybe this is just my way of affirming that these are examples in which I am not best served by that behavior. So, like that. I am working to know myself better and what works best as applied to me. Not you. It is neither good nor bad. Right or wrong. This or that. It is simply what I think I need to be choosing and it is not very definitive. More flexible. More temporal. More me.

contentment/determination

Eider lost interest in soccer this year. In many ways, it was the natural progression of things. Two full seasons off and the kind of multi-sport conundrum of over-lapping seasons and the subsequent picking and choosing. And even though I understood, I was still a little bit bummed. He began playing when he was four back in Mount Horeb and it always felt like something that was just his. None of us really had a huge connection or understanding for the game. Not really. And his autonomy and agency with the sport only grew once he was old enough to bike himself to the town fields for practice. He grew with the sport in natural and exciting ways, culminating in a full season on the club select team our last year living there.

And he seemed genuinely excited to play again this past fall. But once the season began it was evident right away that his heart wasn’t in it. I think he was happy for the activity but when the season ended he was relieved to be done. It is interesting with Eider. He is such a naturally enthusiastic person that it can often be difficult to tell how into something he actually is and how much is just him responding in ways he thinks he ought. And that’s the thing. 

Eider was by far my easiest baby and small child. He was always sooooo content. So go with the flow. He is, after all, the baby that made me want 1000 more. His sister and brother are much more determined. They both seem to want to make shit happen and are hell bent on a struggle if that is what is required to get there. At least that is true for moo. It seems that Wilfred is following suit. And while that particular quatlity is a challenge to parent, it is pretty incredible when they grow older. Maple takes no shit and I have no concern over her ability and capacity to do exactly what she wants to do advocating for her interests along with her needs the whole while. She is a force. And it is super inspiring for me as her mama, but also a huge fucking relief honestly. 

As Eider grows, I can see the shadow side of his contented disposition. He settles so easily for something that he may or may not want. Or he walks away from the difficulty. His contentment often has an expression of inertia and it is hard to tell what the heck the kid really wants. The rock and the hard place that we find ourselves in as his parents is that we do not, by any means, want him to lose the ease and content and radical acceptance that are hallmarks of who he is. Of course. But we would love to see a rise in some of the passion that makes us know he is proud of his efforts and that he is living the life he wants. 

Sometimes, especially as Maple gets closer and closer to her departure from our family nest, it is hard to remember that Eider still has a whole bunch of his childhood left to live in our care. The years may seem short to me, and in many ways they certainly are, but for him, there is still so much time left to live the supported and protected, yet also unbound, life of a kid.

This came up for us recently when he tried out for 802 lacrosse. And even more so once he was offered a spot on the team. He hemmed and hawed. Saying first yes, and then no, and then yes again. To be fair, so much of this is because of a continued failing on the part of Chris and I to always want our kids to be their best and be clear and also exactly how we begin to descend into the realm of crazy sports parents. What we really want is to not make him do something he doesn’t want to do. But the trouble is that him wanting something is so much more relaxed and easy than how any of the rest of us want anything. We are generally each on some kind of mission or another. Like yes I LOVE THIS and OF COURSE I AM DOING THIS and YES YES YES. Whereas bear is more like, yeah it’s pretty cool and I think it will be fun. But he never seems to get very miopic and we interpret that as lack of interest or indifference. I don’t think it really is.

Eid is a big picture kid. He is the type of person that when picked on by another kid is gonna give them the benefit of the doubt, try to see things from their perspective, stand in their shoes to the best of his ability. It is amazing. In many ways it is part of what makes him just the most stunning person. He is fiery, don’t get me wrong. He is a red head after all. But he is mostly very patient, very accepting, very even-keeled. He is a joy to know and love and parent. And yet, I so want to know what he wants and do right by him in supporting him as he wants and needs, that I sometimes- ok often- lose sight.

Alright. I just drove Eider home from his weekly violin lesson. An hour, mid morning, every Thursday. And because I was mid-stream with this thought, I asked him: “Hey, you think you’re gonna still play violin when you are grown?” And from his very own mouth, I kid you not, he said: “I don’t know if I will or not. I am a very obedient breed. I do very well with someone just sitting me down and telling me what to do.” I cannot make this shit up. And kuddos to you if you picked up on his Bluey reference. He is nothing if not self-aware, this kid. It is pretty incredible really. He is leaps and bounds ahead of where I was in that department at like 24, and certainly not even comparable to twelve year old meg’s level of self-awareness, which was nil. Or something maybe even less than nil if that exists.

And so. I am trying to do better. Always. Do better at letting my kid live the childhood that is right for him, and not my projection of what might possibly be best. Do better at not being so hard on him or myself. Mostly myself honestly. I am gonna keep on trying to affirm and uplift his contented nature and also ask for greater clarity in the places where it is his to give. I can still answer some of the questions around certain decisions myself, and let him enjoy my holding of some of the reins for a while longer yet. I can still practice taking it slow with him and letting us both be spacious around who he is and what he wants and what the fabric of his remaining years at home are made up of. 

I imagine it is apparent that these posts either come all in one fast fell swoop or in fits and starts over the course of a day or sometimes even a week. This is certainly the latter. At any rate. I just spent the last hour doing a workout in the basement with Eider. At the tail end of October I devised a challenge for our family called “the 50”. It is 50 push ups, 50 squats, 50 sit ups, 50 burpees, 50 times between the start date and the end of the year. With a carrot held out in front for $100 or something of equal value. Maple has done none, Chris some, me a bit more than that, and Eider in the obvious lead. It isn’t even close. And I think it is so perfect that it is unfolding this way. He is so obedient. I guess that is one way of saying it. Or loyal. Faithful. Steady. Ugh. I just really love him and all of the ways he continues to teach me about the values that I want to live into, the person I want to be, and the life I want to be living. 

And yeah, he is going to do the 802 team next year. After all of us circled around the decision, convoluding it in various and unnecessary ways for days. Chris and I are practicing shifting our perspective around Eider’s desire to be “casual” in his approach to the opportunity and trying to really see that as the gift, even asset, that it most likely is. Maybe a little bit of calm in the midst of intensity. Maybe a little bit of contentment in a turbulent life. 

being. ok.

I continue to be a slow learner. Slow to digest, assimilate, integrate. So it is. When I was younger I mistook this for a lack of intelligence, reinforced in many ways by dominant structures in family and education. But now I see it as something much more spacious. Something in which change and growth unfold at their own right pace and where the time in between one form and another is the real space of becoming. 

I think about this quite a bit and again as of late have had it reinforced in my own experience of waiting for some clarity around what the next right form is, as well as in the musings of some of my mentors and dear hearts. A longer and more intimate exploration of the liminal space of not yet knowing. Where the revelation is there but the light of awareness hasn’t lit it fully just yet. 

The paradox of course is to already have enough time spent in process and in practice to know that the knowing will eventually arrive, that the waiting in wonder and unknowing is in many ways the juiciest place of pure possibility that we could linger in. Hard to know that without knowing that. It is hard to know that trusting something is worth it before you’ve ever lived into the outcome. And so.

Recently Christina has been instructing, when overwhelm or confusion or just too many instructions start to take over: breathe, and trust the shape. I think maybe I heard her say it a dozen times before I heard her say it. Ya know. Slow to learn. Sometimes slow to even hear. But I love that. I have been taken by the relational nature of practice in general and the postures in particular for a long time, but I love the metaphor of that in the larger uncertainty of life. 

Can I trust the shape of things, when parts of my understanding are still hanging out in the dark corners of the unknown or unresolved? Can I trust the form of my life to support the space between one being and the next becoming? That I live in this house on this land with these people and this is the particular form of it all and on like that. Trust the shape of my life, made by many things, and mostly by design. Mine, and ours. And again, this does not seem so much like the appropriate task to set out before the young and eager first-timer. But to get from there to here, it seems it must be possible, right? That at some point we just choose to trust the inherent wisdom in the process without yet having any experience of the proof? I think so. It kinda has to be so. 

And yes 100% this is where mentors and guides and community seem to me so essential in the support system of this spacious, yet often tenuous, unfolding. I know I couldn’t have learned to trust the shape (of anything) if I hadn’t watched others before me. I am curious now if I am making it sound too easy… Simple, yes. Easy, no. It is hard to learn new things, especially new things with no seeming answer other than the suggestion that perhaps the next thing will eventually arrive. In time. After a while. 

I did this practice today with no plan and just a timer and some longing to visit some shapes that make me feel good, with whom my relationships tend toward the positive. Mostly. Like a greatest hits but not at all. I listened to a podcast about sleep research the entire time and the whole thing was so average and just right. Just me. Just a basic daily tending. And then Wilfred woke up and I went on with my day. Unfinished and okay. Unresolved and okay. With more questions than answers and a whole lot left to learn. But I like leaving that way. It might be the very thing that brings me back. So, to more waiting in the space in between. But not so much waiting, and very much more being. Like that.

Ba

I hope that it is clear enough by now that I just mostly show up in this space to muse about identity and all of the surrounding considerations of who I am and what the hell I am doing with my life. Maybe I need to change the blog description to something more like that… At any rate, for months (ahem, maybe 20 or so. conservative estimate) I have been floating in and out of a particular liminal stasis. Part dark night of the soul, part trying not to force an outcome. At any rate, I have been waiting on some clarity, some kind of sign from the Universe about what exactly the next thing might possibly be. What is the next chapter of my life? What are the bits and pieces that will make up the whole of who I am in this next phase and place of being? But, no answer, really no insight whatsoever has been forthcoming and the waiting has left me more often than not nostalgic and depressed.

Signs are funny though. Many times they arrive all at once as though spontaneously delivered from some source with the force of possibility. But often that sudden arrival has been built bit by bit, one thought, one conversation, one dream, one remembering, one discovery, one letting go, one forgetting, and one forgiveness at a time over the course of a secret stretch of weeks or months or often, years. It is funny, but even after all of this time of being taught and in turn teaching by means of “a blinding flash of the obvious”, (thank you Christina), is still really just that. Sudden, and Blinding in its bright clarity. We can see something once it is here, and not a moment before.

What the hell am I talking about anyway? Jeez Meg. More specifics for more relatability. Ok. Got it.

I received my most recent lightning bolt last Monday morning when I saw a post shared by an old farmy friend of mine back in Viroqua Wisconsin regarding a flock of sheep looking for a new home down the hill from where I live outside of Morrisville, Vermont. Like, right down the hill. As in, I have been driving past these sheep as I shuttle my bigs to and fro every day for months. And I was like: Oh those could just be my sheep. And yes, I know, no just about it and I promise I will get into all of that. But in the moment it just shook me. Like this thing that has always been an earnest interest of mine, since the very beginning, at varying degrees at varying times throughout the course of my adulthood, but there nonetheless. I have even rearranged aspects of my life at different points to more easily accommodate the vision of sheep. If I am honest, it is a big part of why we chose country over town in our move to Vermont.

It triggered some serious self-reflection for me. For months I have felt at a real end of things. Like something is dying and I have no idea what is going to rise up out of the ashes. And all of that makes sense. I have felt unrooted and untethered since we made our big cross country move, for some clearly obvious more macro reasons as well as a few particular to me and my personal identity. For the last decade or so my primary identities have been structured in and around teaching yoga and being a homeschool mom. Every part of me filterd through these two aspects. Teaching as I once knew it feels gone forever and I am not necessarily eager to resurrect that even if I thought it were possible where I currently live (a story for another post perhaps). Similarly, how I experienced homeschooling changed forever when we landed here and Maple began going to public school. I couldn’t quite put my finger on that exactly until a conversation I had with a home ed mama friend of mine in which she related how difficult the transition to public school has been not for her son who is going, but for the younger brother that he left behind who has until now, never known a day without his older sibling. That is how it has been for Eider. For me too in some different ways. And certainly if COVID hadn’t taken a massive crap on everything that made homeschool fun and wildly more social than folks ever believe, maybe it would have been easier to hang onto the gold with him. But it hasn’t been and in my awareness of the end of our time learning together in this way, I have been grieving the loss of a part of myself. That loss along with no longer feeling like a public yoga teacher has been leaving me wondering what to do, what is next, who I am now, who I want to be.

For the last year or so, I have been succumbing to the New England value system and thinking that I could restore or even discover anew my own worth by going back to school and getting a higher degree and throwing some letters up after my name. They got me, those Northeastern academics. Ha. Almost. The trouble with that though, which is the same trouble with every other hair-brained idea of what could be next for me in my life is not only the $100,000, but also the fact that everything I have considered doing doesn’t do anything to land me here, in the place that I live now, on this land within this community in this context. It’s just another etheric option that jettisons me out into space or through another airport and off into the world somewhere else. Which, if I am honest, is good god so fucking hard to do even for someone who does a decent job of paying attention (and you can read my last post for more of that struggle if you like).

No. I am not doing myself or my discontent any favors if everything that I am looking forward to is about somewhere else and something else. Yes, I know I am being hard on myself here. I am doing a good job. I said when we moved here that the beginning bits would be all about focusing on my kids and helping them in building up their lives here and it has and I do and that is its own reward in a certain way. And yet, I need my own identity and my own individual sense of purpose interwoven with passion. So, sheep. At least, in part.

But not the flock down the hill. Something more planned and more thought out and more suited to my particular intentions and desires. I cannot throw us into this. Even though that is always my inclination. Cart before horse. Whoops. So, I am busy doing what I do and finding mentors and guides, and digging into the examples of what I don’t want along with what I do, and hopefully, by the late spring, there will be some sheep out grazing on our hill. I am sure I’ll share all sorts of details about that as it unfolds for those that are interested. I imagine there are more than a few wooly friends in my midst. Just an idea.

Oh yeah and by the way the other thing that I figured out this week is that I HAVE A WHOLE OTHER KID that I can decide to homeschool or not. I mean, I knew that but for some bonkers reason, I have been telling myself that if Eider is done then I am too and Wilfred will probably go to school. Well, turns out that I do want to homeschool my little- at least, that’s what I think right now- and holy shit I actually have an idea of how to go about it compared to when we began over eight years ago. Horse, then cart baby! Ha! This may seem obvious to you but please let me assure you that this entered my awareness like a shooting star. Bright and unexpected and with a trail I can follow.

So, at this moment, I still feel the grief of what is changing and what is or has already ended. But I am also feeling more grounded and hopeful and alive than I have in a long time. Like I am here now. And my eyes are open. And what needed to die in me has died and the ground feels fertile with the possibility of what comes next. As my mentor/shepherdess/pal back in WI says: Babes and sheep are the best. Yes indeed.

immediate

Here is the teaching that lives closest to my heart: Tell the Truth. Seems super basic. Which is good, because it is. It is also harder than fuck to keep eyes on. The truth, itself as it is, in the very center of all things and my most essential self, is steady. Not exactly fixed because it has the freedom to evolve and unfold and infinitely become, just like me. But it is everything that sits right up close to the truth that makes the hold itself so slippery. And honestly, it is all of those things that sit close that have me almost entirely consumed in the day to day and leave my vision a lot less crystal than at other times.

These days, my best moments, when most of the parts of me are present and I feel super steeped in gratitude, are in the evenings when Chris and I are doing Wilfred’s whole long and rhythmic bedtime routine. Bath and bubbles and tooth brushing and lotions and potions and snuggling and jammies and stories and all the added silliness that sets him up right for an easy transition to sleep. (most nights. not gonna jinx myself jeez.) It is a soft and cozy time. Just being together. In those moments I am in the love of and respect for the papa that Chris has grown into as well as the grace of Wilfred’s particular presence in our lives. Even though I am tired and feeling the pull of a moment or two to myself. Those are still the central to me moments that I am always calling myself back to. Some central truth of who I am and who we are embodied in the bedtime rituals. And not just Wilfred’s really. But the remnants of memory of the sweet, soft, close of day time we shared with the older two when they were small as well.

And still. Those moments can also feel as much a part of the hamster wheel I find myself on as many of the others. A lot of day in day out and trying to recoup what’s been lost and pay the price and recover what feels to be the compounding deficits of a couple of years of truncated connections and fragmented isolation. Wilfred is amazing. My heart. As Chris calls him: the prince that was promised. omg. To say we adore him is such an absurd understatement. And he has delays. He struggles with many sounds and even though he has so many more words than he did just a few months ago, it is still a difficulty for him to make many of the words that he would like to be using. And he is anxious around other kids. He clings and cries and tries to steer my body back in the direction I came from. He does eventually melt a bit and settle into some shared space and time but it is a rough entry to be sure. All of it is in such stark contrast to how our big 2 were. But then again, much of life, and the world, are.

With Maple and Eider, we were always with other friends and their kids one way or another. At playgroups, at storytimes, at activities, at shared family meals. All of these things that haven’t taken hold in the context of a new community in a new state in a pandemic world where inside hangs are sketchy at best, terrifying at worst. I guess I am just feeling the absence of these things in our lives these days. Or the clunkiness of our efforts toward them and my child’s lack of fluency in them as the subsequent result. I am simultaneously missing and longing for the broader nets of community to carry me and my emergence into the here and now in some meaningful way.

Day after day feels mostly the same. I have to remind myself how much bigger and more grown all of our kids are than when the pandemic began. I have to update my current operating systems lest I continue to treat the toddler like a baby, the tween like a kid, and the teen like a tween. I have to catch up, ya know. To now. Even though it is real hard to know what that even means, even is.

Most of the folks that I work with are in some experience of anxiety or depression or both. Everyone is hanging on. At least that is how it seems to me. And those that appear to be thriving, well, I have my doubts. I can’t help it. I am skeptical about how much thrive is possible in the world as it is today. And if I am honest, I am not even going for that right now. Maybe in 5 years. Fingers crossed. But right now I am all about good enough and not losing sight of any part or anyone so much that something essential falls into decay or disrepair.

I was recently looking through a journal from mid-2020 and I saw a quick note that I had jotted down. I remember at the time that I heard it and wrote it down feeling like it was a worst-case scenario, now I actually can see the hope in it. It said: Immediate Pandemic 2020- late 2022; Intermediate Pandemic 2022-2024; and post-pandemic 2024+. So, I guess, maybe in 5 years. Maple graduates high school in 2024. I mean, isn’t it entire lifetimes lived in the years between 2020 and 2024?

This is kind of a tangent in a sense, something that applied to life when we lived somewhere where we had embedded community stretching out over the course of years and we weren’t still in the getting to know you phase but made infinitely more complicated because do we come inside and hang out or no? Do we take our masks off or not? How can we connect if it feels unsafe to connect? Anyway. The tangent: I was talking with an old pal this morning whose daughter is graduating this year and we were lamenting how we move everything around when they are little so that we can be “home with the kids” and that oh heck “we can work more when they are older.” But she said that right now as she links together a string of “last times” with her girl, she is like wtf NOW is when I need to be home with my kids. In one way or another, this has always felt true to me. When they are little and they need you for mostly everything pretty much always you are a great big steady and waiting target. But when they are big and independent and seemingly need you not so much do not be fooled because when they do need you, they really need you and the target is tiny and obscure and hard to spot and on the move.

Ok so lots of data here. The years are apparently flying by but every day is a slog but nothing changes but everything is different and whoops actually turns out it all changed over the course of days that I was so tired with malaise and dread that I did not notice. Whoops whoops whoops and CRAP. There is no way I can get this right. Plus I really am sooooo tired. But too sentimental to do the things that could possibly restore me in some slivers to myself. I could wean my (27-month-old) baby. Not gonna happen. He is my B A B Y. I haven’t even turned his carseat forward facing yet. Sheesh. I could rest more. Maybe, but when would I knit? I could lay off the caffeine. But hoooooow? And yet I know that something must give. I am hanging on to whisps of inspiration gathered up from eons ago and I am unproductive and foggy and hard to pin down inside of myself. It is a thing. I don’t feel great. My bones hurt and my blood feels bitter. I try to do the things that will reinstate me to me, do the little big things ya know, but in truth, I just want to crawl under my duvet and stay there until I am truly all the way done staying there. Ah well. Onward I suppose. In some way.

I guess maybe this is the truth today. As it is. For me. Or what lives right close up to it. I am a work in progress. Trying to keep my eyes on the evolving truth that lives inside of me. Backtracking or playing catch up. Trying to filter out all of the outdated stories I have been telling myself and rewrite the script more suited for today. How you spend your day is how you live your life or so they say and I am studying the terms of what that can or cannot mean for me. Today. And as needed. Thanks for bearing with me during it. No inspo all truth telling. As we do.

in between

It is past peak where we live in Vermont, and until there is snow that lasts, this season is officially called “stick season”. All of the red leaves are down. Most of the orange are down too or are otherwise in that in-between of half up/half down, like shadow mirrors that circle the base of the trees in circles. A witchy skirt reflected. Quite a few yellow leaves are still up in places, in clusters, which is lovely and I think perhaps enough to attract the straggling peeper.

But we are in between seasons now. And you can really feel it. The in-between. The annual wobbly yet determined descent that lays low everything that was bright and light about the other half of the year. Low down and into the deep now.

I am sitting in the fading and dusky light of a Burlington athletic club parking lot waiting for Maple while she flips and turns, stroke by stroke, breath by breath, back into all of her parts. An embodied Maple. Last week we gave up the ghost- or rather, saw clearly all of the ghosts that had never made their way to her swim team experience after Wisconsin. We threw in the towel and as a family made the call (and the sacrifice) to move her to a proper swim team a solid hour away. We chose to give her a chance and a solid option in terms of what swimming can be for her. For the sake of better coaching, better communication, and feedback that offers development potential, we now drive even further.

Early last week we made the first trip down so that Maple could do an assessment swim. She worked hard and showed up and was seen for all of it and more for the first time in actual years. And an amazing thing happened. I watched her have maybe her first real moment of reclamation ever. She re-membered how it used to be. And all the grief of how it hadn’t been for so long was finally safe for her to feel. She let it out, my strong brave girl. The pain of leaving and losing something essential that feels like you. The horror of realizing that you had been pretending that everything was ok, was working, all this while, when now you can see that it clearly was not. She chose herself and her most true desire over the not-good-enough substitution she had been settling for.

And there are so many stories like this for all of us really, right? The great pretending. And subsequent forgetfulness. It is strangely easy to lose ourselves in one way or another and on repeat. A little giving here, a touch of aquiessing there, a push too long or too far. And I recognize that it seems perhaps like I am talking to you here, or maybe even moo. But really I am talking to me. Forever. And again. We have to be vigilant. But first we have to learn how to be vigilant. We must learn the difference between wanting something to be one way, and what it is to really have clear sight of our reality.

This season of the in-between, the descending energy into the dark and into the cold and into the night is a great teacher of remembering. At least, I believe it can be. A descent into the darkness always runs the risk of laying us low and right down into the grip and the grab of our shadow tendencies. And behaviors. But I think if we can culture some more stillness, more silence, into our rhythms, then we can see what is true in us.

I have been padding around in the dark. Waiting for some remembering for so long now. Like a shadow of a shadow inside myself. And it is strange, or maybe it is perfect, that now that the nights are truly long and the colors have almost entirely faded, I am beginning to perceive some luminescence still clinging to me in parts. A sparkle along my arm. A streak of twinkle and shine slipping across my spine. The light is here yet. Of course. And it is funny that as much as I think myself the lightkeeper and the guide out of the darkness for our children, I am not. Nor have I perhaps ever been save for when they were very small. They are their own. They walk themselves out of the shadows or choose to linger a little longer. Their call. I can try to blow on the ember of a fire but if it is not mine I cannot force a spark. I am the torchbearer of my own path back. As ever. Which as a mama, is one thing to say, and another entirely to embody. I am working on it. All this life long. Remembering to remember that my light is vast and deep and wide and mine.

ships

Maple texted this picture to me the other day, and I just can’t even. Ya know? The clearness of her eyes kills me. Everything about her really. Slays me. There is this way over the course of the last several months that she is just completely claiming herself. It is radical to watch. Kids that picked on her and tore her differences down and did their best to make her feel small and less and other are now like “Hey Maple when did you get so cool?” To which she responds with the only viable answer I can think of “Whenever it was that you stopped being an asshole.”

Last night, during our Practice Wellness Community call, I shared a piece of writing by David Whyte. It is called Beginning and as much as anything it makes me think of Maple and all of the beginnings that wait ahead for her. But also, it makes me think of the continuum of beginnings that are strewn throughout the path that each of us has taken, are taking, will one day take. Last week when one of my longtime students and friends from Madison was visiting, she shared that she was quite enjoying a book and thought I may like it as well; The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. We bantered back and forth a bit about the book because Maple, who reads everything, had said that she thought I might really like it too, even though she said she did not. My friend laughed when I told her that, saying that perhaps that is because she is only 15 and hasn’t quite wracked up the regret of a lifetime that time accumulates for each of us one way or another, like it or not. She is probably completely right about that. So, I am reading the book. I am just at the beginning but basically, I think that the woman is visiting all of the possible lives that she never lived, due to one choice and then another made at each different fork in the road. Relatable, no doubt. Especially to those of us in our middle years and beyond.

It brings to mind one of my most favorite quotes from Cheryl Strayed; “ I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” Don’t you love that? I have been letting some of those ghost ships tumble around in my mind as of late as I consider my many sleepless toddler nights and excruciating pandemic fatigue. But at the same time, I am working to harbor some particular attention to the very real ships that have yet to present themselves or are even in the process of presenting. Right now. In these days.

Sometimes I think about how swell it would be to have a little apartment in an old house in the East End of Portland Maine. I could go there on my own, or with Chris, or with one of the kids, or the whole lot. Eat out. See a show. Do the stuff you can do in a small and beautifully walkable New England City. I also still think about how curious I still am about raising some of my own wool (ahem those are called sheep meg), and seeing what that might yield. Some old world far northern breed with warm fleeces for turning into creamy sweaters and rich meat for eating all winter. Chris laughs at these two ships in particular because of how at odds they seem with one another. Which is it? He says. The City or The Farm Meg?

And I guess that is the thing of it. There is a bit of that feeling of some of my dreams really being at odds with one another. Which is not super helpful in terms of any level of decisiveness for me. I wind up not choosing one so as to not block another which, as far as I can tell, looks a heck of a lot like a whole lotta nothing. I am tentative of the bold moves. And yet. Anything other than some boldness feels not quite right. Not quite me.

So. Lots of living left to do, and choices to be made to be sure. And oh my god, for my girl? So much. She is in the process currently of applying to spend a semester of her junior year at the Oxbow School of Art. Most likely, that will ride right on the heels of another summer spent as an apprentice/instructor at Islesford Boatworks. She has plenty going on, and from what I can gather, much of it is awesome.

OK. All the while I have been writing this, Wilfred, who fought his nap for a good 2 hours today and then finally relented to sleep on the drive to take Eider to soccer practice, has been snoozing in the car. I have been sitting on the steps watching his face through the tinted window, obscured and slightly distorted and imagined like those fancy new ultrasound images. He has woken up now so I guess this is where I’ll leave it.

Here is David Whyte’s piece Beginning, that I shared in the pwc cohort last night, from his compilation entitled Consolations:

BEGINNING

well or beginning poorly, what is important is simply to begin, but the ability to make a good beginning is also an art form, beginning well involves a clearing away of the crass, the irrelevant and the complicated to find the beautiful, often hidden lineaments of the essential and the necessary.

Beginning is difficult, and our procrastination is a fine, ever-present measure of our reluctance to take that first close-in, courageous step in reclaiming our happiness. Perhaps, because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job. There occurs in effect, a form of internal corporate downsizing, where the parts of us too afraid to participate or having nothing now to offer, are let go, with all of the accompanying death-like trauma, and where the very last fight occurs, a rear guard disbelief that this new, less complicated self, and this very simple step, is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead.

It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility...

David Whyte

slog

Sometimes I forget and think that the purpose of my sharing inside of this space is to be inspiring. It feels like a lot of pressure when I think that is what it’s about. Plus, it feels kinda false. What I am really inside of this space to do is to be a truth teller. To speak, or write, what is real for me right now in this moment, as I am, in all of my flaws and imperfections and missteps. Maybe I am just here to do my part in normalizing the slog of being alive. And maybe that is inspiring but mostly, and especially right now, it just feels like surviving. I am bogged down. Anyone else? My fatigue on every level feeds into a constant state of overwhelm and I am mostly just trying to do my best in any given moment and on any given day to at least try and soothe my nervous system. To regulate myself at all and pray pray pray that that matters in my efforts to co-regulate with my kids and spouse. It is fucking hard.

Yesterday was hell. Wilfred was a handful and a half, or maybe more cuz we generally have a lot of hands on deck. He is slow to talk, which I mostly think is no big deal, Eider was too. But unlike Eider who seemed completely content in his preverbal life, Wilfred is frustrated and seething in some moments that feel too big for me to hold. But I keep on trying. Even through the tears. Through the fatigue. When he finally goes down for a nap and I get to leave him at home for a moment with Chris while I drive to pick up Maple from school and to swim team practice, I am rewarded with her low blood sugar rage at me for something that I either didn’t do right or simply just '“don’t get” and I know for sure in those moments that something is being seriously tested inside of me. Whether it is my patience, or my calm in the face of calamity, or perhaps more likely my capacity for compassion and forgiveness, self and otherwise, it feels like a test. Like the kind that sets you up to fail.

Cuz I most certainly lost my shit this week. I yelled at moo in the car. Like, yelled yelled. Refusing to be the receptacle for whatever it was that she was dishing out. A day later I yowled fuuuuuuck!  at the full capacity of my lungs outside of the door behind which Chris was on some work call. Off-gassing I guess. And I forgive myself already for all of this and more and am also a little sad that neither outburst made me feel any amount better at all. It was a good experiment though I suppose. So there’s that.

The thing I want is some relief, right? But what does that even mean? Because even if I get a break from the slog of mom life for an afternoon or god willing a whole glorious weekend, the world that I step out into is still on fire, people are still dying or in denial, basic human regard is still woefully absent and hard to find and there still doesn’t appear to be any end in sight for any of it. In fact, science is basically telling us that even if we heed the fucking emergency and get our shit together RIGHT NOW, that it still only going to get worse for another 30 or so years before any of our efforts even begin to be felt by the planet. What the fuck? And that is assuming that anyone even cares enough to do something for the good of a world that they may or may not even be here to see. That’s a lot of goodwill. Or a lot of faith. Or something else entirely for which I may not even have a word for. 

It’s a lot. And here is what I know for sure: I believe in humanity. I believe in myself. Even if both are the wavering sort of faith that is hard to find consistent footing inside of. Even if I cannot clearly or coherently wrap my head around any version of the future, mine or ours. I do believe in continuing to culture myself. In forgiving myself and working to do better in this next moment. I think that there is actually hopeful room for improvement, for all of it. And maybe it just starts in some way with me snuggling up to the darker and more dismal areas of discomfort inside of my personal experience. I think that there is probably some kind of imperative around my efforts at integrating the more treacherous parts of myself into the whole and shining some light a little deeper into the recesses of my darker spaces. You know, those ones that are so dissociated that they are all heavy shadow and toxic mold. 

Anyhow, that’s it. No inspo just some truth-telling. May my story serve in some way. Or not. Maybe it just gave you a moment of distraction from something harder and that is fine too. I am just gonna leave it with this: thank god for eider. He is the calm in the storm for me right now for sure. That quiet little guy has become a not-so-quiet but incredibly compassionate kid that knows how to hold space and offer support. And while I know it is not by any stretch of the imagination his job to take care of me, I really appreciate the way he calmly steps up to help with his bro while I do something super luxurious like take a shit. I also appreciate the way in which he knows that Freddy loves to eat all of his brother’s food, even when he has the very same on his own plate. And how anything I suggest is gonna be infinitely more fun if done with Eid instead. I appreciate that. I am grateful for that. And in there, some relief.

hike//girl

Last weekend Chris and I hiked up Elmore much in the way we have throughout the summer: we put Wilfred down for a nap after lunch and then head out just the two of us leaving the big kids to tend the sleeping babe. When it is just us we are up and back in just over 3 hours, including time for heading up the tower as well as a snack stop on the ledges that overlook the lake and our home hillside. I have wanted to our hike our mountain all 5 of us all season long; we usually manage it once or twice during a year. I had asked everybody to be game for it last weekend and then I didn’t really follow through and so no one was really ready when it was time to go. Plus going with Wilfred generally means heading out in the morning at an hour that the bigs are never naturally up on the weekends. And so. We went without them and like 10 minutes in I was like: shit, we should have made the kids come. Dangit.

It is super fun to hike with Chris solo. Do not get me wrong. I love it. We love it. It is so much a part of how we have always found connection with one another; in the long unwinding of trail and time and stream of consciousness communication. It is the best. And still, I am aware of the time we have with our kids. And I love spending time with them in this way too. Even when we have to, almost every time, endure Maple’s process of sinking into the experience in the form of picking fights; digging her heel in; and some kind of calorie-related emotional explosion. We all know it, expect it, and it is basically the tax we pay to get to the gold of time spent together in nature moving our bodies and cracking dumb adolescent jokes with a few heartfelt philosophical deeps dives sprinkled in.

It doesn’t happen much these days. Less than I would like. And almost always now minus one. After the hike last weekend I came home determined that we would all make it up the mountain together the following Saturday. I prepped the kids well in advance, all week long giving them reminders and previews; the whole thing. We were set. It was a plan. I get Saturday morning and then y’all can have the rest however you like. And then, sure enough, Friday night I can feel Maple beginning to pump the brakes. By the morning, she had generated a complete state of inertia coupled with some convenient amnesia and it was clear: she was not coming. In fact, she couldn’t believe that I had sprung this plan on her especially on the weekend when she is of course so exhausted and in need of recovery from her week. The later entirely true. The former, well, no.

So we went us four: me and my boys. Eider ever agreeable and trying to caretake me in his own way- yes, I know, also not ideal- in hopes I suppose of mitigating his sister’s impact. And we had a ball. Wilfred ran his little duck run halfway up the mountain under his own steam and then I lugged him up the rest of the way while Chris managed most of the journey down. Wilfred is not light and we were both happily pooped by the time we made it home for lunch. Eider was a delight and it was great to connect with him and hear his thoughts on the first few weeks of hybrid school and middle school soccer. Chris was funny and steady and my best partner and co-parent possible, as ever. Still I missed Maple. A lot. I had a fine time and I loved the day and still I felt her absence and all of the fleetingly few moments that I have left to hike mountains with her while she is here. Under three years. A fucking blink.

I spent the afternoon unable to get over my upset. Hurt and disappointed and unwilling to let it go, which I gotta say, isn’t exactly my norm. I am a bit better at shaking shit off than I was yesterday. And I don’t know if it is the combination of my period, or the physical fatigue that comes from carrying a kid on your back up a mountain, or the afternoon beer I drank, or just the fucking weight of the world every day, but I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed through the afternoon and into the evening. I let go. Didn’t hold back. And sure it was cathartic which was nice but it was also a little overly indulgent and fantastical in not the most life-giving and healthy way. I was stuck in a perspective and it was dumb. Especially because I know I sure as shit wasn’t going on hikes with my family on the weekends when I was fifteen. Not even close. And I am lucky lucky lucky to have a teenage daughter that ever wants to spend time with me. I know that. But still, sometimes I wish that it could be on my terms and not only hers. That is probably not very realistic. Oh well. It turns out I am a person too and not just a mama.

I can just feel her slipping away and it fucking kills me. She is my girl. My only girl and my very first baby. She has been the grist for almost every aspect of my growth as a mom and as a person. She has tested me and tried me and forced my hand at every single turn. And it has served me. It serves me still. And there is a part of me that feels so broken, so hollow, when I think about the day that she leaves our home and sets out on her own new course. It’s nuts this feeling. I think it may be also one of the more cliche feelings in the stack too, but I guess for a reason because all roads of motherhood lead (hopefully!) to this day and it is much more a measure of success than one of loss even if it doesn’t feel that way. And you see, I can know this with my mind, but my heart has a different story to tell. It is the one that began when I first held this little girl baby in my arms and cried for most of her first few months wondering how in the hell I was ever going to be able to let her go. Hooooooooow???

Ugh. Anyhow. Tears and more tears. I love her AND I let her go. I am working on it. Even on days when I throw a fit for half of it wondering why I didn’t get my way. Healing my own childhood wounds as I go I suppose. The parts of me that needed to be mothered but didn’t know how to be if it didn’t look a certain way, and made to feel guilty for choosing me in my own teenage moments. I don’t want that same narrative with my own daughter. I can feel it, of course, just under my skin, wanting to replicate itself. And ya know what I say to that right? Fuuuuuuuuuck noooooo.

So I do my things. I practice and I pray and I sit quietly with my loud mind. I wash my face and go on walks. I read books and write things down. I try to excavate the corridors in my head and heart in hopes of some type of new insight that helps me better navigate the well-worn path of the parent. I try to do my best and also forgive myself my failings; like an inhale and an exhale. On and on. Loving and Letting Go. And I am going to hike that Mountain as many times as I can with anyone who wants to go with me and with my own self before the snow flies and the season ends.

Also this week, I have watched the growing sliver of a waxing crescent set over that same mountain most nights. As I shut the chickens in and tend a fall fire on the hilltop, I watch the moon through its still seeming course. And ya know what? Twice my girl was with me in small moments to watch that beautiful thin silver edge slip past our sight and into the night. And that is entirely what I am here for. The sweet moments when my terms and her terms meet without a plan and without an ask, in the very middle of things.

comb

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.

C.G. Jung 

At the beginning of August, our blueberry baby, the little who completed our constellation, and the one we collectively howled home to our hearts over the course of years and across galaxies, turned two. His August arrival shifted  my experience of the month from the bittersweet end to a too-short-season to a deep love for perhaps the very best month of the year. In August the berries are ripe, the days are hot and slow, and the swimming is fine. It is as near to perfect as anything. 

So much of me in relationship with my children is intertwined with a slow nostalgia, filled with beeswax crayons, and fairie houses, and baked apples, and pushing swings, and rolling down hills. Everything that could possibly engage the part of myself that longs for a soft smile and a fond memory says yes to my kids almost always. And when they are still so small, I try my very best to make it always yes. I am a sucker for a particular type of theme and easy contentment. In my opinion childhood should be laced with as much joy and magic as possible. It all gets difficult enough over time and childhood needn’t be. 

I think my kids are lucky in that. By no means do I undercut the raw intensity of their emotions, or mine for that matter, but I definitely try not to belabor them and rather give them space to move through as they will. I am not sure if this was always the right approach, but it has often been the one that has felt most authentic to me. Hold space but don’t create a big and binding narrative. Open up the space for everyone to be someone new in this moment than they were in the last. As they have grown and the feelings get bigger and fiercer and longer-lasting, I am more and more and more thankful that our bigs have our little to remember their own wonder and the magic at the beginning of the story. 

We each carry a little bit of this bittersweet in our hearts from the departure of childhood. I certainly do. It is difficult to grow as a parent as quickly as your kids are growing. To not get stuck in what I just learned but instead be ready to learn the next thing. Like they are. I never feel far from a wish that I could have done better by each of them. Listened a little harder, held space a little longer, seen their big feelings for as big and real as they really were. Even though I think I did ok, I am relieved to have the chance to perhaps do a little better with our last as well as allow these opportunities with him to also be a chance to apologize for, as well as forgive, my many shortcomings and especially those of the parent I once was. I made some errors that I would so love to undo if I could. Even as they seemed wise at the time, I was, compared to today, so unformed, so narrow in my understandings. I suppose I will look back at now with a similar reflection one day. Ah well. I will continue to make mistakes as a mom, even as I try my very best not to. But it is so certain it is almost stone. The stones that line the path of me as mother. 

For me there has been this interesting unearthing on this side of child bearing, in which some of my energy is freed up toward the vision of the next thing, and yet another, far more exhausted and daily part of me, is very much not. I am far too tired to be much of a visionary. Too fatigued for much follow-through. In a way, I think it makes this space much more liminal than I had imagined it would be. It often feels as though I am waiting for the slowest revelation of all. 

When I was back in Wisconsin, a longtime-stretching-into-forever friend gifted me a deck of symbols. I work with it much as I would The Tarot; drawing cards here and there, more often than not picking a daily card, and on occasion opting for a larger spread. The card that I keep on drawing over and over the past few months is C O M B. Its images are garden sage; for cleaning, clearing, and banishing; hair for freedom and power and self: and of course the comb for release and magic and exorcism. It feels like a lot and I am sitting with it. 

The other day I was taking a yoga class with Christina and she shared a quote from Carl Jung regarding his view on the purpose of psychoanalysis and it was something along the lines of working with the past not to dredge it up and get bogged down and stuck in the stories of yesterday but rather to comb through the past in a way that would reveal some deeper truth and insight relevant for our present and our future. I am paraphrasing here obviously, but there is something juicy in there for me when it comes to this relationship with memory and longing and nostalgia and regret and savoring it all as a way of moving or pulling or combing those themes forward into the rest of my life. When I think of it, or really more accurately feel it in terms of images; it is like this beautiful arrangement of color and texture and form and shape that is many things but mostly pleasing and is the thread or the tone or the VIBE that I want to be pulling forward into whatever is next. There is a way in which all of this mothering and child-rearing and partnering that has lived inside of my body feels ready to invert itself into the world in some new form. Into my next becoming. I am always and forever Mother to these three. And I know it is not the only thing but it is for me central to ALL THE THINGS; it is the ground within which every teaching, every lesson, every bit of wisdom, takes root. It is the one song that lives inside of all the others. The heartbeat drum of whatever offering there is for me to make. 

learning

When we moved from Wisconsin to Vermont in the early summer of 2019, we made all sorts of transitions and we made them almost all at once. We went from being rooted in the Upper Midwest to being almost as far north in New England as you can be. We transitioned from being a family 4 to a long-awaited family of 5. And Maple made the big shift from being an extremely independent homeschooler to an eighth-grader at the local public school. There are more changes that I would love to add to this list but these are the big outwardly facing ones. The inwardly turned ones are maybe a little more nebulous and shifty and so intertwined with the realities of COVID that they have become so implicit that it can be hard to parse out entirely. And that is not so much the topic at hand today.

In the weeks leading up to our move, one of my close mama friends made a comment in regard to the advent of Maple heading to school that went something like: ‘I bet Eider will go to school soon as well, and that you won’t end up homeschooling Wilfred at all.’ I was a touch offended at the time and yet I know where she was coming from. One of the near compulsive questions that homeschoolers ask one another is “how long do you think you’ll homeschool for” or “do you think you’ll go to school when (fill in the blank…)” or some other version of the same question. Also, when one kid heads off to school it can seem like a real break in the home education fabric of a family as children begin to move in even more directions than before. In fact, my friend is now going through her own transition as her oldest heads off to high school this fall while his younger sibs continue to stay home. I get it. I really do. It is a temptation for all parents I think, certainly, it has been for me, to assume that what has worked for one kid might indeed work for all and that the oldest in many regards is setting some sort of precedent and that the youngers are somehow beholden to the same path.

And yet we keep reminding ourselves that no two kids are the same and that what worked for one may very well be a flop for the next. It’s an exercise in repetition to be sure. Also, it’s fair to say, at least in our story, that Maple has wanted to share some of her school experience with Eider and that there has been a fair amount of projection coming from her regarding what path Eider will walk. (Even though they have never been remotely similar as home learners, outside of being dyslexic. They approach learning in completely different ways. Maple has seldom if ever, done anything I have asked her to do and instead takes her learning above and beyond all day every day, but on her own terms. Eider almost always is game to do what I suggest, and yet when he is done with that he is pretty much done. As his reading fluency improves that is shifting slightly- as noted in the way in which he consumes all things history. But, ya know, he is a 12 year old kid who likes video games and the phenomenon that is watching other kids play video games on youtube- what the heck even is that???) In terms of him following in her steps toward public school; we have chatted about it. We have gamed it all out. On repeat. Mocked up fantasy futures in our mind’s eye regarding the educational journey of each of our kids. I mean, don’t we all? But I think I can safely say at this point that I have no clue what the future holds for any of them, save a pretty solid sense that Maple will stay in public school through graduation. That’s it folks.

I don’t know if Eider will ever go to school full time. Maybe he will go to public school for high school, maybe he won’t. We have daydreamed for years of spending a part of one of our winters in Australia and New Zealand- Eider is bonkers for koalas and would love to spend some time working at a koala sanctuary. This type of trip is something that sounds much more doable as a home ed family than one accountable to the conventional school calendar. I also have no clue what Wilfred will do. I think that nursery school is important for littles and generally a marvelous experience and yet I have no idea if I will feel comfortable sending him next year even though I think 3 is the perfect age for it. Plus, I sure would love some time when he is out of my direct care. We also live up the hill from the last one-room combined classroom schoolhouse in Vermont. I love the idea of walking or biking him there from his first through third-grade years but we are weirdly not districted for it and the idea of paying for primary school is something I have a certain degree of difficulty swallowing.

Anyhow, this is a big rambling view of my mind when it comes to educating my kids, and trust me I could go on and on but I won’t because none of this is really what I showed up to talk about today. Really I am here to share what Eider and I are doing for his seventh-grade year. A little tour of the what’s what of our plan and some resource sharing as well.

A lot of thought always goes into the plan for our homeschool year, and this year that feels especially true after the shitty year he had last year. I know that so many folks pivoted to keeping their kids home during Covid and I get that for sure, but as an example of the potential of homeschooling, it really couldn’t have sucked more. At least that was our experience. I actually wish that I had sent Eider to school- it wouldn’t have worked out again because of a district thing, but this is all magical thinking anyway. So- as a part-time in-person schedule where he actually goes to be around other kids would have been so much better than the near-complete isolation of his actual year.

I know some homeschool communities were successful in podding up with one another, and maybe that would have worked for us back in Wisconsin where we were more established, but I kinda don’t think so. We have always been incredibly eclectic and have been a part of so many different groups and circles that it would have been a ton of picking and choosing I think… again, magical thinking. As it was, everything that was cool about homeschooling last year vanished. No orchestra, no nature school, no stem classes with the local kids, canceled sports seasons, no library days, no performances to attend. Basically, a whole lot of nothing. It sucked. And as so many kids did in the long days at home, Eider leaned even harder into the Xbox and tried his hardest to manage the complexities of virtual life with long boring stretches of not much between everything. Craftsbury Outdoor Center basically saved our family and our son last winter and I am beyond thankful and also super pumped for ski team for Eider and lots of days on skis in the woods for the rest of us.

But I digress! Jeez Meg. Get it together.

So! What is the plan? What does it look like for our bear this year? Well, I can tell you for certain that a ton of care and consideration has gone into the planning for this year. But I can also pretty confidently say that even so, I have no idea how it will actually go. I am cautiously optimistic. He actually is doing a little bit of a hybrid situation this year after all, and spending roughly an hour and 45 minutes 4 mornings a week at the local public school- the same one where Maple is a 10th grader- and taking 2 classes. The admin at the school are super flexible and accommodating and I feel so lucky for their open-minded support. We knew right away that we wanted him to take science at school as that is a subject that I generally outsource in one way or another and also kinda suck at trying to teach myself. But he has aged out of the local stem classes for homeschoolers and Earth Walk Village School is still on pause until Covid is more resolved and I have depended on both of those in the past for science ed support. The other class he is taking is by virtue of timing and convenience more than anything else but I think it should work out quite well. It is called expos and it is actually a different class each trimester: art and then Spanish and then technology and design. He is also on the soccer team so he will head back in the afternoons for practice with many of the kids that he is in class with in the mornings.

Interestingly enough, the principal of the middle school has shared that more homeschool kids than ever before in his experience are engaging this hybrid option. That last year didn’t work out well for a number of veteran home ed families. Makes sense. It was certainly our roughest and most depressing year to date. And yes I know that it was for most everybody, but I guess I just really want to reiterate that even those of us seasoned at spending lots and lots and lots of time altogether and at home still found it a palatial struggle. For real.

As for the rest of our coursework details, here is what I submitted to the state back in July. So, the formal description of what we are doing this year, broken down into what the home study department for the state of Vermont terms the Minimum Course of Study:

Homeschool 2021/22

Basic communication skills including reading and writing: We are using the current 2021-2022 Brave Writer Arrow, a mechanics and literature program, for reading and writing (*as well as for English, American, and other Literature). The Arrow uses living literature to teach the mechanics of writing. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and literary devices delivered a thoughtfully curated selection of books. The website product page << https://store.bravewriter.com/products/arrow >> has an example of the workbooks that support the reading. We have used these programs for the previous 2 school years. They are marvelous.

Basic Communication Skill Mathematics: Pre-Algebra: whole numbers; integers; fractions; decimals; algebraic thinking; ratio, proportion, & percent; geometry; measurement; probability & statistics. We use Mathhelp.com for math study.

English, American and other Literature: The books we are reading this year are a part of the Brave Writer Arrow, and are piggy-backed with our Basic Communication Skills curriculum.

This year's books are:

• Amari and the Night Brothers (B. B. Alston) *note to say we are already almost through this first read and arrow and I am once again reminded how amazing this program is. This is our 3rd year using the arrows, and while he is right on the cusp of the next level of books and guides, I am pleased that he wants to stay at this level for one more year. These book selections are just sooooo thoughtfully curated and I really savor the time we get to spend reading aloud together. Lifetime memories in these moments!

• Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories (Leon Garfield)

• Before the Ever After (Jacqueline Woodson)

• Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids (edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith)

• The Lion of Mars (Jennifer L. Holm)

• Front Desk (Kelly Yang)

• Becoming Muhammad Ali (James Patterson & Kwame Alexander)

• The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden (Karina Yan Glaser)

• Show Me a Sign (Ann Clare LeZotte)

• Midsummer’s Mayhem (Rajani LaRocca)

Natural Sciences: Eider is taking seventh-grade science at Peoples Academy Middle Level this year. I believe that they are studying physical science.

I am also hoping that he will be participating in Earth Walk's Village School again this year if their programs are up and running.

Physical Education: Fall Soccer, Mountain Biking, Winter Nordic Skiing, Spring Lacrosse.

Comprehensive Health Education: We plan on having continued relevant and/or topical conversations around growth and development, autonomy and agency, consent, and emotional security. We have been resourcing the book: It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health by Harris and Emberley.

Eider has also really gotten into food and cooking and we support and encourage him as he continues to explore this interest.

Fine Arts: Violin. Weekly private lessons with Jess Zehngut in the Suzuki Pedagogy. He will play in the Green Mountain Youth Orchestra when they begin again in January. Through the fall he will play with a youth strings group in Waterbury once a week under the instruction of Annabel Moynihan.

One of the expos that he will be taking at Peoples Academy Middle Level is art. (More specifically, the class is divided into three components throughout the year: visual art, tech and design, and Spanish.)

Citizenship, History, and government in Vermont and the United States: We have done a good amount of US government study as well as Vermont History in the past 2 years. Eider has a very keen interest in World History, European History in particular, as well as the way geography changes through time as nations shift and change. We are planning to use the OER Project's World History: 1750 to the Present (https://www.oerproject.com/1750-to-Present), as a springboard for exploration and study this year. We will supplement this with various History videos from Eider's favorite history youtube channel: Armchair Historian as well as podcasts such as What You Missed in History Class.

* all of this is as of yet much the plan. However, we have opted to not use the OER History program and are instead using Oak Meadows seventh grade curriculum for World History. I have never used anything from Oak Meadow before and quite honestly whole curriculums have seldom if ever worked for us in the past. Having previewed a good amount of this one though, I do feel cautiously optimistic. We shall see!

Hey y’all, thanks for reading. I imagine you only did if it was of interest to you in some way. And if not, no worries. It’s fine. But I would love to hear other homeschool fams pipe in with something about your plan for the year that you are excited about. I want to hear! Let me know!

xxx,m

two

Yesterday was Wilfred’s second birthday and despite not doing much in the way of celebrating - we are opting to wait until we are all 5 together again for the proper birthday festivities- we had a near perfect day with our littlest. We hiked a new trail, we picked berries and Freddy ate them, we found a perfect swimming pond, we napped, we made and ate blueberry pie, we sang. It really could not have been a finer day.

Summer is at its apex right now. Everything is at the height of its fullness: the heat and humidity are ON, which I for one adore; the days have a long and stretched out feeling almost like a pause in time which is simply excellent; and everyone seems to be in good cheer and heart-full and for all of these things and more, I am thankful. This might just be the very best moment of the year and what a fine time to have a birthday indeed.

Some of these quite right feelings must be in part due to the step away that I have taken from social media for the month. I have put down IG and it is such a breath of fresh air that at this moment I would love to never pick it up again. I am only 9 days in and the spaciousness I feel in my mind and in my days is just the best. I feel present and able and undistracted. I feel inspired and calm at the same time. The anxiety that I shared about in my last post here has faded into a lesson learned and I have room inside of myself to create something new for what feels like the first time in a long while. I feel settled and relatively satisfied.

I probably will pick it up again at the end of the month. It is certainly an effective way to work my work; but I am hesitant to sign back in and will most likely hatch some kind of user agreement with myself before making the journey back. I want a schedule and better boundaries. I want to keep all of this room that has opened up inside of me alive and flowing. I want to knit and write and read and swim and hike and eat and be with myself and my kids more. I want to respect my time. So, ya know. Some considerations and general regrouping as I gather myself up out of the hole that I stumbled in to.

So that is all. Here are a few pics from our day with Wilfie yesterday. Oh yes, and this fabulous piece by David Whyte called Hiding that my gal Liz shared with me at the onset of the IG break. Sums it up quite nicely. Thank Liz. You the best.

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HIDING

Hiding is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Even hiding the truth from ourselves can be a way to come to what we need in our own necessary time. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snow bound internal pulse of the hibernating bear. Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.

Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named. We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed. Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

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messing up

From where we are, I can see the sun push up above the watery eastern horizon a few minutes after 5 am. By six or so, I am usually out on the deck with Wilfred, drinking coffee and watching lobster traps be hauled up by the fisherfolk out off the shoreline. I let my hands fly through as many rows as my charges will allow me to get in while admiring what an excellent coastal canine Tuti has turned out to be. She hunts for the gulls abandoned crab legs down on the rocks and carries them up to the deck where she carefully sucks out any of the remaining meat. It is incredible. Equal parts gross and mesmerizing.

We have mostly been waking up early since around the start of summer when Wilfred gave up sleeping in his blackout tent. He was feeling closed in and a little too separate and ready for a wider more light variable view. I was sad to give up the tent and the additional hour or two of sleep, but he is changing and growing. As are we all this summer.

This summer has in many ways been both quiet and chaotic. I have felt some stirrings of anxiety that have been mostly absent since a brief bout during Wilfred’s infancy and almost entirely non-existent for a good number of years before that. Same old story I suppose in that I have let some of my personal care practices lag over the last few months; my writing practice is intermittent and interrupted at best and with the variability of the summer schedule my meditation practice has been far from daily. I have also felt a massive dip in my typical positive self-regard, which is generally a steady source of easy calm with me.

I took a few risks early in the season that set me off in general. Most are worth it but some I regret and came with some serious blunders on my end and I am no fan of fumbling or of the guilt and shame that often accompany my missteps. I bit off a big chunk when I committed to putting together a retreat in Costa Rica next spring and as much as I am pumped and excited for the adventure, I had to put a hefty deposit down which meant carrying a balance on my personal credit card which I never do anymore and it stirs up all of my childish feelings around being out of control with finances. It triggers a predictable tendency toward financial recklessness. And not in a fun way.

In my fear and overwhelm, I lifted the description for my retreat from a good friend of mine who has been generously holding my hand as I figure out what the hell I am doing. I didn’t think twice about it which is so crazy to think about now, that it didn’t even occur to me in the moment that I was out of line. When she realized what I had done she was of course completely offended and felt taken advantage of, which really, she was. She had put the time and effort into designing something and I just nabbed it. Sitting with it after the fact I was utterly stunned by what I had done and had to spend some time really tracing my actions back. And it is so weird because I can totally see the source- in Beautycounter we share copy and design and all the rest all the time and it totally makes sense. In yoga- not so much. And I got my wires crossed. I feel like shit about the whole thing and hopefully, I have made it right. I don’t know. I am still as sensitive as ever it appears and take my fuck ups harder than I wish I did. But I guess that is life and regret. It just freaking is and I get to live with it and keep on trying to both own it and do better. It sucked and I feel like crap about it and I hope I am forgiven by my friend if not myself. Maybe later by myself. Maybe once my balance has been paid off and my retreat is filled and flowing.

Anyhow. It feels like more of a shit show than it probably is. But it sets off anxiety in me to be sure. I am not a stranger to having muck on my face but it never gets any easier even so. I am super thankful for Chris’s good mentorship around clear communication when you mess up, owning your shit, and making amends, and all the rest. He is the very best and I am lucky to get to lean on him so hard.

The trip back to Wisconsin at the end of June was also provocative. It was busy and full and really everything I could have hoped it to be. But it has left me feeling lonely and an absence of community in my day to day. Something that I have been slow to cultivate for myself in VT. For all of the obvious reasons. And for whatever additional reason, being on Islesford is sort of like pouring some salt into that particular wound right now. My loneliness feels a little louder than it has for a while. I am unsettled. And when I do sit to meditate I am confronted with a sense of resistance that is hard to find the origin of. It feels opaque and long of reach. But I am working to sit with it. Let it be as opposed to pushing it back or down or out. In spite of it all, I trust its passage.

Wilfred and Eider and I are headed off-island today. Eider needs to get a PCR test before the start of camp on Sunday. He will be there for a full three weeks. And for my forever homebody and best pal, this is it’s own big deal and his anxiety is also in a heightened state as he tries at once to feel his feelings and not freak out. And it is a real mix. I know some parents that would be like: well if he’s not ready, why push it? And the thing is for my little double Pisces with a side of Cancer, his emotive, super-sensitive self might very well never feel ready. And yet, as best I can discern as his mama, he indeed is ready and his wings have a big itch to unfurl and stretch beyond the confines of home and family.

It is a tough one though and he is right in the midst of it. The pulse between wanting to stay small and secure, held by his folks and his home, contrasted with all of the burgeoning desires of his own growing autonomy. I think camp will be great for that. Especially a camp with some sweet and tender Quaker values like the Farm + Wilderness composite camps. I feel good about it. More good than anxious actually. Even though it tugs at my mama heart and I am going to miss this kid more than anything. He’s got it. And I only hope he knows that I’ve got him. Even while he’s off and out in the big wide world. I’ve got him.

That is the mix of things this summer I suppose. A lot of the big and the small. In metaphor and in form. On the island these last few weeks, I have seldom seen my big kids. They have been off having their own adventures with friends and on boats and just generally off in the whole big rich wonderful experience that is Islesford in the summer. It is awesome and I am thrilled for them but I also would not be being entirely honest if I didn’t admit how envious I am of them as well this summer. While they traipse about the island, I am tethered to my small charge. Keeping him safe and entertained and napped and all the rest. We have been more often than not going on walks and picking up rocks and finding the other island toddlers and their parents on the Sand Beach in the late afternoons for digging and wading and chit chat. It is so fun. The very best. And I still feel the missing of my bigs and their friends and hearing about what they are up to and maybe getting up to a little bit of it with them myself. Oh well. Life is complicated. I love what is and I still miss what isn’t and on it goes I suppose for all of my living days. Hopefully, I will get a sail in with Maple before we leave her here and head back to Vermont next month. That would be great. The very best.

Now, off to the day. I have a walk to go on with my buddy and our wee rangey mutt. And it too is the very best. Thanks as ever for reading. Just making a practice of owning my shit and all the rest. Fessing up to my foibles of which there are many. All love.

xxx,m

thresh

This morning I took all of the kids down the hill to Montpelier. For some errands, but mostly for a moment all together before this summer is suddenly gone and I am wondering where it went and who I even am anymore. We made the trip because it has been too cold for the beach all week and also because we wanted to pick up a jumbo birthday gift for Maple and Eider to give to Wilfred while we are in Maine. It was his first time roaming around a bonafide toy store and it was excellent. The bigs won’t be here with us on his actual birthday next month, which I am seeing now may be a persistent reality and probably the downside to having a summer birthday, which is otherwise ideal in every way.

All week long I have been intermittently running around making sure Maple has what she needs for not 3 but 6 weeks on Islesford and gathering all of the necessaries for Eider’s 3 weeks at sleep away camp directly on the heels of 2 weeks in Maine. Oh yeah and getting all of Eider’s seventh-grade curricula together for the state of Vermont’s home study department to give a stamp of approval to before the end of the month. Not to mention but oh hey I will anyway Wilfred is still smack dab in the middle of a brutal sleep regression that is leaving me way too tired for any of it. I would love a moment to process our recent trip to Wisconsin - it was A LOT- and also a minute to sit with this massive transition into new territory that we are entering with the kids this summer. But I am facilitating a nap. And bedtime forever. And another nap. And trying to keep my cool. And wanting to cry. And wanting to rest. And wanting to just read a book or write or knit but no not yet. That is what Maine is for. Just. Gotta. Get. There.

If anything, Wisconsin revealed where each of us is in relation to our next becoming. Some of us are more through the process than others, and some of us squarely in the liminal expanses of the in-between. I am more clear in my role of helping the kids usher themselves through, and yet, I am still searching myself where best to land and who best to be in this new world that from every estimation I was rocketed toward sometime near the end of 2018. I think that Maple has landed solidly into her next iteration. She is clear and rooted and bright in a way that both inspires me and gives me hope. It wasn’t a smooth or albeit easy transition for her to be sure, but she is through it now and it is a relief but even more than that fuels some of the trust that I have felt a little lacking in lately in terms of resilience and rebound and personal/familial reclamation. Eider, I think is still looking for authentic purchase in his new terrain. He has been met with obstacles at most turns and even so is still in good spirits and a joy to know. But still, none of it has been easy and when I lay awake at night it is one of the things I stress over for sure.

I am in the mental/emotional fatigue and stress which I think maybe somewhat unique to folks with the big age gap constellation; exhausted in different and sometimes opposing ways in different parts of my body/mind and so unsure of what I even know to be true about an age or a stage or whatever. My sister texted me yesterday saying that her friend was looking for some tips or tricks to get her toddler to wear a mask, and saw Wilfs wearing one and was like: how did your sis get that to happen? And I was like: Dumb luck. Cuz like for real I can’t get toddlers (or tweens or teens) to do anything. Which feels so fucking true. Right now but maybe always too.

So, maybe this is a really hollow and winding public share but basically, this is where I process and that is what I am trying to do here and if for some crazy reason it helps you in any way then god bless.

Yah ok gave this a sit and moved my body cuz that’s how I do and… Oh! Wait! I can’t leave it on that note! And here is why: I for sure do not want to come off as “needing a break from...” Sure. I need a break. But really a break with. A break within. I am good at all of the self-care stuff. For real. I lean there easy enough and sometimes that is simply not enough. I need me with me and then I can be me with them. I need prayer and patience so that I can hang in the unknown and the uncertain and the unresolved with the grace that my family depends on. I have got this. And at the same time I am hungry for some clarity and some ease even when I know that eventually, it will follow. Even when I feel more ready than perhaps I am and the unfolding and the revelation are all happening at their own rate and in their own time and I am right here. Ready and tired and waiting and sad and excited and awestruck and all the rest. I am here.

(the name of this post, thresh, is inspired by a recent episode of This Jungian Life about thresholds. Check it out.)

MA

I feel like I have been nudging up closer to something lately. Whatever the piece is that it is all about. The thing that is holding all of this in orbit all these years. And whatever wisdom or insight it is that comes with the stacked lessons of all the years.

A bunch of things have been lining up sweetly as of late. Reigniting and reaffirming an inner resonance that I think I may sometimes forget or neglect or question into the periphery. I have met a couple of mothers that I feel some kinship with recently, beyond the surface connection of kids and family. Into the deeper terrain of mothering as the modality for the great unlocking of our own, as well as our shared, humanity. One woman shared some Jungian resources and influences with me and I had to laugh when they were shared again by another influence only days later. That is how it goes I suppose. What resonates, simply does. And builds its own whole vibrational infrastructure that magnetizes or repels. Or is neutral. Maybe most often is neutral actually. Which feels like dreamless sleep. Dull and typical and set on cruise.

Jungian analysis has been a particular lens of influence for many years. I have shared that here time and again I am sure. Women and archetypes and the unfurling and becoming of ourselves… But more recently I have been clued into some particular new writings on Motherhood considered through the Jungian perspective and it feels holy and fundamental all at once. Like the baseline to the forever story I have been weaving and telling in my most central heart fire.

I chatted with an old friend of mine the other day. She is one of my life’s big teachers in the ALL CAPS sense, irreverent and sacred and brave and so tender all at once. I have learned a lot from her. And even though I had been mothering for half a decade or so before she crossed over into the world of the MA, I think we are perhaps more similar to one another in our approach and our experience of mothering than most other mothers I have yet to meet and know. She and I let our children devour us. We let them do with us as they will. And we, for the most part, love it. We say things like Yes and More and Come Closer and I Will and I Do and I Am Yours and on and on. And it doesn’t make us less or compromised or hollow. It makes us sublime.

Now before I get any push back about boundaries and respect or whatever it will be, from my own swlf or anyone else, I want to be clear that I am not saying we don’t have those things. Some more than others and sometimes more than others. Sure. It is just that the tone of it feels different to me. The sacrifice and the declaration both of some different ilk than what I think I am encountering through the narrative retelling of other mothers. And what I think is maybe different is this: she and I, my old friend and me, we have let the wild animal of our womanhood loose with our children. We have exposed them to the raw righteousness of our largess and it is something that our kids feel both protected by and in awe of. And sure, when they are older perhaps a tidge annoyed by, but in a way that also makes them weirdly proud. It is unique in that it is so essential. A big mama paradox. More of me is more of me is more of me and on and on like that.

This longtime friend and soul mama on the path also has some children that didn’t stay in their bodies. Maybe that is part of why we are the way we are. Walking the shadowlands of motherhood makes you something different. But also something that, in the end, isn’t separate from any mother anywhere. We all know it in the end. Or at particular endpoints. Perhaps we don’t all choose to light that darkness up, but it is there nonetheless. As real and huge and whole as any one of us on our very best day of living.

So, we connect well you could say. I got to know her right on the heels of the loss of her first child and she was so real and raw and revealed and I knew right away that she had it going on. Living in the bright impact of the pain of parenting. And now, over 10 years later, I still relate to her attitude and approach to parenting. Put it all out on the line. Why wouldn’t we?

After talking for almost an hour, she said: hey megs, while I’ve got you here, I need to ask what you think about something- in that special way that we often save the meat of the conversation til the very end- what would you think if I had another kid? I mean, I am 42. To which of course I said: yeah you are asking the worst possible person. The only answer in my opinion is yes. If you feel it, why not at least try. I mean, thank god that Chris had a vasectomy at the start of the pandemic because I would have 100% been like, hey, why not? what’s to lose? let’s go for another! Which is ridiculous and not a big desire really. I no longer feel someone knocking, pressing, waiting, to be let through like I did with Wilfred for always until he finally made it home to me. But if you feel someone waiting… then I am all for trying. All for it. At whatever age, in whatever form. That shit is undeniable in my opinion and one better listen up, cuz otherwise the shadow mother may be pressed too hard.

All of this said even from deep in the trenches of an extended breastfeeding endurance event. We are living regression to regression right now: waking up over and over in the night to nurse, refusing bedtime from anyone but mama, and sometimes care from anyone else as well. It is an event! I am at that stage in nursing well past the hey day of the first year where I felt lean and strong and vital and well into the end of the second year where my whole body feels like goo and anything vital in the marrow of me has long since been sucked clean. Yet even so. I persist.

Because, why make a fuss? One day it’ll end just like that and the past will be just that. Past. No child nurses forever. But it may be the case that Wilfred nurses for less than the other Newlin babes and is made to wean around 2 or so. I am not sure I have another year in me. Eider was done at 3.5. Maple at just before 4. I can’t imagine that right now.

My friend said that she weaned her oldest when he was about two and half. He had a breast in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other and she was like yeah we are probably good. We can be done. Lol. It is so classic. A certain kind of toddler mayhem that is so perfectly relatable. It is mayhem. The other day someone in my fam left the chicken gate open and Wilfred wandered down there to hang with the girls. When I found him, he had smashed an egg on top of their waterer and was leaning onto it licking up the yoke. See! He’s a big kid now! Just kidding. He’s my bb and he can probably nurse forevs.

Anyway. All of it, always and forever, spins around the theme and the image and the archetype of The Mother. I mean, of course. What else? All of this attraction to a mood of nostalgia and a longing to re-member certain moments. Crystalize them in my being. They are close to the truth. But maybe not quite.

I think the real story may be more closely a longing for the whole experience. Not the good mother but the mother who lives both in the light and the shadow. The mother who sees it for what it is, but also the glittering sublime expression of the mundane. The wild mother. The one who was born of bone and prayer and is equally ready to hold and carry the weight of all the world’s babies and also build the pyre and feed it with the marrow of time.

I am getting closer to her. To the real truth telling of the mother who is all stages in the cycle. Like that. The whole universe inside the MA.

ch ch ch ch

Something about change? Some kind of constant? As is often if not always the case, I find myself reflecting on the cycles and the seasons. Where I am in them and how the overlay of the multiple phases and stages intersect, interweave, and integrate.

Soooo much feels like it’s changing right now. I imagine that that must be how it feels for so many folks after so much uncertainty, followed by so much sameness, followed by so much reorienting; each having become part and parcel of the world for the last many months. And as much as I feel myself to be at a particular point within my own evolution trajectory, I am also so deeply interconnected in those of the community of my family that it can be hard to discern what part of the cycle I am in. Is this an end? A beginning? Am I still in the middle of something? Or is it really, always and forever, the interwoven play of a multiplicity of stories, each different, none separate.

This past week or so has been mostly just staying upright and keeping on with whatever is next. Wilfred has been in a bit of a sleep regression I think perhaps triggered by some developmental leaps, both in his own being and in the fabric of his daily life, that have him feeling very clingy and mama-centered in a way that is not so typical- for any of our kids ever really. But Wilfred is shy. Maple was observant yet independent. She wanted to assess a situation before establishing her place within it. Eider has always been full steam ahead. He has almost always simply jumped right in, figuring out the who and the what entirely on the fly. Wilfred is reminding me and teaching me that all children are their own and that he needs more time and more holding before he can set his feet down into the mix. Maybe it is a result of the quiet and calm of being a Covid babe or maybe it is simply a part of who he is and I am learning to hold space for that. I think maybe I was shy? I certainly wouldn’t call myself or any of the rest of us shy today. But we have space to learn how this is with our littlest.

Anyhow, all of this was perhaps exacerbated by our recent trip to Maine which involved not only different places and people but also an unfamiliar sleep situation coupled with some freezing temps that brought him into my bed and onto my breast in a way that he has not been since he was brand new. The whole thing has all of us sleeping hardly at all and me feeling a lot like a human pacifier which really becomes a dark terrain for me before too long. We have been circling the conversation of night weaning, like forever, and I keep dragging my feet and thinking that I can manage as is knowing full well that I cannot. But… but I am so tender about ending something that we have had since the very beginning, a major chapter in our origin story with one another. It is a severing of sorts and I am reluctant to make it. With Maple, it was hard and complicated like this too, but I knew that I would have another after her. With Eider, nursing was almost always uncomplicated and easy and it really just eventually and naturally faded to grey with little effort on my end. I was hoping for something like that now as well. Oh well. No child is quite the same as the next. As it should be. Anyhow, I am in a liminal space around the whole thing. Not wanting it to stay the same, not wanting to let it go. Feels like the central path of the mama for sure.

All the while… big happenings, and yet oh-so-natural unfoldings are lining up for Maple and Eider this summer. Eider was just accepted off the waitlist for a 3-week summer session at Farm and Wilderness in Southern Vermont. We just firmed up scholarship and financing last night and I am so excited for him I can barely stand it. I also am beside myself on how the hell I am going to make it 3 weeks without my guy. I imagine there will be some rough patches for him as well but good lord that kid deserves some time away from being my biggest helper and near-constant companion as well as the opportunity to be mentored and supported and course-corrected by folks beyond just Chris and myself. I am not a great letter writer but I aim to become the very best one this summer. Like, the BEST.

Maple too is set for a whole new grand experience beyond our nest this summer. She is spending 6 whole weeks on Islesford. Three with us when we are there in July, but then she is staying on in the home of a lifelong pal of hers for another 3 weeks. If all lines up as she hopes, she’ll be working both a job and an internship and just really stepping into the next phase of independence in such a massive way. And, I’ll tell you what, she is not missing a beat. Not a pause or backward glance anywhere to be seen. This girl is READY. Me? ha ha ha ha not so much. I mean, yes and no. She has adventures to be had that certainly do not include me and I am simultaneously thrilled for her and also a little bit broken on what feels like the back end of in-home child-rearing with my eldest.

All told, they will both be away from me (and Chris and Wilfred lol) for 3 weeks, which is a full 2 weeks longer than ever before. And strangely enough, I have only spent the stretch of a week away from them a couple of times in the last near-decade. The year that they were six and three, I was gone every 6 weeks for an entire week for an entire year while I was participating in a teacher training with D and Christina down in Tucson. It was a lot, and at the same time completely fine at the time. So fine in fact that in all of this time since then I have reflected on how that really was the window and there has never been another time that it could have possibly worked again in quite that way. And maybe because of them, but most likely because of me. It was easy-ish to leave six-year-old Moo and three-year-old Eider in a way that I cannot quite imagine at another time and which I certainly don’t imagine any time in the even remotely near future with Wilfred.

Yes, every child is different. And yes, everything changes. But one sure constant is that underneath whatever yesterday’s or today’s struggle is, no matter where we are within the overlay of however many cycles we are each individually and collectively a part of, I want to be still enough inside the center of the Big Picture that I am able to keep choosing responses that inform and encourage our growth as a family and as five people. Each our own. Each united relationally. Each evolving needs and desires and capacities. So, yep yep, it is fucking hard and heart-breaking. And all of it a letting go. Even on the front end. Can you see that from this telling? The way I am being asked to live into the opposites at the same time. Holding one close, maybe closer than is comfortable, while at the same time swinging the door open so that the others can begin to range into ever-expanding fields.

Gah. So that is the story. So much is up. So much is coming. Within it, I am trying to stay somewhat centered in what stays the same. Playing, writing, creating, back bending… with maybe the one new skill this summer in the form of becoming the most amazing letter writer and care package sender I can possibly be.

some haps

MANY YOGA

Next Week // Next Month // Next Year

Whelp! I’ve got a few casual updates that I want to be putting on anyone’s radar who is interested, spanning out from here and now across ever expanding reaches of time and space. 

1. First things first: I am going to offer another weekly yoga practice in June, for an abreviated 3 weeks versus 4. It will be scaled in price to $27 for all 3 classes. Running June 8- June 22. These classes are LIVE + Recorded from my basement at 7pm eastern running roughly 60 minutes. I send out the recording within 24 hours. They are a hoot and I have loved offering them. I will be taking a break from them in July while we are on Islesford, so you know.

2. I am, with the help of someone far wiser and more organized than myself, putting a subscription together to launch by the end of June. These will be all of my recorded classes plus more added regularly. I am not sure on pricing yet, but it will be accesible. And hopefully, really appealing and incredibly awesome. And funny. Hopefully funny.

3. I am for sure going to offer one group practice- live and in-person << completed vaccinations required >> when the kiddos and I are back in Wisconsin at the end of June. Nothing firm as of yet, but thinking 2 hour practice that Sunday the 27th hopefully at the Circus Space in Mazomanie. Suggested D on that of 20 bonez.

4. These 2 little Newlin Rugrats in this pic/vid with me are heading to Costa Rica next April for a family vacation (with M + C joining us for a second week of r+r) but first we are going to offer a super casual yoga retreat in Nosara at a beautiful spot called Nalu. I am still working out pricing, but the dates are April 16-23 << yes, that’s Easter weekend >> and space is pretty limited. I will have all of the details in the next week or so and then we can start chatting deposits to save your space.

That’s all for now! Keep practicing and meditating and washing your face + hands and getting outside or seldom coming inside. High Fives and Hugs. xxx,m

nothing new: mostly

A friend of mine texted me earlier this week with a short “You should (please) provide an Instagram update with how the nothing new til 2022 is going! Or tell me. I’m curious.” After reading this, my first impulse was along the lines of: oh crap! I did make a big deal about that into the vacuum of social media back in the beginning of the year and looks like people may actually remember that I did and now I’m found out! Shit! But then I calmed myself for a moment and considered the process that I actually am in with the whole thing - which is not nothing and probably actually quite worthwhile within the lens of holding my own self accountable and actively engaging what I set out to do with relative transparency.

So here it is. First, I have to say that it wasn’t all that long before the detox of the Holiday Spending Snowball that I work so hard to avoid every year and somehow get just as sucked into every single time had loosened its hold on me and I was back scrolling through accounts of independent makers and designers and lusting after their goods in classic Meg fashion. So there is that. Maybe I just needed a detox and not to take such a bold and faultingly firm stand. Oh well. I am a work in progress.

I have, however, mostly, if not entirely, stayed close to the aim of Nothing New til 2022. With a few exceptions and I will share those here. I have been slow and deliberate with all of my purchases in a way that is both familiar yet also deeper and with firmer roots. Relatively early in the year, I realized that I needed a few pairs of undies other than my big ‘ol Shop Arqs which I love but which are also sometimes too hot for me and I had none. So I ordered some easy organic cotton undies from PACT for myself and Maple. I also recently took a friend of mine up on her Patagonia discount and picked up a xc ski jacket for next year along with some swim trunks for Eider. We recently made a summer shoe resupply which I dragged my feet on (bahahaha) thinking that I might have some luck finding a pair or two of gently used Saltwater sandals, but with no luck.

Save a couple of swimsuits for Wilfred, all of the kids’ clothes that we have purchased this year have been from Thread Up or Poshmark, which is essentially what I was doing before and am happily continuing now. Chris ordered a beautiful handmade linen nightgown for me for Mother’s Day and as a consummate nightie wearer, I am happy to have one that will last my many, many wears for a long time to come. It feels like such a treasure.

So, it has been imperfect and yet highly worthwhile and informative. I have never been much of an impulse shopper but I have from time to time spent money on something and then regretted it, and it has been lovely to be free of that this year. I am sitting with my wants in a new way and actually finding great enjoyment and satisfaction by sharing what I have an eye on with one friend, in particular, gaming it out, talking shape, talking fit, talking color, etc. That has been very fun. She also happens to be my closest knitting pal so indulging in yarn and patterns and the delight of the process has also been holding a great deal of my attention in terms of “the new.”

Another big takeaway at this moment is how much I really do love slow fashion and the whole process of creating lasting and meaningful functional/wearable art. I am super into it maybe more than ever and if someone came up to me tomorrow and was like hey meg let’s start this small clothing company I would most likely say yes… But I digress.

Oh yeah! I did get some shirts made for MANY YOGA and that was fun and entertaining. If you watch any of the copious yoga videos that I post or take any of my classes you may have noticed that there are 4 shirts in my rotation now versus 2. You’re welcome.

OK, that’s it for now! Informative? Disappointing? LMK. I am a Sagittarius after all and highly changeable and subject to lots of inspiring whims so if this isn’t the hard fast commitment you were hoping for from me, my apologies. I am into paying attention to where the energy is flowing and keeping things in alignment, even as that varies from season to season. My relationship with the shiny new thing feels pretty well in check now, even with the occasional mindfully made purchase. I am utilizing The Pause to good effect at this moment in time. I will do my best to share another update or two here as the year continues to unfold.

xxx,m