After a public shutting-down of flakedoves, I think it may be time to start flakedoving again. Some people take a break from blogging without a dramatic announcement, or a removal of their blog from the public domain. I hauled off and made a big announcement and shut the whole thing down. Now, after not even much time, I'd like to retract that, if no one will think me too fickle. And while I toyed with the idea of starting an entirely new blog at some point, I think I'm just too attached to flakedoves, and I'm afraid my small, former audience wouldn't be able to find me again.
I felt I had nothing to share or say for most of the summer. I got a new part-time job at the end of spring, and it accelerated the pace of my daily life and took my mind away from the kind of thinking and writing that I tend to do when most of my time is spent at home, ruminating. Through June, July, and August, Esme kept morphing further and faster into a two year-old, until finally, as of late September, she was a two year-old. Parenting a two year-old is so different from parenting a baby. There are far more words involved--an expenditure of words that must, I imagine, demand a subtraction of other words from other categories in the life of my brain, namely the categories involved in thoughtful blogging--the only kind of blogging that seems worthwhile to me. The sun and the powerful draw of being outdoors in a place where for six months of the year the outdoors are uninhabitable also kept me from writing, or caring about whether I did or didn't.
Now, as the turn of the planet starts pushing me and everyone else inward, I feel the want of writing again. There is still a lot of green on all of the trees here in northern Indiana, and walks are still possible, and sitting on the swing while Esme plays in the gravel, sand, slides, and sea-saw behind our apartment building is also still possible--in hooded jackets. But the air is getting cold, and in the mornings I've been cooking a pot of oatmeal in a noticeably dark--very dark--apartment.
I've also been pregnant, and sick, in that order, and somehow the suffering, albeit temporal and nothing terminal or extraordinary in nature, has thrown me down into that particular view of life for a few days-- the one where normalcy, the ability to function, looks like a circle of unobtainable light from where you sit at the bottom of a dark well. This generates precisely the kind of thoughts that desire release through precisely written words, the kind of thoughts I haven't had for some time.
As far as pregnancy symptoms, my first trimester hasn't been bad, despite the usual tiredness and weird food aversions and cravings. I felt relatively fine until week ten, when I started to feel more repulsed by food and more tired. Then, in week twelve, I got a cold, which was bad enough, but then turned into an ear infection, which, in the past five days, has turned my entire existence into misery. Esme has been wondering, in some two year-old capacity, I'm sure, what happened to her mother, who has been lying down or sitting down with a sour, scrunched-up face, unable to engage her from moment to moment. Jeff has valiantly, as if with one available hand, upheld the pillars of our tiny household and kept them from crumbling on top of his immobilized wife and energetic toddler. But this still leaves me, as the antibiotics start to take effect and allow me to return to normal life (as of today, in fact), a lot of laundry, crumbs, dust, and junk mail to catch up with. I have to say though, I'm so happy to get up, grasp a spray bottle, tear up any stupid flyer from Blockbuster printed on extravagant and wasteful cardstock, sort out white socks from jeans, and remove food scraps from the aged linoleum around Esme's high chair several times per day.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
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