Addendum infinitum:

I never like to worry people, so I just wanted to reassure you:
I’m okay. I’m really, really okay. I’m really GOOD in lots and lots of ways:
I’m happy. We’re happy. Our kids are happy. We have a good life. Homeschooling brings me so much joy.

This was (incase it wasn’t obvious enough! ha!) cry-written/illustrated one night in a journal in those kinds of red river floods of emotion, where nerve endings tingle alight with all the brave fury of the world.

*

I always thought that I would create, write, share forever. I couldn’t see a day, week, month, year go by without that. And yet, six months on, it’s precisely where I am.  And I still don’t see that feeling abating.

My creativity looks different these days.

It’s filled with homeschooling my children. My craft is this one beautiful life, right here, in this precipice moment. They aren’t tiny any more. They aren’t tiny any more.

You elder mamas told me it would be this way:

They grow up far too soon.

I refused to believe you of course. I had fallen down a hole of PND and struggled with the daily rigamarole of tending to a wee baby who needed more than other babies seemed to need. More of her Mama than her Mama had available. And so I was snide and cantankerous in the voice in my head, gasping for a lifeline that it wouldn’t always be this way:

They don’t grow up soon enough.

But time shifted and ebbed as it does.

And before I know it, I have not one long-limbed elfling, but two. The eldest is starting to arrive here on the planet fully after the first seven years of that enchanted place called childhood. I’m not as funny as I used to be to her. My singing isn’t as beautiful. Her wide, sensitive eyes start to drink in reality.

And I don’t want to miss one more thing with her, or with her sister. Don’t want to wish it away. Don’t want to spend it as the mama whose primary joy in life is not them. Don’t want to hide away in my studio when there is so much life and love to be lived out here, sucking great airfuls of it into my skin.

Hiro tells me:

“You can just enjoy this time, you know. It’s okay that you don’t want to be out in the world right now. That feeling won’t always last forever. You can just be with them now. You’ve worked so hard to create this life. You can just enjoy it.”

I spent 7 years trying to find the time to scurry away into my studio, away from them.

Now I want to run toward them, arms outstretched.

*

Before emails come in:

I wish to reassure people (again): I’m not quitting any of my businesses: Academy & workbooks (2018 editions will be available within the next week). I’m happy to continue producing these offerings.

The thing that I am struggling with is the external fluff + guff + creation. The blogging + social media. The public sharing.

*

I have no idea what I will be called to doing next – because it must be a calling… I have no time or inclination for anything but that.

And I don’t know when or where or what my sharing will look like.

I don’t know, and sometimes I am buoyed with the joy of not knowing, and sometimes I am despairing. I don’t know, and until I do, I wait.

But there’s one big mural of a life happening right now, right here. A mural filled with my children and my husband, the sun and the garden, art and books and adventures.

This, right here, without a doubt, is my best work yet. Invisible to all the world but me and us, it is as good and as ripe and as incandescent as can be.

And maybe, just maybe, with all the not knowing of how I will share publicly and the worry and the flash of that… I can lean into this. This one thing that I do know is true.

This, right here. right now. Pour your love right here.

And I do, and I am. And it is enough. More than enough. It’s just what I always wanted it to be.

Love,

 

 

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