mamacate

Things you find in the dark

It has been a pretty dark time around here. I'm not going to recount all our troubles, some of them are ongoing and the subject of pending litigation; some of them (wait! many of the same ones!) are just too damn long a story to even begin to draw out in this little corner of the Internet. But it has been hard. Dark in the sense of hard times, dark days. Not all hard, not everything. But I didn't stop blogging just to eat bonbons on the couch. That's all.

But it has been a dark time in other ways too. You know how sometimes a bunch of things happen that you don't really think about, and then something else happens that makes you realize that all those things were all one thing, and that one thing is an answer to a question you've been asking? It's a bit like fumbling around in the dark in an only slightly-familiar room. You might think you're on the north wall, looking for the light switch and when you bump your shin you wonder why someone put a box there and then you are surprised that the floor is cold and the next thing you realize you've turned yourself around and the light switch is actually behind you, and that box isn't a box at all but the bookshelf.

We have to have ideas and assumptions about where we are, even in the light, because it reduces our cognitive burden. We pretend we know what to expect next, and then we step into it without fear, even though we might be totally wrong in our expectations. Otherwise, it's a cliff you're stepping off of when you leave the house every morning, and for some of us, okay, for me, that's just too scary.

But sometimes, maybe dark times, those images can fail. The soft couch turns out to be the hard corner of a dresser (ow!) and the light switch isn't anywhere near where I thought it was. It's scary, those moments, feeling with your hands out in front of you for the wall, for any little thing to hold on to, that will tell you where you are, that will map the darkness so that you can find your way out of it. I haven't spent much time like that in the literal sense—I've always found my light switch, my eyes adjusted to a few tiny beams of light from a digital clock or a distant streetlight.

The last few years—it's even hard to say how many—have been a darkened room. And I think that, if not a light switch, we've found a night light, or maybe a touch map. It's still dark in here, but I have faith, at least this one day a year, that the light is coming back.  We've been searching for a little beam of light for Henry, and we think we've found one, whether a floodlight or a moonbeam is yet to be seen, in the form of a diagnosis. It's surprisingly unsurprising, considering how long we've been grasping in the dark. Asperger's. Hey, special interest, anyone? Knitters don't know anything about that. Ahem.

So we've got new light on this struggle that has gone on, well, for a long time now, and while it's not an easy piece of news, it's one I can live with. I think it scares me less than it does many people. Seeing as how I'm a knitter who works with college professors all day, well, I know you can live a big and interesting life and be an Aspie. I've got a fair dollop of Aspie myself, in fact, and I feel like I speak Aspie reasonably well, even if it's a second language.

One of the things we're learning is that life for my sweet young man is a little like being in a dark room. Oh, he can see fine, but it's hard to know what people are going to do, hard to figure out why they're sometimes friendly and sometimes act mad and you said the same thing both times! It's hard to follow all those jumbly-up words when people are talking fast and telling you to do stuff, and sometimes, you just need to take some time to recharge and make sure that you have the energy to try to figure out all those people again. So every day does feel like stepping off a cliff, and we haven't understood that as well as we might have.

We just needed a little light to see better.

So tonight is the longest night. Every year, I wish for a return of the light and this year is no different. I need the light to help me figure out the lay of this land, to make a map. But this year I'm also going to wish for better night vision. Because wandering in this dark place, while not easy, is showing me new ways to see.  And if there's anything I need right now to help our family, it's to be able to see things differently, and maybe more light isn't the only way to do that.

Tonight is the longest night, the night when I send my intentions out into the cold sky and wait for them to come back with the sun. I like summer, I do, but this year, my prayer is not waiting for a brightened return alone.  Under clear winter stars, and in glistening snows, I'll take this dark night to listen, and to learn to see.  And that, too, is a blessing, both bright and dark.

Another Cummington

What a lovely time.  I've got so little of my brain to share with the internets these days, but I had another halcyon weekend in the Berkshires with old friends.  Somehow, even if you're a lame blogger like me, those friendships don't disappear.  I had a weekend of pick-up-where-you-left-off visiting, with lots of wool and wine, as it should be.  It's possible that the government of Spain may be increasing wine production in response to our consumption over the weekend, but that's okay because there's always next year.  When everyone left, the silence was deafening.  I need that kind of conversation every once in a while.  I've got plenty of souvenir wool to remember the weekend by.

This weekend was all kid-birthday-parties and laundry and combing of basement storage for purging and assiduous effort in pursuit of a large Indiana Jones lego set's completion.  I even cooked a pretty nice dinner tonight.

Life is hard but life is good.  I'll pop back in next time I can.

Where I've Been

You know how sometimes, if you wait long enough to get around to a thing, that thing starts to take on greater weight than it ought to do and it starts being harder to actually do it and then it has been even longer and you still haven't done it and what the heck is wrong with you anyway and what exactly do you want to do with this blog thing that you've been doing for almost four years but not exactly since you've barely been doing it all this past year?

Like that.  Which is to say, sorry.  And whoops.  Also, Hi!  How have you been?  Missed ya.

A throng of knitters came to my town this weekend but I missed them because I was throwing money at a mouse.   It was a fun trip.  Not as fun as last year, which was like mouse heaven, but fun.  Now we're back.  And so this blog post seems to be following my "I only manage to blog when I've been off of work for a week" pattern.

But really, here's the deal.  Remember all my talk about IEPs and school problems and stuff?  About how my son has emerging disabilities that haven't yet been well-defined but that make his life extremely difficult both at school and at home?  Well, that's my new hobby.  I didn't choose it.  It is NOT relaxing.  It gives me very little enjoyment, except on the rare occasion that I figure out some way to get the school system to do what they should have done in the first place or I manage to take five pieces from six different doctors and put them together and help find a way to help my kid a bit in a way we hadn't thought of before.  But mostly it's a lot of hard slogging, banging of heads against brick walls, begging and pleading for what are literally my son's legal, moral, and ethical rights, and then having to fight to make sure they actually carry out what they promised because the hard-won agreements are meaningless when they don't actually implement them.

Bitter, moi?  And did I mention the school system is nearly bankrupt and are talking layoffs (including my son's direct staff, or so I gather via him overhearing something).  Yah.  Thanks for that "stimulus package."  That $600 is way better than providing our kids with an education that will give them any hope of paying off the staggering debt you've run up, there W.  Right, yes, bitter.

Anyway, if I haven't been clear before, that's why I'm not blogging much.  The things I have to talk about are too private to put here and make the above sound like a tra-la-la happy romp, and my reluctance to blog it all is probably only exceeded by any sane person's reluctance to read it.

I miss you guys.  I'm hoping to escape for a festival (NH perhaps?) and there's still a chance the house will clear out for a party for Cummington (not to cry in my tea but hopefully it won't be me all by myself with a pony keg, not that you people have ever been much help drinking beer).  Unfortunately, due to the above, it can't happen unless the fam clears out: even having dinner guests is a significant stressor these days.

So that's the news from here.  Mouse: good but expensive.  Job: intense but now better-staffed with an awesome new coworker.  Church: continuing complexity, with a small dash of hope.  Family: well-loved and deeply challenging.  School: don't get me started.  Wool: right, wool--an almost done and completely unphotographed charm shrug is in progress.  I do tell Ravelry things but not necessarily with pictures.

So Wendy, I got nothin.  This my system: I don't do it all and much of it poorly.  Blogging, knitting, and spinning I'm doing less of at the moment.  Perfect is boring.  Life is messy.  I'll see you next time I come up for air.  Or at NHS&W.  XO.

Back

I'm back.  I've been back one day short of a week and we're having our second snowstorm since my return.  Ah, February.  After a week in paradise, I can't complain.  Well, recent evidence has shown that in fact I'm entirely capable of doing so.  I have received surprisingly little sympathy from friends to whom I have complained.  I can't imagine why.

The pain of return has been softened somewhat by a great pajama dance party tonight with Dan Zanes and friends at UMass.  We went, we danced, we sang along (we were encouraged to do so even if we didn't know the words--I love that guy).  There's something about his shows and music that make me feel like I can be a mama and can still be cool and political AND share a fun experience with my kids.  When I was a kid I remember going to see Pete Seeger.  Kind of like that.  If you've got kids and you have a chance to go see him, do.  A nice way to spend a leap day.

In other news, I've become the world's slowest knitter, crawling along on various projects and doing nothing worthy of any real comment.  We got a Wii and I've been having fun playing baseball with the kids with that, though the knitting slowness seems to be more of a knitting funk than anything else.

I'm off Sunday for a 24-hour whirlwind business trip.  No chance of yarn crawling, but with so little knitting going on I have no excuse anyway.  That's about it from here.  Now I can get through the rest of the winter by fantasizing about the next school vacation, in April, when we're going to Disney again.  We might just survive.

Wish you were here

And I seriously wish we weren't going home in less than two days.  This is the view from our back porch.  Seriously.

I've only got moments online, so that's all from me until I'm back.  For those going, have fun at Spa.  Though I love that event, I couldn't quite cut short the Caribbean.  See you soon. I'll be the one weeping and muttering about white sand beachers as I walk through the snow and ice.

Another high-minded political post

Here's my endorsement for the other party.

Warning...so not work appropriate, I can't even tell you.  And just in case someone else is as out of the loop as I was, it's a parody of this.

Otherwise, I'm knitting slowly, packing to go on vacation, and working too much.  In other words, very little to say.  See you after my latitude attitude adjustment.

Tuesday

You know what to do.

(I'll also count this as my poetry reading for the day.)

Blah...blah blah blah

Hey there.

What does a knitblogger do when she's not really knitting?  This isn't a riddle (I'm not feeling nearly clever enough for that).  I think the answer is not really blog.  Which is what I'm not really doing.

But despite appearances, I do still value this here knitblog community, so I will whine at you in an unfocused sort of way.  If you like that sort of thing, feel free to read on; if you don't, I fully understand. 

I'll try to do things with wool again at some point.  I trust that I haven't completely given up on this stuff, I'm just in the doldrums.  Call it the winter blues.  Call it a January blah.  Call it an under-treated thyroid disorder.  (I swear I didn't write that email in the link.)  Whatever.  I have all these unfinished projects and none of them make me happy.  Elizabeth I.  A self-designed sweater gift project.  An almost-finished garter-stitch jacket that will look like ass but will keep Rhys warm and very happy since she doesn't care if her sweaters are ugly when she just wears them around the house.  That's not even close to being all of it.  I could be knitting an already-started hourglass, a handspun shetland triangle, a handsome pair of mittens, an ancient fair isle, or a no-longer-mysterious mystery stole.  I could even fix the damn Autumn Rose (which I wore again last week in hopes that I would decide I didn't need to fix it anymore, which didn't exactly happen).  And socks.  Myriad single and half-knitted socks longing for companionship.  Yet I knit not.

So everyone knows the answer to this problem.  Cast on, right?  A kid sweater.  Quick, easy, low-stress, high-reward.  Eh.  Didn't last.  How about a summery sweater for me to wear to the Caymans?  Again with the quick (no sleeves!), plus it keeps me focused on the fact that I will experience sunlight again the future.  I cast on, and am no longer interested.  It doesn't help that, as a fellow raveler pointed out, the yarn rather resembles a potscrubber when knit up.  I caught some whiff of some re-design of the yarn and that the new version is lovely but I have the potscrubber version.  Insert heavy sigh here.  Why knit it if you already know the project is doomed?  Doooooooomed I tell you.  Doomed.

Yes, friends, it's a case of knitting dysfunction (also known as "KD").  A terrible syndrome characterized by proliferation of UFOs, acts of sudden frogging, inability to obtain buttons for completed projects, and the loss of interest in fibers that you have traditionally enjoyed (a more severe, but related disease is knitting psychosis which involves an aversion to yarn shops and immunity to luxury fibers).  Assuming the disease has not progressed to the psychosis stage, we have only one solution, the  first-line treatment of choice:  Chocolate, Wine, and Cashmere.

I predict a full recovery.

Merry New Year!

You have to say that in a fake African accent, a la Eddie Murphy in Trading Places.  You can actually see the section here.  Love YouTube.

Rhys and I quote this movie all the time.  Ja, from Sweden....Please to help me with my rucksack?  We're not the highest of the brows, what can I say?  Anyway, I finally bought the movie on DVD, so we can watch it EVERY New Year's Eve.  It was the Dukes...it was the Dukes...

With regard to this here holiday:

So my new year's resolution is to deal with the insanity that is my house.  I have no illusions that I will become a neat or organized person.  I just want to be able to find crap when I need it.

I don't know if I told you this, but my MIL is taking the entire family to the Cayman Islands in February.  As you might imagine, I'm deeply psyched, despite any stress that sharing a house with 12 of your closest in-laws might produce.  Dude, it's the Caribbean in February and I'd spend it in a house full of Republicans if I had to.  Oh wait a minute, that's exactly what I'm doing.  Never mind.

Anyway, as you probably know, you now have to have a passport in order to go to the bathroom travel anywhere from the US (and get back in at the end of it), so I had to update mine, which expired in '06.  So I went looking for it.  Hmm.  Not there.  Or there either.  Or in the safe deposit box.  Nor in the Big Pile Of Crap That Is Now In A Box But That Was On The Junk Counter Last Time People Came Over.  You know that box?  It wasn't in that box, or the box from the time before.  I know, I know, life is crazy, what can I say?  Well, then I figured I'd better find my birth certificate, which I always knew where it was before the renovation (you know, the one where we were going to have so much more storage space and shelving and organization?  Yeah that one).  Well, nowhere to be found.  So here I am in mid-December realizing that I might actually be waving goodbye to my family from the airport because I didn't have a freakin' passport.  I ordered a new birth certificate from the City of New York but you can imagine how much confidence I had in the timeliness of that.

My point is that I couldn't find a flipping thing in my damn house and there's no reason for this.  So after returning from nearly a week of Christmas with the Republicans in-laws, I went to the basement and I kicked some paperwork-clutter-disorganization butt and I a) found my passport within an hour and sent my expedited application off for a new passport because dude I am so going to the Caribbean and b) threw away a big pile of toys and old junk and c) organized a bunch of stuff in the basement.  Now I have to go to IKEA to get one of these for the basement and, if I can just stick with it, we're going to have a basement where we can FIND STUFF.  Seriously.  I'm also going to be selling and giving away stash over the next few months.  Watch this spot and my Ravelry feed.  (Do you know that you can subscribe to your Ravelry friends' activity on Bloglines or whatever RSS reader you use?  It's a great way to keep up with friends' projects, and it's interesting to see how virally fellow bloggers queue patterns.)

Solstice Knitting Recap:

When I said I'd be knitting for teachers, a few people questioned my sanity asked if I was completely sure that was a good idea, given my stress level in other areas of life.  That's entirely reasonable, of course, but for some reason that even I don't understand, I actually like doing that kind of knitting.  I think it gives me an excuse to make small, easy projects, and there's no pressure--the recipients aren't expecting knitted gifts so if I don't finish, no one will be disappointed and they won't be my kids' teachers next year, so I'm not setting up any expectations for the future.  I'm not sure why I'm capable of knitting gloves for my kids' teachers but can't seem to do the same for myself, but let's save that for therapy, mkay?  Here's the pile on Solstice eve (missing one pair of cashmere-silk fetching mitts, just for the record...):

Among these, for the most favoritest teacher of all, were a pair of chalice mitts, designed by the fabulous Alison. 

I test-knit these, though the pattern was perfect already.  Hopefully she'll be releasing it soon.  I used Elsebeth Lavold Angora (on closeout at Webs, of course), and it was kind of a marriage made in heaven.  I wasn't happy about this at first, but because I ran out of yarn on the second mitt, I wound up having to buy three more skeins because it would have been wasteful to just use a few yards of the third skein.  So now I can knit some for MEEEE!  Okay, WHEN is a whole other question.  Let's not get into that whole therapy thing again.

Well, I never tell you people anything, it seems, but then when I do I do ramble on don't I?  We've had a wonderfully snowy start to the winter here, and my skis are itching to get on the slopes, but it's not likely it will shoehorn its way into the schedule.  The kids tried it while we were in New Hampshire, but it never got past the frustrating stage for them.  Someday soon.  All this white stuff makes me wish I lived where Ruth lives...

Good Intentions

Today, as you probably know, is the darkest day of the year.  I've mentioned before that my family has had a tradition of lighting candles on this day, and in the lighting, bringing our intentions to light the dark in our lives, and saying aloud our hopes for light and air and warmth as the sun returns.

We've turned the wheel again, or perhaps it has turned us, and merry Solstice to you.

When we started this tradition, life was good.  We were planning a family, and our hopes for the new year were very specific and tangible.  A baby, please.  As that process became more complicated, and hoping got more difficult, I lit candles for keeping our dreams alive, for learning acceptance, and yes, for the small hope that someday we might have our wish come true.

It did, of course, and six years later the kids can light their own candles and dream their own dreams for the coming light.  I love to watch them imagine themselves into the future, even if the wish is more Santa than Solstice.

My intention, though, feels like my own turn of the wheel: not moving forward so much as coming around again.  My intention this year is to have intention.  Somehow in the crush of life and kids and jobs and stuff, life has gotten to be less what I make it, and more what it makes me.  While I have no illusions of control or linearity, perhaps I might be happier, a better friend and mother, and live a more meaningful life, if I moved through it with a bit more purpose, instead of letting myself be buffeted by the winds of the many things and people and forces that act upon my life.

I'm struck by how cyclical this all is, how life is never attained, but rather maintained, and how doing it well never gets easy.  In my twenties I thought I'd figure stuff out.  I went to therapy, I read and thought and imagined who I wanted to be and then went to try to be that person.  And I got sort of close, and it felt pretty good.  The amazing thing is that it's not about doing it once, it's about doing it over and over and over again.  And then not stopping for a moment because if you do, you'll lose all the presence and awareness and wholeness you were going for, and you'll start all over again.  I suppose the Buddhists really do have it right: you can't get attached, because then you're not really doing it, you're just holding on to the idea of doing it.  It's not about the idea of awareness.  It's about awareness.  And it's the work of every moment.

Man, that's not easy.

But I suppose that if anyone ever said anything about life, it's not that it's easy, huh?

So my intention to light this day's dark is this: to carefully kindle the small flame of my intention--of the person I want to be--as I walk through the windy world.  I will step carefully, and my hands will grasp less and shield the flame more.

May your own darkness be lit by the returning sun.  I'll hold your intentions, spoken below in the comments or held close in your hearts, for the coming year.

Bright blessings all...