My girls.

I want to write about you, and take a picture of you, and remember you just like that, a wisp, a tuft of a girl wafting through your world of colors into mine. You have an insistent way of inserting yourself, you, this tiny light that should have no weight at all -- physically you don't and yet the love that pushes its way into my arms, stubbornly, is heavy and comfortable. You smile and nuzzle; you kiss my arm, you say, "Mama," and it's just this statement of fact. I hold you there, all your colors swirling in the circle of my arms until you shimmer away, and in a blink you are gone again. Your energy! Your determination! You wear it like armor and wear it to inquire about the world, and I want to give you everything I know. But I know better. I know. Sometimes you stare up into the sky and laugh loud, for no reason that I can see, and I know you already know more than I do.

::

A second with you is the life cycle of a star sped up: a sudden glimmer in the dark, a consistent light, a bright flare, a fade back to dark. But you; you contain a whole galaxy in you, and so it's all the stars in the world contained in your tiny body. In the morning the stars are being born in you, and through the day some die and some are reborn, and it is this constant process so that to be near you is to always gaze in wonder at the life flaring inside of you. How exhausting! For you, for me. I am powerless against the sheer force of you because everything you do, you do intensely. In the face of sadness you are the saddest slip of nothing the world has ever seen, and in happiness you are joy wrapped in rainbows, shooting sparklers. Only in love are you gentle, and quick to give as you get. For all your fire and all your life you are content to arrange yourself as part of my own skin, and all quiet and still, whisper "I love you, too," before I can even say a thing.

Getting to the other side. Part 2.

I didn't mean to leave the last post hanging in mid-air for so long. I'm afraid it's built up into something larger than it should be at this point. I imagine scads (ha!) of people waiting with bated breath for the big reveal, when really there is no big reveal, just this: How did my sanity well get depleted? Because I haven't been going to church.

I don't mean church in the chapel-God-folded hands-Bible-prayerful sense. I mean church in the place you go to get connected to your spirit, or a spirit, or something that's bigger than you, or whatever you want to call it.

And for me, of course, that place is outside, even in this wretched, everlasting, scorching hot blast of summer. Because after a long day at work, switching into parenting mode at home, and trying to take care of all the nonsense that needs to get taken care of at home, trudging through 100+ degree, drought-ridden weather sounds absolutely awful.

Except, I realized as I drove home from work one afternoon, there is beauty in the heat -- something affirming -- in being forced out of your comfort zone by the blaze of nature doing what it does this time of year. Beauty in the enduring, in standing below a canopy of trees, the air buzzing with cicadas, in feeling sweat roll down your back. This is work, I think, driving home in my un-air conditioned car. This is discipline. Not succumbing to the terrible pull of the temperature outside, even while you feel like your face is on fire. Not letting it tear your mood down, not raging at it, not feeling bitter because you are dealing with it. It just is. Why fight nature? It always wins.

Upon this realization I called my husband and told him I'd figured out what my damn problem was already, and that we needed to go outside after dinner, even if it was a short hike. And so we did. We did every day that week, and have since, even if it is just playing in the water hose in our backyard, or driving to the hiking/biking trail at the main part of River Legacy, taking a jaunt down to the river, or traipsing down the familiar paths near our home.The very first night of Operation Go Outside Already was a little piece of magic. Because it was hot and we were sweating, and my girls wanted to run the trails with the dog. So my husband took the lead and they dashed down the trail together, and I lingered -- taking pictures, noticing little, beautiful things -- and then ran to catch up with them. We were pink-cheeked and sweaty, but our muscles were singing and our eyes were open and we looked up and around us, and we noticed everything.

And already I felt better.

Getting to the other side. Part 1.

I have been in a funk lately, quite the opposite of celebrating anything, much less lovely. There have been the normal life aggravations and some old-style Madeleine blowups and maybe a little extra dose of circumstantial stress piling on top of it all.

All of the normal stress, plus the bonus stress, piled up and up and up until Saturday night when Madeleine declared quite loudly that she hates me. She doesn't like me at all. She, with her hands clamped over her ears, firmly stated that she would no longer be listening to anything I said. Because of all the hate.

Here we are again, I thought in resignation and outrage all at once, and we battled our way through the evening until she fell into an exhausted sleep, and I fell onto the couch to drink myself into an exhausted oblivion. In the early part of the evening, I sobbed to Wayland, "The worst part of it is that when she gets like that, I just don't feel it at all -- no desire at all to help her. She says she hates me and I want to retreat and let her fend for herself."

I don't do that, of course. I'm there for her no matter what, and some dim part of me recognizes that Mad is actually at her most vulnerable when she lashes out like she does, so I stay and try to be calm. It works out eventually. It always does.

"But," I sobbed to Wayland, "Right now I feel like I have nothing left to give her. Nothing to offer. No patience or understanding. It's like I have this store of maternal energy and it's all dried up. Really it's not just that, even. It's everything. I'm just drained."

"My old boss used to call that his sanity well," Wayland said.

"Yes! My sanity well!" I said. "My sanity well is all dried up and I have no reserves to tap into. I'm a woman on the brink!" I meant for this to be kind of jokey, with all its dramatic flair, but really I kind of meant it. At that moment, staring dully down at my lap and fighting back tears, I didn't really see how to fix anything. Everything felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Well, we have to figure out how to refill the well," Wayland said.

"I agree, but I don't know what that is," I mused. I ran through the options. I'd been exercising regularly, eating pretty well, reading a great book....all these things were usually quite restorative for me. But not lately.

"There's nothing," I finally muttered.

Luckily I was wrong about that. The completely obvious solution would not present itself to me until two days later.

You kiss me, I kiss you.

Negligible senescence.

There is something deep and mysterious churning in you. You want to call it dark but it feels like light, golden and shimmering somewhere at its core. It's all this possibility, all this hope. You feel it at the base of your throat, like choking. It's three seconds before sobbing, or three seconds before laughing long and loud, shrieking into an expanse of sky, feeling small, feeling big, feeling large enough to hold up the sky, and foolish enough to try. Brave enough to try. These words mean the same thing. Here it is: A day in the life, a life in the day. You've got to try for something, because that churning in your chest, that feeling swirling there, is what's holding up the sky. Imagine if you let the sky fall. You just can't.