I’ve added some much needed pants to SophieBoo:

Handsome little shirts soon to follow!!

I know it’s been forever since I’ve posted with any kind of regularity.

Growing a toddler - this toddler - is taking every bit of my focus and energy.  Hank is a beautiful, funny, playful little person, but she is also a strong-willed, tantrum-throwing asshole of a child.  I love her.  Her face is like a miracle.  Her sense of humor is shockingly developed.  Her sense of self is outrageously sharp.

But she is a toddler.  A toddler, not like her sister was, but like how normal toddlers are…with their physically expressed frustration and adamant commitment to all things taboo.  When she is good, she is very very good, but when she is bad, she is horrid.  With a capital HORRID.

So I find myself blogging in my head as the days creep along, chanting like a mantra: today I’ll post something, today I’ll write. But then there is laundry and vacuuming and toys to be picked up and a young lady to grow and dry cleaning to collect and dinner to be made.  My spare time is slight at best.

Over the last four months or so, I have been using that spare time to follow through on a project which I’ve been considering since Hank was six months old:

This new adventure is huge for me.  This is the first time in my life I have gotten excited about turning a creative idea into a business and seen it through.  This is also a coming home of sorts.  My grandmothers were both seamstresses, and I grew up at the knee of my mother’s mother, surrounded by thread and fabric scraps, sewing dresses for my Barbies and embroidering hankies to keep busy.

I was twenty-one the first time I used a sewing machine.  My grandmother died just months before my wedding and left me her machine.  Terrified, but determined, I made ring pillows for our ceremony, which were far from perfect.  And yet lovely, because they brought my grandmother closer on that important day.

Five years later, I was forced to buy a machine of my own when the tension knob on my grandmother’s machine broke.  By then I was steadily quilting, but still totally oblivious about how to really use a machine.  I used my machine every day and every day I felt frustrated by the limits of my confidence and ability.  It wasn’t until I’d gone to pastry school, determined to become a cake designer, and started sewing for Hank that something really clicked and I got it.  I understood that it takes a little bit more than thread and fabric to sew.

When I sit at my machine, I feel a symbiosis with both my process and my ancestral pool.  It’s a beautiful way to use the few quiet moments I ferret away for myself.

Whether you are looking to shop or not, I hope you’ll take a minute to drop in on the shop and share some of the love.

Thanks.

Today Sophie tore her shorts while playing on a boulder in the park.  Which she didn’t notice until walking down the stairs to exit the school at the end of the day.

On Wednesday afternoon, which it was, Sophie takes an art class.

I spaced and realized at 3P.M. that I was ten minutes late picking my daughter up from school.  When I arrived and found her in the auditorium, where the children not picked up must wait, she walked carefully toward me - backpack hanging low over the tear, tank top pulled down as far as it could decently go - and sadly explained her plight.  She was an eight year old girl with a big rip along one side of her backside.

As I walked her to the art studio, I told pointless stories about my own clothing mishaps in childhood and proposed a variety of solutions to the problem.  None of which made her significantly more comfortable.

Next door to the studio is an overpriced fru-fru shop that smells of fancy soaps.  While Sophie ate her snack and glued herself to a chair, I found and purchased a size small adult skirt and a safety pin.

Crisis averted.  My daughter giggling with glee and relief.

Sometimes motherhood is just this.

Apparently, we were dead here for a while and I couldn’t even log in.

I’m hoping to be back on a regular basis, now that I can be.

That’s all.

Turns out, two years of daily knitting can damage your eyeballs.

2010 sucks.

That is the shorter story of my life right now.

In the longer story, I have spent maybe twelve days with my husband since the new year.  I have slept in our bed, alone, for nineteen nights; give or take.  I have fallen into deep dark holes again, for the first time since I started taking medication a year ago, because I am lonely and overwhelmed and sad about how powerless I am and how pointless John’s absences feel.  I’ve cried and hurt and crawled up out of the holes to find a bright, livable day ahead, only to feel exhausted within hours of waking.  Because it’s all just much too much.  I vacuum every other day and do laundry without cease and clean up toys and cook lame dinners and change diapers on a child who bucks and screams every time and help with homework and try to listen and love and be here where I’m needed.  And then there is nothing left.  John comes home from Toronto, where his current client is based, and I have nothing.  I have spent too many days with walls up, blocking out the actual existence of my husband when I can, so that I can push along.  So that I can get the dishes clean and the diapers changed and the kids dressed and just get through it.  Just get through it.

It’s far more painful to know that I’m sad because I need to be.  Because life just hurts right now.  That this isn’t a chemical problem, because this isn’t that kind of sadness.

Add to this the new twist that I may have alienated my dearest, most loved friend who is herself going through a major life upheaval at the moment.

And so, what to do?  Even the soft flow of wool through my fingers doesn’t warm me now.  I knit mechanically…painfully slow and uncoordinated feeling, my mind always elsewhere.  My heart not in it.  The girls are brilliant distraction, but then there is school and naps and bedtime.  There is too much time to sit here and be alone.  Which is so different from being by myself.

I often feel like I am living someone else’s life right now.  Living in a ridiculously large apartment that is too expensive and too difficult to maintain in a city that I have already left in my mind.  This isn’t how I want to live.  This isn’t what we should be doing.  But how to get to that next place?  How to change it all?  Where to go?

And if it can’t be changed, not for years yet, how do I find peace in the right now?

I wish that just one moment of my girls, at their respective ages, at this time in our lives, could be captured and preserved.

I wish that I could give to them, years from now, the experience of themselves that I am so fucking lucky to have everyday.

I want to hold out to them this beautiful thing that is their sisterhood and say: look at how sweet and silly and loving and stupid this time was.

How very precious.

Needless to say, the last few months have kept me damn busy.

I miss writing. I miss clearing my head and recording all manner of irrelevant minutiae.

When it is not just days before Thanksgiving, and I am not cleaning, cooking and trying to work up a pair of mittens all at once, I will try to recover the time that’s passed.

For now, I’ll just say hello.  Again.  And, thank you.

Just as quickly as the stormy shitty times between us set in, Sophie and I are back to rights.

She is still herself, but clearly more willing to heed my words before things get ugly.

I am still myself, but so much more realistic in my expectations of her.  Of us.

Writing out the worst of it, and later articulating it more clearly, was, as I thought, incredibly helpful.  I don’t just write my posts.  I read them.  And reread them.  And sometimes I re-reread them.  Then, I think…a lot.

Because the quickest way to anger is fear.  Fear of what one feels and society won’t accept, fear of finding security and understanding, and just plain old fear.  Motherhood, it’s responsibility, it’s inherent trust (both your own and your child’s), is way fucking scary.  But if you face that fear, if you reveal it and examine it and even accept it in all of its unpleasantness, you can learn from it.  You can grow from it.

Then you can get over yourself and see your darling eight year old for the glowing human being she actually is: