Know thyself

By 9:45 this morning, I was positively fizzy with overwhelm, and with hardly a backwards glance, I left to take a good run. I knew if I could just get to the gym and on a treadmill, I'd be OK. If I could just start pounding, one foot after the other, the burbling bubbles of anxiety would begin to dissipate and finally be gone. While I was warming up, my innards still a messy, seething mass rather like the pit of asps in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I concentrated on keeping my shoulders back and my core tight. Escapism 101. As my body settled into a rhythm, I shifted focus towards release. Arms, legs, chest, mind. All the to-dos and demands and questions that had spun around me like a furious cyclone since Friday lost speed and trickled away slowly like sand through a bag's minimally-ripped seam. That feeling of letting go, of something weighty leaving your being is thrilling and deeply comforting.

I stopped only because I had a meeting to attend, and I do not like to be late. It was a school meeting, an important one with a definite agenda, but with a wonderful group of people it's always a pleasure to see. We laughed and lunched and the very adultness of it continued to replenish me.

Before I returned home, I ran by the Bethesda Central Farm Market, a Sunday farmers market I don't visit often enough. My mission today was to meet Lynn Voight, one of the proprietors of All Things Olive, a local olive oil (and vinegar and salt) seller that carries excellent stuff. I recently ran out of Frantoio Grove's amazing olive oil and as far as I can tell, All Things Olive is the only source of it in the DC area. Frantoio Grove is a California producer and this oil is spectacular and peppery and makes so many things so much better. I bought two bottles and, while chatting happily with Lynn, tasted a terrific basil-infused oil from Terre Exotique and bought that too.

www.em-i-lis.com

I felt like myself again, really, and thought about how terribly important that was.

You see, I relearned a valuable lesson this weekend, and that is the number of daily activities that tips family fun into overwrought mayhem. We didn't mean to overdo yesterday, but by waking at 6:30am, commencing fun activity #1 at 10:30am, and ending with an evening Wizards game which meant a 9pm bedtime, well, suffice it to say we were all frazzled and done. We never had quite enough time to eat properly nor did I do one thing restorative or just for me (like write, here in this space), unless you count detailing the refrigerator vents. I did find that awfully satisfactory.

Subordinating self is an all-too-frequent mom behavior. It happens because we love our children, because at the beginning and for quite a while they can in no way care for themselves. It easily and insidiously becomes habit. It is, in many ways, a must for any parent, but it's an important behavior to push back on whenever possible. And sometimes, perhaps most importantly, when it seems impossible. Those are usually the times a little self-love is mission-critical.

I've always been a journaler of sorts. Countless diaries and friendship notebooks and inspo quote books line my wake. Old daily planners are littered with encircled Es, noting the days I exercised, and all manner of quotidian minutiae. As I've looked back over those clues to my past and written my way through motherhood since I started this blog nearly four years ago, I have learned so much about myself. I've learned about my life cycles, both macro and more elemental. I've learned about my needs and what restores and straps me and uses me up and makes me glow. I've come to know that self and child satisfaction aren't always in sync and that many things really are "just a phase." For me and them. I see where we were were and are. That intimacy of knowledge is extraordinary, and I don't think it'd be nearly as great had I not written it (or about it) most every day for almost four years.

The benefits of journaling in any way that works for you (diary, letters, blogging..whatever you'll actually stick with) are so tremendous. I am, for example, much better able to inform doctors about my physical rhythms, to anticipate whether I need time with friends or time alone, to know what the real culprit behind any given expression of emotion is (when is sadness not sadness? when it's fatigue or rage or disappointment, actually.), to understand the boys and T. Such knowledge fosters a marvelous sense of peace and control, even when actual control is only an illusion.

The sense of control and the peace that results is in understanding myself and how to tend to me, even if that tending has to come a bit later.

I was furious when I left home this morning. Absolutely seething with rage. But it wasn't rage at all. It was fatigue and a need to quiet myself and think. My body knew that and took me to the nearest appropriate outlet. And I was so grateful and still am. I hope very much to teach my boys to listen to themselves so that they, too, can understand what they are feeling and how they might work through that. If understanding is too grandiose a goal, then perhaps they will at least know how to ask questions of Self, to sit with and reflect on any discomfort they're experiencing so that they can accurately and responsibly tend to that, to learn how to gain peace and fulfillment from within.

Beauty and Blue

Blue washes in, sometimes subtly like a languorous tide, other times racing head-on, an unexpected monster of a wave. Sometimes, within a day, Blue toggles between the two, back and forth, back and forth, like windshield wipers in a storm. Beauty appears to provide light and perspective. Though at times she accentuates that which Blue seeks to expose, Beauty is always welcome because she softens the rough angles of sad and illumines all the good that is still extant. In France today, hateful, hypocritical extremists again tried to silence the very freedom they wish to have. I am so sick of Muslim fanatics. Indeed I am sick of all those who disgrace the god or country they claim to work on behalf of by murdering innocents. No one can say that's reasonable, forgivable or just; those who do are crazy. Literally. And I'm an atheist, for christ's sakes.

Yet, I was heartened by the fact that today's actions were, at least momentarily, drowned out by a cohesive chorus of #jesuischarlie, online and all over Europe. Je suis, aussi.

While driving earlier, I saw a beautiful doe race across a busy intersection. She was so scared that in mid-stride, her knees buckled, and she fell. Ever-graceful and certainly terrified, she righted herself and made it across. My hand flew to my mouth in an involuntary gasp of fear and hope, awe for her instinctive grace under pressure. I have continued to wish that she is alright and worry that she's not.

My heavy heart was given reprieve after school when the boys and I were snuggled in Jack's twin bed. Oliver pants'ed Jack and plunged his nose towards Jack's bum just as Jack farted a dutch oven. The timing was magnificent, and we all dissolved into a grotesquely stunned bout of laughter.

As Blue is wont to do, utter hilarity can be quickly unwoven by melancholy's efficient needles, ruinous beasts working in reverse. I snapped after the third time that a boy tried to listen as I peed, wiggling fingers under the door, waiting so closely outside of it that it swung back to pop my nose when I tried to exit. Anger and frustration and fatigue easily overwhelm equanimity and lightness; disappointment in that fact laps repeatedly over the just-made wound, like the wake made by a speedboat exceeding the bayou's modest limits.

"I really must go," I tell Blue.

"Ah," he says, "but let me tell you just one more thing."

Giant raisins in the Loire

Giggling and eating les raisins secs géants by the handful, we dialed her number. Curious if we'd correctly remembered the U.S. country code, we waited to see if the phone would ring and Claire would answer. She did, and in a blubbery, drunken voice, Tom said, "Mom, help us solve an argument: what did King Wenceslas look down upon?" "The Feast of Stephen. Why? Where are you?" she replied with good humor.

"What a sport," I thought, while cursing under my breath because her answer meant Tom was right.

We were staying in the guest house of a vineyard deep in France's Loire Valley. Amsterdam was our home that summer, and we took as many European excursions as we could, knowing that such an opportunity might not come around again. Newlyweds, every jaunt seemed the height of romantic spontaneity, even if we were swindled here or stuck in a dingy train station there.

Our week in the Loire involved no such challenge because it is beautiful and great wine and crottins of fresh goat cheese are everywhere. Going there was my idea, a way to satisfy my dream of drinking Sancerre every day while at the same time exposing Tom to a place he'd never been nor expressed much interest in. "The French?" he'd sniffed, unknowingly. "Aren't they rude?"

"Bah," I said, "Just wait until you try the cheese, drink their wine, live there for a brief bit."

Before our trip to the Loire (and Normandy), I teased him with a long weekend in Paris. From the first crêpe au Nutella et à la banane, bought from a street vendor on the banks of the Seine, he was hooked. We traversed Paris by the mile, a walk of epic proportion punctuated by breakfasts of warm croissants and coffee, picnic lunches in lush parks and boozy dinners at wine bars and neighborhood haunts.

After Paris, it wasn't hard to convince Tom of the need to return to France. This time, once arriving at Gare du Nord direct from Amsterdam's Centraal Station, we rented a car and headed south toward Sancerre, embarking on a circular path that would let us experience the Loire Valley and some of Normandy before landing back in Paris and heading home.

We'd wanted to stay on vineyard grounds if possible, and at that time, the "agriturismo" movement was hot. It was somewhere near Vouvray, which sits near the Loire River and almost to Tours if you've left Bourges roughly two hours back, that we checked in to the chambre d'hote from which the infamous King Wenceslas call was made.

As an aside, I should tell you that when traveling, Tom and I like to stay casual. We have, for the past eleven years, prided ourselves on: finding and frequenting the best markets and grocery stores wherever we are because we prefer to rent apartments or rooms rather than hotels and then eat breakfast at "home" and/or lunch via picnic; eating at a restaurant's bar (versus a table) whenever possible, especially for dinner; learning the word for "sale" in a multitude of languages -sconto in Italy, solde in France, etc; and adhering to the "See it or so be it" mantra we coined in Vienna. We did not like Vienna at all and became bored with trying to find reasons to love it. Hence, see it or so be it.

Anyway, we had, on the outskirts of Bourges, stopped at a Carrefour which we'd decided was our preferred French grocery. You can't always go to fresh markets, you know? There, our eyes, palates and stomachs had thrilled at the bags of giant raisins - les raisins secs géants- primarily because of their sheer size. Literally giant. It was on those that we were snacking when we drunkenly called Tom's mom.

Why on earth were we talking about King Wenceslas? Because we were planning a trip to Prague, Budapest and Vienna (the very trip during which we came up with "See it or so be it.") and got to talking about Wenceslas Square in Prague, named after Saint Wenceslas who's the patron saint of Bohemia, probably because Wenceslaus 1 was the Duke of Bohemia before being assassinated. Anyway, long, circular story, but whilst talking about Wen Square, Tom started singing the carol, Good King Wenceslas, and I disputed the then-ridiculous-sounding line telling us that he looked down on the Feast of Stephen.

And that is why we called Tom's mom while drunk and eating giant raisins and talking randomly about Wenceslas while in a guest house in the middle of Val de la Loire.

To be continued.