A few things have happened since my last post, all contributing reasons to why it's been awhile.
1. Kiddo 2.0 & Husband joined us in New Town. Turns out, living as a family in a New Town requires as much patience and courage and compassion as living solo in New Town. Despite the laundry and groceries and logistics, the blessings of being back together are huge.
2. I had a "laproscopic cholecystectomy" done last week. In case you haven't hear the term "laproscopic cholecystectomy," let me orient you. It does NOT mean "magical new age medical procedure that consists of a few incisions smaller than paper cuts (I actually-for-real read that) that allows your gall bladder to be painlessly removed from your body by gentle, tiny fairies (I didn't-actually-for-real read that). It DOES mean "an medical procedure that leaves you waking up in your bed, wondering if you were on the losing end of one of these fancy fencing matches:
It's my understanding that the procedure has evolved significantly and the recovery time has decreased dramatically. And I'm grateful. For health insurance and pain meds and attentive partners. But mostly I'm just grumpy and impatient and tired and wondering about the logistics of waistbands and bra straps. 3. Which is silly. Turns out, in the 4 days I was dead to the world, things more awful than waistbands and bra straps have been happening.
Globally- Hurricanes. Multiple hurricanes that rip off roofs and flood cities, leaving devastation for the next hurricane to pick up and whirl around.
Nationally- DACA. I'm not in a mental state to get into much of a discourse here. But here's what I will say. I recently finished the book All the Light We Cannot See. It is 531 pages and the first 500 are a devastating, raw portrayal of life leading up to the Holocaust. A time in history when 1 person convinced lots of people there was a master race & all others should be systematically annihilated. The fictional story took place over 80 years ago, but it felt so familiar that I had to stop several times. Somehow, I made it to the last 31 pages when things looked up enough to remind me that humans do ok by each other sometimes.
Locally- Turns our, our state is facing a significant financial crisis that's looking particularly abysmal for some of our most vulnerable populations. I've encountered people and agencies on the front lines of education, mental health, and corrections that are simply at a loss of how we are going to keep babies, students, communities, and elders safe.
I kept putting off writing because I feel crabby and the world feels scary. But, only writing about happy safe things doesn't feel particularly, ahem, authentic. So. Here we are. I'm going to resist the urge to add a little sugar coat in the form of optimism or sarcasm or sweet story. Here's what I am going to do. I'm going to sign off and spend a few minutes creating (shhh....working on a knitting gift). I don't know what after that. What baby steps do you take towards hope?
