I don't really know where else to put this

*Friends and family have asked for pictures of our house. Sorry, you will have to wait. I have to operate chronilogically so I am sticking some super-radioactive journal entries in as place-holders. You don't have to read them, and I have to forwarn you that they aren't inclusive of "the experience" of moving. However, someday when I look back on the transition from point A to point B I want to remember how it all really went down. I guess then, these are mostly for me.


Date: Somewhere at the beginning of July

My inner ego enjoys the body-snatching of writting untensils. In its ink and plastic form it finds nothing more exciting than teasing the lined paper of my journals. My hand, the guide, plays a literary cupid and has the power to tame the cadence of a sentence and make words waltz. Picture me, locked in my closet, huddled under the coveres, laying on the grass in the shade, or even between stop lights in the car, penning my thoughts and trying, best as I can, to make it origonal so that someday when I re-read them (cause fools, those things are not just for my posterity) I will in hind-sight find some jewel of humor, faith, or providence.

Still, there are times old adages and cliches seem so easy and offer the easiest explaination for what I want to say. I can't help but feeling a small bit of disapointment pool in the creative side of my brain when this happens. Yet-- I digress and do so now:

I am coming apart at the seams. I am fraying at the edges. I am totally unstitched. I wish I could say it in a completly origonal way. But, there you go. In a way, perhaps, that can be universally understood.

I am the loose end of a sweater, flossing the claws of a facile feline riding the end of a catnip indulgence.

Every little tug with razer teeth and and sandpaper tongue, every carefree batting with paws, and every tail-chasing scramble from this phantam cat leaves me losing my shape. I am completely undone.

Oddly, I have submitted to this with calmness and resolve. I may even have the presense of mind to put on a long-sleeved shirt backwards and ask you to knot-tie the arms before I go sit in the corner and foam at the mouth. This calmness about my insanity also begs for a way to outsmart the crazy. It is probably pride, but I have to say it this way: Dumber people than me have raised children--WHY THEN!!! Why? is it so hard for me? I like being a mom. Truly. I don't want any other job. (Masochistic???) How is it possible that this job is so hard?

***I have the luxery now, of piecing together several journal entries. Life is positively less stressful now, and I no longer feel this way. (To the same extent.) I will admit, though I tried to keep life steady, it was most definitly not steady, or regular, or usual while we were moving, living in a hotel, and driving all over tarnation. (Where in the heck is Tarnation?) Regardless,: Hindsight. Now that is a keeper.

I return to the topic of Things That Make Me Fray:

1. That the enggineers of elevators thought it prudent to put the emergency bell, with its pretty picture and temptimg glowing lights at the exact height of an independent fifteen month year old. And that, that elevator would be the only feasible method to arrive at our room which we exited at the most frequent of bases because hotel rooms have little in the way of entertainment to toddlers other than phones, trampolines (a bed?) and things that can break.

2. That my car keys only disapear when I am loaded up with groceries on both forearms, a three year old is hanging on my back, another is running towards traffic, and it is either very hot, a complete downpour, or someone has to pee. (Parenting note: Someone always has to pee. Someone really should have told me this.)

3. Speaking of which, is it possible to alighn the Cosmo's so that these emergencies of the bathroom sort wouldn't happen when a shopping cart is completely full ("Sorry, we don't have a public bathroom here") or when it is exactly our turn in line, or when everyone has finally been buckled into the car.

This journal entry ends upbruptly. Sorry. That is just the way it is.


July somthing, 2011

We are staying at a hotel on Lindsay St. that intersects with Ut St, but I am currently three blocks away at the falls part of Idaho Falls, listening to a liquid marching band high-step down a parade of rocks.

Stillness. The sound of nature. Somewhere my children are sleeping. (Can I get a hallejueah!)

I feel my heart growing a velcro film, grasping on to this place like it was my native state. Then again, at the corning of Lindsey and Utah, I should be home--shouldn't I?


Late July, 2011

Once you love writing--not for the persuesive power of words but for its soul archeology, you feel a temptation to write every word of every thought. (Can't l e t that t h ou gh t go!) I'm tempted to do that right now--just to empty myself of all the emotions so that I can be refilled, with something sweet instead of toxic. The thought came to me that it would be a mistep to write everything...

Perhaps writing is like composing. I shouldn't flourish about in sixteenth notes and not leave a place for a half rest.

(half rest)

I want to tell you (speaking to journal) of an old sadness that has visited. (The kind of visitor that comes, wastes your time, eats your food, and leaves your house a mess).

While cooped up in the hotel I saw a small chunk of a BYU Dancers ompany project on TV. It was about the pioneers and though I had heard about the project conceptually before I graduated, I have to admit I had not thought much of the idea at all. It was mesmorizing, awesome, beautiful, heartwarming, and artistic. ** Elizabeth. If you read this: You guys were amazing! I would sell all of my hair to have been able to dance in it.

The feelings I felt afterward presented me with two problems:

Why am I so weak? I have struggled with motherhood the last few months. Traveling has been such a challenge with kids. I completly lost my grip. (Do other moms relate with this? All the plans, methods, procedures, that help your family balance just desolve and then you are totally lost?) It isn't just my kids behavior I am ashamed of, it is also mine.

So many of the people I love are going through very challenging trials right now. The combined anxiety of it all sometimes gives me some heavy self-pity cargo, but is my struggling of keeping balance in my life at a hotel even comparable to the pioneer struggle of keeping children from starving or freezing?

Counterpoint to that, I feel so many good things in my life, to the point of extravagance. Still, I feel a listlisness as I wait for good things to happen to those I love, and hope that my patented version of faith doesn't have a defective part.

Before I forget to mention, my second and last complaint about the dance I saw was that it undressed a wound of unfullifilled dance dreams that scabs over, but if I poke at it to often it festers and bleeds. Sigh. There is season for everything. Even a season to dance.