{by Mary of Giving Up on Perfect}

We sat shoulder to shoulder in a tiny dorm room around a tiny TV, watching one of our favorite movies. Just as Johnny marched over to Baby and pulled her out of the corner, our friend Jared walked in the room.

As he took in the room, looking from one girl to the next . . . to the next . . . to the next, he said, “What is wrong with you guys?”

Blinking, we looked up at him and realization dawned. Every single one of us was staring at the screen with a [ridiculous] dreamy look in our eyes. It was like we were in a trance.

The same kind of romance trance I slip into when I read romance novels.

{by Amy Whitley}

It’s staying light a bit longer each day, but we still have a long way to go until spring. I can tell because I still have to switch my car headlights on driving the kids home from the karate studio or the soccer fields, still have to flip the porch light before calling them in from the neighborhood streets. In another lifetime (which wasn’t too long ago), I’d sit out these winter evenings indoors, the kids too young for unsupervised neighborhood roaming, my own motherhood too new to risk a public toddler meltdown or unscheduled nap after nightfall. From my watch at the kitchen window, the sun would disappear behind the city long before dinner was served, and something heavy and panicky would rise in my chest and sink in my belly as the outside darkness closed over me like a blanket, locking me into a fate of 5 pm until 7 pm with only my babies for company.

It would have been so easy to switch on Backyardigans and switch off myself, but most days, we resisted the lure of the TV. Instead, I’d play cars on the mat in the boys’ yellow-walled room, listening to the vrooom-vroooom vibrating against their lips, then to the bubbles blown in the bath, the run of the water from the faucet as they brushed their tiny, pearly teeth. I’d find Hidden Pictures, change diapers, press playdough between my hands. I’d pause to find blankies and binkies before scraping the dinner dishes and setting them on the sideboard to dry.

We were on our own most evenings back then, my husband needing to work late every weeknight, every weekend. (I still can’t believe we ever got used to that, but we did.) As the clock inched toward 7 pm, I’d finish the forgotten loads of laundry on the bed, each t-shirt and burp cloth and OshKosh overall cooled and wrinkled in the heap. The blackened windows would reflect my face—too tired for my twenties—and I’d wonder how to make it another hour. Another twenty minutes. Another ten.

{by Jo of Mylestones}

Sometimes I feel like the pit of my stomach is an airtight word container, precariously latched, desperately shoving against my heart to spill onto the open page. Sometimes my soul must labor to breathe because of thoughts lodged in my lungs, freed only in the coughing compulsion of tippity-tapping on the keys.

I don’t always feel it, but when I do, it nags at me until I can’t think of anything else but letting it out. And most of the time, I don’t even know what it is I’m unleashing, until it is there in front of me in words I can finally read.

But that’s nothing new, right? Just a common ailment of a writer? (Or in this case, of a girl who is still reluctant to call herself a writer or even admit that she wants to be one.)

What troubles me is how this feeling gets in the way of my daily life, how it diseases the moment I’m in. And what troubles me more is how in my melancholy, I savor these symptoms as if it is soothing to be sick.

I despise how easily I can disappear into my head and miss the rich flavor of the moment. I know I won’t be offered another taste of those sixty seconds, yet I persist in fasting from the present.

It strikes me at the library, surrounded by foam puzzles and board books. It strikes me at a party, surrounded by friends and frivolity. It strikes me on a run, in the car, in the middle of a conversation. It strikes me, and I think, “I must start writing, or I will explode.” (I am wrong about this. I will not explode. All that ever happens is that I grow weary of feeling on the verge of explosion.)

And here is the bottom line, if I’m really confessing, if I’m really naming the fear. I’m afraid that if I don’t let the container spring wide open and write, then I will never know what the deep-down me is trying to say. And if I don’t find out, if I (the daily I) do not listen to her, then no one will. She will never be heard.

{By Schmutzie of Schmutzie.com}

My past year was filled with some heavy stuff. I went through depression, which is not abnormal for me in the least. If you look back at the prevalence of depression throughout my life since I was about three years old, you would think it was one of my most favourite things ever. It’s not, but there’s been lots of it, and there was definitely enough of it over this past year.

Then, I also faced the ugly reality that is the trap of aging with my grandmother and my grandfather. I came to a point where I finally had to throw up my hands and admit to alcoholism. I walked away from my main social circle in order to hermit myself away from almost ten years of habitual living to quit drinking. Basically, 2010 had me me quaking in my metaphorical boots about mortality and the brevity of life while turning myself inside out both habit-wise and socially.

I had to think and feel and do things that were hard for me to think and feel and do, and I felt like I was pulling out my own teeth a lot of the time. Somehow, though, this turned 2010 into one of the best years of my life. It really did.

There is a lot of positive-thinking noise about learning how to say Yes! to things in your life, but saying Yes! is often best done by judiciously and sometimes painfully say No!, and 2010 was the year in which I said No! a lot every day so that I had the ability to say Yes! in other areas.

Some Pollyanna out there is going to pop up and try to tell me that all those No!s were really Yes!ses in disguise, and to that person I say Screw you. Those No!s were No!s, and I know, because they were hard and awful and dragged me through the mud face down, and that mud had rocks in it, and it was rainy, and it was cold, too, and I had a really shitty time of it. I love those No!s, though. I claim them. They made me.

Anyway, I was lying in bed this morning reflecting on the mindfuck that was 2010 and wondering what it meant that I pretty much just walked away from a whole life, and what it meant for me that I once left a fiancee and did all kinds of drugs and had a doomed love affair and suffered life in the closet and was diagnosed with all manner of psychological illnesses in the 1990s and became an alcoholic and quit my office job for no job and had cancer and on and on and on as all the crazy stuff life throws at a person is wont to just keep happening.

(By D. Smith Kaich Jones)

the ever-wonderful michael was telling me about this thing that happened, and that’s because, well, remember? he said, that she is married to that guy? and this happened?, and then a while back when that was going on, there was this kid who . . . and his grandfather bought him this toy airplane, and he was friends with another kid, and did i ever mention that they moved across the street from these people who . . . ? and all those stories were separate from one another, but not really, they just looked that way on the surface, they were really all tied together, because that’s how stories work, at least stories in conversations, stories told by real people.

that’s what i think i do. at least that’s what i try to do. i start out telling you the story of painting the front room at work, and that reminds me of what i felt when i was buying the paint, the paint was yellow, honey colored, and that reminded me of autumn, and i remembered what i felt when i was standing in the paint store, waiting while the paint was mixed, lots of time for thinking and looking out the windows at the leaves falling away from trees, at the different blue of the sky, lots of time for remembering last autumn and where i would have been on a saturday morning, lots of time for wondering if my need to paint a few walls was a working out the grief i still feel for maggie-the-cat, remembering that’s what i did when my father died, not comparing the two deaths, just thinking about how people deal with grief and moving on, which is not the same thing as “getting over it”, it’s just moving to a different place in the grief. and i move from that thought back to autumn, which always gives me the blues, just not outside the window, and really it is late autumn that makes me feel this way; early autumn is just a phrase here in east texas, just a mellowing of summer, and i think about the leaves leaving, the turning away from the world that we all do; we go inside, even here where it doesn’t get all that cold ~ it gets cold enough ~ and i remember that that night is turn-back-the-clocks-night, an earlier darkness now, and i move from that thought back to maggie, back to my father, and i am filled with missing.

{by Kristen from We are THAT Family}

When I sat in his closet-sized home in the middle of Africa, I couldn’t take my eyes off the pathetic interior or ignore the dripping rain on my head.

I tried not to imagine the “community toilet” he shared with neighbors adjoined by paper-thin walls or how far he walked each way to school everyday, in the dark, both ways.

The peace on his face was undeniable and the light that radiated from his eyes filled the dark room of his orphan-led home.

I didn’t understand how he could be so content with so little. And I couldn’t stop the question, “Why are you so happy? Why aren’t you afraid?”

He looked at me as if I’d missed it entirely and said, “Because I have Jesus.”

He didn’t say anything else. It was a heavy statement. It was enough.

He was right, I had missed it. Entirely.

I equate Jesus to comfort and blessings. And when I sat in a hovel, a young boy called home, void of every comfort, I was envious of his contentment.

I returned to a lifestyle with every blessing, only wanting more.

I add Jesus like salt and pepper to a tasteless dish.

He isn’t the main course, just an extra on the side.

Jesus isn’t enough for me.

Put yr right hand on the nape of the neck and glide it up upwards to the back of the head.
Open yr hand wide, fingers lacing between hair or gliding on soft bald skin.
Direct eye contact always. Keep a distance between yr bodies but lean in ever so slightly.
Tilt yr head and let yr lips part. Move yr eyes up and down in tiny glances.
Let yr pupils dilate and stare swoony onwards.

{By Laurie of Laurie Writes}

I’m sitting in the bookstore trying to grab ahold of the words before they leave me. The game club of Maryland is gathered here, and the bookish men and women at the table next to me are playing a card name whose name I can’t remember, even though I recognize it on sight. I once sat across the table from someone and learned to play it myself, wondering why I was there when it made no sense to be, beyond the fact that I have a tendency to put myself in risky places when I stubbornly and often stupidly feel it’s worth it.

Names dance across my screen – words and facts and possibilities that I’m trying to file alphabetically under what makes sense, whittling them down into a decision that lets me sleep at night, even if I have to sell my car or walk strange city streets alone and mostly unafraid to do it. Sometimes I don’t think I can, that I’ll just let the waves of the next thing wash over me until I’m that half mile down the beach that you float before you even realize it, when all of a sudden the familiar umbrella and your people are specks down the shore, waving you back if you choose to pay attention.

When Virginia Woolf walked into the water of the River Ourse and didn’t emerge, the stones weighing down her pockets, I can’t imagine that no one saw, but maybe that’s just because someone has usually been watching me – not known to be a strong swimmer. Still, I’ve never been truly afraid of the ocean, and can spend more time than you’d believe floating on my back, finding the mellow spot past the breakers where it’s warm, going up and over the tiny waves, chasing the sun on the tops of my legs and my chest and my face.

On that same odd trip to the beach when a truly very sweet man and I played that card game, I took a photograph of an exceptional sunset. When I finally made it to the sand the next day, I was alone. It was cold out, walking into the water out of the question, except dipping my toes in to say I touched the ocean, a personal ritual regardless of the season or temperature. I sat on the sand with a notebook on that cold March day, and there was no one around for a good distance. It occurred to me that at that moment, temperature aside, I could walk into the water and just not stop, nothing on the other side but China – a concept we’d been taught as children digging holes for sand castles. We ignored the barrier of Europe and Africa beyond the Atlantic, even the idea of the Far East as ephemeral as air then.

I remember writing this idea of immersion down that day, feeling guilty for even thinking about it, knowing I’d never do it, knowing as sure as I sat there that later that day I’d be getting in a car and heading home, gazing out the window and wishing things different, but far away from this idea and the ocean itself. Still when I thought it, I wondered if, miles or just yards away as it happened that people who cared about me were, would they feel it? Was there an imperceptible shift in the air around the people close to them when people did things like walk into rivers not intending to emerge? Especially when they succeeded? There had to be, I thought – at least a palpitation or a whisper of an itch. But maybe not.

{by TKW of The Kitchen Witch}

Three weeks before her third birthday, Miss D. starts seeing monsters. My fierce warrior child, who fears nothing, now cowers in corners and under covers. Monsters usually appear around 3am. I wake with my heart pounding in my throat, hot with the strength of her scream.

“Monsters! Help me Mommy! I scared!”

I fumble for lights, footing and child simultaneously in the night and realize that I’m just as scared as she is.

**

I was almost in my third trimester with Miss D. when the newspaper was late. This drives my part-German self crazy. I need coffee and the paper to make me human in the morning; without them I am foul. Sourly, I resorted to the television. Mornings suck hard enough without some perky anchor with teeth too good to be true telling you what traffic’s like Out There.

I flicked the screen on just in time to see the second tower of The World Trade Center descend into rubble and smoke.

I thought it was a joke at first, or some weird movie stunt. Everybody did. You just don’t believe things like that can happen, particularly if you’re my age and have missed most of the good tragedies like JFK and World Wars and even Lennon, who I was too little to know.

I spent the rest of September 11 like most Americans did, grotesquely tuned-in. I channel-surfed maniacally, looking for answers or truth or the latest horrible picture, but it was a one-handed quest. The other hand was glued to my swollen belly,and I remember looking down at it and and thinking, “What on Earth have I done?”