Moveable Feast with relish

As we all know, I'm grounded, from landing on the ground, so I'm writing, and reading, and not wasting all those hours out frolicking with birds and horse hooves and crossing rivers and looking for trouble out in the wilderness where really there is no trouble. Just quiet.

And I can see here, why I've been sad because Nathan is at college and Emma is slowly feathering her college nest, plucking feather by feather herself away from where she's been all her life and making a nest of the future somewhere out THERE.

It's a tragic thing, which they should give you a brochure about in the hospital giving birth. You are going to slam the brakes on your life, focus completely on these little creatures, take very few chances, just feed, sleep, follow, cheer up, laugh, cry, chase then as they get older drive them then let them drive then listen to teenagers cuss flagrantly and yell and frolic (if you're lucky enough to have them home) and then while it looks like you've done nothing but mold these people, you've built this castle, this moveable feast, and then the feast moves off and it's silent.

But worse silent because it was SO NOISY, and all noise you never made or even really wanted to make.

So then where's the place for you? You got all these skills of managing and organizing and joking and feeding and suddenly there's no job, and all the fat love went away. Even though the love is you.

I think you start making movies. (Aside: And hey, I just remembered a psychic I met once when I was 19 told me I was a writer and that people would see what I wrote, up here, she said, motioning a screen in front of her. I thought it would never happen but -- our little movie I wrote is in the Portland Film Festival, nominated for Best Romantic Comedy. It's happening. It's small, but Emma and Nathan started out small too.)

But here, still in my real life,  here I am grounded and writing about motherhood with my Momish script and seeing how busy I am and was and how crazy it makes you with Overwhelm, which would be my kingdom. But what else is there, heroin? And why not love til you're empty, and then write about it. As it fills back up.

I will have earned that place on the porch, with the green pasture and the creek. Listening to crickets. Hoping the kids came out allright. Hoping they're living sweet and rambunctious lives. The next stage is maybe recovery, and relishing.