Your 3rd birthday last week also marks for me the 3rd anniversary of motherhood. So much of that time was spent keeping you physically alive and thriving, and now we are shifting to more behavioral education. It's fascinating, confusing, satisfying, exhausting.

Still what continues to keep my attention is the back and forth feelings of motherhood. Some moments I am seriously killing it. Other moments, it feels wrong everywhere I can feel anything.

Listen, kid. 3 year olds are jerks. Seriously, they are selfish and rude and illogical and bipolar. They yell so loud about the stupidest stuff that you have no recourse but to laugh or run. But they are also unabashedly adoring, delightfully surprised at life, oddly kind to their friends, and wildly funny. You have those moments, both. But there is a strong undercurrent of compliance and desire for peace - an undercurrent I do not possess, not really. As I've always said about you, either you haven't yet grown into your "fight," or, like your father, your default setting is general compliance. 

I think of your older self a lot, Bowie. I watch the 7 year old girl across the street sometimes when I am working, and I think how interesting it will be to have a 7 year old, and yet - also unimaginable. I imagine you as a teenager, as a college student, as a young woman. Almost inexorable from those thoughts exists a question, "What will you think of me?" That question is perhaps my most powerful motivator for the following:

• Take care of myself, my own needs, my own soul, my own body, my own career, my own marriage, my own political beliefs, my own relationships, my own spiritual practices. For when you don't need me to mother you anymore, you will need an example of how to thrive as a woman in the golden years of her life.
• Dig into parenting with all I have - my intellect, my emotions (both hidden and present), my id and ego- and not with the intention of mastery, but with the intention of learning.
• Continue the struggle to define the blurry line separating me from you. As you get older, it gets somewhat easier, but the question will always fascinate me. We are to be connected for the duration of this human life, but the boundary between a healthy and an unhealthy attachment is precarious. I commit to walking it with you, always.
• Not define you. To hold all the yous you've ever been and will be as true and present. This is so difficult for logical troubleshooters such as your father and myself. We want to pinpoint the needs so we can meet them and move on. You do not work this way. 
• Walk in your shoes. I find sympathy to be a large wellspring in parenting, a way to tap into patience and kindness. I find it easy now, relating to your daily struggles and wondering what it must be like to have so many people telling you what and how to do things all day.
• Be honest with you. To incorporate both the happiness, sadness, and ever-present ambivalence of life into your childhood without shame or stigma.
• Continue to teach myself how to play.
• Stay rad. 

As is my usual practice, I've sat with my journals and highlighted any time I spoke of you. This are my thoughts from this year.  I will let them speak for me today.

(In January, I began to spend 5 min per night recording something B had done or said that day)

We are totally potty trained! Yay for school.

At 10:17 pm, my Bowie Andromeda will have successfully completed her 3rd cycle around the star we call Sol on this pale blue dot we call home.

 Happy Birthday, chicken.

I could spend a lifetime trying to write about you, me, and this mother daughter thing we have going on. God, I hope I get the chance.


BAM 3yr old by candacemorris

The last year, every time I sit to journal, I find myself in a reverie. I wake a few moments later and trees, leaves, swirls, skeletons, birds, doodles of all sorts somehow appeared on my page. And I hear, "You don't draw." And I say, "Maybe I could learn." And I hear, "No. That's what Kelly (or enter any other person) does." And I say, "She doesn't own all the art. She would never want me to not do something for that reason." And I hear, "But it's her thing." And I say, "What if it's yours too?" And I hear, "I would have discovered it by now." And I say, "How could you discover it if you never do it."

Everything.
Everything begins some
thing.
Some
where.



And I wonder if I've held myself back for so long because of one word: talent.
And what if talent is total bullshit?
What if it's only ever about practice? Even for the most talented.
They all started some
where.
Some
thing.

What if it could be the answer to every question?
Every nagging bitch inside of me could be shut up by
TRYING.

So I think I will. Maybe teach myself. Maybe just try with no pressure or expectation.Maybe just do what feels good without any reason at all.

I have a good role model. I can watch Bowie and see how she investigates without any self-definition to yet limit or guide her inquisition.

And maybe just start some
thing
some
where.

As a wise friend said this week, "I'm not going to wait for perfection to start living."
-crm

And you guys, Washington drivers are bad, quite bad. But not Oregon bad.