This is how I exorcise my demons. This is how I find my light.

I remember you, but do not miss you. I have defined my success by you for too long- It is time I break my dependence on you for my self-worth. You are not the yardstick I choose to measure my life by. I am building a new yardstick.

I will find my own definition of success. I will seek out what fulfills me to fill in, once and for all, the gaping emotional hole you left me to deal with. I will not longer need your approval, nor feel the need to give you mind out of filial obligation.

I am no more obliged to be your daughter and honor your memory than you felt obligated to be a father.

I am my own to live. I made the right choice one year ago to walk away. My anger has resurfaced and now moves me to act. And to tell you how I really feel. You are gone, and should remain so, regardless of the time of year. For your memory to haunt this season is unacceptable. You are at rest, and my issues with you are dissolved as well.

My relationship with the dawn has changed over the years, becoming deeper and more meaningful as it has worn on.

When I was in middle school, when my tics were at their peak, I experienced a bout of insomnia that introduced me regularly to the dawn. That is when I fell in love with the crisp sweet summer morning smell you can only find before the sun moves into the sky. Growing up, the dawn was a time of anticipation-- each year at the balloon fiesta dawn was celebrated with the roar of propane and all of our faces, cold and upturned, watching the great ascension.

Before moving to Oregon, I woke up one morning with the dog, pulled a chair to the window, and found some peace in the painful world that was my life. The dawn was crisp, cool, and full of promise. It inspired me to plant a garden-- which later inspired me to move my own roots elsewhere.

But the dawn never meant as much to me as it did the day Dylan was born. As the sun came up over the marshlands outside my birth room window, which I could see out of while in the birthing tub, I pushed him into the world. For all the archetypes of dawn as birth, it was truly a symbol of such.

The birth of my son, my birth as a mother, and the birth of us as a family, all took place that morning bathed in the soft light of an Oregon Spring dawn. The rising sun gave me strength and a constant reminder that we were almost there.

Dylan was born at the dawn of day at the dawn of Spring- bringing with him opportunities for rebirth and a dawn of awareness, of intentionally living.

While in the San Juan islands for our 1-year anniversary, Dylan woke me at dawn to eat and while he nursed I drank in the beauty of morning in the harbor. With my boys in bed sleeping and the sun gently lighting the water and our room, I watched the world wake up in a crispness and my greatest gifts sleep side by side. I felt at peace.

Someone said that we are closest to spirit at dawn and dusk, and I believe it. I have never felt closer to God than in the quiet moments when the sun pulls itself over the horizon. There is a stillness there, like a chapel or cathedral, but there is also a more organic wildness that man has never been able to capture or reproduce. It is a goddess perhaps-- still and quiet but full with life, with hope.

I'm boring these days. No, you read that right-- not bored; boring. Just about everything I do, read, or talk about revolves around work or the baby. These two subjects, so mundane, consume me, leaving me just a shell of a person worth spending time with. I wonder at what point I won't even want to talk to myself. When I'll tell myself how much I appreciate me and then quickly slip away downstairs where the more interesting people in my life hang out, desperate to spend as little time with myself as possible, glazing over and waiting for my voice to stop. I am boring.

I think Rob likes to have me around but not so much spend time with me. The difference is subtle, but the effect profound. Kind of like a dining room table-- wen you don't have one, you can't imagine how you'll live civily without it. Once you have one, you can go a week without using it and longer without giving it a second thought. Right now, I'm a boring dining room table and Jeff and Morgan are an XBOX and plasma TV. Not as much a household standard but a hell of a lot more interesting.

I remember grilled velveta and onion sandwiches, fried on the stove top in real butter with a cold beer. I remember tasting my first northwest beer, a Redhook, and searching out the last cases of Winterhook in Albuquerque, around February-- and celebrating when we found one in March. I remember Kyndal waiting while I said my goodbyes so he could chase my car as it passed by his yard. I remember too many dinners at Ortegas, the Range, or whatever restaurant had taken and held your fancy at any given time. I remember birthday dinners with Grandma. I remember massage appointments that lasted hours past their end time, well into the night. I remember Harry Nilsson tapes and Monty Python "Best of" sketches. I remember journeying with you and you being very shaken up by what you saw. I remember the first time I saw you have a seizure, at home in the front yard; and the second, out to dinner for my birthday. I remember how you devoured your dinner while I stared at mine, unable to relocated my appetite. I remember the first thing in my first apartment fridge was a celebratory bottle of Cold Duck. I remember the first time someone (almost) asked you red or green after you moved back. I remember how angry you were when the mayor had all deadbeat dad's drivers licenses taken away. I remember disowning you by changing my name. I remember trying to get you to the bathroom when you were in the hospital and feeling completely inept. I remember Steven from admitting visiting about your hospital bill. I remember being your hospital bill. I remember Bubsy and the Natural History Museum. I remember my first birthday after I moved to Oregon. I remember how you didn't call, and how much I needed you to. I remember you talking to mom the night that Haley's comet passed, on the phone. I remember asking to live with you when things with mom got so bad. I remember how hurt you seemed when I told you I was leaving Dave and moving to Oregon. I remember how painful it was to have to decide whether to invite you to the wedding. I remember feeling relieved when no one thought I was a bad person for not doing so. I remember the night you died; I remember feeling it happen even 1500 miles away. I felt you say goodbye to the unborn grandson you'd never meet.