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.

The few stubborn leaves
clinging to their branches
bright like Christmas lights
against the gray winter sky

The others mixed with water
and painting the sidewalk
in an autumn gloss

I spent a lot of time in the garden this morning. I like my Sunday mornings pulling weeds. Around 8:00 I have the garden to myself, listening to the birds and feeling the dirt underneath my fingernails. I spend my time digging around my head as much as in the dirt, and this week was no exception.

Things have been a little tough lately, and I feel at a loss for how to smooth them over. I can’t help but compare myself now to the self a year ago- more sex, less stress, more energy. Then, not now. I worry that I’m falling back into old habits and that I haven’t made as much progress as I thought. Those are the dark thoughts.

My garden thoughts are a little different- more dewy, more forgiving. I have been working hard to understand how I handle stress, and how unforgiving my libido can be. I realize now that I struggle more with depression than I thought I did- I have my big seasonal cycle, but I also have little spots here and there that sneak up on me. My energy levels are way down—I set aside the evening and night to do things that are meaningful to me (write, photos, time with Rob) to free up my days and let me get done what I need to (work, groceries, cleaning, etc.), but by the time MY time rolls around, all I want to do is sleep. I know I’m not trying to do too much during the busy times—my old self would be mortified at how little I accomplish these days— and I just don’t know how to solve it. I’m practically immune to coffee and sugar doesn’t jive with the needed weight loss.

I’m terrified because this is one of the few things that can’t just be fixed by changing my schedule, my job, my habits. At least I don’t think- and that seems to be the most terrifying part. I can’t say I know anyone who successfully manages their depression- I’m a bit without a resource. I’ve toyed with the idea of a therapist, but who’s to say that’ll work? And it’s not like my company is paying for it. What if Freud was wrong? What if talking about it doesn’t do a damn bit of good?

Maid, mother, crone.  The more I explore my fertility and think about having children, the more I feel in touch with my role as a woman. 

It feels weird being on the cusp of maid and mother—kind of floating between the roles, a place of expectation and sorrow.  I’m afraid to relinquish the role of maid, sad even, to move into this new phase of my life.  Scared, too, to leave something so familiar behind.  But I can’t help move forward to mother, I feel drawn to it.  I want to embrace this time, though, this time of transition- we don’t get too many of those.  In the last year, I think I’ve begun to appreciate the instability and uncertainty in life.  Transitions are most beautiful in their fleetingness- if Fall lasted forever, where would the crisp fall melancholy come from?  And Spring, what beauty would be lost if all the flowers were perfectly poised, eternally ready to split and blossom?  The beauty of the moment before is tied to the moment after—without one, you cannot truly have the other.  So maid is all the more beautiful for its loss to mother, and mother for its loss to crone. 

To Create.

I want to write, but I know I’m too drunk to do so.  Too bad, I feel my tongue loosening, like I may something provocative—at least incendiary.  Why is it that writing, what used to be so hard NOT to do, requires a calculated time and space?
 
I want to be a mother, I think.  I’m terrified, and trying desperately to convince myself that it’s not the time.  That there are bills to pay and houses to buy and life to live—but the baby bug is strong and hits me when I’m weakest.  I want to feel a part of the world around me, a part of nature, of the spring.  It’s cruel. 
 
The world around me is ripe with creation and I am barren by choice.  Of course, becoming a mother is a frightening proposition.  How easily I loose myself in those around me now—what will it be like when I have kids?  As hard as it is for me to make time now, even for the gym, which is arguably to get me in shape for child bearing, how hard will it be for me to find time once I’ve become a mother?  I’m terrified.  What if I become the Jade I was back home?  Totally concerned with others while I fade away, wilting inside myself, screaming silently?