F'n what?

Effen vodka? Damn straight! That's exactly what you need when your child becomes a legal adult...the blog is forthcoming--savannah's 18, my baby (gabi) is in high school--my mind and heart are processing it all constantly but i'm afraid to stand still in it long enough to solidify it in words...right now I'll just let it keep falling like a soft rain...

Safe and Sound

Savannah is successfully moved in to her dorm room. I feel proud and grateful and incredulous and sad and happy and excited and scared and ever so slightly old.

She is awesome. I am awed. We made it to this sort of finish/start line and we made it there spectacularly. There's a bit of relief at having gotten this far with so much good and blessing and love. The rest will take more faith than I've ever had--I have to let it all go. I'm not in charge anymore. (If I ever really was.)

Gabi is staying at her dad's tonite.

I am settling into the alone. I know that the future will bring more.

I will text my girls goodnite and loves and we will all tuck ourselves in under the same starry sky.

eat pray...nevermind

I am reading eat pray love and I have mixed emotions about it. Most honestly (and shamefully) I resent people like Elizabeth Gilbert and Julie from Julie and Julia and a thousand others who have turned their thoughts and drivel--that, while well written, is mostly unexceptional (as is mine)--into a published book.

I read their words and recognize something I could do. They are not really more talented or better at transforming their daily internal detritus into language than I am.

But I think I have come upon a defining difference: they have hit a crisis of identity and confidence that has demolished them. They have had to, for lack of a better word, fabricate an imperative--an impetus--a justification--for their incessant, self-indulgent inner monologue that they must spill out onto paper (or, in this digital age, a computer screen).

DISCLAIMER: This whole theory could just be an extravagant line of defense (and comfort) created by my seemingly over-developed sense of identity and confidence to distract myself from the fact that I just haven't wanted it enough to completely devote myself to one imperative that will result in a book deal.

I feel, most of time, quite content and engaged in my life. I enjoy living it--having a glass of wine on my patio by candlelight; taking myself out to dinner; reading, reading, reading; soaking in the tub; laughing with my friends; laughing with my daughters; watching my girlies become themselves quite spectacularly.

So, whether my underlying reason for not writing Julie and Julia or eat pray love is really a sort of contentment combined with an undeniable imperative to provide a certain life and presence for my children or an inflated and quite eloquently devised self-delusion barely masking a paralyzing fear and doubt, I somehow know that my self-indulgent memoirist tome will not be fully realized or penned until I have (for lack of a better word) nothing better to do.

I find it quite amazing that I truly feel that there is nothing better that I can do right now then exactly what I am doing. And, if Erma Bombeck could use little more than being a woman, wife and mother as fuel for her rapier wit and gift for storytelling, then that is all the reassurance I need.