Heck.

Originally posted September 6, 2013

Things have been really, really hard around here. Harder than I realized.

We went away for a couple of days, and it was then that I got to see just what kind of water we've been wading in.

It's murky, swirling, and stagnant.

It needs to change.

I need to change it.

:::

A friend called this morning and was surprised when I answered.  We weren't supposed to come home from Philadelphia until today, and so she was planning to leave a kind and generous message, offering to take Osi for a few hours while we settled back in.

Instead, she got me - tears and non-stop chatter, sad and confused and all over the place.

She listened and empathized; all mamas have been in the vicinity of 'hard' before.

:::

It's Osi, our almost-three-year-old, our boisterous and energized and focused boy.  Our passionate boy, our get-in-there guy.

When he was 2.4 years old, I remember thinking, "This is hard because he's almost two and a half."  I thought it again when he actually was two and a half, and again at 2.8 - "This is still so hard because he was just two and a half."

It's tipping over chairs and slamming doors.  It's shrieking so the neighbors hear and repeated destructive behavior.  It's the sense that everything revolves around one person, the sense that that's not fair.

And so today, when I was sobbing on the phone to our god-send cranio-sacral practitioner, and she said, "This is about to be the hardest year," - even more tears.

"I can't do harder."

"You just need tools."

And so I drove to her, gathered tools.

I turned Mumford up to blasting, rolled down the windows.

And this evening feels quite a bit different from this morning.

The water's not clean yet, but I can see the bottom.

xxx,
*E