Actually, I’m referring to sleep, which is a like a little death and boy do I adore it — more so during the night than during the day. I’m not really all that keen on naps. One, they take up time that I could profitably be using to DO something in, even if that something is reading, thinking or eating bagels. Two, I always wake up disoriented and crabby as all heck.

But I positively love getting into bed at night, pulling up the covers and knowing that soon I will sink into that lovely sea of sleep, warm as toast, soft as butter.  In fact, I often try NOT to fall asleep right away so that I can wallow in the awareness that sleep is pulling me down. I used to think everyone slept like this — I now know it’s a bit of a gift, one I’m very grateful for. I’m not looking forward to the apparent wakefulness of menopause. What DO people do when they can’t sleep? I have no idea. It was one of the single most disturbing things about having a newborn — that I simply forgot how people go to sleep. Clearly, this baby had no idea and wasn’t taking any hints. How is it that people sleep?

I recovered from that lapse in my love-affair with sleep. Now my problem is that I simply do not have enough time during the hours that I am voluntarily awake to get everything done. I thought maybe I would try getting up earlier (since staying up later just means I watch more Doctor Who and don’t get anything done). But oh my sainted aunt Penelope and her little dog Foofoo, it’s hard hard hard.

Then I read this article from Discovery and realized that it’s not my fault at all. It’s my darn genes. I don’t have the Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill gene that allows me to get five hours of sleep and still be all right. I need something closer to nine. Eight, I can cope with, but seven? Six and a half?

Bring on gene replacement therapy. I’m going to be first in line for the I-need-less-sleep gene as well as the grow-taller-than-a-measly-fivetwo gene and perhaps the when-stressed-refuse-to-eat-and-thus-lose-weight-rather-than-gorge-on-chocolate gene.  Failing that, I’m going to have to start going to bed before nine just so I can get up early enough to exercise, write, complain, meditate, work, parent, eat, worry, call my sisters and blog before tumbling back into bed at nine with a little shawl and a cup of herbal tea.

It was a palace of consumption. D. was awed and amazed. “They have everything,” he breathed. “How would we ever find anything?” He wanted to spend hours in the store, finding out just how much of everything they had.

I always feel a bit like I’ve taken soma when I succumb to the bright, easy, clean cathedrals of spending. It really did have everything. We could have shopped for food, clothes, toys, electron– wait, you probably know all this because you’ve been in one.

Sometimes hard is better. Sometimes I’d rather not have my desires gratified so simply and easily — the ease is like water on a weed and my desires grow and suddenly I want more and more and that want is like bindweed, choking back better thoughts, making them fight for space to grow.

I’m not really in a rush to go back.

Of course, all of that is here, in me. My road stretches back and is paved with those memories, those feelings, those behaviors, those choices. But the wonderful thing about roads is that as long as you do put one foot in front of the other, you get places. The scenery changes. You wake up and it’s warmer or colder or  greener or grayer. This too shall pass.

And so it is, that children grow and PhDs are finished, jobs are found, moves are moved and the road wends on. Today I am forty and some weeks old, physically somewhat fitter and lighter, remarkably lighter of heart and mind. After about a million years of good intentions and a lot of avoidance, I finished writing a book. I’ve even started the next (although I am firmly in the phase of loathing it and thinking I am a terrible writer). I am looking forward and believing that good things are not only coming, but here. And that I have within me a fresh and renewed sense that I can make it so, that I am not simply the prop on which other lives rest but the prop of my own life. That there is room in these daily hours for me and for them, that I can choose to go forward, whatever the road behind me is, and plant flowers along the way (a la Miss Rumphius, who made the world a better place).

I’m still making it up as I go along, but it doesn’t seem quite so foggy. See, somehow in the last few months, I suddenly stood up to myself and said, if you want to do something, start now. Your time here is not infinite and you are wasting it. And so almost three years after I wrote this post, I am doing it. I call myself a writer. I write. This is what I do. My book is being read by a decent editor. I am done avoiding what I want because I’m scared to want it, fail at it, whatever. I am way, way more scared of spending my whole life being scared.

I am building my own website right now (despite my stunning ignorance of all things html-ish). It will — I hope — be a sort of professional home, but I will blog there and post bits of writing and stuff of that sort. I think I’m not only shutting down these other blogs, but (after copying the contents) deleting them. Although don’t hold your breath because it’ll take me a while to do all the cutting and pasting necessary. It’s time for me to move on, not in baby steps, but in huge great flying leaps. Come visit me at my new home here: francescaamendolia.com. Give me a shout out and let me know you’re still out there. And thanks for being with me all these years, on and off, along this road.

But not here. This year, my word (finally!) is forward, despite what Ed said of the word making him think of fascist youth marches. Forward. Not looking back, not trying to be what I was, not trying to get back all the things I felt I was losing in the move, but going onwards, moving forwards and up and away. I might be about ready to do that.

And I’m going to do blog forward on a new and shiny blog I’m calling Making It Up and it’s here, at Wordpress: http://extemporize.wordpress.com.

Please come over. It’s probably going to be almost exactly the same as it was. After all, it’s still me.

But not Stuntmother any more. She’s lovely and I adore her, that cupcake making, baby-rocking, play-dough rolling, half-smiling, half-screaming diaper juggling piece of me. But she belongs to something that’s receding into the past. And I’m going forward. Making it up as I go along.

The leaves are falling. And Ed is leaving. He’s on his way to Montreal for a conference. When he returns, he will have his parents with him. There’s some grand plan of meeting them at the airport when he flies in and they fly in so that they can come here together.

I’m planning menus and yawning. I’m not really a plan ahead kinda gal, on the whole. As I said once to a friend, I do not read ahead in the knitting pattern of life. Which sometimes throws a large wrench into the works. But this time, there will be five adults all over 65 in the house as of Wednesday (my parents, arriving Sunday; Ed’s parents, arriving Tuesday; my aunt, arriving Wednesday lunchtime) all of whom need to be fed. And who will not be happy if I offer them cold cereal and beer. And Ed’s going away. So tomorrow constitutes the last few free hours I have. I’m thinking I have to go to the supermarket and make it count! Thus menus. I’m thinking of making lots of soup and freezing it.

I also think I’m planning because I’m scared. These visits are hard, and I’m not really that robust. There is only a thin crust over the seething lava of my upheaval. It’s getting thicker, but it’s not there yet. Ah, well. It will all be fine, no doubt. Mostly because no matter what days are like, they end. And then there are new days.

Still, time to get in more wine.

Last year, oddly enough, I was also thinking about wine. Mulled wine.

Yoga is telling me that I have never before had a grippably wobbly belly and that it gets in the damn way.

Yoga is telling me that I have seized up in all sorts of uncomfortable ways.

Yoga is telling me that growing that enormous second child really did do weird things to my hips.

Yoga is telling me that I rarely draw a full breath.

Yoga is telling me that I almost never stand straight up.

Yoga is telling me that knitting (typing, driving, sleeping) screws with my shoulders.

Yoga is telling me that I had better go easy on myself.

Yoga is telling me to push just a little harder.

Yoga is telling me to take it slow, but go deep.

I should probably keep going.

Then, Shape of a Mother wrote about it better than I could and you should all go look at the post here. I know I’ve sent you over to that website before, but go again. As the author writes, we need to learn to celebrate the art our bodies become as we go through our lives, whatever our life brings, whether children, illness, health, wealth, fitness, trauma, pleasure. Our scars are stories, our wrinkles, legends. Our hair is the magic carpet of our years, our hands the well-used tools of all our crafts.

I am not at peace with my body or what it has become. But I’ll be damned if I contort myself, punish myself and pay through the nose to put myself under the knife to erase what my life has made of it — in order to cling to some artificial ideal of female beauty.

My body is not what it was and it is not what it will become. It is what it is today. Its story is my story. Its life is my life, its strength, my strength, its beauty my own. My body is on a journey. So am I.

Word to the wise? After almost five years of almost no exercise at all, don’t do two yoga classes in one day. And if you do do two yoga classes in one day, despite my advice, pretend you’re sixty and stop trying to keep up with the teacher.

ow. ooh ohh ouch.

I no longer have muscles. I have formerly fit flab pockets. They don’t know Warrior Three from nuthin.

So in normal life (ha!) I’m much better at tuning out the wants-and-needs-of-others static than I was a child. And I no longer have to feel crabby just because everyone in the house is crabby. I can go be cheerful somewhere else. Or vice-versa.

But whenever I’m with my mother these last few months, something odd has been happening. I feel foggy, forgetful and absent. I feel nervous and strange. I forget the names for things. I lose my keys. I wander in a purposeless daze around the house. It might be simply the stress of facing up to what’s happening. But what it feels like is empathetic dementia. Which is almost as scary as the real thing and makes me want to do ten crossword puzzles every day.

Empathetic dementia. That could have been a whole episode on Star Trek. Where someone you love is losing her marbles, so you spill all of yours out of the bag and watch them all roll around on the floor together.

For that reason, and for many others, right now is a fallow time for me. Unlike the summer green all around, my inner fields are dark and frozen. Words don’t come easily. No accidental poetry, no glimmers of new ideas. I don’t want to knit. I read, but don’t write. I plod, not dance. It’s hard.

I want to write that I believe that fallow times are necessary, that fields and sleeping seeds draw strength from the rest a long, cold winter grants them. That the rest is necessary to grow once spring comes. That the plants will grow better for not being forced before their time.

I want to believe this. And perhaps I do, somewhere under the cold crust of my winter-sleeping self. But right now, I just feel barren. I feel like spring will not come back.

But that is the lie of every winter. That somehow we need to beg the sun to return, that if we don’t beg hard enough, it won’t come back, that the winter will stay. But the sun returns, almost whether we will it or no. As my mother would say, has said a hundred times: This too shall pass.

All things pass, sun and rain, snow and warm, good and ill. All things pass.