Bringing joy into something ugly… this thought has been circling my head for a few days.

It’s been a hell of a year. From having human rights taken away from everyone with a uterus in the US, to the silent knowledge of the crisis in Iran in the world, to small scale day to day inflation rates being in the sky…the world is a hard place to be right now.

Meanwhile in therapy sessions discussing terms like “fusion” color my new mental world and introducing EMDR into my treatments has made the world feel like a kaleidoscope of change. All of that, and my little boy is almost going to be one. I’m a functioning parent in this world who now owns a home.

I can’t express how much I loathe caring about my credit score.

I still don’t know what I really want to be when I grow up. Ideas of becoming a therapist, or getting a doctorate of philosophy in social work and doing research, or becoming a nurse practitioner still circle around in my brain and yet if I had the money to do anything I know that for at least 10 years I’d likely be at home~ but add a farm.

I’ve been in some kind of city or suburb for most of my life. Being in the town we moved to has been a wonderful adjustment to quiet. We have restaurants, all delicious, yet all of the businesses here only take up one street. The quiet here isn’t too isolating, and it isn’t too much like the city. Besides the constant run of trains a block over, it has the perfect amount of noise.

There are days I spot hummingbirds. I learned from another local that it’s very possible I could forage and run into wild asparagus. This was an amazing thing to learn even though I don’t like asparagus.

I think with all the madness and hustle bustle of life even with my new location, I needed to buckle into home. A few days ago my husband and I took turns mopping, absolutely overjoyed about our new mop, practically fighting over it. I find myself practicing more rituals and diving deeper into my divination practices, while finishing more books than I ever have. I can finally withstand novels again, for longer than I can remember I was hypersensitive to reading anything where anything major went remotely wrong (so I couldn’t read fiction at all *facepalm*). This is the first year of my life that has been crazy, but calm. I experience more in the moment than I realized I was missing.

Before this year I had family emergency after family emergency, school, less financial security, and my career and the pandemic driving me up the wall. My relationship wasn’t as stable, and I didn’t have a little one constantly grounding me into my own universe. I think sometimes I needed to become a mom to finally start drawing lines between my home and the outside world, but I find sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind me I’m still here, and not back then.

My responsibilities include cleaning my home, paying my bills, caring for my son and being sure he has what he needs, looking after my pets, and going to work. I’ve had a busy life time of adventure and chaos all leading up to this quiet existence in a rural little town. I think things to myself like did I start the dryer? and I should call my husband to plan dinner…

            I remember more about my time in survival mode than I do about the last ten months; I’ve finally started to rewire that.

Sometimes I give myself a hug and remind myself that it’s over. Not because my family has evened out and the emergencies don’t come, but because I no longer live life like there is anyone with greater priority than my family’s well-being. I can go a few days without texting anyone at all, because my life is in these four walls. When I do share my energy, it doesn’t drain me. I have a knitting project on my mind to get to, my cats will always welcome attention, my son wants to bang a toy carrot and a toy raspberry together and scream with me…this is my life.

I still feel the weight sometimes of all of the ugliness in many times before things started to calm down, which will take more than a few months of peace to release…but the capacity I have where I am now is one where I can turn the tide after a day or two and experience what I actually do have now. I can’t change the past, the world, or some things about the present, but I’ll remember this as the beginning of the rest of my life, I think.

It’s nice.