angel issues

It's been a while. I don't love writing in this space, because it is so small to look at while I am typing. But the thought of creating a word document and then transferring it over to this blog seems like SUCH a LOT of WORK. Like everything seems right now. So much work.

So here I am, alone in the new house. It is almost 11 a.m., and I just got home from taking Maureen to daycare We were late getting there, as well as getting Maggie and Frank to TCGIS. I dropped my keys between the house and the wood front steps as I was on my way out the door. The four of us then had the pleasure of walking 3 blocks to school in the rain, late. Actually the kids all enjoyed the rainy walk, and I almost started to. I had planned to drive because of the weather, and since we were already behind schedule. But the van was a little hard to start without the keys. Maureen and I walked home again, in the drizzle, then I worked on fishing out the keys with a wire hanger. All the while Maureen was pulling on my ears, squealing at me to look up into her face and laugh with her. Life is oh so funny to her. She is so much not like me.

Maureen accomplished her mission, but I did not. Luckily the neighbor from down the hill came to help, since I'd told her my sob story as she was taking her grandkids to school and as I was walking down the hill with my kids. She came up while I was wrangling with my hanger contraption. She had her arms full of papers and notebooks, on her way back from her church. The storm last night left a hole in her church's roof, and she was coming home to call the roofers. She asked if I'd found my keys. I said, "I see where they are, I just can't reach them." She looked down the crack and said," Oh, I can just reach down there and grab them quick." Although this woman is very thin and apparently flexible, I didn't quite see how she was going to squeeze her arm down into this inch wide crack and pull my keys out. Instead she moved over to the side of the steps, got a stick from the yard and brushed the keys toward her until she could reach down with her hand and pick them up. Naturally I felt stupid, as I'd been sitting there for 40 minutes with my hanger trying to hook the key ring on the end of my wire rod, thinking "there must be an easier way to do this, I'm just not thinking of it!" Thinking it had to do with finding a magnet somewhere in all our unpacked belongings, and wrapping the wire around the magnet.

Do I make things harder than they have to be? Are the issues that torture me today simply optional? Is arguing with myself, fighting, trying so hard to do things right all the time, simply one of many ways to approach my life? Is it time for me to open my eyes to new ways of doing things, ways that don't involve so much goddamn struggle?

I'm going to boxing tonight, forcing myself to go. I always have to force myself to go, but I am never sorry after I've finished.


Here is the music that was playing in my head all night, and also this morning after I got up and pressed "repeat" on the kitchen CD player before the disordered events of the morning started to unfold. It's from Van Morrison, and the title suggests that my mom is not the only with angel issues.

contacting my angel:

contacting my angel, contacting my angel
she's the one, she's the one, that satisfies
contacting my angel she's the one that satisfies
she's the one that I adore

got a telepathic message from my baby
in a little village through the fog
here comes my baby, I can tell, I can tell
by the way she walks
said I've been on a journey up the mountain side
and I drank the water from the stream
it was pure, pure water and I got completely healed

I met a presence on the mountain side
and he looked so radiant and he was the
youth of eternal summers
like a sweet bird of youth in my soul
in my soul, in my soul, in my soul, in my soul
in my soul, in my soul