Dear Readers--
When I was a younger mother, all my neuroses were easily containable. All of my fears, worries, concerns, and obsessions were specific. Diapers, flu, fever, cold. Child abduction, schools, homework, bag lunches. Basketball practice, swimming lessons, clarinet.
I knew what I needed to know and did what I had to do to get the day started and then packaged up and put away for the night (dinner, homework, bedtime story).
But as my children grew up, my life lost much of its shape, the shape I had been hiding in. I was no longer that 22 year old girl who found herself pregnant. I was no longer focused on survival but on life and all of its complexity. Things weren't going by the book or the plan. And what was that plan? Could you run that by me one more time?
When my life shape broke open and spilled me out of it, one giant and confused baby, I looked around and realized that all my careful planning of the years prior had resulted in something I had not planned. My children were doing what they wanted to do not what I had scheduled for them. My marriage was taking a very strange path through some garden I had certainly not planted.
What was happening? Should I try to stop it? Fix it? Change it?
And here's the news flash--my children were men now and they weren't really interested in my stopping anything.
This blog is about that first push out into my new life and the things that have happened since I stood up, looked around, and started moving, trying to find my way, often in stupid ways, often in ways that were and are sublime.
Jessica Barksdale
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