Red Lion Books and Blue cats

 A few years ago, my Dayton Bestie introduced the concept of the birthday month and it works well for us types that live in many places and with people we love scattered near and far.  I've basically extended to the entire year. The people I love are so far flung from one another that to celebrate with them all in a confined time? Foolishness! We cannot thusly restrict ourselves.  Fortunately, my birthday week, my local bookshop Red Lion Books held a late evening and I had the opportunity to go to dinner with a dear friend over from Central America and to chat with two published writers.  As impromptu happy birthday splurges go, well...

 It amazes me how year to year, how we celebrate, what celebration looks like, even, changes. This year is quieter, with smaller moments. It is my first birthday without my father, as an adult orphan, less than a year since he has died and it hurts in fits and starts.  At the same time, there is this incredible relief and gratitude: they may not have been the most present parents when I was young, the most reliable, but they have given me a tremendous gift in dying relatively young, especially given how stubborn they both were. 

I had planned on throwing myself a Pirate Princesses in PJs party but after two reschedules, I've had to accept that I am just not in much of a party frame of mind. I'm in a 'lets try to fix this place up, hunker down, plan ahead' frame of mind. Extreme crochet, cuddling with the kids and the cats, horizontal evenings. Looking out the window as the light changes across the sky because sleep isn't always close to hand. 

I try to sit down and write thank you letters, but my hands don't always seem to know how to convey the words I want to say. I am not in perpetual motion in the way I have been for years.  There is no need to run anywhere at the drop of a hat. I feel a bit listless but also a bit like I am in drydocks, not unlike the Mt Whitney. I suppose I should be planning a trip to Genoa, to spread more ashes. And maybe return to Florence, to experience the city as it should be, not with the rawness of having just given birth and then having the baby die. Every where I turned that March, there were Virgin Marys and little baby Jesuses. It was the year I would wake up terrified because I couldn't find the baby that was crying, even after I was pregnant with the BD.  Of course, I say this after binge watching 'From Scratch' and ending the evening bathing a very pissed off cat covered in acrylic paint.

I suppose I should be planning, closing out the dead dad bureaucracy, ordering my brother's prison porn.  But some days, it all just seems too convoluted, unnecessarily layered, ongoingly co-dependent. Why is it so hard to transition from these patterns and trauma bonds?