I’ve written about this before and I can attest that it still rings true, five years and five thousand miles later… I want to be a lady of the locker room.
No matter the gym, the locker room is always where I learn the most. Those women carry confidence, courtesy, and self-possession in the purest of forms. Let it be so with me.
Last night I wrote with the window open, sipping the favored sparkling water a friend brought me from Anchorage. My polish lingered from a recent slow Saturday, when I let a daughter paint my toes. The puppy slept and did not bark at the moose. The sun stayed out ‘til bedtime, clouds pink and mountains aglow.
The world, mine and yours and everyone’s everywhere, seems to be trying its best to heal, one day at a time.
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
Kahlil Gibran, 1923
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
Happy birthday, Isaiah Jane & Honor Rose. Thank you for coming through me, and for pausing to spend these wild eleven years. I take them not for granted.
It’s the night before the twins’ eleventh birthday, and I have a captive audience as we gather around the table for taco salad night.
I tell them about the miracle of going full-term with twins, during a season we could not afford for me not to work.
I tell them about the night spent in triage, convinced I was in labor after my water broke, only to find out it was pee and a stomach bug.
I tell them about the morning of their birth, about how I’d asked my mom, their Sunshine, not to come to the hospital just yet because only Chris could come into the operating room. I tell them that as I’m wheeled out into the hall, back to my room with babies on my chest, there is my mom. Sunshine had been waiting the entire time, just in case Momma needed her mama.
The walking distance between my car and the gym feels too far and too cold this morning. My car feels too soft, too warm. Going inside to move my body on a Monday is arguably the most important accomplishment I’ll achieve this week… and we’re throwing a birthday party for all three daughters this weekend, so that’s saying something.
Scenes from a weekend lived well.
There are nights when I can’t wait to be alone, craving space and distance from everyone I know and love. But then there are nights when I pace the empty house, bored and lonely and missing my people. Perhaps the great mystery of life is to learn to love the in-between.