A question almost a year in the answering.

hossgal asked me, almost a year ago, "Pick a thing, any thing, that you're doing now - the writing, the job, the monkey, anything - and tell me, honest, if you thought it was going to be like this, ten years ago."



Honestly, the hardest part of this question has been delineating what my expectations have been in the past. For a very long time, the particular broken twist of my mental landscape has been to ruthlessly exise such expectations and, I guess, figure out how to live without them and then let the universe decide if I get them. I remember staying up late as a small child, just old enough to write, and composing a note to my parents along the lines of knowing that they didn't really love me. Something I feared, and so convinced myself was true. At my fingertips is the acute sorrow of committing it to paper, crying as silently as I could manage, dithering about letting them see it, and finally putting it someplace it could be found while I was asleep. I remember the reassuring aftermath much less clearly--and I now suspect the guilt and horror they likely felt about the whole thing--the salient point for me at the time was the personal acknowledgement of how very deeply their rejection could hurt me.

There is much confusion in my mind between wanting, needing, hoping, losing and grieving. As a result I waffle between driven determination and apathetic nihilism. The sensitivity of my circadian rhythms to sunlight and season are the frame these tensions are strung on. I actively expect the worst. At my best I defy it, at my worst I greet it with my belly in the air. I'm getting better at sustaining moderate effort with punctuated rest, instead of pushing to exhaustion while the sun shines and not giving two shits when it doesn't--with the new Daylight Savings rules I used my light seven months out of the last twelve, but the smarter I am about using it, the less my desperation for either winter nihilism or summer accomplishment.

The benefit of being in one's thirties is that one begins to benefit from all the individual mind- life- and body-hacks one had to learn the hard way.

Expectations for my thirties: in my teens I figured I would have a child or two, hopefully with a partner, after I had established a career. It was exactly that vague. On the ground, I found my love at 21 and we set about building enough daily maturity and financial security to bring helpless young into the picture. It took awhile, mainly for the latter to come up to our admittedly materialistic middle-class standards. I grew up working poor, and I wanted my kids to never worry about groceries or foreclosure, or deal with the utilities being shut off. Shit happens, it happened to my folks despite their best efforts and we all survived, but it starts you off at a deficit that can accumulate over generations. And as I remarked earlier this week, I'm the fourth generation in this country and we've each done our share of boot-strapping. Mine was a college degree and a white-collar resume (and maybe a profession, if I can swing it).

With a safety net in place we finally tackled expanding our family--at a certain point you realize it isn't precaution stopping you, it's fear. Mr. F made that call, and he was right. He's the emotionally sentient one, after all. So the Cmonkey makes three, and being this family is what we do in life. Work is that annoying thing that keeps us warm and fed. I'll eventually get to be what I want to be when I grow up, vocation wise. It's a banked fire that crackles uneasily sometimes, but will wait. I'm learning patience in the same chronic manner that I'm learning optimism and learning how to fit myself back into the cracks of the daily grind.

Thing is, there is tremendous work and emotion and sacrifice and bone-weary diligence that goes into tending a seedling into a little unfolding person. But there's also, subtle and terrifying and beautiful, an awesome grace in the privilege. This family of mine is closer to me than my own bones, they are my home and my life, my love made manifest as something the very opposite of grief.

I'm not accustomed to knowing the contents of my heart, so it's raw and astonishing to see them before me, out in the world for me to touch, and care for, and be seen by, and loved.