Work In Progress

This year, my Sista Perfectionista turns forty, which for some reason I keep thinking is my age.  I am partly correct because I am in my forties...just the north end of forty...   Somehow, her crossing over the threshold has reminded me of that. But wait, this is not about me. Last year, I got to see Sista on her actual birthday.  It was a Sunday, I had just started simmering soup and she called me. "Can you come and meet me for coffee?" "Oh crap, I just started making soup.  The pot is on, stuff is bubbling, I am chopping..." "OH COME ON IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!" "Ok.  Meet you at the bookstore in 20." "What? You're coming?" "Of course I am coming.  It's your birthday!" This year we were actually trying to plan to do something fun.  An overnight getaway.   She wanted something close,  so we didn't have to spend time travelling.  Something where shopping was an option and observing...

With my oldest back at university, most likely to go from classes to co-op, I have been eyeing his room.  For the past six years, blackout curtains shrouded the space in shadows, trapping the lingering smell of "teenage boy", dust mites dancing in the light the few times I dared venture in and open a window to ensure he was still alive...and not a vampire.   With a desk and long, low dresser crammed underneath his double loft bed, he hibernated in his cave during his high school life and I tried to just shut the door and pick my battles. While I have I have, I am sure, passed on many of my neuroses to my oldest, the need for order, beauty and LIGHT in life was not one of them. I had assumed that my youngest would naturally claim his brother's space when he left; a rite of passage, moving up to "the high bunk".   I was secretly thrilled that he wanted to stay in his own room...a double loft bed is not helpful when your seventy-something mother comes ...

A few weeks ago Robin Williams was everywhere you looked. People were desperate for details; to find the one thing that assured them that his situation was so different from theirs that they are safe; that it could never be them. But if you suffer from depression, the suicide of such a brilliant, successful, individual; part of our lives for so many years and responsible for so many laughs; looks like a leak in your boat. A friend asked me, "Ok but no one knows what the future holds.  Could he not see that?" For someone drowning in the dark spiral of depression, there is no future. There is only now. There is only nothing.  The boat is gone.  You are under. It is not about your spouse or your friends or your kids or career or fans or dogs or anything.  When the darkness squeezes it is all about now.  And now is nothing.  It is bleak and empty and so dark, you cannot see a bottom, or edges or surface ---just darkness. "Some...