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| ::: ::: journal entries: ::: ::: :::
check out: Julie's latest entries.
artifact:
We hung this can from a tree in the backyard and every now and then, we shoot the hell out of it with a BB gun. Do not mock our entertainment.
photos:
| Thursday, January 19, 2006 I was at work today and I was sitting in my uncomfortable overpriced Aeron chair and I was writing up a lame PR blurb for our company and I was chewing a piece of gum and I thought how I was doing all of these exact same things a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and how everything has utterly, irrevocably changed and yet it's all so familiar, except now I like Orbit more than Eclipse. There are whole stretches of my work day where I'm just doing my thing and it's all very pre-August-of-2005 and then I look up to the Wall of Child I've created over my workstation that includes approximately ninety thousand baby pictures and I think: whoah. I feel like I'm overlapping two completely separate images of myself; my life as Riley's mother and my office self, and I'm trying to delineate what shows through and what's obscured. When I head to work after dropping Riley off at daycare I have this sensation of one focus bleeding into another, as I drive westbound and my thoughts turn from his morning smiles and yodelly vowel sounds to my projects at Workplace. I listen to music but I never hear what's playing. I keep thinking in terms of where my non-parent self begins and ends, like that makes any kind of sense, like there are these defined boundaries that I can carefully step over, tidily circumvent whenever it's convenient. I pull up to my office and I catch sight of Riley's empty carseat base in the mirror and I am like a superhero whose cape lies piled in the corner of the room; I'm Clark Kent, adjusting my glasses and adopting some new persona. I'm feeling around blindly in my own head for a sense of purpose. What am I doing, again? I think. Oh yeah. Sometimes it seems like I'm too fragmented, I'm all awkward segues and full stops instead of smooth transitions; I come home from work and Riley is crying and I can't soothe him right away and I suddenly wonder if I've forgotten how to do this, or worse, worseworseworse, if he's forgotten about me. And of course those things have not happened. In the next moment I'm buried in baby head-smell and I can't even remember what in the hell I did all day long. Being away from home for part of the week has been enormously positive for me so far, I've been so relieved and thrilled to discover a newfound zest for my job, I'm just...adjusting, I guess. Trying to figure out how to, what, put my best foot forward? (Can I even say that without throwing up a little in my mouth - no. Glmp. Mmmm, acidic.) To start feeling familiar with this life - baby, work, home, all the trappings, all the fortunes - and to realize I am not the old me or new me or the mommy mode me or the career me but a million undefinable things that I should stop trying to pull apart in order to make some sense of my identity. Really, despite the challenges or maybe because of them, here's the deal, the sweet, sweet deal: I'm so happy these days. God, that was so amazing to write I'm going to type it all over again, with italics this time: I'm so happy. :::
I hope he's happy too.
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