It’s been almost six months since I’ve written here- adequate time to lose just about anyone who was formerly following my journal. There was a time when I watched to see how many people read along, and I found inappropriate self value in the numbers rising. But for now –I suppose for a time now– this has back-burnered to other dearer things.

Andjoli had a number of frightening medical diagnoses since early summer, and we’ve been in the throws. I don’t have words yet to manage all the frailty I felt through this time. And the sour energy doesn’t all just switch off now that her blood enzyme levels are reasonable. Still this is really something: Her blood enyzme levels are reasonable.

I tell myself I knew that it would work out this way, but in honesty, I held to this so I could hold to other things: I wanted to keep teaching, to keep studying, to keep writing. I wanted to keep looking prepared and less overwhelmed than I was. I was afraid to let this professional part of me slip. It felt selfish and necessary, and it feels selfish, still. The guilt makes a lot of the possibility that I once saw for an academic career water-bloated, half drowned in the horrifying realization that I’m not enough of a mother to compromise a professional future for a sick child.

It’s been six months in the poor balance- and it’s over for now. I did not ever take time to imagine myself here, and am surprised, in the moment of over, that I might know even less what to do with myself. The semester wrapped up. My daughter- who I have interpreted, mostly, as a crisis to be managed, does not need the management anymore. I’m less useful, more self depreciating.

I’m spending a lot of my holiday break just watching the person-ness come together- her sympathy and pleasure and creativity. I think this was happening all along, as we went, but now this is all there is: a red-cheeked bright-eyed quick-footed child.

I’m following at a distance, kept back by the residue of all the fear that I can’t put on her anymore. I’m overwhelmed by the nothing-ness of what’s happening, the days just going by.

We skipped out on the cross-country travel and  family holiday. We went to a yule lighting ceremony on wednesday and spent Christmas eve telling stories around our neighbor’s wood stove. Christmas morning we slept in, ate leftovers for lunch, and strung cranberries for the birds. I made dinner, got Andjoli ready for bed, all the while feeling guilty about my decision to skip a tree and wrapped gifts.  I wanted something more for our holiday, and am afraid I delivered something less. I could say this about our year.

Still, I am exhausted from our Christmas, and embarrassed to say so to the friends who have a more pronounced holiday lament- for they all suffered long car and plane rides to distant states and celebrations.  Still they plan on, talking about New Years- It is only a lick away- the year gone. I didn’t get much of it down on paper- and so the writing’s absent, the record- and something too, of myself.

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