Needing to affirm life too

[kiya]

It's fascinating spending time with Naomi, from the detached analysing self-perspective. She's so definitely grown into being a person, with her own opinions and agenda (though that agenda, at least where I'm concerned, seems to involve chewing off my fingernails). And the sense of community that I commented on in the training baby post a while back, it only deepens, leaving me with the sense that this particular small person is someone I have personal ties to, a personal obligation to aid in the support of, even if it's a small one. But she's a child in my community, one of my people; there's this big hit of almost-maternal emotion surrounding dealing with her.

It hit me first . . . three weeks ago, I think, this major wave of personal connection and thus personal responsibility, and it changed me, like a last understanding. And it's there, rattling around, too big for the obligation to Naomi, looking for other things to attach to. Mostly, it attaches to the cat, and that tends to confuse me tremendously. (The cat doesn't seem to object, however.) I need to get my loom built, do the bit of sublimating maternal impulse that I want to do with making blankets for the babies in my community and extended community -- for Naomi, for Shane's son, for the nephoo.

brooksmoses has a date for his thesis defense set. Has had for a little bit now, but I couldn't talk about it, because it's too entangled in this. We've already been under so much stress from the distance, which I'm just awful at, and it's been nearly five years now of emotional Elastigirl. Getting the critical mass on the nesting now . . . is another stressor. Especially with the end of one timeperiod visible, known, and knowing that it isn't likely to mean any change in distance, in access, in contact, because the best places for his postdoc are all still in the San Francisco area.

All the internal changes, I think, are done. I just need to get the external things, the life in order; preferably before the internal changes become pressures, demands, pushing on sanity with inexorable wearing. Which leaves me afraid, wondering if I can get the externals right before internal stuff starts weighing heavily and stressing me. Like having my family all near enough that it doesn't make a permanent rift -- who is there with me, who wasn't.

That isn't much of an affirmation, is it?


Being human is hard.

ETA: This is the Boston and St. John's explanation.