Missing Mom

It's been quite a year. In June of 2012, my beloved mother was diagnosed with cancer. Twelve long hard months later, she drew her last breath. My biggest and most important job during that time was being mom's primary caregiver through the chemo, the surgeries, the clinic and ER visits, and ultimately preparing for her death. Thankfully, there were silver linings along the way but also many challenges, including my father's heart attack last January, even as mom was struggling to overcome large blood clots in her lungs--an unexpected side affect of her bladder removal surgery.

Until 2012, mom was always the healthy parent, seeing my dad through one health crisis after another: Stroke. Diabetes. Colon cancer. Kidney failure. Until one day, to her great surprise and ours, mom became the patient.

Our last trip together was to Charleston, South Carolina. 

I'm still processing the events of the past 13 months. It's often hard to believe that mom is really gone and not coming back. In some ways, it feels almost like I've spent the last year living in a cave, isolated from the real world. When I finally emerged from the cave, I hoped to awaken from what was surely a bad dream. Instead, I  encountered all the things I've neglected for the past year. It's a long list. And my dad still requires a great deal of help, as well, not all of which he's entirely receptive to.

Overwhelm is perhaps my greatest ongoing challenge. I think I expected to feel more relief by now, but so far it hasn't worked out that way. I am grateful that my mom is no longer in pain, so there is an element of relief in that assurance, but the rest still feels pretty relentless, even if the scenery has changed quite a bit.

For now, my work is to simply do what I can, as mindfully as I can manage, knowing I won't get caught up in a day or a week or even a month. In this moment, I don't have to know exactly how I will be able to cross the finish line. I only have to know how to take the next step.

In the Weeds

I spent a few hours pulling weeds out of our flower beds this afternoon. Actually, it might be more accurate to say I spent that time looking for flowers in our weed beds. I've completely neglected our yard this year.

There were several excellent reasons for that, but mother nature wasn't interested in any of them, so the weeds continued to choke the tulips and the little azalea bushes which I had planted last year, until I finally intervened. 

It was an imperfect effort, at best. Had you not seen the enormous mess it was before (or the four bags of yard waste I accumulated) you might reasonably have assumed the beds were still being ignored, as they could surely stand many more hours of attention. But it was yet another chance for me to practice imperfectionism and enoughness.

As I dug and pulled, I found myself thinking about how popular weeds are in folk wisdom, figures of speech, analogies, and such. (Click here for a few examples.) A pastor friend once told me he liked to pull weeds while thinking about what to say in his sermons, and I've known others who found weeding to be stress-reducing, or otherwise satisfying.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a big fan of weed-pulling (especially if you ask my fussy back), but I have been thinking lately about the idea that our outer worlds tend to reflect our inner worlds, so maybe, in addition to making our yard more presentable, clearing four big bags of weeds outside will in some small but significant way help reduce the mental cobwebs inside my mind/psyche, as well?

I have lots more clearing to do--inside and out--but this felt like a worthwhile start and even a hint of a return to normalcy after a long stretch of crisis management related to my parents' medical concerns. After all, what's more normal than weed-pulling? It's a tiny tortoise step, to be sure, but one I can gradually build on even as I continue to attend to the ongoing needs of my mother and father.

recovery under stress

There was a popular health and fitness author in the 80s named Covert Bailey who used to talk about the importance of what he called "recovery under stress" in cardio exercise. The idea was to boost your workouts by including occasional brief bursts of high intensity activity amidst your lower intensity exercise.

An example would be to sprinkle your fitness walk with a few 20-30 second jogs or sprints. The most valuable part of this strategy to your cardiovascular system, as I recall, was not the sprint itself, but the work your body did to recover from the sprint while you continued to walk afterward.

Lately, I've been thinking about the concept of recovery under stress in another context: my mother's cancer treatment. The old paradigm for cancer patients was to rest as much as possible and try not to exert yourself, but today the medical world has figured out that patients who remain active and engaged in life tend to have better outcomes. This doesn't mean that patients never need to modify their activities, of course, but it does mean that waiting until they feel better to start moving, eating well, and actively participating in their lives isn't usually advisable. In other words, don't wait until you complete your treatment to live your life.

As a world-class procrastinator, I am forever coming up against the temptation to wait to act on any number of things until conditions are more favorable. Recovery, whether from a bad cold or a break-up, a serious illness or an addiction, can be a socially acceptable excuse not to act on things, but one I don't recommend overindulgence in. Modify your intensity or adjust your expectations, perhaps, but don't give up on important things, especially if they have the potential to contribute to your recovery. As with the cardio example above, walk as slowly as you need to after a sprint, but don't stop dead still.

The concept extends to all kinds projects which are important to us but we put off because the time never seems right. There is no perfect time. Once we've done what we reasonably can to prepare, at some point we just have to leap. If we stumble as a result... well, we'll have yet another opportunity to recover under stress.

And there's another obvious reason not to wait until the perfect time or until we think the circumstances will be the most favorable: Opportunities have an expiration date that you can't always see in advance. If you make a habit of always waiting, you'll wake up one day and realize it's too late to do many of those important things you've been meaning to do but never quite got around to. Once again, perfectionism robs us of experiences we could have had without all that added stress and anxiety, simply by allowing ourselves to do things imperfectly.

With all this in mind, I spent some time at Callaway Gardens yesterday afternoon, while the azaleas were in full bloom. I had plenty of other things to do, but spring doesn't last forever, and beautiful sunny days are a gift to be enjoyed. I'm grateful that I was able to go.

Standing Tall vs. Leaning Forward

I haven't read Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, but I have read several articles about it, including Why I'd Rather Stand Up Straight Than Lean In by Kristin van Ogtrop, which I came across online this afternoon. The comments below the post revealed significant differences of opinion, and people who had read the book pointed out that those who had not were making assumptions about what Ms. Sandberg meant by the title, some of which may not be accurate.

Metaphors can be tricky things, and even the best can be pushed to the breaking point (which I hope not to demonstrate below, but we'll see...). At the risk of mixing my metaphors, it's clear that the suggestion that women should "lean in" when it comes to the workplace--or that they aren't already doing so--is ruffling a lot of feathers.

I don't want to take issue with a book I've never read by an author I don't know, but in thinking about this particular analogy, it's clear that leaning in doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. It also occurs to me that even if you decide you would rather focus on finding balance than leaning in, striking that balance might turn out to involve quite a bit of forward leaning, depending upon what surface you find yourself on.

Is it a level playing field? Is the ground beneath you solid and stationary? Or have you been navigating on shifting sand or perhaps trying to float on water? Are there waves you will have to surf to avoid being pulled under? That won't be easy to do while standing up straight. Are you standing on a the side of a hill or down in a valley? Is it rocky or slippery or otherwise hard to get your footing? Is the wind blowing? Do you have support?

We are not all dealing with the same terrain, so to suggest that everyone should simply stand up straight and not worry about leaning in is to overlook the realities of privilege and preference. Even the same person encounters different environments at various points of her life. A woman who leans in at 40 may be ready to lean back at 80. 

I suspect that Ms. Sandberg and Ms. Van Ogtrop would agree that there is no one-size-fits-all answer for all women, much less all human beings. As we endeavor to find the posture which best serves us and others in this moment, may we also respect those who make very different choices than our own.

Imperfectionism

I once (okay... probably more than once), in response to someone's description of me as a perfectionist, went into a major rant about how she was mistaken and I was NOT, in fact, a perfectionist. I didn't even like the word. It certainly didn't apply to me, I explained, because I didn't expect anything to be perfect. I was striving for excellence. I didn't believe human beings were capable of perfection, so how could I possibly be a perfectionist???

The irony of being so perfectionistic about even the use of word, "perfectionist" was lost on me. Also lost on me, back then, was the strong connection between procrastination and perfectionism. I would readily have admitted to chronic procrastination, but would undoubtedly have cited it as further evidence that I couldn't possibly be a perfectionist.

I've learned a thing or two about perfectionism since those days, especially from the work of experts like Brene Brown and Christiane Northrup. Dr. Brown's excellent book, The Gifts of Imperfection, was full of aha moments for me. But I still have to make a conscious effort not to get caught up in perfectionism and to recognize enoughness.

On April 1st, I signed up for a blogging challenge. No, it wasn't an April Fool's joke. If you pay attention to blogs at all, you've probably seen these from time to time. In this case, you set a goal to blog daily for 30 days, and you receive encouraging reminders and helpful hints in your inbox each day. On an impulse, I signed up, since it was free and looked like it might be kinda neat.

I've actually been blogging daily for a while now, but not here. My mom is in cancer treatment, and dad had a heart attack in January (adding to several several serious existing health problems), so I post daily updates about them for friends and family on a CaringBridge website. But I'd been thinking of trying to do more of my own blogging again, and this opportunity seemed like a way to move back in that direction.

I don't have any particular desire to blog every day, but that's how the challenge was set up, so I thought I'd give it a try, without being perfectionistic about it. The first couple of days went fine. On day 3, I got a late start and struggled to finish my post before midnight. But I made it.

Thursday was day 4, and I completely forgot. I didn't even realize it until I sat down to blog on Friday. Well, damn. I wasn't sure I'd blog all 30 days, but I didn't expect to blow it after only 3. It wasn't one of those impossible days either--the ones I've spent with mom at the hospital for hours or when I've been completely consumed with putting out fires of various kinds. I could have written a blog post. I just didn't.

So now what? My first impulse was that I was now off the hook, having already broken my measly little three-day streak. No need to bother to blog anymore for a while.  [Yep, all or nothing thinking. Perfectionist? Me?? Nooooo...] Another voice within me said, what difference does it make? You didn't really want to blog daily anyway. But the loudest voice by far was my inner critic: She was irked and couldn't believe I didn't even make it to day 4.

Ultimately, I decided that the chance to practice imperfectionism is at least as valuable as the chance to work on my blogging. And I don't even have to choose between the two. I did go ahead and write a blog post on Friday, and I'm writing this one on Saturday.

It feels a little like that very first ding in the side of your brand new car. It's unsettling at first, but ultimately you can drive and park with a bit more ease, knowing the thing you've been dreading has already happened, and the world didn't come to an end.

I doubt I'll blog every single day for the rest of the month, but I do intend to blog frequently. I'll also be giving some thought to how often to blog beyond April, but my current thought is that once or twice a week is plenty. My best lesson from the blogging challenge so far, though, has been the reminder that perfectionism is toxic, and I'm determined to let go of it and become an imperfecionist.

Breath

When Dr. Andrew Weil is asked what single health practice he would recommend to people, were he limited to only one recommendation, his answer is to have them focus on their breath. Since breathing is something we usually do automatically, it may seem an odd answer, on the surface. If you have spent any time doing breath work or in meditation practices which attend to the breath, you will likely be less surprised by his answer. Dr. Weil says the four qualities to develop in your breathing over time are to make it deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular.

In many cultures the word for spirit and the word for breath are the same. That seems noteworthy to me. As a voice teacher, breathing is something I give a significant amount of attention to for a number of reasons, as I regularly teach students how to breath in a way that not only supports their singing but tends to be closer to the way they were born breathing than how they have been socialized to breathe over the years.

Still, I too often forget that this wonderful key to better physical and mental health is literally right under my nose. Today, I am setting an intention to focus more on my breathing--in exercise, in meditation, in singing, in simply being.

Spring Cleaning

After a slightly shaky start, spring has sprung in Atlanta. Although the pollen count here can get so high that it causes real problems for many of us, I think spring is still my favorite season, with its mild temperatures, new growth, and colorful blossoms. I can hardly wait for local farmer's markets to open.

Spring cleaning is also associated with this time of year. Ordinarily, I can't claim that any sort of clean up effort is something I look forward to, but somehow this year feels different. Maybe it's a testament to just how cluttered our home is at the moment, but I'm actually looking forward to letting go of things we no longer need and clearing some space. Our outer worlds tend to be a reflection of our inner worlds, so I plan to do some inner work, as well.

Do you have personal rituals you associate with the change of seasons? Will you be doing any (physical, mental, and/or emotional) spring cleaning this year?

Social Media: A Clash of Seasons

I'll bet fully half of the arguments I've had with loved ones over the years had less to do with core disagreements than unfortunate timing: trying to be funny when my spouse was dead serious; feeling outraged by an injustice my friend was not of a mind to raise her blood pressure over; trying to fix someone else's problem when what he really needed was for me to listen.

It happens often. We may not be on opposite sides of an issue so much as different wave lengths, and it rarely ends well. If you've ever had someone suggest to you in the midst of an argument that you should calm down or stop "over-reacting," you also understand that even if there is some merit in the observation, pointing it out in that moment (or in that particular way) isn't helpful.

I wonder if social media hasn't increased this kind of miscommunication. A glance at any Twitter stream or Facebook feed reveals a jumble of largely unrelated reactions to life. In the old days, I mostly had conversations with people I was actively engaged with in some way--maybe attending a concert, taking a class, or working on a project together. We might not share all the same opinions, but riding together to a worship service, shopping mall, or Weight Watcher's meeting still provides a common denominator.

Without a shared experience, however, it takes more effort to really connect. We don't have to check in or tune in at all before we start posting. I can--and often do--post without much regard for what's going on with others. How can that possibly foster connection, which Dr. Brene Brown defines as, "the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment"?

Add to that the fact that inflection is notoriously hard to intuit online--a reality only marginally eased by the overuse of emoticons and exclamation points--as well as the way conversation threads form between unrelated people in the midst of very different experiences: one at work, another at leisure, some in a rush to post and run, others semi-permanently stationed at their laptops. It's a recipe for misunderstanding and conflict, especially if you haven't limited your online friends and followers to those who already think much like you do.

Social media is a place where our personal worlds converge and sometimes collide. I find this kind of disconnection particularly challenging when there is friction between commenters on my own Facebook page who clearly aren't attuned to one another. I feel compelled to act as a host. Do I stay out of it or try to moderate a bit, knowing I may further irritate everyone with my awkward peacemaking attempts?

    a time to build up, a time to break down, 

    a time to dance, a time to mourn,

    a time to cast away stones, 

    a time to gather stones together

I'm not sure how we improve these communications. As with most things, I suspect greater awareness, including self-awareness, would help. Your time to laugh may be my time to weep; your time to kill may be my time to heal. Your time to chill out and play games may be my time to garner support for a cause which is deeply important to me. My time to rail against injustice may be your time to regroup. My time to step out and take a risk may be your time to play it safe so you can focus on something completely different. Timing is everything.

I do know that telling someone who feels oppressed or mistreated to be patient is roughly as effective as suggesting, mid-dispute, that your spouse needs to calm down. Unless your goal is to escalate the argument, don't bother. We don't get to define the experiences of others or tell them how to feel. If you do relate to how the other person feels, empathy is likely to be more valuable than advice.

Embrace, reject, or equivocate with social media as you will, but may we never forget that there are real live human beings behind those various tweets and Facebook comments, each dealing with their own stuff, just as we are. Laughing, weeping, planting, reaping, each in due season.

being present

I've been thinking about awareness and what it means to stay in the present moment. I spend the vast majority of my moments physically present but mentally elsewhere--often either worrying about the future or reliving the past.

It's not a new topic for me. I especially ponder these things when I am returning to a meditation practice after a long absence. In this case, a new and fertile context in which to practice mindfulness is as caregiver to my parents, who have both been quite ill in recent months.

Today, I was watching a YouTube video of one of my father's violin teachers, Jascha Heifetz, as he played a famous and extremely challenging work from memory in a recording studio. He did it in one take:

It is not a flawless performance. In this day and age, a recording engineer would surely be tempted to go in and "clean up" a few little imperfections here and there. But what stands out for me in this and virtually every recording I've ever heard from this violinist, even beyond his evident skill and artistry, is his incredible focus. Whenever he is playing the violin, Mr. Heifetz is a shining example of a human being in flow, fully present, from moment to moment.

It is essential to cultivate this kind of awareness in performing. Even an instant of reaching back in memory to a passage you already played (perhaps differently than you expected) or getting ahead of yourself and dropping your concentration out of sheer relief, once you make it through a particularly difficult passage or when the end is finally in sight, can cause an entire performance to unravel.

I have reminded students and choirs many times of this very phenomenon just before they go on stage: Stay focused; stay present. If something happens that you don't like or didn't expect--whether good or bad--don't dwell on it; don't get stuck there. It's not the time to investigate. You can reflect on it later. Stay with what you are actually singing or playing, not what you already did or will be doing in a few moments.

While I have sporadically attempted mindfulness meditation during some periods of my life and found it to be a valuable practice, I'm a long way from what anyone could call an experienced mediator in any classic, formal sense. But I am an experienced musician, teacher, and performer and the child of two even more experienced musicians, teachers, and performers. I grew up in an environment which was focused on making beautiful music. So my Epiphany for today is that I have far more experience in mindfulness practice than I had previously recognized.

What are the areas of your life or the activities during which you feel most fully present and alive?

Is the time ever right?

Waiting for the right time is a favorite excuse of mine, effectively combining two vices with which I have a long history: procrastination and perfectionism.

Why haven't I done it yet? The time isn't right. It's too soon or too late. Or perhaps its too hot, too cold, too risky, too silly, too difficult, too obscure, too tedious, too overwhelming, too uncertain, too time-consuming, too distracting, too frustrating, too complicated, too easy, or too ridiculous. Alternately, maybe I'm too old, too young, too tired, too wired, too busy, too uncertain, too scared, or too angry to do whatever it is. In any case, I'm waiting for ideal conditions which will never arrive.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons not to do things or inappropriate times to attempt them. But let's be honest: that isn't what's holding things up. Not everything is worth doing, and certainly one person can only do so much. It's important to pay attention to all those possibilities.
 
For me, procrastination is too often wrapped up in the fantasy that if I can somehow do everything just right, all the puzzle pieces will finally fall into place. Everything will magically get done, and then I can begin to make conscious choices about what to do next. In spite of what I may want to believe, this isn't optimism; it's delusion.  

The ability to finally make conscious choices isn't some elusive reward for slogging through weeks, months, or years of mindless quicksand. Rather, acting consciously up front allows for the possibility of a different route entirely, a more mindful path, bypassing some of that quicksand.

Since my mother's cancer diagnosis in June and my father's heart attack in January, I've systematically put aside less urgent things, some of which had already been waiting for me for a long time. The interruption to my routine served as an invitation to pause and reconsider just what is most important to me at this point in my life. Not surprisingly, the answer wasn't taking the Christmas tree down by January 6, getting my office organized, or even finding a new job. 

Crisis management is sometimes a short-term necessity. As a lifestyle, however, it is neither healthy, nor sustainable. A brief season of avoiding rather vast areas of one's life may be needed in order to keep functioning at first, but at some point you have to face the totality of your new circumstances, whether or not the hard stuff is over.

Today, I am reminding myself that not every good idea which has occurred to me, can or should be implemented. There is great value in being selective and in letting things go. More is not always better, and waiting for the perfect time to do something is effectively a decision NOT to do it without the benefit--the freedom--of truly letting go of it. It's the worst of both worlds.
 
Further, once I fall into the habit of reflexive excuse making, I have essentially shut down a whole world of creative possibilities. Maybe doing things a little differently would make them easier or better. Maybe I could do some things in stages or choose to do only a part of something. Or perhaps it's just time to focus on completely different things and let those earlier plans go entirely.

Our culture glorifies busy-ness and selflessness, so it's tempting to try to get some credit in those departments by hanging on to absurdly long to-do lists and engaging in a little self pity on the side. But as long as I stay invested in defending my misery (...or busy-ness or martyrdom), I am far more likely to focus on problems than solutions. That helps no one.

I also get caught up in perfectionism: wanting to leave things on the list until I can be certain to do them exactly right or until I have completed the previous items to my satisfaction. But that day never comes. While my intention may feel righteous, it is actually quite toxic and only adds unnecessary pressure to what may already be a difficult situation. 

Reflexive excuse-making liberally sprinkled with perfectionism, has become a huge habit of mine, and I dare say I'm not alone. Habits are, pretty much by definition, mindless... unconscious. Yet periods of high stress, such as family health crises, are times when we need to call on our inner resources to make mindful, informed choices. If you haven't already established a practice of mindfulness prior to a crisis, it's particularly easy to get lost when chaos starts swirling around you. 

My parents are not only ill at the moment, but quite overwhelmed. They need a great deal of help right now, and I have become their primary caregiver. I very much want to make conscious, informed, thoughtful, and compassionate decisions. This intention requires me to be as tuned in as possible to what's going on. The best way I know to cultivate the kind of awareness these circumstances call for is a regular practice of mindfulness meditation.

In light of this realization, I've returned to the work of one of my heroes, molecular biologist, Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School as well as of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic. Dr. Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as "moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention." (You can hear him explain it a little more thoroughly here.)  

Present moment awareness is grounding, by its very nature. I can't make rational choices when I'm no longer in touch with what's actually happening right now. In a crisis, especially, it is possible to become so distracted by fears, pain, frustration, or any number of other things which seem to be engulfing you that you can lose sight of what you most need as the basis for wise decisions. 

Making choices based upon what I'm afraid may happen or what I want to avoid or fervently wish would or would not happen is risky, irrational, and further disorienting. It pulls me even farther away from who I am and what I'm about. When I begin to panic or act out of fear, dread, insecurity, or avoidance, I've lost my footing in the present. 

In continuing to negotiate my ongoing family situation, as I broaden my focus enough to better survey the bigger picture and reassess my goals and priorities in light of new realities, I cannot help but notice how different things look from today's perspective than they did only a year or two ago.

Rather than waiting around for the right time to do all the things I've put off while offering up excuses (mostly to people who aren't interested in the first place), I intend to begin to substitute--however imperfectly--the practice of mindfulness for the habit of avoidance. I'm not ready to speculate on where this renewed practice may lead, but my intuition tells be it's the right thing for me to do.

an unexpected limb

If you want to make God laugh, so the saying goes, tell Her your plans. The last time I posted in early January, it had been a rough 7 months due to my mom's health crisis, but things appeared to be looking up. Then, on January 14, my dad had a heart attack. He survived, but we almost lost him. He spent a a week in ICU followed by a month in cardiac rehab before coming home. Already an end-stage renal patient on dialysis with a history of stroke, cancer, and diabetes, life is not easy for my dad these days. And mom, who has been in cancer treatment since June of last year is no longer able to care for him in the way she once could.

Meanwhile, mom has not improved as much as expected. It appears she has more cancer, in another organ. If a biopsy confirms this diagnosis, she will soon begin new chemo treatments.

I'm struggling to (re)define my role in the current reality. When it appeared that a relatively brief period of intense, basically full-time care giving from me for my mom might get her over the worst and back to far more independent living again, I was ready to sign up for 6-8 months of that and put a temporary hold on parts of my life. Now that things have become more complicated and it's clear that this is a longer term proposition, it's time to re-think things.

In January, I imagined that I would be doing more blogging and other types of writing this year. I even envisioned "Writing" as a theme for me in 2013. As it turns out, most of my writing to date has been my almost daily journal posts on the Caring Bridge site I set up for my mom to update friends and family on her condition. (I've since expanded it to include updates on my dad's health as well.)

The year is young yet, and spring is just around the corner--a time of re-birth and new growth. Maybe I'll start a different blog that focuses on dealing with adversity. Maybe I'll write a book. Or maybe my theme for this year will become "Caregiving" or "Family" and I'll save writing as a focus for another time.

This soprano is not situated on the limb I expected to be perched upon by now, but the nature of tree climbing is such that you have to use limbs that can support your weight and which are close enough to reach from wherever you happen to be. As you proceed up the tree, you may discover things you weren't expecting which necessitate adjustments to your route or occasionally even your destination. But the act of climbing, practiced regularly and with reasonable care, is bound to make one stronger and more discerning over time. And those tree-climbing skills will surely come in handy later, when it's time to change trees.

A New Year

John Lennon famously wrote that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. In June of 2012, my mother was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, and I became her caregiver and companion on a healing journey. Neither of us had planned on that.

Mother has since been through chemotherapy and major surgery along with a few complications, including blood clots in both lungs which are still being treated, but she is improving. As we begin the new year, I can envision a time when mother will be able to resume most of her normal activities, and I will, in turn, resume many of the things I put on hold when caring for my parents suddenly became my top priority. This blog was one of those things.

I have been posting almost daily updates for family and friends on my mom's Caring Bridge website, and someday I may write more about my experience of these past six months, but I don't know that I'm ready to do that here or now.

In a few hours, at a follow-up appointment with mom's surgeon, we should get a better sense for how much longer I will need to be with her around the clock, but my sense is that we will begin to transition back toward more independence for my mom--and for me--in the next couple of weeks.

I intend to do more writing in 2013. I'm not yet certain what forms that writing may take or how public it will be, but I'm getting started by participating in writingyourwayhome.com's mindful writing challenge in January, in which I write down one "small stone" each day. I've decided to use my Tumblr to record these little daily observations. (You can click the grey links above for more info.)

I'm also beginning to (re-)think how best to use this blog. The ideas I had 6 months ago now feel rather distant and may no longer be the best direction. I'm only beginning to allow myself to even think about such things. It feels almost as though I'm getting ready for a long trip home after living on another planet.
 
For the time being, I just want to lay down a marker, of sorts--a placeholder. Soon I will be returning to my own home to live and returning to this place (and others) to write.