Right now my head and my heart are full. I’m going around and around in circles thinking about people, relationships, needs, sustainability, balance, effort, intensity, desire.

I’m thinking about pain. I’m thinking about energy.

I’m thinking about owing people and deserving things.

I’m thinking about choices and about execution. I’m thinking about long-term, medium-term, and long-term planning.

Sometimes you have to choose to make today uncomfortable in favor of having a comfortable medium or long term.

What does it mean to love someone? What does it mean to build them up? What does it mean to tear them down? What is harm anyway?

Why do we want these things from one another. I don’t know. But I feel like I drown in want. But my wants are so complicated and contradictory…

I want. I want to feel connected and interesting and like I help people and I’m needed. Not in a “let me fix you” sort of way.

In the “my neighbor is still dropping by every few days to ask for help studying for a test” and I feel like a really good person for dropping what I’m doing to talk to her. She doesn’t have many people to talk to. She’s really nice and living far from everyone and everything she really knows. She’s a brave woman. I’m glad I can help her with keeping her independence at this stage of life for a little bit longer.

I’m not fixing her. I’m helping her develop the tools she needs to help herself.

Teaching doesn’t always go from eldest to youngest. The best teachers are children who share how they understand the world. In my jaundiced view of the world nothing beats a four year old saying, “You don’t know how to do that? (patient sigh) Here, let me show you.”

Melts my heart every time. Thank you for showing me. I will pay careful attention. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with me.

I will never have a four year old again. My sadness is epic. But only in that teenage bummer kind of way. Frankly, I’m already like “How about if we have a few years of going away to college? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

I honestly hope they will boomerang. But a few years of break from being mommy before a transition to figuring out cohousing as adults would be awesome.

So I can say things like, “Can you go stay at a friend’s house for the whole weekend? Thanks!”

Too many words to say. Hands hurt. Must lay tile later. Bye y’all.