I’m sitting here at Lake Hotel, with the vast lobby near empty. The end of August is upon us and the visitors have thinned out; the wave of record-setting visitation is breaking and sliding back.

August was a marathon of guests for us personally as well. Just two days ago I sat here with my paternal grandmother, Shelby; her partner, Allen; my uncle, Phillip; Lydia; and Rafal. We drank coffee and ate scones late in the afternoon after a long day of sightseeing. Just outside the large window before us, a small herd of bison grazed.

A week before this my mother was here; a week before that, my best friend. Each visit carried adventure, laughter, and lessons about myself in its pack. Kim and I climbed mountains with Lydia, took a boat tour, and stayed up late watching funny videos. Mom and I played at home with the baby, walked geyser basins, and rode a covered wagon to a backcountry cookout. Grandma, Allen, and Uncle Phillip got the animal show, spotting an elusive grey wolf, a grizzly, an elk buck, and many bison. In the mix was the 100-year birthday of the National Park Service, and Rafal, Lydia, and I made the pilgrimage up to Gardiner to see the show.

After such an August, I am simultaneously depleted and extra full.

Though the equinox is weeks away, the start of school means Fall. This is the time of year when we let things fall away. We let our bad habits die. We let go of things that don’t serve us.

I am grateful that so many people made the journey to see us: by way of highway and air. I’m glad they got to see our home, and to report back what they’ve found. I’m excited for people back home to have an image of where we live, what our apartment is like, and the great majestic scenery that surrounds us. I could see a glimmer of recognition in each visitor that told me, “I can see why you like it here.”

We do like it here. When the seasons change and we’re stretched a bit thin, the life we’ve chosen can feel exhausting. But my goodness, do we like it here anyhow.

At the NPS centennial, we saw many people speak. They declared their love and support for National Parks, and they boasted pride for Wyoming and Montana. With the breathtaking mountains framing the stage, the glorious sunset lighting the big sky, and my sweet toddler bounding after bigger kids through the tall grass, I felt connected and I knew what they meant. I was proud to be a part of Yellowstone. I was proud to be a resident of the wild, rocky west.

I can feel change in the burgeoning September wind, and I am ready to clear out the old. I welcome the space of autumn. I am ready to grow.

I am reading Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking. It is a memoir about her husband’s sudden death and the difficult year that followed. As she navigates grief (which calls “passive”) and mourning (the act of dealing with grief) she details memories of her life with John, questions and mistakes she is left with, and the details left open-ended by his departure. She wonders if she has depended on him too much, or did she depend on him just enough.

Of course this bring my mind to Rafal.

We got in a fight yesterday that spilled over into today. I was supposed to make a phone call that I didn’t make. I didn’t realize the urgency of the situation, and my delay made Rafal look bad. We fought (though Rafal did most of the yelling). He said, “I have to do everything.”

This seems like a common stone to hurl in marriage. Each person thinks they do it all. Each person fails to fully recognize the things that they don’t do.

Today frustrations remounted and we fought again (though I did most of the yelling). I was tired of taking care of the baby while he worked on other things. I said, “I have to do everything.”

I needed to leave to go write. I needed to remove the base of the car seat from the Subaru and leave at home. Normally this is something he would do, but we were both proving points.

I had trouble loosening the strap. I couldn’t release the hooks. I pulled and pushed, breaking a sweat in the brisk air. I walked away and went back. I called expletives in frustration. Warm tears began to stream down my face. It’s safe to say I wasn’t crying about the car seat, though I did finally get it free.

In my time alone at Lake Hotel (the cherished writing time I fought for), I am airing out my defensive reactions and taking a reflexive look. What is the right amount of dependency?

When it comes to physical things, technical things, things that involve calling people on the phone, I am too quick to ask for help, to lean on him, to defer. But when it comes to help with Lydia, to taking time for myself, to managing emotional desires, I hardly ever speak up. I wait and stew and the pressure builds until I blow, this habit both old and faithful.

In the heat of an altercation all I can see are the ways I am right. As the cool breeze of time blows through, the ways I am wrong reveal themselves.

We both do everything: for each other and for ourselves.

Patti Smith told me to make something of myself.

Well, not exactly. She said that she was determined to make something of herself. That she had a hunger to be an artist, that the desire to express herself outshined other wants.

I haven’t been making anything, let alone something of myself. So I swallowed Patti’s message as though it were my own.

I recall wanting in a similar way. I recall lusting after the idea of art, filling notebook after notebook with thoughts and stories, yet wondering if I would ever make anything.

I wrote with an untapped need to say something to my future self, or simply to the future. I wrote the way I played guitar, not for music’s sake, but for the promise that someday someone would hear me sing. I was always looking for some way to be watched.

From the time I was small I would shoot up my hand, or audition, or volunteer to be in the most visible roles, the most aesthetic. In Catholic grammar school–wearing a skirt that was always intentionally too short—I performed in school plays, as a cheerleader, as an alter server. I was president of my class. Later on, in high school, I would be on the dance team. And finally, as a senior, I would get over my fear of being uncool and participate in school plays. (Though after snagging one of the leads in fall semester’s Arsenic and Old Lace, and partying much too hard at the Saturday night cast party, and vomiting back stage before our Sunday matinee, I would gain only a very small role in the spring musical, Bye Bye Birdie.) I also joined “Group Interpretation,” where we staged chamber theatre-esque interpretations of literature for competitions (which we always lost). Of course I didn’t know the term “chamber theatre” at the time. I likewise did not know that “Group Interp” was another name for “Oral Interpretation of Literature,” which would later be renamed “Performance Studies.” I didn’t know that I would spend seven years in my twenties and thirties pursuing a master’s, and then a doctorate in this field. I didn’t know that I would dedicate myself to this life completely, that it would be the art and expression and knowledge I’d longed for. I didn’t know that it would then turn dark in a way–stressful and overwhelming–and that I would finish my big degree, only to let it ferment on a shelf until I figured out what to do with it.

I still haven’t figured that out.

I write this as an 18-month-old ragamuffin beauty crawls over me in her pajamas, and without need for help or permission, draws open my rope, pulls down my tank top, and starts drinking out of my body. So I have been making something these months: I have been making milk.

I don’t want to diminish my role as a mother, or the role of parents in general, as if I’m not working, as if I’m not toiling toward something important and great, as if its not the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I need to frame that work differently from “making something of myself,” from making art, from making at all.

Making the baby—growing it from cells and food inside my body—now that was surely making something. But as soon as she exited me, splitting off for her own grand adventure, something changed. Now it is crucial for me to resist shaping her, resist making her, and let her form herself. I must keep her safe. I must teach her manners. I must guide her with stories, and truths, and occasional half-truths, but she is already there: her own person emerging from the ether of mystery. A miracle, as I suppose we all are.

I have many domestic duties to get on with this morning. I have pressing deadlines to ghost write the droll things that pay the bills. I have to make Lydia breakfast.

What is this thing I have stated writing? And will anybody read it? And will anybody buy it? And what is it going to say?

It doesn’t matter.

At least for a small moment this morning—for the first moment in too long–I started to say something, brushing off a small red brick of meaning and stirring up the mortar to resume the long task of making.

(I got new glasses in the mail yesterday: inexpensive, and funky, and loud. Like Patti Smith wearing her long grey raincoat in the summer, these glasses signal something about me. Even if that message is only for myself.)

I will make something of myself, yet, Patti. I promise.

I am living out a dream today.  I have ventured out alone to spend some time writing at the Old Faithful Inn. This tremendous log building, complete with an 85-foot stone fireplace, first opened its doors in 1904. It has been called “the first of the great log lodges of the American west,” and it remains one of the only old-time log hotels still standing.

Near the end of our time here last year, I did some work for the Old Faithful post office, and that is how Lydia and I discovered the Inn. To be more specific, we discovered the espresso cart. We also discovered a sneaky way to park in the front of the Inn and cut through, avoiding the notoriously over-crowded Old Faithful parking lot. Finally, we discovered these adorable antique writing desks sprinkled throughout the second floor, but until now, I’ve never had the chance to use one.

We’ve been spending more time at the Inn as a family, too. Last weekend, we packed up our camping stove and some ingredients, and parked ourselves on the balcony here to cook lunch (and drink espresso). I’ve seen Old Faithful blow many times, but this was my first time witnessing it from the balcony.

Then, we hiked the steep, 3-mile loop trail up to Mystic Falls. On our way to the top, we saw Old Faithful blow again, this time from a different perspective. The waterfall was lovely. The weather was beautiful. Lydia slept on my back for the entire hike.

Look really close and you can see the steam from Old Faithful.

Mystic Falls

We’ve been here in Yellowstone for a full month already, and every weekend has been an adventure. Every weekend, we load up the car and take a road trip to another border town. We’ve been to Jackson, Cody, and West Yellowstone taking in the local eats and entertainment. Every weekend also brings breathtaking hikes through the divergent ecosystems of Yellowstone. We’ve hiked the south rim of the canyon through giant puffs of snow, climbed to the top of Elephant Back Mountain, and taken in the world famous fountain paint pots (bubbling mud pots of colored clay).

Yesterday was no exception. We ventured north through the village called Mammoth Hot Springs, and out to the border town of Gardiner, Montana. It is a slow moving, two-hour drive through the park, and Lydia wasn’t enjoying it, so on our way, we stopped and walked the two Norris Geyser Basin boardwalks (about 2.6 miles combined). Although the structure of these thermal features was familiar, the brilliant colors (like baby blue and forest green) found in Norris are unlike any others I have seen in Yellowstone so far.

When we reached the stylized, Wild West tourist town of Gardiner, we enjoyed some lunch at the Yellowstone Café. Then we capped it off with espresso and chai at the Tumbleweed Bookstore. Here we befriended Jason and Max (a father and 7-year-old son who were killing time while mom and the other kids went white water rafting). Lydia and Max played with blocks together, while Jason, Rafal, and I talked. Wouldn’t you know it, they had driven all the way here from Chicago. Jason and Rafal actually attended the same high school. The world, as ever, holds fast to being small.

The main road of Yellowstone moves in a figure 8, with Mammoth Hot Springs in the top-left corner, and Grant Village in the bottom-right. So rather than heading back the way we came, we took the opposite side of loop toward home. As we traveled south through the village of Tower-Roosevelt, we stopped for a short hike up to Lost Creek Falls. For the second time that day, I found myself in a landscape different from what I’d come to expect in Yellowstone, with lush green vegetation swirling around my feet. Yellowstone is impossibly vast, and she continues to surprise me.

Lydia hasn’t been sleeping lately. (By “lately,” I guess I mean, since the day she was born.) But miraculously, she fell into a deep sleep on the half-mile waterfall hike, and she didn’t even wake up when we transferred her to the car seat.

Then, as we rounded the curve heading south through the Beartooth Pass, we found ourselves in a animal-jam, where we saw a gorgeous mama black bear, and two TINY bear babies! Rafal stayed in the car with Lydia, while I ventured out with the rest of the awestruck tourists. (I tried to snap a few photos, but ultimately decided to just take it in.)

Eventually, we made it home. We ate dinner, built a fire, and gave Lydia a bath. We had a few laughs, put the baby to bed, and watched a movie. Some things never change.

On the home front, things are going OK. It’s still hard to be home alone with a small kid all week, but it’s easier than it used to be. We go for a walk (or two) every single day (no matter how cold or how snowy or how damp), and I think it is doing great things for us.

I bake muffins and give them to my neighbors. I run into people I know and chat with them. (You really know you’re in the mountains when it is 50 degrees outside and everyone you cross paths with exclaims, “This WEATHER! It’s incredible!” and you cannot help but agree.)

The post office is open now, as well as the general store, and the tourists have started to descend. We have (sub-par, over-priced) satellite internet, and I could not be more thrilled. Lydia’s vocabulary has tripled, her motor skills have advanced, and her general disposition is joyfully contagious. We have a lot of fun together. She still wakes up about 3 times a night, and after 16 months of sleepless nights, I can’t help but feel that it isn’t fair. But then I look into those hazel-green eyes of hers, and pour myself another cup of coffee, and forget about sleep for a while.

Yellowstone Season Two is off to a glorious start. One month down, five more to go.

Tomorrow marks one year since I conferred my Ph.D., and as a result, I can’t help but reflect on my relationship to academia.

For one whole year, I have not done anything characteristically academic. I have not taught. I have not attended conferences. I have not set foot on campus, any campus at all. I haven’t cracked open an academic book. I have written, and I have performed, but in ways not funded or otherwise supported by academic institutions.

Seeing the waves of hoods and smiles, as so many friends sashay across the stage, I feel so far removed from the educational system. I miss my friends, and I miss being part of a learning community.

I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with the academy. When I embarked on a master’s, and even at the top of my Ph.D. I maintained that I was not pursuing a career as a professor. “I’m an artist,” I would say, “I study in pursuit of my art.” One May, at our big year-end party, I was voted Most Likely to Shun Academia, and it made sense. But then, after a while, playing Professor began to feel good. I became accustomed to the hustle, the cycles, the carousel of new faces, and let me be honest, the status. I liked being in the front the classroom and daydreamed about when I could add “Dr.” to the front of my chalkboard name.

In so many ways, I loved graduate school. I loved sitting in rapt attention, pencil ready, at the feet of someone I admired, opening my mind with all my will to absorb the information set before me. I loved buying new school supplies. I enjoyed being on a new side of the arts (university fine arts funding), bringing in artists, and reviewing proposals, and even sitting at the head of the table. I loved wearing tights and dresses and carrying messenger bags. I loved learning. I loved reading difficult material. I loved critiquing social structures. I loved writing. I loved being asked to create. I loved being surrounded by other people who were also seeking big, and not exactly practical, goals.

I did not like, and I am still recovering from, The Stress. The self-doubt. The terribly long hours. The ceaseless and unnerving perception that I wasn’t doing enough, that I’d never complete it all, that nothing was ever good enough. My dismay in the face of my inabilities: my inability to finish all the reading, to get a piece published, to think of something groundbreaking to say. The anxiety, the panic, the dread of being asked to produce something critical and cautious, but brazen and new; sensitive but holds-no-punches; honest, though-provoking, timely, well-read, and above all relevant to the on-going conversation. Not to mention, the deep irrational terror that I wouldn’t be able to survive outside of academia. The interminable consternation that I would never be hired at a university, but was simultaneously (by virtue of my over-education) unemployable anywhere else.

Verbalizing these anxieties now, I feel my heart rate rise. (And thanks to the cyborg gadget on my wrist, I can confirm that it’s true.)

To every friend I know who is currently under the weight of that struggle, I want to grab you by the shoulders and tell you, “IT’S OK! I swear to you with every atom in my body that everything will be just fine. If you finish your degree and you don’t know where you are going next, it’s OK. If you have run out of funding and you’re not quite finished, or if you have to move on for other reasons and you’re not quite finished, or you’re just stuck and feel like you may never finish: I promise, I promise that it’s all OK. You are going to walk through the door, and you are going to survive. You are going to find work. You are not unemployable. Statistically speaking, you are very, very employable. You are whip smart, you are resourceful, you often work yourself to the bone, and whether or not you can see it now, you’ve amassed a bag of tricks that is going to serve you in all sorts of ways. Your student loans won’t be that big of a deal. You are going to land on your feet.”

I wish I could go back in time and tell this to myself in a way that I would believe it. I wish I could do it over again with more presence and more gratitude and less worry.

In my weaker moments, I can’t stop the young grad student in my head from answering back. I can’t prevent her from snapping, “But I actually want to be a professor. I want to use my degree. I don’t want to be a stay-at-home mom who calls herself a writer.” And even though I don’t imagine her launching this cold-cutting label at me, it sits there, in the subtext: “You are a failure.”

So what happened? I spent a year obsessively applying for jobs, and not really writing, and did not get even one interview. Then I got pregnant. Then I decided that finishing the degree was more important than finding a job, so I tabled the job hunt and wrote like the dickens. Then I had a baby and decided not to return to the job market for a while. I still have not returned to it.

I know I’m not a failure. Like, I said, I am still recovering. And in the wake of berating myself, I become angry. I feel resentment rise up to replace the self-doubt, because it is not irrational to feel that extraordinary fear.

As a Ph.D student, you get to experience professorship. You get to teach. You get to do research. You get to feel like you have a real grown-up job in every sense (save for the paycheck). Then, after a few years getting used to the experience, getting better, getting comfortable, and beginning to produce quality work, you find yourself being spit out on the other side. My family used to consistently ask me, “Why don’t you just get a job at SIU? You really seem to like it there.” Because if I had been working a low-level position anywhere else—Urban Outfitters, Whole Foods, McDonald’s—for seven years (as I was at SIU), and dare I say, working my ass off, I’d be entitled to some kind of advancement. But that just isn’t the way it works in the academy. A tenure-track job opening at SIU would be like a purple unicorn, and even if it revealed itself with magical sparkle the year I was graduating, they would never have hired me. Only after I spent some time shuttling myself around the country to obscure place after obscure place to teach god-knows-what to god-knows-who (for god-knows-how much), and worked my fingers off writing and publishing for no pay, would I then maybe (and only maybe) be seen as potentially employable by my own alma-mater.

There are not nearly enough tenure-track university jobs to accommodate the number of Ph.D.s seeking them. The job search is brutal. Every application is a massive dossier. The decks are stacked against you. The struggle is real.

And this little game of professorial dress-up played by Ph.D. students the world wide, it isn’t merely professional training. Ph.D. students are cheap labor for universities. Kelly Baker writes, “Graduate programs admit students to fit the labor demands on their campus.”

Baker (drawing on research by Marc Bousquet) explains that “new Ph.D. holders are not ‘products’ of our training, but ‘byproducts’ of academia. Graduate students and ‘non-degreed flex workers’ exist mostly to serve the university’s labor demands. They generate cheap labor. Then they get replaced.”

It isn’t simply that there are not enough jobs. It isn’t simply that we are over-producing Ph.D.s. In part, there are not enough jobs because cheap labor is being produced by Ph.D. students. As a result, “The doctorate becomes not the beginning of an academic career, but the end of one. Ph.D. holders, Bousquet explains, are ‘the actual shit of the system— being churned inexorably outside: not merely disposable labor but labor that must be disposed of for the system to work.’”

When I think about academia, when I try to untangle whether or not I will go back, I feel both enmity and pride, both relief from stress and a lurking anxiety, both an absence of community and an abundance of freedom.

“But you didn’t try hard enough to get an academic job!” cries the idealist grad student.

“You didn’t want a job like that anyway!” cries the artist.

“You’re just not good enough!” cries the impostor syndrome.

“It’s a fucked up system and there was no way you could succeed!” cries the revolutionary.

“You’re better off without the stress!” cries the mother.

“If you don’t become a professor, you wasted an obscene amount of time and money!” cries the fallacy of sunk costs.

“Don’t you miss the ritual, the people, the highs and the lows?” cries the culture of academia.

“Be gentle with yourself,” whispers the future. “There is never only one way.”

Today, I finally hung my diploma on the wall. As I pierced my wall with the tip of a nail, I knew (in a visceral way) that I will always exist in relation to my education. As I straightened the frame, I remembered that I am forever shaped by my teachers and what they taught me. When I took a step back to take in this symbol of my achievement, I could feel that my degree–my big, if impractical, accomplishment–is mine to hold. Despite the debt, despite the dearth of job prospects, it brings with it a privilege (for me as well as my daughter) that we never tasted before. Ten years spent studying philosophy and art, writing and creating, has made me a better person. I’m nostalgic about it all even as I’m a bit bitter, but I am never sorry I went.

We made it. We are back in Yellowstone for another season. Tata’s at work, baby is napping, and I am back at my keyboard. Life is as it should be.

We left Illinois on Sunday, May 1^st as the dawn broke through the horizon. Our car was packed, our trailer was hitched, and we were in good spirits. We made our way to Interstate 80, and we would follow this mainline clear across the USA.

After a brief (but lovely) pause in Iowa City for some pourover coffee from the Java House, we made it to our first stop around 4:00pm: Omaha, Nebraska. We dined on Raising Cane’s chicken fingers and stayed in a decent little hotel room with a full kitchen. Lydia was so happy to be out of the car that she danced and climbed and played until she tuckered herself right out. We all slept well.

The next day we drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming. I’d been in kind of a funky mood, just feeling stressed and exhausted from being cramped in a car and trying to entertain a toddler for twenty hours (over two days). Then our hotel room wasn’t ready when we arrived. Then we got some bad Chinese food delivery. My funk was turning even more sour. So Rafal got the baby dressed and made me get dressed and dragged me out to have a look at Wyoming’s capital. We found an amazing little coffeehouse called The Paramount Café where we had bubble tea and hot chocolate and Lydia tried to tear posters off the wall. It was enough to turn everything around. Seeing the elk statues and the wagon wheels and the mountains in the distance reminded me that I was in the Wild West. It reminded me that I love the Wild West, that I live here, and that I was almost home.

On the third day we made it to Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson is 90 miles away from Grant Village, and it is where we do our grocery shopping. When somebody from Grant says they are “going to town,” Jackson is where they are headed. Even though I have technically never lived there, Jackson Hole feels like home.

We stayed at the Wyoming Inn, and it was lovely. It was gorgeous. It was the hotel we’d been waiting for. We had some BBQ for dinner, and Lydia was an angel at the restaurant. Then we walked around town for a bit. In the off-season, everything in Jackson closes at 6:00pm, so before long we decided to head back to our hotel and luxuriate in our 800 thread count sheets.

The next day we rose early and headed over to the Bunnery for breakfast, where Tata had eggs benedict and I had their famous oat, sunflower seed, and millet pancake (that Lydia loved) plus eggs. Then over to Persephone Bakery for coffee, where they brew a Jackson Hole blend of Intelligentsia made especially for them. Then we moved on to a marathon of shopping, as we acquired goods to hold us over in the woods. We bought groceries, books, more coffee (from Lotus Café), myriad thrift store treasures (such as a kid’s life jacket, a blender, and a nice wooden cutting board), and Thai food take-out for the road. We checked out of our fancy hotel, re-hitched the old trailer, and traversed the final leg of our journey, heading north through Grand Teton National Park and on into Yellowstone.

This particular stretch of road is one of my favorites in all these vast United States. It offers a spectacular view of the craggy, navy blue Tetons (which at this time of year, are covered with snow). The Teton are the mountains of my fantasies; the mountains I sketched with a crayon during my Midwestern childhood, having never laid eyes on such geography; they are mountains among mountains, the absolute real-deal.

Driving alongside these massive marvels makes the two-hour trek to the grocery store enjoyable. I grew teary-eyed as we approached them, not realizing the depth with which I’d missed their presence in my life.

I don’t know when I’ll have the time or money to afford it (I already have one tattoo in progress), but I decided that one day I will have an image of the snow-covered Tetons tattooed on my chest. Téton is actually French for breast (early French explorers termed this range les trois tétons, or the three breasts), so it is a perfect location for such body art.

The south gate of Yellowstone is still closed for the season. As we exited Grand Teton National Park and approached our own, we came upon several sets of marooned tourists trying to decipher a map. Why these travelers ignored the numerous “Road Closed Ahead” signs stretching backwards for thirty miles, I’ll never know. But our car filled with giddy excitement, only fueled by their jealous and confused stares, as Rafal punched in the right combination and manually removed the steel gate. We gained entry into a Wonderland, not yet open to the public, and it was awesome. Snow was stacked high on both sides of the street, waterfalls flowed with powerful grace, and lakes were frozen over. There were no other people around.

We pulled into Grant Village around 3:00pm mountain time, and got right to work. We filled up our little apartment with box after box, taking a short break to enjoy our over-priced (but none-the-less delicious) Thai food, and taking turns playing with Lydia. Rafal’s boss and our next-door neighbor, Willie popped in to welcome us back, and Rafal’s co-worker Matt stopped by to deliver some water plant gossip. Eventually the trailer was empty, a good chunk of our things were put away, and Lydia was ready for bed.

With the baby asleep, the only thing left to do was to take a hot bath is the nice, deep bathtub we’d both missed, and then crawl exhaustedly into bed ourselves. The next morning at 0700, Rafal would report for work, throwing himself into the breadwinner role once again. I would return to the life of sole caretaker; stay-at-home mama; and in the cracks, whenever possible, a writer.

It feels so good to be someplace quiet. Even better, to be someplace we call home.

Can you believe it? I don’t know if I can.

Winter is slowly relenting to spring, putting the whole dang season behind us. We are organizing boxes. We are downsizing. We are daydreaming. We are heading back into the wilderness with so much less mystery. We are getting ready to go back home.

Rafal is now officially a Utility Systems Operator. He will be running the water plant in Grant Village. He is a permanent (not a seasonal) National Park Service employee. It means better pay, excellent benefits, and a permanent residence in the Park. The Park Service is sending movers over to haul our things out to Wyoming. It’s totally surreal. Have we arrived, or what?

We will be returning to our same one-bedroom apartment with our same lovely little wood stove. Next winter, Rafal will get a 3-4 month furlough, so we’ll still get a break from the unfathomably brutal Yellowstone winter.

I am excited, thrilled even. I can’t wait to see those prehistoric pillars of steam rising rapidly from cracks in the earth. I can’t wait to see bison congregated in a vast meadow. I can’t wait to spend my days walking in the densest wilderness, free from pollution, free from distraction, free from noise.

I can’t wait to be the queen of my own castle: organizing my small, sweet residence in tidy patterns; planning my meals and grocery trips down to meticulous detail; just digging in and living my little frontier life again. I can’t wait to feel like I’m control.

More than anything, I can’t wait to see Yellowstone through Lydia’s eyes. She is bowled over by squirrels running through the yard. How will she react to an elk buck tapping on our bedroom window? To a geyser spraying hot water 30 feet into the air? How will she feel about the trees, the stars, the mountains and the lakes? What can she show me that I have missed? What can she teach me about what I think I already know? I can’t wait to be illuminated by her wisdom. I can’t wait to be nourished my her joy.

I’m nervous, too. I’m overwhelmed. I mean, we’re moving again. We’re packing boxes again. This time, we’ve got to detangle our belongings from those of my in-laws. It’s not easy. It’s tedious, and a little sad.

We’ve grown so much closer to our families this winter. We’ve all had a lot of fun watching Lydia grow. I’m not sure I can fill all of those shoes for her on my own. I can’t be a little kid for her, or a Grandma, or a friend. Mama, and Tata, and a beautiful expanse of wild landscape is all she will have. It is going to have to be enough.

This morning, I went to an amazing, soothing yoga class. Now I am at the local coffee shop enjoying espresso and writing, all alone. I am luxuriating in this experience. There will be no yoga classes in Yellowstone. There will be no coffee shops. There will be no “alone.”

I have a picture in my mind of where we’re going. I’ve drawn sketches of our apartment layout, deciding where to place the bookshelf and the play area. I’ve been looking at fireplace gates to buy. I know the store where we will buy our groceries. I know the 3-mile route I plan to walk each day. I know a handful of the people who will be waiting for us when we pull up.

But my goodness if this isn’t still an adventure. My goodness if I’m not proud of us for choosing it. My goodness if I’m not ready to dig in, to work hard, to seek beauty.

We’re coming for you Yellowstone. We will be reunited soon.

It’s been a while, my friends.

It has been two months, almost to the day, since I posted anything here. And if you’ve tried to revisit something old, maybe you noticed that the blog was set to private for a bit.

For the past couple of months I have been trying to wear my big girl pants and call myself a Freelance Writer. I pillaged some of my better pieces from this blog, reworked them a bit, and sent them out. I also kept my little fingers on the keys, but everything I wrote went out for submission straight away.

I have to say, I’ve had some luck. I got a job generating content for a Top 200 website, and while I’m not always writing things that fuel my soul, this company is my bread & butter. I’ve also really clicked with the folks over at elephant journal, and they have published three of my pieces (one, two, and three), with a fourth one dropping any day now. I also had a little bit of luck with xoJane. Beyond that, I’ve gotten a handful of rejections, and whole lot of silence from the slew of other venues I have tried to entice. It’s all good. Rejection and silence are part of the game.

But recently, I started to really miss the blog.

I missed the continuity of it, the feeling that readers have been on this journey with me, the sense that I can speak to my acute experience without starting from square one. I missed the immediacy. The intimacy. The personal touch. I missed just writing into the air without tailoring to a specific venue, a specific audience, a certain slant. I missed not needing to introduce myself.

In short, I missed you.

People in the most surprising places have stopped me to tell me they enjoy this blog. People I’ve never met have found their ways here through friends of friends, and experienced connection. I can feel my community when I come here. It feels good.

I’m back, friends. Let’s both stay awhile. I’m so grateful that you’re here.

Where has the time gone?

I understand that we exist on a space-time continuum; that time exists; that it isn’t merely a method to mark passage; that there is always only right now, a beacon in the wash of the ever-present always.

My baby daughter turned one the other day. A milestone of milestones. A checkpoint that stands out, bold and clear.

All year I have been asking myself, why is this so hard? Why would the universe build itself this way? If we are meant to reproduce ourselves, why isn’t it easier?

I think maybe now I understand. The first year is like boot camp; it breaks you down to build you back up. I’m not a military person, but Tom Robbins describes basic training for the Air Force like this:

“From the hour one lands in boot camp all thoughts of future fun and past attachments are pounded out of one’s consciousness; one is locked in a perpetual present designed to purge one of any trace of individuality and extract from one any energy with which one might presume to resists” (Tibetan Peach Pie, p. 110).

Much like the boot camp Robbins describes, the first year of parenthood removes your vanity, your privacy, your sleep, your time, and so many other indescribables in order to beat you over the head with one simple, but hard to swallow mantra: You are not the center of your own life anymore. You are now forever tethered.

Being tied down gets a bad rap, but it isn’t always a negative. If I were floating weightless in the abyss of space, I’d sure love to be tethered to my vessel. And if you just widen your gaze a bit, you’ll see that we’re all literally hurling through space right now. It’s awkward when you first find yourself gripping, but I’m not sorry I chose to hold on.

When my daughter was a few weeks old, a dear friend of mine told me that the year her first son was born was the hardest year of her life. Her situation was similar to mine: their baby carried a wedding and big geographical move in his arms. But even still, smug and optimistic and not yet weathered by the many months of sleeplessness. I thought, “The most difficult year of my life? No way.”

When newlyweds and a newborn make a new home, the tensions and transformations are so big you can’t even see them. Everything about me changed: my name, my address, my job status. I gained so much weight that I didn’t look like myself. I couldn’t even wear my own clothes. I had to discover a new self.

I was wrong. My friend was right. The first year is almost exclusively thankless giving: giving and giving everything you’ve got, more than you ever knew you had to give. And in this way, you come to know your strength. You stretch your capacity for loving without expectation.

Nothing magical changed from January 31 to February 1. My daughter did not suddenly begin sleeping through the night. The difficulty did not all at once evaporate. But I can see that we are getting into the sweet stuff: the juicy joys of childhood, the excitement of discovering the world, and the unparalleled beauty of expression. She is so smart and funny and silly and lovely that I could just cry thinking about it. Let’s be real: I am crying. I love her so much that I literally cry when I try to put that love into words.

Motherhood has broken me in the best ways. This year, we begin to rebuild.

I thought about dedicating the show to Lydia, but I changed my mind.

I dedicate nearly all of myself to her. I gave her my flat unstretchmarked stomach. I have given her almost a year of my sleep. I give her my time, my attention, and more love than I knew was even possible. But I did not make this show for her. I made this show for me.

I made this show to prove something. I made this show to announce to the world, and to myself, and to Lydia that I am not only a mother. I made this show to have something else to put my energy into, another avenue to find joy. I made this show to remember that I am talented and capable, and to find love for myself again, after a tumultuous year of major change. I made this show to be an example for her. I made this show so I can be a better mom.

So it always does come back to her. That’s life now, and that’s OK. Just as long as I don’t forget to smell the self-love roses on the way. She didn’t need this show. She didn’t ask for it and she doesn’t understand it. Someday, hopefully she will. Someday she’ll find her own way to make something in the world.

But for now, I will keep nurturing her with almost everything I’ve got. Almost.

And that last bit, I will keep dedicating to me.