I taught a piano lesson today, babysat three sisters (ages three, eight, and twelve) until around midnight. It made me a little frustrated and tired, because if there are easygoing children in the world, I've never met them, but it also made me think of how much I want to be a mother someday. There was yet another huge thunder and lightning storm tonight, and Kailea (the youngest) came snuggling against me and looked up at me and laughed, and told me I was "funny and pretty." She's beautiful, one of my very favorite people. I don't think I would be an exceptionally good mother, but I would probably be an interesting one, at least. I used to swear up and down I'd never have a child because I didn't trust myself to raise up another human being, but.... they're just so wonderful and every line of work I've ever wanted to go into involves children. Lately it's the mothers I'm more interested in, though. I watch them with their babies, their teenagers, their grandchildren, and I look at myself, and I wonder how do they DO it?


As tired as I am lately, I have difficulty sleeping at night. Lights are off, my body's comfortable and warm in bed... there's nothing to distract my brain. It just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and

There have been a lot of little losses today. Things too small to mention to anyone, but they hurt. After a major loss I always feel like the small things shouldn't matter at all in comparison, but it tends to have just the opposite effect for me. It makes them matter more. Lately I am losing a lot of things that have mattered to me. I know that that's normal, especially at this stage in most people's life where you're becoming A Grownup and having to make decisions and choices that inevitably change a lot of things... I alternate between wanting to charge forward and seize the world (about, say, 18% of the time) and feeling overwhelmed and alone and sad and missing. And there are other times where I feel so disconnected from both the immediate past and the impending future that I just float. I suppose there are worse things than drifting. I just need to train myself to stop staring at old pictures and trying to memorize every conversation out of fear that it will be the last one.

 I'm supposed to be learning to let go gracefully, but I never realized how much of my life that would require changing. For now, I'm learning to fail gracefully instead.