Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

I have been thinking today, not doing. Not today. I thought we would get to the pool today, but we didn't and I am resting before we go to dinner at a friend's house. I seem to need naps right now. Julia doesn't mind. It usually means a movie for her and clay work or drawing.

I see that I have been working all week, not trying to keep the thoughts at bay, but doing so anyway. The calls, the letters, the visits, the figuring out, and the cleaning up make me so tired right now at night that there has been no big chance to think, but walking, shopping for what we need for our trip, playing and talking to Julia, and I am thinking again.

And changing. I feel like I am changing, by the day, by the minute. I wonder and then I am sure that people who have lost long time partners feel this way. I am not running away, instead I am moving away from the life that I have shared with one person, my person, and towards a life that I am more single. Not single exactly. But us without one of us. I don't have a hole inside but the impression of an always that has ended, at least in the conventional sense.

So changing. When Cheshire and I stood by David's bedside after he had died, I did not want to move. It was that when we moved, we would move away from David, we would share this terrible change with the world, and it would become real. And we would move beyond David's ken, beyond the life that we shared, beyond and into somewhere I did not want to go.

But move we did, and took in the world as it was then reconstituted. I have been living terribly in the present -- maybe not terrible, but very changed. And if I must live in this changed world, then I do not want to live as if the world was as I knew it with David. I cannot seem to imagine a past or future. I have lived in those times since I was a child, touching down in the present only when it was necessary, and surely, always, amusing myself, diverting myself with my imaginings. I cannot do that now. I am only now, and it is very strange.

Bear with these ramblings.

I am going wild. I have told some people about this -- Cheshire, Lisa, Barbara, a few others. And no worries about changing too quickly or making rash decisions. I am way too conservative is so many ways -- a good middle class upbringing -- nothing will happen quickly. But it will begin. Begin now. Began so soon after the moment that David was no more.

I have no intention in living as we lived. We have been utterly conventional for years and years, since law school, maybe since we got married. Now I want utter change. This morning we had cold soba noodles and dumplings for breakfast. Julia loved it. I moved my bed yesterday, and the shape of the room changed. I want to do my renovation but I want to satisfy myself completely. Gosh, these are so insignificant that they cannot explain how I feel -- but they are the first small steps on a spiral. I am sure.

I want to do what I can for children like Julia -- maybe trauma, maybe autism, maybe just the neuro-effects of neglect and trauma. I want to do something for those children and their families. I cannot become a doctor or therapist -- I am frankly too old for those adventures. Too old in my own mind, I don't want to take the time either would involve. But I can still do things.

I will take the LEND course that I was accepted into a few weeks ago, and see where it leads. If that itself doesn't present me with opportunities, then after a time, I will go to China and create a foster home for older girls who could be adopted, or go to Bolivia and work to get that country's orphans into homes and to open it to international adoption, or move to the place with the most advanced autism research in the world and help them somehow.

And I will write. Probably most and always, something like the books and books of journals that sit on my shelves, and the entries in this blog. Maybe a book -- What is the most recent about a life after tragedy? There will have to be another of those. Maybe one like that -- one where the writer is still PTO president and teaches her challenged child about dinosaurs and cannot immediately move to Paris.

I write this in whispers of prayers that it will be so. It is hard to shout right now. I don't know how David would feel about any of this, except I know that he too longed for adventure when we were able. I hope that the able time is coming. I hope it is now.