Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

Getting to the room off the living room, sometimes known as the den, the play room, the toy room, the away room. What is it? Office and Supply closet for my printer and desk, and Julia's toys and supplies. Stripping it bare. Maybe rearranging shelves. Painting parts of the walls. Looking to conform the shape, storage capacity, play space, work space, to fit out summer. Numbers, money, reading comprehension, and transferring my desk back to the desk and away from a plastic file container and the dining room table. And of course, dinosaurs. Took down dozens of dinosaur pictures put up over the past year -- We need new pictures. Let Julia fill the walls once again.

"Well, I've been afraid of changing 'cause I built my life around you . . ." - Landslide, Stevie Nicks

Sorting letter last night, seeing the proof of how long and hard David and I had to work to fit together. We were two such different souls. Thank goodness for passionate, blinding, irrational love. Without such glue, would we have worked so hard? I am now used to thinking of us as the effective team, the good family that we became, but we rubbed each other raw for years and years. We could be needy and demanding. We each felt frozen out at times from the other; we called each other selfish sometimes. And we were. And now, I climb out of the safety of the united life that we built. That too, is not easy. It is as if we worked so long and hard to make ourselves and each other perfect puzzle pieces with curves and flat places and notches and irregularities. We worked to fit each other so that we could live and love and work and raise our girls. And now, my task is to become an end piece, maybe a corner - strong and independent enough to hold my present, my future, and my children as a family.

It was a lifetime of work -- before we were married, we read a good deal of Rilke, especially from his Love and Other Difficulties. We chose well.