There’s a towering pile next to me of things to pay attention to for Gemma’s care. The Division of Services for People with Disabilities, which everyone kept abbreviating at the meeting (oh the DSPD wait list, it’s 10 years long but you should just get on it cause you never know!) and next after that, an endless supply of more acronyms with a one-eight-hundred number and a great batch of hold music to listen to. business cards for folks who are supposed to help out but can’t even tell me a straight answer of what exactly i’m ‘posed to do next.
All this sounds like a pity party. it is a little. (you’re invited!) and it makes it sound like people aren’t helpful–they are.
but there is this pile, this pile that only i can rake through. a pile of logistics that i’m learning and practicing being better at but still, people, my natural skill set lies in wonder-gazing at the sky (with neighbors asking me what the What i’m doing) and making things in the form of made up novels when i was 10 and now photographs and poetry and words (and a list of 87 other things that are currently on the back burner. Sewing my own clothes, painting, writing another novel, on and on). i always skirted logistics because i felt like they were meaningless–setting your course by the clouds was the ultimate shortcut to a life that felt deeper and more. but here i am, with these incredibly needful things staring me in the face, and the struggle to turn them into checked off boxes on a list that will literally never end.
but guess what i just decided: all of the nailing down details and calling numbers is probably just the minuscule price to pay for having the unrepeatable Gemma in my life.
a cost i’d fork over a million times over.
so the thousand small prices you pay to be a mother–in spilled milk and little ones who can’t be bothered to listen and managing schedules juggled with the teetering platter of emotional lives you help your tiny people navigate–no question it’s worth it, right? and yet we find ourselves (see above, cough) complaining about the contrast, forgetting that inherent in the package deal is the most mundane, the most grit-your-teeth challenges, struggles to “balance” and help without being a helicopter–
but ALSO, wrapped up in this deal: the most exquisite, nuanced, inexplicable joy ever created. wouldn’t it makes sense that we’d have to pay for it, a cost exactly proportionate to the benefit we glean? so i’m all in, and the challenge now is to fork over that price with the most grateful, willing, grace-lined heart.
Hello hello my friend if you’re still here reading I’d really love to do a photo session for you and the weird thing is it’s the hardest and easiest thing in the world to sell because preserving memories! time flying so fast! important! but then there’s all the reasons that ‘cha aren’t hiring a photographer (each of those is a different link love!) so after you spend some time exploring why you haven’t already booked something, let’s just do it.
