Sunday: There.  Here, I mean.  Perhaps a redesign to draw me here and get me typing.  Perhaps something closer to Spicy Dragons is what I need -- the impetus from the outside.  First morning of spring break.  I guess it started yesterday, really, but we had early morning clinic for Julia and were running all day.  This morning, laying in bed, Julia on her iPad playing a spider game and me on the laptop, feels a good deal more like a break.  

Tuesday: Here we are in bed again.  After 8.  How long will it be before she is checking her facebook and email but for now she is playing a game on her iPad.  We are now really into vacation mode.  At least, as much as we can with daily therapy.  That therapy, the intensity of which will all end at the end of June.  I’ll write more about my mixed bag of feelings about the changing field of therapy, but for now it is the reason to stick close to home this vacation and leaving big blocks of time with very little to do, only leaving town for a weekend in Chicago with dear Indy friends -- T-rex Sue here we come.

Passover has begun and some Facebook friends post about cooking and gatherings and kids and Manischewitz wine.  I can’t summon up the energy to make a seder happen and I haven’t cultivated some friendship in the right way as to get an invitation to one.  And I miss the ritual.  Undoubtedly, I would cry during some part of a Haggadah reading, most assuredly, after a few glasses of wine.  I would take us to our FUS seder but it is on Friday night and we will be in Chicago with Marcia and Meredith and kids.  And it is not like David and I celebrated every year.  We had years of not doing anything caught up in busy lives or transitions to new places, but it was a ritual we always came back to and one which brought so many lovely people to our homes.  We cooked, we wrote, we read, we encouraged Cheshire to read stories or perform music.  We sat around folding tables or the old dining room table that was a hand me down from Marcia.  

I could go on and write more and more, but the basic idea is down.  Here was a lovely tradition that David brought to our family that I embraced and loved.  And two and a half years after his death, I have not made peace with it.  I have not decided to take it on or leave it go.  Julia and I light to Chanukah candles and I’ve decided to continue that tradition.  It is easy and private.  Passover is much more social, involving a bigger family and much more energy.  If I could go to some aunt’s house, or some cousin, I would be there and that too would be easy at least until I made a firm decision to keep it in my life, in our lives.  

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” ~ Haruki Murakami 

Every so often, I feel like I am the new person creeping out of the storm.  And then there is another thunder clap, another shower, another threatening cloud.  It is taking full responsibility for everything.  It is having to make all decisions without intimate counsel.  It is learning to be my own person, body and soul.  I continue to struggle, learning with each encounter, how to be alone.  And I question whether I need to master this situation, this circumstance, this state of being -- aloneness -- before I can move on to whatever awaits.