I am going to bullet this and add to it during the day. I can't quite sort it all out. Perhaps I can put it in order later.
- The party was good for Julia and for me. It was good, albeit exhausting, to have laughter and conversation in the house.
- Lots of ambivalence around party preparations. I made my usual lists of to-dos with shopping, home chores, cooking, etc, and assigned each item to a day. I had to force myself to accomplish and check off items, or push items to the following day. The exercise kept me aware enough so that I didn't leave too much for the last minute. I am still very competent at party planning. Muscles are mushy but there is body memory. But at times, it was more of an effort than ever.
- Doing a real party alone is a terrible loneliness. Many times, I paused and thought of how the work would have been divided between David and I. One would shop for cheese, one pick up olives, one to vacuum, one to go over the bathroom at the last minute, one to fix supper, one to load the dishwasher, one to decorate, one to read Julia to sleep, one to prepare food, one to do the last minute sweep of the house, one to, one to, one to. But there were two, not one, and divided there was less than half the work because so much was done together.
- I was not alone by any means. I was wise enough to ask Mary to come over hours before the party began and put herself at my beck and call. Her work and our constant patter kept last minute butterflies at bay and actually left us with a few minutes to walk around the house and marvel at our preparedness. For all the reality of loss, the washes of sadness that come and go, words of thanks are hardly enough to say to my dear friends. First help to survive, now, perhaps to thrive.
- Mary and Robert stayed after all the guests had left to clean up and to debrief with me. And also, to munch on leftovers. We have plenty of leftovers. At the close of the party, I felt very well. The three of us spent some time just sitting around praising our efforts and talking about the delightful people who had visited. Julia colored on the floor. Then we all got up and started a clean up. We filled the dishwasher, put away food and washed serving platters. We did so much that Sunday's chores were putting clean dishes away.
- At the beginning of her party when the few kids came over and Julia did not immediately respond to them in the most appropriate way, I was beside myself. Scared that a party had been a mistake, sure that I/she/we were being judged, worried that everyone would just go home. . . but the kids that came over are the few special children who accept Julia for who and what she is. They coaxed her to play and joined her instead of expecting her to join them. Quite humbling for me. I did not really have to do anything to help them give her a good party.
- And Julia did enjoy herself. In her own way, in her own time. She brought out toys and shared, she brought out her precious dot-to-dot books and tried to get all of the kids to do some. Not everyone was interested. When James came in, she hugged him tight and told him how much she missed him. Not completely appropriate but very sweet. Poor James was embarrassed but accepted Julia's enthusiasm.
- When Julia blew the candles out, after she throughly enjoyed having everyone sing to her, she made her wish. "For freedom," she said. I don't know where it came from but it seemed so generous, so of this world. They may have spent time learning about MLK last week.
- Since coming out of heavy mourning this summer, I have grown uncomfortable with the habits I/we developed to survive, and now groping around to change them. I need a new grace for us to learn. I need meal ritual. We need quiet reading time, perhaps with tea and a fire, for our evenings. We need more self-care, family-care on a daily basis. Creating new habits, replacing what is easy, lazy and routine with something to feed the spirit takes energy and imagination. At least for me it does when all I want to do is throw dinner together and stare at the tv in blessed relief after a long, sad, stressful day. And that sounds so awful. When it was the best I could do, it was fine. Julia did not starve and we did not watch much junky tv and we always had time for nighttime reading in bed. But now, I want more for her and for us. I look at our routines and I am not teaching good habits for her lifetime.
- I gave myself some reading time last night -- my reading muscles are mush and it is not easy for me to concentrate. I read the first chapter of Far from the Tree, by Andrew Solomon -- my Christmas present from Lisa. Good reading for me right now as I continue to confront Julia's difference and my own.
- Thinking about vacation and checking out an online venue for stays in homes and apartments. Looking at Brooklyn for a month and coming across some incredibly funky, interesting places to stay. I want my home to be more like those that I see -- "more" meaning that I want to let my crazy home ideas fly and also give Julia inspiration to do and make and decorate. I like what our house looks like right now -- extremely soothing and, I think, easy to live in -- but it is neutral in a lot of ways. I have redecorated with one eye on the real estate market. I don't want to make it harder to sell, or give myself huge amounts of work to do when I want it to sell. But I want a home to make uniquely mine, giving space to Julia to do the same. And that takes a long time and the knowledge that this will be home for a long time. I had much of that at our Washington Blvd house in Indy and a bit here. Maybe this feeling is the maturation of the great clean-out and purge of the last years.
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