The next day....

Today is a day I decided to begin a blog. It's an interesting concept that the internet has spawned among its many children. I write. I write well it seems, but I have only flirted with it over the past 15 years and as I move down the age timeline, there is the inevitable growing urgency to quit stalling and start talking. So here I am staring at the monitor wanting to get into my day and avoid this confrontation.

A terrible thing has happened. A baby came into this world and left 37 hours later. He was to be my grandson. I am declaring that because I am learning from this terrible thing that I had a hard time claiming him and claiming his mother as my daughter. She's not my blood daughter so somehow that makes my pain bogus...like I'm not entitled. What a strange jungle our minds are to come up with stuff like this but so it goes with me. I dared not have children because I knew I would not be able to mother them and I knew that would destroy me. But here I am and was, connecting to a remarkable young woman who I got to call my stepdaughter...when in truth she was more daughter than any daughter I could have brought into the world. And this terrible thing happened that has broken me open. I loved and love that baby, Joseph Henry. I wanted to hold him, smell him...feel his baby hands reaching and exploring. I wanted to be the eccentric Grandma who would teach him about horses and ranch life...let him play with paints and pastels and make his art if he wanted that...show him the garden and the miracle when a seed becomes something so beautiful and maybe edible to frost the cake. I wanted to be the refuge in his teenage years when he needed to "escape" his parents so that he could find himself and his love and belief for them again.

This terrible thing broke me open and there is a different experience of love and need that I am growing it looks like. My tortured and convoluted marriage has somehow found a quiet place to reside in me. I love my husband and have been so hurt and angry about him. But it's different now. Maybe Joseph has brought me the truth of love. You all do know that it is so fragile and ephemeral and requires everything of us to keep it alive and that there are so many faces and iterations of love. So this Baby Bodhisattva has taught me to love and love completely because it is so ephemeral because WE are so ephemeral and we can't have life without love. Not if we're human. He stopped in so briefly and cracked open who knows how many hearts. I don't know why it has to be like this...that it has taken heaven falling on my head to be cracked open but it is true. Now what, I say. Just live...just do this next day as fully and authentically honest as you can, I say to myself. Be happy. Be sad. Life is flowing through you. It's a tributary of the Great River and you can't dam it up or divert it even if you tried...which of course, I have as many of us do.