It’s snowing – that’s right, in many places it is snowing – but not here! Yippee. Instead, we are having a gorgeous sunny day. There are puffy white clouds in the baby blue sky and a nice cool breeze blowing. The joys of living here. A colleague said this morning – “You live in vacation land, except for Hurricane Season.” Guess that about sums it up.
Move your hips – when I sign off from work, I head to the bayou to hula hoop and there with my IPod on my Hula-Hoop Playlist I find the joy that has been sucked out of my day by too many things on my to do list – when all you have on your to do list left to do is move your body to music, you align your rhythm to whatever dreamland you want to enter from a sensual Ofra Haza singing Jerusalem to Three Little Birds by Bob Marley …
Don’t worry about today, because every little thing’s gonna be all right!
Got to love these affirmations I get – I got a text from a friend on Thanksgiving that said HFT – our code for Happy Fucking Thanksgiving – I saw it later in the day when I was a whirling dervish and I was about to write back you mean “Fabulous” right? Because I was having a fabulous Thanksgiving, but I paused for a moment thinking I sounded too Polly Anna, and then never got back to the response as the day kept unfolding.
Daily Affirmation
December 2, 2008
I am renewed by detaching from an outcome and being attached to making the journey fun and exciting!
We were talking about last names for the baby and haven’t decided whether to hyphenate, use one of ours as a middle name, or what. Of course, there will be international travel so we want to make sure we are both identifiable as legal parents. And then it gets to my last name, which I kept from my last marriage – Dangermond. My maiden name is Namer – which is Sephardic and means Tiger.
I kept Dangermond because I cycled through so many names in my life – from Namer to Gratia to Franzen to Dangermond and just felt that I held this last one most dearly. Of course, there are attachments – I learned by being a Dangermond how to ignore things till they dissipate – which, by the way, is the word of the day on my home page.
This is contrary to what I learned as a Namer and that was to approach the world as prey and pounce indiscriminately and attack everything with the same degree of hunger and voraciousness. While Namer speaks to my heritage – I’m Sephardic via Turkey via Cuba, Dangermond’s French Huguenot via Holland via my ex speaks to another part of me.
However, lately I’ve come to believe I’ve lived my life lopsided towards one part of my gumbo heritage and have almost forsaken the Thigpen side, which I have strong ties to as well – this is my maternal side who came to America early and worked the land till they arrived here in the Gulf South.
But I feel like sometimes what you were given doesn’t have to be your fate. I was given blonde hair and a Sephardic core. Instead, I have chosen to be a redhead with an interesting last name. So the main thing here is that you can weave your own thread into the back story of your life, heredity is not destiny.
Surely any child we adopt will be offered up endless rich story lines from our collective heritage for them to rearrange as they see fit.
I’ve got this to say about that – Mondays suck!
I was trying to figure out what generation T is since I’m a baby boomer, but she’s not a gen X which are the youngest boomers, and so is she a Y? Meanwhile, when our baby is born most likely s/he will be a Generation O – born under Obama’s presidency – born under the introduction of hope again here in America.
Loca and I ran into one of our regular walkers this morning in the park – it was nippy cold and we were walking briskly – so was he. Even the swans were gliding at a clip in the lagoon. I said as we passed, “It’s getting colder so we have to walk faster.” He grimaced, “No, I gained ten pounds so I have to walk faster AND farther.” I responded, “Don’t you know it.”
I’ve gained ten pounds myself. It was four at first from hooking up and being in love, then six from too many Slovenian beers during the summer, and now a whopping ten pounds that I am carrying around like a battleaxe. The blame goes squarely on Stacy’s Pita Chips, which my neighbor introduced me to and which became a “little” snack in the afternoon. Stacy’s are so good I should have known they were bad. Even my bony macaroni gf gained two kilos.
So now my kind of sexy muffin top has become the molten exploding muffin top and putting on jeans is exercise in and of itself – but I refuse to size up, so faster and farther it is.
Waited till mid morning to take Loca to the park and the day is absolutely stunning. The little bit of fall color that goes on display here is best seen inside the park along the lagoon. I love to watch the coots chuking along the water, and the Great Egret, the immature Cormorants sitting up in the tree, the lonely rail, the moorhens, the mallards all seem to have found paradise, just like me. The moss seems fatter hanging from the trees and the sunlight has the horizontal quality that makes dense cypress stands seem darker and more imposing.
Turning at the end of the path on the Marconi side an artist is creating a threshold to nowhere out of mosaics. In front of the museum is a FEMA trailer that has been converted by an artist into an Emergency Response Studio fully equipped for displaced artists, there are also two sets of pristine white stairs to nowhere in the meadow, and steel letters that spell DESIRE are still perched on top of NOMA looking imposing and impressive.
For all of us who always thought we would get pregnant at some point, the question is always when is the best time to have a baby? Since I waited till I was 40 years old to try, I feel like marching into colleges across the country and talking to women about the notion of them having it all – it just ain’t so. If you want to have your own child, you cannot wait till you are in your late 30s much like all the actresses in Hollywood that you read about – because your chances greatly diminish after age 35.
I was speaking with someone who is 36 and his wife is 33 and they are thinking of starting to try next year – I nodded my head, yes, don’t wait, I said.
But what about a career? you ask – well there’s that and there’s everything else but what I’m saying is if you know you want to bear children then you have to think within nature’s timeframe, not Hollywood’s or the business world.
In your thirties, contemplating having a child is daunting if you are a) with a partner who doesn’t want a child, b) not with a partner, or c) working on tenure, career, or other major goals that you don’t want to interrupt. But contemplate you must.
When I think back to my early thirties, I wish I would have been more proactive instead of believing I had time remaining. And while I did take action at 40 and did get pregnant numerous times and did lose all those pregnancies, I do believe that right now at 49 is the perfect time because I am with someone who shares the same vision of having a family I do.
So maybe there is no right time, maybe like T wrote in her letter, we are always and never prepared for major events in our life, and maybe one day when we wake up and we’re mothers, all that has gone before will seem perfectly orchestrated.
Monday night look up into the night sky and behold a rare wonder – a crescent moon and two bright shining stars that are actually Venus and Jupiter.