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I spent the last twenty four or so hours in a state of mind that I’d like to throw out the window. You know the state – the one where you question everything you have ever done or are doing. I needed to be by myself so I could wring the frown right out of my face. Instead, I wasn’t alone and I picked up another book that I had brought – Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Someone mentioned this book, said they were re-reading it, and I bought the digital version for the iPad that Tatjana brought for class.

I read the book overnight and it was exactly as if it were prescribed for me. Lindbergh managed to touch on every issue on my hot plate – time alone, the many phases of life, love, and a woman, the centrifugal activities that draw us into a tighter and tighter world, and more importantly the intermittency of life. Highly recommend.

It was a tonic to read especially as she relates middle age to a shedding of old habits, old ways of being, old relationships, and a welcoming of what is new, strange and unfamiliar.

Isn’t that where I find myself? Often I have said I wanted to travel and here I am in Cadiz, soon enroute to Zahara and next Croatia before home to the LaLa. We are speaking about Russia next year – St. Petersburg and Moscow. Who is this person I sometimes wonder – who is traveling all over with no firmness underground? It’s me one side shouts and it’s who? the other questions.

I walked to the market this morning boldly bald in my Prada sunglasses (vestiges of my past monied life), and people indeed stared but I decided they were staring out of awe not out of pity and that helped. I came home and there was a message from my Boston friend – check out Happiness Project was all it said, so I did – and I think she meant to refer me to the post “Try not to talk in a mean voice. Try again. And again” because that is what I tuned into. My mean voice was out big time in the last 24-hour flogging – why am I bald, why did I do this, why did I choose that, who is this kid, who is this partner, why am I here in Spain, where will I go when I leave?

My nice voice came slowly – it happened last night when Tatjana returned with Tin from the beach and before the door was opened he was yelling, “MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY” and then wanted me to read his Why? book that he knows by heart. Or when Tatjana and I sat and watched the rest of Season 1 of The MisAdventures of Awkward Black Girl. And then when I finished Gift from the Sea this morning, and returned to my friend’s email about the Happiness Project. I started speaking in kinder words – even to myself.

We always say when Tin is acting out that his evil twin Skippy has arrived on the scene, and for Tatjana we always call her by the name people who can’t pronounce her name say – Ta-Tonya. For me, I will name my unkind voice Lady MacBeth – because surely when she arrives I feel unsexed, unloved, and unmotivated:

Lady Macbeth:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promis’d. Yet do I fear thy nature,
It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2012 at 4:50 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.