Yesterday Per and I went out sailing with Sara and her dad. It was the kind of afternoon one felt nostalgic for even as it was still unfolding. There were a few complications as we got going. Per and I sat and watched as Sara untangled the dinghy line which had gotten wrapped around the boat. I was watching her through the plastic wind guard when the sail finally took the wind properly and we were off. A blurred version of her threw out her arms in the sunshine and exclaimed “We’re sailing!"

Coming out of Jeddore Harbour she pointed out where the family of minks had popped up last year. As we went along the afternoon mixed itself in its mixing bowl, becoming a dreamy mixture of images and sounds combined and no longer linear.

An eel fisherman drew in his nets. Osprey hovered high above or skimmed along just above the surface. Sara said Look At That when one dove down suddenly and caught a fish.

We came out towards the mouth of the Harbour where the open ocean began. Jeddore Rock was ahead in the fog with its automated lighthouse. There used to be a real lighthouse there and someone lived in it. I tried to picture who it might have been, and wondered what they did there with all those evenings in the fog. The buoys chimed and groaned. I closed my eyes to see what it was like to listen for them in fog. The swells got bigger and the movement of the boat changed, rocking over the swells, up and down. I started to feel sick and we laughed.

We listed all the things we wanted to see: whales, seals, porpoises, dolphins. Passing islands I pointed out my favourite ones, this one chosen for its scraggly awkwardness, that one for its round containment.

The boom swooped suddenly to the other side and Sara, standing, ducked narrowly under it. “I was nearly killed!” she said happily, and I understood.

Flickering

There’s a new theme. A new thread running through everything: a thread of messiness and dishevelment and being scattered, cluttered, distracted. Sit down to do one thing while she sleeps and 50 others clamour for attention in the back of my mind: the kitchen is a mess of sticky high chair spilled water scattered cheerios dirty dishes piles of papers and unorganized clutter. I need to get dressed brush teeth put away laundry put brake fluid in car call Anna email Sara find time for tea with Ange. Try to understand and smooth over and start over and be there and listen with Per. Have long neglected writing about Astrid and her days and her teeth and her crawling and how she picked up peas one by one so carefully and elegantly. I still haven’t written my birth story or edited my chapter book or found an apartment or even decided where we’re moving to nor what I will do next for money or how we will solve day-care.

Scattered, stretched thin, giving in all directions yet not expressing anything. Creative energy feels bottled and waiting, hoping for a little time to grow or show.

And this is how it is now. It’s easier when I allow it, simply, to be exactly how it is. Stand back to look at it in bewilderment.

Bewilder:

1 : to cause to lose one's bearings
2 : to perplex or confuse especially by a complexity, variety, or multitude of objects or considerations

Yes.

So? I have found that fighting it doesn’t work. In a way I still fight surrendering to this new state, but I’m beginning to think about how to embrace it instead. How can I express something despite the complications, the lack of time, the busy-ness, the doing-ten-things-at-once madness? Is there a way to let it be, to let it show, to let it be okay?

I still want to. That’s the one way in which I don’t want to surrender to it. Stubbornly I still want to leave traces of my messy days as they are right now. Record scraps of what I see while I’m chasing and watching and feeding and singing to her. Say or make something even when I feel stretched taut, exhausted, or overwhelmed. When it is exultant, jubilant, pure joy. When it’s humbled, quiet wonder. Record something too of the ebb and flow of us. My days with Per. Our states: close quiet days, or yelling and fighting it out, listening, trying to understand, understanding, returning, finding our balance again.

There’s such a battle between the complications and the necessity of simplicity. A fight for balance between them and balance between letting go and holding on.

I’m getting up to look through the window at her sleeping in her stroller out on the deck. Peaceful. Earlier we read some books and while she played with one I looked closely at the bite marks she’d left all over another. Traces of this time, and my heart ached a tiny bit for later when those bite marks will be fossils and documents of the past; and my heart was glad that this time is still now when she’s still leaving bite marks on everything daily and freshly. I love this how she teaches me how to admire the mess and not see anything as too precious to chew up/smear with food/investigate/play around with.

I made her porridge as usual and she kept grinning her toothy grin at me in between bites and I called her my baby crocodile. She crooned for awhile and it sounded like she was singing and I listened as if it were opera. She rolled everywhere while we were changing her and it was frustrating and tried my patience as when she went to sleep this morning after an hours calming down only to sleep for five minutes. There is often such a flickering mix of frustration-impatience-tiredness mixed with awe-wonder-admiration-adoration-big-big-love.