I needed that. I think she did too.

What’s on your agenda for the weekend?

I have no idea how an entry grade, 100 level class can make anyone truly appreciate anything.

Only standing nose-to-canvas with Nympheas Bleus and then walking across a bridge in Monet’s gardens at Giverney, France on a rainy day does one truly appreciate the artist and his work. The light drenched main hall in the Musee d’Orsay puts Rodin’s sculptures in their intended environment: a place where I, average on all scales, can be amazed and deeply touched by the breadth and skill of the sculptor. The stained glass light of the Canterbury Cathedral coming in during the late afternoon – no book can come close.

The older I get, the more I’m able to recognize the valleys and hills of emotion in a far better way than when I was teenager or even a young wife.

I’ve always swung between the despair and exhilaration of life in equal capacities – both passions in their own right. I should probably just apologize to my mother right here for my wild emotional sweeps between the ages of 14 and 17. I’m sorry, Mom. While I’m at it, I’ll also apologize to the 1996 through 2000 version of my husband. He received the brunt of my frequent crying and why-me? episodes. I’m sorry, 1998-Chad. I really am. I was only 23.

But, lately, it is almost as if I objectively watch myself begin to sink into depression. I can mark the day as its happening and say to myself that I am becoming sad. I see it happen. I can also see myself beginning to become excited, motivated and ready for the work ahead of me.

I feel like only recently, age 34 to be exact, am I becoming a little more aware of my emotional tendencies. I can’t predict myself with complete accuracy, but, like a meteorologist, I can tell myself there will be a chance of tears with a 20% chance of utter despair followed by a slight trend towards low motivation in the weeks to follow.

I am beginning to use this knowledge. In my marriage, I have begun to be up front with my 2009-Chad and tell him that I think I am working through a little depression. Or that I know that the next month will be exceptionally stressful for me and us as a family – maybe we should make some accomodations for each other and try to deal with things one day at a time. We should lend more grace to each other.

I don’t think I’ll ever really be able to predict my tears or anger, but I am beginning to be a student of myself and use this information to work for me. For my family.

Tomorrow? Increasing smiles with a slight chance of laughter by mid-afternoon.

My youngest is learning to pray.

We pray with her, specifically, in the evenings before I turn out her lights. But she is also learning by watching her sister, her Sunday School teachers, listening to me pray over meals and in the car before I drop her sister off at school.

But I have never, not once prayed to the cat. And neither has my husband or older daughter.

Naomi seems to have, like many verbal three year olds, a slight problem with prepositions. She cannot, at least in prayer, differentiate between “for” and “to”.

So her prayer (to the Christian God, let’s make sure we are all on the same page) sounds something like this:

“Dewwr God,

I pway to Mimi, Papa Rob and to Mamma and Papa. I pway to Hopey and Rosie (the cat) and to Mommy and Daddy. I pway to Chi Chi and to Madelyn and Jordan and Josiah.

AAAmen.”

I don’t know of any Christian tradition, Protestant or Catholic, that advocates prayer to living people (although saintly and righteous) or housebound cats.

Then again, she might be making a three-year-old style statement about society.

Or maybe she’s still just figuring it all out that although it does matter who we pray to, words don’t matter nearly as much as attitude.

For most of my life I’ve been grounded.

If I have to choose a word, like my word, the first thing that drips out of my mind is SOLID.

It isn’t as if I am perfectly stable. Not at all. I have wonderfully unstable hours and weeks and years. But I am usually always the one who’s being doing [whatever] for the longest…attended my church the longest, had the same cell phone number for 8 years, the same email address, the same house, lived for my whole life within 20 miles of where I was born.

I’m here. I’m solid. I’m grounded. You know where to find me.

And its likely that http://www.sarahmarkley.com/ will always house some itteration of my blog or a website directing toward me or something.

Some times in my life I’ve view this solidity as a liability. As if my feet, instead of being firmly planted on the earth, were being swallowed up in a swampy mess of mud and concrete. There have been times where I’ve hated my own spot in the world and viewed it as being “stuck” rather than “secure”. How desperately I’ve wanted to extract my feet from the bog and jump. Just jump. To anywhere but here.

Because, now, instead of feeling stuck, I see my groundedness as an asset rather than a liability. I love it that my address has been the same for 6 years. I love it that so many different people have walked through my front door and that if they really needed me, they know where to find me. It is an asset that I can tuck my girls into their beds at night, in their same beds in the same spot in the world as last night.

Instead of stuck in a muddy swamp, my feet are planted in the patchy grass of my backyard, with six-year-old (and older) roots extending as far as I allow them to. And it feels good to be home.

You know where you can find me.

What’s your word?

So far so good.

6850 words. One step at a time, one word at a time in the right direction.

I’m working on two different projects so here’s a peep in the door:

1. A Bible Study curriculum project. Now I know there is “no market” for this right now (I’m sure and I’m sure that is what I will hear at my conference in 5 weeks), but I’m really not writing this one to sell to a house. I’m writing it for my own women that meet every other Thursday at church. I teach a small group and we will be running out of lessons soon so I need to come up with something quick. I had a great idea a few weeks ago and I’m running with it. If it comes out to be something great, then I will try to shop it. We’ll see.
2. A truth-based, personal-essay style memoir. I think I have the structure and the purpose and this is the one I’m excited about.

My word count is both of them put together because I am doing both concurrently. So much for focus.

Some other people that should be writing books because they are that good….

Fire

Mel

Alece

I am still in love with my daughters.

The honeymoon euphoria hasn’t worn off. I still want to hug them and hold their hands with my every spare second and I look for their approval after I’ve made dinner or I’ve told a joke.

I am infatuated, enamoured, besotted and possessed by them.

But it has changed since each of them were born.

Like love changes with a man — separates then weaves back together again, stronger and more seasoned. It dances together and changes with the other and then settles together in a safe spot.

Love for my girls is like this. When Hope was a baby, she was all squishy, screaming, breathe-in-her-baby-breath love. I just watched her heart beat at the top of her baby-head and I was forever smitten.

Now she is seven and screams at the top of her lungs when the roller coaster takes off. She squeezes my hand and I’m in love with her still. Her laughter, her wild joy, her dubbing the howling take-off, “the moment of my life, Mom!!”

My littlest one was the baby who slept through the night the 5th day of her life. I was captivated. I was more relaxed with her and she’d rest in the evening, instead of cry like her sister, on my lap playing with my fingers.

This morning she walked up to me with her own version of a belated Valentine’s Day card: an index card scribbled with purple and pink highlighter pen. “Happy Bawentine’s Day, Mama!” She waltzes through her morning on princess high heels and curtsies whenever necessary (or just for fun). I’ve never been more in love than today.

I’m enchanted and claimed by each of them. They have a hold on my heart unlike any other two mini humans on earth.

My love has graduated from sticky, squishy new-mother love to something different: a love laced around the intricacies of their unique personalities. And I know I’m nowhere near done loving them yet.

So I never win anything.

Ever.

I found 27$ once in an empty parking lot with a friend and we split it and went out to lunch.

But I never win anything.

I’ve earned stuff. I’ve been given beautiful gifts. But never do I, by pure chance/luck/fate win anything.

But last week, on Gitzen Girl’s blog, I won one of her handpainted canvases. And I got it in the mail last night.

I feel honored to have a little bit of her in my home now. Thank you, Sara, for this. You’ve made me feel like a winner.

I finally won something!! from Sarah Markley on Vimeo.

******UPDATE: So I did win something last fall. You see, I’m so used to NOT winning anything that it totally slipped my mind! I won an awesome Paper Source gift card from Kristen’s blog last November. Silly me. She had to remind me. Thanks, Kristen and Sara for being a part of my winning streak! Maybe I should hit Vegas this weekend ; )

Southern Californians don’t remember they have mountains until it rains and the clouds pour snow across their peaks.

The white tops of the mountains (which are usually hidden by smog, haze and a general cloudiness) peep up over the foothills in a rare show of stark brilliance. So when I drove home tonight, northbound, before the sun set, the mountains stared back at me with the most recent 48 hours worth of storm-snow deposited on top.

Only after any winter precipitation scrubs the air and the medium grey-brown sky so that the white mountains stand out against the now blue winter sky do we bother to take notice.

And then we stop. And we remember where we live.

And all the teenagers strap on their expensive snowboards and the aging boomers pull their skis out from the garage rafters (or they opt for taking their granddaughters sledding instead) to play in the snow.

Southern Californians get snow like this and a view this mighty only every few winters. The years in between might see a little dusting of snow in the mountain towns creating a need for the ski resorts to blow manmade white stuff through the air so that they can make their mortgages for one more season. But once every couple of years, January and February unload snow storehouses in our mountains.

It takes a cold snow dump to remind us we live in a basin. Los Angeles and Orange Counties are in a flat expanse with the local mountains to the north and the east and the Pacific Ocean to the south and the west. For us, the sun rises over the coastal range and sets over the sea.
And even in the coldest of winter months, the basin dwellers never get snow on their driveways. The temperature might drop into the high thirties, but even that isn’t enough to bring a layer of snow to us.

Those of us who grew up here treat snow-dwellers with fascination and we all have tall tales about snow in the coastal towns…”I remember it snowed in Huntington Beach once when I was in the third grade” or “It snowed in Fullerton once; I know because my cousin was there and made snowballs.”

Snow for us is interesting, and other. So when we see our mountains (they are ours, right?) covered in snow, and we can actually see them, we stop.

The things unseen to me in the hottest of smoggy summer months are evident now: the blue suburban sky and the mountains behind my back when I face the ocean. Storms and Santa Ana winds are the only cure to my hazy vision.

Only after the storms can I see the snow.