I thought I chose to center this photograph, but apparently not. I'm not keeping up with things as I should. Things in this instance meaning this blog which I started to escape from LiveJournal and all the pressure to be a good mommy. I need to have some space where I can be myself, dirty feet and all.

I want so badly to be a good mother to my daughter and it feels lately that I'm always handing her off to other people because there are so many things that I need to do. Or that I feel that I should do. That things such as dishes and cleaning take precedence over raising here, which isn't true at all. I just get frustrated when I look at the house and all I see is mess. Stupid, isn't it? I never used to care about things like that. But I don't want her to grow up in a messy house and this house is so tiny that it gets messy really really easily.

She is learning to pull up on people which brings her that much closer to walking. I'm both excited and dreading the day. Autonomy is great, but it means banged heads, skinned knees and all the rest. Plus less snuggle time. I don't want to turn into one of those mothers who infantizes their children, but I love how close she is to me now and it's going to be difficult as she gets older. Especially with my problems regarding showing affection. It's odd, but I have no fear of rejection from her now but fear that I will later on. Another legacy that my parents left me.

So, this photograph. I took it a day or so ago. I had gotten up early and gone to the campground office. Amanda was watching the baby and I took my camera and wandered. If I'm serious about photography I need to do that more often. It seems to capture both the squalor and the beauty that we live in. The door to our house, our makeshift fence, the old office. The man guarding the hill and the sculpture in our window. The trees and the chimney. The old and the new.

We should be grateful for what we have. We have more than most our age and our situation. But I want more. And I want more for my daughter. I want her to have a life to be proud of, a novel life, full of wonder, beauty and joy. I want her to exclaim at the world and not be sucked down into the grind of daily existence. I want to share my anarchistic views of the world with her, to have her be a strong, free spirit. But, selfishly, I don't want to have to live within the confines of a money orientated society to do it. Cyric wants to move to Washington as soon as possible. If and when we do that, I don't want to put her in daycare. I'd rather be poor and be with her as much as possible. The public education system failed me and I don't want it to fail her. I don't want to be a corporate slave and to farm my daughter out to other people to raise. Of course, contradicting what I said earlier about always feeling like I'm handing her off to someone else. Having to pay someone to watch and raise her is different though.

I'm blathering on, but I guess that is what a blog is for. All these thoughts in my head that never get expressed. I communicate much better through written text than through words. Or photographs but that's a bit more ambigious.

Today was a day.

Amanda woke us up by knocking at the window. I need to get a nightstand in the bedroom by my side of the bed so that I can set up my alarm clock. It's a bit embarrassing to be woken up every morning by a knock on the window. Nothing like a hired person having to wake up the boss.

I saw Amy and her fiance. She actually seems to be doing very well. Her girl child is beautiful. She has Amy's eyes. We chatted and then the crew headed into my house to clean it. I didn't want to invite her over with it being a wreck. It needs cleaning daily, mostly because it's so small and because everything has been so crazy.

Cy took a nap and Amanda and I puttered around. Spent time in the office so that mum could clean Mabel's bathroom. Then Amanda and I went into town because Cy was sleeping. Town was hell with Avie trying to eat everything in sight. She was very fussy and needed a diaper change and a nursing session in the middle of the pet food aisle. But we got plenty of food for this week. I saw a girl from high school who has stage 2 cancer of the ovaries and the uterus. She is also waiting for a heart transplant and has been bleeding internally for the past two years. She has two boys, a six year old and a four year old. That kind of puts thing in perspective.

Came home, Cy cooked dinner. Ate. Avie had string beans for the first time. She seemed to like them. She's crashed on the couch and I'm about to head to bed. That's about it.

It's been one of those days. I could hypothesize that one of the reasons to blame for my recent lack of writing is because I no longer allow myself to smoke in the house. There is something much more cathartic about writing with a butt hanging out of my mouth. It gives natural pauses to words as you ash the cigarette. It adds pensiveness to the moment of creation instead of just an outpouring of words.

I think that I'm switching from LJ to here. I like LJ for keeping up with other people, but I always end up feeling a bit inadequate with the frequency and lack of content of my posts. Going through my grandmother's papers today made me realize the importance of keeping a diary while things are actually happening. She only started writing within the past ten years and it's wonderful what she remembered but I don't know if it has the feel of transcribing moments as they actually happen. It's more the retrospective way of looking at her past.

There have been so many changes around here these past two weeks. We moved the campground office up the to the top of the hill. Mabel had her stroke. I took on my shoulders the responsibility of running the campground and keeping everyone happy, with delegation of duties as fitting. Mabel died. My daughter turned eight months old, cut her first tooth, and has learned to scoot around. We went to get Mabel's ashes from the funeral home. Blues Festival weekend started. The dispute about the dispersal of her estate began. We've started to go through her things and clean for the "celebration of her life/ninetieth birthday party. I couldn't make it to RZ's wedding, but had a long conversation on the phone to him regarding the death of our respective grandmother's and how it is something necessary to box grief up to deal with it later. He wants to talk to me after I've had a chance to take the grief out of its box and examine it. Lee, Bill, and Cy started to dig her memorial garden today.

And how am I? I don't really know. I haven't let myself mourn yet; I haven't found the time. How can I deal with her passing when I'm still surrounded by her every day? The office is in her house. I still see where she spent her last moments before we took her to the hospital daily. Looking out the office window, I see the view that she saw most of the days of her life. Every day I wake up and my name is her middle name.

Lee and Bill want me to help design the memorial garden, to help pick out what flowers we put in it. I can't. It feels lately that if I get emotionally involved with anything it will grip me and never let me go. That keeping distance is the only way that I can cope and try to remain competent. I don't know if it the anti-depressants talking or if it has been this way for a while. I do know that the feeling is not unfamiliar.

There is so much that is good in my life but so much that is difficult. It feels so hard to wake up in the morning. I feel constantly exhausted and constantly harried. I feel that I am always responsible for something, that I always should be doing something and that if I take time for myself I am being bad and should be more responsible, more take charge, less lazy. Is this what growing up is supposed to be? Being an adult is equivalent to never having a chance to do anything that you really want to do because you are responsible for everyone else. Or perhaps that is just the stress talking.

And my husband is reading this over my shoulder, reading the words as I type them. He thinks that I can't see him but I have very good peripheral eyesight, despite the damage that my eyes sustained from the brain surgery. It's a good thing if he chooses to read my words. I've been awfully negligent lately in letting him in to what I'm feeling, what I've been going through. I've always been much better at communicating through words. It's how I taught myself to be when I was younger. Reading novels for companionship. Learning what I could of people through novels and not through interaction. It's only fair that I should choose words as my best medium of living then. After all, life is just a novel and you are your own hero or heroine.