Nothing flying on bony wings

Just like everyone else, during the period of my life when I was called upon to sing to a child, I was both bad at and mostly uninterested in singing traditional lullabies, as well as coming from no particular tradition (I believe Delight had some italian lullabies they sang to Spark).   So I tended to fall back on endless repetitions of four songs, in descending order of frequency - Patience as covered by Redbird, Tom Waits' Time, Kris Delmorst's Lullaby 101 and Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows (though sometimes I'd accidentally segue into other Leonard Cohen songs). 

 

And now, when those songs come up on my predictably Kris Delmhorst heavy playlists I'm a very specific sort of sad and maybe it's that thing where people miss the baby stage of small humans.  It was a complicated time, it's still a complicated time.  I'm still excited to see whatever part of all the ways Spark changes into over the course of their lives I can, but there's something blurry and subterranean or maybe just an ache I don't want to look directly at.   And I kind of forget that it's going to happen when I hear the songs, or maybe I hope it's not going to happen this time because it doesn't happen every time.  But then it does. 

 

I've been listening to very little music lately, this relentless pursuit of escape through narrative fiction means that I'm almost always consuming a book in some format (53 so far this year, though not all of them are ones I'm comfortable admitting to) and I suspect it's in part just to keep from thinking my own thoughts but for the moment that seems like the lesser of two evils.  I suspect between listening to books at excessive speeds and the vyvanse I often get a little frantic or frenetic, but even after a year, that feels new enough to be really intriguing to watch myself be.   I didn't get a chance to see how I was out in the world on this medication and I'll never get to know what it would have been like to be medicated in this way in a pre-pandemic world and I suspect it'll be impossible for years to sort out the ways I've changed because pandemic, the ways I've changed because meds and the ways I've changed because I've been trying to unfold and disarm some of the pit traps that I've set for myself and for everyone else.

 

In a burst of something, I bought some stickers for the rest of the Admin team that said "Our refusals are so powerful - our refusals are so beautiful" because a lot of inspiring boundary-setting things were happening in places I got to see them and that felt like a gift.  At the time, I was also so charmed by something else the vendor was selling, little purple award-style ribbons that said "An award for signaling the refusal of mastery & an insistence on processing and becoming".  never gave them to anyone, but they're still in an envelope on my desk, next to my favorite blank note cards.  Maybe someday, I guess.