Self Portraits - 30

An old love

The relationship started showing signs of trouble during my junior year of college. Little things really, I would call plans off here or there, sometimes blowing something off altogether. Nothing major, but the signs were there and I chose to ignore them.

By the middle of senior year it became clear that I simply wasn’t in this relationship anymore. I was emotionally and even physically just absent. But I kept on, more out of habit than anything else…kind of a “doing it for the kids” sort of attitude. There was no animosity, no anger; but there was also no joy, no passion…no love.

I did my student teaching after graduation. It was a weird way to do things, because you are no longer enveloped in the safe confines of the academic world. You are paying rent and car insurance and have choices and freedom. At the same time you are still a student and not yet in that adult world. That’s when things moved away from the peaceful coexistence that had been so carefully balanced for the last couple of years. It was done. This relationship that had defined such a huge part of me was over. I removed all traces of it from my life…surgically excising that whole part of me.

Recently though, I have found a peace that I didn’t know I could and I find myself nurturing a new relationship with an old love. It’s slow going, kind of a day to day sort of thing. I owe it all to Will…he loves music as much as I remember loving it.

I don’t remember starting to love music. I don’t remember learning to read music, I just remember knowing how. I don’t remember when I first felt like my entire body would explode because the music I was singing/playing/listening to had come perfectly into tune with something inside of me, but I have been lucky to experience it many times over.

When I realized that teaching music wasn’t the right path for me, I didn’t really know where to go with it. It had been an all consuming part of life for so long that I thought if I couldn’t do it all the time, I wouldn’t do it at all. I went from identifying myself as an alto, a music major, a member of a choir a musician to not even listening to music in the car. I stopped going to concerts, stopped singing in the shower, just stopped.

But then there is Will. As a baby when he and I were alone in the house nothing could calm him quite like music. Now he loves it when we play music in the house and he can “dance” along. He loves being sung to every night...and more recently many, many times during the day. And he has started singing along with me in that fantastic two year old way. So for the past two years I have been mending that relationship I had and have been learning how to let music be a part of my life and not my whole life.

Do you know those songs that you have that you could listen to over and over again…barely letting it finish before you hit the back button to start it again? Those songs that somehow come into tune with something inside of you? I have been finding those songs again. Right now some of them for me are:
Fidelity – Regina Spektor
Mr. Brightside – The Killers (this has been on the list for some time now!)
Vindication – Bobby Llama
Overture to Candide – Bernstein
What are some of your songs? Please, please leave me a comment and share them with me – I am loving finding new music again.

Snow Day

So, we got a snow day today. Kari sums it up best here and here. The only letter I would slightly adjust for me is the one to her school...only because I was personally annoyed with our own school that did not decide to close until 7:45. Since Will's daycare and Dan's work are closed if our school system closes this was an annoyingly late time to call it when it was really clear at 5:00 (and yes, I was up at that hour) that there was no way the roads were going to be safe.

That said, we had a really fun day. We threw all responsible parenting to the wind and let Will drink straight juice, watch as much Toy Story as he wanted and of course spent copious amounts of time outside in the cold without boots and with socks as mittens.

As promised...

I finally finished all of the pictures from December. There are a lot of them...but if you take into account that I started with over 300 then 116 isn't so bad, right? Maybe?

Here you go...December Pics

The way we were

I took a ridiculous amount of pictures this Christmas. Over 300 in the month of December...and I had misplaced my camera for 2 weeks in the middle.

Part of it was that my parents handed off the torch. My mother decided she would no longer be bustling around us all Christmas morning, trying to get a good shot of us opening a present, barely sitting her own self and hardly ever being in a picture. Nope, she wanted to enjoy her grandson uninterrupted so it fell to me. It was really exciting have such an active role in the festivities, kind of like when as a kid you got to pick the presents out from underneath the tree and hand them out to everyone. Also, pictures from Christmas have always been a prominent part of the yearly albums my mom always put together so it felt important to make sure it was properly documented.

Part of the massive amount of pictures is just the digital age...you just keep shooting pictures because you can judiciously edit later. But I've recently realized that part of it for me is that I am terrified I will loose all the little moments in between that big ones. Will is changing so much every day and in the 10 pictures I have of him playing piano with his Papa I see different expressions, angles of his face, motions, and emotions.

I am having difficulty judiciously editing because I am afraid I will forget one of those angles, one of those expressions without them.

In any case, I should be finished soon and have 8 gagillion pictures up on flickr...and another 8 gagillion in my head.