Today was the first day of school for the boys. Their grades are 12th, 10th, and 8th this year. The older boys left around 7:20 to be there a little earlier with it being the first day. After they left Elianna started packing her bags and car to head back to my mother-in-law’s house. Before she left Josh and I sat down with her and talked about something that had been on our minds. We told her if she decides at some point that she wants to go to school somewhere that we would keep keep Zorro here so she’d be more able to do that.

My son and I did our homeschool things for the rest of the morning. I plan to work with him or next to him on the days I am here. This year the subject I am doing with him is reading. I bought the workbooks to also go through the 8th grade reader Where Roads Diverge.

This morning the story was about a boy who went out with his dog to clear brush and trails. He was bit by a rattlesnake when he reached out his arm to block the snake from biting his dog. He had just had a conversation with an older male character who had taught him to cut his arm and suck out the venom if he or his dog would ever get bit by a snake.

We haven’t had a chance to discuss the story. It ended by the boy telling the man he didn’t want to go out again to where the brook was because of the snakes. But the man told him he couldn’t let his fear get control of him. It made me pause because I didn’t know if the boy was being fearful or simply learning or becoming wiser because of his experiences. So the man wouldn’t let the boy be afraid and they were going to go out again the next day and clear out the snake den.

The other part of the lesson started with reading Robert Frost’s poem The Road *Not Taken*. One of the questions asked if we thought the sigh at the end of the poem was a sigh of regret or a sigh of pleasure. I had to go back and read it again. I ultimately decided that it was a sigh of relief after having looked into the future and believing that he would ultimately come to a place of seeing that the outcome and destination of the road he took would be worth it.

My mind has shifted with the baby stuff to getting through the rest of the week. I have a full three days of client sessions and after that then the baby can come. I know it isn’t up to me at all but I do feel like I’ve settled in to being able to think about something else and have it feel like if it happens next week that is not that far away. My laundry is caught up and the groceries are purchased.

Tonight we watched The Princess Bride. We’ve had this planned for a couple of days wanting to make sure we do it before school starts. Last night it was too late to start a movie and I was not in the mood so I asked if we could switch to tonight. Instead I watched a Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac documentary. She seems to have had a really sad life and they used a lot of drugs.

Josh and the kids think The Princess Bride is great. They insisted I try to watch it again. I tried to explain that I don’t really like it because for some reason I can’t take the movie seriously. Something about it seems like a joke. I tried to have an open mind, but in the end my opinion remained largely the same and I gave it a 5/10. It did serve the purpose though of having us spent time together.

My grandma used to tell me that I had the spiritual gifts of giving and mercy. It never occurred to me to ask her how she knew this. She was one of those people who seemed knowledgeable and spiritual so I just trusted her. Later I figured out she must have at one point been exposed to and become familiar with one of those spiritual gifts tests that people sometimes work through in church as a study or a group activity. For a long time I wondered why Lutherans don’t do those things.

I know some of them do, but in general it isn’t really a thing. I don’t really wonder that anymore either. But today in church the Epistle reading was from Romans 12 and the part where it talks about the body of Christ and the different functions that we have as members. I thought of my grandma again when we got to the part where it says, “…the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness (Romans 12:8).” That’s not the first time I’ve thought of her there.

After church we stopped by County Market to get food. We’re still doing our diet but have still been having some cheat times. The afternoon was spent with everyone doing their own thing and enjoying the beautiful day with the windows open. I’ve been meeting with each of the kids to have a “state of your life” meeting, for wanting to know what is going on and discussing things. Elianna told one of her former teachers in church this morning that she quit school when the teacher asked how school was going.

I told her that was good. She might as well just rip the bandaid off and say it. I haven’t had her meeting yet but the boys are all done. The biggest thing for me seems to be making sure there is food in the house for breakfast and lunch and also keeping up with supper. Elianna went to the store again and got food for the week so that was nice. Because it was so nice, the kids played baseball outside while Dad and I walked and sat on the picnic table waiting for Ethan and Laura.

We had made plans to talk in the evening. So then we went back inside and called them. Realistically it could still be a week and a half before the baby comes. I can’t even fathom that long of a wait. She wasn’t going to go to school in person but since the baby isn’t here she is going to go for the first few days. She said she’s cleaned the house for the last time she doesn’t know how many times. I told them I would text them a first day of school text tomorrow so that will keep me busy for a short while.

Today was a productive day of rest and leisure. In addition to those things we also worked on some normal house things. I spent the afternoon still trying to tidy our room. I started in one corner and hung up all of my clothes that I was keeping. Several items I finally decided to part with since they were pieces I didn’t like or wear often enough. I found two dresses from China that I’d ordered from Amazon when I was trying to find a dress to wear for Ethan’s wedding. They’d never been opened.

I finally tried them on just to see. The one I wore was definitely better. So I hung both of those up to donate to Goodwill sometime. I got about halfway through the room including the laundry. I wanted to make sure I had underwear and all of my clothes clean to be ready to go to Nebraska. I found a Gottman therapy I’d printed off when I took my class but had never done anything with it. So I took the hole puncher and found a 3-ring binder and put that together in an orderly fashion.

We went to the bike trail again before supper. I hadn’t much energy to walk and needed to stop once to rest. After supper we moved our television downstairs to turn the basement into the tv area. The idea was that there was more room for us to have evening time together where we could also work on our projects or other things if we wanted. I folded laundry and we all spread out on the couch and the carpet. I feel it’s good to go back to the basics and have an attitude of gratitude.

It was another busy week, or full one at least. The kids would likely not agree. They haven’t had much to do other than start with their cross country practices. Most of the area schools have started back up but for some reason ours doesn’t start until Tuesday. I’d planned to swim the lake with Elianna after work but got home and had to cut that plan out in order to rest in bed for four hours before we went to the Muni again to redeem our unused tickets. It was the last Lion King show.

They did great. We also sat with Laura’s parents and ate supper with them beforehand. I had learned from a client in a session the day before that the junior shows (kids only cast) were only an hour and a half long instead of close to three. The one we were seeing was a junior show, so all of the adults were incredibly excited and relieved to hear that. We had some time to visit and continue to wait for any baby happenings. Laura was hoping she’d be born before school starts Monday.

I’m starting to pray now that the baby comes soon. It’s so hard to wait for them. She’s not even due until Wednesday but your mind has this way of convincing itself that she could really be born any time now starting several weeks ago. On the way to the Muni we found out that my sister was officially miscarrying her baby. So we turned off the Cardinals game and rode there the rest of the time in the somber quiet. On the way home we talked about the show and all it’s interesting parts.

Tonight we went to the fair for my mother-in-law’s actual birthday. She turned 70 years old. I remember meeting her when she was my age, which is completely crazy! We met up for the Fleetwood Mac imitation band concert. As I mentioned, they have had some really good concerts this year including the original Matchbox 20 which we didn’t go to but watched online on YouTube the next day. Someone had actually filmed the whole thing from the front row and posted it.

So that was cool. It took me a while to warm up to the fair because for whatever reason it just is not my thing. The best part for me is when we walk through an underground tunnel from the parking area to the actual fair. The fair environment seems to stir up a carnal energy in me and it did this time as well at first. It lasted until we finally settled into the concert and Josh and I were sitting at the table bench together and touching arms.

My back hurt the entire time we were sitting. It was a longer day at work and I sat for most of the day. I could’ve gotten up to get something for supper but nothing sounded good enough to me to make me get up. I was going to get loaded tots but never ended up doing it. The kids came back with fair food including a giant elephant ear to share, so that disappeared fairly quickly. The band played all the hits and we knew most of the songs. The kids did too which surprised them.

Yesterday was a productive day. I am liking the rhythm of having three work days at Hope with the four day stretch of time to do other things. I had an appointment at my other place, this time in the afternoon. I loved that I still had the morning to be home. Because I don’t know how this is going to work out with the baby, or if I’m going to have to up cancelling some appointments when we leave to go out there, I didn’t want to miss a day this week. Starting out you have to put in more time.

I come away from there happy and energized to have that job too. It sort of fills in the gaps of what the other one is lacking including higher pay, an office space to call my own and develop (and share with interns), and more up close and personal and insider knowledge on how things work. One of the things we also did this week was go to the nurse practitioner for a follow up hospital discharge visit. The practitioner gave her opinions and said that health care for women has come a long way.

She asked if I suffered from anything. None of the physical symptoms that I have had checked out along the way came to mind. Instead it was the mental drop into dissatisfaction that happens every month like clockwork. Yesterday I was briefly looking up SSRI’s and very close to deciding to try dosing with them only for the duration of the luteal phase. I was thinking it would absolutely be worth it if it made it so that I did not have to try to convince myself half of my days that I am happy.

The B6 gave me nightmares and I quit that after three days. I had a random thought to try it again with B1 based on a YouTube video I had watched several years ago. The thing is, I do think that it has been getting better, like something in my brain has finally started to heal. I did tell my husband that if I ever found out that there was some kind of addiction or relationship that had stunted his growth somehow or prevented us from bonding more deeply I would be done instantly. Not after all of this.

I don’t think we talk enough about the struggles of being faithful. In my 20’s it was the exhaustion of raising littles and the completely consumption of my life. In my 30’s, when I had gained back some energy and was feeling more like myself, there was the utter agony of being trapped without any sexual variety. Like the thought of never being with another man was completely soul crushing. In my 40’s it’s more like this repeated wondering of who or where the problem is or has been for us.

Usually I tend to think it’s him. The other thing about my 40’s is this kind of deadening to how I thought I personally or other things should be and being okay with it. The part that gives me hope is when I think about how none of the problems in each of these decades lasted. They passed and became something else. I think it’s important to know this because of other people who might be going through it and needing to know also that the pain of these harder times does not last forever.

There isn’t always a clear distinction for me of when something demands action or if something is simply a cross you are bearing. Having some agency and the ability to control my life seems to matter. But so does being open to the things that are harder. I feel like I dismissed my own problems for so long, or mentally gymnastics’d myself out of a sane solution that it’s been hard for me to go back to at least trying to be reasonable, or praying for God to change my thoughts if he can.

This evening I drove into Athens to drop off my son’s registration papers. In order to be enrolled in the trade school in town they have to be registered through their local public high school. So even though he’s a student somewhere else, he still needs to go through the public school and have $97 fee paid. That’s new from last year so the two school secretaries and I had to email back and forth a couple of times to figure all of this out. The public school was having an open house tonight.

One of the boys came with me. He was going to stay in the van and keep listening to the Cardinals game, but I tried to ask him, “Aren’t you curious?” As in, didn’t he have even the slightest bit of curiosity about what the school where he would’ve or could’ve been going to right now is like? He really didn’t but at the last minute he did decide to come along. It didn’t take very long at all and he noted that the secretary was nice. I said she was and that you have to be with a job such as that.

After that we went to Dollar General. He wanted to get some candy and I was going to look at the decorations. I was feeling the need for a little bit of retail therapy. I bought something to hang on the front door that says Bee Happy and has bright colorful flowers on it. There are always people in the Dollar General there that I am pretty sure are using drugs. After that we drove to the Athens track to see the new and improved version. It looks amazing. We walked over to it to get a closer look.

Masyn Winn hit a home run while we were listening.

I love the August days that reassure us fall is coming. It hasn’t been that hot of a summer this year, but even so. I spent part of the day trying to focus my mind on the emails and tasks at hand to get the boys ready for school. At the dinner table we were talking about how if there had only been two of them we would be empty nesters. Since the first senior happened the others have come and happened in rapid succession. In addition to one in high school, there will also be a senior in college.

Elianna wants to work and travel and visit her college friends. Everyone seems to think that it’s fine to be 19 and not know what you want to do. I seem to have more of a mindset that time is something that shouldn’t be wasted. It doesn’t mean I’m not supportive but it does mean that I don’t know how to support this or figure out the next direction when it is off the beaten path. My plan is not that different to be honest. To work and travel and visit grandkids and keep being a mom here.

So I have got to do something different. I see this Instagram mom in the middle of raising all her small and medium kids and truly can’t believe the mental energy she puts toward thinking about her children and the ins, outs, wishes, and intentions of raising them. I feel scandalized in some way, close to grossed out, like no person deservers that amount of thought and attention from another human. But when it is me who is doing it, there is no aversion or dislike. It is our pure joy to give.

Well enough of the reveries. Tonight we went for a walk on the bike trail. We’re two miles away and hardly ever go over there. It was a wish of mine to bring the kids with their bikes but at the time it always seemed too cumbersome of a feat to attempt. That was something I thought we could do in the empty nest years. I still see plenty of things to do, between working, visiting kids, exercising, and maybe being more involved with a church group. This is all assuming one is alive and able bodied.

But I felt this renewal, as I tend to feel in the fall, of fresh idea and dedication. To not get to the end of another season or stretch of childhood without all the memories of what we could’ve, would’ve, should’ve done. I’ve confused myself with that sentence but do not even have the wishes or the will to try and fix it. What I mean is to keep going, living, doing, and trying to invest. But to do it now and still from a place of peace and contentment and grateful energy for the chance to even do it at all.

Going to church together has had several benefits that I can see. The first is that I am going to church now. Before that I had basically given up going. I didn’t care if it made my kids upset or my husband displeased with me. By that I mean that those two things were not enough to get me to go anyway to make them happy or to produce in me a sense of duty to at least go for them. I’d worked on my attitude for years. Maybe something was actually just wrong with the situation or the church.

The second benefit that I have seen is that I do not have the loneliness or dread that I had for years when I was actually going. Like it just isn’t there at all now. I like driving to church together and even if we’re going to early service and leaving extra early and even earlier to pick up a camp friend I am happy to do it and it doesn’t bother me. The boys are in the back seat and Elianna has been coming with us too in the summer. There’s no more watching them walk away while I remain in the house.

The third benefit I can see is that I actually like the pastors and hearing what they have to say. The head pastor is a really great Bible teacher. I don’t know how to explain the metrics I’m using to determine that. Basically I would say that he is one with the text. He is the one who loves it and is drawn toward learning it himself. He puts down Baptists sometimes but I have thought about telling him that he should be grateful toward them and credit them for teaching him so much of the Bible.

So those are the big ones. The thing that hasn’t really changed much is feeling like there still isn’t much of a church community to be a part of. You sit in the pew for a little over an hour, and then drive to the school to sit in the chair for Bible class, but there isn’t much else happening socially. There are some people and couples our age but no one who really stands out as the, “We ought to totally be friends with them” people. I don’t crave friendship as much but I do still wonder about it.

The friends I thought we’d have for life did not turn out to be that way. Now I understand that friend breakups are a thing, but before it had happened I had no idea, not to that deep and painful extent. And we were the ones who were clearly broken up with. One of those couples is now divorced and another we do not talk to and have not talked to since almost ten years ago when we went our separate ways on vacation. I’ve noticed I do not trust people the same, or put my heart out for them.