Radio Silence

Thank you for the wonderful love and support around my baby-sleep-WTF issues. I put the sleep books away, tweaked the nighttime routine a bit, and now things are a little better. (I think.) Except my back, which is worse—but that's another story for another time.

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In my head, I'm writing all the time. If I'm not narrating my actions out loud for Ivy's benefit, I'm monologuing silently for my own. I propel myself forward through the day with a mental chain of words. I try to file away a few shiny phrases and sentence fragments, just in case this is the day I find time to write them down.

Well, here I am, and I have absolutely nothing. There is static between my ears. I guess I could talk about today—how Rob terrified me by running out for coffee first thing, how the four of us went to Whole Foods for allergen-free chocolate chips so I can have chocolate-chip brownies for my birthday, how we picked up a rental car for Rob to drive while his car gets repaired and it's way sexier than either of the cars we own. I felt so busy and I had some rather astute observations mixed in will all of this everyday stuff, but it all seems so frightfully, flatly mundane now. The shine is gone.

My brother was in town for that post-Christmas, pre-New-Year's time between worlds. Where we're "out with the old" but not quite "in with the new" yet. We talked briefly about Marina Abramović and performance art, and I was reminded that I do have a scholarly brain in there somewhere.

The problem is that when I have a moment to actually focus on thinking, any complex thoughts I might've had are gone. I'm mush. Ideas fizzle away in the few minutes of quiet-alone time before bed (hence the recent silence on this blog), only to be remixed into nightmares about a bear invading my campground and eating my blue umbrella.

Writing—which is to say my ability to write anything more elaborate than a grocery list—is no longer in sync with my life.

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