Oh, cleansing.

The thing is, I know it’s good for me. So I do it. And that knowing is what makes it manageable, for me. In the moments that are hard, and there are plenty of them, I’m able to acknowledge the benefits of the challenge, to recognize that as difficult as it might seem, the rewards are far greater than the anguish.

I always feel better after a cleanse. I need to feel better. So, I’m cleansing.

The second day is never very easy, yet today managed to be pretty great right up until the end. And even the end wasn’t all that bad, it’s just sometimes the day really needs to be over.

There are only 21 more sleeps in this house, unless we decide to start our road trip a few days early. Either way, three weeks isn’t enough time left in San Diego. There are many many things I’m more than happy to release during this cleanse, but San Diego isn’t one of them.

I’m not finished with this place, this quirky city by the sea, the town I had no intention of falling in love with as deeply as I have. This corner of the country feels like home, and I’m going to miss it terribly.

That isn’t to say I’m not excited about my next adventure. I am, more so than I expected. But I am positive there are chapters left to be written here in Southern California, I’m just not at all certain what they’re about.

An absolutely unbelievable amount of pieces to this relocation puzzle need to be organized in the very near future. Not to mention all the work that needs to be done in preparation for the upcoming school year. And, most importantly, there are some special memories that need making before we bid farewell to San Diego after five incredibly vivd and dynamic years.

The best and worst years of my life.

It’s been fourteen years and one day since Emet was born, which was more or less also the day I myself was born. Motherhood changed me in a way I could never have anticipated, rearranging every piece of my identity to reflect the part of myself which is now most prominent, most important, of which I am most proud.

That boy of mine, what a year he’s had. I’m so impressed by his constant good nature, this genuine uprightness that he brought with him into this life. He just came that way, and watching him step into manhood is beautifully bittersweet. I couldn’t be more proud of him, but goodness do I miss my little boy.

Our family dynamic will shift dramatically with this upcoming relocation, and it’s not really something I’m adequately prepared to discuss other than to say that I treasure the relationship I have with my firstborn. He teaches me about grace and integrity, about doing the right thing, even when the right thing isn’t the easy thing.

What should have been a monumental occasion heralding thirteen solar returns for a golden boy, instantly became a frighteningly tragic and deeply unfortunate series of events pertaining to the loss of our fourth baby. And as hard as I tried to fight it, what should have been a monumental occasion heralding fourteen solar returns for a truly remarkable young man, transformed into a melancholic chaos. Not only are we moving again just five short months after what turned out to be an incredibly complicated and lengthy process, I haven’t been able to shake the blues that bubbled up in honor of our angel baby.

One. Whole. Year. For the rest of my days, there will be three distinct periods of my existence: Before Motherhood. Motherhood. After Loss.

Everything about my existence has changed in the wake of that late-term miscarriage.

Thankfully, most of this transformation has been welcomed and positive. But there are a few areas that need some addressing, and I’m taking the opportunity to acknowledge where I started, 365 days ago, where I am today, and were I’d like to be this time next year.

As this day was approaching, I began to realize how disconnected I’ve been with my physical body since learning a baby had died in my womb. More often than not, this vessel has felt foreign, uncomfortable, unreliable. As a person who spent the majority of her life powerfully connected to physical movement, existing in a frame that is wholly unfamiliar has been extremely disorienting. I thought about how little attention I’ve paid to the proper care and attendance so deserving of a body like mine, a body that has been through so much but continues to function. The long and short of it is that I want to get back to a place where I make taking care of myself a priority. I really have no idea how it happened, gradually and then suddenly as is often the case, I suppose. But I haven’t been taking care of myself for quite awhile now, and the time has long since come for me to do something.

A Year of Wellness.

I am going to practice, as best I can, the art of self care. To return to my roots of being committed to caring for myself and my family through food and movement.

The last time I went on a cleanse, it was Spring 2013, just a few months before I became pregnant with Roux. I used to cleanse once a year, never while pregnant or nursing. So, I had planned on cleansing after he and I weaned, which didn’t end up happening until I was already pregnant again. After I lost the baby, I just wasn’t ready. Cleansing is physical, yes, but it’s also very emotional and very spiritual. And I wasn’t ready.

Now, I am ready.

Last night, Emet and I had a little birthday date at a restaurant that is special to us. He even blew out a candle! With everything else that is going on, I wasn’t able to pull together anything more elaborate than that in time for his big day. And he didn’t mind one bit. In fact, he was happy to be having some one-on-one time with me, something that is not too easy to make happen. I told him that I was sorry I couldn’t give him the big party he deserved, that I felt bad for being overwhelmed by circumstances not at all involving his birthday. And he told me, “It’s ok, I just want you to take care of you.”

Thank you, Emet, for all the intuitive wisdom you continue to bestow up me. I’m grateful everyday that you are my son, that I am your mother, that you are the one who escorted me across the most defining threshold of my destiny. I am so proud of the fourteen year old man that stands before me, your honest heart and your noble mind. Yours is an energy of stability, like a lighthouse against a raging sea, constant and brilliant. You continue to encourage me to seek humor in even the darkest places, and to remind me that what matters most is that we have each other. Your mama loves you, forever.

To you, the baby that never was but the angel that always is, I carry you with me everywhere I go. You’re always in my thoughts, perhaps you’ll always be, but not a day has passed since you passed that I haven’t paused at your absence. I’ll never be the same, and I have you to thank for redirecting the course.

And to you, this body of mine that has seen its fair share of trauma, I recommit myself to your wellbeing. You have always been an important teacher, I’m sure the lessons you have waiting for me as I tune into your wisdom are exactly what I’m meant to discover at this point in our journey together. I trust in your resilience.

Seven seven seventeen.

My final full moon as a San Diego resident.

At least for the time being. Who knows what the future will bring?!

But the next time the moon is this bright in the sky, I’ll be sleeping on the other side of the country. Far away from home. Trying my best to make a new home in a new city, at a new school.

One year ago, I was up late writing letters to my kids. All four of them. For whatever reason, I had this ominous feeling about the surgery I was facing the next day, the surgery that would remove my deceased fourth child from my womb, resulting in a myriad of frightening complications that would leave me in a medically induced coma for hours. The surgery from which I’ve yet to fully physically recover, that surgery.

Call it a premonition, or maybe superstition, or maybe plain old anxiety, but I definitely felt as though something was about to go terribly wrong. And it did. And it has been, terribly wrong, ever since.

Nothing has stuck. One bad hand after the next, more obstacles to overcome, more loss, more sadness, more reasons to give up.

More reasons to keep on going.

When we moved from our “old house” to our “new house, blue house”, I thought we had our work cut out for us.

That move is nothing compared to what we’re looking at presently. Trying to relocate a family across the country isn’t cheap! Or without its fair share of logistical complications. And I’m not even talking about packing, or even unpacking. That is in addition to all the other details that must be coordinated to pull off something as elaborate as the move we are about to make.

Do I know what I’m doing? Not really. Does what I’m doing feel right? Absolutely.

And that’s enough for me!

When I first found out the baby we were expecting wasn’t actually going to be joining us on this side of the threshold, it took a lot of work for my mind to rearrange the pieces to accommodate for such a tremendous and unexpected loss. When, a few short months later, I would suddenly and tragically lose the one thing I’d come to rely on as absolute, I did the only thing I could which was to fight like hell.

One full year ago. The baby would have been at least six months old by now.

The day I took the pregnancy test, I told myself to just surrender. To embrace all the change this baby was sure to bring. I had a feeling that little life was going to alter our reality in a substantial and significant way. And while my instincts couldn’t have been more accurate, the picture my mind created of these anticipated transformations could not be more drastically different than the present reality in which I find myself.

I’ve only a few weeks left here in San Diego. There isn’t much time before our journey across the country begins. I have so much to release prior to departure, so many habits and patterns and stories to leave behind, layers I have yet to shed but that have no real purpose other than to prevent me from realizing my potential. Even my physical body had insulated itself, creating a gesture of softness to compensate for the jagged and brittle interior of a woman with a broken heart. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my fourth baby, and I don’t think a transcontinental relocation will change that. But I’m leaving room for the possibility that maybe, just maybe, permitting myself to truly allow for a different future than the one I had planned will result in the kind of happiness only faith and love can bring forth.

In other words, the kind of happiness that got us this far.

The funny thing about having the rug being yanked out from under my already wobbly legs is that, in the most roundabout way imaginable, I’m getting to experience things about which I’ve always been curious.

Like living in The South, for instance.

Granted, I haven’t actually lived there yet, but I did spend last weekend exploring Asheville and all she has to offer. Because at the beginning of next month, that is where 4/5 of my heart will be living. I’m leaving a huge part of myself behind in San Diego, but that is a story for another day entirely. Today is about acknowledging that half of this calendar year has transpired, that I’m as close to New Years Day 2018 as I am New Years Day 2017, and that yet another significant chapter is about to begin.

Six months ago, I wrote about change. About how I had a sense that everything was in transition, and that my best defense was acceptance – to ride the wave, to surrender, to allow for expansion. I knew that things were rearranging, I just didn’t know where the pieces would land.

As it turns out, they landed at a pioneering Waldorf school nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with a class that includes my daughter, teaching the very curriculum which inspired my own unquenchable thirst for good stories.

I’ve just returned from an incredibly inspiring week at High Mowing, immersed in Renewal Courses at the Center for Anthroposophy. The next few weeks will be a mixture of preparing my block rotation, packing for a cross-country relocation, and properly saying farewell to a city that feels like home. There’s just about as much change behind me as what lies ahead, which seems about right for the halfway point of a year that has been nothing if not revolutionary.

“For all that has been, thank you. For all this is to come, yes!”

Dag Hammarskjöld

She walked down the stairs and presented it to me, almost as if it was something I was to receive with reverence and surprise. And it was. Reverence and surprise, I mean, with which I met the gesture.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure when the last time was that I saw the chenille bedspread, but now it’s in my linen closet, asking for me to unfold it and marvel at its presence, conjuring up images from a time long since passed.

It was my eleventh birthday present. My daughter will be eleven next month.

***

I had been working on a draft about renewal, about hope, about how it seemed a corner had been turned for the better. I got a little ahead of myself, and so I’ll just write about how unpacking is by far the worst part of the moving process.

My house feels like an elaborate life-sized game of Tetris. Our new space is less than third the size of our previous space, though the lots are nearly identical in square footage. That is to say, we traded indoor square footage for outdoor square footage, and while I couldn’t be happier with our decision to swap an odd and oversized house with no backyard for a charming and cozy little bungalow with a yard that has inspired an entirely different way of life, I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out what to do with all our stuff.

Obviously, the easy answer to that question is to get rid of it. And believe me, that is what I’m going for – minimalism. But I have a really hard time tossing things my kids have made or given to me, things that hold sentimental value. For a sentimental person, that is pretty much everything. So, I’m working on keeping only the most special mementos and letting the rest go. But, yes. It is a process.

In the meantime, while we’re deep in the throes of eliminating our belongings, we’ve added a few new creatures to the menagerie. I know, right? But first, let me explain.

I blame the backyard. It’s just that it’s got so much potential that I have no other choice but to live into all my urban homesteader fantasies. So raised garden beds and chickens were bound to happen at one point or another and it just so happened that the nursery down the street had a fresh batch of hatchlings.

Here’s a fun fact, I really don’t love birds. I mean, I love birds, they’re beautiful and majestic and important, but they are not at the top of my list for animals I want to hold. They’re not even on my list, who am I kidding. They kind of freak me out. But for whatever reason, I thought that maybe baby chickens would kind of help me get over this little phobia. And as it turns out, nope. Not really helping. But my Huckle? Well! He just loves birds, and he’s always pressuring me into holding the chickens. And I don’t want to make him feel badly, so I hold the chicken even though I really don’t want to hold the chicken. Because that is the kind of mother I am. Ha!

But I kind of do love the chickens in the sense that they are hilarious in their very chicken way, and also because of the whole farm fresh egg thing. Which is really why I got myself into this mess to begin with, and yes it is a mess, because chickens are dirty and impossible to house train. So it’s a great thing they have to live in our shower for the next month.

So I love the chickens because of the eggs, which won’t come for another few months, whatever, but mostly I love the chickens because of how much my kids love the chickens. They were so excited by the prospect, they named them in advance, after the Schuyler Sisters from Hamilton. But the big kids were on a Spring Break vacation with their dad’s family when we brought the chickens home, and Roux ended up bestowing each of them with a name so pure, so innocent, and so so funny, that there was no way they weren’t going to stick. And so goes the story of how our chickens came to be known as Duck, Flower, and Black Black.

“This is my baby chicken called Duck!” will forever be one of my favorite things he has said.

***

At some point, the stories will come pouring out, but I don’t want to force what isn’t ready to be written.

Welcome to your new home, I said to him as he drifted off to sleep.

Welcome to your new home, mama. His last words on his first night under this, the roof that now houses us. All of us.

Almost all of us, Emet and Jade won’t sleep here for another few nights. But then! Oh, but then. All five of us together again, in a place which by all intents and purposes is considered home for each of us.

We live here now.

It’s been quite the road to this new address, but I have a feeling these walls are ready for us, they have felt familiar since the first time I was in their presence, under a new moon full of optimism and promise. And now, I sit in the living room, surrounded by an eruption of boxes and belongings, with a head swollen with ideas and a heart bursting with adoration for our new baby blue bungalow.

A break was bound to happen sooner or later, there was only so long I could keep up daily posting in the middle of such upheaval. And especially now as my computer is about to be incapacitated for a brief respite as it – along with the rest of us – awaits a new home, there will undoubtedly be an intermission of sorts in this here chronicle of a major life transition.

But, oh! These past two weeks since sweet Huckleberry’s third birthday have been pivotal, and we seem to be headed in a much better direction – like a sudden shifting of the winds, adjusting our sails, altering our course toward a wildly brighter horizon.

Keep doing the work, keep believing in love, keep having faith that good will always prevail.

There are a million tasks to be done as we wrap up our last few days in a house that holds a very special place in my heart. I keep having these moments where I’ll remember there are only so many hours left to hear these familiar creaks and see these quirky corners, intimate details of a space that soon won’t be ours to occupy as we have done these last three and a half years. Longer than I’ve lived anywhere since I was 17 years old – half my life.

I keep trying to freeze frame in my mind the certain vantage points I love, like the way the wall sconce looks over the secretary desk in the front living room if you’re looking across the house from the back den, the small staircase framed just so by the slatted doorway. Or the way the green lamp on the midcentury table looks from the corner of the couch in the office. How the sun lights our bedroom, and the way the prism shines in the late afternoon with that golden radiance, casting rainbows on the baby’s crib in the corner.

Trust me, there is plenty wrong with this place. And terrible things have happened here. I broke my foot on that small staircase I romanticized in the last paragraph! The electricity throughout the entire structure is shoddy, a lightbulb exploded overhead inches away from where Mister Baker and I were standing just a few days ago, and that is not the first time it has happened. The plumbing is awful, the cabinetry needs reworking, the appliances are old, the linoleum needs replacing, the house needs to be resealed. So much work is needed to realize the potential of this space. And it’s not work we were ever going to do.

I am not sad about leaving, I am simply nostalgic for a chapter in my life I absolutely loved writing.

As it turns out, this next chapter is having a surprisingly strong start.

The next couple of days are going to be intense as we race to get the last things organized for storing, for selling, for donating, for tossing. We are so close! But the last part is always the hardest. And then, of course, the actual moving. But, then! Oh, but then, comes the fresh start. A fresh start for Spring, it couldn’t sound lovelier. If the plans we have set in motion unfold accordingly, we’ll be waking up in our new home just as the Earth herself begins to rise from her long Winter’s sleep.

My house is a minefield: boxes strewn about, cabinets ajar and drawers open, random debris scattered across the floor, stacks of papers and piles of odds and ends all over the place. I’ve never been good at moving, I’ve never particularly enjoyed moving, but the intensity of this particular move has inspired me to focus on the energy I want to bring into our next home, wherever that might be.

We’re quickly coming up on our last week in this place, and so much has happened in the past twentyfour hours I can only image what the next eight days will bring. But I’m doubling down on what I said about letting go and leaping. I have faith, I am ready, and I am not afraid.