ok, here's the deal

so, that post i made a couple of days ago about shifts...it was like the beginning of the long row of dominoes tumbling. there were more after that, but there is only so much you can capture with words at a time...only so much your brain can process as your perspective widens...only so much it can take in at once, i guess is more accurate.

what i realize is something like this...i birthed my kids, i've raised them...fed them, clothed them, watched them learn to button buttons, brush teeth, take steps, ride bikes (yes, my littlest did this last week and it is STILL my most favorite thing to watch them figure out in the world...srsly), all that stuff that they figure out in my presence...and i'll continue to be right alongside them, as much as they need me...this is my pledge in conceiving them, right? to be there as best i can when they need me...but they are their own people...period. always have been, haven't they?

see, when it takes awhile for you to figure out that these little folks are not, in fact, a representation of how you're doing in life...that their lives are not about you, but about them...well, it's one long "a-ha moment" and it leads to all these other realizations about other folks you didn't birth and your relationships with them...it gives everyone an independence that changes your concept of interdependence, but that's as clearly as i can state that, so i probably need a little more time on that concept. (you know, like a lifetime or something)

anyway...all of this to say, that i love my kids. i see them as individuals these days in a way i don't think i've ever managed before. but then i'm also reconnecting with and still interacting with all these other folks. and somewhere in all of this, i see that our relationships to each other, without our own personal judgments or whatever, are basically the same. where one of us succeeds, we all succeed. where one of us is healed, we all get healed. my ability to affect my kids may be a little greater because of proximity and trust built in a relationship that has spanned their entire lives, but i will not be the only relationship that affects them and i should not pretend my only responsibility is to them. we all affect each other. from the child i dropped off to volunteer for the first time today to the woman i almost hit as she pulled out of the parking lot on the street two blocks before the rock gym said child was volunteering at. we all affect each other. some we think about, plan, and try to control how we affect. some we never have a clue we even were a part of that life. and everything in between.

i don't know why this is so huge, but it has cracked my world open. (in a good way...or at least a way i am drawn into) i feel electric. and grateful. and tiny and powerful and lots of other things.

one other thing...we watched the last samurai with the kids last night and this morning. (started it last night, finished it this morning) i do not really like tom cruise, but i will say he was kind of perfect, in his little, arrogant, cockiness for playing the role of america in that movie. i'm a little torn about the violence in the movie, and my littles cover their heads during much of it, but i wonder how that stuff sounds when you aren't watching.... anyway, my oldest and i talked about the movie, as we were crying at the end...it's powerful stuff...power for the sake of power is a fucking powerful thing...big surprise. but strength for what you believe in...while it gets knocked down, assassinated, massacred again and again, cannot be crushed. and my oldest and i were both overcome with that realization, i think. i told him about obama's line in his inaugural address, "to those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents...You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." it is a fine line between protecting ourselves from terrorists and becoming the very terrorists we seek to protect ourselves from. while i believe it is noble to defend innocents, i believe if we become the same as those we are defending ourselves from, we are no longer noble. and while some people feel being alive is the most important thing, this movie kind of took my teen and i to different paths of thinking in our conversation than we'd ever covered before. and it was emotional for us the whole time.

so, there's today's verbal vomit. i think as busy as i've been, i'm a little backlogged in processing through these thoughts. my dreams have become wild as my mind seeks to work stuff out. i must continue my campaign to get my ass on the treadmill.

but now i have some lego parts to research for my second born's robot he's building and some sheets to change on the beds my three youngest children have all decided to sleep in. it's amazing how they are all growing and progressing and changing and teaching me the whole while.

peace