"back to work"

so michael went back to work on sunday and monday morning i felt his absence most when i went downstairs and there was no coffee. which mad me felt sad but mostly thankful -- because it's a wonderful thing to be greeted with espresso. and then there are those things you don't even think of that make you feel lonely--like trying to put a duvee cover on a down comforter. i decided that if i was going to have the entire bed to myself -- since we're in stage two of owen sleeping in his own bed (tonight i only had to send him back to bed twelve times before he finally fell asleep and have thus far gone upstairs twice to put owen back in the big boy bed)--i was going to do so on clean sheets from top to bottom. really, though, i was standing up on the bed and doing this shake and wiggle and dangle thing trying to get all the corners in and actually now that i think about it i never actually finished because owen woke up.

the thing is, i miss michael terribly as i always do when he's away but it does seem different this time around. it feels more like a team effort and much of the anxiety and frustration seems to have waned. mostly i'm sure because we're getting better at this. but i think having lived over in norway together and then enjoyed an actual norwegian holiday at home gave us time to figure out the important stuff--for us, for our fidfam. and i won't be redundant, it's the stuff, the moments i've been blogging about for the last few months. . . i think too that it feels like we're both going back to work and less like i'm getting left behind. again--partly because i've been there and know that even the stuff that seems glamorous is really all work (although the xl dinners and nomaden cake are no fair) but also because i feel like i'm going back to work too--both book work and mom work. i know i keep splitting infinitives or something gramatically awkward with all these multiple points but maybe that's the point too. life just isn't that easy or that dull. anywhow, i finally made it through my virginia woolf oeuvre and it was a phenomenal journey wherein much of my reading felt novelistic in itself. with lighthouses in sight and waves crashing around me, i couldn't ask for anything more rewarding or inspiring. but i'm no longer "in the waves" but "at the shore." and that's always where my momentum stops. because when you're not swimming anymore, when the boat has docked what do you do? i usually get distracted by sand or exhausted by the sun. so tomorrow i'm going to spend the day (thanks to a newly retired nana!) getting current on my research at ucr and without making coffee dates or scheduling professor meetings i'm just going to pull up academic articles, photocopy, make notations and work some scholaraly elbow grease. mostly, i just need to do the grunt work. and write. and finish.

in the meantime after some intense re-nesting back ehre in the other oc i'm finishing up some creative/crafty projects and am going to try some modge podge with all of our amsterdam souvies to make a photobox for the book-blog i gave michael for christmas last year. if that works i'll do the same for the 100-page norway coffee table/postcard book i made as well as \ my owen scrapbook from last summer. but all this stuff feels less like distractions and more like extensions/expressions of the things that are important to me. one of the promises i made to myself coming back to cali was to live more artfully and to value that in myself and my mothering. so that even though i have moments of absolute panic of being thirtysomething and no longer sure of what i want to be when i grow up i am also at the same time being that person. if that makes any sense. like i already can't tell you when owen got his first tooth and i didnt write it in a baby book but i can tell you in detail the first moment he ran, with joy, freely through the grass. i have that page in my book and the blurry picture with nothing but a dart of red. and that to me seems infinitely more valuable.