It's me

It's me who begins to cry or needs to lie down or put my face into the wind. 

My emotions overwhelm me.  I become weepy or cranky.

Are you alright? the kids ask

I'm fine.  It's just hard for me to put a meal on the table these days, I say to them.  

We need to eat outside because we are still distancing ourselves, but it's not the meal that does it.

Not really.

It's all the other things going on.  The travel to England for one.

The Air Canada lady says that Pearson airport is worse than we can imagine and to get there 4 hours before a flight rather than 3.

I don't want to face that airport;  Ned and I leave on Monday.

He watches me, so wobbly most of the time.  If I ask, he hugs me and says "it'll be fine". 

I played board games with the boys and lost.  There was lots of teasing.  I am a good grand mom.  

(It's not every meal.  Most of them are fine.)

I say to myself "You're fine!"  

But it's me.  It's not them.  

I read Maria Popova's newsletter.  Recently, she wrote about the writer, Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch understood that we act out a 'middle - emotion' because it is too complex, contradictory, and category-defying for us to know what we are really feeling.  Unwilling to fully live into what we are, (anxious, uncertain, tender and terrified creatures), we act ourselves into being, costumed in false certitude. 

I turn to the large soft organic cotton quilt I've nearly finished.  

It's a real thing and it is very fine.