Hi again! Popping up out of the hammering and sawdust to say the work of creating a new site – at least of the nature of the one I’m working on – is akin to building a new house from scratch. Gone are my illusions of a spring launch. But totally present is a deepening gladness that what I’m doing is worth the work and wait! I can’t wait to show it to you!!

Love, again, to you all. And if you’d like to receive an email when the new site launches, please drop me a line – kristintnoelle at gmail dot com. I’d love to hear from you!

Kristin

Hi everyone!  Thanks for stopping by.  It’s been a long blog hibernation, but I’m delighted to say I’m out of the making-and-raising-babies cave and can’t wait to share some of where my creative energy is newly blossoming.  My birthday is February 13, and I’m considering that my horizon date for a re-launch of KristinNoelle.com – this time as a soulful sketch blog with all kinds of other offerings.  Can’t wait to see it completed myself!

Until then, blessings, and warm wishes that your winters are full of what you need!

Kristin

The wind and rain are howling outside, and I swear there must be a full moon to boot; something’s gotten into me.  I’m blogging, for one, and when did that last happen?  This has been a fiercely private season of growth for me, one where unlike the last, I hardly have words for what I’m learning, let alone time to form them into sentences.  I’m like that zucchini vine you planted last spring and then forgot about.  For weeks it grew and grew and grew, working its heart out under and over the ground, but noiselessly, and without the fanfare of something like snapdragons, until one day you happen to glance at the back fence and good Lord where did those leaves come from?  You get closer up and see, startlingly, that that vine is, well, alive, and taking up a good half acre, each leaf as big as your head.  And there are zucchinis, zucchinis everywhere, many so big you feel embarrassed even looking at them.  You wonder what in good sense you’ll do with them all, but more than that you want to laugh at how this, all of this, has happened under the radar screen.  Without you even noticing.

I’m working my heart out daily in my bumbling process of growth and have a hunch I’ll wake up one day and trip over all my zucchinis.  But in my day-to-day I live far more in touch with the challenges of raising two active, curious, willful kids as an introverted writer/artist in a very small apartment.  I live and grow and learn and grow and practice self control when my kids are driving me crazy and grow and pretend alongside of them to be a plumber/firefighter/farmer/clerk/mechanic/skunk/dog/cat/bull a hundred times each day and grow and daydream and grow and read a few sentences of a book and grow and journal and grow and try to talk on the phone with screaming and banging and raucous laughter in the background and grow and snuggle and kiss and rock and sing and wipe bottoms and read story after story after story and grow.  And all of it out of the public eye, off the blogosphere, unwritten.  Who can say how big my leaves have grown?  How many golden flowers speak of fruit as good as here, ready for the picking?

Soon (in June) N will walk the stage at graduation, marking the end of an era for us in this city by the Bay.  We’ll pack our things and head to LA to begin our next phase.  I’m not yet sure how I’ve grown, what lessons I’ve learned these last 5 years.  The last 2 in particular are mostly blur.  But I’m trusting that even in the forest trees fall, and even at the backs of unkept gardens vines grow heartily.  I’m trusting that with time, words will start to paint the outlines of meanings in what I’ve experienced, and will find their way to pages, paintings, songs.

I need to write more about identity. In my own mind I circle around this topic constantly. Does everyone?

There is a corner of my self that is a tuba. She plays my baseline. It goes something like: you (pause) need – a – la (pause) bel – oh – you (pause) need – a – la (pause) bel. And this goes on and on with very few breaks. It’s that driving need to be able to say to people what I “do”, or what I “am”, and have them instantly know what I’m talking about and, at least to some extent, respect it. Having a label (“writer”, “artist”, “teacher”) feels safe to me, and like I’ve automatically earned at least a B+ at life if one fits. And “mom” is not a label that’s ever counted, for some reason.

But there’s more to me than that tuba.

In me there is a vast section of drums. Some are of the type you’d find in fancy stores, but many are the kind you’d find only in villages so remote they aren’t mapped. These are drums that make me feel alive, or Alive, rather, which is to say free. Mostly their sounds are unworded. They pull me from small living, though – small meaning living that’s constrained and afraid of not measuring up or of looking stupid. When I hear them, they work magic on my feet, and before I know it I’m dancing and laughing and exploring all kinds of things with abandon – ideas, fears, interests, relationships, my own soul. When I’m dancing to these drums, it doesn’t occur to me to wonder whether I fit inside a label. Labels don’t matter – for me or anyone else – and it feels as if everyone and everything pulses with beauty and color and pathos, and I want to make love to it all. Or just dance.

Across the room from that whole section is a sad violin. The only song she’s learned so far is about how I’ll never be the person I wish I could be, and I’ll never be able to even define the person I wish I could be, so everything related to establishing value and identity is a lost cause anyway. I haven’t had the right life experiences, she sings, and my body type is all wrong, and I can never freely dance with those tribal drums because even if I wanted to, family and friends from throughout my life will always have me pegged as something totally not free, and their words and assumptions and body language will always create the invisible box that for all intents and purposes is the real, impenetrable one I’ll always live inside. Oh, her song is sad!

But there is a piano, too. And she can harmonize with that violin, a kind of empathetic tune, while not being overpowered by it. She plays all kinds of music. All kinds. She knows that an instrument – particularly one like she – is not constrained to one song, and is actually capable of more range and diversity than most people ever imagine. She can spend entire years learning classical music without fearing that’s all she’ll ever play. She knows she’ll play the blues because she’s always itched to do so, and that “tinkering” is where some of the most redemptive, transformative sounds are born. She can be elegant and refined and course and off-color and the sheer weight of her commands the whole symphony’s respect.

And I love her. I love my inner piano. She is easy to love and I feel safe with her, and like nothing is ever a lost cause or too late. With her I feel like nothing of my life has been wasted, and nothing ever will be.

I am a mom right now, yes, and for many years I have clung for dear life to my writer label. But I want to let go. I have no reason to doubt that I will write much, much more in my life. But who knows what else I’ll do? Who else I’ll be? I want to let my piano play what she wants for a while, and maybe put some new music before my tuba. It would sound nothing like the tired line she’s played forever, and everything like “celebrate life, silly!” And damned if that tuba won’t sigh, itself, with deep relief.

I think identity is a lot more like a crowd of musicians than the static, one-dimensional thing I’ve long assumed it to be.

Since last I wrote, the bubble of air I talked about before has gone AWOL, and I’ve been trying hard to will myself into a fish. So far I’ve succeeded mostly at going to bed earlier than I already do to avoid the kind of meltdown that happened on my way home from preschool drop-off last Tuesday (I cried most of the way home). Apparently, there’s no age exemption for feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.

When Eli was born, a family friend whose kids are grown said raising kids is 50% pleasure and 50% pain. At the time I felt sorry for him, knowing my experience would be WAY more tipped pleasureably. But now, three years later, I take issue with the measure entirely. I think the pleasure and pain of childrearing are located on entirely different scales, so that, at least for my first three years of it, the pain is about 90% and the pleasure 95. I could write a long list of all the ways that caring for my kids is utterly depleting me, on every level, and then depleting me some more. But I could write another list, equally long, of all the ways it’s filling me up. It sounds like paradox, and maybe it is, but I think it makes sense with two scales. One has a lot more to do with the physicality of doing this job – what it does, literally, to the body and brain and to where my body can be located (rarely book or clothing stores, conference rooms, offices, coffee shops, alone in the bathroom, in my seat for an entire meal, awake by choice after 10, etc). The other has more to do with the spirit, I think, or whatever part of me feels things like wonder and joy, and has the capacity to grow in things like wisdom, compassion, love. My rough edges feel totally, utterly exposed by that first scale, and the second is helping me find freedom from them. Or put differently, my physical-deprivation edginess (what comes from never being rested, recharged, or fully fed) is doing a number on the edginess of my soul.

I want to write more about my experiences of all of this, but until I find more air, I offer this question for thought: what if pleasure and pain don’t *ever* have to be parts of the same pie, and it’s possible to experience more than 50% of both no matter where we are, or what we’re doing? Wouldn’t it change the way we experience pain if this is what we thought were true?

the reasons why I dig (just before Eli tried to steamroll Charlotte)

(See previous post for an introduction to this series.)

Two of the many surprises of this last year have been that my “guts” are both far more limited and far more expansive than I ever dreamed. I have always known that I get edgy when I don’t get enough sleep or time alone or haven’t eaten for more than two hours. I need to pee and poo like anyone else, and tend to get cold easily. I like to have a small pillow between my knees when I sleep. My eyes are particularly sensitive to the sun. Things like this are all true, but I swear, my guts have been my superpower more than not when catering to my own needs has been difficult or impossible. “Mind over matter” has allowed me to make it through sundry discomforts with grace and dignity totally, and sometimes regally, still in tact.

Then I got pregnant for the second time, and realized someone stole my superpower. During that pregnancy I chalked it up to pregnancy–hormones and their accompanying insomnia and mood swings, constantly increasing physical discomfort and its accompanying insomnia and mood swings, anticipatory anxiety and its accompanying insomnia and mood swings, a two-year-old and his accompanying insomnia and mood swings. But once the baby came, and my hormones calmed down, I realized that try as I might, I could not find the bootstraps of my will. I wanted and had committed to so many things–exercising, writing, emailing, hosting friends, assuring dust and grime that no, a sublease wasn’t possible–yet very few ever happened. I came to feel cheated by my own body, since my will was alive but apparently had no one to do its dirty work. I had not experienced life like this before.

Simultaneously, I have been shocked and awed by the guts required to make it through the work of my days. On very little sleep, and rarely with even the buffer of that 4-hour block of deep sleep that happens early in the night for most people, I have needed to interact constantly with a totally dependent baby and a sweet and jealous and curious, active, inquisitive toddler. And I have had to find ways of transporting both of them safely into and out of those stores where you buy food and clothing and stuff. And make food into edible form for them. And deal with the “fall out” of said food hours later.

It all sounds so innocuous, and even appears so when observed, but the guts it has required for me to do it without being mean and destructive by the ninety-fifth time I’ve been asked the same question, or the thousandth time I’ve gone to bed without doing one of the things on the “really want to do once the kids are in bed” list (like, sit still; clip nails; read one page of book), or the millionth time I’ve tried to talk briefly on the phone with a friend or insurance broker or business owner only to be incapable of hearing them over the din–happy or sad–around me, have taken my breath away. I am without breath. Almost all the time.

But I do it! I dig deeper. And when I think I can’t dig one more spoonful more, there I am again, shoveling.

Apparently my superpower has been superfunneled into things I never expected needed it, so much so that there’s little left for that list of things my ego demands I want done.

Capitola Beach, June 2008

Well hello! Yes, I’m here. I can hardly believe it myself. After many, many months of trying to get my head above water, I think I may have discovered a little pocket of air opening up beneath the water (where I’m totally still dwelling), which may be enough to allow for some words here now and then. Writing has always been my primary means of finding and making meaning, and after many months of almost none of it (writing), I’m feeling starved for some (meaning). So here’s a first attempt at naming where I’ve been (in my not-writing life) and where I think I might be headed (on this blog).

Parenting two has turned out to be far more challenging than I ever imagined. It has called into serious question so many things I used to take for granted about myself, like: that I’m organized; that I can strategize my way out of most stressful situations; that I can always find time and energy to write; I can be depended on to arrive on time and not need to cancel (repeatedly); I’m aware of my feelings; I’m in good physical shape; I’m well-rested and clear-minded; I return emails; underneath the social graces, I’m not a generally frustrated person.

In the last year, almost every aspect of myself that I used to like has been stripped from me, and I’ve been on a long and bumpy path of making peace with that. I’d like to write more about that process here.

At the same time, I have discovered a world of joy and wonder that’s off the grid of public life, and, indeed, does not require its inhabitants to be anything like the person I used to be. It’s a world inhabited not by deep reflection, or eloquent words, or ego strokes. Here, no one gauges popularity or stylishness or smarts. Showering, brushing teeth, and lack of offensive odors are completely optional. In short, “keeping up appearances” gets zero traction.

Instead, we’re all very raw, and very real. When we need to burp or fart or drool, we do. When we eat, we always spill. When we’re happy, we squeal, sad, cry, mad, everyone in the room tends to know it. We sing about everything, dance often, and spend huge chunks of our days hugging.

Before now I have had, and desired, very few words to give to my life in this world of engagement with kids, but I think I’m ready to talk about it now. The challenges I’ve experienced in this world have tended to get worded so much more readily than the joys that I’d like the new challenge of balancing what I say about it. It is a breathtakingly wondrous world, truly.

And of course, like I said at the start, I’m starving for a sense of meaning in it all. I have had so little time for reflection that I feel adrift in a sea of not-knowing-how-I-feel-or-what-I-understand-about-any-of-it.

So here goes: a series of posts wherein I try to get caught up with myself and my world.

For those of us who feel…human sometimes:

Rock me to sleep (from Tom Hunter’s album Bits and Pieces)

Charlotte, 2 months