A trip to South Valley Park with Aunt Vinnie, Uncle Craig, and Cousin Oliver

My cousin Oliver moved to Boulder in January and his parents came to visit this month from Indiana.  I was so glad to be able to spend time with three of my very favorite family members, and so was Fiona.  After our walk we went to lunch together and I totally forgot to get pictures there.  But a lovely time was had.

Sitting in the driveway pretending we knew where we were going.

Cheerful women in the back seat.

Aunt Vinnie & Fiona

My super cool cousin

It was a rainy, muddy day which made everything very green -- or very green for Colorado.

That's a really loud print I'm wearing, isn't it?

Uncle Craig and Oliver mirroring each other.

Fiona in the wilderness.

Cousins together.  Fiona really enjoys Oliver -- though it takes her a while to start talking when she hasn't seen him in a while...

Teaser Tuesdays -- Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB @ Should Be Reading. To participate, all you have to do is the following:

• Grab your current/upcoming read
• Open to a random page
• Share 2-3 "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• Be careful not to include spoilers!

We both laugh.I like the sound of my mother's laugh.  I wish she'd found those pills when I was a kid, that I wasn't learning the sound at the age of thirty-seven and at the price of a traumatic brain injury.

~page 231, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

So.  I adored Still Alice, Lisa Genova's first (and bestselling) novel.  Adored it.  This one, I struggled with -- largely, I think, due to my total disconnect from Sarah, the main character.  I'm not competitive or Type A and I think lying to your kids is not cool -- for starters.  But I'm fascinated by the idea of left neglect, a neurological syndrome that sometimes happens after a traumatic brain injury.  After Sarah's car accident, she loses all awareness of the left side -- of her body, of her plate, of a page in a book.  Also, I appreciated the changes that came about in Sarah's relationship with her mother, as well as with the world at large.  (And I'm glad that she decided using a cell phone while driving is a bad idea -- I wasn't sure that was going to come.)  In fact, the end of the book has enough positive messages that I need to hear right now -- that one can make a new life and be happy, that hope and contentment exist, that opportunities arise, that it probably erases my issues at the beginning.  Sarah's character is redeemed, for me, by the "new" Sarah she becomes. 

As a side note, she celebrates the anniversary of surviving her car crash just like I do with my accident.  I love it.  And it makes me wonder -- perhaps there are more good things to come as a result of my accident, things that I'm not yet aware of.

Happy Creative Christmas Eve :)

making Christmas tree ornaments with Aunt Vinnie and Eliot

Grandma JoJo helping

My cutest cousin named Eliot

Uncle Craig, my favorite uncle since childhood

I'm going to practice here for what I should say elsewhere, in larger public forums...

On August 3rd, my daughter and I left our house and have been living with friends ever since.  I know that it will soon be time to share a certain amount of what is going on with a larger amount of people and I thought I would do a little draft here of what exactly it is that we might share. Depending on the intended audience it may end up in either first person singular or first person plural.  Writing it here is also a way for my husband to take a look and see what he thinks.

For the last month, Jeremy and I have been living apart.  Things have been very very hard for a very very long time.  While I'm not sure at exactly what pace we'll move, I believe that we are heading toward a legal separation and, eventually, a divorce.

There is a real sense of loss and grief involved in the dissolution of our marriage -- as, no doubt, there should be.  I am sad for the connections I lose and for the hopes I had. I am sad that my daughter has two toothbrushes now. I am sad that life is so very, very complicated and overwhelming at this point.

It is strange, for both of us, I think, to begin moving toward a future that involves the other person to a much lesser degree.   Of course, we will always be connected to the other person because we have a child together.  My hope and dream is that we will eventually be able to be together for holidays and family time and have that be okay -- that we can regain some sense of friendship.

Though it probably doesn't always seem that way to the other person, we are both trying to do this in a way we are both proud of in years to come and in a way that honors both our past and our future.  We both continue to want the best for the other person.

We appreciate your prayers and thoughts during this time.  It is a scary thing to share this intimate part of our lives with others and we hope that you will receive it in a spirit of compassion.  Feel free be in touch, though we are still working out what feels comfortable to share.  Please remember, if you speak to us when Fiona is around, that she is a very "listening" child and that we try to be very aware of what we say in front of her.

Teaser Tuesdays -- Faithful Place by Tana French

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading and asks you to :
1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3 . Share 2 "teaser" sentences also citing the title of the book and the author and in that way people can have great recommendations if they like the "teaser".
4. Please avoid spoilers!

Cover of Faithful Place: A Novel

The rose-colored glasses aren't your style, Frank.  You must have been really crazy about this one, were you? p. 94, Faithful Place by Tana French

I've read Tana French's other books (In the Woods & The Likeness) and liked them. Faithful Place goes even deeper into the sorrows of human relationships and the disappointments those relationships bring.  The story of Detective Frank Mackey's return to the neighborhood of his childhood had just enough echoes of my current situation (you know, minus the whole being set in Ireland and featuring two murders twenty-two years apart) to make a very bittersweet, evocative, and poignant read for me -- though not necessarily in a negative way.  (Run-on sentence much?)

While Faithful Place could certainly be considered to be in the thriller/mystery/page turner genre, French's character development and skill at setting the scene makes it so much more.  Frank's dread of getting pulled back into the downward spiral of his family and neighborhood of his youth is counter-balanced by his almost unacknowledged hope that maybe things could be different -- while almost certainly knowing that they won't be.  The idea of seemingly small and simple things that we do when we are young reverberating many years later certainly reverberated in my own mind -- as did the hopelessness of ever really making things right.  ". . . everything you believe is up for grabs, every ground rule can change on a moment's whim, and the dealer always, always wins." (247)

Frank's relationship with his ex-wife, Olivia, and his daughter, Holly, ring true.  "Her voice had softened.  In all the world, the last think I needed that night was Olivia being nice to me.  It rippled my bones like water, soothing and treacherous." (30-31)  Speaking of his daughter,

"She's completely surrounded, from every angle, by people telling her that reality is one hundred percent subjective:  if you really believe you're a star then you deserve a record contract whether or not you can sing for shit, and if you really believe in weapons of mass destruction then it doesn't actually matter whether they exist or not, and fame is the be-all and end-all because you don't exist unless enough people are paying attention to you.  I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking." (153).

This is the second book I've read recently (see last week's teaser) where things go very wrong after a phone call is not returned.  Let me tell you, it makes me want to keep my phone by my side at all times and never, never ignore it!

Deep Breaths -- Take Two

Image via Wikipedia

I've been going through some major changes and transitions in my life right now, giant, scary, hard, sad changes and transitions.  Overwhelming, exhausting, sob-inducing, confusing, tricky, all-encompassing changes and transitions.  Overdue and potentially life- and light-bringing changes and transitions.

Image via Wikipedia

I've been staying on the lighter side here on the blog -- perhaps just as a space where I can keep pretending everything is normal/status quo/okay.

Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr

I'm pretty sure that at some point I'll start sharing more on here -- perhaps after I figure out the balance between this being my space to process and share and this being a public space that anyone can read.  Between being fair to everyone involved and being good to myself, giving myself some space to think aloud and find encouragement.

Image by LensCat via Flickr

Love and peace to you all on this Monday morning.

Image via Wikipedia

Pictures from the first half of the in-laws' visit