Are blogs even a thing anymore?
It’s been 4 1/2 years since I’ve posted anything here, and unbelievably 9 years since we said goodbye to my father. His last words to me were “you need to write a book”, and every anniversary of his death I find myself stewing about this. I feel weirdly guilty that I have hardly written anything since my daughter was born, like I’m letting Dad down, and yet life is so chaotic right now that one more project would be sheer insanity. I thought maybe I could start small and try writing here on a regular basis. We’ll see; it may be another 4 years before I post again.
At the same time, ask me how many times I have re-watached Ted Lasso and Shetland, or how many hours I have spent on Wordle/Spangram/Connections, or how many hours I have spent doom-scrolling social media. I get frustrated with myself sometimes (ok, a lot), but also? Two years ago we became foster parents and last year our foster daughter’s newborn brother came to live with us. I’ve been busy raising a brand new human, so I should probably give myself some grace. With three kids running amok, it’s not surprising that any downtime I have often consists of me lying in a dark room reading about Taylor and Travis, or sitting on our front porch just staring into space. And yet, not for the first time in my life, it occurs to me that I could have wasted my time in much better ways.
Speaking of space, we have been able to see the northern lights twice this summer from our yard. It was really neat, but also made me miss my dad something fierce. We used to sit outside at night on our back deck on lawn chairs, staring up into the sky. We were so deep in rural Maine that there was zero light pollution, and you could see the Milky Way. Dad used to point out constellations and stars that he knew, and sometimes if we sat still enough it seemed like we could feel the Earth’s rotation, spinning our insignificant selves around in circles. Coincidentally I’ve had a number of dreams about my dad and while I’m usually quite a skeptic about these sorts of things the last dream absolutely felt like a visitation. I’ve always had vivid dreams, sometimes to the point of not being sure if things I remember actually happened or not, but this one was just off the charts.
At any rate, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love, and how if anything defies death it is love. Our foster son has brought us so much joy, even though by any sane standards we are too old to be raising an infant, and there are times when I wonder if my dad’s soul may have hitched a ride with him to come back to me for awhile. It’s crazy, I know, but early in our foster care journey we decided to only take girls since our bio daughter was so young. Despite that, I kept having visions of putting a baby boy to sleep in the spare room. And even though we swore up and down we couldn’t take him, I think some part of me always knew we would. He calls me MumMum, which delights me to no end, and likes to drop things on the floor just so he can say Uh oh! I have zero idea of what the future holds, but right now it’s giving me comfort to know that just like my dad, I can love him wherever he is.
