Henry David Thoreau

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau


Are we bound for glory?
Sadly we may never know until
long after the life has faded from our eyes.

nina michelle


What do you do at night? You know the kind of night where medication that is supposed to help you sleep stops helping sometime before 3am?

First I panic. It's too quiet. Pregnant pauses. The quiet can be full of the possibilities I might hear echoes from things I used to have. Wind blowing through the sun room trees... the sound of the front door as I walked outside for a moment of night air and the garden in the midnight. The kids running across the wooden floors screaming "daddy's home"! Or my son walking through the door after school and running down the stairs and my daughter flouncy up the stairs. The bus breaks squeaking as it stopped outside the house. Baby babel. Movies I bought like The Point and Once Upon a Potty. I lived in the beautiful house, with beautiful things, and we did family things, and had family dinners. (even if they consisted of me sitting there watching everyone speak absolutely nothing except how much they hated it and my ex husband completely silent with nothing to say to me about his day or anything else for that matter). We went on amazing family vacations.I am scared of those voices that start in the silence. Voices telling me I should have been selfless enough to wait and gave all those children the same sounds I was hearing at night. Their safety, their routine. That someday I will owe them physiological counceling and the respect to sit there and let them yell profanities at me for not being the mother they thought that I was should be. It will be like that show Intervention. Just the other day my 18year old told me I should be doing "this and that" with my babies. He has no compassion for the depression I have been fighting, the going back to school at 46 nor does he believe me that I live in pain every freakin day because of fibro. As he told me "ya dont look sick" His father made fun of me a year ago, I asked my son if he joined in the freakin family joke. I could tell the look on his face he knew what I was talking about.

But I didn't know what to do. My husband threw up when he realized I was a lesbian. When we tried to talk, I would wrap my arms around myself as if to cradle myself and back into the closest corner, rocking back and forth. I told him several times I could just leave. Although that didn't make any sense.....

I am so sad. I feel I have lost everything and I feel my children have lost the only childhood they will ever know. I am guilty, I am angry, I am remorseful. But none of these violent, inconsolable emotions are not tantamount to my peace and joy in being a lesbian has brought me.

But my joy remains silent at night. It doesn't flow over me like my guilt and pain does in this quiet I can't escape. I wonder to myself if decisions are ever resolved completely. Will I ever wake at 3am and say "eh can't sleep, guess I could go work on my photography or my writing", instead of hearing the echoes of little feet running acrosss the kitchen floor believing with all their heart that that was their life forever.