I decided to join you.
Love,
Sarah
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Mudville - Nebraska Edition
So, it turns out us Dunsmores make a mean mud pit. No matter where we are...we can somehow add water to dirt and make magic.
It seems to be our thing.
And like the saying goes, once I build it...they will come. And they do. My boys and their friends spend hours in these things.
You remember the original Mudville, don't you?
I think there is nothing better than letting my boys soak their little toes entire bodies in a little mud.
Clean up can be a bit challenging, but in the end...it's worth it.
Good times are had, friendships are sealed, and...
it makes naptime come all the more quickly (which is what it is all about anyway).
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Knowing
Every morning, I get up early to go for a walk before all my boys are awake. This is my favorite time of day. Just me and my dog, in the quiet of the dawn. It is my best (translation: only) time of the day to myself where I can just linger in my own thoughts. Some mornings my thoughts are slow and still laced with sleep and I can get through the entire thing without even knowing what I thought about the entire time. Other mornings, my mind is racing with ideas and I find myself finishing my route in record time and I feel like I can conquer the world that day. There are mornings that I let myself go to the dark corner that I have been sweeping all my thoughts about my family. It tends to bring out emotional thoughts and sometimes I realize I have cheeks stained with tears when I say good morning to a passing runner.
This past week, I spent some time in the dark corner while walking around in the dark of the neighborhood. I came back to the house sad. My thoughts kept stumbling over one concept. I don't know how the family that I left in Texas is working through the split that we all have experienced. You see, there is absolutely no communication between myself and any member of my family of origin. None. I assume they still all talk with each other, but none of them to me, and I am recipricating. My own thoughts and emotions about the past are very present - almost haunting my minutes each day. I am constantly evaluating how I am coping, my opinions, my past actions, my present decisions, and my future plans and expectations. I hear the story that my lips tell when people ask me about my family. All these thoughts and emotions are almost never clear, and perhaps, that is why I decided to start talking about it on this blog. To get it out and organize it. To hear other's opinions, and feel other's support. To make it real to me (because so often it seems like a terrible nightmare that just couldn't actually be true - not in a million years). But on this chilly morning in the very first light of the day, it hit me that I don't have any idea how they are all dealing with it. I see nothing. I hear nothing. And despite it being my reality, it makes me sad. Losing a parent to death was horrific, but going on with my life has been possible. Quite manageable, actually. But the loss of a parent and your only sibling to conflict and then to live with the knowledge that they are still very much alive is quite different. It is a little bit debilitating, for me, at least. And it became crystal-clear to me on that morning that my lack of knowledge about what they feel, about why they acted the way they did, about how they tell the story, about if they are being comforted or ridiculed or what their future expectations are is a gigantic obsticle in my healing. I am having trouble getting closure after the death of a relationship with people who live on.
BUT...it is the way that it is. And I can either attempt to scale this hurdle or move it. As of now, I am attempting to scale it because I don't feel ready or strong enough to reach out. But I still afford myself days of pity and sorrow. I allow myself time to work through the sadness of not knowing. They, after all, do not know either. They do not know how I feel, what makes me cry and how I retail the story of our divorce to new friends. They do not know what it is doing to my children, or my husband. And I have a significant part of that. I am choosing not to reach out, just as they are. I am choosing to keep those things to myself, and not seek out what the answers to them are on the other side of the camp.
When we lived in Texas, I wrote a blog. I snapped pics of my boys, shared stories of our life, and loved it. Since all of my family had knowledge of my blog, and had visited it, I made the decision when we moved to stop writing. I closed my beloved blog and just chilled. I felt strongly that I didn't think it was fair for my family to be able continue to see our lives, if they were choosing not be a part of it. And so it was done. But I missed it. So after a couple of months, I started this one. So I could still share my heart and participate in what I love to do, and what is helping to get me through this. But in the "privacy" of my own space. You see, it is not that I don't want my brother or my dad to see my precious little family. Quite the opposite...I dream about them seeing them. I yearn for them to look into the eyes of my boys and give them a connection to their family. I wish with all my soul that they could soak up every inch of them. But, I still feel strongly about them not just voyaristically getting peeks into our lives without particiapting in a relationship after all we have been through.
So...the very afternoon I came home from my morning walk with sadness of not knowing what is going on in the lives of those that I have lost, I got on the blog to start a post about digging a mudpit for the boys to be boys in. And I glanced down at the little feature I have on the front page of the blog which tracks which people visit the blog and where they are from. And my jaw hit the floor. There was a visitor from Simpsonville, South Carolina. And I don't know a soul in South Carolina, or Simpsonville for that matter, except for my brother, who is stationed there. This visitor had been on my blog several times, on several different occasions. Reading. Looking at pictures of my babies. Hearing my story of coping through this break-up. And there it was again two days later. And then two days after that. Watching my life.
And now I don't know what to do. I love to write on this blog. I finally feel safe enough to open up and explore my thoughts about what has happened and what I want to happen in my future. I love sharing pictures of the ones I love with the people that love me. But I still don't think it is fair for someone who has volutarily given up a relationship with me and my husband and my children to have a bird's eye view of our lives without being bothered to participate in a relationship with us. But I also don't think it is fair to have to give those same people control by shutting this down and hiding. I don't think it is fair to censor the murmurs of my heart that I want to share with the amazing people who support me and read this just because I am cautious about who might be reading and what they might be thinking. I don't know what to do. I just don't.
This past week, I spent some time in the dark corner while walking around in the dark of the neighborhood. I came back to the house sad. My thoughts kept stumbling over one concept. I don't know how the family that I left in Texas is working through the split that we all have experienced. You see, there is absolutely no communication between myself and any member of my family of origin. None. I assume they still all talk with each other, but none of them to me, and I am recipricating. My own thoughts and emotions about the past are very present - almost haunting my minutes each day. I am constantly evaluating how I am coping, my opinions, my past actions, my present decisions, and my future plans and expectations. I hear the story that my lips tell when people ask me about my family. All these thoughts and emotions are almost never clear, and perhaps, that is why I decided to start talking about it on this blog. To get it out and organize it. To hear other's opinions, and feel other's support. To make it real to me (because so often it seems like a terrible nightmare that just couldn't actually be true - not in a million years). But on this chilly morning in the very first light of the day, it hit me that I don't have any idea how they are all dealing with it. I see nothing. I hear nothing. And despite it being my reality, it makes me sad. Losing a parent to death was horrific, but going on with my life has been possible. Quite manageable, actually. But the loss of a parent and your only sibling to conflict and then to live with the knowledge that they are still very much alive is quite different. It is a little bit debilitating, for me, at least. And it became crystal-clear to me on that morning that my lack of knowledge about what they feel, about why they acted the way they did, about how they tell the story, about if they are being comforted or ridiculed or what their future expectations are is a gigantic obsticle in my healing. I am having trouble getting closure after the death of a relationship with people who live on.
BUT...it is the way that it is. And I can either attempt to scale this hurdle or move it. As of now, I am attempting to scale it because I don't feel ready or strong enough to reach out. But I still afford myself days of pity and sorrow. I allow myself time to work through the sadness of not knowing. They, after all, do not know either. They do not know how I feel, what makes me cry and how I retail the story of our divorce to new friends. They do not know what it is doing to my children, or my husband. And I have a significant part of that. I am choosing not to reach out, just as they are. I am choosing to keep those things to myself, and not seek out what the answers to them are on the other side of the camp.
When we lived in Texas, I wrote a blog. I snapped pics of my boys, shared stories of our life, and loved it. Since all of my family had knowledge of my blog, and had visited it, I made the decision when we moved to stop writing. I closed my beloved blog and just chilled. I felt strongly that I didn't think it was fair for my family to be able continue to see our lives, if they were choosing not be a part of it. And so it was done. But I missed it. So after a couple of months, I started this one. So I could still share my heart and participate in what I love to do, and what is helping to get me through this. But in the "privacy" of my own space. You see, it is not that I don't want my brother or my dad to see my precious little family. Quite the opposite...I dream about them seeing them. I yearn for them to look into the eyes of my boys and give them a connection to their family. I wish with all my soul that they could soak up every inch of them. But, I still feel strongly about them not just voyaristically getting peeks into our lives without particiapting in a relationship after all we have been through.
So...the very afternoon I came home from my morning walk with sadness of not knowing what is going on in the lives of those that I have lost, I got on the blog to start a post about digging a mudpit for the boys to be boys in. And I glanced down at the little feature I have on the front page of the blog which tracks which people visit the blog and where they are from. And my jaw hit the floor. There was a visitor from Simpsonville, South Carolina. And I don't know a soul in South Carolina, or Simpsonville for that matter, except for my brother, who is stationed there. This visitor had been on my blog several times, on several different occasions. Reading. Looking at pictures of my babies. Hearing my story of coping through this break-up. And there it was again two days later. And then two days after that. Watching my life.
And now I don't know what to do. I love to write on this blog. I finally feel safe enough to open up and explore my thoughts about what has happened and what I want to happen in my future. I love sharing pictures of the ones I love with the people that love me. But I still don't think it is fair for someone who has volutarily given up a relationship with me and my husband and my children to have a bird's eye view of our lives without being bothered to participate in a relationship with us. But I also don't think it is fair to have to give those same people control by shutting this down and hiding. I don't think it is fair to censor the murmurs of my heart that I want to share with the amazing people who support me and read this just because I am cautious about who might be reading and what they might be thinking. I don't know what to do. I just don't.
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