Magical Moment Monday

It has been forever and a day since I have posted a Magical Moment Monday entry, but as today as been decidedly magical, it couldn't be more appropriate.  And it couldn't be more inappropriate.

When I began blogging and Lovely and Amazing was borne into cyberspace, my intention was to have it serve as a reference for the Down syndrome community. It wasn't to be impersonal, as it was where I planned to share my very dear Miss E with the world and how her entrance in my life had changed the very way I saw the world, but it was most definitely not to be about me. I was a subplot in Emma's story, and that was what I planned to give to my new found community. But, as time has proved, our stories are forever linked, and even in the way I write about the lovely and amazing Miss E and in my ruminations about WonderGabe, the words I chose present as much insight into them as into me. How delusional I was to think I could separate the two.

Thus the object lesson - it is not possible for me to share my experiences with my children without bestowing the intimate knowledge of myself I once thought I could reserve.

Today, and without shame, I surrender completely. 

Welcome to all about me - and of the most random nature too.

Magical Moment Monday has not a thing to do with the WonderBabes, excepting their wondrous gift to leave me be and abandon themselves to the watchful eyes of Sir Snores Alot so I could have an evening and morning to remember the me who was before them. Last night and this morning I was given the gift of literature. I was actually able to read a novel (translated to mean not a trash magazine or community newspaper), and like an addict that has long ago forgotten her vice only to stumble upon it again by chance, I devoured it. Wholly and completely.

‘Life is compost. … All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams fantasies, everything I have every read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one find day I have a story, or a novel.’ (Vida Winter to Margaret Lea)

I just finished The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and it was wonderful. It was filled with what can only be described as prose crafted by a lover of the English language. Her sentences reminded me of the beauty of the written word and of the missed opportunities evident in contemporary communication. She reminded me that I love words and that they have the power to consume me, completely losing myself in them, alternately skimming them in my need to be in the story and lingering over their inherent beauty and the world they have created.

They have reminded me of the child, girl and eventually young woman I once was who lost herself endlessly in the pages of books, mourning the inevitable ending and of my sad goodbyes to the characters I had come to know. Sometimes to love.

And why am I posting such a bizarre entry - so out of tune with the tone of this blog and the tone of myself? Because having the chance to remember one of the various versions of myself, one that is all too often sacrificed in my roles as wife, mother, daughter, worker, friend, housekeeper, chauffeur, advocate, and accountant (notice the obvious absence of cook? Suffice to say, not so much. For the love of god, not so much), while bittersweet, is definitely the stuff magic is made of. Childhood and youth is too easily forgotten, and being able to transcend my body and lose myself in the story, how ever fictitious it may be, was integral to the girl I once was. It is so easy to lose that girl, that child we all once were, that finding her hand again, even for such short a moment, and being able to believe in the power of a story...in the power of make believe, is like having fairy dust sprinkled around you.

And now, with made up characters dancing in my head and wisps of language floating about, leading my fingers to type of their own accord, I will take my leave. There is much to do today and I look forward to my favorite WonderBabe embrace, but for a moment, just a moment, there was no clock, no bills to pay, no laundry to do, no IEPS to plan, no sad bedtime cries...there was no me; there was only the naive faith of a child in world that doesn't exist. 

And that, that made my day.

And in that vein, I hope your Monday is touched by the finest of fairy dust too.