Pardon the cliche, but one of my resolutions, should I actually stick to it, is to try to enjoy my life as it is. I think I do a lot of wishing and fantasizing about what is not yet, or what should be, and I suppose that’s fine because it gives me something to work towards. But it is not fine if it blocks me from feeling good moment-by-moment. Of course one can’t always feel good, but I think I feel bad a lot more than is necessary. The official diagnosis is depression, but I don’t always accept that.<\/p>\n
As I said yesterday, it was a good day. I felt strong and capable and creative. Nat came home from school and when asked, said that he had had a good day. I, of course, checked in the notebook because he might have just been saying, “yes” to get me to stop talking to him. Sure enough, it had been a really good day for him. In music they had studied Mozart. I don’t really know what that means, that they “studied” Mozart, but I’m sure it involved a lot of listening to the complicated themes and feeling how wonderfully they resolve in one of his pieces.<\/p>\n
I asked him if he wanted to hear some Mozart, and of course he said, “yes,” so I asked him a few more times in all different permutations to be sure he really wanted this and would not just walk away when the stereo went on. And yes, he did mean it. I chose a flute concerto or two and a collection of “Greatest Hits.” He settled on the couch and sat through all of it, listening carefully. I wonder what he thought or felt. I know I think of Mozart as hilly music, that builds up pleasantly, and then glides down, in crisscrossing paths (like the bike path at Provincelands National Park on the Cape), meeting up at last in perfect resolution.<\/p>\n
The flute concerti took me right back to childhood, playing in that yellow basement playroom, while Dad listened to Mozart and made candles or something like that. Dad knows how to live in the moment. Back then, he had a candle-making studio down there next to the washer and dryer, with a burner and all kinds of jars of scent and color, and large white blocks of wax. He loved to experiment with molds (half-gallon paper containers from milk, or foil-and-sand) and with stuff inside the melted wax, like ice cubes (the ice cubes would cause holes in the final candle!). Once he even made a candle in a coffee mug. It could not come out, and the mug would have to be broken, so we left it in there.<\/p>\n
Another time, he made a candle shaped like a Poodie, which is a creature he created when Laura and I were little, kind of a guy with a round head and stick figure body and big ears and glasses (I suppose it was a cartoon of Dad, come to think of it!). The friend he gave it to set it on a windowsill and it melted in such a funny way, with the head all bent and stretched, along with the goofy smile. Candle Poodie still makes me crack up.<\/p>\n
He made us tons of Poodie dolls. They were made of socks, with buttons or rubber bands. Each new grandchild got a special Poodie, too. The infants got Poodies that were only stitched, because of the danger of swallowing stuff. I think the Poodie-de-resistance was a goat Poodie, made because he discovered a goat several blocks away. We had all been wondering what was that weird, “Raaaaa” noise, and finally, on one of his jogs, Dad saw a real goat! In the suburbs of Connecticut!<\/p>\n
While Nat and I played Mozart, I was not making candles or Poodies, but I was writing. I had my coffee and my laptop and my ideas. And that was enough. I was nourished enough to make dinner, and even helped Beastie do his homework with a light heart (homework really gets him down, but I think from now on I will make him do it right next to me so that at least I can joke him out of his funk when it comes over him). Kind of the way Wolfgang Amadeus and Precious and candle memories lifted me out of mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pardon the cliche, but one of my resolutions, should I actually stick to it, is to try to enjoy my life as it is. I think I do a lot of wishing and fantasizing about what is not yet, or what should be, and I suppose that’s fine because it gives me something to work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-aR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}