I Love Purple....

but I had to change it as the background color for this blog. Lot of words, here, and the more I write, the clearer the voices in my head become. Instead of being a jumbled mass tumbling over each other, they are beginning to organize themselves, to wait patiently for their turn. As I walked up the hill on Madison Avenue this morning carrying the Sun's violin and music and tape recorder (in preparation for his weekly lesson this evening), as well as my own back pack, the words point out things along the way. "Look, all the ladies are wearing the same trenchcoat... a solid with white piping" they say. "We wonder what store is selling them and why everyone thinks the coat is cool? We're glad we missed that trend, instead scoring a wickedly cool retro 1970's trench off of eBay". Or "you're going to lose some weight, carrying all this weight around, and your legs should get hard as rocks" and "this Second Avenue Subway construction is going to be a major pain in the ass for this neighborhood. It's going to kill the last vestiges of Old New York. You should write about that." (And I will, I promise, but the words need to organize just a little more.)

Ever since I was a little girl, there has always been a low hum running in the background of my mind, like a million conversations going on at once. Like being at a cocktail party. At first I thought everyone had it. When at about aged 2 I started having asthma, as I fell asleep the sound of my own wheezing would become the voices of distressed ladies protesting my condition. If there was no asthma but I was really tired, the cacophony would increase. I discovered a little later on that in the quiet of night or the early hours of the morning when most folks were sleeping, the world's hum would fade a little so that if I listened carefully a word or a sentence would be able to come through in it's entirety. Like a lull at the party conversation, so that one person's voice would carry over the others and you could catch a wisp of a conversation. Because of this, I'm often up at night. And the more stressed I am, the longer I'm up so that the words have a chance to sort themselves out in the quiet.

When the Sun was being formed in the darkness, I began to listen inward for his voice and even though he was wordless, I could still hear him. I got to know his gentle personality and sense of humor long before he came into the light. The Sun and I are currently reading Eragon (given to him by Mima on his birthday in March) and I marvel at the way Eragon communicates with Saphira the dragon. When the Sun was en utero, this is the way it was for us. As he gets older and has more words of his own the unspoken ones seem to be replaced, but I can still feel him in my heart. (Much like I can still hear his father, though I wish it would go away.) Sometimes it sucks, actually. I can hear people's fear or anxiety, and I have often mistaken it for my own.

It's particularly strong with people I am attracted to. (For some reason though, I can't hear my own family... I think I'm too close.) I am still learning, but I still get caught sometimes. Once, a few years ago, even though I wasn't particularly having a rough day, I was suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of stress and anger. It was so bad, I had to force myself to walk around the block to quell the noise. When I came back up to my office, my old boss, who I was having an affair with (and no, I'm not telling that story--at least not yet) was in a rage over something and I suddenly realized that what I was feeling wasn't mine. It was quite a revelation. After that moment, I began to pay more attention to what was going on around me. When I got to Pratt shortly afterwards, I had a classmate who I came to believe was a paranoid schizophrenic. On her "bad days" whenever I was around her I'd get slammed so hard by her voices that it would make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Of course, she knew I could feel her and would often reach out to me. I had to learn how to shut her out.

I realized one day, watching the ending of "The Sixth Sense" that not everyone can hear those voices. If they could, there wouldn't be a movie about it :). (In answer to the question, no, I don't hear dead people.... just crazy people.) And I started writing, mainly to my online Mom's group (who I love dearly) and began to realize that by writing, I could clear my heart and mind. I could absorb their stories without being affected, especially since I wasn't physically close to them or had never met (most of them) in real life. It was quite a relief. So this blog is good, because I can write about anything and not just things connected to raising a Sun, without taking too much list space.

So the purple background had to go because there will be a lot more words here, and as my professors at Pratt would point out, light type on a dark background is very tiring to the eyes, particularly if there are lots of words. I actually like the new look.... I'll save the purple for special things.