The trouble with setting up a blog around a specific premise is that once you've said a lot of things about that premise, the blog becomes abandoned. Another scrap on the pile of detritus that was that issue, that topic, that moment. But it seems that few things in my life have been consistent enough to orient around, really. A good friend of mine writes The Feminist Midwife. She's in practice as, you guessed it, a midwife. She has consistent material. I was a want-to-be writer and corporate shill for a while, then went to grad school, and for a while I was my grief, and sometimes I'm a wife and a friend and a dog owner and a reader and always a feminist but there are so many people talking about that online so why not go back to trying to become a published writer with those existing sites?

Sigh. Deep breath. Swig of beer.

Maybe once I'm in practice as a social worker I can orient around that. Yet I am one now, albeit still learning and working for free. I often think there isn't enough time. But I've always known I am a better person when I make time for writing. I want to be a better person.

I have been exercising 5 days a week for over a month now and that makes me excited. The most obvious reason is the actual release of endorphins when I do it. But it also relieves my constant depression. That constant (and I mean constant) niggling in the back of myself that says I'm not good enough or doing enough and that everyone is smarter than I. It says that few things are worth all the trouble of life. It says I've had a hard road. It heard of Robin Williams' death and was sad for the reasons everyone was, but also because I can imagine sitting alone in a room with that thought before making that decision. The only thing to keep that in check is moving my body. I've made excuses in the past, and they aren't untrue. I have a genetic syndrome that limits the range of motion in most all of my joints, or causes stiffness and pain. But I have found things that I can do, at least 5 days a week. I find that deeply satisfying. I am a better person when I've sweat.

Tonight I'm getting some reading done for school, and of course my last semester is proving to be the most difficult and laden with words to read and write. But I love it. I love how I become giddy over an idea and want to explain it to the next person I see (sorry, husband, that you are usually that person). I think big and then the depression gremlin worries that I'll think so big that any job I get right out of school is going to feel small. Useless.

A friend told me her neighbors abuse their dogs and that has haunted me for about a week now. I love dogs. I worry about those dogs. I can't wait until she makes a report. This is why I need to run an hour a day to keep myself near functional: I worry about dogs I've never seen who live 300 miles away.

I hope to write more. The writing will take a turn from grief. I suppose that part of grief though--the next part. The part where it isn't the only thing.

And yet.

My husband brought a cake home from a coworker. It was billed as lemon bread but when I opened the Tupperware and smelled it, touched it, even before I tasted it, I thought of my mom. She made about a handful of recipes, and mostly from boxes. This was one of them. Her lemon cake. It was confirmed as soon as I put it in my mouth and a flood of cookouts and Fourth of Julys and her annual luau parties came flooding back to me and I calmly thought, I'm never going to see her again. Isn't that strange? Three years ago I would cry without prompt. I'd not get dressed for a few days in a row. I'd stay home from work. And now I can stand in my kitchen, undoing some of the calories lost during my mental health run, and think a very concrete and true thought, and hold it together. In fact, I don't even have to try. It's just there. It's a part of me, and it's just there.

I still have days and moments where I miss her so much it hurts and the unfairness of it all piles on me and it too is detritus but now I reach for my sports bra, I run it out, I kick box it out, and I am able to enjoy the memory of cake and Midwestern deck parties and the sound of a burbling hot tub underneath her laugh.

I'm starting to forget her laugh.