Vines

In the version of Sleeping Beauty that I read to BG, after Aurora pricks her finger and falls asleep, the vines grow immediately up around the castle and completely encase it.  It's not just the thorns and the challenges, it is completely impenetrable for the one hundred years she is fated to sleep.

That's how my brain has felt lately whenever I try to write.  Except I'm not sure a prince is coming to kiss me awake.

(Aside?  This may be a horrible story to read to children.  Why do we read these things?)

I've tried to hack my way through the vines.  Morning pages and free writing and my notebook.  I applied liberal amounts of coffee.  I tried a variety of magic words.

But whatever was trapped inside stayed stuck.  Maybe it just wasn't time yet.  Maybe at the right moment, the vines are just meant to open and everything inside will wake up.

There's a part of me that's been missing for a long time, and maybe I might as well continue the metaphor and say she's been asleep.  I don't remember a time when I had interests and things I cared about other than parenting.  I can't at the moment even remember a time when I parented in a way that was much more than going through the motions.

We've  had good moments and good days.  I took the girls to a play in the park in the sunshine, and BG was enraptured by it.  My sweet littlest girl looks at me and babbles and laughs and I can't stop kissing her.   

But none if it is really about me, or the girl who used to exist inside this body that now seems to belong to everyone but me.  I want people to see her and know her and love her, but I don't even know who she is anymore.

Maybe she's been asleep long enough.  Maybe it's time for the vines to open and the world to come in.