Silence

Blog silence, that is. I thought that the piece-of-peace-a-day gimmick would encourage me to update more regularly, provide an obvious jumping-off point for meaningful posts, and would push me to discuss areas that I might normally leave alone. The opposite has happened. It became one more item that I wasn't checking off of my mental to-do list and instead of being a haven, my blog became an unmet obligation.

So, no more daily peace practices. Rather, no more following someone else's ideas of how I should be peaceful. It's interesting to me to think about the daily practices that have stuck with me already, though. I've never been an aggressive driver (both DT and my dad would probably laugh at this, for opposite reasons), but I've kept the idea of driving with patience and tolerance, and it's made my daily commute more pleasant. I'm also trying to repeat the "talk less, listen more" mantra to myself and have been surprised at just how hard it is. I expected it to be hard, but yikes. Just yikes.

So, as I bid goodbye to organized peace, I'll just list some of the unorganized peace I've felt over the last few weeks as I've been absent on this blog:

• Rocco has begun his verbal explosion, complete with his first two-word combinations. I know that this is another on the series of Good Signs that we are lucky enough to be parents of a healthy child.
• Rocco and WonderGirl regularly crack each other up in any number of ways that I don't comprehend. They spin, they bounce balls, they make faces. I'm peripheral.
  
• After WonderGirl threw a whining tantrum at an inopportune time, we had a talk about how one of the ways we can say "I love you" is to help someone else (DT) pursue his own dreams (running) instead of standing in his way (crying at the door as he leaves). For once, I didn't talk too much, and didn't make her feel judged, and as a result, I think she understood that it wasn't about her, it was about her dad.
  
• At a conference last week, I caught up with a former grad student in my program who made me feel as if my hopes and goals for post-PhD life are not only feasible, but reasonable. Though we weren't especially close, he seems to want to help me.
  
• In the middle of a series of recent bad days, I knew that DT would do whatever he thought would help me feel like myself, if he could just identify it. I saw him visibly relax when I told him that I knew he wished he could help me. It's powerful to give someone else permission not to fix your problems.
  
• I started a big knitting project recently in an attempt to focus on the process instead of on a finished object. I've made the transition faster than I hoped -- I love watching it take shape slowly and feel myself falling into a soothing rhythm as I work, instead of trying to calculate how many hours it will take.
  
• I've recently renewed contact with a group of three other women who went through miscarriages at the same time I did. We were intensely tight-knit for a long time, and though we're spread all over the world and have only "met" through email, they were my closest friends for a long and dark period. We'd drifted away some over the last year, and now we're communicating again, and one of them is nearly halfway through a pregnancy.