I make terrible decisions about sleep on a routine basis.

In other news, my daughter today wore a dress that she got when she turned one year. It's a size 12M--or "twelve months," since baby clothes are sized by age, for all of my many non-parent readers--and she turned seventeen months yesterday. So according to the standards of American sizing, she is approximately five months too small.

I had a moment today, and I've had a lot of these since she was born, where I looked at her in her little flowery "frock," because it really was a frock, with her little shoes, and her hair curling in these crazy little puffs, and her face completely given over to the concentration that balancing a big book in each hand requires, and I saw a human being who existed in her own rite*, as her own entity, who seemingly had nothing to do with me, except for the fact that my heart threatened to eject itself out of my body, wrap itself around her like a boa constrictor, drag her into the cavity where it used to drone unchallenged, and force her to thump out her wonder and balance her books and wear her frocks in captivity, in my service, in service to my life. It was a moment of wild possession framed by complete detachment, that can only be described as awe.

I can't believe that in spite of all of my blundering, she exists.

*I think the expression is "in _____ own right," but I generally like it better this way. We do, all of us, exist within our own rites and rituals and ceremonies.

I went home, and then came back home.

Funny how this idea of "home" continues to be such a riddle. Where it is, and what constitutes one, and can there be several, simultaneously. I think I've decided that home is more of a feeling than a place, and to me, it almost always requires some kind of a return. It seems harder for the here-and-now to wear the mantle of home, than it does for the past...the past is big enough, wide enough, porous enough, to sop up the great sloppy spillage that home enacts, and since the past is constantly subjected to revision by time and memory, it's tractable, too. The present moment is more rigid, less forgiving, and therefore more hostile to the feeling of home, the conditions it needs to survive.

Being homesick is a matter of prepositions. I am sick for home, and I am sick of home, often in the same moment. In my frequent yearnings for some elsewhere, I envision a place free of the past, free of the present, unfettered by all of the complexities of love and history. This is what is meant by 'future,' I think. The feelings, the history--they haven't been born. So there's that marvelous sense of possibility, of completion and fulfillment. But the future can't be home, because it always-doesn't-exist-yet, and home exists, I think, if only as a unicorn.