Being a Good Queen.

The Professor had fresh opportunities too wondrous to pass up, so he left to the metropolis of learning for the extraordinarily gifted and I spent the past months tying off the artery of life we had in our parched, cracked dirt plot of the San Joaquin Valley. The Farmcastle's cream colored paint had long turned into a brown, dusty, spider-webby shell, a falling-apart husk of a home that had plumbing and structural problems a fortune could've fixed.  Imagination was as dried up as our well.  Sludgy. Producing too much nothing between bursts of a brown, murky, copper smelling substance before letting forth a trickle.

Although I raised my children there, I am now grateful to leave behind the plumbing retired of pressure or that was too hot or too cold, depending on if the toilet was flushed or the washer was turned on.  Instead of living in air that sucks the moisture from your face the same way the sand sucks in the rain, we live right on a bay.  It's beautiful.  Instead of a garden of tumbleweeds - literal tumbleweeds, as I let them grow to provide some sort of green ground cover for the Professor's roses - there is infinite green.  We've left the physical desert. 

The distance is surely felt, as within this big relocating process, my three eldest children have grown and made big life decisions in their independence. Universities.  Air Force. Their own dreams taking them hundreds upon hundreds of miles from where they were just yesterday considered children.  

Heartache, heart break, disappointments, excitements, dreams, possibilities, wonderment, and ultimately blessings have been heaped upon my shoulders, back, neck, and then in my heart this past eighteen non-stop break-neck-punishing months.  Actually, I'll be honest...years. Literal years. Years of extremes, of uncertainty, of nearly losing hope. Now, living in a new place full of incredibly intelligent specimens of human beings, in a place where bills are paid for, only two children left at home and a much smaller cottage in which to care for, I will say this ultimate truth for now:

There is within my mind an emotional frozen desert. And I feel...

Lost.

Small.

Simple.

Withered.

And bloody well tired.

Despite all the blessings and good changes, when I pull inside myself for any kind of motivation or creativity there is ultimately an angry, disappointed, and wounded void which used to hold world of faerie, magic, and hinge rings.  Now, there is a blackened rawness.  What is it?  I don't know how to find healing for it, except that I know time will bring what is needed.  There are issues to be faced that I have no idea how to handle.  One thing I do know for certain is that this stagnant, soppy state of being cant' be allowed to stay here forever.  It's not healthful nor helpful.  There are still children to raise.  There's unknown future battles to be fought.  A good queen does not have the privilege to say "I've had enough," though she might very well say "I've had well enough for this moment."

For tonight, I'll just say that I have no idea what to do.  Tomorrow a new day will come early with possibilities at each lengthening of a shadow. I'll probably go cry a bit.  Write out all the uncertainties and unfairness that are a thousand wasp stings on my heart.  After that, it'll be time to gather up what can be gathered, salvage and adjust whatever shreds of dignity there might be left, take a next step forward and remember that none of this can happen on my own.