  The whispy thin clouds of the desert highlands have been replaced by fat ocean clouds, and the azure blue sky is now a pale hue of its former glory.
Still, excepting the geography, I’m happy to be almost home. I can’t wait for my bed with my sheets and thick duvet, my kitchen with my meatless organic food, the kids’ room, completely safe and filled with toys so John and I don’t have to choreograph which one socializes and which one watches kids… Every trip is immeasurably great for the kids.
Their little synapses thrive on diverse experiences. I also love traveling, I crave it, even have withdrawals from it if I don’t get to go somewhere, anywhere! every other month or so. But we’ve been gone over two weeks now, an amount of time that seems to be my personal limit. Two weeks in Europe this summer left me *gasp* missing America, and now two weeks in El Paso have left me yearning for Houston.
It’s good. I needed to miss Houston. More than anticipation for home is setting in as the miles and minutes tick by. The close of 2003 seems to be already bringing hope and renewal for my psyche as well. This year was the hardest ever lived for our little family, it saw the extremes of emotion, certainly peaking with the birth of our daughter, Eleanor, and bottoming out with the tragic loss of Space Shuttle Columbia. John worked longer hours than he thought he ever would as long as our children were young, which resulted in my working longer hours parenting alone than we thought I ever would. I had to fight the resulting emotions as I pondered my definition in the world as an individual, would I become a housewife?
Was I already? Where did my career go? I found myself screaming hysterically deep inside my head for weeks on end without ever making an audible sound. Eventually, appearing somewhat analogous to a wave resulting from a giant undersea earthquake, the scream emerged as a whimper, then a cry, and tears that lasted for all of a day and a night. That was in August, and by September we’d found ways to take real action as a family to improve our quality of living.
While NASA would not require less of John, he found better ways to work at home or even from an Earthship in Taos, and firm boundaries for family time. We put Aidan in preschool and arranged one or two visits a week from the neighborhood goddess who shows up at the door like the Latina Mary Poppins, and lets me leave for three hours or so to return to a clean house filled with bathed and fed children who now speak Spanish. I began taking Pilates lessons. My body is really firming and shaping from the exercises, but my favorite part is laying on my back during the long stretches and staring at the blank ceiling as soothing music fills my head.
Nobody needs me, nobody's touching me. An hour and a half floats by like a blink of the eye, and I emerge flexible again in body and soul. Perhaps one of the biggest changes I made was in my dealings with parents and siblings. Grandpa's death left my relationship with my bio-pop and his family entirely up to us. Instead of being negative, it's left me feeling freer to move within the boundaries of step-family dramas.
I'm trying to lay groundwork for a healthy friendship that can endure my unfulfilled desire of being named in the will, or even differences of paradigm. Separately, the giant August raucous was one of the most painful experiences of my life, but it was also one of the most informative. I realized that all my life I’d blamed my bio-pop’s family for my disease of inadequacy. But in the aftermath of August, I realized that blame fell equally on all my family members! In a myriad of unique and individual ways, virtually everyone in my family has contributed—and in many cases, still actively contributes—to my every nagging feeling of not really belonging, of being the odd man out.
Finally, that blame also falls on me for continuing to feel inadequate, especially around them. Realizing this helped me to let go of another nagging attribute of emotional baggage: guilty emotions stemming from never giving enough or helping enough, which in turn result in martyrdom. But who was I dying for? No one thought I was giving anything of myself, or they thought what I offered was stupid of ill-conceived.
And here’s the big so what. Since no one really accepted me, and no one really appreciated anything I can offer, I could allow myself to say no to my family. 
