My clarity has vanished. I am so full I can not write. And this feels ironic. I need to write. I am burdened. In the mean time, how does a homeschooling mother shelter the children from home, from her broken self? Another irony.

Someone wants me to read the book "Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire." I want to ask, where is the book called, Appear Calm and Capable To Your Children As Boiling Oil Circulates In Your Veins? I want to read that book.

I have a friend. She went for some counseling. She is the sole support for her family - her two young children and her husband, who has a brain tumor. It is hard. She is an MD herself. Think who they send to counsel MDs in crisis. You have to be pretty damn slick, rather "top of the pile," to get called in to advise an MD in crisis. Know the advice she got? "Everyone has stress." I think that felt like a slap to her. "Everyone has stress." But the more I think on it, the more comfort I take from that phrase. "Everyone has stress."

As I look around me, it certainly appears to be true. I have a sister who has spent the summer as a single mother with little support. She has stress. I have another sister who left an abusive husband this summer. She has stress. I have a sister who built a new house By Hand, this summer. That is another kind of stress. And these are not the worst cases around me. These stories are not the most stressful. Though, I have no doubt they feel plenty hard enough.

I said to my husband, if we remove old broken ways of thinking about the world, what is left underneath? If you keep peeling through layers of negativity inside your mind, do you eventually hit some thing innate, something elementally kind and good. I think so. But even that can not shelter you from stress.

Just hearing the word "Stress" is pissing me off right now. It represents something that is completely defined by perceptions, in the same way that heat and cold are largely a matter of relativity. (Right up until the moment they become a medical emergency, that is.)

When I think of a brave mother looking squarely (or even on the oblique) at the very real possibility that she will soon abandon her children, including a baby who won't remember her, and she will simply die. I think that must be pretty stressful. I wonder if she is using the time she has left to teach like her hair is on fire? I wonder if she is, alternately, try desperately to shelter the children from herself?

Where is my "handmade life theory" today? I have been waiting for someone to think that I have been reading "The Secret" and accuse me of stealing ideas. I have not read that book. I don't know how much it dovetails with my thoughts this summer. Nor do I care. I guess the truth of the matter is, today I am sad. I feel the stress today. And tomorrow it may have vanished into more noble thoughts or more skillful actions. But I do feel the need to admit that, in all my brave and right work to shed self created negativity this summer, a generous helping of denial has been at work inside me as well. And some days that denial falls away. And on those days I am still a homeschooling mother. I am still here with the children. They are still looking to me.

Maybe I can tell them, "Hey, everyone has stress." I can walk away from this computer and show up in front of them and make dinner. I can just keep on doing that over and over again. I think, for now, that will be enough.