In the four weeks I’ve taken this incredibly gentle all-levels yoga class on Sunday mornings, one truth has been made quite clear: this body of mine has changed.

Poses into which I used to be able to slip now require great effort to maintain even the most basic variation. A great deal of my natural flexibility has diminished, I’m tight in places that have previously always been loose. I wonder if I’ll ever be that limber again.

Of course, this is to be expected. I quite literally never do yoga. Rather, I haven’t in a reeeeally long time. I more than took for granted the ease with which I had always been able to move. Slowly, and ever so delicately, I am beginning to navigate the current shape of things, accepting with grace where I am and setting a clear intention for where I’d like to be with a little dedicated practice.

Physical fitness is a journey, I have learned this over the years. There is not a more resilient machine on Earth than the human body, it’s ability to regenerate and transform is miraculous. Presently, I find myself in the form of a postpartum woman, significantly softer and rounder than my normal state of being, but without a baby to help nurse off the extra weight. It is entirely up to myself to get into shape.

This is not about getting my body back. To be honest, I’m not interested in that former vessel. I want to be stronger and healthier than I was before, more open of heart and mind, steeped in self-love and gratitude.

Progress comes to those to put in the effort.

I did one of those things I’ve been meaning to do since we’ve lived here, but just haven’t managed to do so. I finally got myself to the top of Cowles Mountain, and I’ll never go on a Saturday again. I can see an early weekday morning excursion being a better experience, less crowded, fewer people competing for space. I didn’t enjoy being made to feel as though I was in the way by the many folks running up and down the trail. It was, however, lovely, exhilarating, and totally worth the social awkwardness. It also got me thinking about the many other quintessential San Diego experiences that we have yet to do.

There is time yet left in this summer and I intend to make the most of it!

I’d be extremely proud of us if we managed to:

Hike and swim at Torrey Pines

Spend the day at La Jolla Shores

Visit the Zoo

Explore Barrio Logan

It’s ambitious to think we’ll get to all of these before school starts, whatever that may mean. But this is a time for pushing myself, so anything can happen.

The Salvation Army Truck just came and gathered a dozen plus bags of miscellaneous treasures for which we no longer have use. There will probably be at least another two dozen bags for collecting in a few more weeks, once we’ve sorted the garage.

This is a time of letting go, of creating space, releasing and opening to the new. I find this to be true in a number of ways, and for our living space to reflect this is tremendously grounding.

It took close to ninety minutes and over four miles for my rascally Roux Huckleberry to fall asleep in his stroller. Oh, toddlers. They try so hard to convince you they no longer need to nap but it just isn’t true! Napping is a wildly important part of healthy development for young kids, a time to internalize all they’ve absorbed. That does not make it any less frustrating as the struggle to get them to sleep intensifies, but the effort is well worth it.

(He literally woke up as I finished typing that last sentence. Ten minutes of snuggling him in my bed and he’s fast asleep again. Punk.)

It’s been three weeks since the surgery that removed from my uterus the contents of a pregnancy that ended prematurely, a baby I will never get to hold in my arms but whom I carried in my womb for over four months and will carry in my heart forever. My physical healing has progressed much more rapidly than I anticipated, a blessing for which I am truly grateful. I am no longer riddled with discomfort or plagued by insomnia. My restlessness has subsided, transforming into heightened level of general productivity. There are still moments of deep sadness, but I’ve decided that’s when the baby is nearest, a remarkably comforting thought.

My main objective at this point is to have as much fun with my kids as possible over the next few weeks. I’m not entirely certain of our plans for the next school year; those questions will be answered in the coming days, after many more conversations with my husband, my colleagues, and our administration. For now, it is still summer vacation and it’s time for us to live into this season of adventure, make some memories, enjoy the incredibly beautiful city which we are so fortunate to call home.

Today I am grateful for happy kids, supportive girlfriends, frozen coffee, and sparkling rosé. And my husband. I’m eternally grateful for him.

I’m not really sure what the next step is, what I’m meant to be doing or even where we are meant to be living. I’ve more than a few questions posed to the Universe and I’m doing my best to be as patient as possible while I wait for the clarity I’m seeking.

In the meantime, I’ll keep going to the gym and tidying my house and adding to the donation pile. And writing, even if it’s nonsense.

I’m pretty good at starting things. I’m even better at thinking about things and I truly excel at talking about things. Finishing things? Not so much.

This is a theme that runs deep, a pattern I’ve yet to escape in a bevy of iterations. Maybe it’s a fear of failure, or of success, or maybe it’s just plain fucking laziness. One way or another, I have been plagued by an inability to see much of anything through to completion.

Not anymore.

I’ve said it before and I’m sure this is not the last time I will say it, losing this baby brought a level of self awareness that is overwhelmingly clear. It is time for me to be a lot more disciplined and a lot less irresponsible.

The truth is, I’m a terribly half-assed writer. I fancy myself a writer, I’ve even been hired to string a few words together for money, and had my work published in a fancypants women’s magazine. But I don’t keep a regular practice and that is the worst thing a writer can do, not write. Because then what? Too many thoughts, is what. Too many thoughts and not nearly enough doing.

The summer I turned 29, one of my absolute dearest gal pals endeavored to write each and every day as she approached her thirtieth birthday. She challenged herself to grow, she shared her journey, and she achieved more than she intended, which often happens with clear eyes and a full heart. Can’t. Lose.

At the very least, I will end up with a real-time account of the year I spent turning thirtyfive. Which in and of itself is remarkable. There is gold in every archive if you look hard enough, more on this later.

I want to be able to look back at this year, more than anything, and be able to say that I tried. I pushed myself as a maker, a mother, a wordsmith, a wife. I did my best to be of service to my family, and cared for myself along the way.

There is so much I want to accomplish this year, to learn, to do. Choosing to document this process of becoming another year older is just something that seems necessary to the experience, so I’m going with it.

Honesty is my only objective. This ought to be interesting.

Yesterday, my husband and my father and my Auntie Kelly came together to give me the best day ever. My husband took me to La Costa Resort, my father sent me to the spa there, and my Auntie kept my kids for the night so my beloved and I could escape from parenthood for the first time since before Roux was born.

It’s been so long since we’ve been alone as individual adults and it was so incredibly refreshing, that alone was such a great gift. We had a few private grieving moments, things I’m sure we’ll continue to share for a long time to come. But we had time to connect in a meaningful and memorable way, and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We’d never been to a spa together before and it was a day we’ll always remember.

We kept saying to each other when you live in a place like San Diego such as we do, there is no shame in vacationing in your own city. There is no shame ever in vacationing in your own city, I’m allll about the staycation, but my point is that La Costa is world-renowned for a reason.

Ah, birthdays. My absolute favorite time to reflect. To consider the past and prepare for the future, acknowledging the significance of another completed rotation around the sun. It seems as I get older that each birthday is a little more poignant, there is a little more at which to look back and a little more at which to look forward. Perhaps that is part of getting older, awareness and all that, or maybe it’s just the time in my life for that kind of self-attunement.

There is something about turning 34 that has intensified my desire to be better, to try harder, to spread more love. To be a being of light and not sorrow, to let hope replace worry, to cultivate authentic beauty, these are the markers of success for which I am striving.

I plan on unfolding right along with this next year, flowing with whatever may come, rejoicing and accepting with a grateful heart every step of the way.

This morning I took a long walk with Roux is his stroller, and thought the same thing I always do: we are so lucky to live here.

Ours is a quiet neighborhood tucked into the hills near the heart of downtown, walking distance from many exciting attractions and metropolitan marketplaces, a cozy little corner of a city I’ve grown to love an awful lot.

It’s funny, the best and worst things have happened here in San Diego. I’ve grown a lot and earned a few scars, making the most out of our time in America’s Finest City. It will be four years this August that we will have called this place home, and while I’m not certain how long we’ll stay, I can say for sure that moving here was a very good thing.

I started moving before the doctors were even ready to let me go, but I was so restless it was impossible for me to be contained. Even my sweet husband couldn’t convince me to sit still so finally at two o’clock in the morning, I signed myself out Against Medical Advice – AMA, this is a thing that exists which I know about thanks to a very helpful nurse who guided the operation to break me out of the ICU.

Intensive Care, because a complication had arisen with the anesthesia. The surgery had otherwise gone very well.

But the moving. That began as soon as the anesthesia wore off. Actually, it began during anesthesia but I don’t have all the details so we’ll leave it at that.

In the two weeks that have passed since coming home from the hospital, I have made a valid effort to use my body on purpose. For a very long time, this was common practice in my daily life, but I’ve grown horrifyingly sedentary as compared to my previous self and goodness gracious I am so out of shape.

To be fair, I wouldn’t say that I have the healthiest standards. As the child of a ballerina slash beauty queen and a Hollywood Entertainment Executive, I come by every single one of my body issues honestly. Thankfully, I reveled in strength and endurance more than size or appearance, so when I say I’m out of shape, I mean that riding my bike uphill is much more difficult than it used to be. I can still get up the damn hill, but just barely.

My point in all of this is that moving is an extremely important part of how I care for myself. It has become far too easy for me to ignore the fact that taking the time to raise my heart rate and warm my muscles actually helps me to function more optimally. I’m much less tense after a good workout, this has always been true for me, it’s probably true for everyone.

I’ve noticed that a lot of what I’ve been doing without really meaning to has been about cultivating better habits. Bringing mindfulness where before there were just motions, action where before only thought.

Today as I was pushing Roux in the stroller, I realized I’m no longer restless. Now I’m just productive.

I’m at my best when I’m being productive.

One of the things I like best about having a very clean and organized house is that I have no choice but to sit and be creative. Or to be adventurous, which I’ve yet to do because it is so unbelievably hot. I can’t be expected to be outside in weather like this, I will actually melt.

I’ve been weaving constantly since last weekend and I’ve made a couple pieces of which I’m rather proud. Like I’ve reached a new place with my design process, refining my inspiration and presentation.

It’s been very cathartic, all this cleaning and creating. Long before I lost the baby, probably even before I was pregnant, I began to feel a restlessness related to my approaching birthday in that I will be one year away from 35.

35!

For whatever reason this birthday feels like a monumental opportunity for reflection and refocusing. My sweet husband is whisking me away for the night, a romantic and relaxing local retreat which is exactly what I need. I’m looking forward to soaking poolside in the (shady) sun, setting clear intentions for the upcoming year, and releasing the things that no longer serve me.

Physiologically, I’m in a funk. My week long inability to sleep has given way to complete exhaustion, and now twice in a row I’ve missed sitting down at the end of the day to write out a few thoughts, a part of processing this journey I absolutely do not want to forsake. But getting through the past couple of days has been like wading through molasses, not even cleaning has helped to speed the time along. And the truth is I haven’t been very still, I’ve used my body more in the last ten days than in the last ten months, and I’ve got quite the ordered home to show for all this buzzing about.

Have you ever avoided something because it seemed insurmountable? That’s how I’ve felt about organizing our house for almost as long as we’ve lived here. It just seemed an arduous and pointless task, having grown accustomed to moving before ever having any time to really settle into a living space. Months turned into years, I used one excuse after another, and finally after little more than a week, our entire home is moved into, organized, usable, clean.

We’ve created a lot of space by sorting through and purging our belongings, letting go of things that no longer served us. My daughter, always one for detail oriented work, took to overhauling a severely neglected closet and was beaming with pride as she showed me her hard earned accomplishment. That’s how I feel about our whole house, proud.

The truth is, a lot of hard work goes into our living in San Diego. This is an expensive place to call home, no doubt about it. But somehow we’ve managed to stay in the same spot for close to three years and I’m pretty sure we’ll always look back fondly upon the time we lived in this house. Even more fondly as in its current condition, this place is about as put together as any place we’ve ever lived.

And we have lived a lot of places!