Fighting for time, fighting for space, fighting for breath.

\Shortening work days, booking sitters for weekends. Realizing I need to pour into myself as much as I pour into my children.

Looking up times for the mall. Will I have enough time to shop at Marshalls if I add in the 25 minutes it takes to drive there? I only have the sitter for 3 hours and I have to make dinner before I go. Will I make it?

Falling into bed at night, disappointed. I didn’t make it shopping. Tomorrow is Monday. The weeks fly by like greased lightening. I can fight to carve time to go clothes shopping, but more likely it will have to wait until the weekend. Which means it will be another week of wearing socks with holes in the toes, yoga pants worn so many times that the spandex is loosening, sweaters on their way to threadbare.

Looking at the schedule over and over again, trying to find the life hacks that will get me to where I need to be. How is it that I can show up for my kids, my business, but I struggle to show up for me?

Celebrating small victories — I made my doctor’s appointment, I left work at 4 pm, I did boot camp on the gym. On my way out I told the instructor I’d ‘be back tomorrow.’ That was two weeks ago. But at least I made it that day.

I love puzzles. When I was newly married I would by 1,000 piece puzzles, dump them out on the kitchen table at the end of the day, grab the pieces, put it all together bit by bit, each piece snapping into place gave me a jolt of adrenaline.

But my schedule — single mother of three, owner of a rapidly expanding business, resident of a city that is always moving — the pieces aren’t quite snapping into place. But I fight, in the hopes that they well. And create a picture of balance with me and my health and wellness at the center.

Alone doesn’t begin to describe how I felt after my divorce.

Shipwrecked… Isolated.. Watching the world from behind impenetrable glass…

I initiated my divorce. By the time I did my marriage was far beyond repair, a collection of broken promises that added up to zero. Leaving me the sole breadwinner of my young household, fighting depression to raise two toddlers and a breastfeeding infant and keep two businesses afloat while my husband wandered in and out of jobs, willfully oblivious to the damage he was doing.

And still walking away from that marriage felt like walking away from the only community I had.

“Ride or die”, that’s what it felt like when my ex-husband and I met. I had moved from Jamaica to the US just five years earlier, and I felt caught in between two worlds. The warmth and saturated color of the Caribbean was the oddly beautiful backdrop to my parents’ angry and tension-filled marriage. The rancor of their relationship seeped into my relationship with my siblings, driving us apart seemingly permanently shortly after we all left home. I wanted Jamaica — it was home — but I also wanted to be free of it. The fights, the conservatism of the culture, how lonely I always felt — the weird tri-ethnic girl with the not-quite-right-accent.

And then there was the United States. A culture so vibrant and fast-paced it took my breath away. White, black, Latino, Asian, city, suburb, town, Republican, Democrat, East Coast, West Coast, MidWest, South, Ivy Leagues, state schools, community colleges. More subcultures than I ever thought possible. So many little worlds in a big one.

My ex husband helped me make sense of it all. A fiercely proud Chicagoan by way of Portland, from a family that was both black and white. I perused photo albums of his ivory-skinned Italian-Irish grandmother and onyx-skinned Southern grandfather. The aunts, uncles and cousins that came in every perceivable shade. These were my people now. This was my tribe.

I so desperately wanted a sense of home that I overlooked things I knew deep down could tank a marriage. But I ached for belonging. For the Thanksgivings at his mom’s small, cozy apartment in south suburban Chicago. For the lazy, yellow afternoons driving through his West Side childhood neighborhood, passing his old high school where he’d graduated salutatorian.

A year or two after college, I read Barack Obama’s autobiography and he vocalized the same feeling, that meeting Michelle — so rooted in Midwestern blackness and African Americana — gave him a sense of home. I read the passage over and over again.

When I finally realized that my marriage could never be the home I needed, I desperately wanted, I felt I had lost everything.

Like a zombie I woke up, worked a few hours at my shop, then called a nanny to care for my kids while I fell into bed at 7:00 pm, clothes still on, too exhausted to cry.

I wailed my pain to anyone who would listen. I was so lonely it physically hurt.

Then one day it hit me — I wasn’t alone. I looked down at my children. Their three almond brown faces looking up at me, those beautiful dark-brown eyes, so filled with wonder despite the pain of losing a father. How dare I say I was alone!

Whether I acknowledged it or not, my union with my ex-husband HAD produced a home. It HAD produced a community. And while I wallowed in pain, which yes, was understandable, I was denying the existence of what I had created.

And so, I began capturing moments. Small moments. With the furor of a documentary filmmaker. Hero hiding behind the coat rack, brown legs poking out from beneath windbreakers and fleece, Sage making silly faces in my floor length bed room mirror, the hot pink mini-backpack I’d bought her hanging off her shoulder, Noah lost in a book, devouring pages by the hour. The more I documented the home I had, the more grateful for it I became.

And so I continue to document — almost every day. No moment is too small, too exhausting, too ordinary to acknowledge. And yes I still struggle with feeling displaced. (Although moving to New York — a city seemingly designed for people who can’t or won’t fit in elsewhere — has helped tremendously.) But I finally understand a truth that is simple and timeless: home is right here. It’s where I am and it’s who I’m with.

I’m a walking exclamation point. I talk a lot. I text a lot. I work a lot. I mother a lot. Everything I do, I do a lot. I’ve always seen this as a problem.

I’ve spent a lot of time tempering myself. Chopping myself into more manageable pieces for people to digest. Even this blog. I’ve wanted to do something like this for years — even went so far as having a developer create something in 2018 — but in the end I backed away. Because it felt like too much.

After all I already run an expanding small business, raise three kids on my own and live in the pressure cooker that is New York City. It felt excessive.

Then I learned about Duke Ellington. Through the magic of the public school black history month project. My son was assigned him. I’d heard Duke’s name my entire life. One of the names you just know as a black person. You figure they’re significant for a reason, but you don’t bother to find out why. When I heard my son had to do this project I rolled my eyes. I hate that black history month focuses so heavily on musicians. But as soon as I started researching him I was fascinated.

Duke Ellington did alot. He was one of the most prolific composers — of any race, color or culture — in American history. He created more than three thousand pieces of music. When he mastered a technique, he moved on to another. When he started his career jazz compositions were short. They were ‘black music’. Enjoyable, but not necessarily revered in any way. By the time he died he had expanded jazz compositions to off Broadway musicals, operas and movie scores. He never stopped.

I’ve always seen excess in human nature as a bad thing — junkies, capitalism, addiction. But I think excess can be a well that I draw from. DOING refines me. It makes me feel alive. So I won’t resist doing.

I have spent my entire life thinking I was not important. That my thoughts weren’t important. That it wasn’t important for me to keep a record of my life. I think I was raised to be attuned to external validation. This idea that things you do or say are only important if there are people around to witness and then approve of them. A terrible way to live.

I bought this laptop on vacation in Denver — a Lenovo Yoga, beautiful silver thing, light too. I told my parents it was for work, to tackle the mountain of compliance that is heaping onto my schedule as my kids age and my business grows. But I felt a pang of sadness last night. I was browsing online and saw a photo for Spike Lee’s 2015 movie Chi-Raq. A flood of memories returned. I was in Chicago in 2015. Had just bought a house. Had a new baby. Had a husband. My life doesn’t look like that anymore. I instinctively reached for my Lenovo to write. By the time I fumbled around and figured out my WordPress login the urge to write was gone. I had gone down another internet rabbit hole. But I realized that this laptop is a recording tool.

You have to write. You just do. Life is this collection of millions of moments and there has to be some mechanism. Some way to feel them, to sort them, to observe them, to witness them. Writing, meditation, something.

As I settle into my divorce and my mid 30s, alone-ness — and sometimes loneliness — become more constant in my life. But one thing I’ve noticed is that many people before me have written about their lives. We all think we’re the only person to go through something — we’re not. That’s why I need to read.

Grieving — that’s just because my heart has been broken again and again.

I left Jamaica, my home, and my parents at age 17.

I left Chicago — the new home I’d spent a decade establishing for myself — at age 31.

I left my marriage at age 32.

All of this hurts. The topsoil of my life is my kids, my business, exploring New York.

The underground river is these memories, swirling, sometimes rushing, a constant stream of melancholy watering the roots. I don’t spend enough time at that river. I think if I did maybe I could make peace with some of this grief. Stare it in the face, acknowledge it so that maybe I could release some of it. I’ve known for a while that I need to make pilgrimages to these places. To finish the emotional business.

Moving — I’m sagging, lol. Plain and simple. I am still a very beautiful woman. I’m self-aware enough to know that. But I feel the changes. The way the fat is shifting in my butt and the skin is loosening. The lack of tautness in my breasts and my belly. It doesn’t necessarily bother me. It does fascinate me though, lol. It reminds me that, at this stage, I need to help my body out a bit more than I had to in my 20s. In my 20s exercise, drinking water, sleeping well was more about vanity — the preservation and enhancement of beauty. In my 30s, these habits are about health. Keeping my bones strong, my mind clear, my stamina high.

So in 2020, my goal is to do more writing, reading, grieving and moving.