Sunday

I've been awfully nostalgic lately.

It began a few weeks ago when I finally unpacked all the photo albums. Even my own girlhood pictures were setting off sentimental connections. The rosy glow of childhood, friends I never see anymore, my once tiny ass.

This week I was showing someone my blog and we started looking through the archives. I don't know if sentimental is the word (maybe just mental) but there are so many strong memories captured there. Some great funny and sweet stuff and then of course the intense drama of the relocation to Georgia and all the drama of leaving the practice and Brian being so far away through it all. I guess the sentimental part was how much I wish I still had time to write like that. I miss having time for that outlet and being able have the satisfaction of a great post.

Today, we were loading some favorite old CDs into iTunes and we loaded up some our favorite musicals that make up some of our musical history as a couple. I know some of you haters (and less cool folk) will be tempted to make fun of us when I say that the soundtrack to Miss Saigon is intensely meaningful to me, but get over yourselves. It is.

I was listening to the ending, where Kim, a young Vietnamese girl, goes to Chris's hotel room to finally see her returning ex GI "husband" who she assumes has come for her and for his child whom he has never met. Instead she meets his new American wife and is told that she and her son will NOT being going to safety in the US as she has thought. Oh! And the perfect clarity of the moment, as Kim realizes that everything she has been hanging her hopes on, the person whose promise to return has kept her alive through unimaginable hardship, all of that is NOTHING-and she is crushed. Crushed in a way you or I could probably (hopefully) never know.

I have always found this plot to be dramatically satisfying but listening to it today as a mother...well. Maybe I'm a bit hormonal right now, but damn! I just began weeping. Knowing that she goes home to her tiny hovel and resolves that the only possible solution, to rescue her son, is to kill herself so that Chris and his new wife will bring him home to the US and a possibility of a real life. She just swallows her intense personal anguish over being forgotten by the man she loves and thinks only of her child's need. Oh, and its so beautiful, the music, and the emotion with which they sing it, and Lea Salonga (Kim) is so amazingly emotive and I just cried and cried. While Hubby mowed the lawn and the girls dressed their Barbies and Gabe played video games. It was nostalgic I guess? Maybe thats not the right word. Maybe I'm just a little too sleep deprived and stressed out? Or just crazier than usual.

So...that's my Labor Day Sunday. Weeping and stuff. Wanna come over and grill out? I'll season your meat with my tears.