Usually when I can’t sleep it’s because there is something inside of my head that just keeps spinning around and around that I just need to figure out. I suppose that is true for anyone who has insomnia – but for me – it’s not quite that. I mean – I could sleep…if there wasn’t a spider that just ran away from me that I couldn’t ‘catch’ before I thought about closing my eyes. I don’t need to revisit my fear of spiders, right? I don’t really mind them – I just mind them alive and running around while I’m sleeping and unaware of where their 8 legs are treading. I might even be able to sleep if I wasn’t thinking about my geography test that is later. I might even be able to sleep if I wasn’t aware of the sun peeking thru my upstairs loft window – and the fact I have errands to run and bills to pay and that I should probably work out and keep my promise to go to the gym and or walk every day AT LEAST. If all of these things weren’t going on inside of my head – I still couldn’t sleep. It’s so much deeper than all that surface crap, ya know? It’s like there is some puzzle that if I just write long enough – it might reveal itself – I might have a chance of solving it – and then and only then I will sleep.

So here I am – at 6:09AM Tuesday morning – writing.

After work last night I came home and tackled one of my year end projects for Geography. We have to make this family tree album of sorts – and I thought that maybe I could talk to my mother about her side of the family. We hardly ever talk about these things – family trees and history and things. I’m not one of those kids that doesn’t talk to her parents – but I usually am quite selfish when I do talk to them. I don’t talk about how she and my father met – or how and when she went to school – and how she felt about her parents. I kind of soak up information from aunts and uncles about her – but never really go to the source. This project, however, has made talking to my mother a necessity – and convinced that I had put it off long enough – I started to ask her questions last nite. “How did grandmother and grandfather meet?” I asked her. I watched her face. Her expression. Her little nose scrunch up when she finds something funny – and her eyes watchful – watchful of whether or not I was humoring her by my questions or if I really wanted to know. I really wanted to know. And she talked. She talked about hiding under tables and making faces to mimic those around her. She talked about how old she was – not much older than I was – when she first found out she couldn’t hear so well out of her left ear. She talked about how my grandmother was – how my grandfather accepted eggs and butter for payments for delivering children in the little country town he served as a Doctor. She talked and talked – and laughed – and showed me pictures in little cookbooks filled with deserts and hotdishes that only a true Minnesotan would love. I looked at these pictures – and tried to trace them with my fingers. Tried to look at the faces and find mine and my mother’s in them. I could find my mother’s – but being adopted – any familiarity for ME was lost.

Pictures of my family, for this reason, has always been pretty bitter sweet.

I don’t have many pictures of me as a baby – another casuality of being adopted at 3 years old. It’s like my life just suddenly started at 3 years old or something – and everything before that is just – I don’t know… vapor. It makes me a bit sad, really – and I try to convince myself while looking at my families history that I belong somewhere in there.

The story goes that my mother, while working in a library – saw my name on the ledger in the back of the book. She vowed then that if she ever had a little girl, she would name me that name. I never heard that version of the story. I heard that I was named after a great grandmother’s sister straight out of Norway. I liked that version better. I could almost pretend as though I was part of the family, ya know – and not just some “substitute” as I often feared I was. But I won’t get into all of that. At least not this morning. I saw the picture of my name sake though – My great great Grandmother’s sister. She did not smile. Her hair was pulled back into these braids – with little ribbons at the ends. She looked – posed. Looking straight ahead with the rest of her family at some photographer – some stranger, maybe, who had no idea who this family really was. Even if he did know – it was obvious by the deadness in the picture that capturing any reality of who they were was not important to him. If I was the photographer, I would want to take a picture of them playing together. Or maybe sitting together at the table eating a dinner. Or maybe even rolling out some lefse for Christmas dinner. I would want to take a picture of my great great grandmother tying the ribbons on her sisters braids. Or maybe even a picture of my namesake impatiently staring back at the photographer waiting for the ordeal to be over. If.

Sometimes I wish that I could paint. I remember so many things that I know there are no photographs for, ya know? If I could paint – I could paint from memory, maybe. I could paint even a picture of a family that had my features – my expressions. I would paint a picture of my mother – under a table – making faces that looked like mine so that maybe people could find a resemblance there. I would paint – I would paint reflections – perfect reflections because they are my favorite.

I couldn’t write fast enough. My mother kept talking – and everything that she said I wanted to make sure I remembered exactly what she said. Even if I had taped her – and wrote it back word for word – how could I remember that specific look she had in her eye. How could I remember to tell my own kids when the time came for their family tree project – ya know? That worries me. I want to be able to record everything down. I want to remember things and I want my words that I write to be a accurate account of things. Yeah – I write to entertain – and yes – I write even to tantalize and titillate my readers (thanks puppy – you were right about that!) but I also write to remember. To record. I write because I can’t paint. I write because I don’t take pictures – and even pictures sometimes can’t tell EVERYTHING (though some pictures I’ve seen come pretty damn close!). IF I could paint I doubt even that would do justice – so all I have is my words. Limited – overused – sometimes misunderstood. But I’m awake trying my damndest to attach words in my head – to everything I love right now.

I love the expression on my mother’s face when she was telling me stories about our family. I love the expression on my mother’s face when she was telling me stories of when she first held me in her arms. I was 3 years old. I didn’t know who she was or where she was taking me. I sat on her lap in a rocking chair and she rocked me until I fell asleep. My mother’s eyes were tender when she was telling me. She looked at me like she wondered why I had ever stopped allowing her to hold me. She looked at me like I was still 3 years old – and that birthdays had never happened to make me older – and too big – for her to rock in her rocking chair. How can I even begin to paint that with words? How can I even attempt to capture that in a picture?

Why does that bother me so much that I can’t sleep?