solipsism

Frazer getting ready to swim breaststroke.

Solipsism.

What’s real? 

Do I know?

Writing this blog earnestly began as a means of documenting the work Frazer and I did together homeschooling.  It was a useful, private tool which I only shared with a few family members and friends.  When Frazer was hospitalized in January, we were blessed with caring hearts and friendly concerns.  The blog was a natural extension of how to communicate efficiently with friends. 

It morphed. 

Inspired by some other friends who blog publicly, I opened the privacy controls and posted on Facebook. 

I let go.

And I found that when I sat in the hospital room at night, thoughtful kind responses held me.  Isolated but not alone, friends from long ago and across the country and over the oceans connected electronically.  

It was difficult to grasp.

Dell's graduation, June 9, 2011

I would read my posts and cringe with the verb tense errors and spelling errors and poor proof reading.  My sentiments were released and available for consumption, and I had not had the energy or presence of mind to think longer or better or clearer.

That anyone even read the blog is a tremendous testament to my kids.

A nagging sense of creating my own private Idaho kept rising. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7t7cGwN7_0

An inner world in which I could not escape the the medical world and could no longer define the boundaries of my angst.  A world in which I would write lists of things to do and stop mid-way to care for someone or research more or lately just stare into space. 

I began a blog about solipsism.  Was I creating reality that no one else saw?

Porter mite party 2011

Dell during Frazer and Porter's fencing feista!

These months of writing and being with the mystery of what is going on with Houlder has helped me control knee-jerk responses and try to frame what we are living.  I have tried to avoid exisitential rants, pity parties and full-metal jacket scream fests.

But, is it True?

I have been wanting to write about this idea but shied away when David Brooks,’ with his crisp excellent writing and somehow radically moderate ideas, wrote about the dynamic nature of our country -- democracy and republic -- in the The Politics of Solipsism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/opinion/06brooks.html

How could I even begin to discuss this grist mill when he was discussing truly  meaty and pertinent and well-crafted ideas? Seemed audacious to try.

Persistently that word would jump out at a stop light, while waiting for lab work, during swim practice, or while trying to find patience to deal with a 6 year old.  I sensed that we were living a life somehow separate.

People have been unexpectedly kind.  Unexpectedly generous .  Unexpectedly concerned.

So, why think that our experience is so singular?  Why fluctuate?  Why not ride the wave?

Fear?

Egocentricism? -- that’s what David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen would say.

It feels like McCarthy’s The Road.  An isolated life, trying to get through, to manage parental love and being blind to the community around us and that’s when I know I am in too deep, too far gone to find a realistic view.  I find I have created a world in which I choose what to say and how to say it.  How infinitely selfish that enables me to be. 


The ultimate trap of the adolescent mind seeing life beyond oneself.