After really struggling last week between my need to sleep and my desire not to sleep, I decided that this week on my day of spirituality I would spend one day throwing out my to do list and letting go of all the things I "should" do in favor of whatever came to me in the moment.

So after I got the kids off to school, I thought, "I should exercise, but I'd like to sit down and pet the cat and look out the window."  So I sat down with the cat and just relaxed.  Every now and then a thought would come to me and I'd worry about when I should get up or what I should do next.  I told myself that I would know when I knew.  And I sat petting the cat until I was done and it felt like time to go lie down and take a nap.  So I took a nap.  And when I woke up, I didn't quite want to get out of bed yet, so I stayed in bed, trying to trust that I would get up when the time was right.

And when my daughter was finished with school, she wanted to play outside.  So I went outside.  And as I stood there watching her play, I thought, "This day feels so much better than last week.  What if I lived every day this way?  Just doing the next right thing and trusting that I'd know when to do it..."  Which I followed immediately with the thought, "But then nothing would ever get done!"  And I realized that I was fine trusting God to take care of rest and relaxation, but I did not trust God when it came to getting work done.  Sure, God could help me relax and pet a cat, but I didn't feel God was going to be there when it came to getting the dishes done or cleaning the bathroom, which was quite a lesson and one I need more than ever at this time of year.  I hope I can take at least some of that into the coming weeks with me.

Did you do anything this week? Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below. And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

I don't remember how it was I first noticed the little bird huddled at the edge of the sidewalk. Did I hear it cheep or see a faint movement? But there it was: a little chick that had fallen out of a nest somewhere. It was fuzzy grey with bulging blind eyes and one of its legs was twisted unnaturally out beside it. I stopped in the middle of my evening walk and stood there wondering how best to help it. I didn't think I could find its nest or return it there, and besides, it was injured. I certainly couldn't leave it there to fall prey to some other animal. So I scooped it up and carried it home.

Home at that time was in another part of the country entirely: an apartment I was sharing with my then-boyfriend. That relationship fell apart slowly, over a number of years, and it was passing through its own calm twilight just then. He was horrified that I'd brought home a potentially disease ridden little creature to our "no pets allowed" apartment, and I was horrified that he'd rather leave it to the neighborhood cats than take it in for a night.

In those pre-Internet days, I spent all the next morning on the phone looking both for instructions on how to care for the bird as well as searching for anyone who might take it; I called the Humane Society who put me in touch with the Audubon Society who put me in touch with a bird sanctuary who put in me in touch with a man who took in and rehabilitated local wildlife. Then (since this was also before I owned a car) the bird took a bus ride in a cardboard box to meet the man. He identified it as a songbird common to that area, nothing special, but promised nonetheless to do his best to save it, because he was the kind of person who did such things, just like I was the kind of person who went to great lengths to make sure my little charge made it to him so that he could.

In the years since, veterinarians and the Humane Society have been recipients of my frequent phone calls, as I've learned how to play foster mama to everything from injured birds to baby squirrels to feral kittens. Anything small, abandoned and in need of protection that shows up in my path (or attic or yard or general vicinity) gets appropriate interim food and lodging, followed by expert care and medical treatment. My husband, like my boyfriend before, if left to his own devices, would let survival of the fittest play out, but (having heard the little bird story before we started dating) did at least know what he was getting into marrying me.

Still, the contrast between my method and that of those closest to me made me wonder for years (in that self-doubting way of mine) "Who's right?" Each time I would throw myself wholeheartedly into saving some little animal that would hardly be missed (really is anyone of the opinion that we need more pigeons?), I would wonder if my time and money and energy shouldn't be directed elsewhere. (With so many problems in the world, I'm choosing to go at fixing them by staying up late at night swaddling a squirrel?) Then when I began working my recovery, I uneasily wondered if my desire to take in strays, to heal and fix them, was just more codependent caretaking. Would it be healthier for me and better for the natural order of things to leave stray dogs where they lie?

I've spent a good portion of my time today providing and procuring care for the latest in the series of helpless creatures to cross my path. And these questions popped up again, but rather than trying to think my way out of them and find some rational way to measure the worth of a songbird, I checked in with my Higher Power. And I found that regardless of whether or not I can see the importance in what I'm doing, it feels right. It feels right even when the universe doesn't bend to my will and little animals die (as they sometimes do) in spite of my efforts. It feels right even if they live in a world already seemingly overpopulated by their kind. It feels right whether I'm praised for my kindness or maligned for my concern with things that appear so inconsequential. And even though some of my character defects do come up around it (as around nearly everything) it doesn't feel like an act of codependency, but an act of love and kindness.

And I realized today that I've been holding a resentment against my ex-boyfriend, from the days before the Internet all the way down to a time when I can blog about it. I've seen him as a cold, cruel person who didn't want to help a little bird, all while fearing that (without the validation of his actions) that there was something not quite right with the path I'd chosen. Today, as my husband was displaying his usual loving tolerance of antics he clearly didn't quite understand, I saw clearly that some people, people I love, would see a baby songbird on the sidewalk and let the crows and cats have at it. And that's the right thing for them to do; after all, the crows need to eat too, and the universe needs people who will let them. But that doesn't change the fact that I do believe it's also the right thing to wrap the bird in one's shirt and stay up hand feeding it, because the world also seems to need people who are willing to do that for no reason other than that they feel moved to.

My daughter, Janie, found the body. Our pet* had been missing for a while, so at first she shouted to me excitedly. She found him! But when I ran to her, it was clear that he was already gone. She looked from his still body up at me and asked, tentatively, "Is he very hurt, Mama?" There was a pause, where I knew that this was the moment I was supposed to do that magical mama thing. I was supposed to kiss the boo boo, mend the tear, put the pieces back together, paste the petals back in place. I was supposed to fix it. I was supposed to make it better. But I had to admit, with tears in my eyes, that he was more than hurt, he was dead. And I couldn't fix that.

Janie's grief was overwhelming and instantaneous. She sobbed until she couldn't breathe and cried until her red eyes were swollen nearly shut. I had to carry her in to the living room and place her on the sofa where she clung to me and wept. Her brother Austen hovered nearby. "I'm sad," he said, in a simple statement of facts, "but I'm not crying." After a while, Janie wanted to sit with the body, so I wrapped it in a towel and we sat together, crying, as we watched its stillness.

I told the children we would need to bury it; the life was gone and the body had to return to the earth now. While Austen accepted and even seconded this idea, Janie was, at first, vehemently against putting the body in the ground. But as she watched it, not moving, she asked what would happen to the body. I told her it would slowly decay and transform, like the dead bird we saw wasting away earlier this spring, shrinking and dissolving to just feathers and bones. If we put it into the earth, it would transform into rich soil and nourish plants. She liked the idea of new life in a plant, so she and I prepared a plant and something to contain the body. She drew pictures of herself, crying, to lay in the grave and a note with hearts and our pet's name to say goodbye. Austen said he would like to do something too. So, he took a Sharpie marker and on the towel I had wrapped the body in he wrote, in block letters, the label: "DEAD ANIMAL." Mark dug the grave and we each threw a handful of dirt on the body before placing the new plant on top.

Over the intervening weeks, each child has continued to process the loss. Janie focused first on death: pointing out dead grass, dead leaves, dead bugs wherever she went and telling me they were dead like her pet. However, I've noticed a gradual shift to thoughts of rebirth. At first, she expressed hopes and wishes for the body and spirit of her lost animal, but more recently she has spent a lot of time tending the plant that sits over the grave, drawing pictures of it, talking about it. Two weeks after the burial, she talks very little about the pet itself, although the loss is still clearly on her mind.

Austen, on the other hand, talks about the lost pet each day. He continues to express, always very matter-of-factly, that he feels sadness and misses the lost animal, even though he continues to appear (to the world at large) not to show it. He talks about how things might be if his pet were still alive: what it might be doing and feeling and thinking at any given moment. And he seems very concerned (in a way that many would find totally un-autistic of him) about how the animal parents and siblings of our pet might react to its loss. He wonders if its mother would be angry or sad to know that it was dead, and he hopes she doesn't find out, so that she won't know the pain. He wonders if its siblings would miss it and feel sad that it's gone.

As for me, I cried writing this post, so I know I'm still grieving the loss — and feeling my children's grief as well as my own.

This week, when our family pet went missing and later turned up dead, I did an obsessive imitation of some of my favorite literary detectives; like Sherlock Holmes, I tried to piece together the smallest clues and like Hercule Poirot, I strained the little grey cells of my brain looking for answers. How and when did he get out? When did he die? What did I miss or overlook? I tried to pinpoint the time of death, doing google searches for information on when rigor mortis sets in in animals. I tried to talk to witnesses, questioning everyone from my five-year-old daughter to my husband on what they last remembered seeing and hearing. I had theories, but no way to confirm them. No answers.

And what difference would answers have made? The answers wouldn't have changed anything, but they would have given me the illusion of control. Next time, I wouldn't let those thousand little circumstances that led to tragedy play out in quite the same way, would I? I wouldn't choose that same moment to go get food ready. I wouldn't ask my husband to run that same errand. I wouldn't have my daughter help me with that chore. I wouldn't let my pet out of my sight. Still I was desperate to know; I felt that somehow knowing would calm my grief. And I was angry and frustrated that I couldn't know. There simply weren't enough data points, not enough evidence, not enough pieces to make out the picture in the puzzle.

Then — because life, because the universe, because God likes to beat me over the head until I learn — my daughter misplaced her favorite stuffed bedtime companion, Gigi, and I had to run through the detective work all over again. When did she last have Gigi? Did the babysitter see her at bedtime? Had my husband seen her the night before? Had she taken Gigi out of the house? Should I search the trash? The yard? The car? The closet? Should I tear the sofa apart again and search under the cushions more thoroughly? And again I couldn't know. I just couldn't gather enough information to solve the mystery.

After a night of sleep, I discovered Gigi in the morning, buried under a pile of other stuffed toys in my daughter's closet. No one remembered having put her there. Someone (daughter? playmate? babysitter? husband? son? me?) scooped Gigi up and dumped her in the closet. We never would know who and it didn't matter. Yet I had tortured myself the night before in my own quest to know the unknowable, both in Gigi's disappearance and in that of our pet.

When my husband disclosed his addiction, I went through the same thing: grilling him for hours each day on exactly what had happened, trying to solve the mystery and create that nice, neat narrative that came at the end of the detective stories of my youth. But some parts of the story were lost forever. There were no answers. Early on, I thought that recovery might help me to understand addiction enough to at least fill in the blanks, like researching the rigor mortis of the marriage I thought I had. Instead, I'm recognizing that accepting what is — and letting go of my obsessive need to have all the answers — is where my recovery is taking me today.

When I was a child, I had the best cat ever. No animal past or present could compare. It wasn't that he had a sweet disposition. He was almost universally mean, awful and belligerent. When almost any creature approached him, he'd snarl, hiss, scratch, bite. He would chase away dogs several times his size with his yellow eyes blazing. And it wasn't that he was beautiful. He wasn't. Or perhaps he may have been as a kitten, but I wasn't fond of him then for it to make any impression. When I loved him, he was ragged and scarred. His ears were shredded and mangled from countless battles and his tail had been broken and was permanently bent at the tip.

Nope, what made him special was mean and ugly, and that he loved no living thing but me. As ornery as he generally was, he would purr roughly as he butted my ankles with his head. And while my hands still bear some of the scars he gave me in accidental and instinctive response to our games, he was gentle for me like he was for no other. He was irretrievably broken to the world and it was broken to him, but he and I loved and understood each other, fiercely.

My current cat is sleeping beside me now. He's stunningly beautiful and friendly to everyone, he's both regal and loving. He's never scratched me, even in play. And yet he's just a decent cat, while the thin, jagged white lines on my hands from wounds thoughtlessly inflicted by an animal long gone are still lovingly treasured. I see in that awful, long-gone old alley cat the mirror for all I wanted in human romance: a broken creature only I could fix and fierce mutual love that denies and excludes all the rest of the world. And I wonder if, knowing how the search for that kind of relationship turned out and knowing all the work I've done since, I would love a cat like that today.

Many years ago, before we had children, my husband bought me a small fish tank for my birthday. At the time, I wanted a car. I didn't really think he could buy a car, but I was relying on a very iffy public transit system to get to work, so I half hoped. His only clue ("it's pink") did not seem encouraging, but maybe he was buying one used. From a Mary Kay lady. He was definitely very excited and spending a lot of time in preparation and whispered conferences with friends. When the big day came, he proudly unveiled the tank, complete with pink gravel.

Over the years, we've had a variety of freshwater fish, from tropical to ordinary old feeder goldfish. We once had a fish give birth to tiny babies, whose growth was somehow stunted, perhaps from my over-caution in keeping them too long in a small breeding section of the tank. When my son Austen was born, the tank was home to one large angel fish, who had outlived all the rest.

As an infant, Austen screamed -- piercing screams -- nearly constantly when he wasn't nursing, which I did nearly constantly to keep him from uttering those awful screams. He had (even for a newborn) problems sleeping. He was different, more intense, more needy from the day he was born, from before he was born. And I felt like I was living my life clutching a live grenade that could explode at any moment.

In the anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation and sheer overwhelmingness of those early days, the fish tank fell into neglect. The water got murkier as it was cleaned less often. And when the last of the fish finally died, we didn't replace them, but let the tank stand empty. My memories of that time are fuzzy -- events run together and odd things stand out, disconnected -- like one long waking dream. And one of the disconnected, fuzzy memories that's weighed on me over the years was of purposely starving the last of the fish when my son was an infant. I remember lying in bed and willing myself not to get up and feed them. I wanted to be free of them, but I felt awful letting them die. Well, they could eat the algae or they were better off dead anyway, I'd tell myself. I remember the tank getting so cloudy and black that I wasn't sure when they had died. And over the years the thought of that tank haunted me.

I eventually cleaned it up and restocked it with fish. Currently, it houses one lone goldfish, as I never have gotten back into the habit of keeping it up well enough to feel comfortable with anything higher maintenance or less hardy. But as I was feeding that fish the other night, I was overcome once again by that familiar guilt and shame for the fish I'd starved. Or, it suddenly occurred to me, had I? Had I confused a dream for reality? Wouldn't Mark have fed the fish if I hadn't? It was hard to know what happened back then. Everything was such a muddle.

I turned to my husband, who was lying on the bed, and said, "I have this memory of purposely starving my fish when Austen was born. Only I'm wondering now if it really happened that way or if it was a dream." And Mark said, "That doesn't sound at all like anything you'd do." And it was true. I've been known to bring home and tend to everything from wounded birds to baby squirrels to stray kittens. And I'm obviously the kind of person who spends years plagued with guilt and shame at the thought that I might have killed some pet fish. But I was crazy back then. Crazy with post-partum depression and anxiety and the weight of Mark's growing addiction pressing down (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time). I wasn't me. Who knows what the crazy-me did?

If Mark was right and it didn't make sense that I was a fish murderer, then what had happened? I concentrated. Wasn't Angel the only fish left in the tank when Austen was born? He was. I had written it in the baby book (one of the few things I wrote in the baby book); next to "Who was there to greet you when you came home?" I had written "Our fish, Angel." And I hadn't gone out and restocked the tank. When Angel died I left it empty. So what fish could I have killed?

Then it came to me: it was the baby fish I remembered killing, because I remember thinking I couldn't tell when they had died; the water was so murky and they were tiny and good at hiding in the plants. And the puzzle snapped together. I was lying in bed willing myself not to go feed the empty tank again, because the crazy, panicky part of my brain was telling me that I couldn't know what wasn't there. I had been feeding the empty tank after Angel died. Maybe, I thought, those little fish that I thought had died long ago were still there in the plants. Maybe they needed me to feed them. I couldn't know, and I shouldn't starve them.

The guilt and shame melted away, transforming first into relief (I was not a fish murderer!) and then into delight at the metaphor for so many of my relationships: carrying guilt and shame for years because I hadn't perpetually fed an emptiness that I thought couldn't live without me. It's a good thing Mark didn't get me a car; I wouldn't have felt nearly as bad for not putting gas in it when it broke down.

Cat asked: "If you could have named yourself any name - when you were younger (first name) what would it have been?"

I actually would have named myself Mary. Um, not "Mary," as in "I really would have picked my real life name," but Mary, as in "my name is not actually Mary, but I do like it."

When I was little I had this (growing up Catholic, go figure) plastic statue of the Virgin Mary that had a little white light bulb in it. The plastic Virgin Mary was dressed in blue, looked very serene and exuded a soft blue light in my bedroom at night that made me feel safe and calm. I've left the Catholic church, but that little plastic Mary light left me with a sense of the mystical desirability of the name Mary.

Addicted Rantings asked: "How many pets do you have (if any) and what are their names, or pen pet names?"

I have one cat and one goldfish. The goldfish doesn't have a name in real life, because it just happens to be the sole survivor of a tank full of nameless fish, who were at one point victimized by my kids' addition of glue to the tank. The cat does have a real life name, but I haven't given him a pen name yet. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned him on the blog at some point, if only because his vomit was adding to some chaos or other I was busying cleaning up.

It's hard for me to come up with pen names for the people and animals in my life I've had a hand in naming. I haven't yet given my kids pseudonyms on the blog because I love their real life names so much and think they suit them so well. I named the cat with love too, so I'm not going to pick another one for him right now.

Sophie asked: "If you could be part of Neo's posse, fighting the Matrix, what would your name, bio, and avatar costume be?"

Oo, that's a good and difficult one. I can think of lots of cool names, none of which fit me... I think I'd like Ophelia, because I identified with her character once upon a time and always liked the name. I think, like Cypher and Neo, I would have been born in the Matrix with all the complicated feelings that engenders. But I'd generally stay on the ship, working the computers and equipment, because I'd be too scared to go back in again. And I think my costume would be something a little like a tattered 80's version of the post-apocalyptic world of the future: some black, updated version of Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" dress.

Shawn asked: "Why the name MPJ?"

The initials are not my real life initials, but they do contain elements of the initials of people who are important in my life. I picked the initials first, then added the name "Mary P Jones" to them when I decided I wanted to my gender to be identifiable when I commented on other blogs.

SAWife asked: "This probably has been answered before, but who's the lady with the typewriter?"

The lady with the typewriter is some poor unwitting model whose image was licensed to Strumpfkunst, who created my blog header. I wonder if the model knows that she gets pasted up all over the Internet as the alter ego for a crazy lady?

1. Elmer's glue really is non-toxic.
2. Goldfish can swim through gummy water for several days and survive.
3. It's really hard to entirely empty a fish tank of water.

I'm happy to report that the fish survived our little Darwinian proving ground, and seem none the worse for wear. With the kids home from school today for President's Day, I wish I could say the same for me!

Yes, he may look regal, like something the ancient Egyptians would worship, but I suspect in a past life, he was something closer to Homer Simpson.