personal thoughts in the middle of the night

i am out of options for sleeping through the night, although now that i mention it, i definitely have forgotten about the herbal nighty-night blend on the ledge above my kitchen sink. i believe i will try a dropper-ful immediately and see if i can get to the place where my partner is, sleeping soundly as ever, breathing deeply and evenly almost as testimony to my inability to quiet the restlessness. my lovely daughter is off at her 'other' family's place on the east coast for a month. i'm dreaming up ways, in the sleep and in the waking, to help her with her anxiety. we've just seen her trying to deal with it alone and it's finally hit us that we need to help her with tools to get through tough times. i'm not exactly sure why her little body tenses up and she freaks out, but if we gently acknowledge it somehow and we breathe and we talk about how the world will not end in any case... she was recounting how she couldn't relax on the little boat she road the canals of corpus christi in with my mother. we said nothing at the time, but discussed later, as it impacted david significantly, that we should use tools to deflate anxiety now while she is young, and possibly she won't carry that with her into adulthood. she carries the weight of the world and is so strong and smart and so attached to her mother that she picks up my own anxiety, certainly. this is the focus of the now - learn to live this life and love every minute of this round. all philosophy aside, i waste my days with the stress of producing for an academic life that is not mine. david finished the farm logo today. it's breathtaking to me. my anxiety today arose from talking with my dad and skirting the issue of how my 'research' is going. i can only focus on how much i've received from academia, how much i've grown, and how much i don't want to be part of that scene, ever. this coming from the woman who is supposed to be presenting at a pretty importance conference next month...