Low Fat Fattie.

“Vivian, why didn’t you eat your snickerdoodles?” I’ve emptied her lunchbox to find the sandwich, juice and kiwi missing. The only thing left are 1.5 homemade cookies, lonely in their tupperware.

“Well….I don’t want to get a belly like yours Mom. I want to eat a low fat diet.”

“….”

**************

I want my daughters to be healthy. I acknowledge that I have work to do on my body, and have told them that the parts I’m not happy with are because I eat poorly and don’t always get enough exercise. I’ve told them that we exercise to keep our bodies strong, and we eat good food like fruits and veggies and protein to make sure we have good fuel. And we eat cookies or candy as a treat.

But then one day I saw something posted at Vivian’s school that mentioned a diet. I worried about it, thought about asking then school, but after some thought, realized it was on the “parent” bulletin board, and wasn’t meant for the kids anyway. But I still worried-what are they teaching about healthy habits and food? They serve mostly junk in the cafeteria-I don’t find shepherd’s pie or lasagna particularly healthy. And to be honest, she watches far more TV and plays online much more than I’m happy about-and most days, that’s an hour, maybe a bit more.

But I can’t be next to her every moment of the day. I wander by when I’m home, check what she’s doing online, what she’s watching. But while I’m not a fan of her necessarily having access, I also realize she’s a child growing up in a new world, and I can’t, and won’t cut her off. I can provide the commentary. I can remind her that healthy insides aren’t always tiny outsides, just as I can remind Vivian women can be warriors.

But what if it isn’t enough?

What if I cannot fight it all? The magazines, the commercials, the clothing, the people around us-what if no matter how comfortable I am in my skin, how often I remind them that health is priority-I worry that the message they will still get is that you aren’t good enough. You must give something up. You must be something else.

How many 6 year olds don’t want cookies?

***

Or perhaps, she’s just internalized what we see and hear and LIVE each day. That food is TEH ENEMY and we must gird our loins in preparation, and is just spouting what she sees.

Or maybe, instead of saying she ran out of time, she just said whatever came to mind, and it doesn’t mean anything.

She’s 6. I didn’t think I had to worry about this just yet.

Death+

Death haunts our shoulders.

We shouldn’t see it coming, not clearly. It should be peripheral, shards  to be brushed off, remembered by the crumbs left on our fingers, the sadness in the corner of our eyes on a cold, windy day, tears that stream unbidden and unrequired down our face as we warm the seat on the city bus each morning. We shouldn’t have the portent, the hidden gas valve in the corner of our future, of our ending.

But taste of it I do odd days, the dusty breeze of an age, the memory of black behind my eyes, of a body unseeing, released finally from bondage. The sweat and the fear and the ruin. The absolute of nothing.

It sits behind me, breathing slightly, lightly on my skin. Waiting.

***

Something today triggered the thoughts. The times I nearly died, the blackness.

Once, at 14, I swallowed a bottle of muscle relaxants. I don’t remember that I was in much pain. I was just so tired of being alive, of everything seeming like an uphill battle I couldn’t possibly walk in crutches. The pills stuck to the back of my throat as I sat in a cold fall park, swallowing them 3 or 4 at a time. Everyone else had gone back to school, and I sat.

When nothing happened, I figured I couldn’t even figure out how to kill myself correctly, and trudged back to school. It was until a few hours later when I kept just randomly falling down that I realized what I had done. The ringing started, the world took a shine, and I fell to sleep for hours and hours.

Interrupted by nothing but an endless, firm darkness which neither rejected nor embraced. It just was.

When I woke up, I swore I’d better. I swore life was worth living, as I stared at an achingly lovely blue sky.

Death 0. Me 1.

Long, long years in which guilt kept me tethered to the earth, where my obligation to others seemed to outweigh my needs. I spent years ripped inside, burdened by the one thought I don’t want to be alive and yet feeling forced to stay put, stay together and whole. Years of stagnation, years of anger and ache. Years of blind living.

Then children, and internal re-org. Facing the demon down once, taming it, then cracking oh so easily one summer night.

I didn’t cry. I was circular by that point, the noise in my head incessant with static and the thought that death was the answer-death was one way to prove that I was needed and necessary, that I was worthy. I crammed 100 some odd pills in my maw, lukewarm water pushing them down. I didn’t cry when I wrote a letter, sorry sorry I can’t I loved you. I laid my head down, and stared at my children, smiling in an old picture. New guilt. Good guilt. A warm tether to my heart.

Calmly at a desk I told the nurse i took too many pills. I don’t want to die.

And they believed me. As I began to slip from the earth, as I felt my arms and body grown tired and limp, my eyes rolling as the room filled with the smell of cupcakes, the nudged me back down, until my body rid itself of my wish. Of my death.

And since then, it’s been like I was stripped clean.

***

I’ve seen nothing  to convince me I go elsewhere when I die. I saw nothing, felt nothing when my mother died but an aching void, a darkness. Both times I have tried to rid the world of myself, there were no warm bodies waiting, no messages, no moments of wholeness, no metatron. Just, black. Just the dark, and the question. Nothing more.

I wanted to. I’ve always wanted to. I dream of the security of knowing that somewhere, my mother waits for me, her arms warm and kind. I wish I could rely on thoughts of there being a better place, even a different place. But nothing has shown me anything but the simple barren emptiness of what I’d imagine deep space to feel like. Think big. Then think bigger.

And so today I was thinking of those times, laying back, eyes unseeing yet staring, and how I wanted so badly for the universe, for anything to take my into it’s arms, and whisper

yes.

and how it never has.

Depending

There is a term that applies when we sacrifice our happiness at the expense of others.   This term is co-dependency.  Co-dependency is: a set of maladaptive behaviours learned by family members in order to survive in a family experiencing emotional pain and stress.

I read the email back from my e-counseler and I immediately regret reading it while waiting for the bus at work. Tears fill my eyes as I blink furiously, trying to clear the glaze.

they have been taught in various relationships, perhaps beginning in childhood, that it is not okay to try and get their needs met; somehow the message is that they aren’t worth it.

I can’t stop the tears, realizing that my life, the life I fought so hard for, the life I thought I wanted, might as well have been a figment.

Seeing your life, reduced to sentences you might find in the Self-Help section, and realizing that it’s so very true? Hideous, and demanding and ultimately far too real.

****

There’s no bad guy here, not really.

I don’t think either side is the devil, full of fire and rage and hurt. Rather, I think we’re two people thrown together, people who love each other, but people who just can’t. My learned behaviours stretch far back, as I long suspected. Having every adult in my life supercede me in some way-by hurting me, by being sick, by dying, by drinking, by the slow hand of turning off, the neglect of grief. The constant “shhh” of living with cancer as a child, the sense that your pain, for all the merits of relativity, is not and will never be as meaningful or important.

Being told, without words, to never talk about any of it. To stare loss in the face, to stare betrayal in it’s vacant black eyes and know that you cannot say the words to make it flesh.

This person can be afraid to ask for what they need, because their needs have never been adequately met by anyone before.

I’ve always been told, in one form or another, that I ask too much. That what I want, that what I crave, the focused attention of love and affection, the warm glow of acknowledgement, is unreasonable. I’ve know this was not true, but I’ve never experienced it, and remember even as a child being so desperate for my father’s love, his attention and gaze.

All I’ve ever wanted was someone on my side-someone who didn’t worry about them, or someone sick or dying or just plain someone else. I wanted someone for me. I want someone for me.

Maybe that’s wrong, and selfish. But there’s a damn pouty little girl who never had anyone listen to her, and she’s stomping on the bone I’ve got left to love with. She’s not asking too much. She’s just asking.

Letters from the Dead

I’m cleaning out the “laundry room”, an awkwardly named room full of dirty clothes, cat litter, summer stuff for kids and all the crap I don’t know where else to put. In the middle of empty boxes, dryer fluff and dried herbs, there’s a box.

Letters.

Mostly, the letters between Mogo and I, the written documentation of the person, long ago, I fell in love with. The good person who listened and cared, who was funny and ballsy and pretty damn awesome.

Fuck me it hurt to read those, to hear that voice again, that voice I haven’t heard in so long, lost behind who we became, grew into. I loved him.

I stopped reading after one. It wasn’t worth the hurt. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to dump them into the garbage. Not today. Maybe never. In those envelopes are my daughter’s parents, before everything else, when a faint lust flowered in ink, an understanding, a camaraderie.  He was so beautiful to me then. I remember that, how excited I would become when a letter would arrive, how I would read each letter over and over, how good it felt to have one certain person in my world, someone who would always tell me hey, it IS ok.

It’s not ok.

I tucked them back into the old box, slogans from my misspent youth scrawled across it, when a letter fell out.

Andrea.

Red hair, huge grin, lively porcelain skin. Perfectly wonderful and yet blandly un-entertaining. She would write me the odd letter when I moved from her town to “the big city”, and I never wrote back, having nothing to say to someone I rarely spoke with, someone I was only tenuously connected to via her boyfriend who liked to play Asshole and sit quietly staring at everyone. Normal in every way, destined to teach, become a mother perhaps, live a full life and die. I never wrote her back that I remember, or maybe once I did. I was pretty high most of the time then, and she didn’t fit in to where I sat, her beauty and the stunning normality of her life a brick wall that breathed heavily on me as it sat, hostile between us.

I didn’t think of her for years. Until Facebook, and I thought, wow, I never wrote her back. I felt bad, a hollow ache I felt about most things from that time, a manic period like no other in my life, when I scorned all that which didn’t burn like magnesium in front of my very eyes. Many a common friendship, lost then, because I couldn’t handle the mundane.

But when I looked for her, when I typed in her name and saw in my mind her lovely face, the hair I envied, I found the one thing I didn’t want to, didn’t dream of seeing for anyone my age, just starting on their life, when you’re honest.

There was an accident one night, on the cold highway linking much of Ontario to the rest of Canada, a twisting road I’ve driven, terrified. A sudden, horrid accident, taking her sister and brother as well. I found she had been a student near me, maybe even at the same time, and I never knew, same school, same town. She grew into a profession she loved.

She had died, and I had never bothered to say hello, or goodbye. She was gone, and I had never really known her.

***

Mortality has always been part of me, more so than most people I meet. I have a keen, if not outsized sense of how close we are, how easily we can fall from this world and into whatever waits. I know we are mortal beings, more likely to float away into dust than meet a maker or live forever in a heaven made of gumdrops and cream cheese. But there is something about a 27 year old woman, just beginning her life, her career, maybe waiting until it’s right to meet her children, dying in a car crash coming home from a movie, that just isn’t right, or fair.

Or easy to swallow. I expected to be well into my thirties before my friends started to die, but then also thought how lucky I am that none of my friends HAD died. Some had been sick, and recovered. Some lost, then found. But none gone, torn from life like this. A page ripped out that I would never be able to read.

I don’t much like regret. I feel it’s wasted. But I regret this-that I never took the time to be a better friend, to be a good person. And that the words she wrote, the thoughts she gave, I never returned.

I thought there’d be more time.

Please, don’t you give me false hope. You’re free to go.

I feel so fucking vacant.

I’m worn this week. I miss the little tiny trickles of love that a relationship gives-a warm body to lie against, fingers on the back of a neck, soft and forgetful. The sense and smell of another in your bed, the completeness of feeling drawn to another.

I dislike being alone. I feel unmoored, despite the confidence that chews me up. It’s not depression, it’s ache, like a phantom limb I miss the security and the safety of arms, warmth.

But do I miss my fantasy more than reality? Do I miss what I think I should I have, in place of what I did?

Getting back to that place, that place of absolute trust, of placing my heart in someone’s teeth-I don’t know if I can after this. With a back that craves simple touch, the pressure of someone who loves you, not just a lover.

I thought I’d die alone. So why aren’t I content so?

I’m tired. I’m 400 pounds of tired on my back in that overwhelming, I have things to do and no time or energy or will to do them, and perhaps later, perhaps soon I should pop those pills again, as I feel paranoia crawl up my back and I wodner, do you feel this too? Do you distrust the motives in all you meet, thinking their interest or open mouths, their words, are all an effort to find a way in to destroy? Do you stare out the sides of your eyes, constantly wary too? Or do you always expect only the best from people?

I assume that dating is going to be a problem with paranoia thrown in.

****

I think I have an appointment with my shrink tomorrow. I think, because when the reminder call came, we said the time but not the date and I was busy dealing with someone from work questioning abscenses from the past 7 MONTHS and worried, no, terrified that they were trying to find a way to pay me, while shovelling food into my mouth, shushing a 4 year old and consulting with my father about dishwashers. So i wasn’t really clear, and now I’m worried that THEY will stop seeing me since I already got a letter about missing my last appointment but then I wonder, exactly how pissy can you get with CRAZY PEOPLE who are on meds that make them forget almost everything?

Sigh. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. All I know is that I want to sleep again, real sleep, not the half sleep I’ve been getting lately, waking up every hour or so, lost. If being crazy is good for anything, it’s getting drugs that get you to sleep.

I want my clarity back, but I want it to be mine. I wanted to feel this, REALLY TRULY feel what’s been happening. I feel like I’m owed that at least, after years of not knowing where my needs ended and the battle really began, I needed to feel something for me. But the hope of living without those magical pills, some magical pills, it wavers as the darkness crawls near and whispers songs I know far too well.

And the drinking. I could drink myself into a hole at this point, and not care. I could pop whatever you handed me, and be glad to have done it. I could pour myself into oblivion and not care.

It’s time to get back.

Eden Fantasys Review: My Friend, The Doc

Warning for the tender hearted and people who have met me in real life. This is a review of the  creatively named Double Penetrator by Doc Johnson. This may be TMI for some of you. I won’t feel bad if you go here instead.

These weeks sewn

I show them video, pictures online, of children their age, children like them, hair a little more wiry, skin burnished by sun and years. They are covered in dust, scrapes and bandages, their eyes shell shocked and hollow, gasping ghosts.

See? I tell them. They could be you. This could be us. Be grateful. Love what you have. They are no different from you.

Vivian wraps her arms around me, while Rosalyn leans into my throat, her arm reaching out to flip through the pictures, these children so much the same as her, stopping on the face of a 5 year old who stares up into nothing.

I place my hand on Vivian’s head, her soft hair under my fingers, golden flax. This is where your money is going Vivian, the money you were so willing to part with. These children-they need food, they need water, they need homes. Unspoken are the words they need their parents. But no money can give them that, and she knows this. Her eyes hollow out for a moment and I know she knows this.

Sometimes my 6 year old sees the world better than I ever have.

****

A friend visits. She brings beer, my favorite, and cupcakes. I feel warm and loved and cared for and I want to hug her even more, even as she says I’m gonna hug you even if you don’t want me too. I know you hate them. I wonder to myself, do I still hate to be touched?

I realize I don’t. That I crave this simplicity now, this closeness. I sigh, deep inside me, and let go a breath I’ve been holding for more years than I can count.

We talk. If I’m honest, I’d say I do most of the talking, but I hear her too. She talks of the love for her niece, the niece replacing her daughters, the ones she’ll never have. Her eyes light, tiny stars aglow in her soft face. She asks me how i know I’m doing the right thing, how I don’t second guess myself all day long.

You don’t. I tell her. You can’t.

But also-I don’t remember the 4000 ways in which my mother likely told me the wrong thing-in ignorance, in jest, in impatience and frustration. I remember that she loved me. That she was always there, and I always knew.

And I know it doesn’t really matter.

I could second guess my every move, fill them full of organic food, montessori thoughts, only allow them access to classical music and the odd Sarah Harmer song. I could control their lives, and mold them to me. I could bend their will.

Except I can’t. I can’t completely stop the world-heart attacks happen, earthquakes happen. Nasty teachers happen. Wonderful, kind people happen. And these things all make up the people we are, and the people we will be.

The oddest things shaped me. The kind Jamaican man who picked me up while hitchhiking, chastised me for doing so, fed me at McDonalds despite my protests, and made me promise to call him when I got home, how his wife would never forgive him if he didn’t make sure a young girl was safe. I never called him. But he impressed upon me the importance of doing the right thing just for that reason. Because it is right and good.

Guiding my sick mother through a pot hole filled driveway one dark Friday night, holding her arm. Learning humility, and the courage it takes to rely on someone else.

Just noticing the golden light at the end of the day, and how it makes my heart hurt just so.

If I open my eyes, in just the right ways, life gives me so much.

***

I go for a walk, enjoying a new freedom, a sunny winter day, music in my ears, the story being weaved in my head. The fabric store looms, and I decide this weekend will be THE weekend to learn how to sew.

My hands list through rolls of poplin, fleece, flannel, cotton. The smell returns, of linen and corduroy, of windless rooms and beautiful things created from flat nothingness. I feel her with me, her solid sense, the magic in her hands as fabric became something lovely, something that flowered and flowed on a body. I stood still, and breathed her in, practical, magical her. I rub my hands over the cheap flannel I’m buying, black with white skulls, and I can imagine her here, with my daughters, with her granddaughters, laughing at me, as I curse and swear at bobbins and thread that won’t stay. I see her smile, and my heart bends a little.

I pick up a spool of thread, and realize, I have to make something on my own.

Her benediction in change. My need for her, all these years later, sated in cotton and wool.

You look like a perfect fit for a girl in need of a tourniquet

I haven’t taken my pills in almost a month. A scratchy voice in my head nods and whispers maybe you should. But I feel no different. I feel honest. I stick my tongue out back, daring it to come and get me.

I feel sad and I for once embrace it, this feeling of blending with the rest of the humans. I feel happy and it’s just a peaceful feeling, born of a wild exhilarated joy and wonder. I feel tired, and ache with loss, and know this too will pass, in the wind, through my fingers, until my life is reborn as I wish.

I won’t not take them forever. But give me this, give me this now to feel. Give me a few precious weeks to just have what you all have-emotion with reason, feeling with need. Let me taste this treasure again.

****

I am so fucking worn down I broke down in front of my boss today, holding it in until he clearly knew what scab he was picking at, eyes boring into my face, relentless. I have been so solid through this-so focused on the girls, on a new life, and potential, that I had begun stuffing the pain inside me, the only side effects the razor blades in my throat and the heaviness of a new normal. I have been doing what I do best-focusing on everything and everyone but me.

And it’s left me tearful, and angry, and just a little lost, spun round and round until I really am pulsating, like some star ready to collapse. I grieve. I grieve my marriage. I grieve my lost future. I grieve the love I gave so willingly and easily. I grieve being loved. I grieve being scorned.

But I broke down in front of what basically amounts to a stranger. And he reached out, and asked what he could do, and here I am, with a week off to try and find my footing.  I have it, mostly, but I’m thrown by navigating those waters where you both care for and despise someone, where suddenly mama bear comes roaring out of the gate, blinded by the need to protect her babies. Waters where I realize I’m not the problem, that my being mad has nothing to do with how crazy I may or may not be.

I have a right to my fucking anger, and have denied myself this for far too long. I have done much of this to myself.

I just want it all to be over, this sticky web of miscommunication, anger, glossy hurt. I stare wistful at couples in hardware stores and think, that’s all I ever wanted, to be happy deciding together.  I stare at confident women in coffee shops and think, i could be her, save that lovely hair and glowing eyes.  I just want the aftermath, the 6 months later like in the movies where it’s all solved itself and I can crow into the summer morning light my lust for tomorrow and I have fabulous toned arms and I walk into the sunset, drinking wine.

For now, a week off, a rock show, many beers and a bath. It’s a start.

****

A compass is useless; also

trying to take directions

from the movements of the sun,

which are erratic;

and words here are as pointless

as calling in a vacant

wilderness.

Whatever I do I must

keep my head. I know

it is easier for me to lose my way

forever here, than in other landscapes.

(M. Atwood, Journey to the Interior)

Me then, now. Here.

If you had asked me on this day 9 years ago, where I thought I’d be, more importantly, WHO I thought I’d be, I would have shrugged. It was 23 and living in Toronto and listless and drinking too much coffee.  Full of anxiety, preventing me from doing almost anything fun. Trying to write. But convinced my life wasn’t going to be much more than my cute yellow apartment at the top of a house in a wonderful neighborhood, no kids, just me and books and a busy husband, in a city as big as the sky, to me then.

Flash forward to now, with two kids mostly asleep below me, tucked in their beds, tired tears still marked on their cheeks, my marriage disappeared, fluttered away on some breeze I never noticed. My body marked by children, by growth, by illness, by life, by becoming. Inside, where it was scarred, has bloomed, fractal like, a new person. Hands which will one day hold lives as they appear to us, angry and covered in that which makes us all. Eyes that will now behold, in time, with hope, grandchildren, my eyes on some, my fingers laced with another. My house creaks and echoes around me, dreams made brick.

I reach out, and hope. Hope to hold these two women together, the one who sat late nights on a deck, struggling to catch the stars between the smog and the cigarette, and the one who walks her daughters into the late summer humidity late at night, the stars bright in this tiny city sky, the air quiet but for the creatures of the woods behind us, and the hum in the air. Her those years past, she had no hope, jut an empty, black future ahead, a fence of sorts at 30, blocking out old age and happiness. She thought that happy came via someone else.

She has since determined that this isn’t necessarily the case.

She had less stretch marks. But she didn’t laugh so loud. She had a smaller dress size. But she hated her body, utterly. She was afraid of everything. She couldn’t find herself.

Now she can.

The fugliness abounds

The fugliness abounds

Originally uploaded by thordora

Since I’m terrible at ever knowing what should go where (I swear, I failed the girl class or something) I need advice. I hate this color. I have ALWAYS hated this color, and will likely ALWAYS hate this color.

Unless you manage to find me grape ice cream. In which case I will love you for finding ice cream I haven’t had since I was 8.

I want this space to REALLY be my space-I’ve got a cornflower-esq blue in the room adjacent, so I don’t want to do blue-images of smurf porn would then abound. And I don’t want to go too too light I don’t think.

See? I don’t know…

What I want

You look back and wonder what made you take it. Why did you sit through being invisible? Why did you expend all of your energy trying to fix something someone didn’t want?

Why did you accept being second best to people you couldn’t even meet?

And so it has begged the question. What DO I want?

In simplest terms, it boils down to something I can hardly vocalize. I want someone who is responsible. I want someone in my life who wants an “us”-who thinks in terms of what WE can do, what WE can have and see.

I want someone who smiles to see me, or hear my voice. I want someone who thinks of me in idle moments. I want a warm house, colored and smooth. I want the low hum of the radio as a constant companion, conversation.

I want dreams. I want stories. I want to live.

I want someone in my life who truly wants to live.

No more feeling like a burden because I expect, and yes, to a degree demand, attention and love in a relationship. No more feeling like I’m a problem that needs to be fixed because I care about a home and a family and a future. No more feeling like being unhappy is normal. No more feeling like it’s all my fault.

Because it’s not. And I deserve someone who wants me, and who respects me, and who doesn’t treat life with a huge dose of apathy and hate.

Once upon a time I was happy. More than anything, that is what I want.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

The first night I collapsed into bed, exhausted by a weekend of moving and the stress of ignoring the grieve and stress of it all. My brain can only take so much, and so shut off my body, wincing only slightly when the almost 5 year old slipped into bed with me, mumbling, her cold feet pressed against my legs.

Last night, the room alight by a new, and much brighter clock, and startled constantly awake by a small kitten soon to meet its maker, I tossed and turned and blinked at the walls, not even lulled to sleep by soft clean sheets and the smell of Pine-Sol in the air. I thought some hard work would make sure I slept. Instead, I’d find myself woken by noise, and missing the familiar weight on the bed, the soft snores and warmth.

I can’t get warm these days.

Yet at the same time, while I’m tossed, as I stuffed pieces of our lives into garbage bags, retrieved from a dirty floor, I felt peace. I felt delighted, carving my own space out, to see the floor gleam, to dream of what color I want to put on the wall instead of the grape purple that hangs. I started moving books, plotting position, pulling out my old artwork, pondering grabbing my easel.

A space for me. A place where I fit, and make sense. Space to breathe and move.

It’s almost like I’ve been thirsty for years, and just stopped noticing. I have always needed this space, and was always denied, given, at most, a small corner of the bedroom, not really mine. Room where who I am, where the words and pictures that make ME up can live and thrive, the room from my dreams with candy colored curtains and pillows to lounge away lazy Sundays strewn along the floor. A room that stretches to meet me, a room in which I am real, and not just some bookworm with no voice.

I miss him. I do. But I miss me too.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

I’m tired, and he’s gone.

I hug him fiercely, and he kisses back, his face in my neck. He says Don’t cry softly and I say I’m trying not to but really, right now, I don’t know how not to. I’ve never been left before,  coats in one hand, clippers in the other as the clock on the stove glows 11:54. I can’t hold in the tears that roll from my eyes unbidden, surprised.

I’m trying not to too he says and the look in his eyes tells me it’s true.

Maybe things can be better. Maybe in 6 months we’ll have worked through whatever we both have, yes both, and find ourselves again, newly happy and sated with finally speaking after years of barely trying. Maybe I’ll have cried and yelled enough by then. Maybe he’ll have had enough silence.

But, maybe we’ll just move on.

I don’t even know what to want anymore.

***

I’ve spent the weekend focused out-on him, on the kids, on the dirty floors and windows that leak air like asthmatic men at a boxing match. I do what I’m best at when I’m grieving-I get busy. I find solutions, I remind, I consult, I do whatever possible to not think about how he’s not coming home tonight, and baring a couple week long business trips I have never not had him by my side. He has always been there. And tonight  he isn’t and I’m empty and crushed, aching for the one person I always figured I’d grow old with, the one I could see living forever with.

It hurts. I feel adrift, unmoored, and broken.  I never wanted this.

***

What if the one your heart wants isn’t the one your heart needs?

***

We’ve spent the last week being, for the most part, gentler with each other, more considerate. He made me coffee this morning, just because I said I had a headache, and maybe a coffee would help. He smiled and listened when I talked. I bit my tongue more often than not, had a warm glance and soft touch at the ready.

If only I wondered, we could do this all the time. Be considerate of each other. Less needy but more willing. Loving yet not smothering. What if we could do this all the time?

But we don’t live under the gun of impending doom, under a cloud of Am I doing the right thing? We don’t take the time each day to look at each other and remember THIS. This giggle or that small gesture-THAT is why I love them. We haven’t taken the time in a very long time.

I believe we still love each other. I just don’t know if we have the energy to start again.

***

I love him. My heart is breaking. I can’t not love him. How could I?

The problem with Cat Food

This weekend he leaves.

The past few weeks have been filled with the slow file and purge of his stuff, garbage bags filled with the crap I begged him to toss for years, piles of things in boxes he wishes to keep, memories for me to flip through, to find my own, to take my records, to read again letters from friends on the occasion of our marriage.

Him, packed into 20 or so boxes and bins, stacked drums and equipment. My former husband, in piles.

My heart coughs, my eyes fill unbidden and my breath becomes hot and laboured. How did I get here? How will I move on, the empty space in my house matched, in degrees in my chest?

*********************

It strikes me, asking to borrow a few bucks for cat food since I forgot to get the BIG bag for the little gluttons, that it’s not as it was. Before, I would have said “We need cat food-grab some?” via text, shuttling between work and home, thoughts muddled with the should do’s and what to make for dinner.

Now it’s-can I borrow? Can you help?, the requests you make of a friend, unwillingly in need, detached, no longer a pair or a team but two people. Certainly two people who want to help, who want the other to succeed and feed the cats. But two completely separate people, revolving in their own worlds.

I find myself blinded, clipped almost by these small thing, the loss of that small shoulder to rely on, the devotion of the tiny pieces of a marriage, the non worry afforded by a partner, the relief of knowing there’s two of you responsible for the detritus of adulthood-children, houses, dental work. The reality of those boxes is that no matter how friendly and helpful we are, as friends, I am ultimately at odds and alone with this, my life.

It hurts in its sad way, the loss of this, of the pairing, of the safety and security. Not because I don’t think I can do it, but because I prefer the sharing, not just the problem of cat food, but the life shared, the house, the future shared. And it’s odd, imagining no one behind me, just being there, even in the cold way as it’s been for so long.

Alone with children, with my own flighty, ofttimes fragile self. It’s terrifying. The thought-this is all the money I have, the two dollars I scammed from my father for coffee and didn’t use-this is what I have.

I haven’t been that completely untethered since I was a teenager. I don’t mind it for myself-but with children, it fills me with a cold hollowness, a fear I don’t recognize, or rather, I do too closely. The intimate knowledge that you are never far from everything going terribly wrong.

**********************

It’s not that dramatic. I still have access to all the tools and credit I personally did before. But now, it’s all on me, this house, or at least it feels that way. Now, it impacts more on my own than it ever did couple wise. I feel that last kick in the arse into adulthood, a sad kick, yet a necessary one.

Packed in a box it wasn’t, but from one it comes.

The scars of others should teach us caution.

There was the time the neighbour liked to touch me, numerous times, mostly blocked from my memory. I’ve bored myself with those stories.

There was the boy who cornered me in an old rusted stairwell, whimpering in his older voice that this was how we played hide and seek, and he had found me, and he could do what he wanted, his hands like fingerless paws on my skin.

There was the boy who thought playing Go-Bots or whatever we were playing meant he could put his hands down the back of my pants before I squirmed away, startled.

The boys who played me like a fiddle between them, daring each other to see how far the sad eyed girl would go.

The boy who thought coercion meant ok.

The friends of my father who leered and tried to grab.

About then I got big enough to hurt back, and mostly, it stopped. Except for the sad drunk times when no one knew how to say no. Those almost hurt more than the others. The ones I really could have stopped.

All have left their marks.

******************

There’s a kerfuffle, which I won’t link to because drama? I’m done with the drama-I have enough kthxbai, but it opened a wound I thought I had closed over, a wound ripped bare by the innumerable hands and fingers and lips and eyes of boys and men, the one a girl learns to live with, learns to take without complaint. The grubby fingernails of a boy, stabbing at areas too soft for blood, the silences they ensure. The silence that overlays.

I understand speaking of it all. Of coming clean on a horrid thing, maybe the horrid thing that once was done. I understand my own almost mute response, the recognition in the thigh of that woman, the tears I never did shed, my response being more defeated than anything, used to the men in my life, the boys even, thinking I was theirs in some pincushion way. I wasn’t angry-I was saddened that my body, my ears and eyes so viscerally responded to that action. That I have been that girl, that woman many times over. That so many of us have, conditioned to accept it as a matter of course.

We make mistakes, all of us. But sometimes you trace back the “mistakes” made against you, and you wonder. Am I a target? Do I draw it to me, like a magnet, these hands, those lips, blank except for lust, unseeing or hearing? How did it take so long to gain the ability to say no, to fight? Why do we insist on not seeing these actions for what they are-a constant waving assault on us, on our women? On us?

Is assault only counted if it’s the most base of crimes, rape? The fingers we’ve put up with, the tongues, do they not lash and molest as well, scald our skin until we’re no longer clean in our own bodies? Giving clearance for small discretions, do we open the door for the larger, letting it swing  clear of our consciences because these other things, the groping and the trapping and the touching, they aren’t that bad?

They build. They rape our minds and our futures, in their way. They allow our sons and brothers to believe that a pound of flesh is just that, flesh for taking, like a slab of cattle stunned on a table. A culture created, but the petty allowances of all of us, women alike. Because I hear the voices of other women saying “it’s not that bad, really”, and it makes me wonder, just how many times they were left alone with their grandfather or their father’s friend, left to anticipate the grab or the leering grin and wagging tongue. Left to fend for themselves.

I’m much stronger than any of those boys. All boys. But the sudden jarring dissonance of that hand on a thigh, those words, so often implied if not spoken. “is this what you want? THIS is what you want!”, the flashback to that girl in someone’s cold bed with warm, molting hands, or standing, scared still under the black stairs of a fire escape-these are the things you cannot escape.

I see cold eyes, frigid eyes that never changed from boy to man. Creatures who never really saw me.

It scares me when women speak with this same coldness, as if the scars we all carry are meaningless. I am more than my scars.

I just wish that none of us had them in the first place.

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

Someone says I’m pretty and I flush, embarrassed by the untruth. Someone else tells me I’m beautiful, and I wonder, is it my soul they see, inside where it counts? Or have I not seen me in so long that the concept of beauty in and about me is abandoned, a sad boat deposited in a field by a flood, its paint flaking from its moored loveliness?

I have never thought myself pretty. But have decided, in the interests of fairness, to entertain the idea this year.

It’s strange to look at myself now. I don’t know this woman in the mirror, the one who has wiry hair that spins itself around my face, curls and waves. I don’t know the curves of my chin, as I wait for it to emerge from its flaccid hiding place, as I eat less and better. I don’t know these tired eyes, more green than brown these days, my favored hazel globes, I don’t know their softness, their compassion. I don’t know this woman.

I’ve known pretty people, still know pretty people, made lovely by their strength, their struggles and the lines it leaves on them. They’re the beauty I recognize, not mine. I am jealous of their etherealness, the impression they leave on people. They are not ordinary, and are recognized as such. Doors, Seas and hearts open freely to them.

I have always wished for that-for a delicateness on the outside, a certain turn of phrase that would mark me as feminine and flowered, for I have always been staunch and tree like, steady and firm. It would be easy to be the pansy swaying in the wind than the birch facing it head on? Both strong in their structure, just demarcated by beauty?

Perhaps for once, I’d prefer soft petals to rough bark, hard to scratch and even harder to remove.

I can’t relate as the flower-when I go out, I’m always taking up space, the bigger, broader version of female, ofttimes not looked at, for who sees the trees while glancing at the beauties beneath and beside them? I feel the room I take, and don’t feel entitled to it. My branches may stretch, but they do so unwillingly, and bashful, I can hardly look myself in the eyes most days.

Someone tells me I’m beautiful and my heart soars, then crests, then sighs. It cannot be the truth, even if I try to wish it so, even if I gather the petals to me.

2010

I am determined.

I’m not even 2 days into this year, and already it’s like breathing new air. Sure we’re all hopeful and fresh and new January 1, and sure, it always looks pretty around here, prettiest even, just before the snow falls in buckets like someone just dumped a pile of manure of Tim’s head, but still…

I feel like I left all the bad things in last year, cast off unwanted. The anger, the disappointment, all the bad moves and roads I walked last year-left behind, with this year devoted to finding the roads I truly want to walk on. I sit talking with a new friend who tells me even she believes and feels I’m on the right path, and my body screams YES!, even while it delicately eats greasy food and nods.  Inside a small girl dances and breaks into song, stretches her arms and feels, for the first time in years and years, space.

There’s a person I want to be, a woman I saw glimpses of when I tried looking past my own nose and into my future. She’s warm and loving, she curious and interested, her eyes full of laughter and joy. Her home is warm and welcoming, full of food and books and music and love. Her arms are full of children, and possibly, blessed with the love of someone who looks at her and feels settled, in their place too. Someday, she’ll see the sunrise over Ankor Wat, and she’ll smile. The walls of her house are all the colors of the gumballs in that machine near Zellers. She sings herself to sleep.

But dammit, I think she’s already reaching out inside of me, rattling her cage and demanding that she and that little girl, the one who sings, be set free. She’s here!

She always was.

I sat on her, I silenced her, I tried to mold her into some idea I had, some wisp of desire someone else had. Now, freed of the monkeys of expectation and protection, there’s a stretch and a rip and she’s there, and desperately wants to breathe and feel beautiful and smart and wanted.

Rebirth, of a sort. I’m just caught in the caul, that’s all.

Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

I’m eating my lunch at one of the long white table in the lunch room, the tops dirty and sticky with the remnants of the last people. I take care to brush the crumbs away, wipe the wet spots. Someone else sits down, takes out his lunch. Wags around his brown banana. I make a face before I realize it.

“What?” he asks combatively. “What’s your problem?|

I start internally, nonplussed. “I don’t have a problem. I just detest overripe bananas. I like mine firm, a little green, so they’re sweet and almost like candy.”

He scoffs. “You’re always so negative. You’re SUCH a negative person, you know that?”

I dryly chew down what’s left of my lunch, and leave the room quietly.

******************

Why is the realist always negative nelly, the dreamer the optimist?

Why can’t we have our negative thoughts without it being a detriment to us, or those around us?

When my mother died, I had the same thoughts as everyone else. That it was a relief-that she was finally released from pain and suffering and disease, and moved on to, where ever. The pain was done. But I ached and I hurt and I pined for her, for my mother, and when those pitying old ladies with the laquered hair and nude nails cooed at me and told me it was all right, she was in heaven with god and all the pretty ponies, I just wanted to ball up my 11 year old fist and pummel them within an inch of their repulsive little lives.

I didn’t of course. My mother never raised me to be a snotty little brat. So I smiled sweetly, and felt bad for, well, feeling badly. For not seeing the silver lining. For having the nerve to be ungrateful.

I missed my mother then, already. But had to view her passing as a blessing I should give thanks for.

2009 has sucked my ass. Yes I’m thankful for the blessing of stability that I have. I’m so fucking happy to not be bouncing off walls moodwise, to not stare down the front of a city bus and think about my death, to not spend my time chronicling the million ways life has let me down. I’m thankful that I’m a better mother.

But to all the people who say I should focus on the good things, and not the bad, in that twee voice that makes me cringe?

Fuck you. I own my unhappiness as much as my joy. And I value each as the lesson they truly are.

I lost my job at the beginning of this year, the first job that defined who I was, work-wise, but also a job I despised, working for a woman who bullied her employees to the point that they couldn’t function. But try as you might, to a degree, who you ARE is tied up in your job, and this hit me harder than I thought it would. Inside, I felt horrid, as my who and why crumbled and I sat desperately trying to scoop them up in my arms.

I got a handle on this, but dealt with my marriage, unsteady, with no fixed goal. But I thought it was a stumbling block, a road we were unsure of. I figured with time, we’d work it out.

November gave me the answer. He wanted to leave me.

I’ve been married since I was around 20 years old. As someone was nice enough to point out-this is the person I was with for the entire adult life so far. I hadn’t thought about it like that, and once I did, no wonder it felt like he was taking my arm as well as the couch. I loved my family. I loved the idea of having a family, of a mother and a father and children in their little house, making a home.

But he didn’t, not like I do, he didn’t want this, at least not with me. And that’s the hump that’s hard to take. That I don’t fit in his worldview anymore.

But I will survive. I will move on, and maybe I’ll meet someone and fall in love and maybe I’ll meet someone and have lots of sex and maybe I’ll be content, on my own for awhile. Change happens, and change is good.

But fuck you if you think I’m not entitled to my anger.

I’ve read posts where people offer their gratitude to the universe, and I salute them, as I cannot do that right now. I’ve read posts chatsizing people for expressing anger when they should be grateful for what they do have, and that if they’d just stop expressing anger, then maybe good things would be around them and bless them.

Fuck you, I’m angry. You hear that 2009? I’m pissed off at you!

Bad things happen everyday. I’ve had enough really bad things happen to know that it’s random in many cases, without cause. They just do. We aren’t entered in a global keno draw. And if all things are relative, no one is dead, no one is dying of an incurable disease, and syphillis hasn’t eaten my cheeks off.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be angry and hurt, or the right to talk about it.  Aren’t we told enough to be good kittens and keep all the bad stuff in? Don’t we get told enough times to suck it up and keep moving? I know I have. Sometimes I’m negative-I call it realistic. My head isn’t always in the clouds, and it’s who I am. I acknowledge the badness in my life, the horror and the agony, and make it mine.

I’ve had numerous people tell me that divorce is great, new people, new life. And yes, that part is appealing.

But not nearly as painful and terrifying as facing an empty bed after 12 years.

I claim my anger, and I claim it here. 2009 can suck it.

**********

I am who I am. I have opinions about things. I have emotions about things too. And this year is one I’d like to forget. This year, the end of this decade, hell, the majority of this decade-years I’d like to lose. 2009 has been my slimy brown banana, edible yes, but detestable all the same.

Let me be angry. Then let me move on to the new year, all fresh and green and hopefully, sweeter than candy.

bare floor, bare

My house is a mess.

The toys are strewn across the floors and I can’t find it in me to pick them up one.more.time, unless of course it’s into that mythical blue garbage bag of “outside for the other kids”. There’s coats and spoons and cats on the couch, magazines and books, pencils and cd’s and I know nothing is where it belongs by the corralling of these things, the hemming in, it feels impossible, unwieldy, like a broadsword strapped to my back I haven’t the energy to heft. It weighs on me, like a puff of smoke and the universe, all together, singing hymns.

It’s the same in conversation, animated, enjoyable, real conversation with people who I enjoy, with brains that engage me in ways I so rarely find, who challenge my words in a good way, make me think. But I find myself staring bemused into the distance, barely able to marshall my brain around to focus, to sit in this moment and be with these women, enjoy the giggling serious talk I’ve been craving for so long. I stare at my hands and wonder why it’s so hard to stay in this place, with these voices. I drift, that puff of smoke sitting on my head, wiser than I yet not, tamping me down like tobacco.

It’s like I’m not even here, floating around like a whisper. I hear the voices of my children but they’re dim, I hear the mutterings of responsibility but dash them off with a flick of my hand, determined to slip past it. The pressures of being alone, weighty, hug tight to my scorned back, slow me. My pennant in this race is black and red with ire.

Ribbons

We talk and we still feel it.

To deny it would be suicide, and at first, I thought it just me, feeling this ribbon between us, the soft ties. But no, he shakes his head, tries to fight it, yet feels it just the same.

A platform we alone live on. A space for us. The buttery smooth forever we glide in.

We don’t know. I don’t know. He doesn’t know. Does love have an expiration? Can you still feel it, not the biased love you have for family or the durable one reserved for children, but the thirsty love you have for the one meant for you, can you still feel that even if there’s something so irrevocably broken you can’t actually see around it? Does love play hopscotch in time, finding us 15 years ago, but then not again for another 5, or 15?

Can we love and yet still be completely and utterly wrong for each other, the us now, the us tomorrow as well?

There’s an ache when I imagine him gone-utterly foreign to me, not like losing my mother or being adrift in the world. The ache I imagine you’d feel if someone took your arm-the space once occupied never quite empty. He belongs with me, we belong with each other. Our souls know, somehow, and if I believed in other lives, I’d think we’d known each other then.

But maybe now wasn’t good either. Perhaps we should wait for another life, when we are both cats sipping on cream.

My heart, my head and my body are so woefully confused, conflicted and sad. What we have isn’t working, but being able to see the what was, the what could be-it’s so painful, like daggers.

I have not stopped loving him. I just do not love who he has become, and likely, this goes in the reverse. We aren’t those people anymore, but we just can’t seem to find each other right now. And it hurts. It hurts to watch the past wave in his eyes, and crave him then.

Maybe there’s no hope. There’s so much between us, and yet, there’s this rope, this line that pulls us, magnets to each other, and we both stand wondering if it means anything at all, too confused under it’s power to figure it out.  I just want us to be happy, together, or apart. I just want happy.