That time of the month

Ever have one of those weeks where the sky is falling, you’re a horrid nasty person and you just want to move to Australia?

Sweet fuck I’m having one of those weeks.

The problem with me is, specifically,  is that when PMS comes, in it’s glory, sometimes I turn into a person not so much myself. It might be for a few hours one month, a day another, or like this past week, nearly an entire week.

I can feel the difference. I go from rational, relatively normal to the person that was. The bipolar freak full of rage and sadness who is filled with more loneliness than makes sense. A person who can push away every single person in her life without even really trying.

I hate this. I hate this reminder of who I’ve been. I hate it’s intrusion into my home, the havoc it creates, the fear it instills in me as I worry that one day, my pushing will work too well and I’ll find myself alone. I hate waking and wondering what I’ve done, and how to fix it.

I’m awfully tired of having to apologize.

I don’t know how to stop it. Any pdoc I’ve talked to shrugs, tells me they’ve never seen any research on PMS/Menstrual Cycles and Bipolar Women. Tells me they don’t want me on SSRI’s just for a few days a month-and I agree. But they have nothing to offer.

I change to someone else on these days. Another woman, a monster. Ask the people who live around me, who are burnt to crisps by living with a cypher. Ask them how tired they are-it’s worse for them because they can’t separate the people, the me from the total shift in my brain. I try and control it, and if it’s only a day, I can, but for days on end, I can’t escape the whispering in my head, the slightly shadowed view of the world that infects me.

I’ve started living without all this-without the fear, without unhappiness, almost normal. And one week-one week returns me to who I’ve been and I’m helpless and filled with worry. Worry that I’m still destroying a life, one full of people who just can’t take it anymore.

Wanna answer some questions?

Considering my obsession with age lately, I’ve decided to give myself a bit of a writing project for the winter-I have no real endgame with this, aside from perhaps, for once, completing something.

 

I’m looking to basically wrap the narrative of events of my life around some very cardinal themes-with those being specific to age-growth, death, change, love. I’m looking to survey a number of people, and for those answers to become part of the current narrative, part of the answer to the question of what does age, what do change, what does growing up gift us, or take from us?

 

I have a list of less than 20 questions that I’m looking for a medium sized varied group to answer. Now, I am looking for largish answers-not just yes or no’s, but answers, from experience.

 

I’m looking to start sending these out this weekend, so if you’re interested, please, comment or email me at thordora AT gmail.com

 

And thanks. Like I said, I have no idea where this idea might go, but I’d like to chase it down the rabbit hole.

The best time of age.

I was raised to nibble on the old chestnut that youth was the most perfect, achingly lovely thing around. When I was a kid, it was perfectly normal to hear some Rothman’s chain smoking old man mutter about the best years of my life as he slowly leaned back in his old recliner, hands rustling the paper while the cigarette dangled like a dare from his mouth. From a kitchen a woman always seemed to agree he’s right you know. Enjoy it while you got it. It’s all down hill from there! and she’d continue on frying pork chops in lard or taking all the nutritional value out of carrots and peas, her own cigarette bouncing on her lips.

We’ve all been to that house, watched TV there. Hell, for some of us, it might have been home.

As a small child we were dazzled with the idea of “growing up“-growing up was magic. When you grew up, you could stay up all night if you wanted, watching the scrambed channels, or maybe Bleu Nuit. Grown up, you could spend your money on anything, run through the streets, wear “those” jeans, a pair of which each of us had. Our older siblings were gods, blessed it seemed with power and knowledge and a casual will they rarely hesitated to use.

We crept towards puberty, then like a Mac truck we hit it, full stop, and in an instance, in a howling second of hormones, felt the innocence leak out from us. How did we not see? Our brothers weren’t smarter! Our mother’s couldn’t MAKE us not go to Joan’s house. We had power, even if we rarely weilded it in the interests of seeing tomorrow. We were growing up, and getting that adult look. A few years in, looking back at 5 or 6 was full of nostalgia, of that damn it, I wish I knew then feeling, and a soft longing for the sandbox.

But wait!, they’d yell, this is THE best time of your life, high school. Treasure it-life will never be this good again.

A teacher told me this once, and I stared at him, puzzled, and asking how anything at 17 could be the best of an entire life. He smiled a wry grin and told me I’d see, someday.

(I’m still waiting. Mr. McNeil, I’d really like that answer now if you don’t mind.)

You crawl, gasping from high school, into the maw of university, college, work, and suddenly, you aren’t a kid. You aren’t young. You’re just another adult clinging vaguely to a dream they made you write down at 15, and wondering how exactly you could get out of this mess.

Adulthood. Past the best time of your life, and now in possession of a recliner suspiciously like the one your best friend’s dad had once.

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

I don’t buy it. I never have.

Think about it. Most of us are living in North America, or some other fairly developed country. For the most part, we’re lower-middle class-we eat well, roof over our heads. We’ll live to be 78 or some random age. We’ll have full lives.

So why should it only be good until 18 or 19? Why the shelf life on joy? Why delude generations into thinking that old age, aging itself, is something worth fearing, and actively loathing?

Wasn’t the moment you laid your eyes on your children one of the best things? Building your own house? Writing that novel?

Planting the ultimate garden? Dreaming the perfect dream, spun on air at 48 or 66?

Our dreams don’t end when we haul up the big girl panties and get our own apartments. Our lust for life and newness doesn’t just drain out with lochia or muscle tone.

Our vibrancy does not have a shelf life. It does not become irrelevant with age.

I’d argue, instead, that it matters so much more as we grow older, as we absorb the world around us in so many new ways, as we make connections between how our mother held our hands at 6 and how she cradles our children now.

There are moments in life that are incredible, and some of those, for me, happened at 17 or 19, I can’t lie. But some happened later on as well, at 25, or at 31. The best time in a life is now, the present-the constant wave that makes youth, the time behind us that creates the very ground we walk on, somewhat useless and weakened. We use our past to feed the future, it’s thought and knowledge molding who we become.

We are so very much more than the very hormone drenched years we’d mostly like to forget.

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

I find myself, these past weeks, finding a new comfort level with age, a respect, a guarded honor. It is necessary and good. I do not have to change who I am to age-I can still listen to black metal and cyndi lauper in one day. I can still have tattoos-I can age as I wish, instead of according to a created timeline that was pulled from air one day in about 1967. My aging is what’s relevant-not the aging of others, be it slow, or quick.

My relevancy is only for me, and my road to the best life ever.

I just wish it hadn’t taken me this long to see it.

Gift Me

I wish to climb inside of you

sweet, to be cradled my small body

warmed by yours, heated.

I’d shape my body as a walnut

round edges and soft youth

shrunk to where you can hold me

this body will raise unfettered

glorious as part of you

flesh blood and years.

Gift me this time. Gift me

your moments, hands held in quiet snowbanks

kisses on eyelids and fingertips

the squaling of your newborn hold me here

in your hot belly, tell me stories.

Give them wings, glued satin to their backs

your lovers, give them seasoned breath which

reeks of yesterday and gift them forgiveness for

breaking the heart that I wish to listen to

forever.

Bring me to you. Wrap me in

denim and petals from the wild tree you planted

that spring

scent me with memory and years uncounted,

carry me

let my small fingers pull from your lips

the aching wisdom I desire.

“Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.”

The sunrise makes me think it.

The pocket of time, like air, entitled in our hands. The golden reach of the morning, shuddering into pinks and purples, gently stretching across the horizon, languid. In moments, small steps, the light reaches for me, cups my chin, laughs her soft laugh and presents her glory to me, my eyes alight with fire and the new day, her wings wet and fragile.

I was as this once, dew in my pocket, my mother’s hips at the east of me, my hands in her blue skirts, clutching. Eyes wide, skin so soft it would make you fear for tomorrow. That light, those morning limbs, they would reach right into that small kitchen with the brown square carpet, lift me up, baptise me in the morning air. I would return blessed, redeemed with the surety of my being, the constancy of love which surrounded me, awed by the magic of it all.

I would grow, sure. We all do, from suckling beast to unsteady youth to breathless adulthood. But my eyes know the fire. They make communion with the light that pours from the frosted morning sky, ask it’s benediction as it’s beloved. My body feels it’s vacancy well before the sky opens, the melancholy breaths that trace fingers and lips. The dream forlorn.

The dream fragile. The dream held over, infused with longing. The dream which cradles us through the womb, and through that bright light, leaving us  only the faintest taste of what it was.

That which we chase, ready to collapse our skin to touch. Our code, our keys, trapped inside our heads, bronzed by morning light.

The dream where anything is possible. This fire makes me think it.

Molasses, again

girlchild

honeychild.

like molasses you are over me

clinging, sticky in your demands

tiny pursed mouth opened to a

black hole of you, of

squirming pouting need.

The

needs of being 2 on this planet.

Soon, sooner than I think

sooner than warned

you will shun my aching arms, you who

finds me, prone

1 am, blurry eyed dragging teddy wordlessly

your airsoft skin gentle on mine, perfect

scented head on my pillow. The candy of an age.

My girlchild to

womanchild to woman, no child.

yet I will always have this child.

I cast my eyes into your future. I cast

lines north to south for

warm mornings, cereal that stays in bowls

wet kisses, tears. They find themselves

tethered, unseen.

I shall hand you reeds to breathe above this. I shall

grasp your hand tighter down stairs. I shall

paint stories with the greenery that frames your

tiny impish glow.

Honeychild, let the bees come. Your sweetness

flows freely as it should.

(originally written in 2007-wanted to post tonight, but lazy, thought I’d rework this a bit.)

Our true nature is free of any and all notions of gender, of any notions of difference whatsoever.

It’s early, it’s dark it’s raining and I’m just too tired to crack open a book, opting instead to look at the window and strain to listen to any conversation on the bus. Not that there’s much-it’s 7am and people can barely muster the will to move towards a seat, let alone cobble together a coherent sentence. I should know. I fell over twice just getting out of bed.

There’s always this one woman who rides the bus-put together in the 1987 way of thinking-shoulder pads, oddly heeled boots, and a full crust of pancake makeup that I can see the cracks in 10 seats away. Her lipstick just can’t keep up, and she’s rather sponge like as the foundation heaves and falls as she speaks, like a busy road during the winter freeze and thaw cycles. I find myself frequently starring at her in awe, especially her over coiffed hair which totters like a scared child on her head. There’s womanhood, and then there’s Bundyhood. She strains the bonds of each.

But what catches me today, as I’m sniffing from the cold and wiping away the early morning leaky eye, is her conversation. Namely, one sentence.

“Oh, boys are just DIFFERENT. Girls like all the same things are easy to figure out. Boys? Well…”

I was struck then, with how bloody offensive that sentence is to, well, just about everyone.

Sure I don’t have boys. I have two girls. But are any two children ever the same? Are girls the same? One daughter of mine loves dinosaurs, insects, Bakugan, Ben 10…things mostly considered “boy”toys if you have the misfortune of buying a happy meal. Rosalyn, the youngest-very pink, loves Barbie, Care Bears, My Little Pony, princesses, playing with dollhouses. Traditional “girl” toys.

They ARE different. As your daughter or son is from you, from me. My children have complete opposite in temperment, and again, Vivian is more masculine, Rosalyn feminine, at least in how the world defines it. I make a point of not doing so. Toys at McDonalds are not “girl”or boy”-it’s the car toy or the kitty toy. We don’t refer to what Vivian likes as boy toys-it makes no sense, since she’s not a boy and she loves them. Vivian is very much mad then over it, as I’ve heard others attribute to their boys in the past, Rosalyn, well, she’ll be the kid in grade school that remembers exactly when you tripped her in the hall in Grade 6 when she’s 25. Rosalyn gets so vividly angry or happy…

The point is-there is no singular, defining moment for gender. We can’t point and say “yup. That’s a girl”. I have two who are so vastly different some days that I wonder where they came from and how they can be so much themselves. But that’s just it-they are themselves. I was told constantly to be more “ladylike” to stop acting like a boy, and in one inspired moment, to keep my shirt on, girls don’t run around without one. Girls wear skirts. Girls don’t wear black.

I’m who I am-not because I wore skirts, and not because my mother had a rigid view of gender. I am, inherently, who I am. Sometimes I’m difficult. Sometimes, I’m not. Just like my daughters.

This constant way we, as a society have of minimizing, making everything common and grouped, like a herd of antelope startled-it bothers me.  A child is never him or herself. He’s such a BOY. She’s so girly. She’s just like her mother. He’s acting just like his father did at that age.

Regardless of any of it being true. We must fold our children into small shapes, until they fit. We must never allow them the freedom of themselves.

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

It was early, but I felt sad. I felt sad for this little boy, judged before action, framed in the perception of a stranger’s eye, now marked, ever so slightly, in the eye of his mother.

If we aren’t accepted, even there, what then?

Kids these days…

We go to a show to see these guys, an all ages show, a rarity around here, most places really. It’s good-when you’re a kid and you live anywhere that’s not Toronto or Montreal or such, see a band while underage-nearly impossible, like gaining the grail from some wizened old man who didn’t want to let it go.

But lord, it makes a girl feel old.

It’s not just the age. It’s the thought that takes hold, the one that makes me shake my head when I see a girl who I could have been, one with that same loose coordination of I don’t give a fuck and please, love me?, the one with the weird pants and the glorious hair. It’s that thought that rolls it’s eyes and mutters what we all mutter lately-has it really been that long?

And my favorite-if I had fucked up at 15, I could been the mother of one of these kids. Truly.

Youth. It’s shiny and brilliant and awkward. And utterly fucking awesome.

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

As bodies bounced and flew, through their set (which I loved and thankfully we bought the record!) and continued into theirs (which wasn’t terrible but it’s been done…), as the colors circles, emeshed with hair, with laughter and grunts, feet kicking and hands flailing, I couldn’t help but smile.

There’s an age, and we’ve all been there and held it softly in our hands. For all the fear, all the heartache and worry, at 15 at 17,  there is a fire inside that cannot quench itself-and it burns electric. Over hair that flailed and waved, hands that threw the horns, laughs and gasps and “fuck ya’s!” floated a whisper, a simmering veil of possibility.

Of course it floated out of my grasp. And when you’re 16 and the world consists of your mother telling you the car needs to be filled up and you better get to sleep, it’s hard to see past yourself enough to see, just over there-the future.

The power we held then! The power these kids had-all at once I say, overlaid like gilt, their futures. The children they would hold, the book, the song, the formula they would write, the lives they would save. I looked into that potential saw future, now. Saw in a startling moment that these are not children, never just children-they are people, alive and vibrant with the truth and beauty only that age can bring.

The bands switched, and the coalesced group they had become splintered, into corners, and I saw as well that which we refuse to admit.

That we’re the future too.

Maybe we don’t burn with the same vivid colors we did at their age. Maybe we don’t shine as brightly as 18 does. But we aren’t the past. We aren’t stagnant, unless we choose so. We have that same potential that the girl who reminded me so much of 17 year old me does, grasping on to her boyfriend in that thirsty way you have of loving then. We can meet on a plane, on the continuum of change and want.

The only difference is that now, I’m a lot more afraid to try.

I looked at that crowd, and saw fearlessness. Swagger. Fear, loathing, love, the emotions you remember feeling like a flame in your belly the last time you had to ask permission to stay out all night. But I saw hope, and power. I saw a want for difference, a lust for creation, the potential for anything.

The power to make, the power to be, the power to become. And it lit up the room.

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

It’s hard to feel old when you see yourself, ghost like, running in front of you, ignorant to everything that isn’t what you want. It’s hard to feel old when the people in front of you give you so much hope for yourself.

Think not on the bipolar mother.

I read my email, my breath stricken, sliding down my chest, a friend, writing in response to my everything ok? her response most definitely not ok, not to me, not really.

I’ll leave her to out herself if she wishes, but she’s wonderfully aware of the magic our world provides and harbours a distinct talent for molding words into her wishes. She writes as I wish I could have already, years ago.

My mother, she admits, diagnosed bipolar, meds again.

My heart, could it freeze and shatter, would be shards in my chest.

I think of me, crawling on a floor, blindly crying filled with black rage and pain.

I think of my rejection of my children, my inability to think of them as people I need to protect.

I think of the paranoia which poured from my eyes, my arms, my mouth. How daggered and poisoned it was.

I imagine my daughters dealing with it, newly born, as teenagers, as children old enough to understand just enough what’s really going on. I imagine them handing me my meds or calling the doctor if I’m manic.

I imagine dealing with this while fragile and fifteen.

I can’t.

Kate Tells…

 

Love Kate. Love The Dread Crew. Answer, and maybe win a signed review copy you can sell for millions on eBay when Kate is the next Stephanie Meyer. Without the crap writing and sparkle.

 

1)  You are facing an epic journey. You may choose one companion, one tool and one vehicle from any book or film to accompany you. Or just one of the three. It’s up to you. What do you choose?

Well that’s easy. Rudi’s horse Epona from S.M Stirling’s Novels of the Change, with The Orb from the Belgariad and Tyler Durden.

2)  You can escape to the insides of any book. Where do you go, and why?

Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy. The idea of woman being able to change, for the better, however different it makes her, intrigues me, as does the potential for change. And space. The chance to capture space, the newness….

3)  You can bring one literary character into your current life. Who do you choose, and why?

Leah from The Red Tent. I could use a little blunt strength once in awhile.

4)  The Belgariad and Mallorean are my go-to books. I could read those books fifty-seven times in a row without a break for food or a pee and not be remotely bored. In fact I’ve already done that but it wasn’t fifty-seven times. It was sixty-four hundred. (I love the entire series. Easy to read, familiar characters…)

5)  Of all the literary or film characters that made an impression on you as a kid, who was the most enviable?

Jacob Two Two.

6)  Of all the literary or film characters that made an impression on you as a kid, who was the most frightening?

Darth Vader. I was TERRIFIED he was hiding in the hallway to my parents room. The hallway I had to walk past every day.

7)  Every time I read The Fire Dwellers, I see something in it that I haven’t seen before.

 It is imperative that Magician be made into a movie. Now. I am already picketing Hollywood for this—but if they cast Dominic West as Pug, I will not be happy. I will, however, be appeased if they cast Laurent Lucas.

9)  The 25th Hour is a book that should never be made (or should have never been made) into a film. (I love you Ed, but the movie just…I dunno…)

10)  After all these years, the  Drano scene in the book/movie Heathers still manages to give me the queebs.

11)  After all these years, the scene where Samantha Mathis takes off her shirt in the book/movie  Pump up the Volume still manages to give me a thrill.

12)  If I could corner the author  of After You, here’s what I’d say to them one minute or less about their book, WHY!!!! WHY JULIE WHY!?!?! That ending…WHY?!?!?!:

13)  The coolest non-fiction book I’ve ever read is Cosmos. Every time I flip through it, it makes me want to explore, see the world, honor the world around me.

Don’t hold your breath.

My father emerges from a dusky purple car after 5 months or so, all smoke and ash and grime, and I find myself startled. He is gaunt, he is, smaller, almost dainty. The voluminous man I grew up with, all substance and solidity, he’s hidden away in a back pocket and instead this husk stands before me and I freeze, terrified. No one loses weight, this kind of weight, no one except for the dead.

I feverishly text my brother later. “He’s not sick, is he? You’d tell me, right?” and he laughs off my worry, reminds me Dad has worked his ass off on the front yard of his house all summer, and since he’s never been a big eater, the weight just dropped off.

I haven’t been this thin since I got married! he crows and I’m caught short, stuck between a latent whimper of remembrance, my mother’s grey shell on a bed, hollow and weightless, and the thought that maybe, for once, he’s actually getting some exercise and eating right.

I also know my father. Terrified of doctors and needles both, since 8 years old. He’ll eat glass to avoid a doctor, and would never, ever tell either of us if something was seriously wrong.

It would be like him to just, float away into the ether, back to the arms, somewhere, of his devoted and loved wife.

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

I’m 32. Why does all of this reduce me to feeling like I’m 12 again? I stretch my arms out for family only to find there is none, and that the spaces between grow larger each day.

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

I see it now. I have to face it, I have to hold reality in my hand and think someday, soon, I will be picking a casket, watching the open ground swallow my parent, allowing him to rest beside his beloved, taken far too soon. I will be handling the small pile of what’s it’s left over from a life-paperwork that proves you existed, paintings, drawing, scribbles. Cuff links and cigarette lighters. My mother’s wedding ring. Handwritten cards from when I was 14.

Meaningless really. A wisp of metal, too little to be worth much. Paper that will crumble and rot into nothing, given enough time. A life that can be erased, easily, with little pain.

This is the life most of us hold. A box of trinkets, and a wrinkled heart.

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

The girls don’t notice that he’s half of who they’ve known all their lives. He’s still bouncy and allows them to wrestle, giggles and screams reverberating through the house. I’m warmed by the sound, and suddenly, sharply realize that I’ll someday have to tell them their wonderful, beloved Poppi is gone. And my heart dissolves into pieces, slithering off it’s shelf wondering if I’ll be strong enough then, adult enough to tell them he’s gone.

That my father, the one last constant, the very human man, is no longer alive.

I hear the giggles and tuck the thought away. Time for eulogies and sad songs later. Let’s live his life now, so we’ve something to say at the wake.

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

He laughs and it’s pure happy, a soul healed by time and small versions of me.

Peace.

Sick or just skinny, it’s just right. I let out the breath I’ve been holding all day, and let the noise wash me.

Opus 32

I feel old.

My daughter asks, as we read a book of numbers with her sister, after she’s seen herself, 6!, which one I am. She pauses before I can answer, remembering, oh! you’re 32, spitting the words out like something she doesn’t like to eat, squash or raw potato. Not as old I remind her, as my father, 71 and kicking, able to take their affection, even at 7am.

She asks what old is, arbitrarily plucking 89 out of the air before her. She tastes the number, rolls it around for a bit, then quietly asks will I live to be 89? I’d like to be 89? and of course I answer it’s a fine age and she will see it, maybe even with a few or 5 of chubby grandchildren around her, and suddenly, I can see and imagine it, my baby beyond me, my legacy in her arms and lips, something around the eye of daughter 2, or in the way her grandson holds his arms when angry. I swell to see those children.

I can glimpse her future, slightly.

Lean to the left, and I see her, another her, at 35 maybe, alone, pleased to be there, her hands in pockets dirty and worn as her feet carry her to another passion, a world away from mine, her children those creatures or words she keeps safe, her life circling itself, drunk on the beauty she savors and protects. I am proud of her here, of her strength, of the will I’d like to think she kept of the things I bequeathed her, of her beauty itself, the beauty she never sees, busy for the trees and the people in her path.

She’s breathtaking at any age, and she makes me feel mine, even at 6.

*********

I want to believe, closing my eyes and burning it in to my brain, that I can still go anywhere, be anyone, dance on the moon, eat rice in Nepal. But at 32, rapidly setting in on 40, I know that any adventures I have now, at this adult age, will not be those I’d have had at 17. They’re different with the world and a mortgage and people who rely on your bank account waiting for you. I know I could go-I know we could sell everything and disappear into the masses of somewhere else, but freedom isn’t the same when ultimately, your decisions decide someone else’s future.

32 doesn’t feel so far removed from 17, but dammit if it doesn’t feel so scarily close to 40, which is SO fucking removed from that teenage girl who still lives in my chest. That teenage girl who is so eerily like this 6 year old wondering, how old are you anyway? Are you really that old? Is it old? Why are you old?

Why am I old? Am I old? Is this number an excuse to keep me tethered, to warn me, to hold me to a promise I don’t recall making? Does age come with the tears that flow when you imagine your firstborn daughter in labour, birthing her firstborn? Does age matter when you can see the people your children might be, a mechanic or physics teacher, working away at their lives? Does age come with the wrinkles that come crawling up my hands, the droop in the skin, the pop in my joints that makes Vivian ask what was that noise!?

Who will we be with age? Who will we be for them, as we leave-what message will our age leave them? Do we bemoan our wrinkles, our grey hair and dropping paunch, or do we embrace them as signs that wisdom has collected and called? Do we stand tall and state these numbers-32 or 45 or 66 and remind our daughters that age is as it should be. We desire to grow up, we desire to be aged, we wish to no longer be the pretty fickle things our youth gave us, instead turning to the women we rightfully should be, strong and proud and not quite so foreign.

Why do we hide our nature?

I tell Vivian, clearly when she asks, 32, I am 32 now, and I don’t mind, not one bit. 15 was fun, so was 23, 26 was pretty damn cool, but growing up-that’s how life is and how we should dance with it. We should embrace that age, this age, our age, and teach our daughters to grab it by the horns and honor it. My adventures-my experiences will be different at 45 than they were at 20, but who is to say that they won’t be richer for that difference? Who decided age came with liability or dishonor?

*****

She saw my Motherless Mothers book on the way to bed, asked what it meant. Because my Mommy was gone when I was 11 I answered. And I have no idea what a 12 year old girl looks like because of this, and the book will help me understand age. At least, I hope.

Are you going to die when I’m 11?

That question I’ve been awaiting for 6 years. The tears I struggle to reign in. The price of disclosure I suppose.

No. I will live long. A long time. Until you’re 89. She’s not old enough to know that’s a lie yet.

I feel old now, my mother’s 43, or rather, the 37 or 38 she would have been when I was 6, weighing on me, like a noose. All the things she never did, the horses that never ran through dark fields for her, the sweet granddaughters who never graced her lap, the love in my veins for her,  they dangle on the honor of my age just now, and I feel heavy.

I won’t die. I whisper. I have far too much to do.

Thank you for calling…

I spend my days around people who use the word “they” like a metaphor to be feared, a blanket to cover their day and their worries. I listen to the sheltered bigotry of people who would never claim to be racist or sexist or classist.

They hate talking to cheap paki’s who try and bargain their way out of everything.

They hate talking to women who are rude enough to talk to their husbands while on the phone. How rude! They bellow.

They shake their heads, wondering why someone on disability would dare to have something like television, or dare to fall behind.

The incessant “I” that I hear, day after day, a lack of empathy not based in selling something, the rarity of someone else truly wanting to make the day better for another human being. In a week I’ve received really helpful renovation advice, details on the differences in heat in 4 countries, lessons on what’s ahead for me when the girls turn 13 or 14, and the giddy joy that comes from hearing someone smile over a phone line. I’ve had recommendations for books, for movies, even a good deal on a car if I ever happen to be in Oshawa and in need.

So somedays are more challenging. I’m not building a rocket ship. I’m not cutting into a baby’s heart. I’m solving simple issues at a desk, with a headset wrapped around my head. I’m doing what I want everyone else to do for me. I’m trying to help.

Say what you will about this shitty job-the last time you encountered TRULY horrid service, it ruined your day. It maybe ruined your week, colored your opinion of a company. But mostly, it just fucking sucked, right?

The overwhelming judgement covers me some nights, causing my eyes to flutter, and breath to pull up from beneath me.

I’m not immune. I have a particular…irritation with the dialet of the white, middle class 16-25 year old female. The second I hear it, I get angry. I find myself closing up.

So I take a breath, face my own judgement, which I will admit, is wrong 95% of the time, and I will soldier on, remembering that this girl is just flesh and blood and need, like everyone else.

Watching my coworkers really makes me wonder-what happens when I call somewhere? When I leave a store after having my issue dealt with? In person, am I just another fat old housewife? On the phone, am I just another woman too lazy to learn how to hook up her own electronics? Am I a bitch? Am I too poor?

Do we walk like this daily, awash in our assumptions, firm in a belief that we’re right, that it’s ok? Tidy in our small corners?

I hate it. I hate knowing that people live daily with a belief that their life is better, their skin, their money, and sleep well believing that they aren’t like that. They don’t hate “those” people. They have nothing against people on welfare, of course not. I look at my daughters and feel so incredibly sad that this type of “ism” is low lying in so many people-the very people who will smile and tell you that color doesn’t matter, gender is just a thing.

Those people grimace at you over the phone if you’re behind on bills because you’ve been sick and you need to make some changes. Those people will roll their eyes and call you names on mute because your accent is slightly difficult and they just can’t be bothered to try a little harder. Those people will refuse to see anyone not like them as human.

I don’t have the best job, I won’t solve world hunger. But I learn something-everyday, about people, about me, about treating people better, finding what they need, even if sometimes, it’s an ear to tell someone about the fiance they just had arrested for beating them, or how lonely their bedroom is without music, now that the divorce is final. I learn about engagements, the last day, ever, of school, the beauty of age between to lovers, 40 years in.

I am privy to so much that I could never dare to judge-every day, people give me far too many gifts.

In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.

I could always feel the slight something off.

Not wrong. Just…slightly left of center. An ability to feel more keenly, sensitive. A “cry-baby” as peers, teachers, and occasionally parents, frustrated, would call it.

After my mother died, I felt this power even more, picking up on the emotion radiating from others, swallowing it much like a sin eater and making it mine. Sadness was overwhelming and yet pedestrian. Even at 12 or 13, the suicidal thoughts which flickered seemed normal, standard, and caused me no alarm.

The world tells you teenagers are mopey, pained creatures, so I assumed I was normal. With the addition of losing my mother young, so did everyone else.

I made all the wrong decisions for awhile, felt free, was free, the monster growling in my head stunned into submission by mania and glee.

When it came tumbling down, it was slow, but it was awful. The knowledge that something is wrong, the inability to fix, the lack of help when I did reach out. Coupled with someone trying to love me, and my being unable to let him, the world closed in, and stopped, stagnant.

A world without color isn’t life.

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

While you can live with depression, live with unrelenting grey days that rarely seem to pass, sprinkled with sparkling good days here and there which give hope, you cannot live well. You cannot thrive. Which is why I may always be grateful to my second pregnancy.

I went insane then. If I look back, I can place myself slightly into my head, swirling with emotion that overcomes at every curve, possessed by a black rage, akin to Morrigu, high on sweet sugar love for those around me, transfixed and terrified at the thought of a family of 8 dying in a fire, unable to look away, swallowed by sorrow. 9 months like this, and then an aftermath of death desire, hatred for my child, rejection of my breast by myself.

It took a year to love that baby I protect so fiercely now.

A chance call from a support worker led to a conversation with a social worked led to a therapist who led me to a psychologist via my GP. Which all led, finally, to the proper diagnosis after so many years.

I’m not ashamed to admit I cried, to find have the words, the right words, to commit to my brain, a reason, something I could fix instead of an undulating “fucked up” that followed me around like smoke.

I dutifully held out my hand, took my pills. Tried more pills, found something that worked, finally. Put myself in the hospital, found the bravery somewhere. Rested my head on nurses and doctor. Let them help me fix me.

Find myself today, the fog mostly lifted from my brain, my family, strong and still here, with me. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s almost so normal.

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

There are people with small depressions. Not enough to keep them in bed, or in the house, but enough to rub the shine of each moment. Some are like me, teetering on the edge, nearly destroying their lives but somehow, finding their way and making it right. Others are where I was so tempting to fall back into, that world colored by the sickness, pretty like Delerium’ s holdings, nonsensical by safe in it’s insanity.  Others still take their meds, live their lives, with you none the wiser. Mother’s with new babies. Wives who have lost their husbands.

Everyone has a story, whether it lasts a month or a year or 20. Everyone has held their mental health in their hands at one point, and tried to juggle. Yet so many of us still try and turn from it, unwilling to face Mental Illness as a real sickness,  much as you might view diabetes. A chronic illness that can be helped or overcome with medication, therapy, diet, lifestyle changes, or a combination of all these things. An illness that might change us from who we are to someone else. I don’t recognize the person I was for years-she wasn’t me. She rarely laughed, or smiled, couldn’t leave the house. I’m not that person anymore. She’s receded into me, part of who I was but not who I am.

I watch each day as comments pile up on posts like “Why do bipolar partners push people away” (371) or “Why does my bi-polar husband run away?” (71), posts written because so many people searched the phrases. I grind my teeth in frustration at the irrational arguments against The Mother’s Act in the US, wondering why mother’s need to punish other mother’s by blocking such mundane legislation. I overhear people are work joking about how they think a friend is crazy, maybe bipolar, and how hideous that is, and I wonder if they realize their friend might very well be sick, and very shamed by them. I wonder why we use crazy as an adjective.

Mental illness, our mental health, shouldn’t isolate us. It should bring us together. We aren’t alone-nearly everyone has been touched, whether they have a mental illness, or a friend or family member does. We aren’t doing the St Vitus dance in the woods, we aren’t locked away in an institution any longer, hysterical. We live full, magical lives, even while sick. We ride the bus with you, we bear your children.

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week. For those of you still ashamed by what’s wrong-don’t be. You have done nothing. You can fix it, you can be helped. Most importantly, you deserve to have your voice without shame or fear. If you have someone in your life with mental illness, and you worry about, have questions-ask them. For my part, I feel I owe it to others to try and educate people about what mental illness really means. That it’s not a death sentence, and I’m not in a hovel eating cat food.

I have a family I love, who loves me back, I have a house, I have a job, I have skills and I live a life I love. I might have a mental illness, but it doesn’t have me.

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

I watch my children for signs I need to worry. I know, that more than likely, a genetic predisposition coupled with traumatic events in my childhood set me up for my bipolar. So I don’t worry too much. But if I can find a way to make sure they do not have this struggle, I will do so.

Don’t get me wrong. I like who I am, and I’m proud of who I’ve become. I just want their lives to be far easier. Each breath should never be a mental struggle. Love shouldn’t be a struggle.

I have this voice for them, should they ever need it.

Walk

 

They skip ahead of me, as usual, half running, half jumping, singing “Last one to the bridge is a rotten, or in Rosalyn’s case, a “wotten” egg.”

Vivian runs fearlessly, straight on until morning, Ros, not so much, casting the odd glance backwards, looking for me, torn between grown up fun and the security of my hands. Eventually Vivian slows down for Ros to catch her, and they lean into each other. There are secrets there, which will only grow.

I have daughters.

They are sisters.

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

Lately, they are closer, by which I mean, conversely more enamoured and more irritated by each other. We walk up the trail, and they plot their “mission” together, covertly. We walk home, and Rosalyn is crying because Vivian won’t let her use her code name and it’s!not!fair!hmph! ~stompfeet~.

They grow closer each day, Rosalyn less and less and baby, Vivian more and more interested in her sister as someone to hang out with, someone who can play and laugh and sing with her. They have grown so over this summer. Vivian becoming this long limbed woman who I can see, ghostlike, hovering over her like a texture someone muddled together in a backroom. Her hair glitters in the sunlight, warm oak and pine, her eyes old already, her soul, muddled like buttered rum.

While Rosalyn has become sturdier, stronger, capable, at 4, of lifting a 12 pack of Coke off the shelf and on to the buggy, making it impossible for me to call her “baby” and mean it anymore. She twinkles, like a star, and sings her songs into the air like a memory. I keep thinking she’s this little creature, surprised when she follows instructions or grabs her own snack without asking me to help.

They become less my daughters, and more their sisters with each month that moves past us. I can’t keep up, the legs that spike, the ears that hear everything, the fingers which have lost their stubble, found their affinity for piano instead. I watch them, and realize that soon, they’ll know more about each other than I’ll know about them.

And dammit, if it isn’t sad, hitting me in the chest as the fall sun glows on their backs. This pure knowledge that they’re growing up, and past me, a breeze I cannot shutter indoors or let cool me. I feel like I can grab one of them, twirl them upside down, and shake out my babies, my long lost, unappreciated babies. Those which were mine.

I’m jealous. I’m jealous as all get out of the relationship that’s developing-the lying for each other, the happiness when Vivian walks in the door from school, the hugs, the sharing without asking, the compassion and love my girls have for one another. It’s lovely, and tugs at my eyes each day. I tear up at the hope and knowledge that this is who they’ll be 20 years from now, friends, co-conspirators. Hopeless without the other.

I’m prouder than I could ever say at the sight and sound of my daughters, hand in hand, walking away from me, giggles from their lips and eyes.

Written

I started.

I always say that, in my head or allowed, assuming that thought and plotting counts as starting the writing. But this week, I really did.

I took the plunge, and started writing my book.

The first night of writing was like being punched, repeatedly in the stomach. The very act of writing down, in some cases, I’ve never actually spoken of-it drained like the flu might. Utterly from the bottom. Finding the narrative, the arc to pull my threads from-not nearly has hard as just buckling down and writing.

Blending fiction into my reality-pouring the years out onto paper, making them real outside. Not just real, but meaningful in a scope larger than that which I usually cram in this space.

Facing the person I’ve been.

I stared at my laptop last night, willing myself to write, and found myself scared. Shaking from wet memories I thought I had let go of, even without venting them to the outside. Memory that’s never been confronted.

Fear, untouched, burns.

I don’t know where this will go. With my history, I’ll likely play true to type and not finish, just another project I try and fail at.

But trying counts, right?

What would you do

It was cold when I climbed on the bus, too cold for July in my mind. I had walked, alone, bag on back, full of clothes, books stolen from libraries, cigarettes. Not much money. I could see my breath on the air at 6am, and I moved quickly to the gas station that doubled as a bus depot in that tiny town.

I was the only girl to climb aboard, clutching my things to me.

I had said goodbye to my father through a haze of cigarette smoke and sadness that morning, my 16 years on the earth still not enough to say all those things I needed to say-I love you, but I can’t stay near you. You’re killing me while you kill you.

Love me father. See me, hear me, touch me dammit love me. I’m still your daughter. See through your pain.

I couldn’t say any of that. So instead, I invented a half cocked story about visiting friends back home, demanded money for a bus ticket and took off. He didn’t even look me in the eye when I left, my hand waiving away his offer of a ride.

I crouched in my seat, headphones to head, and watched the trees and stone of Northern Ontario flash by me. It’s a long drive, full of KOA parks, edges falling into the coldest lake, strange men with narrowed eyes in odd towns on dirt roads.  The trees whipping by were better than words. Apologies translated into road.

Somewhere around White River, a slight South Asian man took a liking to me. He sat close, leaned in as I pushed myself again the window, annoyed. His breath was moist, and his hands-they wanted to be grabby. I stayed mostly silent, not out of fear, but out of that little girl need to not upset anyone. To be good. To be liked.

When the bus stopped at Sudbury, I fled, moved my stuff to the back of the bus, and hoped.

While waiting to leave, sitting eating grilled cheese and reading Androncles and the Lion, he walked up, all golden red hair and beard, tall. He liked my hair, David did, wondered why I was reading such a serious book on the bus of all places.

I told him it was stolen, and so it was only fair I read it after all that.

The asian simpered near, asked me why I moved.

“Because I don’t want to be bothered.” I replied, freed by the air, the green grass and the warm sun on my toes.  David stared up at him as well, watched with me as he moved away.

“It’s always the south asians” I explained. “And I have no idea why.”

By Toronto, I had decided to visit with him for a week. By the end of that weekend, I slept with him. He looked at me differently than anyone else ever had. He saw me, saw a beauty in me I couldn’t see.

I told him I couldn’t stay. I went home for a few weeks, but everyone had moved on. They were people I no longer recognized.

I called David, said I wanted to come back to him. He lent me money for a train ticket, met me at the station.

I don’t even think I liked him if I’m honest with myself. I was stone cold with him-following the motions of how a lover should be, trying to be happy with him. He was bright, successful, destined to do something with himself. Maybe it was the Phish, or his hideous laugh, or maybe it was just the fact that I was too brittle to love anyone, to molten inside to relax into someone.

When I called home to tell my father where I settled, I neglected to mention that the friend I was staying with I had only known for 4 weeks or so, and that I was sleeping with him. I don’t think my father heard me anyway.

Life is not fair Honey Bear.

034

Originally uploaded by thordora

She’s been tears and fears lately, brimming with joy and cringing at the wings she’s growing, her feathers new and moist.

It’s hard to be six.

The world is unfair. She needs help. She isn’t smart enough. She isn’t good enough.

The words from a toxic friendship with an even more toxic parent still hover around her, float, flying out occasionally with a random, “Tomas said I’m stupid. Tomas always broke my things-he broke everyone’s things”, “Tomas broke my heart.”

At six, where does a girl child learn this, a broken heart?

She’s learned already that some adults cannot, should not be trusted. We’ve learned the lesson too, as she speaks more about what happened, the things she couldn’t tell us then, for whatever reason.

We trusted someone who didn’t tell us things, stories about stuff like addiction and criminal records. We trusted her and we trusted him and her little heart-it’s been broken by a boy who’s mother I question in my head, or did question. Her child has created in mine a little girl who doubts, a shining creature who now questions what she knew, her brilliance, her personal perfection, the wonder she grants the world.

If I could hate a child, I would.

She lashes out, not at me, but others, and when I question, she cries in my arms and tells me there’s just too many words in her head and she doesn’t know where to put them.

She’s watched people be hateful and mean to each other, and thinks this is how life really is.

Her nightmare’s kept her up last night, her tears falling on my arms as I cradled her head, the tiny head I brought home years ago and swore I’d protect from harm, swore I’d keep happy.

I broke my promise. Yet I didn’t even know until it was too late to stop it.

Now I fix it. Now I hold her little body as it shakes with the anger she rightfully feels, the sadness, the betrayal. I hold her and wait for the light to appear once more, her light, the beautiful woman in waiting. I tell her she never has to see him again, hear his voice.

I wonder for him, and what he lives all day. We tried-lord knows we tried for him. But did we try hard enough? Should we do more? Do we make a call that rips a child from their mother?

We choose to stop answering the phone, locking the doors. We wait for them to move.

Vivian figures it out, and stares at me with grateful eyes.

It’s a perfect day.

We walked up the gravel path, my girls and I. Rosalyn slightly unwilling and surly about the entire thing, Vivian bouncing and running ahead, Tigger in blue stripes and purple suede shoes. We walk the path we always do, past the blackberry and raspberry bushes, past where the caterpillars made their huge tent nest one year, past where the old husky used to bark our passage. We search for beavers and snakes near the bridge, resting lightly on the wood.

There’s wind but it’s bracing, with the slightest taste of winter upon it, shaking the early weakerthans from the trees. I wrap and tie my sweater around Rosalyn, so it fits like a cape, and she stops feeling the cool as easily she does, my water baby. The sun ripples through the leaves, green with all the attention this last fair weekend, and it falls upon us.

There’s a tiny hand in mine which squeezes how and again, or retracts, a thumb back into it’s mouth. There’s a miniature version of me, crowing into the late day sunlight, blessed by angels or sunspots as she whirls into this day.

We stumble up the soft yielding trails off the gravel, a world the girls gasp at.

“Nurse Logs” I point out.

Vivian wonders, Rosalyn wonders, what could that be?

“They give life,” I whisper, conscious of the implication, “They give life even when dead, allowing new things to grow from what it’s left behind. Nothing wasted, nothing disappears. A circle.”

The bigger things don’t matter. They’re merely fascinated by the idea that something dead can also mean something alive, and every ten feet “Nurse Log! COOOOL!” rings out.

The sun would pierce the tree tops, and beckon, the wind hands that reminded, a world conspiring to remind. My mind calling out “I love this. This, now, I love this world we’re made. Full of love and joy and wonder, even through all the hard things and the whining and the pouting. It’s all just perfect.”

And yes. It is.

“Adults are obsolete children.”

I turned around and summer had stood up, dusted itself off, and wandered into a closet somewhere near Tasmania. I could have sworn that I was just complaining about never ending heat and humidity, sweat dripping off the tip of my nose. Lo-it’s fall suddenly, leaves holding their aching backs and turning gemlike, me needing my hoodie for the walk home.

This progression, so subtle and sudden, also reminds me I’m another year older soon. It’s a nasty gift, having a birthday at the season change. It’s a reminder, a bitter one, that my summer comes to an end, bringing forth what we all hope will be a brilliant and comfortable fall.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the fall days are sunny and comforting, an arm chair to relax in. Some years, the winds blow cold early and the snow finds it’s way to us before we’re ready, and we clutch at our shoulders, wondering how it happened so fast.

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

I’m 32 this year, and I find myself turning that number over and over on the tip of my tongue, like I might a new pea or a piece of candy coated in citric acid. It doesn’t fit this number, this thirty TWO, so close on the heels of that cursed 30 that seems so monumental so recently. Mentally I’m staring back at myself, like I’d stare at my ass, wondering how it got there and who was responsible for it. 32 you see, is much closer to 40 than I’m altogether comfortable with, much close to frank internal discussions of the mortality I’m supposedly not concerned with. 32 is this weirdly adult place I’m stumbling across, all frizzy hair and bad shoes, questionable fashion choices and irresponsible parenting.

32 just seems all too bloody real.

It’s not a matter of age, despite the shuddering queasy I hold towards 43, that myth of an age my mother made. I’m ok with growing old. I’m ok, I think, with the years flipping past me like a rolodex, merging into a nebulous “before” that combines the idiot I was at 16 with the frightening almost woman I was at 25. I’m ok, teary eyes and a bit tight in the chest, with the idea of one day lying in bed surrounded by my children, their children maybe, keening at my death. It’s part of life, part of the circle I somewhat worship and believe so fervantly in, if I can be described as believing in anything at all.

I’m good with life, and I’m good with death.

It’s the adult part I always seem to stumble on, vague memories of the friends of my mother, all dowdy in their elastic waist pants and puffy housewife hair. I remember them being the age I am now, and seeming so settled in their roles, so accepting and peaceful with it.

I don’t delude myself into thinking that perhaps at 6 or 8 I didn’t have the same insight I’d like to think I have now. But there was some indefinable something that my mother’s generation had that I don’t, and it bothers me like one of those slivers you get in the bottom of your foot, the kind that grows into the callous until worn off, not exactly painful but just very much there.

32 seems old, but not in a tired way-it’s more like I used to be the Empress begging Atreyu to save her, and now, I feel more like the Nothing, stretching myself without purpose or end. There’s something about the number itself, a numbing agent or a scare tactic, a clucking of the tongue, laughing as I drag myself out of bed each day at 10, the sad effects of working nights.

This isn’t what 32 should feel like. I should feel settled. I should feel responsible. I should feel more me.

It was a lie wasn’t it? Our parents stayed awake thinking these very thoughts, staring at the drain of their lives, or worse, they didn’t. Maybe they just lived without the constant second and 15 guessing so many of us are privy too. Maybe they were too busy living their lives to examine them, and were then happier for it.

Maybe 32, or 38 or 43 was just another fucking number in a life.

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

At 32, my mother would have just recently become a mother to me. I would have maybe started walking by then, babbling perhaps. I have an old, crackling portrait of me, diaper bulging bottom and winter coat, dancing in the door way of the corner store behind the house I grew up in. You can just make out my mother’s purse in the background. That was my mother at 32. That is the only way I know my mother at my age, in pieces, in the cracked shards of an old picture I’m soon to lose forever. It shows nothing of the angst of an age, of the tiredness of relatively new motherhood, of life as a housewife and mother, a full time job if there is one.

Instead, in it I smile, guileless, with love and affection and joy.

My mother I think, knew much more than she ever let on.