Venus was her name

When I was a little girl, my mother worked part time in a ratty little flower shop behind the house. When she wasn’t busy daring me to touch the dead bodies when we delivered flowers for funerals, she was trying to convince me to stick my fingers in the mouths of Venus Fly Traps. And not to mention the time she gave me a Venus Fly Trap to give my grade 4 teacher. She said she thought it would be a “neat” gift-frankly, I think it was a little passive aggressive fuck you to a teacher she didn’t much like.

Either way.

 

About now, then

If this was then, she’d be dead by now.

It would be early evening, and I would have been preparing for bed, or more than likely in our small, insular town, peeling casseroles off the front porch. Left quietly by the well meaning, a card tucked inside, the sides still warm from hands that departed before any of us could say thank you, or at least stare blankly at them, wondering why we were the only ones who felt like the earth had moved so much in so little time.

I would have come back from a friend down the street, after standing, shell shocked in front of the fire station telling them, “It’s over, she’s dead now, I’m fine.” The stark frozen words that exited my mouth that day. I would have done my part, and my duty, a play I signed on for months back, my staring role, I would have been there, as my classmates stared, gaped really, and the teachers tried to find a nice way to find out why I was there, my my 11 year old self was so unbowed by the events of the day that I was ready, and willing, to be someone else for awhile.

“She’d see me” I’d explained to my father “At least this way, she’d be able to see me.”

About now we would have all been sitting in the quiet of our house, oddly empty when filled to the brim with so many people, the stillness eerie and pressing upon my shoulders. Maybe we stared at each other, the knowledge of my mother’s cold body tucked into a corner somewhere, behind a tree perhaps, where we didn’t need to see it.

About now, I’d be thinking about the day, how it started with a seizure, and a neighbour after the ambulance left. How I muttered she’d be fine and slammed the door before I had a chance to cry. I’d be thinking of my brother, standing in the schoolyard, my mother’s favorite priest (and mine, truth be told) in the car, waiting, the teacher nodding sadly, her hand stretched out to me. The long drive there.

The cold hallways that never changed. The stench of death. The transience on that floor. Even the furniture was uncomfortable.

About now I’d be thinking of that fragmented moment when the machines died, and I screamed and crumbled to the floor, and the stale me that was froze in time, and became merely “ok”. About now I’d be wondering if it was a dream, and she’d come walking around the corner and tell me to tidy my room.

It was all in the book they gave me, months before. Or months after, I never touched it, not for a long time, not willing to admit my loss, our loss, not really, shock taking months to ooze itself from my pores. 

About now I was already feeling sick and tired of being a grown up, being brave, like I could anticipate my life, and how I’d need to split it between having fun and doing what needed to be done. How tired I would become of doing all the things that needed to be done, of paying attention where none was paid to me. Of being a woman when I never really got to taste being a child.

About now I’d be wondering if her fake breast would be buried with her.

About now I’d spend my first night a daughter without a mother, a child bereft, left in the arms of a broken man. About now I’d realize I was on my own, my desires and whims and sadness only for me, never to be shared or held for me, never to be borne by another.

About now I’d have broken down like the child I was, and wept myself to sleep.

Swine Sick

I’m paranoid. Or I can be. My thoughts can be driving the straight line of a prairie highway and then BANG, there’s a hairpin turn, a cloverleaf exit and suddenly we’re on some secondary road that’s never been paved where everyone stares as you go by.

I contain these thoughts, usually with a random “oh for FUCK’S sake, will you give it UP!” or just a shrug and a whisper to myself of “stop it” as I carry on through the day, la la la.

Somethings make this difficult. The threat of a flu pandemic is one of those things.

My paranoia’s, or delusions, or whatever they are, tend to focus on relatively inane things-a resurgence of the cold war and the usage of nuclear weapons, needing to survive without modern comforts, food shortages. Pandemics. Things that don’t usually happen. It’s easy to put them in context when I rationally know that they won’t likely happen.

However, I also read too much.

There are parallels that my paranoid brain links together, parallels that make me hold my breath while someone in my house coughs, or has stomach upset. Hey, I know that it’s unlikely we’d see infection rates akin to half the world’s population again, not if current vaccines can keep it in check. I know that most influenza isn’t necessarily deadly.

But. But but but rattles down the brain stem, and makes me nervous, and wary, the paranoids jumping up and down with the thought that GASP! they might be right after all!

I do, as often I have done, jump to the worst case scenario first. Worrying in a world where you can be on the other side of it in 12 hours that it’s just too damn easy to spread ill will and disease.

I worry when the young and healthy are the ones cast down. It’s all been done before.

And I just worry.

 

What’s your take? Do you get totally freaked out at this kind of thing like I do, or do you just go on about your day?

Six

Up our street, colored by a setting sun they run, followed by a slightly slower, thumpy toddler. The bonds of being 6, or almost 6, with a world ahead of them.

They hold hands, grasp each other’s shoulders.

Rosalyn falls, scraping her knee across the pavement, scaring herself so that the tears take a second to come, and I suck my breath in hard, wondering what bone we’d be mending.

Only road rash, ending with that badge of childhood, a fat beige bandage across the knee. She refused to turn back, straining to catch up with the big kids.

They don’t let her in. Her sister is kind, and picks up the fallen toys, gives her a hug when she cries, but big kids, they don’t want babies around. And Ros is, most decidedly, a baby. The hurt and confusion flickers across her face, a little anger, a little sadness. I ask for her hand as we walk but it’s not my approval she’s looking for.

Vivian and her friend slowly degenerate into that tired place they always end up, with bickering, arguing, general jerk. Vivian, who has grown up being taught she must share with her sibling, he, an only child who seems to have missed the boat on some of the more subtle aspects of social niceties, his single mother tired and busy and all those things I would be too were I her. He’s a great kid but sometimes….I wish they had a share button so I didn’t have to spend so much time explaining the concept, trying to grind into him why we share with each other.

He has however, taken up our cry that “Every day is Earth Day” and helps us pick up trash as we walk. He’s a good kid, solid underneath the BS that seems to entrap him, where ever it comes from.

She tells me he won’t let her play with anyone else at recess, and my mind, being mine, flies to worst case, worries. Pulls back and remembers that what is said by a child may not be the same as what can be said by an adult.

Still. The thought of my daughter feeling this pressure, it builds in my ears and I think of all the times I felt cornered and without option. Fiercely I remind her no one has the right to tell us what we do, who we are. No one, ever. She nods and sighs, I know Mom.

I tell her friends don’t ever hurt us.

Maybe it’s nothing. But maybe it’s not. And I want her to own her life, and her body, completely.

They’re sleeping now, the quiet stretching languidly out from under the door, the odd snore reverberating. They dream of fat rabbits and tall grass perhaps, monkeys, rivers, blood on shins.

In the morning they’ll wake with the sun, and take me with them.

Loser’s Town

SO, I managed to get involved with Penguin and their little initiative to give bloggers books to read and review. While normally I might consider this too close to ad’s to do, the shameless book hussy in my cannot give up the chance to have a reason, nay, a demand to read something.

Yeah, it’s all kinda of awesome. And yes, I’m a complete dork.

Anyway.

So the first book they sent me was Loser’s Town by Daniel Depp. (Yes, it’s HIS brother. Or half brother. Or something) I flip through, read the collateral that comes with it. Notice it’s a noirish tale. I don’t really like noir. It’s too pat for me, full of rain and slappy shoes and bloody teeth. I can barely watch a movie in this style-it’s gotta be really good. But, once given a book, I will plow through it eventually, and then I have to finish it, unless it’s Jonathon Strange and Mr Norell in which case I cannot get through the bloody thing. I’ve tried ten times and it’s just like a big piece of meat stuck in my craw. It won’t move, and it tastes worse every time I go back to it.

Loser’s Town isn’t a bad read. The writing, basically, is good. But I can tell he’s a screenwriter-he’s got those eyes on, and I can see it to, the set up. The plot is basically bad guys trying to get famous guy to do what they want. The book is set in LA, in “show-biz” and it’s seedy underbelly. Or it wants to be seedy, but it really just comes off like the Hardy Boys version. Very overdone, very unsurprising, for the most part.

However, there are moments where it suddenly becomes really complete, where two characters meet and are suddenly fleshed out most unexpectedly. One thug, Potts, becomes enamoured of a woman, Ingrid in a store. She returns the favour, and begins to flesh him into a real person. But it’s pointless because it goes no where, and serves to purpose aside from being an irritant, and a distraction from the plot. It’s almost like there was another thread the author wanted to stick on, but then didn’t. I was disappointed at this part, because I could see building an entire character study off the two characters and how he wrote them. They seemed so effortless, even as they made no sense. It was the only part of the book that caught me off guard and made me stop to look again.

The main character, Spandeau, is meaty and manly and all those good things, but becomes very one sided by the end of the book. I didn’t really enjoy him, or find him as fleshed out as he could have been. While he had the majority of the “air time” I didn’t feel like I knew him. Perhaps that was the point, but it bothered me.

While I was trying to rush the ending since I was finishing the book walking home from the bus. (Yes, that crazy lady reading in the road IS me), I was bothered by how swiftly everything in the book tied up-there could have easily been another 50 pages or so. It felt sped up, and pat, and far too easy to see coming. I don’t expect a bloody rabbit each time I read something, but a little diversion from the point in nice.

The writing isn’t bad. There are some really fabulous moments in the book. Depp can write a character, sometimes. It’s almost like he has this idea of a character who is more than the character CAN be. I found myself saying “but WHY?” to the book a lot, especially when it came to anything about Spandeau’s failed (or limp) marriage. It didn’t make sense that the character would marry at all, or then cling to the ex and her family after breaking up. Or the inexplicable scary German dad stories to explain why Spandeau was so “bad” or heartless or something. As someone once told me, you write to put someone IN a place, not to describe it to them.

It was an enjoyable read-perfect for the plane or the commute, which is when I read it. It wasn’t a bad book-it was just really uneven and almost uncomfortable in some places, feeling unfinished, hurried and not properly thought out. This is Depp’s first novel-I can’t wait to read his next to see how far along he can come, to bring me more of those little diamonds in the rough.

“The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief

I crest a hill with the hard morning light in my face, that brittle iced sun that awakens me on my walk. I’m thinking about my mother, and I’m thinking about me and outloud I whisper

“20 years”

as if it’s a ghost and saying it quietly enough will keep it from hurting me.

I am 31 going on 32. Then, I was 11 going on 12, that netherworld between girl and woman, the inbetween, the sweet snuggled in the midst of sour. I had budding breasts and the turbulence and growing cowering inside me, stuffed down small where I didn’t need to feel it.

Today I’m staring down an ultrasound and the sniggering voices reminding me that cancer in the lady parts runs in my blood. I avoid the rotting breasts of my adoptive mother, in exchange for the knowledge that the women in my family die painful deaths from ovarian cancer, when it doesn’t move so fast as to not bother with a name.

My husband reminds me that bad things do NOT always happen, that sometimes the coincidence is just that. I stare around me and see a family I love deeply, a marriage I treasure, a life I’m growing into more and more. I hold my breath, feeling the shoe as it dangles, and I wait for it to fall.

Twenty years cannot erase the itch in the back of my neck telling me that bad things happen, all the time, and it’s only a matter of when, not if. I may be quiet about it, I may not mention it, but in my heart, I wait for things to fail. I trust not that everything will work itself out, despite the proof in my life that things do, with or without help.

I am mostly healed. I miss her voice, and I tear up when my daughters ask me why my heart burns for her. I envy other women their battles with their mothers, the silly disagreements I’ll never have. I don’t remember her holding me, or kissing me, ever. I mourn those. Some of this, I won’t ever be over-you never get over loss, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool. You would never fully get over losing a spouse-why should we a parent?

I am healed in the knowledge that she loved me, was proud of me, and would be proud of me. That she would adore her granddaughters, be pleased to spoil them. I am safe in the knowledge that my happiness would supply hers, even if we disagreed on the source.

I am healed knowing that she did what she thought was right, so many years ago, when a doctor told her not to worry. I am healed knowing she fought, for herself, for me, my brother, her husband.

She teaches me lessons from the grave. To go to the doctor when I think something is wrong. To go again when I’m not convinced of what they tell me. To do the tests.

I’ll still worry until cleared, until the odd rattle and churn in my belly stops. The old fear of losing everything I never knew I wanted, it hangs over me like a droopy belly, pregnant with fear and terror.

She was braver. I can be braver still.

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.

I remember the warm arm of a pale blue workshirt, likely my father’s. I leaned into her as the sun set, breezy but warm, June, or early July. We sat on our front steps, her and I.

Maybe I invent these memories. Maybe I cobble them together, rubbing the memories until I can make a crisp, something that makes sense, resembles what Mom’s do, and heats up until it’s real.

Perhaps we never sat together like that, ever, and I place my dreams in the wrong context all together.

But she would have. Even if I’m wrong and she was inside the house the entire time, sewing, she would have, some day.

**********

I admire in my mother the courage to die.

Had my father told me that the doctors had to remind her, violently almost, that there was nothing they could do for her, that the only way for her to let go was to realize there was no point, before I had children, I wouldn’t have understood. 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have made sense.

Sure, in that conventional, loss is crap way it would have. But for it to take my breath away, for her sacrifice to truly be grasped, wrapped in cotton wool and put away for safe keeping, I needed to have children I wished to adore and protect and grow to women. Having those lives in my hands, having the wishes to see them grow and people women with lives, wives maybe, CEO’s, mothers, writers, I could plainly see what it took to answer that nameless doctor’s plea with a simple

“OK.”

Not long before my mother died, she had me wheel her to a room with cookies to have a talk. I don’t remember that talk, the words have since fallen from my ears and I hate myself daily for not paying more attention, for knowing more about the cookies on the silver plate on the oval, wooden table. The words I assume, were things I couldn’t bear to keep, couldn’t face at that age, that teetering leap of faith between childhood and growing up.

I can remember her face, and now believe it to have been after the doctors told her it was pointless, as the color was gone from her face, her eyes were tired, and while she was still my mother, she was beginning to become transparent, preparing her leave from us.

Soon after, she came home, and before that week was out, she died, seizing in from of me one cold April morning.

It’s been 20 years since that day, since I was a child, since I was allowed, or allowed myself to be young. 20 years since I felt her hand, warm, inside mine, looked inside her eyes, heard my name from her lips. Known I was loved and wanted in her arms.

But her love, her desire, her belief in me-all of it is emboldened by one doctor having to say “Dianne, let go. We can’t make it better.” By the knowledge that dammit, my mother was stronger than fucking cancer, even if only for a year, maybe two. That her will, and her love for me, my brother, was enough to beat it down and bear her up.

Maybe I can never love like that. Maybe it doesn’t make up for a life lived without her. But it’s a fragrant reminder of the sweetness and strength of our love for our children, and it’s her warm hand around my heart.

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

The magnificant Jen, over at Creative Wanderings, is having a fantabulous contest for Mother’s Day-all you need to do is write a post about the impact some fantastic Mom or other woman has made in your life. Go HERE for deets. The prize is some CW product, which is very much worth your time-natural and yummy smelling and long lasting and yeah…just go get some.

I don’t use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

She was gone.

In the rooms, swept with grey, painted with some crooked brush of forgetful, I sat, desperately trying to focus on the mundane, what’s for dinner, what to say, how to live.

As my heart seized and contracted, and whispered her name in my ear, over and over. My arms suddenly stretched and fell, realizing they’d never feel her gentle, warm body surround them ever again. My eyes would never catch hers, the liquid orbs wouldn’t ever dance for me.

Dead. My first born, gone, simply, from a flu, a cough, a something transient and unreal, too quick, too easy.

And I could not breathe.

The tears would come, and I’d heave and struggle, every cell in my body screaming for her, screaming Vivian! wretched with the knowledge that her body was cold and still somewhere, not giggling and perfect before me. There weren’t enough tears, not enough power in my lungs, enough life in my body to roughly handle her void.

I sat, in a restaurant, and cried my aching womb to sleep.

I tried to wake from this through the night. I’d shake out of it, and be dragged right back to it, to the hideousness of it all, the utter void. Losing my mother was horrible, absolutely, but the absolute blackness of losing a child, losing the issue of my body..my entire vocabulary can’t touch on it. When I finally woke, I pressed my fingers to my face, expecting the tears to have been real, expecting my heart to be laying forlorn on my chest.

After the alarm, after the drunken morning shuffle downstairs, I stared into her room, stared at her softly rising chest, at her shaggy head, listened to the slight snores. She soon come into the kitchen after me, rubbing away the night, blinking at the stove light.

I’ve never held her so tight, or breathed her in quite so well.

25 Words of Fate, Botsford

If you walk down this street, you can feel them, nearly see them. Boys and girls, some lounging against the stone steps of their schools, laughing, flirting, skirts spinning, pin curls unravelling, pocket combs falling unnoticed to the ground. Some sit on the rickety wooden porches, their noses in comic books, their hands busy with knitting or peeling, always talking, their voices carrying in the wind almost to my ears today.

I can feel them in the earth beneath my feet, their warmth in the stones that surround me. They stare out the windows during particularly boring math classes, dreaming of a world away, a uniform, a pistol, the hero under ticker tape. They sigh and it floats down like petals until I can catch it in my hands.

These almost men and women. I see them as if it were only yesterday.

The sorrow hits you around the corner, when you brush a tree that would have been young then, planted by their hands perhaps, the soil cradled by soft fingers and watered by arms that struggled to carry the tin can. You stare into the open doorway of a house, the old woodwork glowing, and see where they would have received the telegram, the 25 odd words of your fate. You can almost make out the sobs of a mother, clutching her womb as her phantom son kicks no longer.

Some came home. Some came home to these houses, school in a life you cannot teach. Some found wives there, in that land that seemed so magical once. They brought them home, promised them riches and children, made a life, created a family. Worked a job so ordinary and different from the life they once held, the lives they ended, that they couldn’t believe their luck, to be on the pedestrian side of victory.

Some never came home, and instead lay cold in dirt, tucked away in a foreign land, the earth given up to them, but still not for them, their families never allowed that one last good-bye, only the howl of a piece of paper as the officer walks away.

Harder still are the lives, broken, that you can feel, at the foot of the legion, the men, the women trapped within themselves, within bombs that will never stop, blitz’s they can’t hide from, the shy eyes of a young boy on the wrong side, dying from their bullet. People who carried their sorrow for years, unable to escape, perhaps unwanting. They hover, superimposed upon before, here, where so many would have cast their lot into the wind and ran off to join the great war. The broken carries with him the man before, the sly fox with slick hair and a sweet car, a girl on his arm.

All gone.

I walk past and they whisper to me, all of their stories. The worlds they’ve touched, the smell of a rifle in the morning fog, the sounds of the young dying, their tears quieted, but their eyes scared and alone as they cry for their fathers. The mother’s who let go their only sons, their precious daughters, duty at odds with the heart that beat in their chest, slowing down as they realized that the back of their child might be the last they ever see of them.

They whisper as I walk, whole and safe and free, and I know that this, THIS is the cost of their sacrifice. This is what must be paid, their scattered words in my mouth, the tears unbidden, the full knowledge of what it cost these children, these parents, to one day have their babies flirting on the steps, and the next, full uniform in a trench in France, or tending the wounded in a field camp in London. My charity, my fee to them, is the ache and sorrow this street holds, laughter and tears, love and ache.

Walk with me there. Let their song play.

Hall’s Creek

The road home is all down hill, with the sun setting behind me, coming down behind clouds until the sky glows, the candy light dripping down on the shivering trees as they await a little warmth.

I stop for a moment to stare, to feel the muddy gravel underneath my feet, hear the bank high water rushing through the creek. These weeks of in between, of reflection before the breaking birth, are like inebriated little children, rushing and pushing to end up exactly where they are, steadied by wind and root and good black earth.

Branches float downstream with the current, small waves cresting. No resistance, no argument, just letting go in the murky brown water. I feel eyes that are not eyes on me, time, past and future and now crumbled into a paper ball, touching, and my daughters stare from then and once was and sit quietly on the fence waiting. Will I become rooted? Or will I float by, at ease, accepting, growing stronger in the light of a day ending?

Will I know the difference?

Teenage Suicide-Don’t Do It!

In the midst of “discussing” the issues around the latest weirdness via twitter (someone tweeting that they were feeling rather…cutty to Demi Moore, and the resulting consequences), they comment that to them, there’s no difference between an suicide, and a suicide attempt-both are merely cries for attention. I’ve no desire to single this person out since this opinion is in no way limited to them.

When most people stop and think of someone who is suicidal, they might think of that over dramatic girl they knew in tenth grade who wore too much eye make-up and smelled weird, who threatened suicide every week or so. Or maybe a boyfriend who was a little closer to being abusive than one might want to say,  who claimed he’d slit his throat if you left. We’ve all known these people. Most of us thought they were idiots.

There’s a truth to suicidal thoughts, a vibrancy that’s so dark and sick that I can barely face it. The truly suicidal-they tell no one, or almost no one. They hold their thoughts close to their chest, knowing that if they mutter one tiny word, they will set a chain of events in motion they don’t want to think about. If they talk about it, it becomes real, and they can fight the thoughts off in their head if no one else knows.

Besides, if they tell someone, and don’t do it, well, then we all know they’re ONLY looking for attention, right?

I have actively tried to end my life twice. Once at 14, and once last year at 30. Both times were terrifying. Both times were closer to death than I really wanted-I just wanted all pain to end. I could touch the end from where I was, taste it. It was a cold place.

Neither was truly a cry for attention. Help maybe. A cry for some sort of salve to make my world better. A way of dealing with the fear of living without the people I loved. A release for the sickness in my head, the last resort to steady chaos. It was never about drawing eyes to me, to be loved. It was only ever about making things just stop sucking so fucking much.

Some of us don’t always have the capacity to handle life. Maybe we never will, without medication, without therapy. Our filters are lost, the windows open, and it all just comes at us. After awhile, you’re tired. Tired of fighting to stand in one place, tired of struggling so much for the things everyone else just grabs so easily. Little by little, the insulation around that tiny little rubber away hole-it disappears, and you’re left holding the handles on a bag that’s empty and heavy, all at once.

It’s not anyone else’s attention you want. It’s your own. You want your life back.

Some threatening suicide, exhibiting all those classic symptoms every goth and emo kid reads up on may need help-but they don’t necessarily mean to end it. They’re desperate, and I’ve been there as well. Quote the right things and you’re rushed to a doctor that otherwise takes years to see. But some, some don’t give their possessions away or mope around listening to sad songs-they just do it.

Because the world can be cold, and scary and oh so lonely, especially when your brain doesn’t work, not like every one else’s brain does. When you’re cornered by voices humming how little you are worth, how much everyone hates you. When even the sunniest day seems cold. Running from these things has nothing to do with attention, or even help. Running towards even death can feel sweet.

Sometimes I think even doctors don’t “get” suicide, not if they haven’t felt it’s clammy hand on their shoulder. I’ve wanted to die because I just wanted things to stop hurting-much as someone in chronic physical pain might wish for death. I can’t put into words how horrifying it is to live each day knowing you’d prefer to be dead, having that thought sit in front and drive, every single day, for years. After awhile, it’s all you know.

It’s never just for attention. When I nearly ended my life last summer, I was terrified to live my life, terrified to go on. I lay on my bed, staring at a picture of my daughters for what seemed like an eternity before I got up and made my way to the hospital.

I didn’t want attention. I wanted a new life. And somehow, coming that close to death gave it to me.

Everybody’s got plans…until they get hit.

She fears fire.

Vividly, it encapsulates her, and she’s trapped in the terrified thrall. What if’s, what of’s, they fill the air around us until I almost cannot breathe anymore and I’ve run out of words to say, out of words with meanings deeper than this one thing:

“I will always save you. I will always be there.”

She imagines she can’t get out, she can’t break the window, the doorknob is hot, she can’t go out barefoot. Yet she can’t remember our escape plan, our meeting place. I ask her what she would do if there was smoke.

“The school” she tells me, “said to go slowly.”

The school has created this monster, this giant fear worming it’s way through her head, eating at her, slowly. A fear of fire is an elemental thing, especially for a child. “Where would we live?” she asks, “What about all my things?” We fear the cleansing of the growing, growling beast.

“Would snow put it out?” she asks, but only after asking if brick would catch fire. So many thoughts for someone so small and young. Such a weight on her back.

I look her in the eyes. “You are safe. We are here. We will always come for you. You think a little fire will keep your mother away? Pfft.” I hold her gaze for a little while, so she can be weak, then strong again. She gets it.

A plan, I tell her, keeps away the fear. And we have a damn good plan.

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

I fear my own fires, but it’s not one that burns in the real world, eating timbers and dolls. I’ve been feeling good-damn good, that good that terrifies me because it’s almost TOO good, a meandering steady that leads irrevocably into madness and mania. I glimpse my own potential, and see it’s shunted and cornered by this fire, my normal fear, my hideous lecture. I fear myself. I fear the fire that eventually tries to eat me from the inside.

I have all the hope and joy in the world for my future right now, but it’s tempered by the knowledge that sometimes, my own brain, my very own self, kicks my ass back down to be burned and scarred. It scares me, and it saddens me, and it sucks the hope right back out of me. I could fly, if only my wings would work for longer than a fledgling. I can’t get off the ground, and the smoke and flames threaten.

I worry just as much as Viv. I just keep it hidden, stuffed down, where I almost don’t feel it, where it almost doesn’t bother anyone, where I can mostly pretend it doesn’t exist. But it does. The terror of a hidden soul can only stay hidden for so long. Then it creeps and smolders up into my chest, down around my heart, until I paralyzed and gleeful, all at once.

I worry that one of these days, I won’t be able to control the fire, to put it out, and the flames will drain me.

I don’t have a plan, I don’t have an escape, and I can’t help but wonder about the fire extinguishers.

I wanna be a Vivian.

Last night Vivian drew a picture of herself giving someone a tattoo, and wrote that she wanted to be a tattoo artist when she grew up, so my husband took her with him while he got some.

When I got there and wanted to take her to get some Pocky, she didn’t want to leave. She just wanted to watch she said.

Tonight, after finding an interesting book about dinosaurs and learning about the first real finds in the Gobi desert, she said no, I want to be a teacher. Or a paleontologist. I think.

I love the malleability of this age.

I whispered to her that I wanted to be a midwife, somehow, someday, when I grew up, and she looked at me strangely, wondering what that was. I explained that midwives help women figure out how to have their babies, and keep them healthy during their pregnancies.

She looked at me like I had two heads.

Walking, she bobbed and dawdled and talked to the birds, shouting COO COO!! across the street at some disturbed looking pigeons. Her hair swung from side to side as she exuded everything that just plain old fantastic about being 5 and a half. The dirt marks ran up the backs of her black tights, and I smiled, knowing that a clean kid is never one who’s having fun.

This is all countered by the fact that lately she has dreams or…something that leave her crying and screaming for at least an hour-unwilling for whatever reason to talk about it. Maybe it’s the drugs she’s on for a nasty ear infection, maybe it’s growing up, maybe she’s nuts like her mother….

I don’t have an answer for any of it. But she can spot a velociraptor at 20 paces, and that matters.