Must remember the rabbit.

There’s a particular head cracking, throbbing pain that sends me immediately to my knees, an ache so fierce that sitting at a computer for longer than 10 minutes becomes unbearable.

sleep

my head whispers

I need to sleep

so I sleep longer. Harder. More. I could sleep for days.

The gift this summer won’t be mania. It shall be depression it seems.

It seeps in when you least expect it. Your schedule changes and your body doesn’t respond like it did when you were 22. The small voices start again, whispering paranoid delusions and crazy talk, mixing your world up with a stir and a spoon, causing fraction and friction.  Rubbing the skin right off. The “those” thoughts come back, the bad ones, the scary ones, the snickering demon voices daring me to live, daring me to ignore what they consider obvious. That I’m nothing more than flesh. That my life is borrowed, and pithy, and really quite meaningless. That those in my life would be better without me.

I fight them off. I struggle, the heaving sigh of breath from my chest which pulls me inside myself more and more, that keeps me locked in my home, that cuts me off even from most of you, here in this place that was so vital and vivid before.

It’s all turning into muddled black and white, grey upon grey. A struggle to move from the bed to the bathroom, to smile for those who find happiness so much easier than I do. I’m struggling, and it’s happened so fast I can barely blink to greet this doom.

I’m scared. I’m angry, no, I’m, pissed off that I’m facing this, again. I’m tired of facing my dragon, an exhaustion that trickles in my veins and weighs me down. I’m sick of being fucking unable to smile, of weeping at every conceivable turn. At feeling very much like a liability, and a problem to be dealt with.

I am so tired of failing at this, of flailing for a solution. Of telling myself I’m a good and worthy person who will get there, who will find her place in this world, come hell or high water.

I’m also sick of being the girl who forgets her medication every now and then, sending her stumbling down the rabbit’s hole. Remains to be seen how long it will take to bounce back from one day’s worth of inattention.

Just one more thing I can’t get right.

Be noble for you are made of stars.

 

neener neener boober, you can’t catch me! she sings from ahead, her small feet skidding through wet gravel as she stares at the lupins, the blooming raspberry bushes, the fallen leaves from the storm the day before.

Echoing in my head is a voice, softly, sadly saying “no, I can’t.”

We let go. We release. We cradle these daughters, sons, our children inside us, until we cannot any longer. Each day that follows is another lesson, another reminder on letting go. Without release, there could be no joy. I watch my youngest, my babe fly upwards, her feet barely touch the ground. She runs down the trail to our house, full of long grass and pooled rainwater. Spiderwebs, wild strawberries, aphids.

Only the water stops her fastidious self.

I cannot catch her. I wouldn’t dream of it. To do so would be to stop a star in it’s progress, to hold it from spilling it’s star stuff, to trap it within limits it cannot hold.She is aloft and spinning, and I am merely her maker, her nebula. Spun from my arms and belly, she travels and glows.

I look at other children, the boys and girls in the neighbourhood, and I can see their future. I can see in their eyes where they’re lit, what they’ll look like, who they’ll be possibly. I see tomorrow in all those little faces. I look back at mine, and I see only the glory of their joy, the sweetness of their curiosity, and the fire that burns behind them.

She runs ahead of me most days now, the child who at one time never left my grasp, the warm sense of my side. She takes off into the moody damp of the woods behind our house, stopping only slightly to see if I’m still coming.

I’ll fall farther behind each time.

The Opposite of Love: Julie Buxbaum

Obviously, someone read my blog.

About a week ago, I received another package from the lovely Penguin Canada, containing a few books. This, as usual, elicited a SQUEE! and WOOHOO! from me as I love getting new books. To the top of the 3.5 foot tower of “to be read” they went.

I finished with whatever I had been reading, and dove into “The Opposite of Love” by Julie Buxbaum. The synopsis had caught my eye-successful lawyer up and dumps her boyfriend as he’s about to propose, and she can’t explain it. She just knows it’s her. Throw in a job with a “hands on” boss, a Grandpa who’s slowly losing it and her distant father. Top it off with the memory of a dead mother.

So, we know the dead mother clinched it for me, and I just had to get reading.

I really like this book. Now, I know, reading about single girl heartbreak isn’t normally my preferred demographic, but this book is strong. While the character isn’t entirely likeable all the time, she is understandable, especially for someone who has also lost her mother.

Emily, our main character, is very familiar to me. Maybe not the lawyer part, but the inability to connect properly to others, spurning love and happiness because we’re scared of hurting again, in that oh so particular way of letting go of our defenses-I recognize that, and connected very strongly to Emily.

Having to take care of her Grandpa as her father was absent, likely unwilling himself to suffer another loss, was just another facet of the motherloss experience. Having to take responsibility, having to become the parent. Being protective and closed in about the people we do love.

Ultimately, Emily learns from the people in her life-learns that to live, we do need to take a chance, do need to love. That the people who love her will be there, will not break her, will not leave her.

The writing is strong, in the way I like it. When the writing is such that I don’t notice it, that I become immersed in the people, the characters. When I stay up almost all night reading, when I’m excited to pick up the book again-the writing is strong, the writing is good, and it’s honest.

This isn’t a heavy book-the writing is still light (for the subject matter) and in parts very witty and fun to read. But it’s also a great conversation on how we find it in ourselves to love when the very capacity to do so has been damaged almost beyond repair.

The Opposite of Love is out now in paperback, and is being made into a movie with Anne Hathaway. Ms. Buxbaum’s next novel, After You is available this August.

Hope is a waking dream.

Mostly the voices, they stay quiet. A misprint of  a thought, circling my head as I stand up to take a few steps through the long grass of time, into the future. They start as a chorus as I move, a low hum following.

“shoo.”

They mutter to themselves, stare impudently at me. I grin and walk along.

I see a future laid out before me, and it scares me. My voices conspire to give me a reason to flail-my anxieties about dealing with new people, with organized systems with rules. I see the mistakes I can make, and might.

The broken brain, she grins back.

It doesn’t have to be this way, not this time.

****

So I’m staring at what will likely be the genesis of a career, in nursing, as a midwife, in healing. And I like that thought. I like the thought, I like that I now have a future plan, that I have a dream. You had dreams, right? Had them I imagine, at 10, at 17, at 25. Dreams of travel, of career success, of finding love and devotion, starry nights and mimosa.

I dreamed of staying alive. I dreamed of outrunning my demons. I dreamed of functioning well in a world I could barely hang on to.

The prosaic nature of having a simple goal, of a career, of something fulfilling I wish to do, it quiets the voices which haunt me with my failures. I have come back from the absolute pit, the darkness of no dream, teetering on death, to hold in myself so simple of a beauty.

Hope.

I can now believe in a future. I now look ahead to when we’re old and crotchety and throwing peanuts at little kids who walk on our lawn and think

oh yes. Please.

and mean it.

I’ve lived for so long, empty bereft of such a simple gift. To be filled with it now, to hear doubt and fear cease, made mute by calm hope, is almost too much.

These voices, they’ll come around.

Placement: Grade 1

 

Maybe it means more to me than her, the last long look into the first classroom she ever entered, wave goodbye to her desk, hug her first teacher. Maybe she won’t remember this year, the way I remember my kindergartens in spurts, tiny spores released into the air of my memory. Maybe the memories will just be warm spring sunshine, the cold dark air of winter in her mouth. Singing, running, joy.

But it means so very much to me, on the verge of tears as we say goodbye to the woman who helped my daughter learn to read, who can be thanked, years from now, when Vivian accepts her Masters, or flies to Mars, the woman who has started Vivian on a road she can never fall from, a passion for words, and knowledge, and someday, hopefully wisdom.

How can you repay that? How many words match this gift?

Last September, I dropped Vivian off with a fair amount of trepidation, and a lot of relief, and shock. That we were there already. That she was so very eager. I read her last report card on the way home, focused more on the teacher’s perceptions of her than the evaluation. And I cried, quiet tears, swallowed as we walked through the playground. My daughter, called amazing and wonderful and bright, all those things I understood, all these things I’ve molded and helped create. To see it reflected back, to see her blossom under the tuteledge of another woman, and learn. It fills me with awe this change. It fills me with awe for my daughter, for her mind, for how nimble and thirsty it really is.

Seeing “Placement for September: Grade 1″, for all the smiles it gives, makes me feel old. She’s growing up, this magical girl of mine. She’s growing up,sprouting in her mind and legs, and leaving her mother behind already.

Maybe it does hit me more, my memories being sporatic, full of wisftul nostalgia. Maybe it’s just how it should be.

2 feet and a heartbeat

The air smells of fish and old men, cigars in a moist wooden room, the greenery that waves underwater.

Children ride on this air, their hair short and uneven, behind them the tired masses of mothers and wives, starting, finishing, bolstering those who have come before, submerged in the dark which stretches around the world.

Our dead lie here, in wait, stumbled from ships and wharfs, travelling miles and miles under they are left to only float past me when the tide returns. They’ve been there, they’ve seen.

We breathe and drink them all. They are, after all, just us.

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

I think while I walk, while one foot follows the other, my jeans pulling and heaving against the clammy air. I stare at the stars on clear nights, transfixed and slightly in love with the forever above me. I’d name them if I could, but satisfy myself with wonder and belief and that childhood fantasy that somewhere, someone else is staring at our star with a winsome, irresistible belief that someone is out there. That their planet, their worries, their griefs, are never lonesome.

Staring at that dark sky, obscured by urban light and smoke, I always become filled with what I can only identify as heady, blissful divinity. A world, a universe, a life filled with such mystery, beauty and wonder. A life, blessed with the ability to find, to learn, to touch and taste. How can we ever stray, ever feel doubt with such magic hanging above us?

I walk further, and I know the answer. The moon crying through trees, the heavy whisper of early summer slipping through the leaves, and I can feel my mother. She never truly leaves me, her voice in my ears, distracting me from that wonder, her life, and death, harboured inside of me, deep down, burning. She is the doubt.

She is the doubt that floats on that moist air, the scent of life and death, co-mingled until we can barely tell the difference. But she had memories, and eyes that saw the vastness of our past. Staring into the new green of these trees, I see the children, the missing sons and daughters left behind, or started forward. Perhaps they sit, kitty corner to the nearest star, waiting, growing as we mourn their loss. But their eyes never saw the great question, so I think of them as waiting for their mothers, and fathers, in that great beyond, dancing with a red dwarf, their hands still soft and clean.

I can’t help but think of them all, motes now, as the grass and the leaves and the strawberries grow, as the sky grows clear and the tide sweetened air fills my lungs. I can’t help but think that while they’re all dancing in the stars, I’m watching the trees sway in moonlight, and the air is tentative and kind like a first lover.

I can’t help but think of them all in the stark white of the moon, and where they’ve been. They float on, adrift on a sea of time, unravelling slowly as years drift by.

They touch us, they touch the skies, they touch the stars. Patiently, they become part of that wonder. Head in hands, chin poised on fingers, they wait.

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

I come home, sit here, writing this very piece. On my chest, a 4 month old kitten fidgets and purrs her way through the night.

Wonder and beauty, life and death are all very well. But they can never overtake the purring of a new cat.

Lira

A rare Sunday off, now, a family run to the mall. Sundresses for the girls at H&M.

I stop in the over priced fat lady store otherwise known as Addition-Elle, to lust after my own sundresses. I chance upon two skirts I like, some underwear. Normally I would have cringed at the 50.00 price tag on the skirts, perhaps bought one since I’m rapidly running out of clothing.

I left with nothing.

I lost my job in March, one I hated, but one which kept us at a reasonable level of cash flow. I’ve replaced it with one I don’t mind, which is stress free, but that pays, how do I put this, like shit. My money goes straight in the bank, do not pass go, don’t collect 200.00. And I’m ok with that-I can spend money pretty pointlessly, and we have bills.

But sweet fuck, I feel like I’m 15 again and begging my father for money for clothes or shoes because I’ve grown. I used to have to do that-convince him that I needed jeans, or running shoes for school because I couldn’t play basketball in bare feet. He never just knew what was needed by looking. And I always felt like shit having to ask, having to be treated like something secondary for needing something.

No one is doing that now, but I can’t shake this itchy feeling, like I’m a pet or something. The lack of control, of no longer contributing as much-it’s eating at me. Walking through a mall full of stuff I absolutely cannot have-it was almost degrading, and in no was freeing. Seeing things my children my want, or having to constantly say no to their asks even though I like getting them the odd little thing here and there, it hurt. It felt like I couldn’t provide for them.

My parents rarely if ever had extra money around for toys. (Of course, they also had a house that looked like a house so….) But I always wished I could occasionally have something, a surprise, once in awhile to just be given what I wanted and asked for. So doing it for my girls is like that.

I can’t do any of it anymore, and it just eats at me. I don’t feel successful, I don’t feel secure-I feel like that child who never had anything, who had to ask and ask and ask.

It just feels so bloody humiliating to have nothing after working so fucking hard to have something. Sure, going to the mall isn’t like making the big leagues, but it was the security of having an income I could rely on. Feeling like I was doing something right.

Anymore, I’m just not sure.

Sun

Thank you.

I hear a voice fluttering in the air. It glances off the bluest sky I’ve seen in what feels like months.

um…yes. For what?

WELLLLLLLL…it trills….you’re out here, in my arms, and the sun is locked on to your skin, can you feel it? And the back of your neck has loosened, your walk has slowed-your feet don’t hurt, and you aren’t struggling to breathe. You ARE breathing!

It scoots off ahead of me as I try not to trip over one child while convincing the other two that a road isn’t a place for a deep conversation about transformers. I growl, they move marginally slower as my youngest begs/whines for my hand.

It’s a lovely day to see through their eyes, isn’t it? it sings around my head.

I suppose.

It sighs, stomps little tiny feet. I feel the air pulse outside my ears.

How long do you think you really have? she breaths. How long will they be this little, this happy, this untouched. How long?

ok ok. I’ll pay attention. I will (sulk)

sigh……

Really…..

How long do you think you’ll live? Forever? Tomorrow? How long until you can’t see this blue sky? This grass so green and furlike-only a single thread keeps you from rolling in that. How long until it’s gone?

What does that have to do with anything?

Ever felt eyes roll instead of seeing them? Felt that, sticky itches on eyelids.

Your mother must have thought she had forever too.

Mother Mother, Are you listening?

Everyday, or almost every day, I open my reader in anticipation. That someone will be writing something that makes me smile, makes me tear up a little and get that “huff” in my chest. That someone will make me angry because they’re right. That someone will write with such clarion beauty my heart will pause for a moment to acknowledge it.

More and more, I open it glad that I subscribe to so many news and science feeds.

It’s not just online fatigue, although I know it’s some of that as well.  There comes a time when it’s all been done-where you’ve had the breastfeeding discussions and the organic arguments and the daycare hissy fits. You’ve talked, you’ve bonded, you’ve agreed. You’ve found your kindred spirits, reveled in the fact that they are your kindred spirits, embroidered their names on trucker hats. But then, life, real life, you know, the one at your door with a package or the one blowing on the breeze through the window? It intrudes and people wander away.

Leaving, in many cases, either new people singing the same songs, or old people singing the same songs for money.

At least once every 3 days lately there’s been a post or a reference to some “bad mom” movement that’s suddenly everywhere-in papers, magazines. How it’s ok to not be so perfect all the time.

It’s funny-I seem to remember having that discussion with Karrie, Edenza and Kim a lot about 3 or 4 years ago, all of us agreeing we weren’t that perfect mother, never would be, and not much caring. Our mothering identities were weird, but solid.

Post after post seems to be filled with hand-wringing and proclamations about how we’re all just mother’s, and no one is bad or good. (Gee, coulda used that in January) Or how it’s terrible to be a bad mother, harming our children, or embrace it! Let them run with scissors and fall asleep eating gum! RIOT!

Are we so insecure in our parenting that we have to rush to embrace the nearest and dearest cause celeb in order to define it? Or is it just another way to generate page hits? Are any of us TRULY worried about this, or are we writing about it because we’ve seen it in a few places, and it might look good to be worried. Wouldn’t want to actually think we’re good mothers.

I’ve had my moments of worry, but they’re buffeted by the knowledge that I’m not a bad mother. I’m A mother. No more, no less. I’m not hurting my children, unless punishing Vivian for a major offence with the loss of her birthday party is considered pain. I parent them as I believe children should be-hands off, standing back, just enough rope to choke on. Raising them to the adults, the women I want them to be.

That’s what missing in all of these posts-it’s ALL about the mother. What SHE does. What SHE likes. What SHE believes. The children?

Well, they’re there. Somewhere, if the writing is to be believed. But it’s bad, or good, to act like the children don’t matter, that the only person with a point of view in the parenting relationship is the mother.

Hooey. Sticky, green hooey.

Parenting, mothering can be done without labels, without cute t-shirts illustrating how badass we are, without posts rattling on about how labeled or UNlabeled we are.

I’d settle for mother’s who didn’t judge the shit out of other people, but that’s just me.

Hungry Eyes: LOTD Edition

Last night I listened to my husband howling and slapping the table, while listening to “Hungry Eyes”

Seemed rather….odd.

Then he showed me this. Which I don’t find funny so much as I find it to be almost every woman’s secret fantasty. Go Viggo Go.

Voiced

I walk, most nights, home alone, in the delicious moist air of near summer. I should spend the time writing, in my head. Plotting and thinking and compiling. But I don’t. I find it hard to cobble together coherence, to mold experience and wisdom from the clay that surrounds me.

I should have a voice.

This rattles around my head most days, as I’m reading, as I’m studying how someone else builds a story, creates a person from ink and wood fibre, until they stand, firm behind them, holding their hands out with nameplates and short bios. I should know how to create this, how to parse wisdom and hope into the mouths of those people I create.

Farce. I cannot do this. My people are dry, and tired, throwing themselves into the wind to inject some sort of life, a false vibrancy into their fragile limbs.

Where is my voice?

Perhaps I have not been sufficiently humbled, or have yet to find the way, the one way, the encouraged way, to hold those limbs up myself, give them blood and tissue. Maybe I’ve been afraid to open my fingers and let loose these dogs, these people, these creations.

Maybe there’s a honesty that even I flee from, much as the voice itself cowers in a corner, just out of sight. I know you’re there little one….I just can’t draw you out. Perhaps my voice has gone feral with fear.

Why my voice? Why?

Year after year, I’ve heard that I have this agile talent, hoarded inside me, some sort of natural gift to put one word before the other so it paints visions in the eyes of others. Somehow, I’ve taken this to mean it should be easy, that I should produce my version of a Pollack or a Carr without thought, or effort or struggle.

But does art need struggle? Does my voice need more of a battle to come out? Do I need to succumb to the oft cited myth that manic depressives make better artists because they’re sensitive and broody and willing to cast loose into their illness? Is my problem that I’m holding to or not letting go?

The urge is here-the quivering, jelly like drive to work-to write, to produce. Yet the voice behind the will-it’s missing. The thoughts, they scatter in my mind, seeds on wind, impossible to catch in hand.

Voice? Can we put you back together?

NEW KITTEH!

Yeah, I’ve about lost my mind….but really, who can resist?