In summer, the song sings itself.

I have fingers that dance in your late summer sun. An afternoon slouching into evening, the waning of a day. The heat takes off it’s shirt and inches it’s way into the deep end, breezes releasing as the light grows whiter, nearly phosphorescent.

I touch them to the soft tails around me, as I walk, the imprint of every summer since I began to walk, the round hardness of a stem, the wool like tip, the softness in that rigidity. There’s a sigh trapped in this greenery, in it’s purples and browns too.

 Into the light, indulgence and I am transfixed, my fingers deftly around these petals, around this unknowing. There’s a cry to this color, a battle song and a keening mourn. To summer it might sing to summer, to the days which sup too long at the foot of a slowly faltering star, to the ground which grew so cold, so unyielding such a short time ago.

A concerto these colors, these moments in time, to a season which last no longer than a blink of an eye all told. Defiance in the face of a land built of rock and swamp. As I sit captivated, a honey bee flirts and yet pass by, unconvinced.

 

I would carry this land in my bones, in my blood. I carry this land in blood. This late day brilliance, this stark warmth on my back, it’s the reminder, it’s the sign, it’s the calling. The whispering melancholy of time, the past and future coalesced into a beam slipping stealth like through the clouds of bromus cilatus, calamagrostis canadensis, phalaris arundinacea. I walk into this light, on this land, imaging women, stomachs barely settled from the voyage across the ocean, standing back, pausing to soak in this diffuse day. I hear children cutting through this green, laughing into the distance. I can taste the fires they lit as this light escaped.

It is delicate, and fleeting. Much like youth, love, hot bread and first snowfalls. Yet in it, all things glow and shine, magnificence takes on new shapes, and I find a sighing satisfaction I cannot explain.

Beauty, I think, has only time in it’s pocket.

Now dammit. Stomp. And how.

I want my future now.

-petulant stomp. Wagging fingers in my own face.-

I watch the women I wish I could be-you all know the ones. They’re neat, and tidy and hip. Their clothes fit without effort or diets or question. Their hair cooperates even when the humidex adds nearly 20 degrees to the summer heat. They do things-they are successful, and watching them makes me believe they aren’t even trying.

I’m jealous. And angry that nothing falls into my pocket as easily as it seems. That I have a dream, and wants, and stand facing the possibility that they won’t come true, because I am not as they. I want so badly to suck up that inherent ability to just do things, to keep it together, to appear as the adult they are.

I’ve never been that girl. I may have been the smart one, but I sure as hell was not the one you picked to get shit done, not the one that juggled jobs and families and hobbies and friends with the ease of a master acrobat. I become bewildered and misplaced.

I spent years feeling like I couldn’t-years within a void where there were no dreams, no tomorrow, no goals, no lofty thoughts. And I woke up one day to the smell and taste of wanting something, wanting more than anything. I stared at cars driving past me the other day and realized I had never driven in a convertible with the top down, and oh, how I wanted to do that.

How simple my dreams are, compared to those of the women I know with magical books being written, with films being made, with songs written and adored, creations stitched and pulled into beauty. I want to swim in that largess. I want to grow 90 arms and pull together all the threads of who I am and let them find each other, and glow warm and blue.

I want to eat the candy light at the end of a day, and know that I can be these women too. But I look nothing like them, I talk nothing like them, my dreams and eyesight aren’t necessarily filled as theirs is.

Maybe (chewing the skin around my nails, please note, NOT my nails) I really just want to find a way to be me, and move forward with a dream in my own way.

I just don’t know how. Years and years of sad quiet haven’t prepared me for the euphoria of possibility.

“Life is like a rainbow. You need both the sun and the rain to make its colors appear.”

The sun is warmer than I normally prefer, burning into my skin, causing my eyes to dance and spin as sweat quickly pools down my back. The last few days have been cool, and rainy, mysterious autumn weather mid July, and I’ve preferred that. The kiss of a rainy morning, drumming on my roof as a child burrows underneath my arm, the forced march inside of simple household chores, coloring books on the table, creatures underfoot.

The sun today, while cleansing, is nearly too bright for my aging eyes, and I find shelter underneath bowed trees. I sip coffee and ice water alternately, reading in the shade, buffered by motorcycles and the rumbling of gossip beside me. I want to stay in that spot forever, the one beside the sun, where I’ve sat year after year, growing from child to adult, from maiden to mother,  the table in front of me once full of magazines and cigarettes, now cluttered with histories and water,  my girth expanded as much as my wisdom, or so I can hope. I can see a line straining from that girl wasting time on summer mornings in a little coffee shop in the Annex, waiting for life to happen, to me now, sitting still within a life, waiting for it to stretch it’s rubber arms and sigh. She’s not so different that girl, and yet somehow, despite the lingering smell of cigarettes and quiet, she is.

Vivian, July

She’s so almost….

 

She spins and I catch a glimpse of tomorrow, of ten years from now. Of last Thursday, 2 years ago.  Depending on how the sun whispers in her eyes, I can see each and every one of her, smiling.

 

She turns 6 soon, my little honey child, and a child she will be. No longer a baby, a toddler, a preschooler. Just a kid. Just a glorious, wonderful, little kid with a head like a stubborn ox on her shoulders, full of curiosity, wonder and love.

She is so much herself-right now, at peace with herself, yet so human, so normal too, none of the worries I remember having, her biggest tearjerker is her friend being mean and telling her she “just isn’t cool” in a moment of pique.

 

She’s an explorer, an artist and a linguist. She mouths off to her mother in all the appropriate ways, reminds me that I’m not so smart, and only getting older.

She brings me magic.

Someday the mess will be gone. My floors will stay clean, the food will never run out, and the walls won’t be sticky.

I’ll miss it though.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

I ruminate about trust.

I argue with myself. I stare at the wall to quell my questioning brain, my nature. That nature to seal myself in.

I mentioned to someone at work how I trust no one, absolutely no one, and his face fell. Sadly he looked at me, muttered “That must suck.”

It does.

I always assumed trust was something you just had-that if you had to think about it, actively work at it, then perhaps your faith is misplaced. I get older and I don’t know anymore. I can’t blindly trust, not anymore. But working at it seems so contrary, so counter to the entire thing.

I’ve asked it before, but I ask it again-how do we trust? How do we feel safe in the belief that the people in our lives won’t hurt us, won’t betray us or leave us?  How do we find our footing on that path if we’ve become lost?

I worry you know, that I’ve totally lost my capacity for any sort of trust, and it saddens me. I want that glossy place of faith, or surety. I worry that I’ll totally revert to the girl waiting for someone to hurt her, instead of the woman sure she only has good people in her life.

Even new people-it’s so hard, so terribly drastically hard, even when I meet someone and they are totally, 100% getting me for once, something I never, ever have happen, and I just can’t break down that wall, this fencing I’ve placed around myself. I see them and I see hurt and laughter and whispered tweets or stories and I can’t imagine opening up at all, not totally as you might do with a good friend down the road.

My lack of trust is nearly suffocating at this point, but how do you fix it? Do you fall headfirst into it all, or do you just get used to life with less oxygen?

Kindness has unraveled my future.

I question my own motives.

Staring into the dark brown eddy they call a river around here, I ask myself why nursing, why care, why this level of commitment, has suddenly become so pressing and desired, like water in a drought.

I’ve dealt with many nurses in my life-as a child I was hospitalized a few times, with some random problem no one has ever explained. Later, when my mother was sick, I encountered numerous nurses-in the chemo and radiation labs, on the ward, and finally, in palliative care. In the last few years, visits to labour and delivery, and sadly, the psych ward, has broadened my experience.

Nurses were a constant-an ever revolving, steady stream of someone. Starched, strained, tired-I remember faces, but no people. I remember figures-bulbous, brassy, rail thin. But their voices? Rarely.

Some, remember fondly, were a squeeze on the shoulder, a brief hug, a glance. Others, nothing more than a glare, a snip, a yelp in my direction to not go there.

I remember with joy the nurses who let me sneak into the fridge on the palliative ward and take ice creams and ginger ale, brightening the grim visits to my mother.

I cringe and want to break down and cry when reminded of the L&D nurse who hounded and harassed me, pushing me to choices I wouldn’t have normally made. While she focused so intently on her Regal catalogue.

But I remember Lana, the only good soul on the psych ward, who saw past my crazy to the person contained within. She sat and talked with me, while the other nurses spoke in monotone while looking everywhere but at me. She reminded me that anyone could break down as I had, and only I was brave enough to do something about it. She mirrored humanity.

I try and not think of the nurse who prodded and poked and ignored my mother as she cried out and tried her best not to scream while the nurse dug for a vein that was viable. Her face hardly twitched as she told my mother to sit still.

Oddly, for all the time I’ve spent in hospitals, all the horrid memories pulled from there, how dirt in the sink reminds me of being close to death, how the smell of the antiseptic brings forth a smile on my mother’s face, how a cot reminds me of my first birth I want to do this. I want to be this close to death, and life. I want to be the hand that guides and heals, that sustains.

It might be optimistic, and foolish to believe I can make a difference. But I think I can.  I think of the nurse for my second birth, who laughed and was stern when needed and helped wash me off after the birth, while I was all jitters and silly energy and fear. She looked me in the eyes as I birthed my daughter, and told me I could do it.

Simple confidence, and a hand on my leg. I’ll remember her forever.

I want to be her. I want to be the nurse who brought my mother extra chairs and let us stay a little later, my hand in her. I want to be the nurse who ran, horrified, into our room a day after Vivian arrived, sweeping her out so we could both, finally, get some much needed sleep. I want to be the nurse in the ER that looked me in my glassy eyes, close to death, or damage, and told me, assured me everything would be fine, that I would be fine.

I want to be the voice you trust. I want to be the voice I would trust.

I should thank them, all of them, for showing me this road. Their kindness has unraveled my future.

Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

 

On buses, walking, waiting, anywhere that a child slithers into my side, a woman will smile that wistful smile, one of waiting or wanting, and stare at the three of us. I can always feel the eyes on me, the same I cast on the unknowing 15 year olds when they walk past me, their hips free of their futures, their shoulders strong and dreaming.

Sometimes, like yesterday, we’ll rise to leave, to make our transfer or get the groceries and a smooth hand will reach for me, briefly hold my gaze and arm.

“Your daughters are beautiful.” she’ll whisper, almost to herself, a secret of gold on her tongue. She’ll smile at me sadly as we walk away, my hands gripping each child warmly.

These women, they are so very right.

There are days when everything is so very hard, where I am tired, or lonely, or just plain done with small creatures who talk and touch and harass and otherwise get thisclosetome all day long. I have to force myself to step back and marvel at how Vivian is so utterly curious with everything, so responsible and such an old soul. Or how Rosalyn can create a new little world in seconds using only the two ratty sticks she carries and the back of a coloring book. If I stop fretting and fluttering, and just breathe, I can see them, the women who will one day play chess for hours together, instead of arguing about the set up as they are this very minute.

I see them as beautiful women then. I see them strong, and brilliant, and talented and above all happy. Their beauty, today, comes from the light which bursts from them, from smiles and grinning eyes, from the peace we feel with each other, when I relax and settle into them, and allow today, as well as tomorrow, to nourish me.

Their happiness keeps me found, solid and firm as they ready themselves to fly. The beauty and strength they project, lights my way as well as their own.

“We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.”

I scour the internet for that magical it which will somehow make me happy. A pair of cute flats in 11W, with skulls or silver sparkle. That hardcover book taking forever to go to softcover. An answer to why I get headaches or why dragging my ass to work is now such a bloody horrid chore. The right picture for my next tattoo, whenever that will be.

I organize and clean the house into stark terror, smiling almost wantonly at the smooth clean of my floor, rushing to place each toy back in it’s proper bin. I find a soothing silk calm in picking through their toy bins, sorting, cleaning, destroying, casting off the offal. I eye new places and their dirt, mentally shaking myself and wondering why I let all this dirt happen.

I cast aside the thoughts that remind me that if I was always home with the kids, as some part of me claims I should be, things would always be this peacefully clean. That my head and body would sigh and lean into this quiet uncluttered place and just be.

It’s my way of ending the search, of controlling something, anything. When I start to hold that sense in my fingers, the one where the world spins and shudders around my eyes and I cannot stand, I reach down into my earth and pull it around me, frantically finding a place for all.

This is not me. My happiness is not normally built of order, preferring a good chaotic mess to this. But the thoughts linger, what if? What if my brain, in it’s rush to reorganize itself and reorient, is pointing me in the direction I want to be? What if it’s telling me, order and stability and lord forbid, cleanliness is a habit not only desired but safe?

But then, what if it’s just a little hypo-mania messing with me, and cleaning my house?

I want to be like this. I yearn for the satisfaction of a clean house, for wanting it, for being able to find it. I want so badly to be organized and neat and all straight lines and puffy sleeves. But I can’t maintain it. It slips through my fingers like spiderweb, so sticky at first and then…just lost to the wind.

I look for that happy-in shoes, in plastic bins, in the detrius that makes up a life, that which surrounds a life. I look for happy in me, but that is this ever-changing, constantly inconstant creature I don’t know from day to day. It’s why Myers Briggs always amused me. It was different depending on the mood, the day, the hour, the problem, the love. I am different in each of those places.

Should I be happy in my quicksand soul? Should I ride it’s crests as I once did labour pain, steady, with yelling and tears but worth the end? And where is the end? Is it in the plastic bins beside me, grouped by “type” of toy? Is it in the new roof I have to find the mental space to plan for, deep breaths to sound like an adult? Is my end in my children, their glowing eyes following me, caring not about bins or roofs, or anything other than me, or us, as a unit together, or at worst, themselves?

There’s a light in our front room, the playroom, where there was none for awhile, it’s lamp stolen to the girls room while we dither on calling an electrician, terrified by our old wiring and constant surprises. It reflects amber from the cheap wood floor, liquid honey pouring into my body as it remembers this glow from a different place, years and years past.  It’s warm and secure and grows arms as I sit here, remembering a body and a face that was never quite perfect and never quite who I thought she was either.

Maybe it’s not mania. Maybe, it’s just me.

I forgot my lithium, again.

I forgot my pills the other day.

It’s simple enough to do. My schedule is out of wack, getting home at nearly 1am, falling into bed by 3am if I’m able-most nights I’m able to stick to my focus in terms of water-pills-brush teeth-bed. The other night…who knows.

My memory dilates, being perfect one moment and remembering the precise texture and smell of my mother’s beef stew, and yet in another moment, unable to remember what room I was just in or why I have 2 pencils, a book and Gatorade in my hand. It’s irritating, is only getting worse, and can cause great harm. Like when you forget your lithium and it can be out of your system in a few hours, what you had taken almost 24 hours before.

Within a day, I realized I had forgotten it. It’s like suddenly your axis is removed, and you start off with this slow wobble that starts to build momentum, slowly at first, so you think you’re just having a crap day like everyone else does.

Many people don’t believe in mental illness, or more specifically, the drugs that can treat it.

By the end of the second day, I started to become suicidal, and by the third, I was yet again irrational, completely paranoid, and nearly unable to keep intrusive thoughts at bay. I had gone from being in a good mood, from being fine, able to keep the odd nattering tucked in tightly, to screaming, yelling, crying, and expecting people to be able to read my mind about my needs. I started thinking about the ease of death, and how it would be salvation.

I worked and worked to keep that particular thought sated with it’s own existence.

It’s been a week, and only now do I feel like I’m approaching my normal again. The overwhelming sad thoughts are a few days behind, and outwardly I’ve been ok. Inward…I have moments, and it will likely be a few more days until I get my sea legs and am able to stand. The cleaning rampage I’ve been on signals that I’m on the right track, and my levels are approaching normal.

It’s scary though, fucking scary, to see that the difference between my normal, and possibly death, can lie in 4 small pills. My own persistence and effort counts for something, but without the strength lithium provides, I would be nowhere.

Because of this, because of this happening a few times, I will always believe that the right drug DOES help a person. Because there are two me’s-one who is treated, and one who isn’t. And one of them wouldn’t survive without the other.

“Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.”

In the muggy part of July, on the dirty river I grew up next to, I’d sit with friends on our front step as the sun set, willing a breeze to appear, a break in the heat, a storm to snap the air back to it’s senses.

We’d talk, as deeply or as plainly as any 9 or 10 year old is capable of. My mother was sick, but not dead at this point, treatment still rendering her bedridden at times, but other’s she was up and about and doing all those wife and mother things she did so well.

She’s bring us lemonade, crisp and tart on our tongues. We’d forget the heat for a few moments as our faces acclimated to this breath of reaction, the coolness of the glass, the brightness of the taste. If we were lucky, she’d bring us cookies on a plate to slowly share after she turned off the porch light as we stared up for stars.

I watched Halley’s comet up there as a child, and looked constantly for it’s sisters.

My friends would eventually find their ways home, before the faint voices of their mother’s would cascade down the streets, a block or two away. You never needed a phone when your friends were just around the corner, or through some one’s backyard. I’d sit quiet, listening to the hum of a quiet town, the odd car downtown, whispering laughter from TV’s across the street, dogs barking, their temper with the weather loud.

My mother would sit with me then, always in pants, a short sleeved shirt, comfortable shoes. Her face was puffy with her medication, but her smile was still her. And we’d sit, still and quiet, shoulders touching, until mosquitoes became too much for us.

In the quiet, we spoke the words we never could say out loud. There she told me she loved me, and was proud of me. There I told her I was terrified to lose her, to the point of denial, and spooked that I would forever be a disappointment to her.  A small voice told her I loved her as well.

Comfort would have no comparison since those days.

There is something so unmeasurable about the presence of a mother, just the sheer hedonistic pleasure of being next to the flesh that knows yours, the woman who held you nights to her breast and calmed your crying. Something strong and unmovable. You never really know your mother, but you don’t need to. She is permanent, yielding and kind. She is a beacon for the rest of your life.

Like the lemonade we drank on those hot nights, a mother, my mother, any mother, is a cool breeze through a life-an awakening, and yet also the cocoon. Inside, I was my mother’s daughter and safe, warmed and growing.

I think of my mother often during the summer, those few nights that nearly slip through my fingers, glimpses of her in my memory which grow sparse with time. I think of strength those moments gave-the steady, unwavering devotion that she passed on. The ability of silence.

Such gifts she left me.

My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.

I stand, legs straddling a divide, a chasm. Wind whistles beneath me, around my jeans and through my shoes. I’m standing on nothing, staring into who I’ve been, where I’ve been. Things I’ve done. Hands that have touched even when I’ve said no. Mistakes, regrets, eyesores.

From up here, it doesn’t feel quite so bad. I can stand on this edge, on it’s crumbling sides, and stare upwards, the great beyond, full of clouds, uncertainty and possibility.

The problem with having a dream is finding the courage after so long to make it happen. To break free of all the if’s, and’s and why’s clinging to your skin.

I stand between these places, haunted, trembling, and ultimately alone. It’s my battle, and my story.

***********

I’m not terribly found of this precipice. In my life, I’ve always had roads, clearly cut, defined options, black and white. I find my life now full of greys, multiple shades that alternately tickle and slap. I’m shaken by hope, and not just a little scared of it.

Squirt in a dose of low grade depression, the kind that settles in for the long haul, the kind that absently mentions that being dead would be the easy answer*, the way out-just slip out the door into a new outfit or something, and moving in any direction right now is, for me, like standing over the void. I cannot see. I cannot move. I’m frozen, torn between yelling at my tormentors and walking past them, totally unable to do anything.

If it weren’t for customers or family, I wouldn’t say barely 10 words all day to a real live human. And I’m not quite sure small children count. I draw inwards with this, my constant conversation reminding myself what I do have, where I have been.

Nattering back, moneymoneymoney worries, worries about child care, worries about our roof and our lawn and my hair and the children’s hair and the front porch, curiously full of flies all Amityville style. Worry, my constant vocal companion, fills me up past comprehension with problems and issues until I sit staring blankly at a paper I can’t bear to ruin by writing on. Or at least that’s the excuse I give myself at 31, when I can’t write a fucking list of things I need to do, and what order I need to do them.

It’s a slow burn, and I’m hovering above an abyss, lacking the power I need to fly upwards. It’s a lonely, painful burn staring from the inside at an adult who can’t be an adult, who cries at everything, who feels stabbed in the heart even at simple things like an old couple holding hands.  So starved I feel, of some elusive feeling or place. I look at the things around me, my mess of a lawn and home, my dirty children, my unkempt self and wonder how the fuck did I get here? How is this 31, working some shit fucking job I worked at 22, how am I right back there, except with 2 more mouths to feed?

How did I let this all happen?

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

I want to fly. I want to take a running leap, and glide straight up, into the clouds, into a place I cannot predict or mediate or control. I want to fly into that future, and be loved, and love there, find my place and center.

But let’s face it. I can’t balance a checkbook or drive a car, and I’m completely, and utterly terrified.

 

*Please note that this is not in any way, shape or form ideation-it’s garden variety annoying depressive voice, who is shooed away, plan-less and balless, every time he dares to speak up. And yes, he IS a boy.