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.

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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.

After You-Julie Buxbaum

I was so excited to read this, and hated having to wait to talk about it!!!

The blurb:

The complexities of a friendship. The unexplored doubts of a marriage. And the redemptive power of literature… Julie Buxbaum, the acclaimed author of The Opposite of Love, delivers a haunting, gloriously written novel about love, family, and the secrets we hide from each other–and ourselves.
It happened on a tree-lined street in Notting Hill to a woman who seemed to have the perfect life. Ellie Lerner’s best friend, Lucy, was murdered in front of her young daughter. And, as best friends do, Ellie dropped everything–her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs–to travel to London and pick up the pieces of Lucy’s life. While Lucy’s husband, Greg, copes with his grief by retreating into himself, eight-year-old Sophie has simply stopped speaking.

Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As the two spend hours exploring the novel’s winding passageways, its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them. But so, too, do Lucy’s secrets–some big, some small–secrets Lucy kept hidden, even from her best friend. Over a summer in London, as Ellie peels back the layers of her friend’s life, she’s forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she’d hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie’s carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life–and those around her–forever.

I really liked The Opposite of Love-anything that bridges that gap of motherloss I usually really identify with, since the feelings and experiences are rare, but yet so similar between us. After You takes a slightly different tack while playing with the same ideas-but the motherloss if shown from the experience of the child, the father and the sister (figure), showcasing how the loss can cross and like a dagger, slaughter all.

I found After You to be solidly written-if anything, the writing was more mature, sober, and yet still I found myself snorting with laughter in a few places. The writing around the family-the suffering husband, the mourning child-was nearly perfect. The raw emotion after loss-the sudden new context that brings to lives-I loved this, and identified so fully.

At first I couldn’t understand why Ellie would drop her life completely when her friend is murdered-we’d all visit, but would we stay? But then the context-her own lost baby, her starry-eyed view of Lucy-remind us that we don’t all make reasoned, understandable decisions all the time. As a mother, imagining the daughter of my friend alone, without a mother would be enough to drag me across the world.

I really enjoyed this book. Until I didn’t.

The book was 336 pages long. About 331, I stared yelling at it, scaring the cats. “WHY!!! JULIE WHY!!!!”

I’m not going to ruin it. But let’s just say that this book takes the hard road a few times, not necessarily the surprising one but the honest hard one. And then, suddenly, either she got tired, and reconsidered and wanted a happy ending.

And it did not work. Not one bit. I didn’t want it, not after how the book had developed, and frankly, I didn’t see Philip wanting it either. It didn’t make sense after everything, to suddenly tie the world up in a bow.

The majority of the book dealt with real life, and did so honestly. The ending, frankly, was almost a betrayal. And made me throw the book. I never throw books. I like books.

Julie? Sigh. I LOVED this book up until 331. Then…not so much. I had tried to commit to only reading it near the review due date, and I couldn’t and then I couldn’t stop! It was that good! And then….

I would absolutely recommend this book, but personally, very disappointed with the ending.

After You is available….well, everywhere! And is Julie Buxbaum’s second book.

We interrupt the maudlin trip…

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Originally uploaded by thordora

Yeah, I’ve been parsing out what I’ve been working on mentally, and it’s pretty fucking depressing I know. Be glad the rest is safely on the laptop and not here…..

Instead, I give you-BABY ZOMBIES!!!

Father Father

I had just finished singing my plaintive song in Hebrew when I could hear my father, in the back of the auditorium, push his chair back, stand and clap loudly. I could hardly see him-the stage lights bright and blinding, limiting my vision to the first row or so. But my ears, and my heart-they could tell, they could see. My father, standing just for me, his gaze locked firmly to me, his heart full of his daughter.

We drove home that night, my face covered in pancake, so heavy it moved separate from my face. His face was full of pride, flushed with it, a smile genuine on his face, in his eyes for the first time in years. We stopped for burgers and fries, squished in costume and suit into a booth. It was the best dinner I might ever had, and we spent the rest of the drive up Hwy 2 in silence, the stars a smiling accompaniment bouncing off the calm river beside us.

My father loved me.

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

I knew I was adopted from, forever, like a broken record in my head I knew this like I knew I had to pee sitting down. It was part of me-an important part of me sure, but just something else interesting and different. But ultimately, it didn’t matter. There was no divide, no division between my parents and I, no worry about flesh and blood not being theirs. They loved me, and I was theirs. No question, no subtle other meaning. I was their daughter, and they loved me.

My father especially, seemed to hold my heart. Winks and treats, patience to teach. I would follow him everywhere, and believed him when he claimed he’d pull the moon out of the sky for me.  He was magic, he was vision, he was a world I couldn’t wait to explore and touch, his was that omnipotent god of our childhoods, knowing where Halley’s Comet had come from and how to make a sponge look like swampland. 

In the land of my youth, my family glowed with simple love and contentment.  I remember being happy-plainly happy in that place, that time which stretches and sometimes reaches for me.  My mother the rock, my father the magician. Wrapped in their arms, in the space their breath made real, I never felt without, or unloved. It might just have been the only place I ever felt real.

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

I heard the noise, a dripping sound, persistent. I woke up further from a deep sleep, shaking my head. I opened my half finished door, the one which stuck at the top corner and needed to be sanded down, and found my father, pissing on the floor, a small river pouring into my room, splashing onto the pile of tapes by the door.

“You vile, repugnant little man!” I screamed, “What are you doing?!?!” The words, the formed themselves so perfectly and clearly on my lips, flowing out on a ribbon of hate, of anger and shame.

My screams woke him from his stupor, the drunkenness rolling off his face. “Sorry, “he muttered”, “I thought this was the bathroom.”

I screamed for him to clean it up, and now. I screamed out my rage, my sickness with the situation, my exhaustion with dealing with a drunk after everything else we’d suffered.

“I’m sorry,”he kept saying “I’m sorry.”

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

After Mom died Dad kept his distance. I don’t remember him touching me much, if at all. He threw himself back into work, trying to keep busy, and inadvertently kept him away from me. I assume now, from this distance, that it just hurt too much, but then, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see past the grey haze of grief that kept us all numb and in our corners. In shock, in pain, frozen.

I’d cry by myself, for hours when the ache was too much. My fears, while not exotic, still terrified me. I envisioned my father dying, my Daddy! and being alone. One night, finally, my father heard my cries and sobs, and called me downstairs. He held me for the first time in months, and my body nearly fell, so relieved it was to have someone finally touch me, aside from the doctor or hairdresser.

“I’m not going anywhere!” he joked gently, “Nothing can kill your old man!”

I stared at the wood panelling as he said this, his arms rough around my shoulders, and wished, fervently wished it wasn’t a joke, that he could speak plainly, tell me he loved me, tell me he’d be there.

“We ok now?”

A little while later, a book about grieving appeared on my bed, my father acknowledging my need to read through things. He wouldn’t touch me for a long time after this, dropping my hand if I grabbed his, freezing up if I leaned into him. After awhile I stopped trying, retreated. I didn’t let anyone touch me for a long time after that.

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

They were doing a Midsummer’s Night Dream in the park, and he agreed to come with me after work, smiling and saying “Hey, that sounds like fun!” We walked to the park, laughing, enjoying the night. We sat on lush grass as the performers continued on in front of the crowd, smiles and peace.

The skies opened with a hideous roar, and the rain came down.

He didn’t get angry. He wasn’t annoyed. He shrugged, looked at me, grinning, and said “Guess we get wet then.”

We walked home, giggling, down 6 blocks, his newspaper ruined, my shirt sticking to me. All I can remember is his smile in the rain, the shelter in that moment, healing us a little as we learned life did, and would go on.

And he was proud of me then, and I him.

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

I show him my writing, and his heart is near to burst. I show him my firstborn, and his eyes loose some of the hurt, the years of ache slipping off.

“You did good kid.”