WWMD? Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with
people who are reckless with yours.

I imagine the first boy who breaks her heart, and I crack my knuckles in preparation. I never had my heartbroken by a boy until now, but with this new understanding, I fully understand father’s who wait up with an axe in their hand and a Bud Light on the table beside them.

Look at her. She’s magnificent. She is a creature conceived in love, long ago yes, but very much in love, and she grew beneath the weak pulse of my heart. She grabbed my finger and my tears and my heartstrings sitting in my arms, once my heart let her. I promised her, those first days, that nothing would harm her, nothing would touch her heart, not in the ways they touched mine. No one would would be reckless and teach her how not to trust, not to love.

The events of this month remind me that I cannot protect her from reckless hearts. The reckless hearts aren’t always ones you can change or get near, or matter to. Sure, she’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll just need to put her in therapy later. Maybe we can still be some sort of fractured family for her, at least for awhile.

But I won’t be able to put her world back for her once it dissolves, once what was once safe because unsteady and fast.

We’re reckless, with these our daughters. We play loose with Vivian, who understands things she shouldn’t, who already seems to live with some terrible sadness tucked behind her eyes. It is she who will suffer. I will hurt, my heart will be battered, has been battered, but ultimately, I will find my happiness somewhere eventually. You can replace a lover, a friend,  husband.

You can’t replace a father. You can’t replace your parents, loving each other, even if they’re considerate and warm and friendly when they see each other. She will only see the recklessness with which her parents cast each other off, respect lost some random morning, love slowly dwindling down a void they couldn’t get it back from. You can’t replace that security.

We are reckless. Yet I have to teach her not to be reckless, with herself, or with others.

I don’t know how either.

(Quadelle had a fab idea to do a series of posts based on phrases from Mary Schmich’s commencement address . [You may remember it better as a "song" by Baz Luhrmann] I thought it was a great idea, so, I stole it. Or copied. Whatever. Imitation is the soul of wit. Or brevity. Or both.  )

Mourn Memory

Shuffle on my media player lands on this

and for a moment I can’t breathe and I curse the fact that my Ativan prescription sits unfilled in my pocket. I feel my eyes well up and my chest tightens as the past falls on me and I see our first apartment and think of the hours we spent there, just us, and how I made Absinthe for our wedding and the morning after I touched him and thought Husband! and there was magic in that word and I swelled. My world swelled like it was breathing, and I felt whole there.

I graze over the red meat for what may be the last time, still unsure what I should bring home. Suddenly I’m full of those first months together when we did it all together, when we were a unit and we could laugh together, even while I waited for someone to figure out he stole a donut every time we did the groceries. I can feel laughter from then like bubbles in my chest.  Sparklers alight inside me, convinced I was glowing.

Bus past the hospital where my daughters were born, one early morning after a long night, the other quickly after days of waiting, misty and wetwarm when Vivian made her way into our arms, cloudy and cold, crunchy ground cold as Rosalyn stormed and roared into life. He’s there, in awe, in shock, in immediate love, and never did I love him more, never could I love him as much as the moment when he fell in love with his daughters. Inside, something felt peace watching his strong hands absently counting their fingers, my heart skipping a beat as he’d glance back to me briefly, our eyes meeting before his went back to his newest lady love. I fell in love with their father in that hospital, not just my husband.

All the places we walked together, all the time, the places touched, the resonance in a memory-these things I cannot erase. I cannot throw out. I cannot erase the trail behind the house, I cannot forget the love I felt as I watched my family walk and laugh, the pride, the joy this gave me.

I cannot lose these things, and I cannot stop the grief that rises up.

I’m told I’ll come out of this stronger. I’ll know more about myself than I did, and in the end, I’ll be thankful that the end came before we ground ourselves in to powder, to even less recognizable parts of us.

But that doesn’t stop my hurt right now. It doesn’t stop the ache that screams to return to when we understood who we were, or at least, when we were able to love despite who we were. It doesn’t stop me from hating myself for failure, for having the one thing I swore I would not have-a fractured family. I grieve more for my daughters, for the family they’ll never know, the unit. That which I lost too, the only thing I apparently could not protect for them.

I’ve never mourned the living. In this moment, it hurts a hell of a lot more than any crying I ever did for the dead.

********

Those of you who have gone through separation, divorce-how long is it this bad? How long until I can spend 18 hours awake and not find myself seized by memory and loneliness? How long until I find my footing?

A Keening

Leaning against a soft warm back, my face nuzzled in a scent I’d recognize twenty paces from anywhere, I sigh and bore in closer, bathed in security and comfort, recognition and love. The body presses back, slightly, acknowledgement, a melting into the other, a moment where two really can masquerade as one, without moving beyond that moment of hands and arms and skin.

I sigh and wake up again.

****

I miss it.

There’s a whisper living around me, a vapour. I watch a young couple walk smiling past me, hand in hand, and the ghost of that warmth slides itself across me. It’s emotionless, but present, fading like the smell of a baby on the first blanket. It merely watches with me as the ache seizes me and the loss takes hold.

He’ll never hold me again.

But he hasn’t in a long time. We haven’t held each other in forever, in that way where strength and love and joy crosses. This loss that I mourn, the warmth in a bed, the shoulder to lean on, the electric sparks across fingers-these things disappeared months ago under the weight of recovery, children, growing up, finding ourselves.

I can still feel it there, it’s remnants, and it’s what aches. It gnaws on me inside, the has been and was. The comfort I’ll need to work towards, someday, with someone else if I’m lucky. The conversations you don’t need to have because they live your life and just get it. The joy of a body who knows another.

Of course, my grief forgets the years of fights, the storming off, the misunderstandings, the struggles, the alientation-the things done wrong between two people who just can’t find what they want in the other person. Trying to balance love with the realization that the person you want to spend your years with, the qualities you desire, they just aren’t there, and maybe, never was.

A relationship can’t be built underneath a bridge of who we think we are.

So I don’t miss the terrible parts where we wounded each other beyond recovery-where finally one of us would step back and something inside would click with that resounding thud and we’d realize that there was just no stepping away from that hurt, from that betrayal, that disappointment. Maybe I should have told him I was proud of him. Maybe he could have laughed at my jokes.

Maybe doesn’t warm the bed. Maybe doesn’t make us whole.

There’s a bigger ache inside of me, a bigger hole to be filled than he can, than he has. Once he fit comfortably inside, completing me. As I grew and changed and found the me I’d lost, as he found himself, unfettered, I think we both found that the holes we filled in each other’s sense of self were much much bigger than they once were. I clawed at it, desperate to make it conform, making him crazy in the process, then pushing him away from me as far as he could run. In a sense, I both broke him and fixed him. I wanted US to work-I wanted my family to be whole, in a way I never had. I wanted an ideal to work, instead of us, the two real people who still feel a very warm affection for each other, who can still snicker like an echo at a joke. Two people who find that 12 years is very long indeed.

I’ve known for a long time that my love wasn’t how a spouse should love. I’ve pulled at it like taffy, wanting it to be more while he knew, with almost firm certainty, that he didn’t, that his love wasn’t the love that burns. All things break in time. All things die.

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

His arms may still be warm, but they’re no longer mine. And I mourn that, the sheer visceral need for his body next to mine, that which initially drew me in, how my body and mind seemed to know him before I did, how he drew fire across my skin.

I cry at the loss of that heat. There’s no contentment in this dream.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

I was fearless until I was comfortable. When I had nothing to lose, when I was 16 and running on the cold fumes of Coke-Cola and Benson & Hedges, and life couldn’t touch me, couldn’t even feel the breeze drifting behind my back, it was all before me. Like the gaping scene in movies when the girl is on the bus and the city at night stretches before her, beckoning, arms open, I stood in front of life, arms at my hips, daring it to fuck with me.

I walked as I wished. I danced as I could, with anyone watching, my eyes brazen and on fire. I welcomed into my embrace anyone who would have me, who would worship me, even if it was only for that night, for those moments on a wet lawn staring up into the starry sky astride a concrete building. I felt no fear, deep inside. Nothing could touch me. Nothing could come close to really touching me. I was memory on air, born of a twirl and a running start through a dew touched part in May. I was myth, I was a creature only written about in song.

My oh my how beautiful I was then.

That life without fear, a life lived in the now, the absolute center of here and I and this second, it’s a sparkling thing, a diamond you can hold, softly in the palm of your hand, but any movement, the slightest shake or shudder will throw it off. It will sprout wings and float away, leaving you breathless at the bottom of a hill, weightless with the sudden realization of what the world might have in store for you.

Those 3am, high as a kite long walks home where you stop and examine each and every thing to catch your gaze-they stop happening, so focused you are on getting somewhere or getting home to someone.

Saying yes! to a random group of people and launching out on an adventure, ending up in a dank park on a misty foggy evening as a hand drum keeps time with the earnest conversation stretching around you-this disappears, since no one in their right mind just wanders off and sits braiding the hair that lays in their lap for no good reason.

Adventure disappears when sense manifests.

I saw then this change as my struggle-my struggle for a place, an understanding of my time in a world seemingly against me. I could harness my own power, my fear or lack of it. But the power in my hands, the fearlessness, I couldn’t move it into the world in honest ways, in those that paid off for others, sticking it out in university, truly finding themselves before settling. I could only splay it out like something spat from my mouth in distaste, unharmonious, frightened in spite of itself.

That fearlessness turned into a crippling fear of that which others take for granted, sanity, normality, being able to put one foot in front of the other and make a life. I was paralyzed by the fear of just growing up, of doing all those adult things. Of loving, of being loved, of taking it seriously enough, life, to do what I really wanted to do, to life a real life.

I fear, or have feared, the living. It’s easy to jump into a cold lake when you have nothing after to worry for. Fearlessness, is living recklessly, living for your heart, when you have things to account for, people who wait up for you. I look forward now to a future that scares me, even while it fills me with joy for what may lie ahead.

I was that girl once, unafraid and filled with belief in tomorrow. I will be her again.

(Quadelle had a fab idea to do a series of posts based on phrases from Mary Schmich’s commencement address . [You may remember it better as a "song" by Baz Luhrmann] I thought it was a great idea, so, I stole it. Or copied. Whatever. Imitation is the soul of wit. Or brevity. Or both.  )

Don’t Worry About The Future

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

There was a time when I had no future.

I can remember living, firmly inside the now. My visions ahead did not contain a future. The contained whispers, memories cast forward, shadows. Where those around me saw marriage and family, career and travel, I saw a curiously blank slate, a wall of sorts. The Nothing.

The world had taken away most of what I thought was my future, and cast me listless into the wind of time.

Life without a future leaves you open to most anything, as there’s no timeline to destroy, no expectation to shatter, no worries to form. There’s nothing there-no children in the minds eye or picket fences to burn. I couldn’t imagine old age, since I couldn’t conceive of making it that far to worry.

And loss, and neglect, they condition you to see only today, only what you can hold in your tender paws and chew on gently, just to make sure it’s pure. What can the future hold, except more pain and disappointment, more anger and fear? If you take everything from a person, and replace it with an ache and a void you cannot erase or fill, how can they look ahead?

But a funny thing happened. For a moment, I found happy. I found a steady place to stand and wait. The wall dissipated, and for the first time in my life, I could look forward into tomorrow and really see who I could be, where I might sit, the books that would lie next to my bed, on the floor as messy as they did at 11.

I could see me, old and grey and smiling, surrounded by family and love, a life well spent. Or a me travelling into her golden years, covered in twilight. Or me and my husband, on a porch late into the evening, not saying much, but sitting anyway, thinking of this or that.

But that isn’t the future either, not now. The wall descends as I find I cannot believe in the future, wounded once more by my present, by my love and trust, still naive enough to believe in both. My future melts into the now, blackens once more with the dust of daily life.

I can’t worry about the future. My worries are here, and now and firm and block my sight regardless. My worries are commonplace and not so far ahead, if someone will ever love me again, if we’ll have enough to eat. If I’m strong enough for now, let alone then.

They blindside me, these worries. And they’re enough for 15 tomorrows.

 

(Quadelle had a fab idea to do a series of posts based on phrases from Mary Schmich’s commencement address . [You may remember it better as a "song" by Baz Luhrmann] I thought it was a great idea, so, I stole it. Or copied. Whatever. Imitation is the soul of wit. Or brevity. Or both.  )

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

I was never beautiful.

I can stare at pictures of then, of before, and I see awkward. I see half a foot too tall and 3 dress sizes too big. I see myself lurching over my friends, eyes downcast, ashamed of who I was, who I could not help but be.

I see a creature unable to find her womanhood, so cast off it had become. Calloused to insult, to ignorance, to the odd yet simply fact that she couldn’t possibly be sexual, or loved, or wanted.

My youth was never wonderful in that way. I never flowered or blossomed underneath someone, convinced anyone who did show interest would eventually come to mock me. I rarely held the power in my hand, except for a brief few months when I was 17, and on a manic rampage of sorts. I stared wistfully at the pretty girls, the skinny girls, and observed the control they held, the magnificence they grasped for their time in the sun.

I would never be pretty. No one would call me beautiful, not ever. My only power came from knowing such things were fleeting, and in time, pointless.

Not that it helped then, or now. Even the ugly duckling eventually grew wings.

(Quadelle had a fab idea to do a series of posts based on phrases from Mary Schmich’s commencement address . [You may remember it better as a "song" by Baz Luhrmann] I thought it was a great idea, so, I stole it. Or copied. Whatever. Imitation is the soul of wit. Or brevity. Or both.  )

 

WWMD? Wear Sunscreen

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

I never wear sunscreen. Maybe this traces back to putting some on when I was young, and inadvertently rubbing it in my eyes. This led to me howling and screaming around the house, convinced I was blind for at least an hour. I’ll forever remember staring at that little girl and her cracker white ass on the bottle while my eyes misted over, and wondering why I needed, for the first time in months, apply fucking sunscreen.

I would spend hours outside as a kid, most of those in the summer in the local pool, where you could collect friends, Dickie Dee ice cream and warts. Generally I’d forget that spending 11am to 4pm in water in direct sunlight is a bad thing, and would wince my way home, the color of an angry lobster. occasionally I’d manage to give myself heat stroke as well, leading my mother to toss me in the tub in an attempt to bring down 104F temperatures.

Sunscreen she’d mutter as she rubbed a stick of cocoa butter roughly over my baked skin why can’t you ever remember sunscreen? Or get in the shade? She ignored any grimaces or cries of pain, considering them collateral for what I had done to myself. Later, trying to sleep in a windless room on sheets that stuck to my charred arms, I’d think, suncreen, huh. Maybe.

I can’t say I became any smarter as I grew older, walking for hours in tank tops and shorts to the point where once, my shoulders blistered like a toads back. I stared at myself, fascinated, while friends retched. It’s not my fault I’d repeat. I shouldn’t burn this easily. I’m ruddy and brown haired, with dutch and english blood. I’m not fair. My ability to sear like tuna was inexplicable but true. Give me 15 minutes, and I’d be burned. 20 minutes, maybe, with sunscreen. It never failed.

You can lecture me until you’re blue in the face, and I’ll still forget the sunscreen.

Now, at 32, spending more than 20 minutes in the heavy warmth of a July afternoon will cause me to become, in order, whoozy, nauseous, cranky and weak. I’m like some consumptive Victorian swooning in the light. It’s irritating to almost anyone I know, but I don’t fake it-I cannot handle the sun.

And I miss it. Little miss hates the sun…doesn’t hate it. She misses those days when she spent hours lazy under a blue sky, chasing after the cute guy driving the Dickie Dee bike. I miss hot toes on pavement, afternoons by the river, staring. Sand tossed from swimsuit bottoms, bass nipping at legs in seaweed, swimming off the side of a sailboat bouncing lazy on the bluegreen water.

Minus of course, the sunscreen.

 

(Quadelle had a fab idea to do a series of posts based on phrases from Mary Schmich’s commencement address . [You may remember it better as a "song" by Baz Luhrmann] I thought it was a great idea, so, I stole it. Or copied. Whatever. Imitation is the soul of wit. Or brevity. Or both. )

Where I whine and act like a baby, cause there’s nothing left.

Increasingly I find myself spiraling into a bad place. I sit on the bus thinking “Your pdoc’s card is in your wallet. Just reach in, find the card, and call. You need her-this is what she’s there for.”

But the blubbering and the hissy fit in my head refuse to listen, babble back at me that I’m being a baby, and I should just stop whining, chin up, and soldier on.

I have no where to collapse with this, no arms to rely on, no voice to tell me it will be better. I’m right fucking back there, this place I despise and was told to spurn, you know the one. The time out rug in the corner at alone. I didn’t see a future colored like this, where I had to throw back to the me I saw at 17, only this time she had kids and a mortgage and she’s fucking terrified of all of it! and wants to leap up onto an offramp, stick out a thumb and make for Mexico. Or worse,  I hear the swan song of voice which has tempted in the past, and lo, as much of an easy route that may seem, it’s not, but it’s tiring and depressing fending off it’s rude advances all the time.

Over and over two things play in my head.

This isn’t my life.

Fuck me, I hate this life.

I don’t want to be alone. I never wanted to be alone again, and yet here I sit. I’m so fucking scared of the weakness invading, of a slip, a fall, something in my head knocking itself over and ruining me. I can hardly cry anymore because everything has been so blunted that it’s merged into one horrifying numbness, made worse by the fact that only I feel it’s pain. How awful to be scorned, but worse for the other to feel nothing but pleasure in release. What a horrid fool I really was in thinking I couldn’t be alone.

I have no one. I really and truly have no one, stupidly moving to a province with nothing, relying on a father who will just as surely leave as he comes, as he pleases. Nothing but me and two daughters who need me to find strength where I don’t believe any is left.

I don’t want to crawl from my bed in the morning. There’s nothing to face that isn’t horrid. A life full of nothing, alone, dreams destroyed.

I’m so tired of this. What am I doing so wrong that everything needs to fall apart every few years? Why is there nothing I can’t destroy?

Humbug

Bah.

I’m sick. I’m depressed-ish. I’m cranky and quiet like a small child with no friends, feeling the lack of physical affection in a way that makes me wish I never ever had it. I lived for years with no one touching me-I can do it again, right?

Sigh. I don’t want to. I crave affection. I crave the simple touch, more than I’ll ever crave sex. Maybe I’m old for this to happen. Maybe I’m just too sick and all I want is to fall backwards into someone, safely, have my back rubbed and my hair played with. (Maybe not on this last part-my hair hurts when I’m sick)

What bothers me right now, is the heaving sigh of irritation at which I’m staring at Christmas. The effort. The stuff. I don’t want to play happy family for Christmas, I don’t want to go shopping, I don’t want to pretend that anyone wants to get my a present I just want to bury my head in the sand and wait for it to all go away.

I usually like Christmas. I love the sounds and the smells and the paper and the newness. The potential. Right now though, I’m in an eeyore place and only seeing the bad things. The money I can’t afford to spend. The things they won’t get, the happy mother they won’t have. While I’m ok with the principal behind our separation, I don’t want to be alone, and it echoes in my chest, the thought of not being a family, a true family for this Christmas, first of many.

So I’m likely fatalistic, sitting here trying to breathe and now sweating from this sickness that won’t leave me. But I’d like to skip to January if you don’t mind, to where it might be better, and I won’t have to paste on that fake smile and try to not snap at my kids.

Promise Me.

I want your absolutes that I will be loved again.

I met him at 15 or so, my heart soared then, unrequited for a few years, and even then, when it was, melancoly and half warmed, I accepted a half cocked version that wasn’t what I had read or seen or heard about. Figuring it closer to reality I took it and ran, muttering to myself “he loves you. it’s ok. It’s fated!”

Except the rub. I don’t believe in fate. I didn’t then and I really don’t now, instead believing that I took what I needed at the time, a body to hold me, words to whisper wet in my ears, someone, something to come home to instead of an empty bed and a mirror I had to face on my own.

We accept things through a lifetime. Things we perhaps wouldn’t accept out of hand but sitting atop a pile of yesterday’s and whatfor’s we just take and walk free. Until we sit down and really look at what we have, or what we don’t have, and realize that without passion, without a victory to be proud of, without someone truly and willingly listening to our days and stories, there’s nothing there. There is nothing more than an emptiness more profound than that which we find at the end of our mirrors.

We end with years of nothing. Years of tired weighted glances we’re just too exhausted to pursue. Years of half measures, of shrugs, and arguing and tears and screaming and black hands. We end these years panting and lustless, worn from running to keep up with the myth we’ve created for each other. We’re better on paper than we’ll ever be in real life, better in the mists of memory, tied to TV Shows and records.

But promise me I’ll feel that again, that silk shudder in my chest, across my breasts, the goosepimples inside my elbows and ears that made me quiver, promise me that someone will glance my way and convince me I’m just a bird on a draft, floating effortlessly upwards. Promise me love. Promise me magic. Promise me songs in the morning, new gifts at dawn, kisses at twilight, ghosts at night. Promise me this won’t be forever, this ache, this haunting where a person was, were someone should be. I’m better paired, tethered to a creature who knows the other side of me, filling the hole that’s already begun to clear.

I’m not meant to be alone, not for real. Promise me I won’t be.

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn’t a sign that they “don’t understand” one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.

We get along like two old friends, the comfy kind you have from high school who knows what it takes to make you blow root beer out your nose.

I find myself warmed by talking with him-not in the girly flirty way, but in the hey! I like talking to my friend! We get along and he’s funny and he laughs (sometimes) at my jokes and the look in his eyes isn’t cold like it was. kinda way.

I come home without the weight of what or if or should I on my back. No more constantly examining my marriage, no more staring for the flaw, picking at a scab of what was, trying for the sake of it. I come home and look into the eyes of my soon to be ex husband and I think I do love you, after nearly half my life, I love you to the tips of my toes, but you’re right you know, that love isn’t the wifey kind. It’s a warm glass of rum instead of the cold shock of tequila.

And now, on the other side of the table smiling at each other warmly, I am perfectly all right with that.

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

People gasp when you tell them you’re breaking up.  After all this time! How sad, they tsk, how sad. I suppose that it is, sad that we couldn’t manage to salvage what always made us so right for each other, sad that one, or both of us changed just enough for the other to not recognize any longer. Sad that I got sick, sad that he had to shoulder the burdens of a family alone through it, weather my moods and my ire.

It’s sad that we won’t have more time together, it is.

But that time is long past, the years of love not meaning obligation. The time when things were tender and devoted, not forced. We haven’t lived there in a long time, and I don’t know why. If anything kills me, it’s the not knowing why, why we couldn’t find the right way to this.

I can see the threads now, slipping downhill. I couldn’t see them before, caught up in the now, but I can stare back from here and see where it began to unravel, and all the places where I didn’t stop and pick it up, or where we together kicked the thread aside and moved ahead, without it. So many tiny moments that added up to now, to us both holding the sad dying pieces of a marriage, with the terrible knowledge that we couldn’t put it back together.

I don’t think we mourn it. Maybe it will be worse later, like it was the other day in the supermarket, as each item he liked grabbed me by the chest and nearly started the tears coming with how I’d never buy it for him again, how I’d need to learn what cereal someone else likes best someday. How I wouldn’t have a lover to smile for as I threw chocolate in the cart. I mourn in the strangest ways, the buildings where we sat, the streets we walked down, hands touching softly, the rooms where our new daughters once lay, and the beautific smile that graced his face as he rocked them to sleep.

I will mourn the us that wasn’t, that never could be, the lovers who couldn’t find the pace, get the steps. We tried, and once, we did hold it together, cradled the ball of us in our hands. But it was so very long ago, and life is so easily ran from habit, our hands splitting, letting go.

But we tried. We’ve spent the last few years trying, and finally, I’ve thrown in the towel as well, saying those words he’s so rarely heard from my lips.

You’re right.

Whatever we had, whatever flowered for 2 or 5 or 6 years, it’s long since dried up and become lost as we’ve grown up and apart. Think of it like a firework-beautiful, dangerous, and ultimately, never meant to last.

I like that image of us, exploding into ash to fertilize tomorrow. I like that.

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

We get along, and agree and plan and I can see tomorrow, I can see next month, and I’m not that scared! Everyone tsk’s and says they can’t imagine and I’m gleefully clapping my hands and saying But I CAN! see! And it’s not so bad! We divy up the goods and calmly discuss what custody will look like and if his new place will be up the street or down three more and I think I can do this. This isn’t the horrid divorces my friend’s parents had, this is our divorce, as two people who do care for each other, and more importantly, love their children more than life and realize that this, what we do right now, impacts every step of the rest of their lives.

And most importantly, because we will always be a family, drawn together by blood and time. I will always be their mother. He will always be their father.

We will be better this way. I am quite sure of it.

 

There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

Life is, changing.

Many of you know, hiding in my hidey-hole, exactly what’s changing, and maybe we can come right out and whisper

(divorce)

in a small small voice so no one hears.

Terror? It comes in corners, scatters and clatters up against me, scoots up my leg and straight into my heart. To be responsible for me, well now, I’ll eat Mr. Noodle and wear out my shoes. To face a future where my kids are totally subject to me, in at least some capacity-flabbergasting. A future where running out of bread and money at the same time is possible again, but this time, with hungry little mouths.

Screw horror movies. This is what keeps me up at night.

And now, it’s reality.

******

Of course, we won’t be alone, desert island eating each other alone. Their father will be involved, likely only away from us a few blocks, ready and willing and able to take them according to plan, and sometimes likely not plan, when one of us is sick, or wants to take them for walks or dinner. We won’t be isolated and stuck, but it feels that way, the vision of life without another adult in the house, something to lean on, someone to protect you and tell you it will be ok.

I’ve never been that totally on my own, not ever. There’s always been someone in the background, just in case I fell. The anxiety rising in my chest oozes from that newness more than anything else. It makes me fear for my children-if they get sick, or grow too fast. All the variables I can think of-they scare me breathless.

This-the potential to be alone, absolutely alone, not stuck in a place we can’t leverage or change, but the only one on the couch watching Dexter or alone in the bathroom, cleaning the hair from my brush for the first time in years. This alone where you take a shower with the door open so you can hear what’s going on, and have to drag the kids with you when there’s an appointment.

Sure I could find someone else, someday. But they won’t know me the same way. It won’t be the comfort of 12 years. It won’t be easy again, not for awhile. The house will still echo, only bringing back my own voice and thoughts.

I’m equally terrified and thrilled at the prospect of starting again. I’m sad that it’s happening, I am. But there’s also a relief in the inevitable, the necessary starting. Staring across an abyss at someone you love, but more as a sibling, or a friend than a lover, and knowing you’re better apart? Sad, scary and yet so right. I can love him again this way, as the father of my daughters, as a friend making fun of me. As a lover-it was just too hard, too much, for more reasons than I can count.

It’s like an exhaled sigh really. A glance out a window, a coy smile at a bud in spring. Growth, and change and fear-they all hold hands while singing Bird on a Wire.

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

Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
it’s just that I thought a lover had to be some kind of liar too.

Like a baby, stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry no more. It’s over now, it’s over babe, don’t cry no more. I say don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry anymore. It’s over. It’s finished. It’s completed. It has been paid for.

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

That time of the month

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

Sweet fuck I’m having one of those weeks.

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

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

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

I’m awfully tired of having to apologize.

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

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

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