Disquieted

When I was 13 I was in a hurry to dump something disgusting out the back door. In my haste, I didn’t see the broken glass sticking out like a tongue, and barely felt it until the blood started to pool at my feet. I cursed and swore as I hobbled into the kitchen, trailing blood like carnage behind me, a gaping hole visible in my leg.

I never had stitches. My father refused to take me to the hospital, telling me it would heal without them, that I could bandage it and keep it closed, hidden and safe. I wrapped it in gauze, a tensor band, watched it bleed through and through for hours, a slow ooze. The next day I unwrapped my leg to change the gauze, and yanked off the scab. The blood flowed free again, and for the next week, I danced this waltz, the pain fresh, the blood copious and frightening until one day, the scab just clung to me instead of the gauze, and my leg could begin to heal.

There’s been a scar there ever since, faint now, but if I run my fingers ever so gently down my leg, the nerves change, the skin hardens and twitches, and I remember the dark red pool sticky under my foot on the chair my mother had so carefully upholstered before she died.

***

Here’s the thing about grief, and healing.

There’s no secret recipe.

It’s not like the Caramilk bar. It’s not like those cookies your grandma makes at Easter, ingredients stored in her head, only parsed out when you’re older. It’s not a 4 year term like school.

It is forever. And it’s ok.

***

You don’t feel healing. Not in it’s slow crawl towards the door, it’s lego block skyscraper of better. It’s imperceptile, feeling better, until you realize that entire days or weeks or maybe even months have gone by and you don’t feel quite so broken, and maybe you haven’t cried except when watching The Notebook. You don’t feel someone crazy gluing your heart back into place, and might barely even feel the sigh you heave late one night when, looking at the stars in their rabid glory, you make a deal with the universe that you will merely accept what you’ve become and what you’re lost. You only feel the loss of an ache until eventually, you realize the smile you’ve plastered on is real.

You will be better, someday.

But someday isn’t a train in the station, and it isn’t a fucking self help book waiting to take your 29.95 cdn and it isn’t a list you stick on the fridge between “pedicure” and “buy more mustard”. Someday is what you become, and you alone, your fractures and fissures slowly closing between your own hardened hands.

I cannot make you better. I cannot order you  ’Woman! Heal yourself!’ anymore than I could instruct the me at 12 or 19 or 25 to just fucking accept things, accept loss and pain as part of my humanity and to just move on. I couldn’t get there until I could breathe through it, and past the porcupine of ache and loss I held in my lap. I do not believe myself deluded or assholish enough to believe I have a right to dictate to you the terms of your grief or your own acceptance.

My hands have no right to your pain.

***

I hear the words you have spoken and I want to find you, and make the hurt yours. I want to crush your heart into a glass and watch you drink it, aware of each sliver that slices your throat and leaves you breathless and mute.

I want you to feel this pain, this terror and helplessness. I want you to devolve for a hour, a week, a year and become the howling pit of fucking horror.

Then I want you to try and lay hands. Then I want to watch what nonsense scratches the surface of your lips when you find that all your words have become lost and meaningless in the face of a world absolutely bereft of someone you love.

We are, none of us, experts in living. We are frail human creatures, all of us, and we are fragile beyond measure, even in our strength. But my frailty spits in the face of your repugnant pity.

All scars heal in due time.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

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Originally uploaded by thordora

Try as hard as I can, I can hardly see myself there.

I know I was seven, once. Long ago. A lifetime, maybe 3 lifetimes ago, the memory tucked neatly beside that one time my brother broke my hockey stick, just around the bend from when my mother started getting sick. There was a little girl, just like this one. Heavy in the eyes, shouldering the burdens of the world already, heart sad at the unjustness of it all.

“This husky killed a 21 day old baby Mom!” I hear peep over lunch as she reads Macleans, absently with her food, much as I did, and still do, eyes tracing words as food, eventually, found it’s way home.

I curse her quick wit, her knife like brain, the inner workings which barely skip a beat. I can only shrug and nod, my own heart hardened and inured to this type of thing, the horror of everyday life in our world. While I have trouble remembering the sunlight at her age, or the helplessness, I vividly recall the echoing terror of that age, the realization that things can, and will hurt you.

She’s too perfect to feel this yet. Too lovely, too wonderful and magical to be weighted down with such earthly concerns, with the dull roar of what we’re capable of, you and I, and eventually, her. She’s much too Technicolor to be part of the machine.

***
A mother’s bias, the beauty I see in her. She will always be a myth I’ve created, a glorious accident, the collision of love and passion. Like a stutter she exists everywhere, in my arms, newly born, hesitant to hold my hand near the school these last few days, slamming doors in my face while emotion reigns king, handing me my first grandchild as she smiles, standing fearless at my deathbed. I see all the Vivian my age will bring, and beyond, this woman I’ve created, the girl I hold at night through terror when the darkness only brings the dogs she fears.

I am sad for the person I will never know, the woman I will never see because I am her Mother, and not her friend, or her sister or her lover. I will walk only part of the way with her, in this, the spring of her life, setting her free into her summer to blossom and roar into the sunshine.

Gladly I dance with her now, for spring is fleeting, and terribly sweet.

***
When I was barely 6 months pregnant, while she slept under my heart, I dreamed of her, the her now, walking hand in hand with me down busy streets, much as I remember of my mother and I.

And here we are, her voice flying through the tender leaves of our new summer, her growing hand loose in mine, ready to slip away in readiness for someone else, sooner than later. We walk the grey streets of my dreams, and talk of nothingness and love.

She the dream, I the dreamer, blessed with foresight.

Be, here…now.

There’s silence. The silence between two old lovers with no words left between them, no common ground, a co-mingling of longing, anger, love and loss. A stale air.

We smile, we laugh, we talk of old things and new things. My heart warms at the sight of him with his daughters, his love so transparent, their adoration blinding. Every girl needs their Daddy.

I miss him.

Like a fucking freight train it hits me sometimes, the ache this brings. The sense that my arm is missing, that there’s a space filled. I miss their father, even if we have nothing to say and blindly grope for this new normal, saddened ourselves with what’s become of all of it. Or at least, I’m saddened. I cannot speak for him. I wish I knew that he missed it too. Perhaps then it wouldn’t hurt so much on the days that it does.

I am slowly adjusting to, and am gladdened by my space. The giddy sense that I and I alone make decisions-what I buy for food, what we have on the cable bill, the fucking toothpaste flavour. Iam slowly adjusting to being the only adult in the house, and finding I enjoy it, this power, this scary responsibility. I’ve never really been alone in the world, not like this.

But to see him with my children, to feel that old solidity in the house, that which I never truly appreciated before, this devotion I never saw. To suddenly understand how important it is to me, how vital this family thing really is, and to not have it….my heart crushed itself again into pieces, waiting a full day later to scream itself out.

I want to stop missing this. I want to move on, I want to find someone else, something else. I want to make my family work. I want to pretend it was never there.

What I want is to stop wanting any of it, and just breathe. Just, be.

If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.

“Mommy, why doesn’t Daddy live with us anymore?”

I’m busy unravelling bacon into a pan when she asks, casually holding Mao-Mao in her arms, thumb ajar from her mouth. The glitter on her new Hello Kitty shirt catches the random sunlight in the room, her eyes wide and sad.

I stumble, the words in my head (cause he’s a jerk/cause I’m a bad wife/cause he was a bad husband/we were too young/we gave up/cause it’s the right thing) and spit out the old line.

“Because sometimes Mommy’s and Daddy’s can’t live together.”

She stares into my heart, and knows it’s bigger, and yet simpler than this. She senses the pause before I talk, the catch in my breath, the worry.

“But why can’t he wrestle in your bedroom with us anymore?”

I stifle the heave in my chest, months later, still hidden deep inside, and just shake my head.

“You can do that at his house Honey Bear.”

“But I want to do it here.”

What to say? How do I make this better, this hurt I cannot control, cannot change, and am at a helpless mercy to? How can I soothe a 5-year-old who only knows that Daddy isn’t here, and hasn’t been for a while?

“Do you miss Daddy?” I ask softly

Her eyes grow wider. “Yes Mummy.” The thumb pops back into her mouth, and she grows quiet again.

The hurts I cannot solve, or salve. The ache of something broken, something lost. In my head I’m screaming “It wasn’t supposed to be this way!” but find myself helpless, torn between modelling calm acceptance or just sitting down on the floor with her and agreeing that yes, I hate this too. I don’t miss the fights. But I miss my family, as fractured as it was.

Like a fluttering curtain in the breeze, my heart wavers on her gaze, settles as the wind calms, hangs slack. There was a life before, and a life now, and the in between where my daughter still lives, emerges from slowly. The bareness of our life now, the aching hole.

I recognize it, its burn and sting. The empty seat in the picture. The word missing, the shuffle of houses, the irrevocable destruction wreaked upon my children. I have tasted this, in different ways but still, the nectar is close enough to dose my heart and chest in the shuttering stop.

***

There are things I know as true. That life isn’t fair, never will be. That I can control myself, and on a basic level, nothing more. That love and hate are more than two sides of the same coin, ofttimes muddled together like a trifle, sweet and cool on the lips, glittering in the light.

I know it’s true that you can mend a heart. But I also know it’s never quite the same.

***

I finish a book that leaves me breathless, and aware of myself. I can feel my nerves alive from words, the tears which come unbidden as I read on the bus, a patio. How the tentacles of the story stretch out and slither into my body, connections gloriously made. I smile into the clouds and realize, for the first time in years, I am truly and utterly moved. I see myself hovering briefly, reaching out to meet skin, and feel silenced by awe.

I am returning, me who has been lost. Dusty and worn, but aching to feel more than the numbness of these years.

The book speaks of love, loss, and love yet again. I swell with hope.

***

I don’t have an easy answer for Rosalyn, or Vivian, or hell, even myself. There’s 101 reasons why their parents can’t be together, even if I don’t want to admit them, bound by pride and a sense of duty. We’re both happier, the kids are happier. But they know. They recognize that something has shifted, a new normal descended. Soon, they won’t remember when we were a family together, and perhaps he’ll take a wife or I’ll find a lover who will turn into a partner and life will move on.

But memory isn’t a fair judge or jury. And hearts carry their scars like flags into the future.

***

Ros curls into me in the morning sun, pressing against my body as I wake slowly, as she does every morning, thumb in mouth, head boring into my arm. We rest for minutes, before the alarm, before the day begins running, snapping orders, hugs, the detritus of day-to-day life.

There was never enough room in the bed before for her tiny body.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people .

I stand in front of myself.

The mirror is no friend. It never has been. A scrawny child turned too tall and broad teenager turned adult with more bumps than roads, I’ve spent a lifetime staring away from myself. No matter how healthy I have been, how in shape, how active, I scorn my reflection. It has never been good enough.

Too tall.

Too broad.

Too fat.

Too curvy.

Too unattractive.

Too nervy.

Always something.

***

I have never been a little girl.

Around other women I feel awkward and oversized, my height, the sheer heft of my shoulders, the calves that never fit into those sleek black boots, the boobs which double as bird feeders and get in the way when I talk with my hands. I watch other women, they of tiny hands, thin bones, in some cases, the blessings of genetics, and I feel envy, as well as shame. Womanhood, is it not in delicacy? Is it not in the lovely flutters of fine boned hands, soft and pointed? Have they not the trappings of will, or at the very least, a slot in a lottery I lost out on, my own blood full of the tall, the thick hipped, those who will survive famine. Hearty stock. Peasants maybe.

My unease with women may stretch back to the fact that I always feel like a giant among the munchkins, and I am the problem. Rooms full of svelte and tanned, bellies that lie flat, arms that rarely jiggle. Pants that stay put.

When the world, or at least the one presented to you, is a consumptive tea party of flounce and vanity, of slimness and restraint, how does a girl look around her if it’s her ass that doesn’t fit in the party chair?

***

I haven’t worn a swimsuit in public for years, not openly without something over it. Does it matter if crazy gained me weight? If medications did? If stress, lack of time, the natural progression of my body? I haven’t worn one without covering since I was 14 or so, when, relatively skinny, someone still called me “lard-ass”.

Of course, I’ve also heard this in varying combinations while walking down the street minding my own business, flung from a car window like so much trash. Sure, sticks and stones. But the 10th time. Then 50th. How long until you believe it, random words from adolescent idiots? How long before the world reinforces that regardless of your actual strength and health, it’s how someone else sees your ass in those pants that matters as you walk home late at night.

If you’re lucky, someone only throws something once.

***

I am pleasantly surprised at the ease push ups start to come, at the smooth feel of my body as it relies on itself. I smile as muscle replaces slack in places. I make conscious decisions to eat better, to eat less.

I am however, still fat. Judging by the biological members of my family alive, I will always be fat. But does my fat dictate my health? Can the people who drive everywhere, who rarely take the stairs, but who perhaps don’t eat, or who are lucky to be blessed genetically, are they more healthy? The fat women doing biathalons-are they unhealthy? I will always be a size above, unlikely to ever slip under an 18. (I haven’t been a 14 since the summer I spent high without eating, having maybe 200 calories a day while I cycled everywhere. I still had a stomach, even then.)

But how does that determine judgement? If I recoil from a skinny woman, who to me, is far too slim, I see judgement cast at me. Yet recoil from me, and people will join you. I’m fat. I’m not welcome at the tea party. I’m disgusting and unhealthy.

I am, essentially, invisible, and yet, visibly judged. Even though you may know nothing about me, and how I live. I am your perfect whipping boy for your own vanity.

***

I love to run. I always have. And yet, I’ve never been able to without my lungs seizing up, and rendering me breathless, culminating once in passing out during a basketball game, legions of 13 year old girls newly trained in CPR wondering if they would get to try it out on the fat girl.

(Ironically, just writing about this makes my chest seize up in anxiety.)

I try to run. I try to run away from the body I have, because it is, quite simply, not the body the world condones, and is one it barely tolerates, no matter how fit it might be, no matter how healthy each doctor deems it against their own judgement. But I cannot run. And I am faced with raising two daughters in a world which makes weight and either or proposition, which it may not necessarily be.

I can’t run my way out of my body. But I can’t seem to run my way out of expectation or judgement either.

***

30 years in, 33 this year somehow, I can stand in front of a mirror, and face myself. I am imperfect. I am lumpy in places I’ve been lumpy since 14. But I am also strong.

I’m tired of letting you keep me from myself.  And it stops now.

Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.

I’m drunkenly leaning back in the seat, bemused. Quiet, at that point where I realize that I should have eaten dinner, or perhaps, not had that last drink, or perhaps not the cigarette, perhaps not stood outside for an hour with all the smokers.

Either way, I’m pretty buzzed, and fairly quiet, and quite sure I just want to go to bed.

My friend, my first good “girl” friend in years, the one I can talk to about anything, the first friendship which, in a long time, seems to put up with my quirks and oddities, she started to try and explain to me that I’m her best friend, her truest, the one she can trust and talk to about anything.

I smiled and remained mute.

She repeated herself.

My mouth opened, and yet, no sound escaped. She looked at me and asked if I felt the same way, any sort of connection, would I miss her if she wasn’t there, would I notice?

Would I?

***

I hardly miss my kids these days. My time is spent at work, home briefly, eat, work, online a bit, sleep. Repeat.  I ask my friend “Have I only been a good person all these years because I was with someone I didn’t think was good? Am I a bad mother because lately, my heart just isn’t in it and I wonder, oh lo I wonder, do I love anything at this point, my kids included?

I feel detached, like a scab hanging from a healed place on the skin. Superfluous. Their father comes to claim them, and holds them like a dying man in the desert clings to water. I find myself short tempered and craving silence, my moments with them full of voices and nattering and needs. I do not miss them when they are away.

I rarely, if ever, miss anyone. Hardly have since, well, forever. Have I been taught that missing people only ends in sadness, in regret? Or am I broken? Am I rendered forever incapable of attaching normally, instead privy only to this hollow place in my chest, simmering with fear and distance,  echoey and blank?

It’s not about a person. It’s not about the kids. It is, I’ve come to notice, me. Something has snapped, and while I can feel and speak of theoretical love, while I can wax poetic about the nuance of seeing myself mirrored in a child, or feel reflected in another person, I cannot truly feel these things. Even drunk, even incapacitated, I feel nothing more than a dim light of affection or empathy.

But not love. The desire to not be alone maybe, a thirst to be known, to be seen. But not love.

***

I know it bothers her. Friends are people who care, right? Friends are people who hold you up in the bathroom, who make sure you get home safe, who listen to you cry or laugh. And I do these things, without labels, without meaning, because this is what a friend does.

But is that enough for people? Would that be enough for you?

Toy Review, and Giveaway!-Hard Throb

This is the point where, if you are easily offended or otherwise may be traumatized by TMI on my part, I ask you to step away, and look at this instead.

“Grow where you are planted”

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Originally uploaded by thordora

I run out of words somedays, I’m so stunned by their beauty. I take a step back and wonder, who blessed me so? Who gave me creatures who mirror me in all the ways I would have never imagined, and yet somehow show me who I’m not, make me believe in myself, believe that I could be better, smarter, nicer.

They make me want a better world.

I can’t help but stare at Vivian, at this woman-child who I can hear growing and becoming, this beauty, this strong smart child who will one day be a woman who will drink beer with me and curse the state of things. A woman who will know her power, and her grace. I see them all-all the “hers” overlay-ed, laced together from the first moment she lay in my arms, to the last second I will breathe in her world.

I look at Rosalyn, my baby, not a baby, off to school soon, eager to be on her own, yet mimicking her big sister every step of the way. Vivian comes home from school and every time, every.single.time she’s excited to see her and hugs her and chases her. She has such a capacity to feel my daughter, my second born. Her heart will open to the world, and I can only hope and plead with the universe to not let it bend and break too much.

My daughters become women with each other. Not with me. I will always be the elder, the wise woman, the hag. I will be their beacon and guide, their terror made flesh, their fears holy. But with each other, they will see in tandem what life can give, what it can take away. With luck, and a little hope, they will be the pillars through life. With a little luck…they will always stand in the sun like this.