I gasp in recognition when I see her. I, adopted, always loved, always cherished but always….just slightly more alone for the blindness my providence brought me. I dreamed of seeing my own eyes reflected, my strong legs built from someone who was connected by blood and not will.
Cast out almost, surrounded on all sides by those with the security of knowing exactly where they came from. I spent hours gazing at myself in mirrors, dusty windows, puddles, waiting for wisdom and belonging.
And when I did see myself reflected, when my eyes were finally swallowed by the blood I had craved, there was a sating, a measure of quiet that overcame.
But nothing like staring into the eyes of my second born, and seeing myself, squared by the universe. Seeing my wide eyes, darker. taking after her father, but delicate and lovely. The steel behind them, my stubbornness, tangled in her own charm and wit. Nothing has been like catching her stride out of the side of my eyesight and seeing my own muscles bending and pulling, legs which could settle a nation and wrap a lover tight.
Nothing like hearing a laugh full of candy glass, and knowing it’s more like yours than you’ve ever known.
She’s 5 1/2, and I stop her movements in the setting sun and plead, stop Ros, please, let me catch you in the light like a dragonfly and she sighs and smiles politely, the forced smile I can never make real ever.
Two of us who should never play poker. Two of us, transparent for all of our masks and putty.
Inside a somber self cradles a book, and sighs satisfied.
The air is heavy and moist as I speed home, the lights glittering in the new night. I can smell the ocean, it’s shores stolen from me by kilometre, by time and tree. But I can feel it, sinking beside me, absorbed to my skin like so much velcro or kelp, floating.
It is all shifting, this life. These lives.
I walk in my door, stumble more like it, across a dark gravel and potty lawn, and up the steps to my old wood deck. I tangle with cats as I open the door, hear the silence of rest down the hall, my children safe dreamers in the corner room. The sea carries to them too, monsters, adventures, memories they’ve yet to birth. The lights glimmer against the ink sky as the moon sets, a dull orange candy widened, and a whisper is made, a promise I spoke aloud once, years before.
I do not recall it, not in words. But it had wings, and petals. Shone silver in the light of a wet road.
Fall comes. Fall opens her woolen coat, stretching her arms peaceful through it’s sleeves, readying herself. The twilight calm a penance she’s paid, a held moment before the pricking months descend. Her breath is dusty like a new lover, and mewing, only a thought on the wind yet.
Yet.
She grasps this moon, this snake which gnaws itself, the scent like ribbons on the breeze which captures my eyesight. She holds it still for us to gasp aware for, suddenly children again, suddenly wanting and misty with the echo in our lungs.
Her hands cradle my cheeks, her fingers just the edge of chill, eyes the color of deep water and death. From her skin rises the earth and water scent of melancoly and unattended, a pale wounding in how she misses something she can no longer name.
A kiss she gives. Before the light moves off the milky world, off my daggered arms. A gentle nudge before she casts off, windless.
It’s not a permanent situation by any means. But it’s the one that (sorta) pays the bills and allows me to eat right now. And frankly, I’m pretty good at it when I want to be. Or rather, when people are douchebags.
I’m the person at the end of the phone when you want to call and bitch about your bill. I’m the person you whine to when you think you pay too much, even with a discount. I’m the person you curse at when, like a pouting 12 year old, you’re angry because you didn’t get your way.
I know that my mother always warned me about people, but they just really do NOT get it. You catch more flies with sugar than shit. Period. Sure, I’m supposed to be all friendly and professional, but when the words “YOU PEOPLE” are muttered with contempt 30 times in 5 minutes, how do you think I feel? When you say the words like something you stepped it, and make it clear that you think I’m an idiot before I’ve said a word, how helpful do you think I might be? How helpful would YOU be?
When you say the services suck. When you complain you pay too much, despite being a short term customer who already has the best possible “sale”. When you are unwilling to pay more, yet want everything, your entitlement oozing from your tongue. When the word “LIKE” crosses your lips more than you breathe, and you expect me to roll over like your mother does every.single.day.
These things annoy me, and will basically prevent me from doing anything more than the bare minimum.
I’m not an asshole. I don’t go out of my way to not be helpful. When someone calls in and is polite and mentions a tight budget and have been a good customer for 20 years, I will bend like a pretzel to help. When you call in after years of never paying on time, and demand to know why, after being cut off for not paying for months, you can’t have your TV-I will at the very least mute while I snigger.
Entitlement will get you no where. Mentioning how important you are will get you nowhere. Screaming at me and using profanity will only amuse me. Being a general, snide arsehole will make me twitchy and get you nowhere.
I’m inherently a nice person. I want to help. I want to fix your problem-you are paying for something after all.
But I want something from you as well. I want you to step back and remember that I am just like you. Maybe a little lazier so I’m stuck in a shit job. I want you to realize that on the other end of the phone is an actual person. I know it isn’t in vogue to keep this in mind, to remember that just like everyone else, I have a job to do, and rules to follow and that I like feeding my children, and will not compromise that ability just so you can watch a little porn for free.
I want you to think how you’d feel if someone spoke to your child the way I’ve been spoken to. I want you to think about how insane you’d get if someone talked to your wife like that.
I want you to realize that despite the fact that you look down your nose at me, at my job and lack of education, you need me. You need the chick in tech support who will patiently explain that if the power is out, nothing works, least of all your internet. You need me to add that channel so you can watch the fucking Bachelor or whatever piece of crap you’re destroying brain cells with this year.
I want you to realize that someday, you could be me too. And you won’t like any of this either.
I’ve discovered this, after years of believing otherwise, years of expecting a new hurt, a new pain, discarding hope for apathy, acceptance. Inside I’ve blossomed into a woman who says things like “It will work out.” or “I’m blessed, even with my wonky floors and overdrawn accounts.”
Hope is a flower which blossoms in a soil of bullshit, the ability to hold our anger and our pain in our hands, draw in a long white breath, and blow it into the wind. Hope is the soul which burns brightly.
Hope is the sun through leaves on a broad Sunday morning.
***
It’s like the memories are leaving me now, at the speed of light they drop from me.
Hands blindly groping when I couldn’t say no.
The beeping of fake lungs, the drone. The silence that replaced it.
The shock of being on the floor, anticipating the kick and yet feeling helpless to stop it.
The moist palms, the dry empty eyes.
Voices yelling, whimpering, whispering how useless I am.
Urine softly dripping down my bedroom door, the smell.
The yelling. All the fucking yelling.
Like a switch has been pulled, a tie removed, a barrier defeated, I feel all of this, these past lives, drop behind me. Baggage left at another door, a station, in a dump.
I am free of it. All of it.
***
I have few wishes in life, really. I wish for healthy children. I wish for happy children.
But above all, I wish for children who never know a touch unwanted, a voice raised in anger, a fist in their face, slurring insults. I wish for children who only know love, and kindness and beauty.
We walk to the park so the girls can play in the new splash pad, relief from the late August heat, a change, something not the inside of the house.
Vivian insists on walking “Lizzie”-her pretend pet…lizard on my old dog chain, remnant of a youth I haven’t seen in forever. I smiled when I found it, remembering my friend Pierre wrapping it around my neck when I was 14 or so, closing the padlock. I grimaced, remembering the largest pair of bolt cutters I have ever seen closing in on my throat two years later, long after I had lost the keys.
The chain felt like a weight when it was locked on me, and yet I missed it when it was gone. Never enough to put it back. But enough to mourn it’s absence.
We walk and I can hear the chain clinking against the pavement, and I marvel at it’s reincarnation as a toy, years and moments away from the 14 year old I was, the messed up little girl. We walk and I imagine Vivian in a few more years-today she lost her first tooth, a linear progression from the first one she ever had. Tomorrow, soon, she will be 14 as well, more woman than girl, and I shall be tormented, wondering what secrets and pain she hides from me.
But that’s a thought for another day.
***
We walk home after much whining, cajoling and promising. Too close to the dinner witching hour, I don’t want to be caught with crying children too, so we hoof it home, balancing acts on the curbs as we go, popsicles (which cost far more than they ever did when I was their age, causing “old lady Dora” to kick in and secretly rant in her head how when SHE was a girl, popsicles were only 10 cents…) in hand.
As we walk, Rosalyn asks what an apartment building is, and I answer, adding “someday we might live in one. Man I hope not.” and it hits me that it’s highly likely we will, despite my hatred for them. It hits me that I will likely lose my house and all that bonuses that go with it, that I will let this dream of mine slip through my fingers.
It also occurs to me then, that the side effect of loss is a good night sleep, and the ability to just live for now, and dream bigger. The sun is shining, the grass is green, and my children tiring as we walk, their bellies wanting for their dinner, their skin dusky from the sun and the dirt and the day.
When we lose things, we make room for the better ones we truly deserve. We just have to keep looking.
I stare at my backyard, the hole where the pool was, cluttered with toys, old plastic things half buried. I wonder how much fill will cost, how much it will cost to take down the old fence to get the fill in, put up a new fence. I see my garden, in the future, the garden I most likely will never have.
I turn into my house, see the peeling paint, the flooring coming up at the seams, the holes in the walls, the doors that don’t close.
It’s as if a dream slowly became a nightmare. Difference being, this was my dream, and I’ve never been able to keep it alive. Now, I barely skim the surface, and vainly hope I’ll make back what we spent 6 years ago.
My dream was a home with a porch, many windows, warm corners to read in through winter. Fresh squash and flowers. Sunlight.
I’m feeling it slip through my fingers, and frankly, all I find myself wanting to do is curl up and cry.
Another failure. Another something I can’t fix.
***
I’ve quite nearly given up. A friend was here and her husband, bless him, did all the man tasks he could in a few days, and was angered by the sheer negligence involved. That a husband would do nothing, just let the house fall down around, fall to pieces. I felt helpless and humiliated in the face of this, knowing I’ve been trying but not trying hard enough, not focused on my home, not focused on the things I need to get done.
But it’s so big. And I’m so alone with this, and while I can make my lists and start little projects, I feel like I’m pissing into the wind trying to stay dry. I couldn’t sell the place right now and make back what we need, but I can’t afford to do all the things that I need, not correctly. How I dream of just walking away from it all, leaving it behind, this dream, the quiet home I wanted, the one I still want but just cannot carry on my back alone.
I’m just not strong enough to do this by myself, not with kids and a job and my own needs and desires. I’m not strong enough to feel so fucking poor and unable.
I’m not strong enough to be the woman I know I need to be with this. Not right now.
***
Everything else in my life is heady and wonderful and scary, like a rollercoaster in all the best ways. I have a lover who makes me smile to my toes while my brain works overtime to keep up. I have two incredible kids who stop what they’re doing to tackle me with hugs, just when I’m at my wits end. I have family and friends who are always there when I need them.
But this one thing, this albatross on my neck, this house…it drains me. There are moments when I think “I can do this on my own!” and for a second, I really believe it.
But then I remember the toilet leaks and the pipe needs to be cut and replaced which means tearing up the bathroom floor to get at the pipe and I don’t have the money to gut the room like I want to and I worry that the floor will just fall through some day and I realize, I just can’t.
Sometimes, the hardest part of a dream is realizing you just aren’t ready for it yet.
This is a review of the Tommy Gunn Dildo, generously provided by Eden Fantasy for review. As per usual, I am providing an escape valve for you-this post may veer on the TMI for some eyes, so feel free to run away and hang out HERE for a little while.
I catch my breath when I catch her in profile, her dusky brown hair swinging in the sunlight, the chocolate of her eyes like saucers as she watches, then jumps, feet first, into her life.
This is my daughter. This is my firstborn. This is the first true love of my life.
***
Sometimes, I think she saved me.
With my daughter has come a certainty, a settled ideal of who I am in this world, a reason, a hope. A light in the darkness, a lighthouse lit for me alone, a beacon I could follow out of the chaos and shuttered isolation I had grown into. I may have stared dumbfounded at her in my arms, squirrely and angry after birth, but there was a switch triggered, a change. Perhaps it was small, and the earth didn’t shift as much as I felt it move. But my insides reordered, and my heart, before two sizes two stunted, began to beat and grow once more.
I know she saved me. I know that when I ate that bottle of pills, when I stared into the abyss I thought so black and empty, she stared back at me, Vivian and her sister, wordless but pointed. There was no more empty.
And now we’re here, and she’s 7 and sprouting out as girls are known to do, the slow but far too hurried process of turning to woman. She lengthens, her voice blossoms in depth, her eyes gain a soul only age can provide. Now we’re here and I feel myself scrambling for time, to stuff it back in a bag and be back at those harried terrifying months when she was just a new pure creature in my arms who smiled and eased my fears. We’re here and 13 is much too close and my usual joke of “You can do X when you bleed monthly.” isn’t so much as a joke as a threat to myself.
Your baby girl is growing up Momma, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.
***
I worry, the common fears of motherhood. Am I doing it right? Am I raising a good, smart woman? Is she strong enough for this world? Can I protect her from this world while letting her fly off?
Last night I let her run back, out of sight, into the raspberry bushes on the trail behind the house, with a friend and her sister. I would hear the odd yelp and giggle and bubble of joy come through the trees, and I realized, bittersweet, that the ache in my chest and the bliss from her lungs, they were intertwined, and would be forever.
They really do take a little piece of your heart with them as they take that first breath.
Lina called Lina wanted a TV in her room, at the foot of her bed, on the dresser I imagine. She was sick she told me, The Cancer, in her brain, her kidneys.
My mother’s was in her kidneys before, before it was done.
Lina talked of her life to me, of the sores from the radiation, the weakness from the chemo, how all she wished she had done years before was just enjoy being able to walk outside into the daily sunshine without thought. How she wished her body would operate with out fear or pain.
She told me about how even through the pain of her weakened body, nearly deadened from this fight, she held her daughter’s hand as her beautiful grandson squeezed and shouted his way into our world. Nothing she said, nothing was as incredible or as inspiring as watching him breathe our air for the first time. Maybe not even the day his mother was born.
The doctors told her they got the tumours in her brain. But she was down to one kidney, and unspoken still was my knowledge that at the last, The Cancer came for those very organs, until my mother at least, was wasted and pale on a hospital bed, a fragment, a figment.
I didn’t mention this to Lina. I wished her luck, and said good bye forever instead.
***
I dream of home.
Not the home as in picket fences and manicured lawns, lemonade in summer, hot chocolate and blankets on a damp winter afternoon, but the home that sets your heart at ease. The home filled with people who are touched by you, people who love you without words, who will hold you up and on if you need to lean into them. Home is a static creature, in flux as we move and shift, the only constant the light in our eyes and hearts.
I miss this. I miss that soft place to land, the feel a part of something. I miss the mental warmth I can still see and feel when I think back, years ago, forever ago, a memory that may not even be at this point it’s travelled so far. I can feel the late afternoon sun pouring in the side window, the light glinting around the swollen face of my mother, the sterness and sparkle in her eyes, the mischievious woman there.
I never questioned, not once that she loved me. That they loved me. We were a unit, a home, and a golden thread wrapped around our bodies, an entity unto ourselves. My home was safety and heft, the old wooden walls heavy with time and wisdom. The air was always silvery, and prone to glitter.
All things to dust turn, and like a vacuum or a black hole, as she died, she took home with her, turning that warm safe place to a cold grey torn rift in my time. So very cold.
I stopped believing home was possible. Replaced the very word with “house” when I could. Mourned a life in which the puzzle was completed, and whole. I thought I’d stay safely from it forever.
Yet I talk to Lina, I hear her voice and I hear my mother and I mumble how in awe I am of their bravery and she stutters and tells me of her beautiful walking grandson and I realize home is something we carry with us to hold us up. And how desperately I want that again, the magic protection of a voice in the kitchen, the smile late at night, the sense of somewhere to belong. The space with no words, guarded.
I’m sweating at the kitchen table as the temperature, or at least the humidity rises. In my bemused, tired, not feeling too terribly terrific mood, I lean on my arm as I stare at the clock, watching the minutes tick slowly by while my daughters, mysteriously, occupy themselves together for hours.
This time last year…this time, this very day, things were so very very different. And like a dream, I find myself shaking my head to clear the fog, so distinct and foreign it seems now, to live in that prison, that empty soulless place I fought for month after month. Maybe it was no one’s fault, maybe it was all mine. But looking back, I gasp at how lonely and angry and sad I was, and how I let myself stay that way.
I cannot imagine it now, as I breathe freely, and could never counsel living as I did, as we did. The destruction of the soul it seems starts with three simple words.
***
This changing life, this year of turning and roads and myths, this 2010 which I’ll remember forever as “that” year I believe, it’s so far been one which makes me question myself, face myself. It’s been a year that placed who I am on a platter and whispered
you aren’t broken darling. Far from it.
and this is the year I started to believe it.
I’ve begun surrounding myself with a life which wants me-which is eager to hear my voice, eager to touch my body, cradle the soul. Friends and lovers who light to be with me, who laugh like the mad with me, who hold me through the bad nights. People who deserve me.
I had come to believe I wasn’t worthy of love, or caring, or delicacy. That beauty wasn’t a gift I was welcome to, or attention or kindness.
How wonderful is it to realize how absolutely wrong I have been, how deluded.
***
I have been happy lately, in a surprising way, one that’s caught me off guard like a ghost, shuttering my mouth in some ways, making me treasure each day and word. Like Aqua Vitae I drain each moment, conscious that nothing lasts forever, scared by such luck.
But I won’t chase it from me. I will sit back and let myself be happy. I will live in a moment which makes me smile from my toes and makes me feel so simply understood. For the first time, I will just be, and watch where life takes me.
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