The day I took this picture it was about 13C, with a sun that warmed and a wind that cooled. We wore hoodies and smelled winter cackling in the distance, somewhere in the mayonnaise clouds perhaps, or behind the brittle candy glass sun. I remembered someone’s advice about finding new angles, new perspective as I crawled around in the loamy cold earth to capture my favorite and best light.
I’ve decided this light is clean, and virginal, my attraction to it an attempt to refresh my own self, encapsulate my desires, start anew. Yet it’s also a lust for beauty, for simplicity, the convoluted logic of something so pure.
It’s nearly a taint for me, yet I shine for it. This light, my happiness, this beam of YES! that nearly pours from my skin when I awake in the morning, the dawn peeking in my window under the blind, singing of love.
I am poured in this light. And I am all the better for it.
My soul opens as the fired trees pass, glimmers against glass, moments I will be awed by yet ultimately, fail to remember, so common they become. Hours from the city I become quiet and still, my heart and body stilled by the absolute of a world not tied to hydro lines or paper. All I can explain it by is stillness, like a quake of non movement, silk across my lips.
It comes this winter, and with it we shed the colored skins of where we’ve been, of heat, of tempered mornings in the quick light. The season rolls across to us, reaches out her fingers to mouth
-hello-
as we blink back, crazy to think we’re here already, hadn’t the trees just begun to bud? Hadn’t we just been soothed by the joy of those new green leaves, waving in the breeze which smelled sweet like our youth did, once? Wasn’t I just here, toes in cool water, ice cream rivulets down your chin?
Weren’t we just here?
How can time be a highway like this, a soothed balm to a soul and yet stuck in high gear, and spinning faster and faster as we question, if this is my last year, would these burning trees be enough? If this was the last glimpse I have of our fair land, is it honestly judged? Have I danced my thanks through starlight, a pale worship, but an honest one?
Have I understood?
It makes me quiet, the growth, the creeping sleep that overtakes the land as I watch, bemused and shocked, how time rakes across, how time is blind and carefree. It gives me pause.
What is a soul undone, if nothing more than a free spirit in trees?
This is a review of the Topsy Turvy by Doc Johnson, provided for review for Eden Fantasy. If you choose to not know far more about my sex life than necessary, click here to learn something new and cool. Otherwise, read on.
Also, I’m eating candy corn while I write this, so if it gets really odd, blame the sugar. Not me.
Every day I find myself ranting after the girls come home from school. Or rather, after I work the first half of my god forsaken split shift and go haul their carcasses home 4 blocks. I open up their homework bags and idiotic “star” binders and see what fresh hell awaits.
Usually it’s a request for money. Flyers for stuff we can’t afford since we’re neither rich or on assistance. Lectures about reading to your children, not parking in the “kiss and drop” zone.
And today, a note. No giving out party invitations anywhere on school grounds. Because, and I quote, “we wish to avoid hurt feelings.”
I’m not an ogre. I was a kid once. I was a kid who was never, EVER invited to anything. Unless we count the months after my mother died, when the pity invite was in full effect.
I didn’t like the other kids. For the most part, they didn’t like me. I was strange. I was bigger than them. I did weird things. I knew all these things, and it never bothered me.
Vivian received very few invites last year, and never mentioned it. The few she did get I mostly ignored since we couldn’t get there, or couldn’t afford a present. And she was well aware that with the exception of one of her close friends, that there were reasons we weren’t going. She was also aware why not everyone gets an invite. Some kids don’t like you. Some you don’t like. Some parents can’t afford everyone at their house.
A multitude of reasons, spawing a multitude of conversations about class, budgeting, friendship and self confidence.
However, because we’re sparing “hurt feelings”, I no longer get to have these same conversations with my children, who apparently get to wait until who knows when to have real life jump up at them and bite them in the ass.
It’s not that I don’t understand the inclination-I do. No one wants their child to suffer.
But it’s a big bad world out there, full of people who don’t like us, and quite possibly wish to do us harm. It’s a real world, with obstacles and people and emotions we have to process and deal with. And speaking as the kid who was weird and shy and had a mother who sheltered her as much as possible from these blows until she couldn’t anymore, it’s a world we need to be exposed to early on.
And it’s also a world that I am responsible for guiding my children into.
It’s bad enough that a kid cannot walk by herself 10 feet off school property, that I get glared at for letting my daughters gleefully run the last block and a half to school alone. It’s bad enough that the school seems intent on teaching my daughters to be passive and rely on other people for their own protection, to the point that I need to virtually scream at them that a little self defence is not a bad thing.
But this…this just smacks of all the wrong things, protectionism for all the wrong reasons. We’re poor. Period. I cannot afford the latest and greatest of everything, and frankly, I don’t want to give them to my kids, let alone anyone else. And this is a conversation that I have with my children, because we do not live in bubbles of magical ponies. When I say we can’t have something, or do something, Vivian automatically answers “Because there’s no money for that, right?” She’s beginning to understand that money doesn’t grow on trees, and part of the reason for this understanding? Being unable to attend parties last year.
I am growing so irritated by the fact that every single movement seems to be one to cover children in cotton at this school. My favorite was during Vivian’s kindergarten year when they weren’t allowed to jump off half foot snowbanks unless they formed a line and took turns. No creativity, no chances to make mistakes. Just rote. Just…what passes for problem solving and fun.
I send my children to school for an education, and I worry enough with poor test scores and an administration that is unable to send the right student info home or even spell my children’s last name right, despite being given it in 10 places correctly over two years.
And now, I have to worry about my children being taught that things are always fair?
Maybe I’m harsh, but this is one lesson I wish to get out of the way early, and in my way. Not by pretending.
Fear is a funny thing. We run from the idea of it, hiding behind pretense, lies. We sit sedately in our armchairs, in our pods, cornered by inertia. We surround ourselves with things, stuff, blinkers and tweeters, invisible things, words on screens, whispers across airwaves. We pretend at fear.
We manufacture horrors. Drama. If we should breastfeed. If the kids should walk to school. Epidurals. Peanuts. Weed. Small terrors, things that once would have worried us in passing that now engulf us. Inside we become shrunken, slivers and shadows of who we should be. Of what we could be, wrapped up as we are in HFCS or local produce.
Who would we be, before? If we were explorers, or hunters, dancers or willful neglect in the air-who would we be? What would we have discovered before we lulled ourselves into half measures, drooling children of a forgetful world?
Who would we be?
***
This weekend, with some gentle prodding, and slightly too much information, my lover took me for my first motorcycle ride.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I tried to pretend I wasn’t, but he looked in my eyes and softly said “You’re scared.” I was. I was freaking terrified. Heart in my throat freaking out, distracting myself with instructions and the necessary clothing. My fingers scrabbled against my palms and I became quiet. Unnaturally so.
But I swung my leg over the beast. I settled myself on the back of that bike, clutched at his back, and swallowed hard. Slapped down the visor and breathed again.
And we were off.
I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t nearly puke my ever loving guts inside that helmet. I’d be lying if I didn’t spend the short ride reminding myself to relax, that I was safe, that I trusted him and that he would never ever put me in danger. I’d be lying if I said my eyes were always open.
When he asked if I was ok, and I said I wasn’t, we returned home right then. No questions, just a straight line on a bike under his gentle hands, and my unsteady breathing. I climbed off the bike, wavering between wanting to be sick and wanting to cry, so great was my fear. And he was there, to tell me it was ok, that he was proud that I climbed up despite my fear, that I tried.
How I wanted to just sit and cry right then, from my fear, the emotion racing through my veins, the terror, the calm that it was, as expected, ok. How new, and unexpected, this physical fear, the gut jerk as it streamed through me.
I was fine in a bit, as I processed the input. But for a few minutes, maybe 20, I was quiet again, overwhelmed. I had faced my dragon. The dragon didn’t win, and somehow, I felt all the stronger for it.
***
He pushes me, this lover of mine. Not only did I climb on back of his bike, but I sat in the driver’s seat of his 4WD truck and drove, however briefly. (I was fine until he pointed out not one, but TWO ditches. At that point the fear took over and I freaked out a bit. There may have been some girl screaming involved.)
The main thing here-a few years ago, just sitting in a car as a passenger made me want to cry and be sick all at once, anxiety from no where for no good reason. A few years ago, hell, this time last year, I wouldn’t have even contemplated driving anything. The fear held me like a dancing partner, cheek against mine, caressed me as I stood alone and unwilling, letting it lead.
But my hand on the gear shift told me better. Tightly gripping the wheel, or his back, either way, I had won. The fear didn’t own me anymore, even if I shrieked and refused to drive farther than 30 feet, even if I may have gibbered “get it off me! get it off me! when some strange catepillar landed on me in the woods.
I swallowed fear. And then I danced it outside.
***
Who would I be, if I hadn’t been so fucking scared for so many years?
***
He tells me to put my boots on, come outside, come see. I rouse myself from the fire he has stoked for me, and clomp out into the night. My gasp echoes across the fields and empty roads.
The dark sky, alight with thousands of someone else’s suns. The milky way, stretching like a cat. My eyes brim with grateful tears as awe and wonder fill me, and I reach for him.
There are no words to thank with, not for this. Not for beauty, not for strength. And so we stand staring into the past as it glows at us, and I murmur.
When we release our fear, when we stand open, all manner of things are possible.
I found myself staring at both of you this morning, as we brushed hair and washed cheeks. Over your heads I stared, eyes slightly damp, at the picture that has sat on the fridge since Rosalyn was a baby. In it, Vivian, you stare intently at 2 day old Rosalyn, curious like a dog, nose barely an inch away from Rosalyn’s red cheeks, her tightly wound reddened hands.
I remember that day. I remember it was too hot for the heavy sleeper we put you in Rosalyn, the cute one already packed away for nostalgia. I laid a homemade blanket on the kitchen floor as I gently laid you down, Vivian circling and wanting to see. Her sister. Sisters, the two of you.
Two of you. All grown up. Your hair it tangles, and weaves itself. Vivian you yell and curse and scream until I hand over the hairbrush, ever so insistent on doing it yourself. Much the same as you did at 2. You both let me tie your hair back today, feeling distinctly grown up and old as I wrap the hair tie around the thick hair. 4 brown eyes stare intently, my daughters, flesh of my flesh, and I feel a slight sigh flutter out of my belly.
It’s like I’ve escaped something, or exceeded a goal or just…crossed a line. Suddenly you both feel and seem so awfully grown up and old, that is until Rosalyn starts rattling on about Ren and Stimy or Vivian, you start telling me it’s ok to kill ants because no one likes them anyway. While you’re both silent, you seem ageless. Short, but simply without time. Yet then I feel so old, as minutes and hours march by me in your eyes, and I feel the wind change.
The wind carries your womanhood on it, your growth, the days ahead. Lunches, pencils broken, hearts and flowers. Futures.
But for now ladies, I’m good with both of you out of the house each day.
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