Spring air, sweet with you

I miss you on days like these
Shorn away, shucked and discarded
The scent of you abandoned on the air
Lingering.

Not possible, as it is
So very far away and long ago.

I miss you on days like these, on days
But not for me.
I miss you for the daughters.
The ones you knew as a mother knows.
A mother knows.

Dark traded for light. My slight moods
Swapped for her largesse. You knew her, in me.
You saw her, a ghost of the unliving,
Unnerved.

I miss you on days like today, when the light
Hits the eyes of my youngest and
Her fingers glow like magic and she is suddenly
Unequivocally yours. The delicate
Touch of a hand. The glossy upturn of
That same side of hair.

That one Mother, which never listened to men.
Or iron. Flipped like a turtle, unyielding.

I miss this for you.

They were kids that I once knew.

I suppose that spring will always remind me.

If a marriage is a bloom, is a growing, breathing creature of change, winter is it’s anathema, spring it’s mother. A marriage develops in similar ways-the new green of yawning trees, the blinding naiveté like that of the lilacs growing in the ditch. (Of course, it also includes the thawing stench of secrets and hidden poos. It just wouldn’t be that certain shade of new without those hidden minefields.)  Then rushes in the burning warmth of late July, with the sweat and the late nights spent staring at the ceiling, too tempered to touch, too tempted to not.

If we’re lucky our marriage falls into autumn, glowing with the flames, cocooned in the comfort of drawing in, drowning in the scents that welcome us home.

If we’re unlucky, we fall prey to winter, and remain frozen in it, immobile and vacant.

My winter is past me now, a year out my limbs are new and wet, glimmering in the brightening light, and I feel renewed, validated and whole. But the memories of that winter, that long, interminable winter linger and drag, a vapour trail of pinched lips and leaking, bitter anger. 

But summer is near. I can smell it. I can feel it.

***

No one starts out that way. I imagine once we mattered to each other, that there was love, something more than teenage lust between us. I always felt that he was a memory I had forgotten, sprung to flesh. Perhaps at 20 or 23 he was, but closer to 30, it was more of a dream turned to nightmare as my mind and body morphed to the left and his roots grew closer to himself. Growth can be value but sometimes, it’s just cancer.

If I’m honest I loved him best as I could, but trapped in my own sadness, my unreasonable anger, my belief that my brokenness defined me. I loved him as a child, I loved him as a half grown feral. But that’s not real love, and that couldn’t break the cold walls. Often I wonder if we wanted it to, content instead to lobby back and forth the barbs and wires, afraid of life outside. Afraid of spring.

It’s easier with what you know, and on dark nights, it can be missed, that person who saw you every day for years and years and years. The strings that tie, not tight but tenuous. A whisper of connection. But not the real one. Not the connection that understands implicitly why tomatoes are so horribly icky outside of those sweet summer weeks when they taste only of the sun and the sweat from your hands.

It was never the connection that understood why my winter anger had to be let loose in silence instead of anger. It was never the connection that understood my strength was in allowing myself weakness. It was never a connection that said “you can, if you want.”

Spring brought me that. And I cannot be angry at the one who couldn’t give it to me, not anymore. He couldn’t. And I never would have let him.

It’s taken a year, a hard winter, and a love I never saw coming to admit that to myself.

It’s my spring gift, my Lenten contribution, my budding flower, this honesty.

***

We were just babies, the spring of our lives, new and blinded, terrified in some ways, excited. The world beckoned and we shrugged. Why not?

I smell spring and I think of our wedding, of the faces saying no, of the hope we had, the throw away faith that somehow it would work.

And like benevolent neglect in my garden each year it did. Until it finally didn’t.

6

070 a photo by thordora on Flickr.

And so it goes and so it is that leaves grow green and fall and winter blankets us with snow and the sun comes back out, eventually. And children grow older.

My baby, my second born, my risk has turned 6.

Where her sister is rough and burly, she’s delicate and tiny, walking everywhere on her tip toes, lips pursed, a story on her lips. Monkeys that fly, perhaps a pony or a diamond. She’s the girl my mother likely dreamed of, flounce and poof, pink and purple, dolls and puppies.

But she has more than one story my girl does. For all she appears careful and girlish, she has a solid core, a steel inside I did not anticipate. She will wait, she will howl, she will say no, and mean it, and know what that means, to say NO. She is fierce in all the ways I can never be, a silenced acceptance of herself even now,

When I think of women, when I think of the woman I want her to be, I shake my head and realize, she’s already half the way there.

***
She’s 6. I sat on the bus home yesterday remembering her howling face in mine that first time, the scowl, the iron core even then. How big she seemed in my arms, wrapped and rubbed and angry at a world that woke her almost too soon. I didn’t feel love, I felt puzzlement, awe that I had held her in me, then cast her away from me, as mothers do, again and again and again.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

I was sad the other day.

I had written this post, and was still feeling conflicted, and more than a little delicate about it. These are thoughts I have difficulty expressing due to the immediacy of the response from others, the firmness of opinions. I feared exploring outloud, but did so anyway.

But it still made me sad, the thought of not being there 24/7 for my kids, giving up my house, looking for my place in the world.

So I was sad, and cranky, and out of sorts. I fell into a rough sleep, woke up just as sad and cranky as before. I spent the morning pokey and cranky.

Until I decided I didn’t want to be that way.

So I fought with myself, to remember what I do have, to remember that change is good, and sometimes refreshing. I laughed at jokes, listened to non emo whiny music, beat at the driveway with a shovel until the anger and general pissiness exited my body, like a fever you burn off.

I stood up in the wind, the strengthing sun falling behind my neighbour’s house as night came. And thought, Wow.

The right to be angry. The right to be sad. And the right to make myself feel better.

What a concept.

***

The problem with being told once that you’re crazy, and believing it, is that you believe it. You start thinking you’re broken. You function in an environment that tells you that to be “normal”, you need a pill. You need to talk more. You need to be made different.

So you take the pills. You take more pills. Maybe the pills don’t work, maybe they do. You wonder if you’ll ever be better. You’ll wonder if you’ll ever be normal. They tell you that working harder is the secret, or maybe something is wrong with your brain, or it’s all because someone didn’t love you enough, or those girls who were mean to you in high school…

Regardless, it all ends the same. You aren’t supposed to feel.

Don’t be sad. We have a pill for that. Don’t be TOO happy. We have a pill for that. Don’t be angry, especially if you’re a woman. There is most definitely a pill for that.

They told me I was bipolar. I believed it. One doctor tried to reach me, tried to tell me it sounded like my relationship was the problem. But no, I said, that couldn’t possibly be that case.

That would be my fault. That would have meant that I chose wrong, that I caused my own problems, that my circumstance was causing my distress. Self Sabotage.

I didn’t believe it then. 4 Years or so later, I believe it now.

I know there are people who are truly brain sick, and who need the pills like I need water.

I do not believe that I should know more people on those drugs than not.

How are we so removed from feeling? When did the earth shift and make emotion something we tether and control. Where once we had poetry to accompany heartache, we now have tricyclic anti-depressants. Where once we had anger over death or divorce and poverty, we have Risperodal. Where once we had joy…do we have joy anymore? Do we have private joy that we can feel, unconnected from the things we buy, the clothes we wear, the places we go?

Are we allowed?

It all links together-the overprotectiveness of my children by others, the increasing feeling that something is missing in our lives, the trouble in connecting with others in life, the wonder if this is really all there is.

Is it all we have left, this beige world where sadness or joy cannot be visited without suspicion? Is all we have left a place where something is wrong with us if the circumstances of our lives make us miserable? Is all we have is the ability to drug ourselves into submission so we don’t have to feel it after all?

Is it worth it?
***

They told me I was broken. I believed them. I believed happiness was a struggle, something difficult to attain, a bliss I could never follow.

What do we do if they were wrong, all of them?

Leavetaking.

Comments from a piece on Salon, from a mother who “left”:

“A narcissist. Totally self involved. Your children are lucky they had a more involved father. SHAME.”

“It sure would be convenient to parent at your leisure; it just wouldn’t be parenting, would it?”

“You seem very proud of yourself for someone who caused so much needless misery in the lives of two little children. You seem to buy every aspect of the grandiose rationalization you’ve constructed.”

***

Would we hear the same if the writer had a penis?
I’ve been beating my brain and heart for weeks about this decision, one weighted against my own background of loss, my experiences with other children of divorce. I remember the look on a friend’s face everytime her mother came, and left. I remember the echoing hollow of my chest not having a mother. It was hideous. I’ve been weighing the guilt of this decision against something so vagrant and seemingly radical that I don’t know if I can voice it without the critical mass rising up and howling for my blood.
I want to know myself, and be happy. I never wanted children either. I love them fiercely, but if I’m honest, and in the red light of a late night I am, I am not the mother they need or deserve. I am a shadow with them, a stressed shell of a woman who knows not herself or the world around her. A woman child who has made life altering decisions for others, always. For my father. For a husband. For a child.
I find myself now without time, without pause, in stasis, unable to move. So much time spent being broken, being in a broken concept that I cannot figure out what it means to be me.
And so selfish, I think I see the answer, even as it breaks my heart.
The problem is, it breaks my heart for all the wrong reasons. I don’t hear my own desires (for space, oh blessed space I can trap myself in, the silence stretching before me like a ribbon, the stillness I could melt to) I don’t hear my desire for my children’s happiness.
I hear the judgment, and the guilt of the modern mother, or more accurately, the war against her.
Does my vagina make me a better person? Does it automatically invest in my abilities their father doesn’t have? A bigger, warmer heart? More patience? The desire to play Lego? The want to be there, day in and day out until my hair grows greyer, faster?

Why is it that because I have created these creatures, willingly or unwillingly, regardless of my desire for them, I am to be tethered so absolutely to them, forever? And why does this not extend in the same way to a father? If I were the man, I could have left months ago, with nothing more than a “tsk tsk” to feather behind a door. If I were a man, my desire for summer visits and the occasional weekend would be lauded. My desire to have any interaction with my children at all would very nearly be considered revolutionary.
But I, possessing of a vulva and breasts, am none of these things for leaving. I am a bad mother, a selfish, narcissistic person, and a shitty all around creature. For wanting to breathe.

***

I spent the majority of my weekend with my girls, and by the morning on Monday all I could think about was getting back to normal, where normal is a day with limited interaction with them. I couldn’t bear to be touched any longer, and my knee jerk near revulsion when one of them jumped on me or asked for hug left even me ashamed.

Later when speaking with my boyfriend, I lost it. I burst into tears and couldn’t see why.

But then I could.

I spent about 2.5 days straight with my daughters, the longest amount of time I have in months, despite them living with me. And I hated it.

I hated the noise. I hated the sticky fingers, the need to be near me, constant, the mess that spiraled out from them, their crap, ever increasing in all directions, their voices, their incessant need. And I hated the way I felt, distant and unknowing.

I have all the stress for the least reward. My children spent the majority of their day at school and then with my father, seeing me for thirty minutes before school, and a few hours in the afternoon. Then weekends they spend with their father, who they miss and are genuinely happy to see. With me, it’s like puppies aching for affection, and I feel stunted and small.

I am not raising them, and I am fairly confident I no longer want to try.

I am not saddened by that thought, at least, not as much as I likely should be. I am saddened by the thought that at least a few of you think badly of me for it, for my rapidly approaching decision to walk away. I am annoyed that anyone might think this easy-I am full up with what if’s, and should’s. I am angry that as their mother, I am to be everything-I do not want it. I never did.

That makes it harder, that lack of wanting.  How do I explain any of this to people who want their children, who enjoy them, who are made better for them? I am made hollow by this mothering, this facade. I am not made better, or am good for them. I am unhappy with them, unhappy in this house and with this life.

This, this home, this place, these children, they are all failures I cannot change. A dream I had once that I cannot assemble, and have lost the will to fight with.

I am not the mother anyone thinks I am, or should be.

You have your homes. You have your warm place. I have empty reminders of all the people I wasn’t, and cannot be.

I cannot do it any longer.

***

I am terrified.

I want a clean slate. I want to start over, and breathe slowly, and finally determine, finally understand what I want. See if I can become the mother my daughters deserve, in months or years from now. I cannot be that woman here, not now, not like this.

I want a little house with a garden someday, a small thing like a fairy cottage, with lattice and fence, grasses. Stained glass in the window, trees all around. An attic room for my daughters, chicken coop behind. A quiet, sane place we can hide in, where I can love and stretch my arms. A place where the air is scented of lilacs and sunlight.

What I have is a house of cards collapsing, with a leaking basement, and a father who slowly seems to be taking over. I have become a wisp of a dream here, a passing thought to pay the mortgage and cafeteria bills.

I cannot do this, and I am scared.

Do not judge. You never quite know what it’s like in here.