Take us the foxes, the little foxes

It’s beautiful where I hardly suspected.

Behold, thou art fair, my love, behold, thou art fair, thou hast doves’ eyes.

In each line I can smell the rise of love, the dusky glance in air, the longing, oh the longing. I can taste the need.

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

In reading it I feel almost dirty, witnessing something so private and yet so truly common, that of love, of two souls entwinned. The pride in that love. The surety.

Thou art all fair my love; there is no spot in thee.

Oh, the pride. The silly, blinding pride.

***

I haven’t really, truly touched a bible since I was a young teenager. Reared roman catholic, schooled unwillingly, I have always been more familiar with the words from that book than I was likely comfortable with. Or rather, I was familiar with the bits fed, the beige parts, the instructive parts. Burning bushes and fish and wine and zombies wandering down the road.

But I don’t remember my heart burning in recognition of that phantom feeling the Song of Solomon brings forth. (To be honest, I’m thinking that reading those lines to hormonal teenagers would set them over the edge. The more aware of them at least.) I don’t remember feeling so very wretched with beauty. I don’t remember any lines, ever, taking my breath away and filling me with a magic I scare thought existed.

I don’t remember anything making my blood sing so.

***

Sun dapples through leaves. My coffee is bitter and warm on my lips, it’s roughness sweetened so slightly on the edges to barely be there. Skin is bronze and browned, smooth with youth, gnarled with age. Words are in the wind as the ebb and flow of people come around and beside me. She wears a dress of purples and pinks, short to the knees, sleeves like bells, and her mouth quirks slight towards the heavens when she stares at her coffee date. The grey in his hair shines silver in the sun, glistening with the day.

There are black dogs, and white ones, big and small but all are loved in the arms of their masters this morning.

The sun comes and goes, and the song sings to me again and again.

His mouth is most sweet yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters if Jerusalem.

***

I am not drawn to faith. I ponder it, I envy it, I watch it from a distance and wonder what it must be like to be so full of such a certainty-even my faith in science, my knowledge of it, is tempered by the fact that even the light switch won’t work if I screw with the wiring or forget to change the blown fuse. I do not get the seeming blindness of faith, and do find myself drawn to understanding the workings of it.

And so I found myself reading The Cloister Walk.  The author resides with Benedictines for awhile, and we read her experiences, set against a year of liturgy. A year of patterns I remember in my very being from youth, raised as I was. I may be an atheist, but some habits remain-even visiting a church, like the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaumont Chapel as my boyfriend and I did a few weeks back, I found myself almost genuflecting and crossing myself at the altar, completely unaware. It took an actual act of will, a thought to remind me that those actions had no place in my world.

This is how strong my mother’s catholicism was, truly. I wish I could say it was mine.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that in reading this book I feel the draw to the quiet places the author finds. I feel her draw into the words-she’s a poet after all, and understand simply how evocative words really are, how seductive they can be. Even in her own confusion and wonder about her place in the words, in the worship, she is able to give simply an understanding of how the words can be solace unto themselves.

This I get. Even as someone who has no draw to an other, no belief in something larger, I get the sparseness of the quiet she describes. Reading some of her selections through the book soothes even my heart. And gives me hope that I can find my own solace in words again, be it Anne Sexton or the bible or e.e. cummings. A reminder is what I needed, that words are a balm to my soul at it’s barest essential. Words are the spring to a winter’s heart.

I heartily resent your bean sandwich.

As a single mother I need to attest to a fair amount of resentment regarding certain types of people and comments. Some of this is just further proof that I’m a bit of a bitch, but a lot of it is surely driven by flat out exhaustion. You get your 5 year old to eat beans? I’m lucky to get her past the yoghurt! Yours is fluent in 3 languages? I’m terribly impressed if mine speaks english to me in the morning without the inflection of whining that she’s picked up somewhere this summer, a new variant on the past dialect.

So i’m scrubbing the bathtub this morning, the filthy tub I’ve put off for too long because dammit, when it’s 38C, I am not spending time scrubbing head down with hot water. And it’s nasty filthy, actual dirt, not just “un shiny”-and I wonder if the people who have time to do elaborate meals and outfits for their kids, who have these incredible sounding little cultured people, if they have the spotless tubs I imagine them to have? And if so, where is the time?  Do they not sleep? Do they eat? Is this why some women are so skinny?

My house is something I look at with a certain level of shrugged irritation. I can’t get ahead of it all, the cleaning, the cooking, the “educational toys and books”. My kids eat Mr. Noodle too often and spend time on the computer doing what kids in the summer do-playing, wasting time, dicking around. Presently they’ve been kicked outside as my mother would have done “I don’t want to see or hear from you in the next hour.” But I’m thinking in the grand scheme of mom war, I’d lose, Because I flat out don’t have the time.

I am jealous of those women who have the time to do all the baking and cleaning and interaction that I can’t do. I really am. I envy their lives, their plans, the meaning they give to the days. But I have a choice-I could spend my little time with my children cleaning and organizing and planning and making, or we can just hang out and be kids and Mom together in the last humid weeks of this summer.

I resent that I lose all this time with them. That parenting isn’t even benign neglect at this point, but rushing to and fro. I parent more on the walk to and from day care than I do at home. Mornings are crazed muddles and “let’s move!” and evenings a time when I have to puposefully slow myself down, so we all enjoy Equal Rights, not just me for the small victory of creating another Pratchett addicted person. I resent that these days move too fast, and I know it. I feel it rush past us, and then suddenly I know it’s not about bean sandwiches or sprouts or doing algebra. It’s about the time I lose to my circumstance, to reality, to a world I know I didn’t ask for, this one where we run and we run and nothing gets better.

I can’t get it back, any of it, and they grow older as I stand, hands slipping through time like water. I can’t stem the tide.

Vivian, 8

136, a photo by thordora on Flickr.

I was 8 forever ago, or maybe not forever. Maybe just in enough time to squeeze between two lemons. In the silence that fills our kitchen, the one in which I fight off ants with vinegar and the cat sleeps on your new clean clothes, I can remember the feel of 8, the excitement of that year. I remember also the dread, the secret I carried, the want, the need to split myself off.

My memory, as it is today, began that year.

I got my first pair of glasses. I lost my two front teeth, just in time for school pictures, just like you. I had the worst bowl cut you could ever see, or at least, to tomboy me, the worst cured monstrosity I had even encountered. It required a curling iron and time. Who has any time! You’re EIGHT! The cat died that year, or maybe the year before. improbably named Suji, I came to figure out years later that it wasn’t any kind of cool “my parents smoke pot” sorta name. Rather, they were lazy and merged the names of the previous owners, Sue and Jim into one name.

That cat hated me anyway.

Being 8, and starting Grade 3, it was the cusp. Where I grew up, you were the big kid in Grade 3, although you’d shortly become the little one again in the new 4-8 school. But for a glorious year, you were king shit. First in the school. Too tall for the fountain. Pants ready for floods.

Grade 3 was the year that Michael kid threw his desk at the teacher, full of what I now recognize as rage, grief fueled anger and hopelessness. I understand why the teacher didn’t freak out so much. My mother was only sick at the time. His father was already gone. Grade 3 was the year I remember actively daydreaming entire chapters of work away. Most of the math, and grammar sunk into a strange heard but not heard sponge zone in my brain. The grass was so terribly green that year, and sun, scarlet light and glare. The world glowed then, and I could hardly hear a word above it.

Grade 3 was the year I learned exactly what mother’s did when you jumped on a half full Welch’s Grape Juice box just to make that loud POP! while wearing pale yellow pants. 8 was the year I learned that mother’s roll their eyes even more than their daughters.

8 was the year shit was just starting to get hard.

Vivian, you’re getting hard on me. You’re getting lovely and incredible and smart, but you’re also surly and forgetful and entirely too enamored of yourself. You’re becoming. No longer content to just say ok, you’re truly coming into your own, the bright light of you tarnishing around the edges some, but also morphing into blues and purples, your dusky self, molting. Where my time condenses and all at once you’re that newborn squalling after a terrified night of labour and then a baby clapping as she’s mastered the stair climb, then you’re that toddler, flailing on the deck with a seizure as I scream in terror and fear. You’re the first day of school, the Christmas concert. Your tiny hands in mine as your parents tell you they just don’t love each other enough anymore. Your face, stubborn and willful as your mother’s, jutting out of the darkness as we walk home.

Viv, I hold all these moments. They are all one singular place, not a file cabinet but more of a snake eating itself, a continual meaning, that dimension they still can’t find where today and yesterday and tomorrow all live. This is who you are to me, still. You are all those moments and memories. All those times make you, my daughter, my eldest.

Yet, they are static moments, and they don’t let me see you for who you are, or will be. My memory is frozen, but child, you are not. You change like the weather, you flit and flounce and sometimes when you sit, in certain light, I see your future. But it’s different from the one I plot, the one I see. I see all possibilities. I see the woman I want you to be. I see my dreams in you.

But honey bear, trust me. These things rarely are the same between mothers and daughters. As they shouldn’t be.

So on this birthday, your 8th in this world, I promise you this. I do not promise wisdom or patience. I do not promise that I will always be perfect, or strong, or right, or sometimes, let’s be honest, nice.

But I promise to remember my 8. I promise to listen harder still for the shrill canyon echo of that age, the silvery birds of possible that flew by every so often to say “don’t go! Don’t grow!”. And I will remember that child you might still be, woman you soon become.

I love you daughter. First born. Ache of my heart, gift of my soul.

Happy Day Vivian. Happy, Happy Day.