Crocodile

I don’t often miss being married anymore, these days full of my mess, left where I wish, my food, steady in the fridge, my couch, clean for me.

But then I spend a few days in a row with an eight year old moodier than me 2 days before my period, and one of the nights involves multiple wake ups and bad dreams and crawling in with me and I just cannot hack it. The tired, the soul destroying tired that leaves me weak at the knees and shamefully wanting to lock myself in a room where they just cannot reach me, huddled with gummi bears and peaches.

But there’s no secret room. There’s no where to hide, no way to stem the flow of tears. The reasoning fluctuates from ‘but I wanted something too!” all the way over to “my hair is so short they say I look like a boy!” and I hear my mother crawl out of my mouth with a “we can find a reason for you to cry” and then I hear that hated little girl in the back of my chest who blurts out “at your age I was worried sick about my mother, but I didn’t dare cry. What do YOU have to cry about?”

As much as I hate that I’ve said these things, I wonder if I’m so wrong. I do everything possible to make sure they have what they need, and then some. I maintain a reasonably friendly relationship with their father to make sure that stays as normal as possible. I do what I have to, and then I do some more.

And I’m tired. Good sweet crap I’m just, tired inside. Tired of their feelings. Tired of explaining and reasoning. Tired of wondering and hoping and trying to get it all right and then looking for a space to carve for myself. It never ends.

At least when their father was in the house, I could split the crying and the comfort, the need for love and understanding. Now it’s just me, every night, over and over. Vivian’s even started the little “I miss mommy” game which means I’m dealing with the crying over the phone on my days off from them. A part of me, a large part of me, feels like it’s in danger of shutting off completely, my usual compensation for when it gets too much, but I don’t want that. I’m trying to learn how to feel, like normal, how to let it flow through me and past me, around me. Shutting down won’t help, but I feel like I teeter on the edge lately.

It’s all so very much, and by the end of the day, after all the other multitude of stresses that make up normal life, I just cannot find it in my to deal with or care about a child crying. Again. Especially because she’s changed her mind about wanting a bath for the 5th time that night.

Single mommas, how in the hell do you do this?

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

In air turned a dirty grey dusk, the scent of it tacky on my lips and skin, voice ring.

Counting. Counting down.

Come find me!

Where are you?

Find me!

I’m searching.

The dull gassy hum of streets lights balance against the warm brick of our house, our home, as we’ve made it. That sound, the grass through their toes, the laughter which bounces, terribly naughty against the neighbours house, spills in through my windows as this gauzy late summer night begins it’s drawl away. Perhaps the last summer night of her 8th year, her 6th. Perhaps the night they both build memories that become the stories and bedrock of their futures. Perhaps they’ll parse in in the smell of chocolate cupcakes, years from now. They’ll paint it in Venice, sing it on stages from here.

Draw the futures of their children against it.

Vivian, where are you? Vivian!

The house is lit, and welcoming against the coming night. The woods behind are darkening, turning from friendly caves to malevolent holes. I can hear Rosalyn, tethered between, wanting her sister, her heart arching to look under the maples and yet still young enough to see the orcs and goblins and child eaters hidden within, whispering.

Come find us.

Only this dank falling night can hold them, whispers, plaited promises. She yells for her sister, song on the wind, voice aloft.

I tell her, sweetly, kindly, to come wait, everyone has to come to home base eventually.

She won’t be moved. She stands, knee high to the clover turning to winter in the ditch, waiting.

***

 

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”

The voice at the other end of the phone is a pleasant warm one, a woman. She’s young, not so young that you can hear the inexperience in her voice, but young enough. Late twenties, rough with time, glossy with hope.

There’s a gurgle, and a small quiet squeal. New baby sound, close to the speaker. You can almost hear the hip jiggle in progress.

My heart bends, constricts and sighs, memory overlaid with echoes, the foreign land of a time I’d almost forgotten, and I can feel the petal soft skin of my daughter’s arms, the down on the cheek, the satin hair that tuck under my chin. I remember hearing those squirmy noises and thinking how curious it was that she had so recently been inside of me, snatching time under my heart.

I whisper congrats to this woman, to her newborn child, still dewy. Welcome.

***

They can’t be this old. Not yet.

Time is like one of those snakes of a spring that hide in those cheese ball nut cans, all ninja sneaking and fake noise. You least expect it to draw back and punch you in the nose, but then it does. Time shudders and overlays itself, moment over moment and you wonder just how you can possibly hold it all in. The angle of the sun on the grass. The slush in the driveway as labour began in earnest. The night sky that one summer when, too hot for sleep we danced through our street greeting the stars.

It scares me. I remember the lost child I was, the broken girl, the strong woman who needed no one and nothing and I cry even imagining this as you. I remember taking pill after pill and hoping for death, wanting for it, and I weep at just the idea of you, either of you, ever feeling such pain. Let me take it from you now, so instead as horses you can run, strong and swift and lovely in wind. Let me promise the day to never impose such terror upon you.

Were it to be this simple, a benediction to air, a promise to nothingness, a wish, a hope. I fill you each with as much beauty and wisdom and strength as I can muster, yet worry it is never enough. I obsess over things like new shoes or proper lunch snacks and hope I’m getting it right.

I was too alone at the age you are now Vivian. I see that phantom pain in behind your eyes sometimes, and to know I cannot change it hurts more than any moment of bringing you into this world. I see Rosalyn trying to understand why the other kids just do some things. And I can’t make it make sense then either.

Baubles for wishes? Days of my life for their to only be candy floss and sweet songs on air?

Tell me what the trade-off is to keep them soft and petal-like. Tell me their secrets so I can hold them tight.

Tuck them back under my heart, to rest quiet forever.

Stop this implacable rush to the future. I almost cannot bear it.