Cold water. Cool water.

I fell in cool water this year, tipped a canoe after only seeing a rock at the last moment, so last minute I only had a moment to blurt out “the fuck! A rock!” and SLAM we were in the cold and down went the canoe and my feet kept slipping without purchase on something so accurately named rock snot and the water just kept moving past and over me. Time held still and moved away into that space where it stops doing much of anything at all. When I find my footing and stand, finally, against the snot and the earnest current I just stand breathing, shocked into stillness and awe.

Something so cold, and seeming so small and low, it had the power to rock me on my ass and leave me there, at it’s will and whim.

There’s a lesson there in that cold water, in the cold water of my sink, in the egg bowl, in the rocking canoe.

It’s the same lesson the eyes of my babies taught me, long ago.

Be patient. Let it pass. Go with it. Bear up babe.

You can do this.

***

Sometimes you’re the rock, sometimes you’re the canoe. If you’re lucky, you’re the cool water rushing.

No touching when moving is writ large on the dull yellow walls of the gym, and I joke with another mother how constrained these children are, how limited. Do they understand their bodies? Can they touch and not touch? How do they learn the simple reassurance of a friendly hug? How do they play tag without, you know, the tag?

I float in and out, not touching. I’m better on the outside, no investment, no responsibility. You don’t hold my crap so I don’t have to hold yours. I am not a burden. I will not be a burden. I will not touch, or be touched.

I know my reasons for how I am, but I wonder, how on earth can I teach my daughters how to reach out without worry for the burns?

***

It’s amusing to me on some levels how women interact. You might say it seems to be a pose, an act, but I don’t get it. Sometimes I wonder if I missed out on the vagina card when I was born, since I don’t understand women, and as I grow older, find I don’t want to. They gossip. I sit near a few tight groups of women in my workplace and nothing has changed since grade school. Not one thing. Cattiness and meanness and snobbery. I find myself sucked in unwillingly, and have to extract myself, confused by the tide of mean, hating myself for it.

I look to other groups, and find it disguished in well meaning glances, in advice, in “help”-women always seem to want to help me, leading me often to the conclusion that I’m better off hanging out with men since I can drink and pontificate in peace, without worrying about what’s being said the minute I’m 5 minutes down the aisle. Help with my hair, my esteem, my attitude. Always something to fix, always something to change.

I don’t understand sisterhood. It makes me nervous and uneasy and glossed over, closed up. I don’t understand the touching, the hugging! What is the need for hugging, for contact? Surely I’m not the only person overwhelmed by physical proximity and touch, so why is it always so difficult to believe that I really don’t want to hug or be hugged, hands grabbed, hair twirled? Do I need to do this to be a woman? Are these the things that make me part of whatever red tent sort of arrangement that gets made? Is it necessary to subvert my needs and wants in order to have any sort of closeness with women?

I teach my daughters to stand up for themselves, to defend against unwanted advances and actions. I teach them these things with boy and men involved, not able to think of how to adequately defend against girls and women, against the slithery smiles and whispered “did you know…” when they’re barely out of earshot. I teach them to give no quarter, but I am at a loss for how to deal with the shunning, with the changing requirements, with the seeming needs of women. Most of which I don’t understand.

And being alone, do I teach that? Do I teach them to find solace and satisfaction in being on their own? Is it right to teach them that the sisterhood might possibly be a lie, and that reveling in a weekend or 10 spent reading by themselves is glorious? Is it right and good for them to notice that some of us don’t need the network that others do, even when it’s faced with a disapproving eye?

Can they learn to touch little in a world that touches too much? Should they?

***

They were lovely but aloof, my eldest with eyes only for her mother, my youngest the one who knows all the names and loves her friends. Rosalyn points out her friend’s dress, her shoes, her other friend’s tie and hair, carefully mussed by a mother’s hand. One loves grand and the other to herself, and I find it lovely and simple and right.

But later this year, or the next, things will change, and one or both will find they don’t know or play by unwritten rules well. There will be no signs on the wall with these lessons.

And I fear I will have nothing for them than my own lessons, which are likely not nearly enough to go around.

devoted

I gave so much to, no longer split ends, fresh water and pure air

they are whole and growing and into the moon

into the sun they reach. Skin splits and grows hard

as do their hearts presumptive.

We skim the air with them, with their stories and youth

stretching before me as fields of green

the new sweet buds on the rosebush, heavy with summer at the door.

This look is gone, this moment, hold still my darlings but no!

don’t gasp or it’s over.

I can beg until I’m bloody, I can cry silent again

i can dream until the day returns in sleep

corked

and your skin is gentle and purrs against the winter wind.

I can whisper breathless again all time

and bring you back, as now

nimble, scentless and free.

It’s the usual, the always complaint, the never ending rush of a day, the socks and the dirty floors and the disappointment of a child told, yet again, that there’s just no money for that, yet there’s no time either, not with work and housework and trying to fit all the pieces together, the wool puzzle shrunk until it’s just not quite right. The exhaustion comes from knowing I do this on my own, watching in sore envy as others have family, friends to surround them, to understand and make it better. I have but one person in my life I can lean on, and that is not fair to them, this seeming dependance, this need.

So I do need to be strong. I do need to pack it all in, shudder that quavering breath and march off to another day of letting my soul slowly wither because children need to eat and mortgages must be paid and one needs new shoes and the other pants. Somewhere in there, there might be a few dollars for me, but even that is riddled with guilt and hate because it’s not important and really shouldn’t be.

When I say I’m tired, it’s not the tired you can resolve in a few days sleep. It’s the tired that comes from knowing the future holds nothing different, just more of this battle, a little worse, a little better. But forever this stretching agony.

So I am weary, and coming to a point that, just like the elastics I wear in my hair, may mean that I cannot return from whence I came.

But you can’t.

I’ve spent the week trying to avoid the knowledge that I was being triggered, in the most massive of ways, just by coverage and words. It’s like my insides were retrieved and pulled back in time, to another place. I wasn’t that little boy the the showers, but dammit if I don’t remember the feeling of knowing, of knowing without a fucking doubt that someone knew. Someone saw and someone could have stopped it and someone did nothing.

I have lived my life with the knowledge that I wasn’t worth saving. That I wasn’t worth the effort of protecting.

It sounds like the simple choice an adult could make. Get involved, don’t get involved. Walk away. Pretend you didn’t see. Pretend no one if hurting. Pretend there isn’t a little girl naked on film, film in your hands.

Wash yoru hands of it.

To me, it makes you complicit. It makes you guilty, If my eyes had reached to you, much as that little boy would have reached, in anguish, in horror, in terror, and you could walk away, are you any less a monster?

Somethings are just wrong. I, like many others this week, have spent time reliving our monsters, playing it over and over in our heads. The knowledge that we just didn’t matter.

That we were something to walk away from.

***

I can’t listen about the man who just got 5 years for 4.5 MILLION images of child pornography without wondering if I’m one of those pictures. I will never know. I will never know if the man who took the pictures while the other man directed the action ever felt bad when he walked past me in the street. I wonder if he ever thinks about what he did, about the full impact of what he did.

On bad nights I wonder if he kept them and enjoys them still.

On bad nights, the voice whispers to me that I must be unworthy, I must be garbage, less than some, a null value. Why else? Why else did this happen? Why else was there a cold wet tongue in my mouth at 8, fingers at my chest? Why else are there memories colored by condoms and pain and frigid terror, a red wash to the skies behind my eyes while my body goes rigid and eats it’s own screams?

Why the fuck else?

Why else would anyone destroy a child, if they were nothing to begin with?

***

I don’t have the answers. But you know what I do have? I don’t trust anyone. I try, and I bind my lack of faith in pretense and poetry, but there is a nagging doubt behind me always, nodding. They will betray you. They will ruin you.

You will deserve it.

I hate myself. Every child who has been touched, every adult who has felt the power leave their limbs will nod and understand this loathing, the scars on my body where I’ve dragged metal through skin, the sudden shudder to my voice. There is such hate inside of me, a burning seething wreck, stranded lonely. I cannot soothe it, or break free from it. Instead I cover it with the cotton of time and walk from it in hope.

And you will never know.

Your skin will turn cold at a lover’s touch. Your stomach will curdle, your breath will catch and you’ll resist the urge to call out your own name in rememberance. You’ll forget the difference between memory and a dream.

As if there was ever one anyway.

I don’t though.

We believe that for suffering, our reward should be wisdom, knowledge, the pat clatter of enlightenment. But I got nothin. For all my trials, my struggles, I’ve instead been cursed with the knowledge that sometimes it’s just bloody rotten horrible, sick and coagulated and messy in our hands, and no amount of  whispered platitudes or sheltered love can change that. Life, a pile of entrails slick in our hands and cooling in the fall air.

I want to have the meaning. I want to have the purpose. My children ask me, what’s the point is living if we’re just gonna die? How does that make sense? and I shake my head and shrug with resignation and a reminder to myself to read more Descartes and tell them I don’t know and maybe no one does and does it have to have a point? I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

It gets no better or worse for repatition, no simpler, no prettier. Remaining it hangs in cold air like truth, bartering with us. Give us a kiss it slithers let us in, this doubt, this wondering acceptance. I don’t know now what I didn’t know then and the balance hangs and I find myself again with the shrug, and the words trapped, perhaps forever in a place where they mean something else, and they matter. A place where words are a solace we can quantify, paint silver and ruby and massage under dim gold light.

But I don’t know.

They’re hidden then, if they’re there at all, burnished and cold. Perhaps they’re as lonely as we are, scratching and crawling for meaning and reality, sober in the corner, suffering with us. Perhaps they don’t matter, as we revolve with the knowing that it just is. That the suffering, the pain and the ignorance and the wonder, it all just is and we handle it with aplomb, and grace and many nights of plain faced sobbing into pillows.

I don’t know.

I have no answers. Is it better to admit that I’m not omnipotent, to myself, to my children, or stay the course in strength and glory? Can I mock an answer made of gods and monsters, tied with wax and arrogance?

Sweet hell, can I ever make it better?

I crave to take this pain from you, from all of you, transform action and slivers of ache into love and warmth and marshmallow relief. I want to bring it meaning, bring it reason and cause. Can we spin tears to gold, sadness to leafy green mornings in June? Can we make it better?

Can we answer yes,  there is a point Virginia, because we make it so?

Can we answer yes?

Then there are today’s.

I’m not in the door 5 minutes when Vivian starts to tell me about this kid who pushed her on the playground. Only the playground is the jungle gym that resides within the bounds of the low income housing, with it’s unofficial “stay out mantra”, and the kid is one of the (many) children of a woman who quite possibly personifies the myth of the mother who has babies for the checks and who couldn’t possibly be any more verbally abusive to her children in public. It’s quite frankly a place I want Vivian to stay away from, especially considering all the needles and cigarette butts and broken glass. It’s hard to not reference the stereotype when it seems to live in such vivid color.

I shake my head, drag the story, such as it is from her, and tell her to have her actual friend come over here instead. Any time Viv goes up there, someone throws something at her, pushes her, etc. And while I’m more than quick to blame my own kid, it’s constant and I’ve seen it. The adults are bullies, and sadly, for too many of the kids, it’s an inherited trait.

I wish it weren’t so.

Then as we’re getting ready for bed, I hear Rosalyn in the bathroom, staring into the mirror. I hear “I’m ugly.” and my heart, is makes this WAAAH sort of noise and I try to keep calm as I ask “What did you say Sweetie?” and she comes shamefaced out of the bathroom and all I can think is “what the hell did I do to cause THIS!?’ There is little to no poor self talk, only mentions of how lovely and smart and strong they are, what wonderful women they’re becoming. She won’t tell me where she’s heard this, denies anyone said it to her.

But I worry at this one. Where Vivian seems so self reliant, so adaptable and frankly, so strong, Rosalyn reminds me of someone.

Me.

I turned 34 this past September, and this is the first year I can remember where I have actually felt confident, and beautiful, and smart and strong. Maybe not every day, but most days. I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t wracked by fear or doubt or self loathing. I can look in a mirror now. I still don’t always like what I see, but I see it and think this is me. This is a me who has come through and survived and thrives now. This is someone who is loved, someone who is in love, someone who matters. Someone who cares. This is someone.

But I remember being that person who felt only horror at herself, who felt that pain everyday, who said “I’m ugly” and meant it. I remember that as vivid as any picture I have ever taken. I never want to feel that ever again. And I certainly do not want it for my daughters.

Especially my youngest, as delicate as Queen Anne’s Lace, as lovely as starlight, as strong as a young birch, at whim to the wind. She who shares my apparently flighty constitution, my flair for the dramatic, the simple peace of naivete, that which I do not want her to cast aside until the last possible moment. I baby her because she is who I was, she is the creature I remember being, before it all changed. Quietly lovely, and happy. I cannot let her lose that so easily.

I cannot let her lose it.

But it will go. Now, maybe later, maybe well into the future. But I cannot protect them, not completely. Not from others, not from themselves.

All I can do is try and arm them, and hope.

From the corner of my eye I still see, slight, a girl. She lingers in the lines beside my eyes, in the way my hands wave along as I walk. She whispers in my hair with the wind. A certain time of day and the light might catch her, fresh and terrified.

But she’s receding. She’s receding in everyone, tethered behind children and marriages, failures and dreams we face and shake off, forever lost to us. Those versions of us, those gentle philosophers, music prodigies, the fame and the fortune, they are slumbering, tucking away as suddenly, we’re old enough to realize that when I grow up is never going to arrive. We are there. We are the other side.

We begin to misunderstand, we shake fists at youth while staring wistfully. A girl on the cusp of womanhood wanders by, and we remember, the halting nervous legs, newborn colt wet and ready. We see the age in eyes, the age she holds already, but unburnished. We sigh and miss and wish we knew, wish we had listened as you cannot then, youth born of fire and deafness. We scatter ourselves back in time but cannot touch.

We wimper as the young men walk by, brash and unshaped, time is gentle on the immortal. We remember and we stall them for time, willing the air to steal back that which, so vital, becomes hidden, stolen away from us. Our bald spots and wrinkles, cellulite and blood pressure, when did it replace joy and vigor and the sweetness of another day? When did we lose sight?

When did we get so old? How did we begin to forget? Where once we sat in glory as the world moved for us, now we’ve been shifted back, into wings, the far north to ripen off and age and pass, our jobs here done. The shine is off the penny, and time, it marches for no one but itself.

One day it was suddenly all about places to stay instead of places to go. How did we let it happen?

About 1.5 hours into my day, I think gee, I should take a peek, just to be safe. You never know.

Missed call an hour previous. The school. (Of course, the school being the smartest place I know, shows up as a private number, meaning I then need to scramble to find the number.)

I log in to my land line voicemail and hear a message which chills me. “Vivian doesn’t appear to be here today-can you call and confirm if she’s out sick or late?”

I’ve never felt such a sick, greasy fear before, but it shot straight down my spine, and settled somewhere near my liver while I sprinted off the floor to call.

The lady answering asks, not unkindly, “Is she sick? We noticed she isn’t in today.”

I sent her. She walks to school. She went. I walked the same way, back and forth since Rosalyn made me miss the bus, and I didn’t see her. She must be there.

A hem. A haw. She puts me on hold while silently, I pace and I slowly burn with a million thoughts. The rational ones are buried in the back, drowned out by self doubt (why did I let her walk? Is it worth it, letting her have this freedom at 8, these 4 blocks, barely even a km to school?) by anger (it’s not like her to not go straight to school! If she’s somewhere else I’ll lose it I swear to crap…) and by cold fear (oh sweet hell, is she somewhere cold? Did she get hit by a car and they didn’t stop? Is she lying behind a house, her leg broken? Did someone snatch her?)

Is she ok? Please, please, let her be ok.

The woman comes back. “All the kids are in the gym. Let me go look and call you right back.”

Let. Me. Go. Look?

I can’t breathe waiting for the call. I’m on fire, my nerves tense and strung, and all I can think is the possibility that my sweet girl in hurt somewhere, or scared, or all those horrible things you don’t speak of, not out loud. Did I tell her I loved her as she left? Did I hug her enough, distracted as I was by the morning, and getting her sister dressed, getting her sister to eat breakfast faster than she does? I pace and gnaw on my fingers and stay as tightly wound as I possibly can.

She calls back. “So sorry. Teacher marked the wrong kid absent. She’s here. She’s fine. I’m so sorry.”

I barely choke out my understanding before I burst into hysterical tears, heaving the words “holy fucking shit” from my lips. I catch my breath and run to the bathroom so I can let it go, the fear, the panic. The fucking cold fear.

This was maybe 15 minutes of my life. And it was terrible, horrible. How parents lose their kids, and carry on, survive-I cannot imagine. A few minutes of not knowing ate me up inside for the day, and all I could think was that some people life with that pain, daily, forever. Their kids never come home. Their kids, are just gone.

And I just couldn’t imagine it, hope I never, ever have to worry.

***

What I hate the most is that I automatically questioned my judgement in letting her walk, something which, honestly, is likely safer than if she got on a school bus in the morning or drove. It’s 4 blocks, through a residential area full with her peers and other families. It’s absolutely safe, unless you really worry about some random person smoking weed.

But I doubted myself. Instead of assuming, rightly, that everything was fine, and someone just made a mistake, I doubted me, just like all the media and the hyperbole and the paranoid suburban housewives want me to. I fell prey to believing in the boogeyman, even if just for a minute.

But there wasn’t a boogeyman. Just a miscounting teacher, and a secretary jumping the gun. A little girl who seemed oddly surprised at the extra tight hugs she got the other night. And a mother who should trust herself more often.

(Is it just my kid’s school that just does not have it together? Is your neighborhood safe, or would you doubt yourself first too?)

Her teacher had cancer. She had long hair she tells me, but no longer. Why does this happen Mommy?

Cursory explanations, rogue cells, the memory brushing my eyes of verdency dropping to the floor of a bath tub, the hollow look of a woman with no eye brows, the acceptance I held to the just is. The vomit and the weakness and the size 6 boots she wore that winter, mincing up the laneway in the dark, leaning on me.

Leaning on me. I was just her age then, 8, then 9, then 10 then she was gone and the memories I have left to hold, the crumbs given are so few that I can’t even piece together who she was any mre, just a figment, just a second in a life.

And just like that, 23 years fall away and unbidden tears fall and Viv sees them, frowns and I can’t not tell her, I can’t not let her know that everyday somehow, my mother is with me and I miss her, desperately sometimes, wistful others, because she was my mother and even after all this time I love her and how can’t you? How can you stop loving someone, even when they’ve been gone so long their voice is a mystery and their dreams are nothing more than the heights climbed in sleep?

When she asks why I cry it’s for her, and them and my mother and the grandmother she’ll never be, the nightmares she never shushed for them, the dresses she never picked out, the interruption, the godfucking awful end of all of it. The shuddering finale that left us all wounded, bear trapped in the woods and maimed, leaking blood and water even years later.

I tell her all these things, I see her as a that newborn, I hold her close and wonder that her skin is still just that soft and her hair new and shining and waiting and the ache roars up my chest, like an arrow through my throat and I feel my mother then, I feel her loss, I feel her fear and her wonder. I see her arms about me. I remember leaning into her, fire on a cold night I remember, years and days and ages later, I remember her love for me. I understand it’s meaning.

I understand what it gave me, and I hold my angels now closer, bare to the heart, knowing. I carry her heart.