“If you don’t create change, change will create you”

I want to be alone. I want the gloriousness of a bed to myself, hogging all the pillows. Picking all the paint colors, never having to share the ice cream with another adult. The joy of wandering off somewhere on a Saturday afternoon, just to see where I end up.

I want to be loved. I want someone’s arms around me, their breath hot on my neck. I want to see myself reflected, want to share my world with them, my bookshelves, my dreams. Learn to run together, learn to cook, learn to love. Wake up lazy weekend mornings in the sun, like cats.

I want to share. I find myself intrigued and pulled towards a world where love doesn’t end with two, where my thoughts and dreams and wants are tied to two, where all my little hippie dreams play out, and each little part of me is warmed and full. I envision a life full of the green of this earth, the blackness of it’s dirt and the swelling of my own heart.

I have to pick just one?

***

I’m so not good at this. One day to the next, I don’t know what I want.  A partner maybe. Or just someone to play with. Or a situation far removed from what’s considered normal. Or no one, just me. Then I miss arms to hold me at 2 in the afternoon on a bad day or someone to share a inside joke with or just spend the night talking with and I realize I feel like I’m missing an arm, but have absolutely no idea how to figure out how to find one.

I’m socially inept. I’ve been broken inside in a multitude of ways, and am only now realizing how fucking less than zero I have felt, how hideous I believed myself, and still find myself believing if I’m not careful. I had come to believe I was ugly, an worthless, and unfit to be loved. And who wants that? Who wants to be near anyone who believes these things? Who wants to talk to someone who spent years believing no one really wanted to hear what she had to say, that no one cared enough to hear what she actually thought and believed?

I feel as if a lion has taken up residence in my throat, and is finally learning how to speak.

But I still feel so bloody hideous some days, so unworthy. I cast my eyes down if someone looks my way, and don’t wish to burden them with a visage so revolting.

This is why marriage scares me so, the thought of commitment again. Because it has scarred me in ways I never would have seen, and somedays I wonder if I can ever scrape off the scab to let the new skin grow. Because I have come out the other side feeling so horrendously minimized, made to believe that my desire for a life beyond the now, my desire for dreams and love and togetherness were wrong, naggy and bitchy. And sometimes I feel so weighted down with it all, the staggering size of it, and how tiny I feel compared to it.

I am not perfect. But I know I am not the waste of time and space and love that some would let me believe. I am not her. I have never been her.

But how do I convince myself of this?

***

I can’t imagine telling a guy I like them, not without clear input on their end. I can’t imagine having the nerve to just ask a guy to dinner, my mind’s eye telling me, showing me how they’d laugh with their friends, call me fat and ugly and stupid behind their hands, needy and wasted. How I would again be unworthy.

I want to love again. I want to actually BE loved.

But where do I start?

-Have you started over again? What’s the secret? Extra points to answers from people who aren’t already blessed by the gene pool. My fat ass works against me….

Mothers and daughters are closest, when daughters become mothers.

I was 25 and unwieldy my first mother’s day, pregnant but not showing, being fat and squishy in all the places skinny girls start to get taut and glowy around 6 months. I was browsing in the bookstore with my then husband, bemused, fingering the childbirth books, fantasizing about my perfect birth.

Feeling the echoes of my mother, where she should be. A year before this, I had dreamt of her with me as I birthed. I did not give a child, but in hindsight, I gave myself over, releasing her spirit and splinters of her memory from me, bursting forth in light and ache. Perhaps I am a prophet. But that day, I felt only the loss, the emptiness of new life without the guidance of an elder, of a mother, of my mother.

I will never feel as alone as I did that day, surrounded on all sides by mother daughter duos giggling, bonding, drinking latte’s and tea, eating scones and generally, absorbing the air I could no longer breathe.

I made a conscious decision that day, to finally accept my pregnancy, to finally come to grips with my transition into adulthood, to the mother, to the person I would become. I wasn’t just bringing new life into the world. I was healing my own, finding it with groping paws and empty promises.

I picked up a pregnancy journal, and decided it was ok to become someone’s mother.

***

I said I was going to ignore Mother’s Day. And, it’s very likely that I will, knowing there will be no cards or flowers or well wishes, just like every other year-difference being is that this year I don’t have to be mad at anyone about it. It just is.

But it feels off to not acknowledge it.

It’s not razor sharp anymore, that pain. I don’t walk dazed through my days, like I’d fallen down a set of stairs and hit my head and could only see the stars before me. The pain lessens, nearly disappears, leaving me only a reminder of who I’m not, what I could have been, how it all could have been so different.

If I look at the clearly, my mother never dying would have likely meant me never wasting my teen years embroiled in drugs and drinking and confusion. My mother never becoming sick would have meant I would have never moved to Northern Ontario. Never bought a magazine. Never met the father of my children.

Never had my children. My mother’s death directly created my daughters.

As I tell Vivian, frequently-light and dark are only two sides of a thin coin. So it seems, are life and death.

I cannot curse her death any longer. I cannot curse my loss without acknowledging what I have gained. Who I have become. The lessons writ large on my heart, in my skin, by losing her all those years ago. I am a mother because I have no mother.

Ten years ago, when asked, I would have said I would give up anything, and everything to have her back.

No longer.

Becoming a mother has given this to me-a love broad enough to hold my pain, the ability to understand her sacrifice, her pain, her ache, while watching my own recede in the distance like the sun setting in August. Becoming a mother has allowed me to let go in my own way, sitting late at night with a daughter under my child, curled into my body, secure in the knowledge that Mummy loves her, and will never let anything harm her.

I miss my mother. But I’m proud of the mother she has helped me become.

****

Sometimes I stare at the sky as I walk home, and marvel at how big it seems in this province, how spacious and grand. The wind pushes the clouds around, musses my hair and I’ll feel, briefly, like I’m 17 and impossible and wrinkled with pain. The sky smells of tomorrow and I feel my heart pause, sure of her breath on my neck, her perfume on the breeze. Her voice whispers around me, just past hearing, and the world rights itself.

I’m solid again, and grown.

She’s with me everyday, as she’s part of me. I have become her. My daughter’s hold her attitude in their eyes, her bravery in their hearts. My mother’s humour infuses my days, dry and startled.

We are our mother’s daughters.

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn’t a sign that they “don’t understand” one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.

We get along like two old friends, the comfy kind you have from high school who knows what it takes to make you blow root beer out your nose.

I find myself warmed by talking with him-not in the girly flirty way, but in the hey! I like talking to my friend! We get along and he’s funny and he laughs (sometimes) at my jokes and the look in his eyes isn’t cold like it was. kinda way.

I come home without the weight of what or if or should I on my back. No more constantly examining my marriage, no more staring for the flaw, picking at a scab of what was, trying for the sake of it. I come home and look into the eyes of my soon to be ex husband and I think I do love you, after nearly half my life, I love you to the tips of my toes, but you’re right you know, that love isn’t the wifey kind. It’s a warm glass of rum instead of the cold shock of tequila.

And now, on the other side of the table smiling at each other warmly, I am perfectly all right with that.

************************

People gasp when you tell them you’re breaking up.  After all this time! How sad, they tsk, how sad. I suppose that it is, sad that we couldn’t manage to salvage what always made us so right for each other, sad that one, or both of us changed just enough for the other to not recognize any longer. Sad that I got sick, sad that he had to shoulder the burdens of a family alone through it, weather my moods and my ire.

It’s sad that we won’t have more time together, it is.

But that time is long past, the years of love not meaning obligation. The time when things were tender and devoted, not forced. We haven’t lived there in a long time, and I don’t know why. If anything kills me, it’s the not knowing why, why we couldn’t find the right way to this.

I can see the threads now, slipping downhill. I couldn’t see them before, caught up in the now, but I can stare back from here and see where it began to unravel, and all the places where I didn’t stop and pick it up, or where we together kicked the thread aside and moved ahead, without it. So many tiny moments that added up to now, to us both holding the sad dying pieces of a marriage, with the terrible knowledge that we couldn’t put it back together.

I don’t think we mourn it. Maybe it will be worse later, like it was the other day in the supermarket, as each item he liked grabbed me by the chest and nearly started the tears coming with how I’d never buy it for him again, how I’d need to learn what cereal someone else likes best someday. How I wouldn’t have a lover to smile for as I threw chocolate in the cart. I mourn in the strangest ways, the buildings where we sat, the streets we walked down, hands touching softly, the rooms where our new daughters once lay, and the beautific smile that graced his face as he rocked them to sleep.

I will mourn the us that wasn’t, that never could be, the lovers who couldn’t find the pace, get the steps. We tried, and once, we did hold it together, cradled the ball of us in our hands. But it was so very long ago, and life is so easily ran from habit, our hands splitting, letting go.

But we tried. We’ve spent the last few years trying, and finally, I’ve thrown in the towel as well, saying those words he’s so rarely heard from my lips.

You’re right.

Whatever we had, whatever flowered for 2 or 5 or 6 years, it’s long since dried up and become lost as we’ve grown up and apart. Think of it like a firework-beautiful, dangerous, and ultimately, never meant to last.

I like that image of us, exploding into ash to fertilize tomorrow. I like that.

*************************

We get along, and agree and plan and I can see tomorrow, I can see next month, and I’m not that scared! Everyone tsk’s and says they can’t imagine and I’m gleefully clapping my hands and saying But I CAN! see! And it’s not so bad! We divy up the goods and calmly discuss what custody will look like and if his new place will be up the street or down three more and I think I can do this. This isn’t the horrid divorces my friend’s parents had, this is our divorce, as two people who do care for each other, and more importantly, love their children more than life and realize that this, what we do right now, impacts every step of the rest of their lives.

And most importantly, because we will always be a family, drawn together by blood and time. I will always be their mother. He will always be their father.

We will be better this way. I am quite sure of it.

 

Fire in the Belly, at 4

Originally uploaded by thordora

Lately I find myself reaching for babies a lot, my fingers twitching greedily for the soft, chubby legs, the tiny buttons on the tiny sweaters, the wispy hair (OH! the wisps) I don’t really want one-hell, I didn’t want mine when I had them, and hurried their babyhood’s alone with a wink, and nudge and the hope that lack of sleep would cause amnesia.

It must have worked since I can’t remember Rosalyn’s first word. I do recall that she walked for the very first time on her first birthday however. I don’t remember much else though, and thinking on it is like wading through mist. Ok, actually, I remember her exersaucer and how she took it as a personal challenge to get it across a room. She was always so determined to get moving.

In flipping through pictures of her, I noticed that her face, particularly her mouth, is dirty with something in nearly all. Cheese, crackers, peanut butter-always a greasy smear and crumbs down the front, too busy, much much too busy, white rabbit watch checking and running busy.

Then lately, now, I think of her, and the constant strains of “my haaands are durty!!!” and the running for the bathroom, the recent fastidiousness that has risen within her-the clean face I hadn’t seen since birth. I stopped and thought about that snack filled face, and nearly dropped what I held.

She’s a little girl now. My baby, my second born, my brave wonder woman birth, my angry little baby, so serious and sad for months in photos, still with the lost in thought head. She is not a baby. I can carry her down the stairs to her bed, her tiny arms twisted around my neck, her breathing warm in my ear, and I realize she never liked this as a baby, was never comfortable. She wants to do things, communicates her thoughts, tells me she misses her sister when she’s gone. (Yeah, I usually have to pick my jaw up at that one)

Man, where did she go? My baby, will she always be my baby? I know I treat the two of the differently, but how can’t I? They ARE so different! Where Vivian seems to run the rails on the straight and narrow, Rosalyn just…floats by, like she’s on water, plucking lilies from the shore. She’s got that purple crayon, and she’s drawing the road herself.

She really is a fabulous little creature. Not my baby, the baby is gone, and yeah, good riddance and all that jazz.

Four years ago, I was such a mess, and I was angry and depressed and scared, and almost unwilling and unable to love my baby, my daughter.

Four years later, I can’t imagine my heart not full with the sight of her.

Happy Birthday Ros. Sing me a song.

Teetering on the edge of all her tomorrows.

High on daiquiri and bravado, I follow a friend into a bar, a dark bar, narrow, one which,  a few years back, would have held tightly in it’s fist that blue haze of cigarettes and cigar smoke. Now, it has only a few morose smokers huddled against it’s heavy doors, looking listlessly out into the rainy night. We squeeze through the awkward crowd of 80’s clad early twenty-somethings and father figure type bearded men and find seats at the very end of the bar, unfortunately positioned directly in front of the amps, from which poorly executed Johnny Cash covers are whining their way through the room.

A beer, a feisty red beer which sits so poorly in my overly fruited belly, and I stare before me into the small sweaty dance floor. The man playing the guitar mentions it’s “mother-daughter night” and I glance closer. So it is. So it is a group of smiling, shiny young girls are drinking and dancing and holding close their mothers. Mother’s who hold their daughters right back, whose eyes shine with pride and amazement that their daughter, THEIR daughter, is so perfectly beautiful and delicate, so explosive with life. So ready for what might come, hanging on the edge of tomorrow and the next day. Tangled in the hair of one with black hair is a white flower, glowing against her, the porcelain gaze of her skin made frothy almost. She shines, like the new leaves in spring, just from the bud. I find myself watching her in awe, trying to recall when I felt that simply alive.

To be those mothers now-not the daughters. That ship has sailed and frankly, i know what lives underneath the lovely dresses and perfect tresses. Doubt, fear-am I on the path I need to be? Will things be ok? Will I find love, happiness, truth, beauty? Will anyone ever love me? They were beautiful girls, but I focused on the women, the singular devotion, the quiet in their eyes. The sweet satisfaction that come from them, their strength passed on to their daughters, girls on the cusp of becoming women, of finding their footing and destiny. They were the sweet oracles of Delphi, their daughters, merely the handmaidens, for now.

It was as if a ritual, a letting go, a slice at the ribbon of childhood, allowing these mother’s to really see their daughters as the individuals they are, not just as the babies that once suckled at their breast or the rotten 13 year old’s who screamed “I hate you!” when denied the chance to see Outcast or Nelly. Watching these women, there was the sense of a job done, and done well. Satisfaction, and pride. The cubs were coming into their own, and were lovely, and strong.

They stumbled into each other, drunk, mother or daughter. And they laughed a laugh I have never laughed, but wish too more than anything. They saw each other only with love.

It was beautiful.

***************************************

My darling second born, or Shiva, destroyer of worlds as we are apt to call her, turns four on Monday.

That’s right. FOUR. I turned around, and the universe put a stubborn, obstinate, flighty little GIRL in place of a cranky sweet baby.

Already I experience such joyous things as, when told she cannot do something, usually along the lines of, no, you cannot run with scissors, she’ll cry out “You never let me do ANYTHING! It’s NOT FAIR!”

Yeahhhh. At FOUR. Not 13. FOUR.

Or the constant battles about underpants and proper bathroom hygiene. We had a 20 minute argument/fight/screaming match due to both of us being tired over her wiping her own butt.

Yeeeaaaahhhh.

Since both of us are stubborn and always believe we’re the one who is right, I’m thinking the ages of 10-18 are pretty much going to suck. Hopefully she smokes more pot than I ever did, because lord, she is smart and wily and strong and pretty fucking awesome.

She’s lying next to me in my bed as I write this, unable to sleep due to having a small nap too close to bedtime. She’s sounding like she’s snoring, but it might be the horrid congestion that’s had me feeding her cough strips all day long to moderate the croup like barking. You know the cough-the one that makes all the other mother’s stare at you at the mall like you’re this pathetic mother for taking her outside, even though it’s only post nasal drip?

Yeah. You know the one.

 

I look at her and think about last night and cast my mind ahead 15 years or so, to a day, a weekend, a night where all of this doesn’t matter-the interrupted sleep, the inability to remember to get to the bathroom 30% of the time, the screaming over nothing. I think ahead to how lovely her eyes are, and how they’ll burn with fire when she’s 20 and on the verge of taking everything by the horns. I think of her strong legs, and how she’ll maybe be a runner, and fly like the wind, the wind I could never quite take hold of.

I think ahead to that life where we have a beer, then maybe 5, and laugh about where I’ve been, and where she’s going, and all the wonderful, horrible, incredible places in between. We’ll see each other, in the strangest places, in the hairline, the wrinkles at the edges of our eyes. I’ll think of my mother, the empty placeholder between us, and wish she could see her granddaughter, be there to correct her posture and grammar. But I’ll see my mother in Rosalyn, her strength, in their inability to take no for an answer.  I think ahead to us in a dim bar, age narrowing to where it no longer matters, on a plane of is and was and will be.

I think of how beautiful she will look, teetering on the edge of all her tomorrows.

****************************

Dammit, she’s FOUR! Which makes me 32 this year, which makes me feel time speeding past me so fast I can’t hardly catch my breath. She was just this giant baby in my arms, a sturdy toddler. Now, she’s this gorgeous creature who looks so much like me I get confused. How could something so lovely, and yet so very immovable and strong be brought forth from me? My heart breaks at little bit, thinking of how bewitching she is, how sublime. How marvelous her future will be.

She’s the creature most like me, mercurial in her moods, loud in her upsets, sweet in her love. She’s the me who was, or as close to it as I might come.

And I love her, both.

There

 

In the air, this sweet break from the cold, rivulets down the road with winter dissolving, floats forever ago, a place disappeared, a land where the nights were long, crisp journey’s into another world, where time lasted and spun it’s magic around my ears. This air, reminds me of the warmth in our kitchen, the images of my mother’s hands across my back, on my head, in the sink, dishes clanging as I sat, underfoot, studying the patterns there. This air, it marries us across the years, the me then, the me now, handfasted, tied with thread and IV lines.

This air, it burns my eyes.

Taking advantage of a state of hypomania lasting more than 30 minutes (and explaining away my need for sleeping pills last night) I rip apart the bedroom, old clothes sorted out into a garbage bag, magazines on to the porch, to give away, to save for that day all trash is allowed, anything, maybe even the monkey’s on your back. I shift the bookshelves, notice the “unread” pile has grown to 20 or more books, smile. See my lonely photo album, the only evidence that I had a childhood, somehow tucked under the cat’s sofa, ragged and old.

Rosalyn, who has been “helping me” by laying on the futon and rolling around with Bride Barbie, sees the album and is drawn, as all children seem to be, by these frozen moments trapped. 

“That’s me!” she screams at the baby pictures. I find myself correcting her, but not really, so entwined we seem, so much the same, the air between us thin and enraptured, time meaningless. She sees me in full ballet regalia, the hated tutu, the flower hat my mother made that I wasn’t allowed to wear in the recital.

“I want to look like that Mummy.” she mutters, staring intently, eyes boring through the photo. Her grandmother deserved this child, she who loves pink and Barbie and babies and ballet, everything my mother wanted and wished for in a daughter, none of which she got. My mother deserved this granddaughter, who would have made her so proud, so happy, so fulfilled in all the ways I never could. Rosalyn deserved my mother, deserves her still, to embrace her in the ways I cannot, and possibly never should.

I turn, find the one lonely shot of my mother and I, the only picture I have of her holding me, the only one where she’s smiling, where her face isn’t forced for the camera’s or fighting back the pain I know she suffered. She’s gorgeous-my mother was beautiful and I try to show Rosalyn, try to make her understand how lovely and perfect my mother was when I was her age, how I must have crowed “You’re the bestest mumy EVER!” to her in the mornings but I just can’t find the words, all gummed up like marshmallows in my throat and it won’t make any sense, not now.

Possibly not ever. How do you explain an absence to someone who’s never felt it? What’s the point is deciphering that which will never be?

My mother was who she was, and all the things she wasn’t and never would be. She loved me. Maybe I only have one picture and it’s fading and cracking but she’s sitting as I sit now and holding me as I hold my girls and I know, without doubt, her heart glowed for me and shone in the darkness that were her last days.

She loved me. That I can tell Ros. That makes sense.

I point to another shot, curled up in that hideous chair from so long ago, pointed at the television. Shot taken while I was in the grip of the nightly news I imagine, legs pulled under, wearing only underpants, despite my hair being neatly pinned back.

“Ros, who is that?”

She knows it’s me, but waits, looking into my eyes.

“I hated them too, see? No pants. Hated pants.”

“Like me!” she sings, grinning.

“Like you Honey Bear. Just like you.”

The air shimmers, and I can taste the air in that room, liver and onions perhaps, my mother’s ribs, a Sunday dinner of hamburgers, chips and illicit soda. It’s warm and secure and snug around my shoulders like one of those granny square afghans you find in the thrift stores now and again, the work wasted on the receiver, or maybe dead. We’re there together, Ros and I, but it’s her little legs on that chair, my hands holding the warm milky tea and buffing my nails before bed. We’ve merged and danced into each other, my childhood, my memories becoming hers, settling in to a quiet corner where in 10 or 20 years she’ll find herself telling a story about a little girl in a room full of amber light and love and they’ll never be able to tell what’s mine and what’s hers or where it’s all gone.

They’ll never know for sure.

It breaks my heart to never know my mother. I’ll stare at her eyes in photographs, thinking I’ll know the secret if I look at her long enough, that somehow, I’ll absorb enough of her to really know my mother, for her to mean something more than the sum of her loss.

But you can’t know the dead. You can’t know the people they were-you can only wave to the people you want them to be, the people you think they were once, before everything happened. I can stare at her face, the before face, the one before the chemo and the radiation and the pain, the pain of knowledge, the pain of leaving, the pain of facing your life ending, a plane crashing into so many lives. I can’t know that. I’ll never know that in the ways that kept her up at night or guarded her eyes as the days grew closer.

I will never know my mother. She will be that perfect garden in a picture, all beauty and tragedy, curves and angles, youth and hope. She will be annectodal memories for my daughters, the one we cannot hurt, the one who lives forever in our hearts and fingertips and the glittering spring leaves in the broad maple behind the house.

The one that got away.

She was happy once, that I can convince myself of, even when I stare at a face yellowed by treatment, frightened by what might come, and yet absolutely resolute in her ability to ignore what will be. Hope via ignorance. How very catholic of her.

She was happy once. God fucking dammit, she was happy, and alive and beautiful and she was my mother. Sometimes the air arches back and around, like today, and I imagine her, young, like I am, newly blessed with children, just breathing in the air, glad to be alive, remembering when she was young, and all the stories she’d some day tell.

She was happy there.

“The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom.”

The questions are simple and familiar. I respond in a cadence I’m not acquainted with. The woman speaking, the woman sitting there, in the most hated of black tights, she’s not someone I’ve known. The answers pour from her mouth like oil, slithering, her laughter meant to charm and bewitch, entwine. Her entire demeanor screams “Like me. I’m fabulous!”

Where the hell she came from is news to me. I haven’t seen this woman in, well, ever.

Days later, having “a serious conversation” about stuff like end dates and payouts, I hear her again, making it clear that I expect what’s deserved by law, and also, by courtesy and fairness. The voice also stands firm and lets it slip in a very subtle way that if the letter of the law isn’t followed, there is no concern in taking it somewhere that could get very complicated.

Her entire demeanor screams “Go ahead. Try and fuck my shit up. I’d enjoy the fight.”

She’s news to me as well. But she fills up my chest like nothing else and I’m perversely proud of the woman who finally found a hill she’s willing to die on. Her back is straight and for moments, I imagine this to be the woman I should have been all along.

Fearless, breathless and utterly charming.

****

Kate wrote  a post last night that hit upon something I’ve been thinking about all week. Sorta.

2009 is twenty years since my mother died of cancer. Grief has underpinned my life so much in the past 20 years it’s not funny-it’s crawled into bed with me, held my hand as I brought new life into the world, rattled my cage at any sign of newness. And it hangs with me still-my need for attention after those formative years spent worrying about everyone else, everyone else thinking I was strong enough and didn’t need to be weak. My fear for my children, my fear for them because of me, my worry that anyone I come close to will screw me over, not might, WILL.

These are itches in my brain that I’ll spend the rest of my life attempting to negotiate and move past. They are part of me. They are no longer strange glitches to acknowledge and then push off the coffee table, they are part of me, and learning to worth with them-that’s the struggle.

But the hardest part, the plain grief, the shuddering quake in my chest, it’s long gone. There are days when I feel wrong almost to be ok with what was, sullen and rude to not still feel that cold hand inside me. Days where it’s easy to imagine she is gone from me, totally and irrevocably lost to my ears and fingers.

The pain allowed the mystery to stay true and follow. Strangely I miss that, the only communion we had, her voice lost amid the trees and the ducks in summer, my ears deafened by children and chili and Sunday mornings lazy in arms.

20 years now, and she is really truly gone from me. I see her everywhere, her image, her doing, her will, her morals, rising up in my like some terrible voice. My thoughts are sometimes her thoughts, and it’s like the years have compressed and for just a second, we are the same people, just two young mothers trying to make it all work. Moments as these are understanding and forgiveness, as years ago they were anger and sadness.

I get it now. Perhaps that’s why the ache is gone. I understand, fully, the sacrifice she had made for us, for herself. I understand the woman who stared at her child, wondering about the years ahead. I understand that for the woman in me to unravel and become, I had to start letting the child die, let her free after holding on to her for dear life for so very long, the only thing I had known was safe and loved me back.

They had to tell my mother to die. In no uncertain terms my father asked her doctors to tell her to let go. Her will was that strong, the fire in her belly and heart so warm and unwavering that she wouldn’t believe she was leaving us, not until there was really no choice, and she made the long trip home to die.

I understand now, that she spoke with a voice she had never heard, and felt it buffer her from the inside, to stay, to last just a little more, the sweetness of life and love just so right. I understand now that this voice is more than just the woman i was meant to be. It’s my birthright.

The last, and most tender gift a mother can give her little girl.

“These are weighty secrets, and we must whisper them.”

Dear Body.

I love you. I’ve decided, finally, to come off the fence, and just say it.

I’ve spent time loathing you. Holding parts of you and crying, being angry, wishing something could be smaller or bigger, my tits not so pendulous, my thighs not so strong. I’ve stared in a mirror many times, glaring at my soft belly, at 12 or 22 or now at 31, wishing it away, once at 18 or so punching myself until I couldn’t even cry anymore, sick of what I saw an an unhealthy and tired body.

No fucking more. I am blessed with this body, with it’s softness and strength, with it’s weakness and beauty. Last night, I stood before the mirror, foggy with shower. My arms were wrapped around my belly, and I stared. At a body that’s round and fertile and heavy with life. A beautiful life, displayed before me, forced despite, or in spite of, any acceptance I might prefer.

Right then, I thought of my mother, her body in a mirror, left breast gone, scars remaining, lumps strewn beneath it still. I imagined her thinking of me, in my bedroom down the hall, snoring lightly, and how her body didn’t create me, but sustained me despite this. How she much have despised her body, that turncoat, for eating itself out until she was nothing more than a frail shell of skin and bone inhabited by the ghost of the woman she was.

I saw her-superimposed on my height, on my girth, she stood with me, my hands on her barren belly, her soft hair, bloated hands. She stared me deep in the eye and said “You daughter, are more lovely than you’ll ever know.”

And she was gone.

Who am I to judge my body? Who am I to judge that which cradled my children as they grew, which holds me when I cry, pleases me when I love? Who am I to think my stomach too broad, my breasts too heavy, my legs to wide? Who am I to judge the weight of a body?

I don’t recall my mother ever saying a bad word about her body. She was a beautiful, petite woman who carried some extra pounds, be it from cancer treatments or from life. She also carried an incredible sense of her value and worth, a grace about her, a serenity, even before she was sick. She was powerful, and her body was an extension of that power in it’s quietude. Her signpost to the world was a body she loved and treated well.

I have never been small, not since I was 9 or so. I’ve been tall and broad and strong my entire life almost, gaining, losing according to life and circumstance. I cared once, I did.

Now? Not so much. Now I stare at the people, so many people around me desperate to lose a few pounds, desperate to base their worth on their pant size, and I wonder what they miss. What do they miss, focused on food so much? What do they miss, counting points and grams and feeling horrid for having that cookie yesterday or not eating all morning so they can have a little bit of dessert? What’s missing from life to make the lie that weight loss is TEH AWESOME so prominent for people?

I refuse to miss anything. I refuse to curse my body, curse it’s curves, curse it’s generosity. I refuse to disparage the thing that brought such loveliness into this world, the thing which thrives with love and care, blossoms with kind words and spring rain. I refuse to hate myself any longer. I refuse to wish for smaller, or tighter, or different.

I am me. Hear me roar.

You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.”

Never watch Law and Order SVU if there’s no plot synopsis.

Last night, that plot was bipolar, and I really wasn’t prepared.

I saw myself, fully, for the first time ever. Or as full as a healthy person can portray. I wish I could hate it, but I can only regret it while I use it, while I gladden myself with movement and change.

Stabler confronts his mother, speaking hard about his childhood, her threats to leave, to die, as she makes a sand castle, two planes, two people, one never listening, incapable of feeling for the people near to her.

Later, she says she’s lived the life she wanted, and paid a terrible price for it.

It’s cheesy to see one’s self on a TV, to face your demons on network television, but suddenly, vividly, I saw what I’ve been doing to my family, to the people in my life, for years. Sure, the TV version is always the most extreme, but what’s better? A slow death, or a fast one?

The voids I’ve left in lives, the utter wrung outness I give to people, squeezing them dry of everything inch of life, of passion, all the while demanding more, telling them they’ve stolen mine. I’ve made people raw, I’ve started down a path that would have destroyed everything in my life, made ruin of my children.  All because I circled on myself, my own orbit, my planet around I the sun.

Oh how I saw that last night. How my heart cracked and shuddered, with that awful realization of who I have been, what this disease makes me into. What it could become, who I could be. Who I do not ever want to be.

I could be worse. I’ve never spent thousands of dollars on a spending binge-I’ve been too poor for that. But I’ve ran multiple credit cards up to the edge, destroyed my credit. I never ran around sleeping with everyone, but hey, I was never that attractive. Likely, without marriage to tether me, I could have at times. I’ve always felt one step away from catastrophe.

Then I fell into it, and came out of it and now I’m sitting here wondering how anyone could last though all of that, how I could possibly be in anyway redeeming, worthy of lasting through the hell that I’ve been lo these many years.

How crushing to discover you’ve been not only bad, but horrid. Like a haze clearing from an early morning highway, I can see the road ahead, and the carnage I’ve left in my wake, and no amount of apologizing, no amount of trying could ever make it right.

And that scares me, as does the image of my future, bereft of those I love.

I’ve made changes. I know that if I stick to this path, my future is open and wide and full of love. But it’s hard, and I’m frightened of my very easy weakness. I’m frightened of myself.

Carry Me

Did she hold me now? Three hours ago? 12? Did they leave me in her room, snuffling, comatose little child beside her as colostrum poured from her breasts? Did she look out the window, perhaps at the rain, as they wheeled me away from her 17 year old unfinished hands, clutching at her elbows as she suddenly felt emptier than ever? Was I alone, screaming in a room, my echoes covered by those of a multitude of other lives I’d never touch again, their mothers waiting in their rooms, warmed by the slow engorging of their breasts, the blissed tiredness of their labours?

Did I know she had left me? Did my small trembling fists know what had happened, that she had signed a paper releasing me from her, just another cord to slice through? Did I feel the gulf then, as I do now, wavering and shimmering, a golden forest of time, of pressure, of regret between us.

Does she think of me today, now? Does she drink the beer she drank for years, not knowing, or is she at peace, knowing I survived, knowing that I have grown strong and tall, if not a little knicked and torn in place?

Did she love me, ever?

**************************************

Do you love your mother
The way I love mine
Expecting nothing of her
’cause she was changing all the time
I couldn’t take my mother
And I’ll never hate my home
But I learned to rock myself child
And get on

Do you feel your mother
The way I feel mine
I tried to change the nature
But now I like it ’cause it’s mine
And I let you love me up
And I let you bring me home
And I could go away
But I don’t wanna

I don’t wanna be too smart
I don’t wanna talk too fast
I don’t wanna look too precious
First impressions never last
There’s always complications
Weird vibrations
Frustrations
Have patience

Do you love your mother
’cause God I love mine
In a dream she let me love her
Gotta hand it to my mind
In case you never meet her
I’ll tell you what it is
She was lonely like a woman
But she was just a kid

Oh mama
What are ya doin’
Yeah yeah yeah
Ooohhh
Shit
Carry me

**************************

Today I turned 31 at around 2:15am. And it hit me, mid afternoon, that I’ve never known when my mother said good-bye to me, when the finality of all she had done and decided had hit, when she last touched me, held my fingers. I’ve never known, and when I met my biological mother, I was too young to think of these things, to young to understand the heartbreak of saying goodbye to your first born.

All my life, I have felt lonely on my birthday. I have always craved as much fuss and bother as I could get, and rarely, if ever, have had it. I figured this had much more to do with losing my adoptive mother than with being adopted. But what if? What if a body retains that initial abandonment, what if it remembers that hand leaving, tears trailing, months of unwillingness swirling in the womb. What if the body remembers what the brain dare not?

I don’t much like my biological mother. Or much of my biological family for that matter. Blood isn’t thicker than water in my case. But when I met her, I wanted, more than anything, to find a mother, my mother. I wanted to be embraced, welcomed. I wasn’t, not as I needed, and perhaps finding her at 18 wasn’t the best of ideas, but there was something poetic about meeting her around the age of when she lost me. I couldn’t grasp the enormity of it-bearing life at that age!

I’m sure it hardened her. She told me that for years, she would get stinking drunk on my birthday, wondering where I was, how I was, and that the year she found me, that was the first time she didn’t have to drink herself to sleep, wondering. Turns out I was 40 minutes down the road after all, blissfully ignorant in the arms of two parents who loved me more than I could wish. But she never told me how it all felt, how long her labour was, how scared she had been, if she saw me, or if they took me before she could.

My narrative is incomplete. I feel the echoes of that part of my life, my beginning on every birthday. It no longer hurts, I don’t know if it ever did. But it was a space yearning to be filled, a place that will likely never know fullness. A place to honor what she gave, the arms she left barren, the people who she gave such joy to.

Happy Birth Day to you Mother. I hope your womb has healed.

How many days does sorry count? Draft

inside the whitewash of my mouth

tangled there, thorns and bramble

there hung a moment, and instant a

hateful thought borne of anger

pain and a tinkling sadness I thought

left behind in that

sinking ship I like to call a past.

 

It cannot be borne, nor

retrieved and I, in my

blinding Alexander like pique

don’t hear the air crack and seize, don’t hear the

whiplash of a heart break.

 

Caught up am I. Seething am I.

Oblivious, wrapped in caustic am I.

 

From my rage my eyes, the broad bridge

of a nose, my thin lips arise, my ears

uncover, I pierce the skin of my madness

only to peer through the corners and feel that

all have left me.

 

Something changed.

Like the wind between summer and winter, that

warm biting edge on a breeze that smells like sleep something

shifted, softened, sighed and released.

 

I have smothered this love, coated it in wax and

walked the other way, my work sinking

deeper, festering. I have

brought down the walls and

collapsed the cellars.

 

My hands holding the dirt

of what once was between us.

Pere

I don’t say it often enough to Mogo, I don’t mention it between work and dinner and bedtime and a little time for ourselves.

Mogo, you are a fantastic father.

Many times as parents we think we need to “do” things to be good parents, that we must be teachers, musicians, artists, chefs, scientists. That every moment can be taught and made valuable. I’m one of those parents, finding a place to insert a little knowledge no matter what.

Some parents are able to ride childhood,  allow it to blossom and bloom through benevolent neglect and a pointed finger directed outside. Some parents will roll on the floor and let their children bounce on them like Tigger’s, until, inevitably, they get hurt while giggling.

Mogo is one of these parents.

He can take them to the park and let them play for an hour when I wouldn’t even make it 15 minutes. He can get down on the floor and play, setting up intricate train arrangements for the resident conductor. He brings home comics for his daughters, explaining the back stories. He makes them hamburgers whenever they ask.

I have sometimes high expectations for all of us, too high. And I forget to remind him how much his daughters eyes glow for him, and how empty this house would be if he was ever gone from it. I forget to remind him how much I love the father in him, how pure and simple this life we lead is, and how I adore it despite myself.

Happy Father’s Day Mogo.

(P.S-Mogo is also the reason that Rosalyn has, for the most part, mastered the potty this week. If that isn’t kick ass fatherhood, nothing is.)

We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.

Cuppa?

Originally uploaded by thordora

I’m not a big stuff person. Sure, I like things. But if they go missing, or break, I don’t miss them much. A small “huh” usually suffices, unless we’re talking about my Rainbow Brite doll that I lost years ago, or the hockey stick my brother broke when I was 7 or so.

Stuff just is. I’m not a collector, or a hoarder. My slob tendencies aside, I don’t have a lot of things. I have books. I have music. I have few clothes, little in the bathroom and I can count on one hand the things I’d be saving in case of fire.

Both my father and I believe that death imprints upon you a sense of urgency and need, an awareness of the bigger world looming around you. Things are meaningless to him as well. We like nice things, expensive well made pieces of furniture, sculpture, a perfect light fixture, emotion cast in bronze. We want to respond to that which we own. After losing my mother, little things trickled into the background. You might still want that Wii or those shoes, but you just don’t care enough to save up for it or fight some bitchy lady in an aisle for it.

Those concerns are swept away, replaced by more morbid thoughts, conversations about dying with a 5 year old.

Today, spurred on by this lovely bout of hypomania, I cleaned the counter where everything goes to die, and the shelving around it. On the top shelves live my mother’s tea cups.

All through my childhood I coveted these. I was only allowed to touch them every few months when she took them down for cleaning along with her copper pots. As a child they were delicious to look at, colors so vibrant, flowers so perfect. Each English Bone China, likely worth very little. But when I was allowed to hold one briefly, they may as well been eggs from the golden goose. They were treasure. They were special to my mother and I was allowed to hold them.

For years I didn’t have them, until I moved into this house and my father arrived one year with them.

“You always loved them, and it’s time for you to have them. Otherwise they’ll get broken”

I nearly burst into tears at the sight of them, at the feel of the cold china in my hands, the smoothness of the handles, the delicate folds and bends. My mother’s industrious hands were all over them, and briefly, she was with me.

Tonight this happened again, that bubble flashback in time to simpler things, standing next to the reassurance of my mother, her hands methodically yet cautiously cleaning her tea cups. I found my own hands caressing the china, her arms and thoughts moving through mine.

Vivian asked to hold them and I reminded her they were special and she wasn’t quite old enough. She asked me why they were special, why we had to be so careful.

I told her “Because sometimes a thing can bring a memory back so real that it’s like you’re there. And sometimes sweets, I just want to be with my mommy so bad I need something special to take me there. These are all I have left of my mother, and I need to be careful.”

She asked me if she’s be gone if the teacups broke. I told her no, she’d still be in my heart, but that then the specialness of holding something her hands had once held would be gone.

With that wisdom only the small seem to carry, she nodded and walked away.

They are only teacups. But they are also gateways to another place, another time entirely, where the sun shines heavy on a winter afternoon. Things are meaningless, without the stories built in.

“Age is opportunity no less,than youth itself, though in another dress. And as the evening twilight fades away, the sky is filled by the stars invisible by the day.”

A perfect day Elise: PJ Harvey

I’ve always loved this song. The tension, the pacing of the story, the vividness of the setting despite so few words. It would play itself out so clearly in my head.

To imagine that it’s 10 years old-meaning I’m ten years older. That it still has the same kind of hold on me…

I think a lot about aging, on how I still feel 17 inside, where it counts, but my knee kills when I jog and I can’t eat raw broccoli anymore. I think of it as spaces, bubbles that intersect, co-mingle, but never truly merge. We float into each age, effortlessly in some cases, kicking and screaming in others. Are some of us old souls, unfazed by the passage of years, knowing that they are ultimately meaningless, while others are young, too young, and are angered by responsibility and necessity? Do our stories ever merge?

I spend a lot of my time in public staring at other people. I always have. There’s something fascinating in the little tidbits people let slip. How they adjust their underthings when they believe no one is watching. How they drink their coffee. How they smoke a cigarette. If the person with them is a lover. Who they are, who they’ve been. A story in each individual spark, waiting to be told. A life lived. A baby suckled. A child held, and released. A teenager who danced, or lied to join the war. A young adult, faced with marriage, a job, or the agony of choosing their life work. And old man, staring at his hands and wishing. The loves that danced between, the loves lost, the lives stolen, children snatched.

Artwork that has never seen light. Music never sung. Voices squandered. I imagine every single one of those people a book, covered in rough leather, bound tight to be opened. It’s a mighty cliche, but I see volumes stacked on a shelf in these lives, the moments left to memory that only become real when spoken.

Old age has never scared me. I never imagined that I’d turn into a wrinkled crone, handing apples out to fair maidens. Maybe the image I hold in my head of my mother forms my view on aging-that it means grace, and dignity and wisdom. That it represents coming through and out from the events that tear your life asunder, and arriving at a delicate moth wing of a place where the air is cool with petals and sweet wind and you can breathe and just be, convinced that you are who you should be and that all else matters little. In my mind, my mother is this person-secure and stable in herself, clinging to the mast inside, spine firm and rigid, yet just curved enough to weather the storm.

Of course, she never completed her voyage. She never became a crone in the strictest sense of the word. Her art, her songs, her music died inside her, and has left me searching ever since in the faces of the old for pieces of her, slivers in grey eyes, giggles on blue dresses, a smirk in a corner. My guide in age has left, but has also left me fearless, aware that I walk into the unknown, head high, playing out my own story.

I am roughly the age now that she was when I was adopted. When I was placed in her arms and told “You are her mother now.” When my life became hers, when old age meant my grandchildren surrounding her on a chair listening to her stories about how frightened I was of some silly old Venus Fly Trap and how I couldn’t be trusted to walk home alone, my head in the clouds searching for dreams and leprechauns.  Right now, she would have become a mother to a daughter, and her hopes, her own questions for mortality and aging, for then, and forever and someday would have crystallized into one moment, one song –

I love you.

Age is meaningless. I look into the eyes of my children, and see my mother looking back. Not through blood, but through will and spirit, through the eyes of the older gentleman that seem to say “You’re doing just fine” through the mouths of the old ladies who dote and squeeze and love so unconditionally that I want to run screaming into their arms asking HOW! How did they do this, losing sons, husbands, sisters, friends, until it’s just them, waiting, biding their time and asking where did it all go? In their eyes my mother is 16 and dancing to Elvis, waiting for her true love.

In their eyes, future and past tell their stories to each other, and bubbles burst into the air, showering us with quiet memory. And I wonder where 10 years have gone so quickly.

 

Somedays

I don’t believe in luck. I believe in hard work, perseverance, dedication, harmony. Somedays, I don’t believe that happiness is a simple thing-an equation of love and contentment, divided by the lives we live.

Somedays, I don’t care. I just look ahead, and see my life, and smile.

 

 

Days like these….everything just makes sense.

Nineteen

2 days.

I can place myself in my mother’s shoes. Watching the grass spring into place from the picture window in the front of the house from her vantage point on the borrowed hospital bed. The legs of which dig divots into the plush carpet that will take 2 weeks to fully disappear. Her breath won’t remain in the house that long.

I can hardly remember the last two days, merged as they were into the days that came before. The emergency ambulance rides, the hasty packing, me slipped to the side, quiet so no one would notice. I hardly remember our family as a foursome, as a team, together, as we were meant to be. There was a crack in that picture already, a crack dug deep with cancer and hopelessness and dreams.

My memories, like Mad’s, are sparse, but thankfully, I have a few that are golden. The crackling late afternoon light pouring in the side windows as I tried on new clothes at 6 or 7. Chocolate covered fingers in the kitchen, licking the bowl, watching my mother bake and cook and feed the people who would come to feed up, the stereotypical casseroles splayed across our doorstep, cards attached, pieces of tape on the bottom of the cheap ceramics with names, “Brenda”, “Mrs Bishop”. Driving to Kingston in her blue car, holding in the nausea, not wanting the Pepto Bismo that would make it all the more worse.

I remember her hand, and mine it it. A downtown street, a sunny warm summer morning, her soft sandals slapping her feet, her dress swinging. Stopping to talk. Stopping to talk. A warm muffin and ginger ale at the cafeteria in the store my father ran, the laughter of a group of women as they talk above my head.

The warmth of her hand, the strength of it. The softness, the yielding, the smell of her hand creme, the Charlie on her neck.

I don’t remember hugging my mother, or kissing my mother. She wasn’t affectionate that way, not that I can remember. But lord, she was lovely. She was womanly and graceful and strong and sweet, in her way. She was kind.

In the summer, we’d sit on the front step, await the squirrels who would inevitably come to her, who would climb on her shoulders, snatching peanuts from her breast pocket, the breast that would eventually come off and be replaced with a facsimile I would play with. She never worried that they would bite her.

“Sit still and they’ll be gentle” she’d remind me.

And it was true.

She loved to laugh. She loved to prank. From kinking the hose until I’d stand over it so she could let loose the water then, to sitting in the front row at mass, marking the sermon with friends to rapping on the wall, making me believe in witches, she had a devilish sense of humor.

I think of these things instead of the 2 days before. Instead of the cold dampness of the stairs I sat on. Instead of the panic and fear and terror that ran through our house, circled the voices telling me the just go to school, rang through my head when I was pulled out during spelling by one of her Priests, taken to a car to silently watch the highway with my brother as we drove to what we knew was inevitable.

I shall think of none of these things. I shall think of my mother as the woman who loved me, who craved me, who wanted me. The woman who loved her little girl, who taught her that glasses can sing, who taught her that strength isn’t only measured in muscles. I will think of my mother who my first born is named after, in part. I will think of my mother as the vibrant woman introduced me to Hitchcock as a child, yet refused to let me read Frankenstein.

My mother, Dianne Joanne Marie, has been dead 19 years 2 days from now. And I miss her still, as I always will.

The Tin and The Diamonds

So today is our 10th wedding anniversary.

No, I’m not really old. I married young.

10 years ago today, right about now we would have been, officially, with only one single God reference, man and wife.

I kept my name.

All things considered, we feel pretty superior about our marriage sometimes. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have our problems-like any couple, we do. But we’re proud that despite our problems, we have a strong and healthy marriage.

Sometimes we look around and wonder if people don’t split up because it’s easier. Lord knows some of what we’ve had to handle has been anything but easy. But we made a commitment to each other 10 years ago, one which many of the adults in our lives didn’t believe.

I love knowing they were wrong.

So what works?

1. He respects me. I respect him. We may not always agree, we may have different opinions, but we respect each other enough to leave well enough alone.

2. We give each other space. This one might freak him out a little more than me-I’m not a jealous person, I don’t need attention every second of the day, and I firmly believe people need their own little “world”, things to call their own. He’s come to accept, and respect, my need for a little space, which makes it easier for me to relent. Giving space is a HUGE one for me. I need my alone corner.

3. We talk. Sometimes our communication is poor-and at that point, we can tell, because things just get crappy. This has been huge with me being bipolar-it can be very easy for me to make something up and run with it. He brings me back to earth, and makes sure we talk, even if we’re then up until 2am

4. Our sex life is fantastic. Sure, we’re tired lately, and with a third person in the house, it gets weird, but when the bow-chicka-wowwow thoughts start, we’re all good. We’re at that point where we’re totally comfortable with each other. Admittedly, this took longer for me than him, but it’s so freeing! I can’t imagine losing this absolute safety in this regard. Newness has nothing on comfort. Of course, I feel strongly that great sex goes back to great communication.

5. We want the same things. Sure, some desires are divergent-I don’t get his thing for comic books, he has trouble understanding my wish to meet other bloggers, but in terms of the big things in life, we want the same simple things-a nice house to live in, a comfortable cash flow, happy children, a happy existence. Nothing fancy-just living a happy life full of warmth and ease. I could think of worse things.

6. Most importantly, we love each other. Are still in love with each other. Even after 10 years, my heart still leaps a bit when I think of him, my skin still tingles with certain thoughts. He makes me laugh, we make each other laugh. He has loved me enough to stand by me through wants for suicide, through a hospital stay, through years of undiagnosed hell. He has truly loved me enough to be strong for me when I couldn’t be. He has held me through tears, through rage, through sadness and confusion. No matter what, he has been there for me, because he loves me.

I don’t think you can ask for more than that in a partner.

I believe we’ve been successful in our marriage because we were truly friends before lovers. From the moment we met we’ve been talking-a connection made, a synergy. A bond reflected in the mobius strips on our wrists. An infinite love, even if Mogo isn’t able to put the words to it. I suppose I more than make up for it.

10 years with the same person. And I couldn’t be happier.

10 years now, bonded and branded.

 

cradled.

my world in brown, in dewy heady

earth we’ve buried our bodies in, the flesh of time.

 

In visions your hands are there, strong dusky mittens of

memory, the cold splash of a peach on a Sunday morning, remnants

of strawberries and cream, slithering up your palms as my belly,

full with child, our child, you brushed.

 

Arms would be cradles.

Eyes would be cradles.

Soft words at 4am buffers

bumpers, shields.

 

Love would be meaningless if given only as gestures.

 

Entwined in my heart you are-tangled like

vines in the backyard, ripe with

raspberries, or

exploding with lupins, bruised in pale blues and purples.

Your fingers dance through mine. Laughter like the rising sparrows

from your lungs to mine

echoes through these years.

 

The tin man is ours, he with no heart.

Empty we were, bereft and yet, quietly unaware.

We fill him now, we fill rooms, we fill forests and cities.

We cradle his heart in ours.

 

Happy Anniversary baby. I love you so very much.

“She’s too young to see that as we gather losses, we may also grow in love;as in passion, the body shudders and clutches what it must release.”

Mother I wish…..

I wish many things. I wish you had explained things to me better. I wish I would have known more than that nebulous “I’m sick”, wish I would have truly known what Cancer meant-not in terms of rogue cells and less than functional cures, but in the human cost, in terms of what I was to lose.

Or perhaps it’s better that I didn’t.

Mother, I wish you had told me you loved me. My ears don’t remember hearing those words. I know you did-my core knows that you loved me and wished for me and asked for me and one day I was there for you to love me. But I can’t recall hearing the words pass your lips. I have no notes in your handwriting, no secret messages left encoded in the wallpaper. I have one thing in my possession that crossed your fingers, and I treasure it, even if I can rarely bring myself to touch it.

Mother, I wish you had told me about love, about how it cuts both ways, how it endangers me. I wish you had told me it was worth it, so I wouldn’t have wasted years convincing myself it wasn’t, and that I was unworthy and unready.

Mother, I wish you would have told me how wonderful finding your one true love was.

I wish you would have had “the talk”. You know the one. Instead, I learned from cold books, hidden in a corner of a library where no one would find me. I wish you would have left some warning about cramps and blood and sex so I wouldn’t have felt so bloody alone curled up on a damp bathroom floor crying.

Mother, I wish you would have told me about you, your past, who you were before your family became the second part of your life. I saw drawings, art-were you an artist? What dreams did you have? You had dreams, a farm girl from southern Ontario, I’m sure you wanted to escape. Was my father your escape on Saturday in a Drugstore?

I do so wish you would have told me how much I would come to love my children, how much you loved yours. I wish I had a piece of your love to carry on with me, to share with my children, something more real than my stories. If only you had written something down for me to carry forth.

I wish you had admitted you were dying before it was too late. You had such hateful hope, and this hope prevented you from truly preparing us, for saying those things we needed to say. This hope kept you from preparing for a future you were not in. That hollow fucking place I’m finally out of. I’m so very angry with you for this. You didn’t want to face what was happening. I admire your bravery, but I’m angry at how you left us.

Mother, I wish you would have seen a second doctor when Dad told you to, when you first found that lump. I wish you would have taken it seriously, even if the doctor didn’t. You had such faith in these people! They fucked up your leg as a teenager, and they fucked up your life as an adult. Why did you believe in them so?

Mother, I wish I would have just appreciated you while you were there, instead of being the shitty little kid I was somedays. Dad would tell me to knock it off, and I just didn’t get it. Not really. It hurt, not understanding why we couldn’t go places, why you couldn’t get out of bed. Why you took so many pills and spent your days getting sick.

Mother, I wish I could have shown more compassion, more love. I wish I would have been more loving, but I just didn’t understand. Even I couldn’t yell those words, those “I love you’s!” until the machines were winding down. I was scared that if I said it, you’d die.

I guess I was right.

Mom, more than anything, I wish I had known you. I have fleeting memories of a talented, strong woman, but I never knew you. I’m told that I was always by your side, your constant companion. I’m told that you loved me more than anything, loved your family to distraction.

Mom, I wish I knew these things for sure, and not just in my mind, and sometimes even my heart.

I wish I didn’t miss you.

I wish we had beaten that cancer.

I wish things had been different, and you were still here, making your legendary poppy seed cake instead of me cursing the world that made you never write the bloody recipe down. Cursing a world in which the taste of that cake is as mythical as your voice.

I wish your knew your grand-daughters, their songs, their games, their idiocies.

Mom, sometimes, I just wish…..

 

(Title is a fragment from a fantastic poem by Julia Spicher Kasdorf)

in our hand.

Winter: Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes

 

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I’m so desperately tired of winter right now-the dank, the tired snows next to the road, the icy streets that catch me unaware, the damp light that filters through the clouds on odd occasions. I’m done with it. If I could break up with winter, I would. I could do it via text message even-it’s not me-it’s you.

Only 3 months ago, snow was a wonderful blanket, a coaxing covering that looked like pudding-inviting and cozy,a simple cureall for the rotted undergrowth summer had left, sparse under the porches. It cleansed.

Now it’s dark and full of yellows and blacks and browns and the odd disturbing red, especially outside those dirty bars. And I’m tired, woefully tired of it this early easter, this first week of spring.

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I’m tired of a lot lately. A general dis-ease with most of life. I think it’s the snow. I’m pretty sure it’s the snow, or the busy life I’ve had lately, the lack of just plain old sit down, read/knit/sing/do something other than work on work or the house. Dissatisfaction, time, little time, life spinning without my permission as my children grow older and new mothers grow younger. I cannot stop it and yet the snows continue. My life grows quicker and I grow older and the winter won’t budge, shaking it’s head slowly and smiling slightly at my anger and stomping feet.

I feel time now. Wrapping around me, hugging my arms dancing through my ears in whispers, enveloping my daughters in it’s embrace she giggles through my house, through the memories we create, stubborn as they are. Her breath is heavy on my neck as I cradle my youngest for what could be the last time, babylike she holds herself close to me, her eyes shuttered and chest heavy with sleep. Soon, time will move her away from my lap, then my hands and arms, then sight altogether.

Time is in the corner, her watch set for my death, maybe theirs, someone’s. The days of a life on a watch I’d give much to own, and destroy. How dare you path it all out, like a project, little arrows and stars for milestones, saved on a disk somewhere-this is my life, my little world inside these brick wall. She needs to go, to leave us as we are. A moment, blocked off, held firm inside these walls, safe.

They grow older, and away from me. Their thoughts, not mine, their days, unknown to me. I curse this life, these needs, my inability to just sit still and inhale it all, the smell of child, the smell of adventure and hope and possibility. I curse you time. I curse the moments that slip away from me even now as I cry, mourning the time I’ve lost already.

The snow stays. The snow never seems to leave. Or perhaps, that’s just my heart.

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Tori Amos: Gold Dust: Scarlet’s Walk