They were kids that I once knew.

I suppose that spring will always remind me.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

21 Years

I’m not there but I can trace the streets with my fingers. Technology gives me tentacles, allows me to walk the streets of my home town yet again, stare at the front door I open and closed so many times, the curb I drove my brother’s bike off one dewy spring morning, into the side of a passing car. The steps I sat with friends on fiery summer nights, or with my mother on cooler fall afternoons.

The shutters are falling. The siding is grimy and stained. If houses are metaphors, this one matches my life. Full of memory, dingy at the sides, but still standing.

***

She’s there.

In my mind, in my frosty memory, it’s April 1989 again, and she’s laying in the front room, her blue room, on the hospital bed my parents procured from somewhere, her body wasted and yet bloated. She had come home the week before, her doctors forcing her hand, blunt with words “We can’t help you. You are dying. Give up.”

It was not in my mother’s nature to give up on anything. And so her last wish was not denied, to die at home, to spend her last days in the home she built with her lover, her husband, the one she brought her children home to, my first home. Her beautiful sitting room, strewn with the chaos of death-the drugs, the gauze, the tiny cans of near food in vanilla. The pale sky of carpet she laboured over choosing became compressed and dirtier by feet, vomit, life.

I watched her final days there, much as her sister and my father tried to shield me. I saw my mother naked for the first and only time there, flailing and seizing on her bed as her, the woman I knew, finally left me. Some of me expired with her, sailing towards a sky, cloudy.  A crack in a lifetime, the line in the sand of before and after.

I stare at the house I grew up in. The house she died in. The house I ran away from, feet pounding on distance and action-had I the ability to sprout wings I would have, and flown straight into the sun. Even my dreams rarely brought the solace of her, and slowly I have forgotten her voice, her touch, what it meant to be her, to be my mother.

But her ghost still echoes, across these years. Sunlight around her like a halo, possesses my memory. Her distant smile, haunted somehow, wistful.  The heft of her, the sense of solidity, security, like a vault I could land in. Years I never got to know, stories she never told me-all hover like fireflies over a night field in that house, beautiful and untouchable.

It’s been 21 years. I am not a small girl any longer, rigid in my strength, weak behind those doors. I have been alive for longer than she was with me, only pieces of her left to remind me, whisper gently that I have a mother, that she loves me, and she misses me more dearly than I can imagine.

I love her still, and that house, and that yard, all the places our hands and feet touched, even silent on that burgundy couch lazy Saturdays, watching movies as the rain poured. She’s in that house, her breath trapped in the corners, behind the blue wallpaper, inside the steel stairs.

And she’s in me, forever.

She’s home.

Letters from the Dead

I’m cleaning out the “laundry room”, an awkwardly named room full of dirty clothes, cat litter, summer stuff for kids and all the crap I don’t know where else to put. In the middle of empty boxes, dryer fluff and dried herbs, there’s a box.

Letters.

Mostly, the letters between Mogo and I, the written documentation of the person, long ago, I fell in love with. The good person who listened and cared, who was funny and ballsy and pretty damn awesome.

Fuck me it hurt to read those, to hear that voice again, that voice I haven’t heard in so long, lost behind who we became, grew into. I loved him.

I stopped reading after one. It wasn’t worth the hurt. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to dump them into the garbage. Not today. Maybe never. In those envelopes are my daughter’s parents, before everything else, when a faint lust flowered in ink, an understanding, a camaraderie.  He was so beautiful to me then. I remember that, how excited I would become when a letter would arrive, how I would read each letter over and over, how good it felt to have one certain person in my world, someone who would always tell me hey, it IS ok.

It’s not ok.

I tucked them back into the old box, slogans from my misspent youth scrawled across it, when a letter fell out.

Andrea.

Red hair, huge grin, lively porcelain skin. Perfectly wonderful and yet blandly un-entertaining. She would write me the odd letter when I moved from her town to “the big city”, and I never wrote back, having nothing to say to someone I rarely spoke with, someone I was only tenuously connected to via her boyfriend who liked to play Asshole and sit quietly staring at everyone. Normal in every way, destined to teach, become a mother perhaps, live a full life and die. I never wrote her back that I remember, or maybe once I did. I was pretty high most of the time then, and she didn’t fit in to where I sat, her beauty and the stunning normality of her life a brick wall that breathed heavily on me as it sat, hostile between us.

I didn’t think of her for years. Until Facebook, and I thought, wow, I never wrote her back. I felt bad, a hollow ache I felt about most things from that time, a manic period like no other in my life, when I scorned all that which didn’t burn like magnesium in front of my very eyes. Many a common friendship, lost then, because I couldn’t handle the mundane.

But when I looked for her, when I typed in her name and saw in my mind her lovely face, the hair I envied, I found the one thing I didn’t want to, didn’t dream of seeing for anyone my age, just starting on their life, when you’re honest.

There was an accident one night, on the cold highway linking much of Ontario to the rest of Canada, a twisting road I’ve driven, terrified. A sudden, horrid accident, taking her sister and brother as well. I found she had been a student near me, maybe even at the same time, and I never knew, same school, same town. She grew into a profession she loved.

She had died, and I had never bothered to say hello, or goodbye. She was gone, and I had never really known her.

***

Mortality has always been part of me, more so than most people I meet. I have a keen, if not outsized sense of how close we are, how easily we can fall from this world and into whatever waits. I know we are mortal beings, more likely to float away into dust than meet a maker or live forever in a heaven made of gumdrops and cream cheese. But there is something about a 27 year old woman, just beginning her life, her career, maybe waiting until it’s right to meet her children, dying in a car crash coming home from a movie, that just isn’t right, or fair.

Or easy to swallow. I expected to be well into my thirties before my friends started to die, but then also thought how lucky I am that none of my friends HAD died. Some had been sick, and recovered. Some lost, then found. But none gone, torn from life like this. A page ripped out that I would never be able to read.

I don’t much like regret. I feel it’s wasted. But I regret this-that I never took the time to be a better friend, to be a good person. And that the words she wrote, the thoughts she gave, I never returned.

I thought there’d be more time.

“When you really trust someone, you have to be okay with not understanding some things.”

When she’s gone my mind begins to fill up with all the things that can happen, slowly like I’m filling a pitcher from a drowsy tap. Images fill with bruises and indignity, how well do I know this other mother? Where have they been all day? What might be happening-what could be happening, the things I know that DO happen.

It’s not paranoia, not really, despite being impossible to explain to other parents, women and men who didn’t spend their childhood in a currency usually left to adults. In my brain lies a summer I can never leave behind, and it colors everything. I’m not paranoid, knowing that the worst can happen.

Rationally, I know it likely won’t. But it could, it can and I worry for all those reasons, even if it’s buried in my brain somewhere and the other mother laughs when I call and says “Man, don’t WORRY! She’s great!” I can’t tuck her away in my back pocket and hope nothing ever happens. I have to let her free-but that freedom costs. It huddles in the corner and whispers to me about boyfriends, neighbours, people she might meet. It whispers that they could be holding her down right now, taking pictures, ignoring her crying, hurting her.

It whispers of all the horrible things that happened to me, and more. “Be the person your mother wasn’t!” my body shouts, “Make sure she never hurts!” but then she walks in the door, eyes lit with 5 year old joy and frosty air and I know my fears are relatively misplaced, and that people, most people are good people who wouldn’t help someone else abuse a child I know this and try to wear the callous off my heart.

Pregnant I foresaw this. I felt her tiny feet in my ribs and knew that, if a daughter, I would place the little girl I was over top of her-I would make a transparency of my childhood and hover around it, waiting for the chance to erase the potential of what could be. I would protect her from everything that tried to destroy me.

I can’t though, you know? I can’t protect her from the world anymore than I can get North Korea to stop being asshats. She is in the world, on her own terms and while I can still guide and try to shape that world, I cannot prevent the bad things as I could when she was just an infant. That lesson they warn us, as parents that will hurt the most, it hurts doubly, knowing exactly, in technicolor, what terrible things could happen to her.

I might not ever get past it, the tenseness in my chest when she’s not home when she was to be home, the quiet worry when she walks out the door, into the hands of another woman, the possibilities of caution, the frank terror some of this holds for me, trusting someone, not just with me, but with my child, with the creature that turned beneath my heart such a short time ago.

Letting go of this, my worst fear, my scared little girl trying to make sure the worst doesn’t happen to my daughters-it’s a struggle. And maybe I’ll never grow past it and will always freeze up with momentary agony, remembering, wondering.

But maybe not. Maybe she’ll just come home, smelling of smoke and hay and joy, as a kid should.

Appetitus Rationi Pareat

Oh the guilty stolen afternoon, snuck quietly from the house, stolen to read a surprisingly awesome book (I love it so when that happens-when you buy it thinking, meh, why not, and suddenly you’re drawn in and the world is being colored around you..) The late February wind gusts around me, while puddles of new snow trickle beneath my feet. I can smell spring.

Fishing through the old clothes, I sigh a lot, all the cute things are just that much too small. We’ve grown past it. I finish eating my leisurely lunch, and while waiting for the cashier, spy a tiny boy, only 3 months, cradled in his mother’s arms as he has his lunch, eyes swollen with lunch stupor. His feet were so very small.

I’m on the bus when a little girl comes on, bundled in winter, cheeks rosy, her perfect little nose poking out, eyes curious and watchful. She stares at me with the no-stare. I’m fairly confident that I’m too far away from her to be really seen, but there’s something about those piercing little globes, like jelly beans or black jujubes.

My entire body cascades in on itself and cries out for more. My arms ache, my womb echoes for a child, my body feels drawn. My children are now children in the fullest sense of the word, and my body, my muscles, my soul shakes in the absence.

The simple unfair fact of knowing this ache after the birthing is complete. It startles me, like a cat shook from it’s sleep, and it angers me, that I couldn’t have felt this 6 years ago, blooming with the cells that would eventually become my first born daughter. Why not then? Why not when I could have reveled in every moment, enjoyed, simply stood in between maidenhood and mother, and accepted it, embraced it? Why only now, when the over is unplugged and in pieces?

I enjoyed the last 5 years. It has been a hard ride, a rough one, the brambles of mental illness entwined with simple achievements like first words (I can’t remember Rosalyn’s, and hope I wrote it down) and birthdays. But these years have been so innocent, comparatively speaking, as I’m noticing now that I have one in school. Those first 5 are halcyon days, glowing with such wonder, fabulous flowers on a plant you always found ugly. I eagerly sold the high chair, the crib, gave away 99.5% of the baby clothes. I welcomed, with open arms, toddlers, preschoolers, and now, children.

So universe, why now huh? Why burden me with a hunger I can never satiate? Why fill me up with this longing, for another child to grow in my belly, another gasp at the quickening, the terror of crowning and the quietude of 4am? Why bestow this gift on me now, after all this time, when its unnecessary, and more than a little inappropriate?

I stared hard at that little girl’s eyes, smiling wistfully, looking a little high I imagined. I could feel that baby skin on my fingertips, the porcelain of it, the chubby fingers grasping on their own, without measure or wit. I could imagine her weight on my hip, the little sighs she’d make while feeding, her tiny thumb, barely clinging to her lips as she slept.

In her eyes I imagined enjoying the babyhood’s of my daughters more completely, sanely.

Wanting a child is merely my wish for wanting to be normal.

Having Rosalyn so soon after Vivian stole that from me. And I can breathe now, and see that, see that for Vivian, I was scared, and worried and full of far too much book learning but I loved her and my world ran around her. But pregnancy, and a new child later and I was full of venom and hate without much room for love or empathy, not at first.

I crave a do-over. I want to be able to love a child the way Ros deserved to be loved, almost 4 years ago now. I can’t make it up, but on some level, my ovaries are trying to have the great chess game, to make up, to make due.

I’ve known, for years, that there’s no going back. What was, is, and simply, I cannot change or make that up. I can only move forward now, grasp my daughter tightly as she grins and tells me I’m pretty, as her cheekbones light up, exactly as mine do. What I can do it love the baby that was, the girl that is, the woman that will be.

The pinpoints of light in that baby girl’s face, interrupted only by the hesitation of the bus on a busy street, will forever hold me in thrall. I can face that hunger down, hold the door open, ask it to leave. And accept that finally, I have been allowed a feeling so basic to women, a hunger I never dreamed I’d feel. All of this shakes me from reverie, telling me to move on, move past and beyond.

I can love that phantom child, he, or she that will never be. I can love a ghost that never was.

 

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

 Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne’s So Sexy So Soon seeks to address this very type of childhood experience: a complete lack of awareness about sex and reproduction coupled with a media-fed understanding of sexiness – that is, as one young girl in the book explains, getting boys to chase you and try to kiss you – that revolves around emulating TV characters and buying as many products as possible.

There’s a great book review of So Sexy So Soon at Feministe-please, go read.

But it got me to thinking.

How much time can we, as parents and mothers, spend blaming the media, the western world, capitalism, Walmart, etc, before we also realize the true impact we have on our daughters?

I firmly believe in openness, to the point of irritation I imagine. Vivian telling me that “that place” feels good when she touches it-that filled me with pride. Pride that she was able to say this to me with no fear or pretense, and that she took such obvious joy in herself. Pride that I’m starting to create a woman who isn’t afraid of herself, knows where all the proper things are, and just exists in this manner.

Because I disagree that this is fully the fault of what Mattel is selling this season, or that sitcoms have taken things too far. I disagree that it’s those damn music videos, or those stars that kids want to emulate. Not fully.

Cues are taken from parents.

How many of us were raised in a don’t ask, don’t tell sort of environment, where the most sex education you received was 2 weeks in Grade 5, and maybe a book left covertly on a counter top by your mother? How many women can’t bring themselves to call a vulva a vulva, or even know that their vagina is only on the inside? How many women can’t bring themselves to orgasm, or help their partner to do so? How many women blush at the thought of talking about all of this? How many of us learned, early on from our parents, that our hands can be dirtied so easily?

When I was Vivian’s age, I liked to rock on a specific doll-I remember, it was a pink stuffy with one of those plastic kewpie doll faces on it. It made me feel good-happy, in touch with myself, like a sun rising, so I wanted to tell my mother. I showed her.

She didn’t hit me. Instead, she looked completely horrified, and I never saw that doll again. Standing in the hallway, my mother stared at me, and held her hand out. I handed it over, cried, and stumbled back to my room, confused.

Later, a few years perhaps, when my neighbour molested me, I remember feeling like I had no control over my body, that it never belonged to me, and I should submit. I could never tell my mother-it would be my fault. I would be punished, and would still not know what was mine in terms of my body. For years I dreamed of being abused by conveyor lines of robots, people. Just my lying there, at the whim of others.

It was my mother’s responsibility to teach my about my body, about myself. It was her responsibility to teach me that there is no shame in acknowledging my humanity in this way, in embracing my sexuality, even at that young of an age.

Make no mistake-we are sexual creatures the day we are born. Which is why as parents we need to step it up right off the bat, in the most normal way, as if explaining how to make bread or why you have an elbow. Blaming media and society for one’s child wanting to dress like a Bratz doll or a 13 year old knocking up a girl-it’s a cop out. It’s easy to say “The school never taught it!” or that “Miley Cyrus made her dress that way!” and turn the other way.

Much more difficult to raise your children with appropriate sexual values and mores, to have those conversations that at times, are less than easy.

Being sexual is part of who we are-and it always has been. We now treat even into mid-twenties like teenagers, so why is it so strange that a seven year old starts to act as they might? Why is starting the mating dance at 12 so odd? What if, biologically, that’s where the drive can start for some. I began menstruating about then-if I can bear children, if I am considered a woman, physically, why can’t society, or parents be bothered to?

I may not necessarily agree with a pre-teen acting out in any way sexually-but I’m raising my daughters with the knowledge to make responsible choices, when appropriate. Will I always win? No, not with two daughters. But I refuse to use the cop-out that the world around me has more bearing on how my daughters come to their womanhood than I do.

It took me years to come to grips with my sexuality, having children being the last nail in that particular coffin. I don’t want that for them. Our bodies are wonderful, beautiful things, and by telling our daughters on what’s bad, and horrible and not allowed because they’re too young/not ready/just can’t only serves to increase the need and make it more attractive.

Refusing to speak to your children out of embarrassment, or fear-to me, that’s worse than all the Bratz dolls and belly tops. Because our parents are our guides, for good or ill. And we do ourselves a grave disservice by leaving our daughters out to dry.

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.

” Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever… “

In about 12 hours, it will be a new year on my neck of the woods.

I was gifted “Madness” by Marya Hornbacher this year, and have been reading it in bits. It’s painful, too painful. The mirror of who I was, who I could be, how bad it could get, could have been, sometimes is. How absolutely difficult this all is somedays, how heavy the burden I am.

I can’t read it all in one sitting. Hearing my thoughts echoed, but by someone even sicker than I will (hopefully) ever be-it’s salt in a wound I fear won’t heal.

I nearly died this year, by my own hand. I nearly lost my family, by my own doing, sowing the seeds years ago by refusing treatment, by neglecting myself, by not learning.

I have bipolar. And I have let it get to where it’s been.

Someone with cancer doesn’t get better by just laying back and hoping, by only taking the chemo, and still eating garbage and sleeping too little. They rest. They follow the doctor’s advice. The try and fix what they can fix, those things within their power. They play an active role in their recovery.

I spent time believing that my meds were all I needed to worry about-that if I took them religiously, all the voices would stop, my anxieties about cars and people would diminish, my paranoia’s would trickle away to nothing. I believed that i would suddenly know how to handle all the problems that had festered in my mind, hidden by 3 years of madness, and years prior by the onset of all this mess. I thought 4 pink pills would solve everything, and I’d be happy, fun and easy to love. I thought, I thought…maybe I figured I could hold the box open so long as I wasn’t the one looking in it.

2008 wasn’t a happy year. Or in many respects even a good year. It’s been the hardest I’ve had things in a long while-full of fear, loathing. I’ve seen my own death in my hands for the first time since about 1993, closer than ever, fluttering behind the lights in an ER. I’ve sat alone in the aftermath, with only voices reaching from a distance to sustain, to hold me.

Lessons are learned from this. Lessons are cobbled together-that yes, it’s good to have people to fall back on, who support you. But it’s even better to learn how to support yourself, how to learn to live a good, honest, worthwhile life that draws people to you, that draws you to yourself.

It’s ok to love yourself as much as anyone else.

I don’t think I truly wanted to die this year. I don’t think that’s what I’ve ever really wanted. I just wanted it all to end-the noise in my head, the chaos that has surrounded me, the crushing weight of real life-the things people do everyday, without pause or fear. These things are not easy for me, and may never be easy.

And that is ok. I can work with that.

But you know? It’s not all bad.

I have two fabulous daughters-daughters who continually delight, frustrate, awe and move me. Their love-their joy, the incredible wonder they provide me every day-it reminds me why I fight, why I struggle with this, why I don’t just lay down and let it take me. I see the women they will become, and know that they deserve the best me I can possibly be, even if she’s still not enough when they’re 16. I have a husband that loves and advocates for me, even when I can’t. Even after a tough year, I know that love is there, regardless of how muddled and difficult I’ve made that. I know I am fought for.

But love isn’t always enough, and 2008 has brought me that realization-that love is a fine, wonderful thing, but so is respect, courtesy, care, gentleness, the things I cannot be-the things I can write but have trouble acting or saying. I have to be better. I have to find the kinder, better version of me that had been buried for so very long.

Tonight, weather permitting, I will go out to a club for New Years Eve for the first time ever, and out for NYE period for the first time since 1998. I want to bounce and dance and sing with fever and joy at finally being able to do what everyone else has accepted and done for so long-go out and have fun. I can do this now-now, finally at 31, I can set foot out that door and just have fun.

It’s been a long time coming, and a hard road. It’s still uphill, and always may be. But without the land mines and lions and tigers and bears, I’ll take it.

Happy Year my friends. Fill it with all kinda of awesome, will you? That’s my plan.

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.

“Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.”

Broken, lopsided Backyardigans tent.

Water Table

Mangled soccer nets

Chair. Tricycle. Slide.

A storm is coming. The prior air whips around me, moist and warm, potent. The simple last crumbs of summer, advancing before wind and rain and possible destruction. But likely, nothing. We prepare for potential.

I hold my head to the sky, watching the reddened leaves twirl down around me, brushing me carefully as the birds seem to have lost their voices in knowing.

I finish and escape back to the house, leaving the slithering humidity to itself.

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

The earth seems right in fall, pieces snapped into place. I’ve always had this theory that we love best the season we were born into, the first we knew, the first air that kissed us. That we revert back into the arms we loved best. I can never wait for the leaves to crumble into color before they fall, for that shivering wind that whispers of winter, with the sadness of late summer. I can spend days in the woods behind the house, fingers entwined, eyes full up on lovely. My hands twitch with the memories of all the leaves I ever brought home, stunned by their beauty ad given to parents who never once denied it.

Somehow it just feels right, my body relaxing into it, into a season of decline and sleep.

I remember, I hold on to that day, after school, falling from the rock wall by the church into decaying piles of maple leaves, three of us laughing in an hour that lasted for days.  I remember older, a day in a graveyard, stoned on acid, a conversation recorded about unicorns and the enveloping of the leaves I lay in most of that day, it’s earthiness holding me still as I laughed and talked of flying. I cling to the warmth of the indian summer after Vivian was born, the hope in that orange light and gentle wind, the minutes I’d stop and just breathe in the day.

In Spring, we dream. In Summer we dance. Through Fall we tell stories before Winter brings us to slumber. But we remember.

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.

Guest Post 3: C

Marcela is someone else I stumbled upon-not quite sure how, or where. I was immediately entranced by her certainties-her devotion to her family, to her children and to herself. Married to a soldier, she herself has soldiered on while he has been away, and has been nothing but a positive and inspiring role model to me, reminding me to look for the silver in the midst of all the fog.

Marcela blogs at The Sushi Chronicles, and is a breath of fresh air in my feeds most days. Thank you my friend, for being brave enough to share this with all of us.

 (and I apologize for the formatting. It will NOT do what I tell it to!)

This is not easy for me to put in paper.
It’s not easy for me to speak about it, much less to put it in paper.
C was born a few years before I was, to the woman closest to my mother. My mother and her mother literally shared their lives with each other, never living further away than a few miles.  They knew each other so well that at times one folded into the other, while being opposites in so many ways.

In many ways, C was my parents child as much as she was her mother’s.  Years later my brother was born, and a year after that it was my turn. Both my brother and myself came fast, one after the other to end the “single-childness” of C in our communal family. She went from being doted on exclusively by 6-7 adults to having to share them all and share her mother and my mother with my brother and myself. She did not like it. 
As we grew up, I always looked up to her, but now looking back to our childhood pictures, I know she was not fond of us being dressed in similar dresses and me following her as her shadow.   I so wanted her as my sister, she always searching to be without us.   So my brother and I would play together, with hot-wheels and other boy toys and whenever I needed a girl-toy fix I would play alone or with school friends, as C would not ever join me. 
I so longed for her attention, and felt very rejected for her.   Then I learned to leave her alone.   She only joined when she wanted, and the game had to be under her rules, otherwise it would end.  Then came the one day the three of us were playing together and C decided I’d be the mother and she’d be my daughter. I was 5.   I have a sketch in my mind of how things happened, but what I know for sure is that she leaned on my shoulders and I could not hold her weight so I bent forward and hit my face against the glass corner of my father’s desk.   Blood started gushing out as my brow had opened about an inch and half.   I remember my brother and C trying to stop the blood with kleenex and telling me not to make noise.  Which of course prompted the mothers to come and they were not happy with what they found. 
That was the very last time we officially played together. I needed a good number of stitches and to this day have the trace of that accident visible on my face.
C would share my room for nights or weeks and sometimes months, and then it would be just me again in that bedroom.   Cycles of that coming and going.She was raised as one of us, went on vacations with us, attended the same schools, went to the same extracurriculars. Yet, she always stayed at a distance from us.  She was there with us, but never really joined us.
Growing up, I just thought she was not a social person.  I believe that’s what I told myself to reason why C would not hang around with me, even as we were getting to our teens. It was always hard to have a conversation with her. If you didn’t agree on her points, she’d get angry and so many times raise her voice which in my family was a big no-no. My parents tried to steer her away from that, but one way or the other, she was always ready to yell and scream.
When she was 16, something happened. I don’t know what as I only overheard pieces of conversation.  I know she had some sort of “nervous breakdown” and was taken away to El Paso.    In our small Mexican City, you simply did not deal with “nervous breakdowns” where everyone would hear of them. I got to see her about a week later, she looked frail and pale,  sitting at a hospital bed.  She was happily talking to my mother when we got into the room. She quieted down as she saw us, she did not seem happy that we were there. That broke my heart yet a little more.
After that we had a parade of doctor’s visits, all of them in Texas. I was not sure what was all the testing going on, but I knew my brothers and I had to wait endless hours at the reception areas, upon me to entertain my little brother in the “surrogate mothering” role I had assumed with him.  After that, I can tell you of countless episodes, medications and doctors she went through. 

I only once heard the official diagnosis: manic-depressive schizophrenia.
 
Her mother and my mother then sort of molded into one, trying to nurture her into health. My brothers and I felt displaced as the priority was C, her peace, her joy, her stability… none of which came, with cycles of euphoria and success and severe depression, hallucinations, paranoia and violence. It was very difficult for me to deal with what was going on. On her good days, it seemed to me that everything was an act she’d put up to get the attention, on her bad days I was filled with remorse for doubting her being ill and trying to be invisible so as not to be the target of her rage.  

 
My mother loved C as her own, and both her and my father tried everything they could to help her, and to some degree their own children were put aside. I did not understand then, but my mother did explain it to me later on: as a mother you protect, and sometimes over-protect, that child you regard as the weakest.    In our family that was C.  The rest of us, while never neglected, were paid attention in a very different way.
For a long time I was angry at my mother, thinking that she preferred C to me. During those late teen years  we argued a lot, the most heated arguments always involving C in some way. 

Her stays at my house were more sparse, yet when she did stay over it would be weeks at a time which made for a very uncomfortable situation for me, as I’d go back and forth from having my own room to sharing with someone that I felt did not like me or wanted to be with me.

We all grew, went to college… we all graduated and started working. C’s episodes of anger and violence were fewer, but then she decided she was well and dropped her medication altogether. It was not long before she had a severe breakdown and ended up in a hospital and then at my house for almost a year.That was a very difficult year, as she was very unstable and would go from laughing to crying, from hugging you to hitting you.   

It was very stressful for everyone. I can remember lots of incidents, but the one that truly stands out was the one that broke me away from her for good. She was mad for some reason, started yelling at everyone, my older brother, my mother and myself at the house with her in that moment. My mother trying to calm her down, her getting more and more aggravated. All of a sudden she went straight to my mother and was about to hit her, I got in between them protecting my mother and she hit me with all the anger and frustration in her body. I just took it while my brother tried to restrain her. She scratched my arms, my face, gave me lots of bruises.   I just stood there between my mother and her praying for it all to end.  

My brother finally overpowered her and then it was all silence. My mother crying. C crying. My brother talking her to peace.  I just was in silence. I decided that I had enough. I did not understand.I could not and did not wish to even try anymore.
I stopped talking to her. She tried to apologize, but I knew it was a matter of time till her rage would surface again and her apology would not mean anything yet once again.   
I’m not proud to say that after that I was mean to her many times not through something I did but through what I did not. I would not acknowledge her in the room, even when she slept in the bed next to mine.   I would not respond to her words, I would not hold eye contact with her. I knew then it was hurting her, but I wanted to hurt her and in my mind that was the only way to avoid ever being hit or yelled at by her again.

 
Cycles of happiness and turmoil came and went, just like it had always been with her… My mother and I broke the line separating mother and daughter and became friends, best friends.  I was 23, and from then on my mother was my confidante and I was hers.  
And then I heard my mother’s side of the story. 
My mother explained to me as an adult what had gone on all those years, and all the pieces came together and made sense, I had finally a complete image of what had gone on.    We always wondered if this illness had been part of her always or just after a certain time in her life, we could never come to an answer.    I’m ashamed to say that it did not change my attitude towards C.   I did become more civil, but I kept my distance as much as I could, always expecting her to hurt me.
I started traveling a lot, moved to a different city, and felt like I was leaving all that behind, yet one phone call home would bring all the pain to the surface upon hearing that she was in a down again… it took her a third hospital stay to convince herself that she could not be playing with her life like that.   She finally committed to following to her treatment and looking for stability.
I got married and so did my brother.   My little brother graduated from college and C was in a stable job.  We all seemed to have grown past it all. Yet I could not forgive her. I would not let go of all that between us.
It took me giving birth to my daughter to finally understand what my mother and her mother had done.  It took seeing my infant child so defenseless to put myself in my mother’s and in C’s shoes. It took becoming a mother myself to let go of the pain and confusion, and I knew then that all my parents and her mother had done was just trying their best to help her, and that her yelling, crying and all that violence was a cry for help and love. 
I felt ashamed of myself. And still do to this day. 
C and I now have a good relationship, the kind of relationship I always wanted from her.  It’s such a shame that now I live so very far away.  I talk to her as often as I talk to my father, and sometimes more than to my brothers…  she is at peace, takes her medication without missing a single dose, she’s happy at her job and has some good friends.   
I have to admit here that I don’t talk about this with anyone.   not even with my husband.   He loves C, always has and I’m afraid that if I mention anything to him he’ll love her less or see her with different eyes.  And although I keep silence about C’s specific history somehow protecting her, I do talk to people about mental illnesses, I read as much as I can, and try to steer others into learning, into understanding… that is the only way to truly help.

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

I had a wonderful post percolating in my head for days-a post about those blue skies in late June, those same blue skies you said good-bye to your childhood under, the same blue skies you left home with, packed your things, spent a last few days quietly with friends, not thinking ahead with sadness but with excitement.

I spent the last little while thinking about this post, thinking about my own ambivalence when high school ended, my hidden fears, manifested by tension headaches my entire last semester and compounded by falling in love. I was terrified, sad and excited all at once.

My friend and I would walk our small town streets at night, and walk to the top of the single overpass in town, staring out across the river, pretending the equally small American town was actually a city, Montreal, Toronto, that place where our lives could begin. We’d sigh and keep walking, waiting for sunrise.

We assumed we’d always be friends. It was implied that we’d always be there for each other as she watched me leave town without a backward glance. It was assumed that the lovely day in the park that last June, with the apple blossoms dancing on the soft kissing breeze in the sunlight, balanced against the glass like sky would not be the last, that we could continue those halcyon days, those precious, simple, slowed days where time is like taffy and we only pull at the very edges, the insides staying heated and full.

We were rich then, and we didn’t know. It wasn’t a perfect time-our edges stuffed with shitty home lives, the navigation of other fucked up teenagers, the fear and absolute confusion we felt at our futures. But we were rich with each other, our small group of friends, piled on each other in a park, high as kites, imagining UFO’s as we scared our selves silly. We we rich with those sunrises we talked until, satiating our minds and eyes on a quiet fire that still burns. We talked and laughed and ate and lived. No more, no less. We were pure in ourselves, even if the world around us felt like crumbling.

I’ve had this post in my head because there have been days where again the sunlight, the blue forever brings to mind that wild exultation that living in your future can’t bring. The possibility we lose growing up, having responsible lives. The clarity we once had, even in our wild states.

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

It’s raining here today, as it has for days. The kind of rain that makes you wonder where the magic disappears to, and then you wander out into your yard and stumble upon wild strawberries growing with abandon. Not all are nibbled by slugs, and in the rock hard rain, they’re the sweetest bit of wonder you’ve had in quite a long time.

They do indeed taste good to her.

1984, the years you stole.

stopped in the store, glaring white light

she cries “Mommy! Cherries!” and a moment a skip

I find myself swallowing bile and vomit and 20 plus years of

squeamish denial.

 

One hand in, one round fruit out. A perfect stem

stretches towards me. “This one is perfect!” she blurts.

I turn my head so the clenching will go unnoticed.

 

Inside, in the distance, an unfurling, unravelling.

 

I place the fruit singly in the bag, each contact

weighted down, a jolt, a bridge.

That day, any of those days that summer, somewhere

around 1984 and I had that red bathing suit with the

racer back and yellow straps, and sun shone a

chemical burn between those rotten apple trees.

 

Those days, pocketed in my hand the smell of him, the

taste of him his wetness and his burden on my face his fruit

passed between us.

 

Unravel.

 

They ask for them, the one fruit denied the thing

I couldn’t bear to look at, to listen about “Wow-look at these cherries” the

hurried wives and businesswomen would say “so lovely” under the 2.99/lb signs

while I

did my level best not to collapse and teeter around them,

my mouth turned to stem.

 

Thumbs bore inside as the kitchen light

shines off their edges, as the light of my daughters lies stark 

across them and I’m covered in it, the stain of them

bloody across my hands and fingertips those same

fingertips which opened that door and opened that drawer

filled to flowing with those bloody lush fruits.

Filled to flowing with that one particular torment. Filled to flowing with

his tongue down my mouth and cherries floating past, excuses.

 

Unraveled…

my door holds the remnants

holds the last story, moldering inside clear.

 

They will not be eaten.

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

Someone I know is very close to losing her new baby.

We went to high school together. We never have had much in common-our only bond is a bunch of notes left in a desk anonymously through Grade 9 french-progressing from single words to phrases to full blown letters. We waited almost all semester before figuring out who we were.

There’s no magic beyond that. She a simple nice girl with a lovely name, and I, a big bumbling grieving fool at the time. We went our ways, and occasionally, the thought of those letters gives me pause, makes me smile like they were found in the Dead Sea.

Facebook brought her back again, and we caught up and I’ll admit I envy her simple put together life. I do-it’s all the things I’ll never have-things like persistence and will. I’ve always admired her for simplicity and peace. Never flustered that girl, not that I’ve seen.

Her first son was born early, very early. I didn’t understand why all the messages from her friends were “congrats” until someone pointed out that since she is a nurse who works primarily with pregnant women, she knew the risks oh so very much. And today, I am told simply to pray. He is no doing well.

I know many women who have suffered loss, but to imagine this woman, hell, this girl she remains in my head, getting pregnant so excited, growing and then suddenly he’s out and she’s staring at his little hands and wondering if…when….how….and crying and trying to pray..I can’t bear to imagine her like this.

In my mind, for the world to make sense, some people have to make it through unscathed. Some people have to know only joy, and happiness, and only the sorrow of parting. She is one of those people who deserves only good things and despite barely knowing her anymore, despite never speaking in 15 years, I ache with the want to remove this pain, to erase that small coffin from the picture, a picture that hopefully, hope against hope, will never be drawn.

I know loss. We’ve talked. But I don’t know this loss, this most primal and terrifying. I wonder what I would do if I lost a child now. And I know. I would become death.

How do I be there, while so removed? I want so badly to reach out but I’m afraid. Afraid to hurt, to rock, to open.

“But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.”

I’m going to write an intentionally vague post here, something I’m not usually apt to do. But right now, it’s how I feel safe without passwording the post, which I really don’t want to do.

I’ve been dealing with some things in my head lately, and you know, it’s REALLY hard to NOT write it here when I’ve become used to this outlet over the last 3 years or so. But I’m still rather private in many ways, so there we are.

Nothing is wrong-there’s just stuff I don’t feel like getting into. So no freaking out.

++++++++++++++++++++++

I trusted my neighbour, he of the apple trees and ferns, he of the clenched fist and cherry. My wide eyes opened to his, and I found a hand removing my shirt and a flash in my face.

I trusted my mother to be there, and she’s not. Rotted away long ago, her voice a memory on a cold wind.

I trusted my father to protect me, and instead was greeted with sarcasm, drunken 2am sob sessions and a warm stream of urine down my bedroom door the night before an exam. My grief was lost to his.

I trusted my brother, and in return was given nothing, the past hidden under his downcast eyes and ruined life.

I trusted many other people, all of whom broke my trust, all of whom took that opportunity to stomp on me, to ridicule, to be amused at the idea that I could possibly feel deserving.

After awhile, I said no more, sealed up the walls and crossed my arms. Ain’t nuthin gettin in here.

I’m not alone in my distrust for everyone. Most people have a healthy caution around other people. But mine is different. I live with the expectation that everyone, given enough time, with screw me over in the worst possible way. I live wary, waiting for that pounce so I can move out of the way. I have no friends. It is safer that way. No one can hurt me.

I’ve spent a life running from harm, and when there’s no harm left, when all there might be is potential and newness, I become scared and witless, confused, my jester hat broken and lost. I don’t know how to trust.

How do you trust someone? How do you tell yourself that it’s safe to trust the people who say they love you? How do you let go enough to be free within that? I’m finding it very difficult to let go-it’s making me insecure and scared, and just plain old dizzy. The little part of me that’s been laughed at an abandoned time and time again, she can’t move past this.

It’s ridiculous, because I’m old enough to know that circumstances in the past do not dictate my future. But it’s a gutteral reaction, one borne of spending my life waiting for approval. My father used to joke when I was younger that it would be so much cheaper if I wasn’t around, and I’m pretty sure he meant it.

How are you sure? How are you confident that the person you trust won’t lash out at you, try and break you? How do you not end up feeling stuck like that little girl inside you?

 

“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.

 

“Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything. “

I’m sitting in the waiting room to do my stress test, staring at an older woman, and a younger man. He’s going on and on to her about his stroke-how it felt, what happened, matter of fact like, as if telling a fable he’s told a hundred times before.

She’s desperate for it, for his pain and suffering. She’s desperate for an opening, a chance to say “Me too, but”. You can smell it. I smelled it when I walked into the unit, all full up of the infirm, and sometimes the not so infirm, people waiting to be told if they’re dying, if their breaths are all used up, if they are not so solid, not so balanced on terra firma.

They watch the young people when we enter. I feel eyes on me, misty eyes with more memories than time I’ve used up. I don’t belong. I’ve entered their space, their world. Weekly check up’s maybe, casual familiarity with nurses.

The youngish man leaves to do his testing, handsome in a mature way, but scared, settled by scared. The woman sets her sights more firmly on me, and I make the mistake of mentioning a sudden wave of nausea a few days past, similar to what he described. The clammy skin-she reminds me-you have clammy skin when this happens.

I smile and nod, absently, but she launches into what sounds like a practiced speech about losing her sister last year. Funny thing was, as she spoke, I realized she was speaking of someone I worked with, sorta, someone who worked for our company, who had a sudden heart attack while working from home. I casually said I’d love to go like that, quick, simply, no mess.

Oh how old ladies can glare.

I mentioned that I new here sister’s daughter in law, and her babies, and how lucky she was to be there when they were born.

“But she doesn’t get to see them grow up. She doesn’t get any of it.”

For one hot blinding second, I wanted to stand up and scream at this woman, wrapped up in bitterness and all the wrong kinds of anger and screech that my mother never got to even meet mine, that she wasn’t lucky enough to be given that time. My mother didn’t know it might happen, didn’t have something wrong with her heart from day one. She was snatched. She didn’t have a chance to be an old bitter lady in a hospital.

That of course passed, and I moved on to reminding myself that relativity is looking into what you despise and forgiving yourself for hating it. Something in this woman ached endlessly, rattled her bones and held her trapped in her little world. She was waiting for death it seemed, eyes at once shrewish and hopeless. She was transparent, in my memory she’s like the skin of a snake, discarded and hanging from a tree.

Finishing my test, with the usual “nothing wrong here-you’re fat, that’s why you can’t breathe” lecture to bid me farewell, I walked again through the lobby, through the 70 and 80 and 90 year olds who followed me out with their eyes. I had an urge to run back and ask them to tell me one magical thing about their lives, one thing I should do, one thing they could have never lived without, one regret. I wanted to ask them to bless me with the knowledge of their years, so they could remember they’re adults and not the children the medical staff treat them like. I wanted them to remember when their hearts beat strong and they were more than cast offs in the wind. I wanted the color to flow back into their eyes and their skin.

But I was late for work, and besides, the TV was on.

 

(Title taken from Affirmation by Donald Hall)

“this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light. “

On the bus I pass a bridge with that unfortunate year chiseled into it’s side.

1989.

The year things stopped.

As always when faced with that year, I’m amazed. That something began when something else ended. That something was lasting. That someone was born, even on the day she left us. I stare hard at the bridge, wondering what blessed it with creation.

Irrational I know. But I can hardly be the only person who counts lost years, the years hence in things, in births, in incredulous “how can someone born then be ready for university?”

It doesn’t seem a lifetime already. Wasn’t it just 2000 a minute ago? Wasn’t I just in high school, dropping out of university a year ago? Weren’t those trees just planted, the lawn tended?

Shouldn’t everything else have stopped as well?

That’s what slaps me most of all. The fence that year provides, the utter confusion at the fact that while everything came to a shattering halt for me that year, other people moved on. While I changed, when I was changed, others simply continued, unaware, living. I gawk because I forget that while my life has been centered around a loss, other’s haven’t been, or have perhaps, and I just can’t see it.

Grief is transparent. We can walk through it, talk to it, make love to it. But it’s still there, like the air we breathe, the air sticky sweet around us on a summer night. I can’t see it hovering, unless I look, unless I stop and take the time to see that everyone, or nearly everyone has a year branded in the space above them-1989 or 2005 or 1974. But it shimmers so, becomes fairy like so much so that you barely hear it’s giggle above the tears, you barely see her for the stoicness of her owner. You have to see, really see, and ask, really ask. Then it becomes clear, the words tumbling free.

“I lost….They died….I hurt….I miss…..”

The human condition, right? Suffering, pain, grief. Joy being so sparse and brief sometimes. We should adjust and move on, get over it.

Get over the label grief brands us with, a date seared into our brains. Get over the alteration of ourselves, us at our core beings. We are changed by death, something shaved off the sides. You’re never the same. Your giggles turn to bubbles as if you’re underwater and lost. Your hopes fade into the sides of buildings which are there until they aren’t, and you notice in passing, 3 years later. Bridges and age of majority dates take new meaning.

Everything you should have, suddenly has new meaning, or no meaning.

Spring is supposed to be about renewal, about celebrating an opening earth, warm and welcoming. But for several of us, for different reasons, it’s not. Spring has a shadow behind it,  a mystery reminder that what giveth also taketh. That newness is only at the expense of last year’s left over crop. For some the ache is new, throbbing, still leaking sap. For others, myself, it’s an old wound that aches from time to time, but is mostly healed. Each of us those, is irrevocably branded by these events.

We’ll forever watch the sidewalks for our loved ones, stare out of the corner of our eyes for they who look like someone should. But it won’t be them. It will never be them.

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

As a teenager, I dreamt I was chasing my mother through a store, her back to me, her blue purple coat standing out against the endless bottle of shampoo. Around and around racks we went, my voice calling for her, echoing back at me. She refused to turn and acknowledge me, and allowed me to chase her instead.

She disappeared from my sight, leaving me wailing and defeated.

 

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.