Category Archives: Getting personal

just a minute…

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"At the end of the Universe" by Keven Law

“At the end of the Universe” by Keven Law

 

I believe in so much right now it hurts. It’s just that before I was so wrapped in the bonds of motherhood, of tending and mending, that I hadn’t time to really see much past the tiny socks littering the floor. The tantrums and tum tums were a mandatory, albeit adorable, distraction from all things personal for so long that although I tried to reach past the crazy and into a writing mind, I was frantic with it. Then I was overwhelmed and ornery and grieving the me I wouldn’t ever, never be (all things look impossible from a distance).

Then I found God.

Ah-ha! Right. Me. Cynic. Honorary naysayer of The Good Book. I did not say what god. Here he/she/it/they/we/were/was/are. Here is God: self-awareness; visibility to true desire and a sloughing off of fear. Names get in the way. Prescriptions. Sizes vary as does taste. God to me is one great and powerful self-fulfilling Oz. When does the heroine/hero find the golden egg/ticket/pineapple? When she/he believes (squiggly line. squiggly line) and then she/he goes on to find out it was right there all along. Duh-duh!

There’s all this magic out there and we’re so busy filling our pockets with sand. This crazy thing happens every time I give in and say–Fine, yeah, I know what I really want from this life. I find peace. I find time to do the things that matter to me. I forget about all that judgement and ugliness that can bear down so heavy on a person they think no good will ever come, not never and I drag my sorry ass up and out. I wish I knew how. I wish I knew anything other than what makes me feel good, what gives me the strong, hard-worn belief that Anything Is Possible. But I don’t. I just believe. Isn’t that what God really is?

 

Living, Breathing Men

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ID-10053995

photo by Stuart Miles

I will most certainly defend a man in war. I love them. I admire them. I venerate them. When I read this I know things about these men. They never respected or loved their mothers, their wives, or their daughters. They never respected themselves or their put-upon gods, and they have never once had any fun in bed.

Here’s to the good men–the fathers, the brothers, and the lovers who see us through. Here’s to living a good life.

 

The Unconscious Neutrality of Rainbows

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Do we really live life in black and white?

I have failed and I am profoundly disturbed. Tonight I discovered that my children, my heart and soul, believe the color of our skin determines our goodness. My community, my town, the place I have raised my daughters for six years is not a diverse and widely accepting community. We are light of skin. My friends, my children’s friends, our extended family is pale for the most part. We veer brown of Asiatic persuasion at rare intervals, but we’re generally the same. Dark skinned people do not move here often. This is small town America, Midwestern by locality, European by descent.

I don’t know what it was growing up that got to me (certainly not my older siblings who could shoot out a slur a mile away), but racism was always the biggest injustice I knew, and fought against. The Klan came to my town; that was my first protest. I wrote letters to the editor of the Gazette standing up for Native American spear fishing rights; yelled at the TV every time some dumb daytime host subjected the world to the ugly rants of hate groups; and thought I opened myself to a wide assortment of friends and viewpoints. The thing is, when time gets distilled and age moves in and friendships whittle and wane, there are only a few people we really hang on to. These are my peers, my very good friends, my twins in the mirror.

Until now the subject of skin color is not something that comes up often in conversation. Why should it? I don’t talk about people’s looks on any level really. I mean these things as benign, the lack of talking. I don’t call people skinny or fat, ugly or pretty because I don’t want my daughters to go around labeling everyone they see or themselves. It’s the mind and heart, I tell them. It’s how we are to eachother that counts.

So far this not-talking theory has worked. My girls have confidence in themselves and their bodies. I knew there would only be a finite amount of time that I could set precedent before they went out into the wild and made their own friends who might or might not begin the slow burn of peer review. And I know that “colorblind” isn’t really colorblind at all, but I thought I had that covered.

Oh the thoughts we think. This is when I turn to books. Not parenting books. I don’t want to know how anybody else did it. This is how I’m going to do it. We’re starting a new lesson in diversity, and it’s not stopping with the color of our skin. We’re learning more about world religions. We’re crossing cultural boarders. We’re walking a geographic superhighway right across our beloved Earth into the howling realms of humankind.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” –Nelson Mandela

 

 

 

She sits astride a wild pony

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I’m hiding from myself in my room with the ceiling fan for company. Summer’s heat has beaten me, accompanied by stomach pains and petulant ennui. I read this morning that there were flood warnings in Madison; just sixteen miles up the road the blessed rain fell for minutes at a time, causing motorists to forget themselves all over again, as if it were December, as if it were snow.

Here it sunned and continued its drying lag. I could have fried an egg, perhaps a side of bacon, and some toast on the hood of my car and served breakfast to the neighbors.

My youngest daughter asked to read a Disney version of Snow White, and I couldn’t help but think of it as a story written by the teenage girl about the injustices she was forced to endure. We’re taught to sympathize, but what if instead Snow White ran away, and, found by the cops, she wove a deep, and troubling tale–a wicked queen, coveting Snow White’s pure beauty; a death threat; a poison apple; seven strange little men in a hovel in the deep, dark wood.There are always two sides to every story, after all.

I’m turning into a wicked queen. Negativity fumes from me like noxious green gas. It’s possible that I am divided so completely in half (with a charged electric fence and barbed wire) that one side believes beyond absolute certainty in the possibility of all outcomes, while the other half sits in blatant consternation, bubbling away in horrifying anxiety.

Last Saturday I ran an open mic, but an hour before standing up at the microphone I took a prescribed dose of beta blockers. The banishment of anxiety was atypical, especially before an event I planned, and I felt a rare calm spread from my core outward. Relief.

I could live in that calm, cool world without anxiety, but would my drive to do and be and create disperse as well or would I become more centered, tear down the electric barricade and unite the two countries implacably at war?

“We’ll see,” Ma says. We shall indeed.

 

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We couldn’t have known eachother better if…

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I don’t want my daughter to be me–afraid of everything that touches her, flushing at stranger’s questions, a teacher calling her name. She keeps me up all night some nights when she sleeps the hardest and I worry for her with a panic that if, right now, I don’t tell her, or show her, or say to her, she will be broken in the way that I have been broken.

In the morning she comes to me with the truest joy bouncing off her face, and throws her body across mine, claiming me and naming me, Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. In less than an hour she is fighting her way to breakfast, a tantrum of spite and definition. She possesses herself, her staunch desires, her situations of intent.

I’ve spent years trying not to scare her out of life the way Ma overburdened me with gasps and Careful!s and Don’ts. Still she hesitates at all my hesitations, as if through our bones we are afraid of falling.

You are such a brave girl, I say and I mean how strong she is in her mind. Her pride and her stubbornness will work for her if she can just get through me first.

She taught me this–I said, The thing about these movies is that they spend so much time making a person think that the most important thing is for a girl to be pretty. Four year old she said, That’s silly. That’s not the most important thing, loving is.

Loving is.

I don’t want my daughter to be me–the fearful bits, the self-fighter cramped with anxiety, but maybe that part where we grab eachother and hold on and giggle like little girls, she can keep that bit. She can keep the loving. It’s a good bit to have.

 

 

 

Do you have to make everything a story?

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Yesterday I was hit square on the jaw with a memory so vivid I could have woken up bruised and not felt surprised. It was the kind of memory that lasts seconds in the life of a teenager, but pops up unexpectedly twenty years later and all you want to do is run head-on into it to feel and smell and taste that one clear thing.

My immediate response to the recollection was, “I could write this.” Then I preceded to compose sentences and list publications and punch the gas along a country highway between here and there.

Today I sat down (a gift to Linda; here I find in practice I am absolutely wrong about my Ups and Downs) to write out the memory, find the story and create something beautiful out of hormones and punk rock, and I realized that most of all I wanted to give the memory back to the person who helped create it.

Maybe the story is a story, but maybe too, it’s five lousy sentences on a Facebook page waving to an old friend.

 

 

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On Solstice and Pocket Lint

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I have a huge appreciation for this moment, ice water, and heat. Old wooden crates. Typewriters and ink. Tattoos inching in hyper-detailed increments down a twenty-year old back. Hot sauce, hollandaise and horseradish cheese.

I feel minutes like this creeping just out of sight, where the peripheral sneaks off behind and away. Fleeting, they call it, like a glimpse of something imperfect enough to be just the right kind of beautiful.

Today is the summer solstice–a series of moments layered one atop another, stretching light between dawn and eve so far as they might break from one another, snapping clean off, and in need of a mend. Maybe this is how every day breaks from the others, along a perforated line at midnight in God’s back pocket.

And God, or Gods, or Goddess, or Goddesses–You are singing today with the high wind shrieking, a tantrum of Nature, while we move from house to house, forgetting you in the grass and high energy spectrum of our own immediate lives.

You are too much for us to eat and drink. Too fast you fill us with your own hot breath. If we notice you noticing us, we flush pink to red, burning in our embarrassment that we weren’t doing something better with our time than changing the sheets or feeding our own need to be heard.

 

 

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At The Intersection Of Heart Attack and Vine

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image by Vlado

It’s an easy accident. Just a bump really. The kids hardly notice over the sing-song gadgets snuggled in their laps. Even so it’s a call to the police, a jam in the schedule, a later night to bed then planned.

Then it’s a meditation on the habits of being human. Namely, love.

“Why did you call Daddy?” Ivy asks. I say it’s because I want to let him know what’s happening, but when I think about it, long after the girls have gone on to deeper subjects (think Shrek in the bathtub), I realize it has more to do with us at large.

Relationships form patterns. Their own cadence and expectation. Who do I call when something doesn’t sit right? My husband. He knows how to talk me down or chill me the fuck out. I’ve known him for more than half my lifetime and I honestly don’t know what I would do without him. I made up my mind a long time ago I’d probably go it alone. People are everywhere, but they’re incredibly hard to find.

Your turn: Who matches your pattern?