Mother's day

This day has always been a complicated one for me, being the "other mother" in (what was) a two-mom family. In the wake of the "gayby boom", much has been written about the experience of being the non-biological mother --the ambiguity, the difficulty and awkwardness of that identity, or lack of identity really.
I remember my first mother's day, just a few months after our first daughter was born. We rented a house with a small group of friends for a long weekend up in Mendocino. I didn't think of myself as a mother yet, despite the late night feedings and everything else, but I was bothered that our friends--who certainly should've "known better"--wished my ex a happy mother's day but not me. Did they think of me as the "father"? No, but clearly I was not the mother either. Who was I in all this anyway?
The problem was that even I didn't know that answer to that, having never imagined myself in the role of parent and barely understanding the notion of family. No room in any blog to explain all that, or rather no reader with patience enough to get through it--suffice to say I missed out somehow on a lot social programming.
One of the first things I learned as the other mother is you get really good at being comfortable with little lies. I can't tell you how many times moms in the playground would comment about how much my daughter looked like me or would ask me about when and where I gave birth. Now you may be thinking, well, that's not so different from women who adopt, they go through that same thing don't they? True enough, but they are not partners with or married to someone who did give birth to their child. There is a legitimacy associated with being a biological mother that by default makes the other mother an imposter. And then of course there's the assumption of heterosexuality in most of these interactions as well. Small lies or the silences that are their shadows become the necessary grease in these interactions with strangers--people with whom it is just too much trouble to explain everything. You'd think it's be easy after a while but that shit wore me down.
Anyway, it's nine mother's days later and I've learned since that first one that mothers of all kinds--single, married, straight, lesbian, whatever--are confounded in their own ways by the identity of mother. And though I'm a little wiser for the years, I still struggle with what it means to me, especially now because when I am with my daughters I am a single parent, the only mom. But through it all, I am constantly surprised at how much I like that and more so that I'm actually quite good at it.
Sometimes, I think back to how I was before--only really feeling responsible for myself, how easy that was, so much so that I didn't even realize it. What would my life be like now if I didn't have these wonderful girls? I can't even imagine myself without them, they have become such a part of who I am. I wonder sometimes, how did that happen? I know but I don't know. Another happy mystery.

welcome back, dark side

Everyone has a dark side, which is not necessarily a sad, suffering, evil, or unwanted part of ourselves but merely a place that is normally hidden from the light of day for whatever reason. I am a big fan of dark sides. I think they are the only thing that keeps the light side light. And not to promote some bullshit notion of the suffering artist, but for me, some of my most creative work emerges when my eyes are adjusting to the darkness at the bottom of a well. Although sometimes I just try and make something meaningful and creative out of the pile of raw sewage down here in order to get through the day. This post being a case in point.

But my day didn't start this way. It began with longing, desire, and transcendance--thank you perfectly fitting girl who is so much more than that. Indeed I felt transcendant through most of the day in the way Kant describes it--when our knowledge of something precedes our experience of it. How wonderful that is.

But then I dropped her at the train, did my grocery shopping, and suddenly I was a destabilized mess, wanting to cry, wondering why I hadn't really cried in some 4 months, feeling needy and insecure and hating myself for feeling that way--so not myself, but then if these feelings are not mine, whose are they?

A short jag of crying sufficed today, not the heaving sobs I know are down there, but it's a start. Part of me says what do I really have to cry about? Isn't suffering just part of a life filled with desire? But I don't want to negate my desire, and buddha didn't have two wonderful daughters to worry about.

into the brighter day

I've been too busy to post anything these past two weeks, and also I suppose unable to articulate certain missives from my darker regions. I did jot this down this admittedly hormone-inspired spelunk in my notebook a week ago though...
This fog of fear and longing is thick as my will is thin. I can't see beyond my outstretched hand and what I do see shifts its shape and meaning with the changing light. Why move at all from this place? My feet march on though, legs snap woodenly forward, my top-heavy remainder following that, teetering dangerously back before tilting forward once again. But my feet don't know they walk in circles, and my head only suspects as much because I feel inexplicably dizzy.
I need help.
I recognize this vibration of air as my voice. This amazing orchestration of body parts--lungs to larynyx to tongue, teeth, palate, and lips, and then ears for verification, looping feedback--this tiny miracle is not lost on me. But the real wonder is that my brain conceived the words at all.
Despite what you may imagine, I can tell you a rock does not get lonely, an island is content to be uncharted until it is swallowed by the sea. But this analogy only goes so far with me today. I am not solid and impenetrable, remote and unknown, worn down only by the unrelenting forces of time and water. Today I am smashed apart by a six-year-old's innocent words in under a minute, and it doesn't take oceans, just a few salty tears to dissolve what remains.
Well, this is just part of being a parent, I am tempted to say. And it's true.
Later I was surprised and thankful to have a shoulder to cry on, to melt into actually, about this, all of this which I can't write about here. I was expecting nothing, except to wander and eventually find my way as I always do, but she somehow found me in this fog, grabbed my hand and led me back into the brighter day. Who is this strange visitor to my island?

bedtime story

Tonight, at bedtime, my daughters asked me to tell them a story about when I was a girl. This happens a lot and I almost always dread it because I have so few memories of my childhood, at least any that make good bedtime stories. But their persistent (and by that I mean whining, pleading, incredulous pestering) requests did prompt several memories.
I told them about the time my parents decided to teach me a lesson about not leaving my bike out in the yard. I was probably eleven or twelve and they always were bugging me about bringing my bike onto the porch or into the house. It seems improbable to me now that it might have been stolen from our yard, but that was their line at the time. And with due respect I understand now how parents fabricate all kinds of stories for different reasons to get their kids to do certain things for somewhat arbitrary reasons. But I would get home from a ride, promptly dump my bike in the yard, and that would be that. One day, I went back out and saw that my bike was gone. I was devastated--this the bike I had modified myself from a girlie banana-seat high-handle-bar cruiser to a cool bmx dirt bike was GONE.
I remember, almost viscerally, the feeling of panic as I ran inside and told my parents what had happened. They just looked at me calmly ( and with what I now recognize as a certain parental smugness), and said "Come with us." They led me around to the side of the house, where they has stashed my bike as a lesson--in what, I still don't know. But I felt only ashamed and betrayed in that moment. Did it teach me me to bring my bike in from the yard? No, and even though I did bring my bike in after that, the real lesson was that my parents were capable of deceit, were not beyond question.
Of course I didn't tell my daughters that, instead delivering the story as a moral lesson in responsibility, etc. This is the funny thing about being a parent who is also a grown-up child, as we all are, you are constantly being thown back into your own childhood self as you try to parent. In my case, I haven't decided whether this is valuable or not.

stuff inside

I was walking on our old street this afternoon with my younger daughter and we passed by our old house. This always makes me tense up a little, wondering if seeing the only home they knew up until a few months ago makes the girls feel weird, displaced, sad--they never say anything and my own feelings seem to always get in the way in the way of asking.
Today though, there was a big debris box out front and the windows were papered down. The new owners must be gutting the place. For my daughter, I kept my eyes ahead and feet moving forward, but in my mind I was bounding up the steps by twos to peek in. I wanted to see if it looked like my own insides, gutted of old hopes and dreams, brittle and crumbly like the plaster in those old walls, which when touched with any force at all, end up as a fine dust over everything nearby.
Just then it started to snow, big fluffy flakes, my daughter laughing with delight as they landed on her nose. She said when they landed on you, the snowflakes were kisses and when they missed and hit the ground they died, but the ones that kissed you wouldn't die, they would go inside your body, kill any germs and other bad things they found there and get them out of your body. We must have looked like a pair of drunken sailors, weaving about the sidewalk trying to manouever ourselves into the paths of all those snowflakes.

Charlie Porter Quartet

Piano, upright bass, drums and trumpet. A classic jazz quartet. A small room and a table with an intimate view of the pianist's hands. Me. You. A complete surprise and delight in the middle of an already lovely day. How am I so lucky?
They played a few standards, some inspired originals. I got lost in some of those pieces. Some took me away, all took me to you.
I would have said thank you thank you thank you, do you know what this really means to me, the passing of music between us, the easy, perfect weight of your arm around my shoulder, are you really here with me, here and now, and as you say, how is that possible. But there was no room for words in that moment, no moment for words in that room, and even though you have trouble believing in things, I know you felt this too, know this to be true.

one of three

Whatever you think about the psychology of birth order, I will tell you this: being a middle child does make you a good mediator, even-keeled and sorely lacking in expectations. It also makes you an expert in passing along sibling aggression, beatdowns, sadistic teasing and practical jokes--also known as fun to the one dishing it out. My friends and I had our share of that with my little brother, who being three years younger was easy prey.
One day, during one of my routine invasions of his privacy--ie, snooping though his room for candy, comic books, or other items I was sure he had taken from my room--I found a small diary. I remember feeling simultaneously shocked--he was only seven, and a boy, what was he doing with this thing?-- and filled with evil glee at my luck: ah, the teasing that would be had now!
I opened to a random page and began reading. The first, and only, thing I read was this: "I feel like a cat that is purring but doesn't know what the sound is." What's this? And then I felt all the weight and feeling of what he wrote settle on me like a heavy blanket, warm and familiar, and somehow I knew I must close this book and put it back, carefully, where I had found it, and never open it again.
Maybe these wonders of self are easier to see when we are younger, more open to new things, not yet formed into the hard shapes we become. I continued to tease and torture my brother for years, but it was with a little less glee, more like following a script. I wonder if he knew and what he wrote about that.

whirling dervishes

Recently, in a strange and wonderful coincidence I was reminded of Rumi, the 13th C. Persian poet and mystic. Strange because I haven't thought of Rumi in about 20 years. Wonderful because of how I was reminded and the remarkable relevance to my life right now.
Rumi's main themes are love and longing. He is writing about spiritual love, his relationship with "god" or the unknowable, but because his words are so passionate and down to earth, it's easy to relate to them personally, applying them to our relationships with other people and ourselves. If you ask me, it's all the same, just different paths to the same place, but I'm no mystic.
The longng though--I think we can all relate to the spiritual longing he expresses. Who hasn't felt the "something missing" of life, that there is "something more" close at hand but you can't quite reach it? And what exactly is "it" anyway?
Since I've been feeling connected to both of these themes recently more than I have in years, I've been re-reading Rumi's stuff with particular pleasure. Here is one that is perfect to me for right now:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Indeed there are thousands, but I am grateful to be experiencing just one.

resonance 201

Have you felt the way certain music enters your body--the sounds eveloping you from the outside while resonating throughout your inside until, if you're lucky, for a moment you are one with the song?

Or imagine you are walking in a lush forest in the mountains of some faraway place. You stop to catch your breath and take in the view--a particularly lovely grove of trees. You exhale just as the wind comes rustling through the high branches, and for the moment of that breath, the seemingly random imperfections of nature are revealed as a set of beautiful interlocking patterns connecting leaves to branch to limb to trunk, to all things across the forest floor, up through your feet, then flying out like spirits through the window in your chest, up to the sky.

I have these experiences most with nature, music, art, but occasionaly with objects, and even sometimes with my clumsy words. It is rare luck to find it in another person.

Since we live our lives in a world so sadly disconnected and distracted from that experience, I sometimes forget it is possible at all. Or maybe I shouldn't blame the world, maybe sometimes I close myself to it. In any case, I am profoundly grateful for those reminders, when they do happen, of the mystery and wonder that allows the universe to be contained in a blade of grass. Or as my experience with you, to feel your creative energy, gentle will, openness and laughter as well as some sad, dark parts of you that all seem to resonate in me so harmoniously and effortlessly, the echoes finding home within similar places inside of me.

So I want to thank you for this gift that maybe you didn't know you were giving. And I can only hope it is returning to you in some form that pleases you as much as this does me.

resonance 101

"Suppose that a tuning fork is mounted on a sound box and set upon the table; and suppose a second tuning fork/sound box system having the same natural frequency (say 256 Hz) is placed on the table near the first system. Neither of the tuning forks is vibrating. Then the first tuning fork is struck with a rubber mallet and the tines begin vibrating at its natural frequency - 256 Hz. These vibrations set the sound box and the air inside the sound box vibrating at the same natural frequency of 256 Hz. Surrounding air particles are set into vibrational motion at the same natural frequency of 256 Hz and every student in the classroom hears the sound. Then the tines of the tuning fork are grabbed to prevent their vibration and remarkably the sound of 256 Hz is still being heard. Only now the sound is being produced by the second tuning fork - the one which wasn't hit with the mallet. Amazing!! In fact, it is so amazing, that the demonstration is repeated to assure that the same surprising results are observed. They are! What is happening? "

from http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/sound/U11L4b.html

a little book

Here's a little book project I was working on last night. I used to make these all the time and hopefully this is a sign of more to come. They really are one of the most perfect modes of expression to me, with the weaving together of writing, painting and drawing, plus craft of course. The title of this one is Lone Ranger.

Is there anything more simultaneously frightening and seductive than unmasking the villains and heroes that live inside us? Parasites in the dark unmapped interiors of our hearts and minds, they breathe the dust of old memories, feast on the tender meat of dreams you can't recall in the morning.


They float and fly, an elusive buzz at the far edge of awareness, whispering praise and accusations in my ear. I listen closely, trying to learn each of their life stories by heart--where and when were you you born? What was your childhood like? How did you come to be who you are? Why do you wear a mask? Are you my friend or an enemy?


I will work so hard to know everything about them so that maybe I will know one thing about myself, and an inkling of something about you. And then when I'm ninety I will realize that I've lived my life backwards, that our insides are like mirrors--showing us only golems made of reflected light--and if only I had looked outside of myself, facing you squarely and open, I might have seen something wonderful.

patience

As I watch this pile of ashes, waiting for something to rise out of it besides smoke and soot, I am pondering the difference between patience and passivity. I mean, I don't mind waiting and sometimes even enjoy a good line. When you're waiting for something good, there's the anticipation to savor of course. It gets trickier when you're waiting for what may end up being nothing at all. But even in that there's a unique opportunity for observation--it's amazing what floats by you when you sit still in the water, resisting the tide. And you may also notice that the persistent forward march of waves--with the exhilarating, frightening weight of all that liquid--is an illusion of motion. It's just the same water in the same place undulating up, down, up, down.
If you're feeling sleepy, you can see how easy it is to slip into the slumber of passivity and how welcome and wonderful that bed sometimes feels. Or this is all just yawningly boring. In any case, I guess that's it--intention, awareness, mindfulness, whatever you want to call paying attention is the key to patience.

There's a side to patience that's all about stubbornness too, and I have a feeling that my own talents for waiting are rooted in that--because I am the gd world class champion of stubborn. Ask anyone. Especially my ex. It all makes me wonder if I have framed up the wrong question here, lecturing myself on the virtues of waiting, when the choice is not patience versus passivity, it's action, creation, and movement versus not.

song

seduced by
resonating vibrations
afraid of the space
between the notes
do you hear this song
or is it just me

old things

It's my weekend without the girls (yes, I'm mentioning them again--some boundaries cannot be re-crossed I've found). Dropped the younger at my ex's place this morning. It was my first visit there and an odd experience--to see so many of our old things in an alien context, and also interspersed with new old things, boon and booty from the new s.o.'s life, their history unknown.
Old things are infused with old feelings, memories. Isn't that the meaning of sentimental value? But what of sentimental debt, in which the feelings are not wanted, are merely liabilities? How are those paid off and by whom? And how long does it take? All these unanswerables bundled up neatly in the discomfort of a single unnoticed twitch of the eye. Or am I flinching now?
Needless to say, I rushed through my farewells and skedaddled on out of there, back to my own alien space, my own old things.

resolve

I had resolved not to write about my girls here, for my own internal notions of appropriateness and boundary-keeping, but I will say this: there is nothing more painful to the heart than watching your children suffer and feeling powerless to help them, or worse that you are contributing to it through your own inability to be a fully present, whole person when it is needed most. I need to do better than this. I need to cry and then smile and do better. It will be okay. It will be okay. Repeat it until you believe it, believe it until you know it, know it until you become it, become it until you transcend it.

interactions

My friends, known here as Elf and Gnome, left yesterday for home after four days of extraordinary companionship and care, helping me set up my new home, and keeping me sane and happy, well-fed and entertained for the duration.
Yesterday, we spent our time split between the Cooper Hewitt design triennial and good food. At the exhibit, Gnome and I were fascinated with one piece in particular, the true depth of which we had initially missed until Elf pointed it out. It's called Panelite and it's a sandwich of acrylic panels with light-transmitting tunnels between. The tunnel openings were diffuse (so as to glow) little squares on the panel's surface, so that if you held your hand over squares on one part of the panel, adjacent tunnel-connected "pixels" on another part of the panel would go dark as well. The effect is a sparkling of pixelated light and shadow that reacts to your movements.
If you are saying "so what", I'm not doing this thing justice and you need to just go see it.
Gnome and I were inspired, seeing immediately the possibility of more complex effects using fiber optics to tunnel light into interesting and varying imagery. One more project for for the list, eh?
There were a lot of installations at the show that featured "interactivity"--almost it seemed for the sake of itself--from the motion-detecting light sculpture on the stairway to Carpenter's LED sampled window view to first-generation androids--virtual and robotic.
Is our persistent fascination with all this technology-driven interaction some kind of proxy for the lack of human interaction that pervades our culture? Is it a reaction to the prevailing sense of anomie and alienation that makes us desperate for someone or something to react to us, to listen, to acknowledge our real live presence? In this way, these installations are to me cut from the same cloth as reality tv, tell-all talk shows, online social networks, and yes, blogs. But they are also part of an exciting evolutionary moment in art and design where technology is allowing us to become part of our built and designed environments in ways we never imagined possible or desirable.

sluggish

Friday 2/2
Kuh-chunk click crack kuh-chunk whirr. the gears and motors that rotate the giant telescope are creaking to life, doing a slow 180 after receiving the signal, the alarm, that there has been an excess of internal stargazing, hasty careless naming of unknowable planets. Time to focus again on the known universe happening at eye level and below.
The move took its toll, which I completely underestimated--probably some sort of mental trick to enable me to actually get it done. Today it's hitting me. Hard. I feel like a salted slug turned inside out, except there's no pain, I'm only tired and a little bored with the show in my head starring me, produced, written and directed by me. even the commercials are about me. My brain is yawning just writing this.
I look outside though and all I can think is, will it snow today? I hope so. Not sure why.

felt

Do you know the feeling of tearing apart a soft fibrous material, like felt or spun wool? Imagine a little square of white felt, held firmly in both hands between your thumb and forefinger. Now pull, gently. There is a surprising resistance at first. But then individual fibers start to break apart at their weakest points. The break points start to connect up with others forming a sort of fault line of stress and strain that was undetectable in the whole cloth. If you keep pulling--can't stop now, can you--the ripping becomes easier but not clean; a daydreaming dog's ears rotate with lazy curiosity at the high frequency screek of tiny threads disengaging from themselves. Two distinct pieces now in each hand. The space between is a nest of wayward tendrils--reaching back, dangling with newfound freedom, recoiling from the snapping tension of the break. And a few still bridge the widening gap whether out of stubbornness, naivete, fear, or denial none can say.
Go ahead, rip it apart, pull hard, quickly, twisting if needed. The frayed edges are beautiful in a way, like an open-armed meadow of swaying grass or some undiscovered thousand-legged sea creature slowly making its way through the inky black of the deepest deep. But the compulsion to tidy it up is hard to resist. Needle and thread are brought out, scissors made ready, glue gun heated up. But the little edge won't be folded down, or hemmed, or cut or even glued back. Toss it to the wind, let the wearing, healing motion of air and time do their work.

Tranny on a beamer

In an odd coincidence today, I found a picture of the woman who sold me my beloved table saw. I didn't know that shortly I would be buying a table saw from her when this picture was snapped--she was just the person in front of me in the Dykes on Bikes contingent of the SF pride parade. She came over and struck up a friendly conversation as we all waited impatiently for the parade to start.
She was very tall and lean, and in the picture she's smiling broadly, leaning on her bike with one hand resting delicately on the handlebar, the other dangling idly off at a tangent from her hips, a result of her jauntily off-center stance. I knew she was a transsexual (this is 1994, before "transgender" came into its own, and "M to F"--well, of course what else?) when I first saw her, heard her voice, but the pose captured in the photo emphasizes plainly what few token masculine features remained -- broad shoulders, giant hands, and a certain squareness of the jaw. I guess she identified as a lesbian as well, but probably not as strongly as a motorcyclist. We talked bikes for half an hour, from chain lubricants to spare parts dealers to reaching nirvana on route 1.
When the parade finally started, we revved up and were off on our 5 mph cruise down Market St. It felt great to be following someone who, back straight, head up and smile flashing, seemed to embody the notion of pride despite the fact that the parade at this time didn't officially support or want to include transgender people. "Fuck 'em" was, I like to imagine, our shared sentiment.
So, a couple months later, when I found myself in Berkeley at Whole Earth tools I was delighted to talk shop once again with this defier of gender-norms. I couldn't have articulated this then, but the deep resonance I felt with this woman was a glancing recognition of the true expansiveness of gender, the rich variety and inherent contradictions within us all. I believe we contain many many ways of being, and when we overcome fear and doubt and the conditioned urge to templatize and assimilate, we may be who we are, all that we are. And man, did she know her table saws.

old now new part two

Craqueleure of old words
sweet and thick multi-layers
of hardened facts
spoken now
dissolve like cotton candy
on my tongue
Acute light fills eyes
shaping former existence
sub-exposure of anti-archaic element
reveals fresh and crispy purpose to live
What time is not like the present?

Ryobi BT3000 my friend

Of course you can love a machine more than a person. It is a sad irony that the selling of my home means at least temporary retirement for the table saw that made the house so darn sellable in the first place. There is no part of this house that did not benefit in some way from the Ryobi's masterful combination of power, control and accuracy -- qualities which, in that nigh magical transference that happens between mechanical objects and the humans that care for them, I would for the duration of a cut embody as well. The smell of sawdust, sweet and slightly acrid. The almost embarrassing pleasure of touching together two perfectly mitred corners. The deep satisfaction of positive locking parts snapping firmly into position.
I will miss you Ryobi BT3000 my friend.

old now new part one

How close can you come
to the absolute
bang, bang, bang
I am nearest to my
extinction, my initiation,
non-stop trip to nirvana nevada
stop now not for preservation
save the wails exorcise those
demons spring expected
to solicit you
to slithery pools of dank buddings
gash, gash, gash
camoflauge shucked skin
like potted plant arches to light
swell with relief embrace remission
crawl to me
if you dare to spy on likeness it requires full attendance