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?
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
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.
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.
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