New Year

I wonder what kind of people we would be if all the things that have happened to us, did not happen to us. I wonder how much of it is nature vs. nurture. How many of their demons are there because of me, or despite me?

I wonder what we would look like if we had continued our trajectory. Would we be softer? Would we be more kind?

I have an idealized version of myself as Mother where I am the person I used to be. Patient and solid.

I don’t know that woman anymore.

Sometimes I see her when I get excited and ahead of myself-as-the-person-I-am-now. I think I can do a thing or be a thing or make life look a certain way, I’m so sure of it and of myself. And then everything falls apart and I fall apart and I remember that the old life was a dream, and my old optimism was born of naivete and stubbornness and heroic cognitive dissonance. I tried really, really hard.

And myself-as-the-person-I-am-now does not, or can not, try very hard anymore.

I wonder if I had not had my whole ass handed to me by life if that would still be the case. If I might have some stupid bright eyed optimism left in me. Enough to organize the toys. Enough to gently walk my child through a teaching moment without wanting to scream. Enough to look at myself in the mirror and think, “OK, sure”.

It is no joke to not like the person that you are.

Love Letter

You’re good. Solidly. Every part of you is made up of good things: good works, good intentions, good nature.

You work hard. You value hard work. You reserve your respect for those who deserve it, and you’re an excellent judge of character.

You’re smarter than everyone. You have such a smart mouth.

You surprise me all the time. You’re thoughtful, and careful. You’re old fashioned and well mannered and you respect your mother. You say wildly silly things that catch me off guard.

You say intensely serious things and deliver them softly and with humor.

You are always so careful with me. You make me feel safe and loved and held. You call me on my bullshit and tease me worse than anyone.

You make me laugh when I want to cry. You make me cry laughing. You sneak jokes out of the side of your mouth meant only for me. You make my heart stop sometimes when you look at me.

You laugh at me in a way that isn’t ever mean. You laugh with me more often.

You always know what I mean and I don’t have to explain, but you let me explain anyway.

You think I’m funny?

You love me.

You give me room to mess up, and you let me come back from my failures with grace.

You take time for yourself and give to yourself. You let yourself be lazy, you force yourself to work harder than anyone, and you have no problem transitioning to a middle ground. You slide seamlessly into whatever role works best at the time. You make it look easy. You make everyone else look like chumps.

You have plenty to complain about and you never complain.

Your brain runs at a clip that’s unattainable for most people. You never seem to question yourself, and you move forward with a casual confidence that makes me crazy with jealousy. I’m proud to be at your side. I’m proud that you chose me. 

You can create something from nothing and you do it all the time.

You can make things with your hands that are practical and necessary, and you will laugh and roll your eyes at me because I say things like this: there’s an ancient and animal kind of wisdom and ability that runs through you. There are not many humans like you left.

Men like you are the reason our species has survived for so long. You are a better version of a human than most men can ever hope to be.

You have given me love, and home, and family, in ways I never knew were possible.

I love you, so much

This Is Not a Love Song

This is my story, too.

And if it is ugly, well then…it is ugly.

I remember the death of my grandfather in stages of my own loneliness. I remember the first phone call as I sat in my cubicle, my step mother telling me that it wouldn’t be long before he passed.

In the moments after the call it felt like I was underwater but somehow, annoyingly, still present. In the ladies’ room. On the third floor. I was mewling at my own image in the smudgy bathroom mirror and dabbing at my face with 1-ply and watching my phone light up with texts as co-workers streamed in and out. They spared me quick and confused glances as I sobbed in our shared reflection under the fluorescent lights before heading to their stalls.

I mimed “I’m so sorry!” and “I am ridiculous!” with my eyebrows at them all.

My job was stressful enough that I gradually lost forty pounds over the first year working there and started a round of anti-anxiety medication. My hair was falling out but I had a good job with insurance, and so I stayed.

I remember fighting with my then-fiance to convince him to take the day off to stay with our baby so I could go to the funeral. It never even occurred to me that he should come with me.

I remember Grammie being disappointed that I didn’t bring baby Ben to the service and I remember the deep shame of letting her down in some impossible-to-predict way at her husband’s funeral.

She said, “Oh. You didn’t bring the baby?”

I said, “Oh! No, no I didn’t think I should…”

And then she was swallowed by the crowd or she patted my hand and turned around in the pew or she disappeared in some final way that left me standing there wondering if I’d imagined the conversation. I don’t remember, exactly. I just know she was gone in an instant and I was left standing there hating that I didn’t have an armful of chubby blonde baby for her to kiss and tickle and forget for a moment that her husband was gone.

I remember checking my fiance’s phone a week after the funeral, intending to gather real proof of his cheating, and instead seeing a text that he had sent to his boss claiming to take the day of my grandfather’s funeral off for bereavement and thanking his co-workers for their condolences. He asked for an extra day off after the funeral to be there for me and to take care of “family stuff”. They said “Yes of course, take all the time you need.” and he replied “Thank you, we really appreciate it.” Truthfully this man, who I had chosen to spend my life with, had stayed home and played video games and angrily texted me throughout the wake and funeral wondering when I’d be back to unburden him of our child.

I remember singing “Black Sheep” to my younger sister while we waited in the receiving line at Papa’s wake. Trying to make her and my brother laugh. Trying to bring the dark humor.Trying to acknowledge how I knew I didn’t belong. It’s me, guys. I’m the black sheep. Get it?

I remember hugging my older cousin who I had never, not even once, hugged before that day. We didn’t know what else to do.

I remember watching my family go up, in pairs, to kneel at my grandfather’s casket and say their goodbyes.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I remember walking shakily up to his casket and kneeling by myself. All alone. Always so alone. I cried more for myself than for him. I cried and told him that I was so sorry for not being better. For not being more. And for being a person that’s left to kneel at his funeral by myself when everyone else had someone.

I remember watching Grammie go up for her turn, and maybe it was my dad, maybe his brothers, maybe all of them at once, holding her tiny body up against the weight of her grief. I couldn’t watch. I turned away. Her goodbye was too tender. It was a moment not meant for me to see.

It was a moment not meant for any of us.

On Friday we will lay her to rest in the same burial plot. We’ll go to the same funeral home. It will be the same kind of Too Hard. My dad will have a broken heart.

My son said tonight, “Poor Papa doesn’t have anymore parents!” and it took more than a one-two count to compose myself.

I remember Grammie had the softest face in the world. If you kissed her cheek it was like velvet.

I remember Grammie and Papa had a wild strawberry patch in their back yard.

I remember the upstairs bedrooms unchanged from the days their children played there. Sharon’s scary baby doll still in the bassinet at the end of the bed. The way light filtered in through the windows; green and hazy.

I remember watching The Wizard of Oz every single time we visited, even though I know that can’t be true. Sometimes it was Escape to Witch Mountain.

I remember a framed needlepoint on the living room wall, a little stepladder with plants spilling off of it. At Christmas there would be bowls of weird hard candies and huge gum drops in little crystal bowls on the stereo cabinet beneath the needlepoint.

I remember Grammie showing me how to crack walnuts in the little dish that she always had on the coffee table. I’d sit there on the floor cracking the shells and scraping the bits of flesh out with the pick.

I remember creeping between the dining room chairs to try and win the affections of Sophie, Grammie’s demon cat who liked to nap under the safety of the tablecloth in between sessions of hissing at me and warning me to stay away. Grammie looked so deeply sad when she told me that Sophie’s first family was unkind to her that I promised myself that I would always try to make Sophie know that I loved her and that I was a safe person. Sophie hated me, and everyone else, for her whole life. Everyone else but Grammie.

I remember the shortbread cookies with the sharp sugary crystals that she kept in the fat Friar cookie jar.

I remember the grape soda and diet cola that had expired years prior but still held a place in their basement.

I remember at my baby shower, which I knew I didn’t deserve, where I feared she might be ashamed of me or upset with me like my other grandmother, for having a baby too young and having a baby out of wedlock. Instead she walked up to me and took my hands and looked into my eyes and said, “My first great grandchild!” and hugged me, hard.

I remember one Christmas when my tiny son was afraid of her, her soft white hair and translucent skin. I remember my own mortal fear, that I, too, might live long enough to grow to an age where toddlers would fear me.

A woman who had raised six children of her own, a woman who had been the center of her home. She’d been the heart.

Now we’re left behind to reconcile with ourselves just who the hell we actually are.

Am I the heart, now? For my family?

That can’t possibly be the answer.

When my children lay me to rest it will not be a tearful and tender goodbye. They will not call me gentle and sweet, the way they did Grammie.

Who will I be in their memories?

The Shearing

I have fallen in love, so many times

with so many people and things and

paths and words and ways.

I trip, drunk and giddy into the

wrong answers

nettles and salt pits

My whole being is the question

My body takes the shape of a

question mark in someone else’s bed

I keep pressing my mouth against

another and waiting for the doors

to open and

the angels to sing

or the sirens to wail

My bowl is waiting for beauty

ethics and stewardship

convenience, heat, skill

and comfort

I want to eat

I want to know what nourished means

So I cut the excess from my diet

the unclean

I cut the parts of me that are inflamed

I keep seeking, I keep asking

For more

I have an ugly treasure trove of

fool’s gold

In the shadows though, I’ve found

That when I fall face first into the

Earth

It is always freshly tilled

And fertile

I find the weeds in the furrows and I

do not pull them out

I’m so fat and full of my wisdom

I’m fleshed of the scraps of my own

butchered life

The answer is: keep gorging myself in times of famine

The answer is: give thanks for the bounty that is set before me

The answer is: slaughter the lambs

living in the patches

 I want to write. I’m too tired. I don’t have the energy to find a notebook and pen. I’m not strong enough to turn the lights on or sit up and actually do it. I don’t want to accept that night is over and that sleep didn’t happen. Again. I don’t want to give in, although I knew at 2am that it was going to be one of those nights. I knew at 11pm.

If I’m being honest I knew by dinnertime. Nerves so frayed, brain chemicals so muddled. Mouth full of nervous chattering, fake smiles, trying so hard to tell stories, to compliment, to reassure. Who am I trying to convince? Myself. Obviously. I am fine. I am fine. I’m really, really great. Truly. I am making great progress and I’m working hard and trying to stay positive. It’s hard, you know? It gets to me. So I’m working hard​ to keep perspective, stay positive. I just have to keep on trying and something will give. It has to.

I have become so adept at reassuring people that I am not crumbling.

There is truth in those words, the “I’m almost there, I just have to keep trying” even though it feels so hollow when I say a thing like that. It’s not a lie.

It is a very weak truth.

A bird’s bone of a statement; it’s made mostly of hope. It sounds just like something that somebody real would say and so I say it, too. Chant it until it becomes solid and I can touch it.

Or exhale and watch it kick up the dust particles, all at war with each other in a patch of sunlight that made it through the blinds.

Almost there.

I think I’m doing everything mostly right. I know I could have lived a different life up until this point, and made different choices that would have made it easier for me to live now. But I didn’t. This is the life I have. So I’m gathering up the tools available to me and I am trying, trying, trying. I’m not asking for the stars. I’m asking to be able to breathe steadily when I throw my head back and gaze up at them. I want my life. I want my life.

I am trying.

To Do

Be more patient
Actively choose peace, every time
Be honest with myself about my feelings, about my actions, about my intentions
Be considerate of my health and my body
Remember how lucky I am
Remember that I don’t have to be satisfied with what I have even when I am grateful for it
Know that it is ok to make mistakes
Know that it is ok to keep trying even when I make mistakes again and again
Accept that is ok to stop trying and to make room to breathe when I don’t know what to do
Wait for the answer to come to me.  If it doesn’t,  wait for the next scene and try again
Say hard things when they are true and when they are necessary
Make myself vulnerable

 

Father

To men who made us
To men who raised us
And to the men who raised them
The ones who showed our fathers how to be decent
How to be kind
How to be steady
To the men who stayed

To those, even, who did not and

To the boys who fumbled in the absence of a good man
Who had to squint at the negative space to find the gifts of their manhood
And became whole

To the boys who couldn’t; to those who could only see the loss
Who grew into men that used their father’s broken tools
To build homes out of themselves where the floorboards are loose

And wind screams through the gaps by the windows when the storms come

To the men our brothers will become
To the sons they will raise
To the men who will emerge from the
Tiny souls that I am tending
The boys who call me Mama

To the men who will love my daughter
To the men who love my sisters
To the men who love my friends
The men who will turn them into mothers

To the men we lost and the men we grieve
Their faces in old photos, pure joy as they hold their grandchildren, their great grandchildren
Just as they held us

 

 

The men who are the origin

The provenance

The beginning
To the Papas who come home dirty and tired from a long day of hard work
And roll in the grass with shrieking children anyway
While Nanas watch (or listen)

from the kitchen window

To the man who a grown daughter watches for in her memories and searches for
In the faces of the men who might love her

To men
Who are the home where the heart of their family beats
I love you
I love you
I love you

Uncovered

Some bullshit happened the other day. Some further bullshit. Some completely preventable, you -can-see-it-coming-a-mile-away type bullshit.

I was pulled over on a Tuesday morning, en route to a birthday party for my dear friend’s  son. I was driving without insurance, the officer informed me. I was driving with a revoked registration and I had been doing so since August, apparently. I want to write “allegedly” as if this were some serious journalistic endeavor  but let’s get real serious for a minute and just admit this is my actual life and I am telling you this story-a bit tipsy off gas station wine, as it were- loudly and with grand gestures at my kitchen table. In this scene I pronounce the word apparently like “a-parent-LEE!”

It’s an accusation.

I say the word like it, in and of itself, is an entire story.

Side note: my insurance policy did, in fact, end in August  2016. In September 2016 I purchased a new policy and did all the extra paper-worky and payment making bullshit one is expected to do at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.  I did the thing! But nobody recorded  it. Or somebody did but some other body didn’t check the box on a form, or some other body was a human and overlooked something and maybe it was a gov’t employee and maybe it was me, I really honestly don’t know because I thought everything was all quite right in the state of Denmark, but some shit got scrambled in the systems of the Powers That  Be and well…?

Well.

Here I sit.

I paid three hundred and thirty four dollars to rescue my shit truck, which the gentleman on the other end of the tin can so named when I rang the tow yard all ashamed and slightly suicidal, “Oh yeah, that  old junker that  came in?”

That’s not a junker, that’s my golden fucking chariot.

It may have tape on the windows because the window motors failed but it’s the strongest tape that Lowe’s had to offer in my price range of ten dollars. And it may not be fancy but it  was a top of the line model and a beaut back in its day. It’s a Ford F150! That truck is the embodiment of my country song life. My dad gave me that truck out of the goodness of his heart and despite the fury of his parenthood that his daughter should find herself in such a station that she needed to be given his old and unwanted vehicle because she was not upwardly mobile enough to purchase one on her own.

God dammit almighty am I tired of being poor.

I am so.fucking.tired.

Done with it.

My  insurance policy did, in fact, cancel,  coincidentally that same day that I was pulled over. I was informed of  the fact later  on that afternoon as I watched my lasagna shaped toddler hurl himself into mud piles in my  dear friend’s back yard at said birthday party. An email popped up on my shitty Walmart phone,  alerting me to the fact that GEICO was sorry to say that I am one Broke Betty and they simply can’t be bothered with my shennanigans, nor my sob stories, any longer.

I honestly don’t blame them.

Fact is, I haven’t found adequate work. “Adequate” as in: pays enough to afford my $1650 in rent and solely requires work between the hours of 9am and 2pm (except on Tuesdays when my son’s school releases at 11:55. Every Tuesday. Yes that  is a public school with a half day every week)  and also allows for the inevitable shenanigans that a single mother of three children (aged two, five and seven) downright requires.

That’s right. My life REQUIRES shenanigans.

A shenanigans clause, if you will.

I don’t have one of  those. Nobody does. I would refer you to my post on being a welfare queen but it is apparently offensive.

A-parent-LEE!

Oh somebody  get me a goddamn drink. 

Bulleted Points

-I am a very busy person these days and I’ve no energy left to figure out sentences

-not even two weeks into our new life where I work full time and the kids are in school/childcare full time, and then some.

-first week was exciting and new enough that nobody was devastated

-this week everything is a garbage fire and my children hate me and I hate me as well

-I’ve been awake since Monday 4am because I’ve got some stupid virus that toes the line between really gnarly cold and pneumonia. I cough through all my sleeping hours and then cough through the waking ones, too.

-I just discovered that I can pinch the skin between my eyebrows and pull it straight off my skull like chicken skin. I don’t know if I’m just rapidly aging or dehydrate. Probably I am both

-I nearly Googled “sudafed and wine interactions” earlier tonight but then realized I was just going to have the wine anyway and didn’t need to go scaring myself. #Selfcare

-Currently 2am and I’m having a mug of theraflu and some buffalo chicken beacause I’m ridiculous and my body has every right to be this sick and upset with me for the shit I put in it

-Theraflu is not working. Am still awake. Too tired to chew chicken and too tired to figure out what to do with it now

-Oldest boy woke up, howling down the stairs and through the house for me. Sees me, collapses on the floor and says “growing pains!” and now he has medicine and is pretending to sleep on the couch while whispering songs to himself

-Tonight I sang them Sade’s By Your Side for a bedtime song and when I finished Ben said, “I hate youuuuuu” and burst into tears

-I literally have no idea what I am doing

 

The Mama Being Meen Book

My Instant Gratification Monkey is so wide-awake right now, you guys.

 

I’m pulling an all-nighter. Sorting, tossing, packing and repeating. Tomorrow is moving day- we’re going to live in our own place, me and these kids, for the first time ever. I’m afraid of what it will mean for them, what emotions it is going to bring up. Mostly it feels like a relief, like a prize at the end of a year of the hardest work I’ve ever attempted. Thinking about it like a prize is probably a good way to set myself up to have the wind knocked out of me by life again, so I’ll try and dial back my enthusiasm here to a solid “content and hopeful”.

My oldest has been horribly behaved lately- mean and sneaky, explosive with his emotions. I have been so absent since I started working full time again. We all started up a new routine at the same time. Summer ended and they went off to school and day care, I went off to work, and we’ve found ourselves in a place where we only see each other in the last few hours of the day. We are all exhausted, cranky and starving. We are all about to burst from holding it together all day long in the presence of other people and we all end up exploding together. One tantrum sets off another and the other, the fighting never ends. I shut down, robotically cook and clean whatever I can, half listen to them and say things like, “What? No I don’t know. Yeah. Hmm.” The only thing that snaps me out of my haze is when they eventually start bickering, or the baby stands up in his high chair to throw his milk across the room.

I do know that I am doing my best. I know that.

I wonder why my best isn’t enough.

I keep trying to figure out some trick, some thing I can do that will make me expand, that will make me, finally, enough. I need to plan and work and budget and clean and cook and do all the everyday maintenance things. I need to be present and listen and say the right things to them so they know they are loved and supported. I need to comfort them through the ongoing strangeness of our family being ripped apart. The strangeness of knowing that accepting things unfamiliar is our new way of life; of being completely and totally heartbroken. Especially because they don’t know that they’re heartbroken. They will realize it over and over in small ways until one day when they’re grown they’ll realize they’ve had a gaping wound the whole time. Who will they see when they look back at me? Is she enough? Are they going to forgive me for the spaces in their lives that I couldn’t fill?

I’m packing these boxes and being so careful with what we have. It’s amazing to me what we’ve managed to accumulate over the last year. I wonder how things will look in our new place. What paths will we weave once our space is our own? How long until it feels familiar? How long until we feel at home? How long until we start to heal?

 

 

God I do not want to keep working on this shit right now. It’s 2am! I have so much to do tomorrow, so much physical work. Staying up all night is a bad move, but I am not enough during the day to have been able to get this done in any other way. I knew it would be like this from the minute I signed the lease. I know it’s going to be like this for a long time. I am going to be up in the wee hours, borrowing energy from tomorrow, for years and years to come.

Cleaning up tonight, making room for bins of things that I still have to pack up, I came across Ben’s latest piece of non-fiction. I don’t remember stepping on the book, but it was probably when I was trying to drag the baby out of the TV room to get him to bed and telling them, for the five millionth time today, to clean up all the stuff they dumped out on the floor because we are MOVING IN THE MORNING FOR CHRIST’S SAKE CAN I GET A BREAK HERE?!

 

Without any further adieu, I present: Mama being Meen Book

OK. 

He took money out of my wallet and pretended it was his. It did not go over well. He didn’t want to talk about it, but I forced him to. Because I am MEAN.

This actually made me laugh at first, before it started hurting, because it is so absurd. I am the Berlin Wall of mothers. My eyebrows are made of lightning and my heart (not pictured) is made of ice.

Mother: giver of life, ruiner of dreams. 

 

Damn, little dude.