11/15/16

 

There will be time to prepare,
some other time, when gentle breaths puff
the solitary exhale of nearly sleeping chests.
Some other day when reflected back would be
that we had done our best.

When your drowsy eyes slide low, and lower-
till you are cocooned in cotton candy dreams,
spun soft-hearted for exhausted souls.
These defeats do take their tolls.

There will be more coffees sipped,
and taken trips to borders and beyond,
you can be assured the daffodil will follow
unafraid of April’s fickle moods-
and soon it will be safe to plant the seeds
to reap the harvest, of your good deeds.

Did you think the slamming of a door,
would ripple out with such a crack,
that Hatred might take notice and turn its head?
To eye the unrest and sickly stumble from its bed,
were you too, taken aback?

I left the couch, then left the room
and walked out amongst the gloom
of Pittsburgh’s weeping, solemn sky.
I shook my head then shook my fist,
my sleeping children’s heads I kissed,
then sat back and reminisced,
and keened a mournful cry.

I will stand beneath the arch,
and wait for spring to buck the cold.
Wait for the optimistic tulips to take hold,
and weep their frosty corpses come the dawn.
I will hold on.

---

 

 

 

 

What I feel and cannot say aloud

 

I: Two days later

I who have been wordless seldom,
reach into the depth of a numb throat
and force the words out like retching.

Chest cavity broken open like a thing prepared for feasting.
My heart; asunder.
This grief has teeth and she gnashes.

This is fear, and flight-
a dinner guest who has expired after dessert,
sits, head lolled to the side,
as people clean up.

Ignore it. Ignore it. Ignore it.

A keening wail that rises like bile,
foams like a wave, over takes the throat
and just like that, it’s out.

Every moaning voice that howls together,
and someone somewhere instead hears a song.

---

II: Worth

A delicate question
clutched close, beyond the observance
of a quiet room.

Will this happen? Could this occur?

A necklace of red grapes,
sweet collar-bone that beckons your kiss.
You tell me I am safe, you will keep me safe,
but I am not one to be kept.

More like, a rootless tree bearing fruits,
as apt to run as stay.

Your hand, on my back as
I fall fitful into slumber.

Your stability has been the sun,
my beating heart;
the Earth which circles without consideration,
you are the only thing it knows.

This week grief split me open without permission.
A mess, pomegranate seeds and mango flesh on
a cold tile floor.

Anxiety made me heavy with worry,
falling, falling, plop.
All fruit bleeds. My chest is full of it.
Stuffed to bursting, a captive cavity.

My head rattles as if empty,
but instead, full of
orange rinds and lopped off pineapple tops.
The throw aways, like me, like you.

This has happened. This has occurred.

Fingers, blood blister raspberries,
weeping due to worried drumming.

Fruit basket of a woman, carefully arranged,
left at your door step, a gift.
Quickly, quickly, before she spoils.

Now decide her worth.

 

 

Word Quota

To know his voice with the certainty
of knowing, my heart will continue to beat
even if I don’t urge it on,
and yet, with the same conviction that I will
never be able to replicate his tenor for anyone else.

No one will hear it as I have,
there was a finite number of words for him to speak,
and now he has spoken them all.

How deep is the ravine of that pain?
A foot? A mile? A hole which has no end?
For which the bottom never rushes to meet me,
never swallows and splits me open upon its terrible teeth.

There is no succinct finale,
no period to mark the end of this ache,
to let a breath be taken before moving forward.

It is a tidal wave in pitch black which capitulates,
It is an ulcer pulsating unseen,
It is the feeling of unequivocalness.
Turning around in a forest to find a wall in its place.

Death is candid, he does not take and give back,
what he snatches is for keeps.
He never lies and says ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do…‘
He is not a salesman but a judge,
a brusque swing of his gavel-
and then noiselessness.

To talk about Things

There are things you can only talk about
once you are far removed.

Things you look at with sideways eyes,
and stare at across a full room.

Which with spindly legs do creep the surface,
hoping for a damp place to fester,
to nest, to gorge on sorrows full bloom.

There are things that are never cool enough to pick up,
that stay white-poker-hot and smolder,
yet the wound never cauterizes.

You can stay bent and aching,
forever stitching the undone lesion;
or sit with your ice cubes clinking, then melting, then gone,
and stalk the feeling to its roots,
and find yourself then deep in the mud.

I remember the dark, musty, suffocating dirt.
Recognition at having dug myself a hole,
needing to decide if it were a grave,
or momentary respite,
and the anguish of having to climb back out,

The realization that it was much harder than falling in.

The Trembling

My heart; asunder.
The black goblin who weeps from the wound
and drags himself up and out with gladness.
Careful of the cracks, darling,
my grief has teeth and she gnashes.

My chest, broken open like a thing prepared
for dining on, feasting.
A white table cloth smeared with tear grease,
saltwater breath and the mortuary smell.

My anger sits boiling in the pot,
ladle it out and baste me.
I am a dry husk, brittle and unsavory otherwise.

I am the dead, the dying, and the left behind,
I am the fear, the flight and the savagery,
I am the crater left behind when everything blows up,
the dinner guest who has expired after dessert,
and sits, head lolled to the side,
as people clean up around me.

The unimaginable, and unchangeable,
what has not happened yet, and has already occurred.
The dark night that falls like a shroud,
and the next breath that doesn’t come,
the silent room that rises to a wail,
that vibrates in your ears and deafens you.

I am every mourner who laid a hand on a coffin
they picked, and found themselves unable to move away.
I am every grief stricken cemetery go-er who considered
jumping in after the casket was lowered,
but didn’t, and was bitter for it.

The direction in which I grow

Me: Should I renew ‘the blog?’ I ask my husband.
Him: Yes. Definitely. You haven’t been writing in it lately.
Me: I know. But should I bother to renew it? Do you think it matters?
Him: Yes. Do it.
Me: …maybe.
(and so the conversation went for weeks, if not months).

Words For Trade, my blog, which has been tended to in fits and starts for the last two years went silent on November 15th, the only reason I know is because a real live person called me up (I didn’t even know this happened anymore) and said ‘Hey, so your blog went offline because you haven’t renewed it, do you want to?’ and I said ‘Nope. No thanks.’ And then I promptly hung up.
Then I changed my mind. (Typical)

My blog went silent because I didn’t renew it, I didn’t renew it because I haven’t been writing and I haven’t been writing because I don’t know what the purpose of the blog is, because I don’t know what direction I am writing in, or what direction I am living in either.

Two years ago (last week), I sat at my dining room table and said to myself ‘Self- just do it. Just buy a domain name and writing something. It will be fun. Free therapy for everyone!’
I chose Words for Trade and felt exhausted after the transaction went through. Words for Trade. That was fair, I conceded. I certainly would be using words, and I wouldn’t be charging admission to read them. (Lucky you!)

Then, in a flurry of over zealousness I wrote a bunch of mish-mashed entries, about my kids, about motherhood, about how I can’t cook, I even threw some poetry in for good measure, and promptly abandoned the site. Instead of my path becoming clearer, it was as though it were the damp heat of July, everything growing at phenomenal speed, the undergrowth swallowing any direction, the self-induced pressure to have a point or moral to every story was fertilizer to the weeds of anxiety.

Who am I and what am I writing about, are queries that shadow the bigger question; “Am I making enough progress in life [to document], and am I doing a good job of living it?”

Friday night, sitting in Temple Sinai and my Rabbi is telling us about Jacob’s dream from the Torah, (which Marilyn was also scream-whispering into my ear, so the details are a little hazy), but the point of the story was that things take time, not everything happens at once and we often don’t get to see the end of the stories we are living. (That’s a really hard lesson for those of us living in the age of instant gratification.) However, these are the stories of our lives, and it is our job to write on the pages we are afforded, not necessarily to see the book to its end.

So I renewed the blog. (Surprise!)
I don’t have any clearer idea for the path of it, or really, for me, but I do know that there will be some posts about my kids, about motherhood, maybe even some poetry (with bonus curse words!) thrown in, because that’s me, and if at some point I look back and sense ‘Hey, that person looks quite familiar but not exactly the same…’ I guess I’ll know that I am indeed growing, even if I had to hack through some underbrush to see the results.

Stardust

The Mothers Song-

I, the lone adult, lop off strawberry heads,
give them over to eager hands
whose feet march the tiled floors
like a roving army.

I, the kitchen guard enslaved to endless snack orders-
or else chained to the beast in the basement,
that creaking weary warrior
sputtering out half dry clothes,
threatening to take leave of this earthly place.

My cotton-stuffed brain remembers a time when,
I was necessary for more than
wiping faces, asses, refereeing
arguments that start and end with ‘because’.

Dimly, but still there-
is someone who felt worthy of time,
who drank coffee when it was hot
instead of finding it filmed over,
in the microwave no less!

My books, like so much refuse of a life leftover
lay dormant in another worlds room.
I, the mouse nibbling at cardboard corner,
desperate to gain access.
Constantly scared away by a loud noise.

---

 

The misheard blip-

There is an upset in Spring!
This bud, refuses to burst
instead withering on it’s vine.

All its generation explode in gentle blues,
and lady pinks, but this one,
tightly, prudishly wrapped will never know
the blistering sun or the cool of dusk.

I had mapped out this universe
and now must come to terms with my halted exploration.

A week later, freshly cut stems
grace my table, harvested by loving hands.
They wilt, age, just the same
as those roughly uprooted and discarded;

for Death leaves no one un-plucked.

---

 

---

 

Is this where he left you?

“When I grow up, I want to cook for my family”

That’s my daughter Marilyn talking. She’s four (and a half. The half is very important). She hates practically every food except chocolate, and her mom (that would be me) cooks what my son lovingly calls ‘hospital eggs’ (because that’s how bland they are) and very little else. So her random proclamation caught my attention.

“And my kids, they will have both a mommy, and a daddy. Like Sam, and Judah and me.” she continued talking at me. “But not like you mommy. You have no daddy.”

There are moments in parenting when a sticky subject will pop up, you will not be prepared, and all the shower-talks you’ve had with yourself about how you will handle this water-shed moment will evaporate, you will be left with a sand paper tongue and no where to run. This was one of those moments.

I wanted to press that elusive ‘pause’ button. It’s the button I wish I had mid-temper-tantrum with my seven year old so I could gather my patience before I put him up for sale on craigslist, or when they are playing; the three of them, so sweetly with one another and I know if I move to grab my camera, the spell will be broken and someone will knock someone else’s block off. Someone should invent one of those pause buttons.

‘Of course I have a daddy.’ I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t want to confuse her, because for Marilyn, “Daddy” is a sacred word. Daddy is the person who will let her jump on the bed, who will make her a peanut butter and fluff sandwich, who tells her how proud he is of her when she does something important, and even when she does something not so important. He is the guy who drives her to school each day and picks her up each afternoon, the kisser of boo-boos, the person who gives nicknames and bear hugs. Daddy is the one who will continue to play ‘chase around the house’ long after Mommy has lost interest. She will tell you all these things, but she will leave something off the list, something that I, as a child, would have loved to take for granted; Daddy Lives here.

The idea of a daddy who simply is not present in his daughters life does not compute for Marilyn. She does not understand that while my father is not dead, he has ceased to be. I can see her wheels spinning when I tell her that my mommy and daddy could not live together, they fought a lot, and so they got divorced. She understands that. She knows kids who have parents who live in different homes. But the idea of a daddy who just doesn’t come around at all? That doesn’t make sense.

The reasons behind my parents divorce are private and unimportant to this story, but the bare details are that it happened when I was eight years old, and after that I was a very angry child for a long time. By the time I was 15 I no longer communicated with my father on any level. I could mudsling and accuse and explain and defend the reasons, but the truth is, it also doesn’t matter to this story.

After inquiring as to whether or not I had any photos of my father, Marilyn and I sat cross-legged in my bedroom and searched, but we couldn’t find any. As I put back piles of photos, Marilyn held one in her hands, studying it intently. When I asked her what photo she had she turned it around, it was a photo of little me, sitting in my old living room where I grew up.

“Is this where he left you?” Marilyn asked me very matter of fact.

I would have identified with that statement, as a kid, as a teenager. I did feel left. Abandoned. No one asks to be a child of divorced parents, and in 1992 I felt like the only kid in the whole world whose parents were humiliating her to death by daring to be unhappy, and doing something about it. I don’t feel that way anymore, every one deserves to have a chance at a happy life, because this is the only one we get. If being a family man wasn’t what my father wanted, well, he missed out on me, and I’m a pretty okay person. He missed out on my kids, and they are incredible people. That’s his loss, but only I get to choose how I let that affect the rest of my life.

I didn’t expect her to understand this though. I barely understood it until recently.

“That’s the house he used to live in. Yes.” I told her. And then I quickly pulled out another photo, a warm summer in North Carolina with her Daddy and I hugging in the shadows of a store front. “And this is where I found your Daddy.” And then a photo of my three children sitting on the couch “And this is where all my love is.”

Marilyn smiled. “I guess it’s okay then. Because sometimes things are sad. But most of the time, things are happy.” Expectations exceeded.

The moral of this story is that there is no moral. The conversation isn’t over, all the questions have not been answered. But for today, Daddy remains the hero in all the legends, the guy who makes the best pancakes, the strongest man in the world, the worst pony-tail-maker ever and the best person I could have picked to prove to me, our kids, and the world, that there is a difference between Fathers, and Daddies, and good men, never walk away.

 

Fat Chew

Fat Chew

Eight years ago I would have stalked
the streets instead of pacing our bedroom floor.

Before children became my tethers
I would have burst like a flame leaping
through an unopened window,
and left you lacerated with this fury.

Or maybe, I would have insisted you left- instead.
My gums pulled back to bare teeth,
the inner-ugly spilling out.
But not now, now everything is fragile and neccessary all at once.

In the now, things,
important things hang in the balance of us making it.
There is no room for dramatics.
Or the crust-breaking desperate breaths
like a drowning victim fighting for the surface.

No moments of would-be silence filled
instead with disappointed if-onlys.
Or broken spined poetry books to share
the torment of being let down.

Willingly,
I gutted, rinsed and cleaned out
every big town dream
till my thoughts were sterile, quiet and calm.
A lobotomy to stop wanting things outside reason.

Anything outside of being your sounding board,
your partner, was too difficult to manage fairly.

A dream tourniqutte around my lungs.
To breathe, if just to breathe.

How I have erred,
the naive fool who thought
she was only pretending at playing the joker.

How surprised when the mask would not come off!

——————————————————————————

Guard

I was meant to be sleepless.
To toil into the deep night,
working on the future, documenting the past.
Awake in time to see children off to school.

However in the bright morning I am,
just another mother flipping laundry
unloading the dishwasher,
making up four beds emptied of their contents.

I guard the door,
here when you come home
and when you leave.

Hello! Good-bye again.

How keeping up almost killed me

A friend of mine recently said (and by said I mean typed through the Internet) something poignant to me.

“Don’t compare your ‘behind the scenes’ to everyones ‘highlight reel’ ”

I cannot tell you how much this simple sentence has changed me. Of course! Right? It seems so incredibly uncomplicated. Except it’s not.

We love to compare ourselves to just about anything and anyone, and nowadays it’s so easy to get sucked into the vortex of Pinterest and Facebook and Instagram (et al).

You might find yourself thinking things like:

• Do my cookies look as delicious?
• Are my children making crafts as beautiful?
• Why didn’t that 24 step process of ‘make your own cleaning products’ work for me?! It had 5700 re-pins!
• Why didn’t our vacation look as amazing as [that person] on facebook?

These are dangerous thoughts. They make us feel ambitious and competitive but they set the bar so impossibly high that it’s no wonder we fall flat on our faces.

Let me start off this cozy little sharing circle, mmkay? We’re safe here! And then you tell me about your revelation!

Let me take you way back in time to January 20th 2013.

I had a 6.5 year old, a 3.5 year old and a 6 week old baby. It had snowed enough to keep us inside nearly every day since he was born (except to drop off and pick up from school) but not enough to accumulate into anything useful.

My eldest son had begun giving me looks of pure hatred as I continued to lock him in the house, afraid for my sanity if I tried to take three children anywhere. My daughter on the other hand happily became one with the television set. I realized this when she was sitting at the dining room table eating cheerios and reciting My Little Pony episodes. (Not lines, full episodes).

My days had blurred from the hospital to the house. Occasionally I scurried like a recently released convict to Target and back again. But the majority of my nights were spent working out ways to get rid of one of my children.

I had made a mistake, surely. I was definitely not meant to have more children than hands with which to duct tape them to the wall.

Who was I going to give up? It was three am. The baby was latched successfully to my breast like a leech and I, in my delirium was pretty sure he was drinking my brains cells instead of milk. I was checking facebook. Again. Facebook is a lonely place at 3am when you are reminded that all normal people are sleeping. (and how I hated the sleeping).

These were the things I looked upon, at 3am:

• Someone’s vacation photos.
• Someone elses date night.
• A pinterest party.
• An entire album dedicated to someone’s children making a snowman.

The thought electrocuted me through the screen and seared my brain. I must do something to prove I am handling motherhood x3 well. And that was where it all went wrong.

On three hours of sleep the next morning I catapulted out of bed and declared to my wide eyed and obviously afraid (of me) husband. “We are going to the Aviary today!” My children rejoiced at the idea of getting outside of the house and I spent the next two hours packing us up, feeding, changing and then re-feeding and re-changing the baby.

That was the first time I had the niggling feeling that maybe this was a bad idea. But I was not going to let something as ridiculous as instinct ruin my plans.

I wont hold you in suspense. The trip was a complete failure. Judah had his first blow out diaper right there in the Aviary’s viewing room and we were banished to the restroom where I realized I had left his second outfit in the car, exactly one zillion miles away. Sam and Marilyn decided this would be the best exact moment to have an epic fight right outside the restroom door that my husband chose to ignore, but the rest of the Aviary chose to watch with disapproving ‘tsk tsks’. I failed to even consider packing food for my older kids (Gee whiz, you animals want to eat?!) Judah wanted to nurse and currently my blood was boiling (from aforementioned children’s argument) and I was beginning to panic (cold sweat). These were the 2nd-15th times I thought ‘maybe this is a bad idea’. The blanket I brought to cover myself while nursing was hot, Judah was now sweating, the big kids were done with eating and bored. They took to the dusty floor to entertain themselves by pretending to be snakes. Perfect. My husband looked upon the wreckage that lay before him and became quieter and smaller as though if he made no noise, perhaps my wrath would not find him.

The worse it got, the more determined I was to have The Best Time Evar! By the end of the day we had staged photos of happy children, I had frantically stuffed souvenirs into their hands all while near-shrieking ‘Be Happy!’ at them and my husband had written Help Me on his palm and frantically flashed it at anyone who looked at him in a feeble attempt to save himself (I am pretty sure he did this). By the time we got to the car, I was near tears. I don’t think I even saw a bird, to be honest.

As we packed the kids into the car I jokingly said to my husband “Well, I got some good photos. So even if we didn’t enjoy it today, we’ll look back on it in ten years and think we enjoyed it”.

And maybe that’s true. Maybe in ten years, or twenty. I will look back on these photos and forget the time we really had and instead remember the time I wanted everyone else to think we had.

But what was I striving so hard for? To appear perfect and non-flustered? To seem calm and collected? To be some sort of bizarre alpha mom who succeeded in each parenting task with not only poise and grace but also with gusto? I just wanted to show that I could do it too. That I could merge my way back into the life of the living and keep The Wildlings happy while I did it. That I had not made some tragic mistake and ruined all our lives by exceeding my natural talents as a human being, as a mother.

I went home and posted all these photos to facebook. I put up captions like ‘Best time ever!’ and ‘So much fun!’ when what I really wanted to put up were captions like ‘Just changed my kid in a filthy restroom. Would have been more sanitary in a birds nest’ and ‘Thanks for using Judah’s fragile head as your arm rest Marilyn! Way to be careful!’.

But remember when I said the day was a Complete Failure? I fibbed a little bit. During the day of staged photos and near-meltdowns there is one photo that encompasses the truth of life. I didn’t even realize I had taken it until a few days later.

The kids didn’t need perfection, they just needed to be out of the house. They didn’t need souvenirs, they just wanted Joe and I to be present with them. And they certainly didn’t care who thought what about anything.

So if you stumble upon my facebook, if you happen upon my instagram or my amazing gorgeous pinterest boards full of things I’ll likely never do and places I’ll probably never see? Go easy on yourself. These are my highlight reels. But it’s my behind the scenes that make this family mine.

Remember to leave a note sharing your highlight vs behind the scenes story !