Friday, August 21, 2009

I am sitting in the front seat of my car on the side of the highway, the car is running, the air conditioner is going full blast, Sam is asleep in the back. I know, of course, that this is one of those things you are not 'supposed' to do. But it is a little moment of quiet solitude, a chance to look through the patterns I found today, sit still, think my own thoughts, just be.

Except, of course, that Just Being in a small town is sometimes a little tricky. Because I am not just an anonymous car pulled over on the side of the freeway with strangers passing by. This road leads to a very particular place in the middle of nowhere, and most everyone who drives this way, especially at this time of year, knows me and Sam. Never do I attempt this but someone stops to check and see if we are OK (Auntie Whoozie now just slows, waits for a thumbs up, nods, and drives on).

Today, I look up to see the brake lights on my old beloved Subaru. Big Chris and his boy are making the U-turn to come back and check on me so I roll down the window and let them know I'm OK. The boy, with his bright red mohawk, looks quite concerned, and then relieved. He's such a great kid, so big, so intense, with a mind that works so fast and furious I can hardly keep up. He is maybe 12, sometimes a little awkward and hesitant, mostly barreling forward at a furious pace.

Last week he accompanied Theresa on her weekly visits to help us dig out from under the clutter of our lives and he played with Sam, pushing him around in the little red car. And it hit me that, like this nearly man sized boy, Sam is going to be a big man some day.

This realization astounds me when it happens (it has happened before). He will be big, bigger than me. He'll be big and loud and boisterous and maybe he will have a carefully glued mohawk standing on the top of his head.

You see, the thing is, that boy is so real but Sam still somehow sometimes seems like something I read in a fairytale. I guess it is that Sam and I and Husband live in a bit of a bubble out here on the edge of the world. Our lives are so quiet and easy, so peaceful and free (except for all the madness roiling around on the inside). It is a kind of fairytale we are living. It is a blessed and lovely life.

And yet sometimes I feel a frissure of fear when I think about Sam growing into a man. What if this life doesn't seem so enchanted to him? What if he wishes he lived more like other people? What if he turns out to be a freak completely incapable of socializing with other people? What if, what if, what if...

What if I am a failure? What if I can not do this? What if I am as lame at this as I have been at everything else I have ever tried?

But shhh, quiet little monkeys, I say. What if this is not about me? What if this is not about failure or success? What if we just live our lives and believe that love truly does heal all things when the heart remains open to it? What if we believe in miracles, what if we give our hearts to love, what if we stop thinking about the future and start living in this moment?

What if we Just Be, right here on this highway, no matter how many other cars drive by?

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Today was an odd sort of day in which I continually flipped through the different versions of the story of my life, rather like changing channels with a remote. I saw my stories ebbing and flowing like the colors in a kaleidescope. I noticed that sometimes I felt quite peaceful and pleased with my life, and others I felt like an enormous failure. These dramatic shifts and swings in my view of my world I attribute to reconnecting with my beloved niece, whom I spoke to today for the first time in three years. It was a joyous thing to hear her voice, to learn about her life and all that she has created for herself. But in opening the door to her, a few little wispy black imps snuck in, scampering past her feet.

They are the little imps that used to always inhabit my thoughts, the ones that whisper that I am ugly, stupid and no good. They are the ones that inhabit any interaction with my mother and sisters, poking their bony fingers in all the old painful wounds.

I had no idea, until I stopped interacting with my family of origin, just how much pain I was carrying around, tightly packed away in the various corners of my mind. In the small hours while Sam sleeps, I have wandered back to the past, following the trails of the pain I feel now, back to its various points of origin. This is sometimes a horrifying process, for it means sitting still with things I have avoided for sometimes 40 years. I sometimes feel punched and pummeled by what comes up, literally feel the pain in my chest as the full impact hits me.

My mother left me. Because I was stupid and ugly and no good. And she left my sister, too, who must also have been stupid, ugly and no good. Because our mother took the other sister, who was pretty and clever and wonderful, with her when she went and left no forwarding address, just a bundle of food stamps and rent paid up until the end of the month.

And as a stupid, ugly and useless girl I presented myself to the world--a cracked and broken vessel into which no amount of love could be poured and ever reach the top. And I attracted very little love into my life, very little at all. Mostly, what I met with out there was desperation. I understand now that what I met was a match for what I carried inside--desperation.

Walking in the desert this evening with Sam I feel the perfect heat, the moment when the outside temperature matches my body temperature and the sun is low enough not to scorch, high enough to give the most lovely light. More and more lately this moment in a summer evening has tugged at me, gnawed at me. There is something I want from it, but I don't know what, and I remember that feeling of desperation.

Sam is roaring and chasing me and I can barely remember where I am going, that I am running, or why. I am having trouble remaining in the present, I am only here in this desert by the slightest thread of connection.

I want something, but I don't know what it is. I see hot asphalt and a Slurpee at 7-11, summer evenings, warm air, something lacking, something painful, something I want. It's back in Concord, where I must have been maybe 11. We lived there for a few months, I fell off a skateboard and broke my ankle. Construction workers brought me home, my father wasn't around so my sister called an ambulance.

I want something from that hot day, that memory, I want something that I can't have and I don't know what it is. But I notice for the first time that sense of wanting, it is something I carried with me for most of my life, so familiar that I never noticed it until I experienced the absence, and then return of it. That reconnecting with my niece, despite her own sparkle and loveliness, awakened old memories of my family, and of that feeling of emptiness and want so entwined with a dark sense of self loathing.

We are heading home me and Sam, the darkness is gathering, our foot tracks becoming indistinct. We reach the road--hot asphalt--and Sam trips over the toes of his new shoes and goes down on one knee hard. I am there in an instant, moving with that superhero lightning speed that eludes me in any other moment in time. I scoop him up in my arms and blow on his knee and give him kisses and snuggle him while I carry him home. Home is a long way away now, now that this heavy child is in my arms, but I carry him and he cries until he's done and hugs into me and as my breath comes heavier he pats my arm to comfort me.

And suddenly it hits me, I know what it is I want from that memory. I want this. I want someone besides a man in a hardhat splattered with tar, a man I don't know, to pick me up when I fall and break my ankle. I want someone to notice that it hurt. I wanted someone to hold me and love me up. I wanted someone to carry me safely home.

And no one did. Not then, or in all the years following when the injuries were so much more sinister than this.

And so later, I sit with that. And I'm sitting with it still, and writing it out here and tying off the end of this little helium balloon and sending it out into the sky. Get along little memory, go find a happy place to play. I release you now.

There was no one there that day, that year, that lifetime of mine, so long ago. But now, here I am. I am here. And suddenly, that is enough.

I scoop up my boy, I examine my heart, I look back at that child that I was. In the cool comfort of our home, we patch Sam's knee with an enormous bandaid and draw on it with magic markers. And then we play dinosaurs, start to yawn, go to bed, fall asleep.

We are safe, we are loved, we are home, we are whole. And, at least for now, the desperation has subsided.

Bless you Mom, bless you my sisters. I'll see you out there on that field, the one I read about somewhere the other day, the green meadow out there beyond the place of right-doing and wrong-doing, beyond the place of judgement, pain and hurt. I don't know when, but I will see you there one day.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Happy Birthday




What a lovely, lovely day! I love this day, I love remembering Sam's birth as a seperate person and my birth as a mother. I love eating chocolate cake made by Auntie Whoozie and Uncle Carl's mesquite grilled chicken made just for Sam. I love the friends who are our family. I love Theresa's grandchildren who brought Sam a home made card with quarters taped to it and John and Ryan and Shelley who came all the way here just to be with us and Karen who drove all this way and Diane and her big pregnant belly and Max and his happy smile, and Jim who came early and stayed late and sat outside under a tree when there got to be too many people in the house. There is so much I want to write about all that the celebration of this birthday means to me, but I was too busy living it and now I want to go to bed--so here is a happy photo instead.