misplaced mama

In gratitude.

Today: My Mirror

[i will preface this was something off topic.  last post i totally cold-dissed my computer and sure enough 20 minutes after I hit send, my computer was pronounced dead.  it’s gone.  so my ‘30 day in a row of thanks’ business will be ‘30 days when i can get on another computer’. unfortunately, uncle sam went and took a bunch of money i was hoping for to buy the much lusted after ibook, so patience will be my practice as i await the funds for my new machine. hand jobs on the corner anyone? 20 bucks a pop].

* * *

Sula! If you don’t give me that right now I am going to get a better toy and I am never going to share it with you ever!

Sula! I am gonna smack you in the head with this bowl at your head if you don’t give me the blue marker!

Sula! I am going to throw you out the window if you don’t give me my book!

* * *

Mia. Those words you used with Sula today are not kind ways to talk to anybody. You can choose words that will make you feel better and won’t make Sula sad.

Long after the fact of the numerous five-year old volcanic expressions, I sat down to talk to her.

But mama, you talk like that.

And I look in her big brownish, greenish, yellowish round saucers for eyes with lashes that are illegally long. She looks right back at me, then glance away for a moment, knowing in some little kid way that what she is telling me is going to make me react somehow, she knows that what she is saying to me is big for me.

I don’t use those words, but evidently my sentiment falls through the holes in the sieve.

I do? I talk like that? I don’t say those things to you.

More quietly than she has been all day Yes mama. You talk mad last day and today. I am just talking mad like you.

* * *

And everyday I get to look into this mirror. Today it looked ugly, like beyond bad hair and acne. It was horrible mother day in my river valley. Yes. She is right. My level of stress has been so high and my voice reflects how totally and utterly unconscious I am about it. Sometimes a straight up look in the mirror is all I need.

I have been watching how my voice sounds, the energetic quality and the words I choose even when I am totally frustrated and want to throw every last one of the out the window, shedding, slobbering four-legged friends included.

Thank you mirror, for reminding me how to walk my talk.

i come here and i can hear rattling of the skeletons, the silence of a graveyard at night, the emptiness of a bachelor refrigerator.  i have been on a computer fast, a digital detox.  i am trying to be here, not somewhere else world-wide and webby.  I finally stopped goggling "what should i do with my life" and went cold turkey from window shopping at etsy.  I discontinued my wonderment in who all me 205 Facebook friends were and why I really did care what they ate for dinner.  My eyeballs roll back and feel dry everytime I hit power On.  My arthritis acts up when i finger the keys.  Something counter-intuitive about this machine and me right now.  But I miss this space.  And so one of the muses called upon me.  I figure someone has to make me chuck something up.

In Gratitude everyday,  but for the next thirty I’ll write about it.

Today: to feel. 

Isn’t is just amazing to feel? I don’t care what it is. The soft kiss of a lovers lips on my neck or the sticky fingers of my girls interlaced with my own. The hot flames of a bonfire stinging the front of my face. The sharp lash of someone’s tongue devouring my ego. An incisive heartache. The dark and morbid moods when the moon is just about New. Longing. Restlessness. The nothingness of time when I write. A throbbing tubbed toe, the moments I am wailing on the ground, and that one moment that the pain magically lifts. A good scrubby hair washing. Being buzzed, alone, wandering through city streets. The feeling of hating the cold and loving the warmth. Hating the heat and loving a cool rain. Lace panties against worn in jeans. A hand placed on a frosty winter window. Suffocation of children climbing all over me. Exhaustion. Open to be climbed on. Closed. Jealousy. Scared shitlessness. In awe. Sitting in comfort. Miserably uncomfortable. Holding in a pee. Orgasms. Remembering someone who is dead.

I know it’s broad, all encompassing, the physical to the psychic, the seen and the unseen. But to feel, isn’t that really what we are looking for? Isn’t it all we want? We came into our bodies so we could feel. I don’t venture to know much about the spirit world but personally I think that I gave up living in perfected bliss to step into flesh and feel this spectrum, the riff-raff and rainbows, the mind-fucks and heart palpitations. Tumors and headstands. Whips and feathers. Betrayal of a lover and the love of a child. And to just feel it, not getting dragged into reasoning or explanation or psychoanalytical doldrums. To just feel it. To feel is to really be alive. I like it, feeling. I give thanks for that.

Today, for about an hour or so, I felt like I wanted to hit someone. A good high kick in the face would actual satisfy me to no end. Whaaaapooo. A clock in a jaw. Jab in the gut. A twist of the nuts. My pointer and middle finger right into someones eyes. BAM BAM a club to the head. Nobody I felt like doing this to. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I just felt like it. My inner  longing to have a date with rage and violence. And I thought, as I sat in front of the fire and sewed little felt flower cut-outs onto a crown for Sula, isn’t it just so damn human to feel this and to make the choice to do nothing about it, just feel it until I don’t. And then I pricked my finger with that long thick needles I was using. And it hurt and I winced and I looked down and there was a little bead of blood. And I sucked it and got to taste my own blood.

I recently have been attending Sweat Lodge and it’s my ultimate challenge for me to feel. I have chosen to feel an array of things like the vibrating sharpness of tattoo needles all over my body, 13 hour hallucinations, bikini-line waxes, self-deprecating relationships, piercings in intimate places, hour long lotus pose , unmedicated births. But the sweat is where I resist feeling the most. It’s the one place that’s really hard to leave the spot of comfortable numbness and go beyond, into a realm where it it doesn’t feel easy or familiar. It’s melancholy, anxious, supernatural and to be totally honest, fucking scary. I hold on to myself so tightly in lodge, keeping myself from shifting to the Other Side. The heat, the unadulterated, pitch-blackness, the prefuse sweating and constant body rubbing, all of it is an invite to let go of where I am and transport to another state of feeling. I only inch my way there, just barely allowing myself to betaken over by the dance of steam in my face, the closeness of the bodies next to me, the inhalation of the sweetgrass, the beat of the drums. for the most part, I spend my time in lodge trying to feel something cold.  I reach behind where I sit and feel for that tiny little crack where the ground meets the tarp and an inch of earth can be felt. I love that I can feel that, so good just to know its still there, the cold.  I don’t love that I don’t love feeling the sweat. That in itself keeps me interested in going, keeps me practicing becoming a river of wetness, dislodging what has me clogged. And I like feeling that, like I have so much more to do.

And to keep it simple. Today. I felt:

Victorious.  I got her to sit down and right some thank you cards.  And then I felt pride.  She can write thank you all on her own.

I felt like I was going to go down in history for being the shittiest parent alive.  So I gave them some watercolors and made that little one an indigo crown and took a photo of these bowls which always make me really happy.

I felt pure honest to goodness elation.  I felt their happiness and laughter.  I felt trust.  I felt giggly that they decided to wear the baby’s very unused bibs.

I felt like a genius.  I used some masking tape to tape my favorite but broken sunglasses to my head so I could look superhip on our walk this very sunny snow day.

I felt like even more of a genius for having something to do with the creation of her.  And I felt really good that I had food to feed her.  And I felt super clever to have snapped a photo of her with a bib on so my mother can stop saying Shouldn’t she be wearing a bib? And I felt those big old teeth of hers deep, deep in my heart.

On second thought.  I feel like a total idiot.  Especially when my husband refused to walk next to me on our walk because apparently he didn’t think my glasses were superhip.  I felt great pain when I took the masking tape off around my head of hair and felt even dumber.  I felt sad at the amount of hair I lost.

I felt like I was grasping, holding too tightly, wanting time to stop.  My last little girl is getting so big.  Climbing and standing and screaming DOOOGGGY NOOOO out the window.  And then i felt guilty for wanting her to stay tiny.  I felt like I had to want her to grow up, but then I said hell with that she’s my baby forever. 

I felt ridiculious giddy wiggly love for him.  And then I felt like I wanted him to go back to work after he dissed my masking tape shades.  And then I felt like I wanted to curl in his wooly old coat forever.