Sunday brain clutter

I went into my classroom for the first official time since I got the job. A big geometric room, with yellow paint and fairly new rugs. It’s still waiting for summer cleaning though, so other than sitting in the middle of it to draw a quick floor plan on the back of a used piece of printer paper, I didn’t stay. I’ll be there enough once it’s waxed and scrubbed, arranging chairs and labeling things. Instead, I went shopping.

There is a whole slew of outlet stores right down the road from my school, and I’ve been dying to go, but have never had both hands free. That is probably one of the greatest things I miss about my pre-baby life: both hands. Now it’s a rare occasion when I’m not schlepping Bean and/or his stroller/diaper bag, or some other baby related accoutrement. But today it was just me and my blue bag.

I discovered something depressing while shopping. Something I’ve kindof been made aware of, but have been ignoring: my boobs have shrunk. Yeah, I’m stepping this low. A boob post. But I’m a WOMAN, after all, and women are aloud to whimper and whine about such things—especially after my negligee drawer has only seen D cups for the past year. I’m now in what might be called the “nearly B” category. Did you even know there was such a category? Google it. You’ll see. There is, and I’m in it. I drowned my sorrows by spending a small fortune on glorious midnight blue on-sale bath towels, and savoring more of this wine (it’s cheap, and luscious: a bouquet of blackberries, and a sweet finish.)

Doing

1) Grinning because it's a perfect 70 degrees and sunny today, with no haze. The mountains seem close enough to touch---like perfect cardboard cut-outs on the set of a play.2) Planning to make kebabs, red wine & peaches and ice cream for dinner with friends tonight. I'm into cooking lately. Trying new spices (juniper berries & star anise), and loving blush wine (how can anyone not love something that color?) 3) Tiling (finally!) our backsplash with lovely white handmade tiles. A zillion special cuts, cement on my cut-off jeans, and we're one step closer to having a finished house. 4) Wincing when I smile because Bean wacked me in the eye brow with DH's watch this morning. Ow. He thought it was FUNNY when I started to cry. Grr.

So much goodness

Sweet cantaloupe for breakfast, like golden crescent moons on our plates, and tonight a dinner party with our neighbors. Red wine by the glass full, thai noodles, chicken grilled to perfection. Laughter and unexpected ease. Our neighbors are amazing people. The kind of people I always wished I had as neighbors, but never believed really existed. The kind who say: come over to my house any time, grab a beer if I’m not there or borrow my tractor. The kind who are professional chocolatiers (no kidding, they make amazing tuffles and live just down the road), mechanics, doctors, and athletes, who sit us down and tell us where the local swimming holes are, who to call to get our brush cleared, or how to handle the local skunks (walk right by them, pretending they don’t exist & they won’t spray.) The kind who make authentic German strudel, or go for 25 mile 'casual' Sunday bike rides. Yeah. That kind. How did we get this lucky?

Photo Friday: Portrait

Reaching

Tonight the room is supple with heat. On the kitchen counter, new red potatoes, yellow tomatoes, and a half-drunk bottle of bully hill wine---red and sweet. Outside, the dark ink of night pools up against window panes.

Since we moved to this hilltop, wild with poplar saplings and clover, I find myself thinking often of my dad, though rarely in the way I used to do---remembering small fragments of the life I knew with him at its center. Now it is almost as though I’m catching glimpses of him right here beside Bean and me, as we ramble about the yard, walking with tall sticks, or finding small fossils. And as if they were some ethereal proof of this, dragon flies and butterflies as wide-winged as the palm of my hand, often follow us about, or settle near us on windy stems of grass.

It seems as though moving here, I’ve inadvertently moved beyond the bitter sweet of remembering—to some place that follows the improbable zig zag flight of finches towards the future.

I stumble over my thoughts tonight, wanting like I always do, to reach out and touch what the experience of loosing my father was, and never grasping more than empty air. As though the experience were a foreign film that I've watched a hundred times, and still the crux of the story remains a mystery: lost in translation between what the living mind can know and the spirit mind cannot say. He died four years ago, yesterday.

Outside moths with wings like frothy chocolate beat against the screen, trying to touch the light. Sometimes I’m angered by them: their innate stupidity sends them again and again up against the scorching heat of a flame or bulb, and in the morning I find their delicate corpses scattered on the sill. Other times I understand them utterly: that fierce longing to know what exists just beyond the grasp of all things knowable. In a way I am like them, throwing myself again and again at the mystery of death, trying to reach out and touch the light on the other side.

Self portrait as: trying to get the balance right

The morning after our fight feels exactly the way it does when you walk outside after a rainstorm: everything is washed clean, and light refracts from a thousand small droplets of water.

He looks different to me: maybe more like the person he really is. And as I watch him making coffee, I see that this is what marriage is: a process of holding the mirror up again and again for each other, so that we may see ourselves anew—and also, so that we may be seen anew. It takes both: to see, and to be seen, to become truly aware of ourselves—and despite the hurt of it, this is what we offer each other in the moments when we hurl words about in the narrow place of our anger.

I catch myself sucking in air, realizing that no matter how long we’ve known each other, I’ll only know a small sliver of who he is. This is why I’m grateful for our moments of tension---because they force something deeper to open, and for a brief moment I catch a glimpse of the him that’s bigger than the picture I already have.

It is so easy to grow accustomed to seeing only the part of him that is us. The person that picks up where I leave off, emptying the dishwasher, sautéing zucchini, running Bean’s bath, or the other myriad things we do together every day. Easier still to see him for the things he doesn’t do—the small, banal things that don’t really matter at all, that my mind alights on like a hungry vulture after a day spent giving, without time to myself.

Today I lie in the tall grass on the hill behind our house, all alone. The green is so vibrant here it almost sings: the foliage is such a riot of emerald hues, dense with insects and ruffled in the wind. I close my eyes and let go, feeling the earth spin.

I feel my cells drinking this solitude, replenishing the part of me that has grown sparse in the past few months, when every moment was jam-packed with responsibility for things that had very much to do with us, but never to do with simply me. I know he feels this too, this fierce need for time spent all alone doing things according to pure selfish whimsy. We both thirst for it, just as we thirst for each other, and this is the push-pull I think we’ll always feel. A struggle to find the balance between our separate selves, and the self that is sum of our love.

Without directions

We sit in the walk-in closet amid the silent heat of boxes and winter garments, and our words fly around us like an angry swarm of bees. Here, everything requires translation but the lexicons are burning.

What do we do here? In this place where both of us feel like we’ve reached the outer boundaries of love---when really the only boundary we’ve reached is the perimeter of our own large egos. The tool box is locked, and the delicate wrenches of kindness are inside.

In our culture it’s easy to interpret “successful relationship” to mean “effortless.” Friction doesn’t fit the definition we’re so often fed: the quick Hollywood snapshots of couples walking hand in hand, laughter always on the lips. Hurt—-that parabola formed at the intersection of anger and loneliness and loss---does not belong to the stereotypical shape of affection. And yet we find it here, close to us, filling the space between us, even though we are in love.

We feel terror seeping in, the moment we go beyond what’s comfortable. What if we can’t recover? What if the words we’re saying are really the basis of regret or unraveling? What if we can’t rebuild, continue, grow? Now in the heat and silence, there are large gaps between us as we look away, staring at the slope of the gabled eaves, the shelves organized with shoes and belts.

Why are we here? Away from everyone, this unventilated room is the only place where we can fight tonight with no one hearing. But really, why are we here, in the middle of this place, exchanging oxygen for anger? Because we are unskilled and unpracticed in this kind of action. Few share this part of the journey; when the rubble strewn mess of for-granted and regret collide.

We ache in this small space, trapped by our egos, and our inability to really reach beyond ourselves and meet the other. Shame drenches us, and makes us stubborn. In the balance of things we keep believing a loss of face is somehow greater than a loss of love.

So suddenly we’re there, at the breaking point. You’re walking away from me, too tightly wound, and I’ve given you nothing for everything you’ve tried to say. You’re starving but somehow I can’t offer you any bread of apology. I’ve taken yours and thrown it to the sparrows.

You stand to walk away, and as you do I finally break open, no longer caring about being heard or being right or being sad. The brittle shell around my heart breaks all apart and with the greatest effort I say it. Like Atlas lifting an entire world, I strain under the burden of my own weakness.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “For not giving you an inch.” Your body turns slightly, and you smile, just a little. Then we try again.

We do not know how to fight this way: one to one, face to face, navigating the battle map of our hearts, and this is our cultural loss. Personal conflict is always locked behind closed doors, a thing of shame. We’re taught never to talk about our family’s heartbreak, about the endless ways we hurt each other, and recover.

Yet all around us conflict is glorified in external ways. The media is saturated with constant acts of aggression. And we hardly stop to think about this lesson we teach our children, generation after generation. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a link between our failure to share the unmarked maps of our personal conflicts with our children, and our failure as a culture to live together peacefully in the world. Each generation grows up just as unskilled as the last, in matters of the heart. Each generation encountering it’s own inadequacy in understanding how the mystery of loosing and winning, of giving and receiving, of selfishness and selflessness is contained within the greater mystery of love. Could we do better than this for our children?

Everything is at stake in the moment I reach beyond the brittleness of myself. And when you turn back, that smile quivering at the very edges of your lips, we’ve made it to the other side.

But it takes both of us to move ahead. Waving a white flag of apology does nothing by itself. Too often you say those words trying to end the strife before it’s started, before we feel ourselves raw and exposed, on the operating table of each other’s mercy. Too often, you say “I’m sorry” before either of us know what we’re really talking about, before we reach what matters buried beneath what matters less. It takes great effort and great risk to keep talking beyond apology, beyond blame, beyond embitterment, without walking away.

We stay. And now at the breaking point, we hover like surgeons, over the open wound of our growing love, attempting at once to remove the malignancy and repair the damage. We are untrained and clumsy, yet our effort counts for something, and after hours of this mess, we are sitting together on the bed. Your arms are around my shoulders, my hand traveling the contour of your knee. We are through the worst of it: through the time of where transfusions were needed, where openness needs to replace bitterness, and the chances of survival depended not on how much we were willing to loose, but on how much we were willing to give.

Now I write, because writing does something alchemical to experience; transforming it from a blur of things merely felt, to something better understood. I write so that I can remember—so that we can remember; my words bearing witness to the things we hardly ever say (that hardly anyone ever says), that are, in the end, the words that matter most.

From a family of writers

You know how it is when you get an email from someone and it’s so good you can’t bear to just click ‘save’? I got one like that from my older sister last night, and I have to share. She’s a sales rep for the uber-cool new woman-specific clothing company Lole (“Live Outloud Every Day), and she’s traveling through a whole bunch of Western states showing their new fall line. 9 days on the road. Dear Family,

Miles and miles under the belt, streaming across the lands of the Nez Perce. Cheyenne and Shoshone, the engine laboring under the cruise control as rolling hill and pass grind under the tires. It's amazing and not surprising that they call this the land of the big sky. It's breathtakingly beautiful. I can imagine those native faces crossing the waist high grass on horse back, moving swiftly and efficiently from summer to winter camps, leaving nothing in their passing but the slight traces of a camp fire pit. It's amazing what we've done to this country, and by we I mean us white folks. The mine tailing piles high, filling entire valleys in some places; toxic streams trickle from the fetid flanks and poison entire communities. It's so hard to take, this mix of breathtaking beauty and life-taking toxicity, Montana yet another state of juxtaposition, the awe-inspiring amazing with the equally deadly amazing.

I passed a forest fire today. Burning bright against the hills, smoke searing lungs of all in range no matter the air setting on the car air conditioner, fire fighters huddled against the shade of a helicopter watching the flames move ever closer no matter the effort of the air tanker above. This land is so wild it steals your heart; just like that kitten found behind a dumpster so weak and starving you have no choice but to take it in.

I am exhausted today. The odometer measures nearly 1500 miles so far. Tomorrow I drive north to Flathead Lake and Kalispell. To the cool of the mountains, a welcome break from the heat of the valleys, I will turn and twist, following the flanks of the hills and peaks that make this part of the world so famous. I have had only about four hours I can call my own so far this trip. I am a maniac for stretching my personal limits of endurance. Let's see, Kalispell is three hours drive from Missoula that means I can show three accounts, tour the town, stop at the local dive for lunch and then race for the hills, arriving in a blur to do it all over again. But something about this job inspires me to be my best and that is all I can ask of a job.

I miss my husband I miss my animals and most of all I miss the green, color so achingly hummingly green it hurts my teeth to look at. Out here, it's all brown: beautiful but brown indeed, interspersed with irrigated farms….

Good, huh? So are their clothes. I’m in love with several hoodies, and some of their pants make you look like you have the perfect ass, regardless of your actual ass. Check ‘em out.

I'm not saying

Either this gorgeous handbag is the real deal & an exquisite gift from my mother-in-law. Or, it is a knock-off that she bought on Canal street, after following a man who didn’t speak any English up seven flights of stairs to a back room in the garment district where she was locked into a room overflowing with bags, where she selected this beautiful specimen for a mere fistful of smallish bills. I’m not telling.

But I love it because it does far more than simply schlep all my stuff around: it makes my painfully boring black t-shirt and khakis fashionable, simply by being tossed over my shoulder nonchalantly. For this reason alone, I will now commence carrying it everywhere.

Didn’t think I was the type to tote Prada bag? I didn’t think so either. But then I though this might be just the thing I need to rectify my flagrantly pathetic approach to style.

I'm all about effortless fashion, people. And what could be more effortless than carrying a bag that can hold everything from diapers to lip gloss and still look divine?

Self portrait as an elephant

The giving, the always tugging, scrambling, jungle gym antics that my body has grown accustomed to, since him. ‘Here honey, you can hand mama the toilet paper, but no you can’t flush while I’m going. No, stop. Okay, four flushes is really enough.’

Banal things I never knew to cherish have become ornately choreographed two person acts.

I think of elephants, while we brush our teeth. Our arms like trunks, entwined each morning: his little hand holding my brush, while I frantically wiggle his brush around trying to get all four quadrants of his mouth before he grows board of the process entirely.

Or waking to his fierce affection: an inquisitive finger up my nose, perhaps, or a wet series of kisses planted on a partially open eye. My body is no longer really my own, though I try to claim it. My padded cup bras have returned, now that I’ve stopped nursing.

“They’re really small now, huh?” DH may have commented last night, the way one might comment on zucchinis.

I stand in front of the full length mirror looking at the geography of stretch marks, muscle and soft flab that my body has become, and feel the familiar disaffection rise like bile.

Then I try to remember: tomorrow I’ll wake, and before I’m fully conscious, my body will lift and carry me through a thousand small movements. I’ll kiss my husband, carry my son to our bed, press his tousled head to my cheek, and fend of his clobbering embrace.

Tomorrow I’ll wake, and my body, without being asked, will consent to the daily task of lifting and carrying, like an elephant bowing to permit a human so small, to clamber up onto her back.

More 'self portraits as...' here.

Sunday antics

Doing

1) eating sour cherries2) unpacking boxes in my office and finding: old magnetic poetry, nude pregnant pictures, squeezed out tubes of paint, and a passle of blank cards 3) panting in front of the fan (it's HOT here right now, and humid) 4) loading the truck with broken-down cardboard boxes to take to recycling 5) planning an evening of leisure with just DH: frisbee, perhaps, or a picnic 6) grouting the last of the tile and staining doors (a bathroom door would be devine) 7) removing the daily dead mouse gift our cat brings to the back door (why, why do they do that?) 8) making grilled cheese waffles for lunch (try it) 9) hankering to make peach pie 10) wishing I had more time to blog

Things I crave right now:

1) Having paint on my fingers and making things again. 2) Splattering paint on the page & blotting a wet brush on the corner of my terry robe. 3) Sitting in a bright oval of lamplight in my new studio, stuff still in boxes everywhere, and not minding when a little paint gets on the floor. 4) Eating dinner outside, with shadows growing long across the slatted table. 5) Licking my fingers after eating something sweet. 6) Walking with my guys after dinner along new trails; finding a pond with a topsy-turvy bird house on a pole, and an old stone wall from long ago. 7) This song. It has the perfect beat. Hearing it once is not enough. 8) The way DH has been glancing at me lately, across the room. In that kind of way. 9) Fresh sheets and fresh flowers in my bedroom 10) A clothesline mood wall like Mav’s to hang whatever strikes my whimsy.

What are you craving?

(Go on, you know you want to write a list!)

Running in the rain

I went running for the first time today since our move six weeks ago. It felt a bit like remembering how to bike again after a long hiatus: the synchronized action of my limbs following the kinesthetic blueprint of forward motion. I never wrote about not running the marathon, but I didn’t, and it made me sad for weeks. Part of the reason I didn’t run was because we moved THE VERY NEXT DAY, and that was entirely poor and ridiculous timing (what WAS I thinking when I scheduled it?) But most of the reason was because I developed a stress fracture during the latter half of my training program and despite dutiful trips to the physical therapist and cool green orthotics for my shoes, my shin would hurt excruciatingly for days after a run and eventually I was forced to weigh my options. Run the marathon and be injured for the summer or, skip it, move to our new with a wholly functioning body, and enjoy the rest of the summer sports that I so dearly love.

So I didn’t run, and then suddenly I was immersed in the massive project of unpacking in an unfinished house, and somehow six weeks have whipped by in a blur. But I’ve missed running. A little like a craving, a listlessness in my tendons at night. So today when I leapt off the front stoop and took off down our winding gravel drive, I was grinning.

It felt so good. And it felt so bad.

Do you know how much muscle tone you loose if you just up and take six weeks off of any regular exercise? A lot. Throw in weaning a baby, and the ensuing hormone restructuring, and it’s a sure-fire recipe for feeling the way I imagine sea turtles must, loafing their way up some sandy escarpment to make a nest.

A four mile run took me a lot longer than a four mile run did a month and a half ago, and afterwards I sat in the corner of the couch and begged for someone to make me a PBJ and a glass of milk because I couldn’t move. But surprisingly, during the run I was so distracted by the beauty of this place where I live that I barely noticed how unmistakably plod-like my gate was.

The wet air was fragrant. Everything is in bloom or fruit now: raspberries are ripe along the hedgerows, and elder berry blossoms, burdock, cornflowers, and Black Eyed Susans spread out across the fields like a thousand speckled suns. And somehow, the time mostly went by without my noticing.

It is inevitable I’ll feel it tomorrow. I’ve started to notice how my body no longer forgets the cumulative effects of the things I do to it each day. But there’s something of value in having one’s attention be focused on one’s body in this way: noticing it for the things it can do, for the way it feels, rather than simply for the way it looks. I’m ready for this again---especially after spending a week on the beach being all too aware of how I appear to the rest of the world.

(You know how the flight attendant always cautions that “your baggage may have shifted during the flight,” ? Let’s just say this is a good way to describe my physical accoutrements as well, since Bean. )

"The moon, Mama!"

The smell of chocolate cake baking makes me heady. My friend’s birthday is this weekend, and I’ve spent the evening whipping frothy egg whites, melting dark chocolate and licking my fingers.

The house is quiet, in that way houses get at the end of the day when everything is put in it’s place and children are asleep. Outside an orchestra of insects trill, and across the room The Piano soundtrack plays. I haven’t heard it since high school, when I loved it with a sort of moody passion. Finding it again, the same feeling rises up. The drama and cinematic artistry of the movie moved me to tears, and the music still manages to slip into the small open places in my soul, in a way that begs for solitude and intimacy both.

The past few days have been filled with sun drinking and wave kicking; long enough away from home to miss it. And it has also been one of those milestone weeks for Bean, who has taken to everything here with wide-eyed wonder: the lizards with their bright red throats, the delicate hibiscus, the sleek bellied otter, the ocean’s waves, the shells, the snakes, the endless sand.

I find myself staring at him (like I always seem to,) trying to mark in my head exact moments: the way he knelt on a big chair at the table, and ate couscous all by himself with a spoon last night; how he ran wildly, willfully, eagerly down the shore towards a flock of rosy-legged ibis today, carefree and confident that we would follow; or how tonight, getting ready for bed, he kept pressing his small palms to my lips for kisses, and then turned them so I could kiss the backs of his hands, and then his wrists and elbows. Over and over again he wanted this ceremony of affection, and over and over again I complied, my heart filling with a feeling beyond sweetness, beyond sorrow, beyond joy, but made up of all three.

I used to feel entirely one with him---the border between his self and mine, a mere distinction of skin. But now he has started to really become his own self---choosing to ignore me when I call him, fighting to do things without help, or asking for things with specificity and intention.

Each week, each month as a mother, it is necessary to learn a new choreography of love. And now in this dance there is a delicate space between us; space that he fills with his giddy twirling, his wild happy limbs, his smile, his troubled pensive frowns, and his many new words.

“Moon, mama!” he says now, pointing up at the sky. And there it is, the moon bright and clear, against the evening blue. I feel my heart skip a momentary beat in wonderment: he has just claimed the moon for his own, for the very first time.

Pleasure

Upon arrival

Sun drunk, I remember how much I love the ocean. To be pounded over and over by salt water, to feel sand, rife with shells under my feet. In the back yard, a pond with possible alligators, ibis, herons. On the beach, sea turtle tracks like swirving half moons up the sand, marking the way to round nests of eggs. Giddy to be around a woman I love this much---who also loves Bean and DH, and even giddier to walk out the door from lunch to see the space shuttle shooting up into the sky, suddenly dissapearing beyond the blue. Tomorrow more time to write and post, and some pictures of the long legged birds, the hundred lizareds, and Bean frollicking on the beach. Happy 4th!

Mapping home

It’s been a busy week: tumbling through these strange days of weaning, unpacking, and packing all over again for vacation. The fact that I’m not necessarily an organized person flares up in times like these, and I find myself circling the house every morning looking for my hairbrush, or trying yet again to remember the last of ten items on one of my many mental lists. But despite the small specks of chaos that continue to dance over the surface of my days, things are falling into place, and home has begun feeling like just that. Home. I’ve had the hankering to cook here: grilled tuna and couscous salad, vanilla waffles, banana scones, barbecued chicken and corn on the cob, hearty soups. I love sliding pots over the smooth soapstone of our counters, and finding knives and measuring spoons just where they should be.

Every day Bean, DH and I go for ambling walks: imprinting the geography of our land onto our souls. Learning by heart the location of the many apple trees, the small creeks, and the thick carpet of wild strawberries in the high meadow at the back of our land. We visit the sheep and donkeys down the road; walk through chest high grasses and daisies to a thicket of blackberries, just starting to swell and ripen; or sit out on the newly mown lawn in the evening to watch the bats zip about, backlit by a pastel sky.

My heart has been longing for this kind of solace: for this connection to a place. This sense of belonging. And now I drink it up daily, gulping with a certain disbelief. Eager at once to know everything about this place, and to never be done exploring.

From the driveway, the moon looked like a chip from a teacup wedged into the piece of sky between the V of our roof last night, and across the meadow and along the tree line, fireflies were blinking like a hundred small stars in a universe of grass. And when we went to bed—DH and I pressing into each other, reacclimating to being just us in bed, coyotes started to howl, high-pitched and wild, from the nearby wood.

Up close

What it is

Paint gets everywhere, on his legs, on the rough red of the patio bricks, on the paper, and I nod. “Yes,” I say, “Yes that’s awesome! Do some more.” And he grins, swirling the brush through the paint, confident in my pleasure.

He swipes the paper with a bold stroke of red, thick as jelly, and looks up, checking for my grin. Then a smile alights softly on his face, like a playful cat, matching my own. So here we are, in this moment of pure joy. All previous frustrations, tantrums, exhaustion, entirely obliterated by this bright happiness.

Each day I learn this, again and again: allowing someone to make you happy is the ultimate forgiveness. Allowing a small gesture of joy or tenderness to pool in your heart, again and again and again, even when things have come up short. To open, even after words have zig-zagged like blistered arrows across the room and leaving dark trails of hurt across the heart; to allow a small fissure for pleasure to split sorrow in half like a opened melon, this is forgiveness.

*** PS--the theme over at Mama Says Om this week is forgive, go check it out.