Love Parts

I can’t really look straight at the Haiti disaster, or let it in. It seems the heart is asked to do this over and over: To try and encompass all the human groans and turmoil, all that it can bear before bursting.

Each day is this way. It takes years to understand why we count each joy, each christening so carefully. Takes years to know why the moments of laughter, communion, joy, must be noted, felt. When you’re young  you think there will be a million of those moments coming.

But they aren’t endless. Beads on a string. Something beautiful to hold onto beneath an avalanche of loss.

If you’re experiencing what I do some days, a swamping of your person under the groan and twist of the human condition, remember the rule of One:

Instead of trying to understand all the people who suffered today, think of just one face, one person, one heart. Send your comfort out to that one. Take care of them. Give them your prayer, your consideration, your love.

This is how a tragedy becomes human, and grows small enough to eventually encompass. This is how we help each other heal.

Trying to want redemption

I guess I’ve been way deep in it. Emotional highways are the only part of me that go very far, and so.

This week (this year, this decade)

_ urgh.

It’s so scary to start out.

“I am angry.”

“and sad. And I have been forever, in adult years.”

I miss my kid. Not the one I have, the one I didn’t have, 12 years ago. The one I was too frozen and weak and mechanical to experience. My baby.

I failed. Failed me, failed her. It was not entirely conscious and not voluntary, except in the fact that I voluntarily did everything I could to blot out my own existence in ‘real life’ so as to numb out what was happening, even as the moments passed and my inability to connect became a situation of shame and grief and hopelessness.

She survived. She was given over to other people’s care, at least in part.

I guess all these years later, the shame part has made it hard to give voice to the other part of why this is so hard to get over. You seek to rationalize your own actions, find the cause, find a way to go forward, but I can’t go forward because the truth is, I don’t want to. I was trying to freeze time because that experience- motherhood, the connection to my girl was just as important to me as it is to anyone, and I don’t want to not have it.

Still.

I want to have it. Not just to make the bad feelings go away, or to assuage guilt, or to make her better, but to make me better, too. I want my baby.

The things that made it so hard for me were the things that could have made me a great mom. Over-sensitivity, deep emotional response. Those things that drove me away from human connection after systematic abuse were also the things that could have made our relationship amazing when she was little.

I didn’t have it.

I do not want it with anyone else. And now it is too late.

And I am mourning.

And it hurts.

I am a little tired of people saying, ‘Well she’s here NOW. You can make the connection NOW.’

I know that. But I can’t quite do that yet, and it’s maybe time to acknowledge the loss. Yes, the loss. Of her, and me- the her she would have been if I had been able to be a mother. The me I could have been if I’d been able to be her mother.

Let’s grieve that, because it’s gone. And I’m sorry, and I want it, but it’s gone.

So let’s grieve that now.

So maybe we can move on.

Wakey-wakey

It’ll be slow! It will be slow, darnit, but I’m waking up a little- here (blogland)- & at home. I think I go into a safe mode, just like a computer, when all the holiday stuff has to be got through.

So, like,

what did ya get? For Christmas I mean. I missed it. Anybody get a tuba? A trombone? A shiny susaphone? I didn’t either.

I have this iTunes gift certificate, though, that I’m sitting on. $40 bucks at Barnes and Noble? No problem! I’m all over that. But I have no idea what to do w/$10 from the iTunes store. There’s so many choices! Music, t.v., movies- inevitably buyers remorse will set in if I pick a movie, cus the ones you really want to see tend to disappoint. “I coulda bought Star Wars with that!”

So if you have a *really* awesome recommendation, be it t.v., books, movies, I challenge you to hook me. Intrigue me. Make me a fan of something I never woulda thought of-

but of course, you hafta sell your suggestion, first.

I just got on here, mostly to babble and stuff. I wish there were something profound lifting the roof off my cerebrum, but alas- not.

So have a jolly Thursday. Do.

Poeming

I have a weird relationship with poetry. Sometimes I really need to write what I would call a poem, but unlike regular prose, I don’t feel I have any craft at the medium.

It’s a strange feeling, because I can *recognize* a good poem immediately. There’s a resonance right there, the language does all sorts of things in a good poem that you wouldn’t think language can do.

I can see it, I just can’t make it very well, and this is where I know the frustration of the passionate art aficionado who cannot paint, or the deeply sensitive lover of beauty whose own facade is ugly- I love the twist and ache of crystallized language, but I fall short at creating it.

So I’ve sort of made my own style of nugget sized prose- call them scapes, or oubliettes or itty weirdnesses. They aren’t exactly, really poems.

And they don’t necessarily mean something. (They don’t necessarily not.) A poem, to my mind, is something like a snapshot- the imagery of emotions taken in a moment. It doesn’t hafta fit into a framework or have immediately recognizable context. It can be inspired directly, or by several degrees of separation.

The result always fill me with ambivalence. Ah well. At heart this place has always been my space, to write or not to write, to poem or not to poem. -And so the nuggets will continue.

For now.

AfterMaths

Tonight, you fall in love.
It was the black t-shirt that did it, and the laughter
and someone cuter, better at things than me.
You have an eye-crinkle
that could not have escaped obvious romance plots for long.
And as I love, contorted around my love,
twisted in a little knob around a central, expanding point,
it really does all seem ridiculous.
Not tonight, I mean, but the faces-
primates, shaved and charming, carefully groomed,
& our expanding star,
burning slowly.
We live on artifice and crutch,
like gravity, for example.
Look at the clouds.
If anything were really like reality down here
we’d all be hurtling off this little orb,
reaching, clutching, losing
flying off-
chartered for panic, chaos, certain doom;
hair flying, mouth agape.

That’s the part you don’t consider till you lose a little something
day by day.

A Year for Making Jam

Well if you’re a blogger worth your salt, this is the day you typically write some sort of summing up of the last year, or decade, or make some kind of list, or at least state some resolutions.

I haven’t been a very salty blogger, lately.

Er.. You know what I mean, just barely keeping tabs here, and then mostly for the holidays.

I have this to say about 2009:

It was interesting.  Isn’t that the highest compliment you can pay, at least to a person (or a weeble)? It had ups and downs. Obama was president for all of this year; I liked that. This was the first full year I had w/Kevin, and I really liked that. *hearts*

My daughter got into a kick-ass charter school. I saw people this year I haven’t consented to see for a long time, and it went pretty well.

There were also some tears this year, uncertainty and phases of frozenness, which is maybe the worst thing from my perspective.

I feel cautiously positive about  2010. I think the global weather will get worse, which is sort of scary, but personally, at least in this little circle of connection, I think me and the people I love are more ready to be open-hearted, to listen, to be patient, and to enjoy the moments we have more than ever before.

This isn’t a very exciting post, but any blogger worth her salt would put something down here, and wish you all a Happy New Year.

Have a great one!

Maya

Surrounded.

The stuff pushes in, new stuff; Christmas stuff and clutter. I have a tendency to be overwhelmed even by too many groceries after a trip to the store, the consumerism of Christmas always freaks me out a little. I don’t know how to catalogue things, except books. I have just gotten done giving things away, things with emotional weight; I never keep such things. They stay new and perfect if they are full up with expectations that never realized fruition, or a disappointment that hangs over my heart. It’s so much easier to gift wrap my emotional bounty and give it away in parcels,

But there is always the incoming. The influx.

I don’t pretend to be well, but tomorrow and the next are also parcelled into organization bits. This year I will synthesize a little bit more of the love offered. I’m frowning over a sum, bent over the computer. The stuff has a presence of its own, looming and omnipresent as rock formations in my mind.

What she does, the kitten, is she leaps into the middle of everything that seems so serious and so much. She’s a little girl cat, and she’s one of *those* girls, you know: The kind that prove boys aren’t _quite_ the most lovable things on Earth. She’s all round tumminess and slightly slanted green eyes, and she can take the distance from the couch to the arm chair in one leap, no sweat. She lands in the pile of my terrible stuff, and I’m laughing, suddenly, because there’s a ribbon caught on her whisker, and she’s a rakish pirate cat. I push it all aside, very matter of factly, and retrieve my wayward cat.

Strange magic, Maya. You turn my sink and soar into a comical flounder. I want to write, to respond to people far enough away that I can get close to them. And of course push away those who have gotten too close, find some way to word my regard and still carefully post my ‘Keep Out’ borders, but you won’t stay on the floor, will you?

She jumps into my lap with the stubborn, single-mindedness of a girl cat. Gracie was the same way, but Gracie didn’t leave four tiny holes in the skin of my thigh, rousing me to holler from the pain of her stubborn climb.

You’d laugh too, to see her looking wild and alarmed, rushing away from the shout, to hide behind a pile of ‘Shall i keep them?’ books. She knocks things down. She doesn’t listen. She hops into my lap over and over while I’m sitting at the keyboard, thinking I will write the twisted etchings of my mind down.

She licks my chin.

I have to take my hands off the keyboard, and wrap them around this little, purring body. She doesn’t understand anything. She doesn’t know I’m a failure, that I make some sort of living off of introspection, that I hate myself, and the holiday, and love my family and hate their presence and hate  hate hate the STUFF; she’s a fool.

And she’s real. And soft. And alive.

And I’m in love. w/Maya.

Children take us away from ourselves but fill us with a passion of uncertainty and regret and twisted, awkward love.

Maybe I needed a kitten.

Maybe I wanted one.

Who could have known? I stop here, because she is purring insistent, and maybe I’m bleeding a bit, but that’s okay.’

Wiry, real-live things can do that to you, sometimes.

We Wish you a Rainbow Pony

Merry Christmas, weebles.

I hope all your hopes for the year to come bear fruit. Good fruit. Sweet fruit. Happy, healthy, wholesome fruit.

Yellow Stones

I’ve been revisiting our Yellowstone trip, now that the big dark is here.

Dead Stuff on the Wall

Bears & Buffalos

Everts & Rosie

Waterfalls

Old Faithful & Farewell

Happy Thanksgiving

I won’t be around the next few days, but you’ll hardly notice because I’ve been so absent from here. 

But I want to say, Happy Thanksgiving to all the friends who read here, and who I’ve known over the last year or two. Have a safe, happy holiday-

and remember to be thankful.

Thankful for family, for love, for joy. Thankful that the spring always comes, and soon will come again.

Robin of Bountiful Healing has helped me see things differently many times with her gratitude posts, and her efforts to find, appreciate, remember the positive.

A special Thanksgiving to you. I’m very grateful for you and the beauty you put out in the world.

Take care!

-Alissa