OrdinaryArt

Mostly we love and we lose in small increments.

There is no large detonation when a relationship ends, just an infinitesimal stain on the living room carpet, the last drop to signify the slow bloodletting that occurred over years. You bleed yourself in supermarkets, and church pews, in parking lots, and darkened movie theaters where you both sit with arms crossed, your bodies reclaiming the boundaries your words took in the shape of a thousand and one misunderstandings. At the death of you, no one can even remember just when and where the wound.

Friends of ours are getting divorced. I sit and listen as she shares the fear she has of his moving out. She is not sure exactly what day of the week to take the recycling out. This, like the weekly mowing of their lawn, is something her husband has always done. She shakes her head and tries to laugh at the idea of her soon to be ex having to balance his own checkbook after all the years of her fiscal control. She laughs, but all I hear is sadness. I think about my own marriage. I wonder if David left, if I would become that exhausted cliche, unable to reclaim his side of the bed. I imagine I would sleep forever parallel to my grief.  

Did you know when you married him? I mean, were there signs you just ignored?

I can not help but ask this question. My mouth if full with the meat of my own heart. I wait for her to answer. I want her to tell me that she did, in fact, know all along. I want the end of a marriage to be more than the hindsight of 20/20.

Marrying him was the happiest day of my life.  These are the words that split open her grief. She cries uncontrollably at my kitchen table. I want to comfort her. I reach out, but just before our hands make contact, my skin touching hers, I recoil. It is so much safer on my side of the table. I do not want to reach across. I do not want to become her.

This thought is fleeting and selfish. I cross over to her side. I wrap her in my arms. I whisper.

Everything is going to be okay.Even though, I have lost a certain faith in the order of these words.

After she is gone, I clean up the detritus of our conversation, the box of kleenex, the half-empty cup of tea with her smudged lipstick on the rim,  the book she brought for me to borrow. I put this all away. I place a fresh table cloth on the kitchen table. I lay out the dinner plates, note their steady weight in my hands. I run my palm over the dull edge of the kinfe. I test the point, sharp. I pull back and watch a tiny droplet of blood flower on the tip of my finger. I place it in my mouth, which fills to copper, as my husband’s key turns slow and familiar in the front door’s lock.

In the garden of simple/where all of us are nameless/you were never anything but beautiful to me-Ani Difranco

**********

Oh she is so beautiful, the sales-lady says.

She leans toward us with floral polyester she masquerades as silk in break room conversation between the stubbed ends of borrowed cigarettes. I recoil from her perfume. It permeates the space between where I stand, disheveled at the counter, a box of generic tampons in hand, and where she rests her lacquered finger nails against the click-click-clacking of her cash registering machine.

Just beautiful. She says it again, and I watch her mouth bloom the color of hibiscus. 

Butterfly sits in the cart. Her eyes a very blue astonishment.  Her lips, the pucker of her unadorned mouth, the dart of her small tongue, rolls the word back and forth.

My daughter just turned two. Suddenly she is new, long and lean. I wonder where the chubby infancy has gone. On her birthday, I think about her birth. How they placed her all angry squirm on my chest, and I recoiled. There were months when I did not know just how the two of us would ever belong to one another. There is a part of my heart that sags as I write these words. Post-partum made me a puppet, and depression pulled my strings.  It wasn’t me. Someday she will read this blog, I hope, and I want her to forgive me.

I want her to see my now in some far off future. I want her to feel what I feel as I write these words, both weeping and laughing at the enormity of how I love her. My Butterfly. My girl.  Every sentence here is measured against the impact of who she will become as she grows into the shape of her own womanhood. 

I want to promise her things, like that I will never show up at PTA with botox or a boob job. I want her to know that I have been planning the cd of songs I will give to her the day that she leaves for college, since before she turned a year old. I want her to roll her eyes with exasperation that masks her tender pride over the fact that I sometimes cry when I listen to Ani Difranco or Regina Spektor, thinking we might pass lyrics between us like soft secrets whispered to bended ears.

I want to give my daughter a world without misogyny. I want to pass down a pair of thick black shit-kickers she can use to stomp her presence known to those in society that will expect her always soft and pink. I want her strong enough to tell me she wants pom-poms and lipstick, even though she knows it will wreck my stubborn heart. I do not want her to fear her shadow or the sound of her own voice. And so I tell her, as often as I can, that she is more.

*************

I said baby show me what you look like without skin-Ani Difranco

*************  

I Beeeeeyoutooooful!

She tells me this as I pull her from the bathtub. Her tiny, naked body splays droplets of bathwater on the rug. I try and wrap her in a towel. She growls and escapes.  She runs across the bedroom giggling, away from my diapered hands.   

I Beeeeyoutoooful!

When she is laughing, I laugh with her.

You are, my darling girl. You are so Beeeeeyoutooful!  And, you are smart too.

You are so very smart, my sweetheart. And that is good, better than good,  smart is the very best of all.

Smart is something more.

**********************

You know they never really owned you/you just carried them around/and one day you put them down and found your hands were free/Your hands were free-Ani Difranco

**********************

Happy Birthday to my darling daughter, who taught me what it means to have my own hands be free, by allowing me to wrap her safely inside my arms.

All we are, we are…

******

You have piano fingers, someone once told me this as a child. I remember sitting down at my grandmother’s piano, looking at the slim elegance of my long, lithe fingers, imagining concert halls reverberating. Not prepared for the discordant sound I produced. Tripped blind by my inability to read music. Every Good Boy Does Fine, it seems. But, not every little girl.

I never learned to play the piano, or take the perfect picture. At 34, I still feel silly as a clown when I apply anything other than chapstick to my lips.  Some talents, it appears, are truly inborn.

*******

I write. I am writing. I am a writer.

*******

 I want to let this blog go. I want to let myself go….All we are, we are…What is the accumulation of this space? These three years of heartache and revelation seem so silly. If this was paper, it would be confetti. I’d have a party as the small scraps fell like snowflakes in July, to decorate the curved wooden table of the living room. The absurdity of summer snow, decorating the eyelashes of my children. 

*****

There are no cohesive thoughts. There is no thread for you to follow. I’m unraveling before you, and it’s a beautiful thing. Laugh with me, will you? We are far too serious.

*****  

Last night, I called my father in tears. I can not bear the weight of these decisions like boulders on my back. I’m all melo-dramatic allusions to Atlas. I want to shrug. You are my number one priority, he says. It is going to be okay. And, I’m suddenly five years old climbing into the lap of his words. I want to be stronger, Dad. I want to be stronger than I am. I have left my shit-kickers at the door, the ones I wear down the suburban street of my daily life. I am reduced to whimpering. You just be who you are. You just be you, Kelly. This is who I am. Topsy-turvy emotional wreckage sometimes. I love so hard my ribcage hurts.

*****

I wanted to tell you that there are words that I do not speak. Words like, I miss you. I hate you. I forgive you. Do you forgive me? There are words that I write down that make me cringe. But, I’ll be brave if you will. Let’s be brave together.

*****

My husband arrives home from work, 32 text messages. He comes into the kitchen with his phone in his hand. 32 messages from me.  He laughs. He loves me. He loves me. I sent him 32 text messages in the space of 42 minutes, fueled by my own fear. It happens sometimes. I can not move to breathe. The only thing that will shake the anxiety from my bones is action. I act and I react. 32 text messages. He laughs. He takes me into his arms. He loves me back to being.

*****

All we are, we are….

*****

I call you because you ask me to. As I dial, I find myself flattered that you thought I could help. Sometimes I am not kind, you say. But, I hear kindness in your voice. I read kindness in your words. I am tongue-tied wanting to take your sadness and turn it into something else, like a magician at a magic show. I am a writer but I have no words. I want a piece of scarlet tissue paper that the long elegant piano fingers of my youth could turn into a dove with slight of hand. Instead, I pull muted cliches out of my mouth and hand them to you. I shake my head at how foolish I am. I am a writer, but I am tired of writing about remorse.

*****

Ships Ahoy! He screams and streaks through the house naked. Ships Ahoy! Momma! The boat has capsized but suddenly I am swimming. Be a mermaid, Momma! Be a mermaid!  And, I am. I think about how easy it is to suddenly feel enchanted.

***** 

All we are, we are…

*****

I’m not sorry. Don’t you be, okay?

See Me. Please. Just really see me.

It is terrifying to say this aloud, to admit, I want to be known.

I want you to ask. I want you to pull up a chair and take off your jacket. Give me the time, and I would tell you.

I really want to tell you.  

See Me. Please.

If you try, I promise to enter into this with my own eyes wide open too.

I am a grown woman, but when the wind tangles fingers of air through the ringlets of my curls, I laugh like a child.

When I was 20, I opened up the yellow pages in search of a spiritual guide. I turned to “S” and looked for words like Shaman. Laugh if you will, I do, thinking back now to late nights, chemically altered, watching the movie The Doors, and thinking that if I could just find some hippie-esq enlightenment it would rescue me from loneliness. Problem is that Jim Morrison ended up bloated and dead in a bathtub.

Loneliness is its own brand of death, more quiet and insidious. Creeping on the fringe in crowded rooms, wrapping gnarled fingers around your skin after the door closes in the middle of the night, and you realize the stranger from the bar will stay that way, despite whatever intimacy you perceived in swapping spit. Loneliness settles on your bones, and if it stays there, you grow old quick.

For a long time, I kept thinking that I could fill myself up with possession, a lover, a soundtrack, a new pair of jeans that lifted my ass and gave me swagger when I crossed a street corner. I thought you could actually package content like the right shade of blush. I spent a good deal of time ticking on my fingers the things I did not, but desperately needed to posses. All of them were outside myself, little of them were important.

I am not 20, anymore. I am no longer lonely.

I look at my children, now, and I think…No one will ever love them like I do. This thought is fleeting in its comfort. How horrifying an idea, really. Someday they will find lovers, best friends. I want there to be rounded shoulders they can rest their weariness upon. I want there to be tender hands taken after first kisses, and roly poly babies of their own. I want them to find soul-mates, and let the imprint of my arms and kisses fade against the belonging of the husbands and wives they take, children borne of that loving. I want other people to eclipse me in the lives of my children, so they may never know what it means to ever be alone, even when I am gone.

I do not want my children to go searching in phone books, or on daytime television shows like Oprah and Dr. Phill. I do not want them to pay out of their pockets for life-coaches, or for them to get lost in the self-help section of the book stores. And most of all, I do not ever want loneliness to make a campfire at their door. I do not want them to burn with it. I will not let it eat their bones.

And so, I look to my own center, laughing. I teach my children to catch the wind.

I would like to lick you, love. I would like to slurp you up greedy like an overflowing spoon, all metalic shine against the moon that pours itself sideways in a slant against the couch pillows that we rock our bodies against in this rising heat. 

They say that in her 30’s a woman’s libido is at her peak. I used to laugh at the cover of glossy magazines that promised orgasmic perfection if I learned to tip and angle myself to fit against the trajectory of what they said a man’s body could do. I never once believed until now. 12 years we have been together, and suddenly we are new. I find myself laughing at the shape that I’m discovered in the cupping of your hands. I find myself laughing until you mold me into sighs. Then I am made quiet by all the longing that climbs like flames to lick my legs and settle in the center where I open up to bloom.   

I once thought that it would never be as simple as skin to skin, the fumbling touch of me at 19 with grass-stains on my knees. The first time I made love it was not really love, but this sort of awkward bucking above my body. I did not close my eyes the way I had read that women do. I did not throw my head back in anything but quizzical wonder at why the stars spread themselves out like mathematical equations above my head. The only sighs that escaped my body were from the startling realization that there would be no poetry in my lithe form lying naked on a baseball diamond in the waning of the moonlight.

Everything has changed now. I am hungry and in heat, rubbing myself against the furniture to substitute for your absence. When did this transformation begin? A part of me believes it was giving birth, knowing the power of my own body as I pushed life from the once angry spaces between my legs. I was a wound turned flower, then.  

There is something sexy about motherhood, isn’t there? The confidence I have as I shepherd them in their little lives that grow,  through diapered infancy, the tantrums of their toddlerhood, pre-school and beyond. There is the thrill of knowing you are watching as I bend over to pick up the toys in the playroom in my stretchy grey sweats. I am so very good at this loving of my two children.

I am so very good at loving you. It makes me want to lick you, full and warm, spit out the bones, and roll the flesh of you between the dizzy of my tongue. You are this love that leaves me hungry.

And I? I am so very good at loving, me. That is the greatest aphrodisiac.

It is just a building of brick and mortar. It is just a place to kick off your shoes after a long day of business, or being a kid at the local area attractions. It is one of so many hotels that dot the landscape of the strip we are driving, but still…I find myself holding back tears as my husband turns the car around the circular drive and there we are smack in front of the sign that says, Welcome to the Extended Stay.  

Remember when this was home, Mom? For almost two weeks, almost three years ago. Remember when this was home? I look over and my mother is crying too.

My son was born almost three years ago. He was born in a state that I did not live in, from between two legs that were not mine. I did not grow his small body from fish-like thing to squirmy baby toes and fingers in the water of my womb. Instead, I carried him in my heart for six months prior to his birth. Hope is a road that lengthens itself across the Pennsylvania turnpike.  

This weekend, I traveled with my son, who is not yet three but so close to being three we can almost taste the pink frosting of the cupcakes he has already requested upon understanding that his birthday is fast approaching. I traveled with my son and my daughter, my husband, and my parents to Pennsylvania. We were celebrating the fact that my son and daughter will both be having birthdays in the next few weeks. Celebrating with Elmo, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster at Sesame Place.

I have been planning this trip since the week my son was born, looking longingly at the glossy photos of the park’s brochure as I laid my back against hotel pillows and fed my son his first bottles.

Those of you who have read me for awhile know that Bug is adopted. Some of you know that when my son was born I traveled to Pennsylvania for his birth, and have been his mother ever since. What you might not know is that having adopted in a state I did not reside in, I had to wait for something called the Interstate Compact to clear before I could leave Pennsylvania and take my son home. My husband was a new teacher, then, and could not stay in Pennsylvania the two weeks it took for this paperwork to be processed. That left me, with the help of my mother, to wake up each morning in a foreign hotel room and learn what it would mean to mother my son.

Bug was such an easy baby. He would wake with hunger and easily take to the bottle, curl up in my arms, and drink himself back to sleep.  I can still remember the way he would rest one small hand against the freckled warmth of my breastbone. The other hand he would use to grip around my thumb in propriety fashion. In those days and nights of efficiency kitchens and cable TV, he was marking me as mother. Each time he cried, and it was my arms that comforted him in the dark, we laid down the lines of this story. My son and I, the ache that eased into belonging, together, my baby and me.  I think of this and smile as I listen to my son pepper his grandfather with endless questions as we sit in front of the hotel.

What we doing, Pa? Where Elmo’s house? Whose house is this? Can I have a pretzel? Are we gonna see Big Bird, now?

I pull out my camera and we take a picture. Bug and I are all octopus arms around each other with big silly grins plastered on our faces. This is where we started, my lovely. I tell him as I plant kisses on his cheeks, his nose, his lips.

Ahhh…I missed you Momma.

This is something new that my son does. Each time I hug him, which is countless times a day, he sighs like a man that has come to water after a month of drought. He sighs as he sinks against my body that curves itself in the shape of his little boy form.

I missed you Momma. I love you so much.

That I would love my son was a foregone conclusion. I had a dream a few months before he was born. I was sitting in a rocking chair holding a child dressed in blue. He had a full head of dark hair. When Bug was born and he was bald, I wondered about that dream. Until, the nurses put him into my arms and he turned the contours of his perfectly shaped nose and lips towards mine. Then there was no question. I had a dream of my son months before he was mine. I had a dream of my son that came true.

I know you. I have always known you. This is the first thing I ever said to Bug.

And I do, I know my son, and what I know delights me. I am amazed that he can tell the difference between a Phillips head screwdriver and an Allen wrench, or that he is so tall that all the other mothers at the park mistake him for five. I love that he can sing the lyrics to over seventeen songs, and can count to 25 in both English and Spanish. I know  that he is afraid of the hand dryers in public bathrooms and prefers to wipe his wet hands against my pant legs. I love that when I ask him what he wants for breakfast every morning without fail, he will throw his arms out beside him and shout, ice cream, before breaking into giggles. When he goes to sleep at night, he likes to wind his fingers through the curls of my hair and listen as I tell him Once Upon A Time stories where little boys named Bug always land their rocket-ships on the moon.

Oh, Bug, my Bug. You are stubborn, and sweet, and smart, and almost turning three. Someday you will read this, see the picture of us laughing against the ordinary landscape of an extended stay hotel all smiles and octupos arms, on our way to a toddler amusement park. On the day that you do, I want you to know how full my heart was in that picture, in the moment, in the day to day I am so fortunate to spend with you.  Please know that you, my lovely boy, are the greatest wish I ever asked against a night illuminated by stars as the backdrop for my longing. Standing in that driveway, looking at the place I called home for two weeks when you were born, just days before your third birthday, felt like a homecoming, a completing of the circle we’ll keep turning. You and me, tumbling together through this crazy world.

Happy Birthday, my baby boy. Momma loves you so much.

For the past week or so, I have not wanted to come to this page. When I do, I find myself caught in a cycle of type and delete. My fingers move over the keyboard with the weight of heavy stones. Nothing I say is adequate to what I feel. What I feel is….bliss.  

Do you really want to hear about sandy beaches and dandelion wishes made with my children all sun-streaked and joyous, multiple orgasms, and how I lost fifteen pounds? Seriously. I feel like I’m rubbing it in your faces, this happiness of mine. I feel like every line I write is the equivalent of a unicorn flying out of my butt. What is up with that? Why can’t I blog bliss? Why is it so much easier for me to channel angst into poetry. What do I do with the fact that lately, there is nothing to despair?

This new found contentment could be due to the fact that I’ve been burying my head figuratively and my body literally in the sand. I’ve been avoiding my reader like it has an awful case of the swine flu. I’ve taken to only reading the comic pages of the local newspaper. I’ve been carting around chick lit in my beach bag. I have been isolating my family from society. We have been taking nature hikes, choosing the long way home rather than having to sit in the heavy smog of traffic, immersing ourselves in puzzles and picture books as insulation. I am doing all that I can to protect the buzz.

This isn’t like me. I was empathetic and committed to causes outside of myself even as a child. I championed the case of the stray dog that bit a neighbor’s child out of hunger and fear. I sent my birthday money to emaciated children I saw on television. I planted trees in the local park.  I sob when I hear of hurts that others feel. I’ve always felt that it is my responsibility to be vocal, to help others, to give back, and to put myself last.

I have used this blog the same way. When I write about miscarriage, adoption, or the shape of my own womanhood, it is always with the hope that my honesty will create a fissure in the swollen heart of some stranger somewhere, who will reach down deep to find his or her own story, his or her own singular truth, and then share it in his or her own spaces, so we can all feel a little less alone. I try and write the way I live, giving and compassionate, not being afraid to admit all the ways that I often fuck it all up. But, I’m tried of the self-deprecation of my own words. I’m tired of feeling like I’ll come off as cocky or full of myself if I write a post with the simple theme of I rock! I totally freakin rock!

I thought about writing a whole post about the way women are made to feel shamed by their own self-promotion, the guilt I often feel over the fact that I am loud-spoken, opinionated, and confident. Did you even know I was confident? I am. And, I’m just tired of thinking that is wrong.

I’m a beautiful woman. I am a kick-ass mom. I have a lover who knows how to satisfy me. I can write. Oh, lordy yes! I am one hell of a talented writer. Damn it feels good to put it out there, and not care how many critics flame me.

I was going to write an entire blog post today about how sorry I am for not being by your blogs lately. But the thing is, I’m not really sorry. I’m not. And, I’m belly laughing as I write that. I’m not sorry, and you should not be sorry either.

When I come to your blogs, I want to understand. I do my best to be supportive. I want to let you know I care, because I do. I do care. I care about you. And yet…..

I do not want to give to you right now. I want to keep it all for myself. I do not want to think politically, or socially, or culturally. I do not want to measure the impact of every sentence or worry about whether or not my intended meaning has wound its way through my language.  I just want to let my words fall reckless on this page. I want to keep wearing this suit of selfish because, frankly, it looks quite good on me.  

So…Instead of sitting down to write that feminist post I had all planned, the one where I tell you about my daughter singing to her beeeyoootoooful “gina” in the tub. Instead, I’ll just tip my head back and laugh with the memory of that image, know that this story is all mine.

There is a mistress of pale skin, dark clothing, blood-red lips. She is gothic, wearing bits of strung-out pathos like a word-chain around her neck. She stamps herself between the pages of my posts, sullen as the expectant slit of her own tender wrist. I marvel at the anger that blooms like a fresh welt against a throbbing pulse.

I have watched her kick kittens in steel-tipped boots. I wonder about her origins. I think she may have been birthed in baby fat shed to skin and bones laid shivering in snow.

She is raven night to my daylight soft. She is the celestial tipped, the curved bowl of the moon, the wolves that whine and bay hunger outside of windows where sleeping babies lay.

I would not recognize her if we met on the street, this doppelganger with the same solitary freckle, a marked star next to her navel.  She would lift her shirt in recognition of our shared skin, and I would still have to fight against the familiar, mount my disbelief as armor so she could not take possession of my long-fought for body. 

I would not invite her in if she came knocking on my front door carrying an empty bowl for sugar.

 But here….

I can write my pain down. I am free to be the black-hearted queen of  melodrama. In these badlands of blogging, I can cry inside the margins of my own poorly writ poetry. Then I simply turn off my computer, and return to the sunlight of myself.

I have stomped my angry feet and, like a petulant child, pounded my fists against the table. Damn, woman!

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to rock your sleeping children in the night, and whisper lullabies that you will never leave them. Tell them that no harm will come, even though you know that the madman is busy busting down the door, charging forth in the form of your own damn heart that beats impostor when you lie between familiar sheets and dream of foreign hands.  

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop telling stories that only have heroines with smoky-eyes and size two clothing. No one wants to know about your bruised back from the same mistake you keep making furious against the floorboards. I know that you can be more than Eat. Fuck. Shit. Overly-medicated memories of the rough contours of your father’s hands are nothing short of terrible tragic, but this does not provide adequate excuse for why your own child’s eyes can sometimes appear so hollow. It is not an excuse for why you lie, and lie, and keep on lying.

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop spreading your gossip like disease passed from one unwashed hand to another. You need to stop feigning victimization. I want you to have the courage to step outside of the carefully manufactured photo-shopped persona that you have created, and admit that what you really were then, still might be now, is just a scared girl masquerading inside her own womanly skin.

I want you to be. Better? No.  

I want you to be who you are. Even though, I am struggling with what I have come to discover about you, what I have come to discover about myself in relation to you. That I, the women who claims herself to be feminist, is the most judgemental, hypocrite, fucker of them all.

I want you all to be. You. And, I want to be better.