OrdinaryArt

I told myself that I was not going to write this Thanksgiving week like a hallmark card, commercialized, and syrupy sweet. Instead, I was going to remind myself about the way that history spins it. I was going to give you the college version of government blankets sent with small pox, instead of the gobble gobble turkeys made out of the construction paper fingers of our right hands. I was going to, but grateful just keeps getting in the way.

I am this kindergarten version of myself, all dressed up like pilgrims and Indians sharing a meal. I am this sugar-sweet version of me, this OD on the holiday itself. I am all stuffed to the brim with tofu turkey and sweet potatos festooned with pecans. I am all laughter and holiday lights we pull from basement boxes and begin to un-string, ready to usher in shiny silver wrapping and over-sized red bows. I am.

I am all of this, this weekend. Because sometimes you wake up and the sun just shines so bright.

Outside, the leaves make wet piles of themselves atop the grass. I do not yell when Bug and Butterfly jump headfirst into the mess and emerge with mud splatters on their new jackets. All things new become old, at some point. I want the wearing to be joyful. I want to pack away those London Fog coats at the end of the season and know they were worn well. Tattered jackets with ripped pockets, and loose teeth zippers should indicate nothing if not joy.

I stumble into the kitchen and joy greets me like the smell of molasses. There is the sight of my husband teaching my son all about measuring cup math, the fine art of flouring a pan. And even though I had never tasted a shoefly pie before, I had a feeling that one was going to be nothing if not melt in my heart at the sight of his small back next to his guiding hands stiringly sweet. 

Sweet is the way that she loves me. See Mommy! See Mommy!

She calls out as her tiny feet hit the floor and she pitter patters her way down the stairs to where I am waiting open-armed to wrap her in a hug. A two-hour nap is too long a separation for us now, mother and daughter, re-discovering each other again and again in this weekend of so many things that I am grateful for. 

I am grateful for so many things. And, it feels damn good to be this much of a cliche.

Editor’s Note

This post was cut short on account of the fact that a certain Bug, who was suppose to be napping, found some black paint, decorated himself and his bedroom, before going all tip toe into his Mommy’s room, with a twinkle in his eyes, and his hands behind his back. And what did that Mommy do?

All cracked out on feeling good, she just tipped her head back and laughed, pressed the little boy to her heart, and marveled at the black spotted ornament he left on her sweater.

Here is to wishing this season could last forever and then some.

I want another baby. I want another little girl. I want to travel to China and claim the daughter they let go of, even though there are so many reasons this is not logical, money being the biggest factor.

How selfish of me to want this when there is a house that needs to be bought, and colleges that need to be saved for, school loans needing to be paid, when already I sob and weep each morning as I get in my car and drive away from the children I do have, two beautiful children that stand at the window and mourn me as I go. What right do I have to want more when already I raise my children with this lack of?

And yet, the need fills me.

I want her to be mine. I want so much for this to be that, already, I miss this little ghost girl when I sleep with the warm soft skin of my own two babies in our big bed. They curl their limbs around me and I am content, until the wanting starts to creep in. A daughter is missing. My daughter is missing. I know it.

I tell my husband of my dreams and he does not laugh, even when I call this little girl by name. Caitlyn, Caitlyn. I whisper as we lay close on the living room couch after our children are bathed and fed, tucked safely in their beds. Caitlyn, I sing her name like a song, like a sigh. My husband does not laugh but reminds me of all the ways he loves our children, all the ways that he loves me. He reminds me…

You willed our children into being, he says.

There was the long ride home from the hospital after the DNC. Before they put me under, I kept asking the doctors how I would feel when they took our baby boy away. When I woke up and was empty, how would I feel? I wanted them to tell me so I would be ready for it. But, doctors can not prepare you for the weightlessness of that kind of loss. You will have some cramping, is what they say. You may bleed for a few days. As if the textbooks definition of a medical miscarriage can convey the sort of ache you feel when you drive the long ride home from the hospital and you are no longer a mother, when only days before you thought you would be, felt you already were.

You gave birth to our children on that car ride, he says. And I remember it was so.

I remember that we got stuck in traffic. I remember that I would cry furiously in five minute jags, the type of crying that causes your ribs to ache, and snot to run out of your nose. The kind of crying that leaves you bereft of breath. Then my sobs would slow to something more manageable. The car would be quiet. My husband would squeeze my hand, knowing better than to lie and say that it would be okay. We both knew that it wasn’t. Our son was gone and we had never gotten to hold him.

It was then that I willed it, spoke it aloud, and demanded the universe make it so.

We are going to have children. I might have slammed my feet against the dashboard, raised my hands tucked tight in fists, forcing God to hear me, my belief.

We are going to have two children, a little girl and a little boy. I said it with such intention then, and found a certain calm, in the fury of my own words.

I am going to be a mother. It was the last word of the sentence that hung in the air between us, that broke my resolve. I descended back into sobbing.

You said we would have two children, our baby Butterfly, our amazing Bug. They are here because you wanted them to be. My husband is a certain sure that makes me lean my head back into his body, to relax.

But, I sit up abruptly, suddenly plagued by my own fear. I didn’t ask for her. I should have asked for her then too. It is just that I did know I wanted her so badly. I could not see her until now. I am on the edge of all this worry that I have already missed my chance to be her mother.

You know now. It is not too late. It is never too late. Ask for her and she will be. I’m sure of it. I am sure of you. And, he is this love he carries, the love that never wavers, the love that makes me calm.

Yesterday, I stood still in a parking lot whipped by cold and watched a flock of birds shake themselves across a sky. The black and blue of it was riveting. I tipped my head back, and while woman ran by with carts filled with frozen turkey, all the ingredients to make their pumpkin pies, I shouted it aloud. I did not care when strangers stopped to stare. I laughed at my own lunacy knowing it was right and true.

I am not done with becoming a mother. There is a daughter to be born in a country I have never been to yet, a little girl with shiny black hair and a dimple when she smiles. Her name is Caitlyn and we belong together. I shouted it to the universe.

I know it will be so.

Schmutzie has offered up this challenge. And because I truly love me some Schmutzie, and Thanksgiving is around the bend, and I have this urge to shake off my melodramatic ways and just be grateful, I’m going to participate today.

Here are five small things that I am grateful for…

soft afghans warm from the dryer

early morning forgiveness, even when it hurts

Ingrid Michaelson songs played on repeat

The New York Times book review

and

the small of my daughter’s hand offered up, accepted by the waiting warmth of mine..

These things they are more than enough today, every day, the knowledge that grace is simple.  

What are you grateful for?

My mother used to tell me that it would all be better if I just put on a brighter shade of lipstick. So, I took to using the word fuck just to spite her, and I learned to love myself a little less. My whole life has been this sort of tight rope walking of speak, do not speak, whisper when I want to roar.  So much is left unspoken between us.  

I am away from my daughter for eight hours a day. When I come home to find her sleeping in my mother’s arms, I only want to hold her. Butterfly screams and arches her back, content to be with her Dee-Dee. My mother’s laughter does not leave the room when she gets into her car and drives away. I lay quiet on the floor next to my daughter, who will not let me touch her, and I wonder how I can call myself a feminist when there are women I do not believe in at all. But, I am certain that I believe in myself. I know that I believe in my daughter. This belief did not come easy for us both, the long three months of my post-partum, when I tiptoed around the house so as not to wake her, and then have to face myself.

I learn to be still, silent on the carpet, while Butterfly misses her grandmother. I know that I can not hope too heavy to be my daughter’s favorite. I have to be content with what we are. I am still her mother.  There is all this love. That is enough for me then, when her fingers unfurl from the tightness of fits, and she lets me hold her hand. I cradle it gently in my own, proud I have not asked for more than she can give. Proud of myself, then.

 I was taught that it is not okay to be selfish, even when others are, and I carry this into my mothering.

I am not selfish.  I wonder sometimes what it would feel like if I was. I think that maybe if I was allowed to be for even half of a day, something inside me might break, some angry parts might just fall away. Then, I could forgive you for all the ways I see that you are. I could forgive myself.  Maybe, this shouting into the wind is just my twisted sort of resentment. Why do I always have to be the one with the pocket full of apologies, even when I have not done anything wrong? Maybe, it is not even a question worth asking anymore.

I think I should just lie there quiet on the carpet, accept my daughter’s tiny hand in mine, sing her lullabies that remind her that I love her, and watch the simple pucker of her lips. If I give her enough time, those lips will upturn at the corners to form a smile, a smile that is all the brighter in the coaxing of the tiny rosebuds of her lips, those curved lines of her lips that I vow I will never force lipstick on.

When I was having the first of three miscarriages, sitting on the couch stuffing ice cream in my mouth, and sobbing at all the EPT commercials on television, a bloody maxi pad tucked between my legs, I got a phone call from someone close to me. She was pregnant, young, scared, and about to have an abortion. She wanted me to console her. She wanted me to wrap my arms around her and rock away the regret. I remember wanting to slap her. Instead, I spoke calmly through clenched teeth. I told her it was going to be okay, assured her that I loved her, even as I felt the soft spots of my heart, that once she had claimed, hardening against the impact. It was not fair of her, of me, of circumstance. But, this is how it was.

Two miscarriages, an oncologist office, and a handful of “experts” later, they told me I would never be a mother, not in the traditional sense that I had always imagined when I was young and reckless with the way I used my body. Instead, I pinned my hopes to adoption, on an 18 year-old girl. She wore a tiny bikini the weekend that we met, and swam beside me in the hotel pool. She just knew she could never have an abortion, not with all those couples eager and waiting. She wanted, instead, to give a gift. I thought about her capacity for bravery, and all I could do was hug her, go back to my hotel room, and cry.

When my son was born, and the nurses called me Mommy, the woman who carried him for nine months and pushed him out into this world, lay weary in her bed beside us. The beginnings of her loss were already creeping across the hospital room. I just could not see it. I did not think her choice was anything but noble, me being on the receiving end of it. We celebrated with popsicles sticks that left our fingers sticky and blue, and I tried not to see the way her mother had to hold her up, her unsure legs too shaky for the long walk to the parking lot, unassisted. In the months that went by, her grief only grew. It became something large and imposing, threatening the fragile bonds that we had established all those months that she had been convinced the choice would be an easy one, but turned out never to be. My son is a gift she gave me, but at what cost to herself? That is the question left unanswered between us.

I did not want to acknowledge the loss. I just wanted the simple celebration that I thought should be my right as a new mother. For a long time, I was so thankful for my son’s birthmother’s decision that every time I heard the word abortion I considered it a slight against the blonde-haired child that I held in my arms, and sang lullabies to against the backdrop of silence, in the nursery with the walls I had painted in blue. I felt abortion was a kick straight to the empty damaged uterus that I carried inside my body. How could a woman be selfish enough to have an abortion when adoption was an alternative, when couples waited years to fill their homes with the pitter patter of little feet, when my son was alive and growing strong because of his birthmother’s choice?

This answer is simple.

Those women are not me. They have their own paths, their own reasons, their own stories to tell. If I keep sitting here in judgment, expecting them to make determinations with their body based on the heartbreak of my own, than I have no right to call myself mother, sister, and friend. I dishonor the pain that my son’s birthmother suffered when she let Bug go, with nothing but the hope he might come back to thank her for it, when I expect every woman faced with this decision to choose as she did. Adoption is not an easy choice, and not the only one worth making. The truth is that these decisions are never simple. I know that. And this is why I write these words down, and will my heart to listen. I want to be glad when I read something like this, and learn that there are women who live without regret. I need to support that. I need to understand it. If I don’t, I will be the one stuck carrying around a regret that should not belong to me.

I saw you today for the first time, your hair a subtle flame, the lit tip of a cigarette against the backdrop of snowy silence. I sat quiet in the wonder of why you would ever be afraid. If I had hair that red, I would always want to flaunt it.

I tell you that when we meet, and go to all those parties, I will decorate your neck with strands of iridescent beads. When you tip your head back to laugh, every single woman in the room will pause to make a wish. What is the power of this friendship if not our ability to make beauty out of the recognition?

I recognize you, the way you gather up your words and scatter them across the creaking floor boards of abandoned houses, those words you cradle to your chest on the days your children’s limbs are stubborn in their growing, the lines of poetry you send as signatures at the end of all those e-mails, I am fortunate to read.

I am thankful for you, and for the circumstances that have given birth to this hope that we may meet against the back of swollen skyscrapers, lit up Chicago nights.

I imagine the rush of conversation, our spilling out across the sidewalk like shiny marbles warm from children’s hands, pitched out rainbows across the concrete that pedestrians will slip on in their way through nine to five. And I wonder if this city is big enough to contain us, our girl-hearts, our ordinary freckles, the wings we hide under the thick sweaters of low resolution film. I imagine us infinite then.

I imagine us.

And so I write this down, and hope the act of belief is enough to make it so. Hope that car rides and currency, and far away places I have yet to go, are not insurmountable distances for two new friends to travel, to discover what I think we have known all along, that we are really just two old souls pulled together by the fate that is our love of words.

So between the Great Lakes,
The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie,
The living lighted skyscrapers stand,
Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow,
streamers of smoke and silver,
parallelograms of night watchmen,
Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging
Carl Sandburg

I am going to Chicago.

I am going to stand before you and ask for you to love me, with my hair all tangled in knots, and my palms sweaty. I will be all legs and wineglasses, name tags I’ll have to squint to read from across a room because the children have broken my glasses. My children, who will wait at home while I shrug off the role of mother, quietly place it in my breast pocket, and become what has, up until now, been only longing…
                                           this dream of being a writer.

I am going to Chicago to claim it. 
I hope to see you all there.

It was this hunger than brought us together.

You did not love me. You loved the way my finger traced itself across your collarbone in search of a place for lips to linger, lust to land. I convinced myself that because my body was your familiar, and I was not ashamed to invite you over even when I had not taken the time to shave my legs, that we were something more than bodies crushed together in early morning hours while roommates slept.

I did not love you.

Maybe just the way you gave me a rock in the shape of a heart, and I melted crayons in a dish to make a candle holder we would light the first time you told me I was beautiful. I felt beautiful then. I made mixed tapes I inscribed with you name and brought eye shadow in sparkling new colors you never saw, so quick were we to make our way to dark rooms and bury ourselves under covers.

And because you questioned who he was, the boy with the dark hair who lent me his notes on Shakespeare, and laughed with me in the student union while I ran my hand through my hair, and might have licked my lips once or twice, did not mean you loved me. I should have known you when you laid yourself across my body and you asked in a voice that carried such indignant hurt, who he was.

I wish he had been more than just a boy who always watched me shyly from across the class, with his voice that would stutter and break over the hellos he could not fully master when I came into the room, all bent from the way you took my body in your hands, and made belief out of my legs stretched up against your shoulders. I wish he could have been the reason I pulled on my jeans and sweater, laced my shoes, and walked out the door.

Instead, he would be the great big bellying of hope that started my belief that you wanted more. And, I cringe when I think about the way I swelled and blushed to tell you that you were the only one, and thought that maybe I could, did, love you, when all you were really thinking was that you did not want to be sleeping with a whore.

And, I should have known the way your hands tightened across the fistful of my hair at that moment, that all along, I had been nothing but a possession you would grow tired of.

Even now, looking back and knowing that I did not love you, could never, would, I just wish I had been the one to get up and leave, the one who had the memory of being in control of when she was full.

You tell me that I am a hard woman to love.

I want to rescind my apology, the one I gave after we fought and you built a fortress of your face, you demanding my forgiveness. I give in because it is easier than being exiled, cold stares thrown across the table when the family eats a meal. I use the words, I’m sorry, but I do not feel them in my heart. I walk a little slower to where you wait, arms outstretched on the couch, to fold me inside of a hug I no longer want.

This is the way you mother sometimes. This is how I am with you.

You call to complain at how you can not make the soup to her specifications.  You spend the whole day doing her grocery shopping,  and she acuses you that the labels on the soup cans are not aligned on the second shelf. I tell you all the ways it is not your fault, and wonder when it will suddenly fall on my shoulders, this pattern of being raised as disappointment.

I know that you were angry that I did not thank you for the way you cleaned the basement, throwing away the old toys, making a point to tell me how easy it was for you to straighten, even with my two toddlers underfoot. I busy myself, face down in a bowl of cereal, so as not to remind myself of the insult. 

Sometimes I leave my dirty dishes in the sink before you arrive in the morning, and I smile behind your back at how you sigh and busy yourself elbows deep in the scrub. I wish I did not hate the way you run a wash cloth over the bookshelves in our living room, then stand with you hands on your hips and demand that I be grateful. It is just that I do not understand why love has to be measured by the accumulation of all this dust. I wish, sometimes, it would be okay for me to just settle.  

Today, I did not want to comfort you, tired from taking on doctors and filling up prescriptions. I know you are afraid that her near miss death will make you an orphan, but something in me was unwilling to bend to the way you martyred yourself above the grief we all carry. Why are you always more than the sum of all the rest of us put together? How I tell you my day was long and hard and all you have are stories about the way that yours was harder. Sometimes the way we love is competitive sport.  

  Because I do not have sympathy for you today, I know I am a terrible daughter.

When you leave the house, I grow silent. The children call your name at the window, and press their fingers to the glass. They look forlorn. To them, you are a parade of paper hats around the dining room table, ice cream sandwiches at the park, soft cuddles on the couch in the midday afternoon. It is this love of theirs that softens me against my anger.

I turn my attention to the children, who reach for scissors with eager hands, and we sit at the tiny table in the playroom, and we cut construction paper butterflies, lopsided hearts we color with bright inky pens. I do not criticize these asymmetrical drawings, but instead I hang their rough edges on the fridge. I put away the dishes you stacked neat and clean atop the counter, and I vow not to make these same mistakes again.

If ever I wished that I could show you the content of my heart without having to bend and shape the words like a roadmap to take you there, today would be that day.

Today, the girl they called a communist because she did not believe in competition, and was at war with no one but herself, and was the angry feminist bull-dyke because she would not flirt in break rooms, reveal the mystery of what color underwear she was wearing, so she must have just been bitter that she was not a size two, because she couldn’t actually mean it when she cried when the holocaust survivor came to the classroom, and she grabbed her belly and thought it would have been her child thrown into the air with machine-gun hate, and taught in the school district where desks were not a necessity because those black boys and girls they said would never learn, and she fought and she fought and she fought until her voice broke just for someone to see the poetry of all of our skin, and she worries constantly about the state of the world, and it’s all hell in a hand-basket, until she stumbles upon beauty in the simplest of things, and it causes her to break all over again, and so she gives herself away to this dreaming, to this page, oh yes, that girl is going to vote today.

I am this girl here who blossomed into this woman, who can not help but be angry that condoms are the enemy in school districts where children give each other blowjobs on the bus. Just as long as she never mentions we came from apes, and wonders and worries why men are so adamant to open doors for her, but want to keep crushing her under glass ceiling fists.

This is the woman whose father fell asleep at the kitchen table, right into his worn and dirty hands, too many hours away from her Momma’s pot-pie, and she sees the life they’ve made, the gnawing down of bone just so she could sit in a lecture hall three-hundred strong and open books that smelt like crimson leaves crushed under muddy boots. She knows he deserves to retire without the threat of looming taxes and an inability to pay for the medical care the over 30 years of dedication to the same company should surely afford.

This women woke up today with her medusa-like hair and her country proud and knew that although the need for God is strong, she does not agree that Jesus would have turned his back on love, even if it did not come in the shape of his own, and she just wishes that marriage followed love, for everyone who felt the need to make it legal with a vow and a ring, and she worries that they will strip the rights away from women to own the shape of their own skin, and even though she is so blessed to have had hers stretched to hold one children born of her body, that she never would have thought to abort, and the other out of the selfless choice of his birthmother to give up her nine months, and give in to the grief that comes after, and she wishes all women could be that brave, and she has trouble making eye contact with the ones that have not, she does not believe it is her right to judge, three babies bleed out on the bathroom floor is her history, and does not believe the government should try to own what does not belong to them. Believes that it is all about choice, and she has made hers long ago, when she heard his sonorous voice, and watched the way the goose bumps rose on her flesh, and felt the tears climb into her eyes, at what she thought had been long dead in the silent dark of the eight years that trail behind us.

That girl. This girl. The me that I am today is ready for change, and wants to give herself over to the faith that she will get it, when she pulls the lever, writes the name, wills the cards to fall in this direction.

This woman, yes, this woman that I have been since my Californian birth, there must have been something in the water he always says that gave his conservative longings a modern-day hippie of a child, with my converse shoes and my Mommy and Me tie-dye. Her. She. Me, can not wait to take her two children into the booth and let them help her pull the lever, and then sit at home and bit her nails down to the quick.

And wait, and worry, and wonder at the history of it all.