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This Is What A Love Song Looks Like

Because it is so important…I do not forget you against the laundry in its pile, the emptying of the dishwasher, and the bent knees of the floor that I scrub by hand. You are always present between the lifting of the lids on simmering pots. You remain the center.

I tell you that it was hard… Butterfly bangs her toe, dressed up in her holiday sock, against the coffee table that her grandfather built. Her little black and blue begins to bloom immediately. All I want to do is hold her in my arms until the tears subside to laughter, but her body stiffens sometimes, as if remembering the slight that was her birth, and she reaches for the waiting arms of her father.

I am left to wonder about windows of opportunity that are now slammed shut. I stand on the wrong side of the glass, knowing I should be thankful for the giggles that erupt when you blow kisses on her belly, but I cannot. Because the truth is that I have always been too selfish as her mother. I wonder what it would have been like if she had come first.

I tell you this when the words fall against the naked backs of bodies in the bedroom, and we whisper our worries to the stars. It is then that the tender wishes for our children get tangled up between our sheets. I find you again, in this fear that you will make the same mistakes your father made, how the taste of copper pennies fill your mouth each time Bug calls for me in the night, and I go on silent feet to comfort him, while you lay worried pulling on your lip.

Separate we are fearful.

But then, I lay back down beside you, we re-create the absence of space that is our arms and legs encircled, we give it all over to the night that is dark and quiet in its comfort. We listen to the bend of trees so certain this will not break us. We say a prayer for sleep, and hope our dreams will strip our bones to softness, and ready us to love the next morning’s light.

I Choose The You That You Are

To My Son,

Because you run down the street with underwear on your head, rubber boots on your feet, and your arms white wings the wind carries, I am lucky to mother you.

I decided sometime soon that I would never cringe again. I will not retreat into my pocket of apologies when you are the only child that does not follow the simple rules of row, row, row because your boat is your own at library school, and you can not help but throw your body against the stream of legs at the fairground today, and push your way through to where the field is open.

You do not mourn for the dying grass, but surmount the free that is you rolling yourself into happiness that will leave permanent stains on your little boy clothes. Your face a smear of jelly and dirt, I do not bother wiping clean with the wet tongue against my finger.

This dirt has become your signature, while other mothers stand holding firm the hands of well-pressed children, and your sister sits a daydream to herself, examining the ridges of red leaves falling, you are more primordial, down on all fours in the mud, shaking out your imaginary fur, barking and wagging your bottom.

I am not sorry for you.

I am not sorry for the way you weave in a zig and zag while the world is stiff and straight. There is no room for sorry when the ground shakes under our feet from a million violins, and you reach up and ask for me to dance. I spin you reckless to the wind, around, and around, not caring about the apple cider that they are brewing, and the crafts that are being sold, deflecting all the cautious stares as our bodies claim rebellion, the joys of reckless limbs are what belong to you.

All we care about are the ways of fingers interlacing, and how dark hair streams down my back like satin ribbons on hand wrapped gifts. You weave your smile around the shape of Yipppeee! And, we holler it together. I am not sorry for this.

I will not be sorry when school reports tell me about the way you will fidget in your seat during class, and how the only thing you want to do with scissors is make your classmates paper crowns. I will tell them gentle but firm about the itch that I have seen in your soul since you were only seven minutes old and reaching for more than the overhead lights and my face looking down at you. I will tell them so they know. You are insurmountable.

You will scale mountains instead of opening briefcases. You will always be breaking down windows, despite the open doors. You are constantly showing me how to make illegal u-turns in my heart. And for that, I am so damn grateful.

No, I am not sorry for you, because happiness is a choice we make together.

Becoming What We Are

I wanted to be one of the Horizons, the chosen child who got to leave the fourth grade classroom to have a meeting of the minds in that special place where construction paper Picassos hung a brighter shade, with a teacher that smelt like watermelons, the kind with the spit the seeds out onto the freshly cut lawn, which was her smell. They tested me for the gifted class. They asked me what I would do if I was given a large oak tree, a rope, a two foot plank, and a bucket. I wrote a poem with old man branches, and half eaten apple cores diving into buckets tied with rope that no one wanted to hold. I did not know what to do with the plank, and so I walked it, right out of my chance to be called smart. Later in the year, a friend that they had tapped to be a part of that secret, I could not touch, society, invited me to their party. I was so disappointed when the cookie crumbled into my mouth and it was just ordinary cream.

I wasn’t the valedictorian of my school, more like the girl who sat in the back of the class reading The Cider House Rules and wondering which of my fellow students would end up needing the abortion, wondering if my own flesh would ever be rubbed into a version of its own sin. Smart was defined with IQ tests and word lists that tied my tongue. It seems if you can’t ride the phonetic pony it doesn’t matter if you can shape a snake and shake it loose across the page. Just make sure you bubble in your Scantron and you color between the lines. I always wondered why it all had to be so paint by number.

I almost failed out of college my first semester, majoring in booze and boys that did not love me, but only the way I was so willing to spread my legs. I cultivated an act of cool in worn corduroys and unwashed hair. I wrote forlorn poetry on the bottom of my sneakers that the ice and sludge of a Buffalo winter washed away, leaving trails of blue ink bleeding into the snow. I forged friendships I could not maintain, leaving the wreckage behind like abandoned car parts on the highway, the sleeping with her boyfriend, and the borrowing of your clothes. It made sense that you did not want to live with me. I did not want to live with myself. I just wish I could have turned my heart inside out to show you the side where there were seams; maybe you would have forgiven me all the ways I could not forgive myself. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, for all the opportunities I missed.

Seven years later, with a Master’s degree, and a shiny 4.0, I still had trouble opening my mouth at faculty meetings, imagining they would only see the skinny girl with the trembling knees hiding out in the back of English lit., hoping that if she was called upon she could unstick the tongue plastered to the roof of her mouth, to explain just what Darcy’s mirror symbolized in the house that Elizabeth stumbles upon, to realize her own mistake, the pride of her own prejudice, and oh how I have prejudiced myself!

Then, I took to wearing black, and boots made of metal. I stopped shaving my arms before protest rallies, where we chanted about the patriarchy that was chaining us to the kitchen walls, refusing to stand barefoot turning the bacon he brought home, trapped under our own glass ceiling, all of us hating ourselves. How many times did I tell you that I did not want to be a mother, while my uterus screamed otherwise, and I worried about how badly I would fuck it all up? Those were the days when I wore my anger like armor so no one would ever detect how delicate the skin underneath. But desire is like a varicose vein, it always is this throbbing.

Desire is the way you look at me, my stretched out skin, a beautiful mosaic of all the places you can hide your eyes, and hands, and body when the night sniffs at your cold feet from where the blankets have fallen away. That the crib does not give you half the comfort of my body is the blessing that I repeat over and over in this blogging. We come across the landscape where all is quiet, no ranting voices in my head, no prying eyes. There is just the way you dance around the living room in your purple stripped socks, dropping raisins, as you follow me into the kitchen, and help me knead the bread. We are all dough up to our elbows, and it is the laughter that causes our loaf to rise. It is the way we pick pumpkins on a Saturday afternoon, and the sun slants against the side of my jeans, where the curls of your head are silhouetted, and I can not help but drink this in and be glad for every single thing that came before.

Here Is My Simplicty Found

Your mouth made a ring around the rosy, the alphabetic letter O, how badly you wanted to climb atop the dining room table, tiny tumbles, capitulations into the air, your belief that it will catch you.

I try and ground you with books and the ordinary blocks that lie on the rug in primary color. You feign interest in Dr. Seuss. Looking up from those pages, your eyes dare me to turn my back on you.

I can not turn my back on you.
I can not take my eyes off you.
I can not protect myself from you.

And when you are ready to rest, you bend my body into the shape of a lap that you will conquer. You press the skeleton of your back against my chest. We move into this cadence, rising and falling, our breath a syncopation.

You remember this, the shape of my womb, the scent of my skin, the thundering of my heart, this heart that only you can quiet. This heart that once was steeled against the colic and the chaos that you brought into our home.I did not know how to be your mother then.

I am learning now. I am learning this. I am learning you, my child that is the simple act of grace, so filled with wonder, that I can love so deeply all the parts of you I so often deny within myself.

Fear Is Never Simple

My writing is suffering. This happens when I hide behind metaphor instead of saying what it really is that I want to say. I need to make it simple, but I am afraid.

How do I explain how often I am disappointed in the world, how sure I can be that I will always be at odds with it?

This morning, as I was driving to work, I heard a song that brought back this memory...

The day after September 11th, I had to pull my car over to the side of the road, where I wept for an eternity, all in a mere five minutes, at the heartbreak that was the sound of a voice against a violin.

The sadness I felt quickly turned to anger at every single driver on the road waving an American flag. I could not help but feel like our sudden sense of sisterhood, brotherly love, brought about by tragedy, would be fleeting. I knew people were grieving that day, but I hated them for not having been generous the day before. I was crushed under the knowing that they would go back to their myopic behavior and road rage in the weeks after.

Why do we have to lose 3,000 people before we discover our best selves? Why could I not take the community generosity at face value, instead of contorting it until my expectations where no longer met?

Perhaps, this is an imperfect example. I am floundering with my words.
Every sentence comes out wrong, a small detonation, a cloud of dust.

Instead, I think about my first trip into New York City as a little girl. Awestruck, I vowed I would move to the Village, pen a novel, break some hearts on the way to learning about love. The city, she was infinite.

That was until I saw a homeless man living on the street without shoes. My father had to hold me against his chest, tight, the whole ride home on the railway. He kept repeating over and over, it is going to be okay, while I wept. I was 8 years old and already he had an inkling, fearing that this world was too much for me, knowing with certain heartache that I was so easy to break.

And I do, I break again and again and again.

I'm tired,
wishing I could live in a world with violions instead of shoeless misery on city streets that are suppose to be paved with gold.

I'm tired
of inauthentic language, and hiding behind metaphor.

I'm tired
by all the ways you dissapoint me.

I'm tired
by all the ways I dissapoint myself.