Best Friend

Everyone should have a friend, somewhere you can go uninvited, where your car hogs their driveway, and your kids run together like wild boars. Where you are invited to sit in their bed and listen and speak to hear stories that are woven beneath the threads of the humdrum and the routine, the whirring of the washing machine, and the distant barking of those annoying dogs. Where you are greeted without the fear of falling beyond the meaning in your words. Where you are uplifted by the support of their understanding. Where you interpret their worst fears because they are mirrored in yours. Where the abnormal becomes sane. Whole, when you leave again.

Mothers Day 2015

My darling daughter made me breakfast in bed today. The first breakfast in bed that I have ever had, not made by my mother. The plan was simple enough. I heard rummaging in the kitchen. I heard her slow footsteps down the hall. I heard the scratching at my door as she tried to manage the burden of the plates sliding on the tray, as well as open the door. The plan was unfortunately thwarted. Botched by a series of events preceding her sweet desire to bring her mothers’ sup to her bedchamber. I had been up all night. Wretched sleep of those thinking a myriad of senseless things in a feeble and futile attempt to solve everything all at once and to make sense of a life suddenly spun so out of control. I woke this morning before dawn, greeted by birds whose chirpy glorification of the new light only seemed to amplify my dark and brooding sense of despair. I made coffee and ate breakfast then, wrote what I needed to write then, and feeling some sense of relief, retired to my room and fell into the chasm between seven pillows, one quilt, one antique cotton blanket, and two sheets, into a desperate and dreamless sleep. Why a single grown up needs seven pillows is beyond me, but they do block out the wry fronds of luminescence that escape my frilly girl curtains and sateen blackout curtains. It was then that the hopeful voice came “Mommy, I made you breakfast in bed!”… And it was I in my grumpiness, awoken from the belly of sleep, the slobber on my face, the eye squished into the pillow that responded “But baby, I am sleeping and I am not hungry”. Her simple “Okay mommy” would have crushed even the fiercest warriors… I believe Leonidas would have been brought to his knees knowing that he turned her breakfast down. But in my desperation for slumber, I pushed her away. An hour later, I leapt from my bed with the full consciousness of what I had just done. I flew down the stairs to find her, to talk to her. She was watching tv, and she crawled into my lap. She now fills my lap. I wrapped my arms around her and told her how no one had ever been that sweet to me before, and that I hadn’t appreciated it when she did it, and I was wrong for it. I was holding her and we were crying. Wet, hot tears of this sadness, the saltiness of other griefs, the prolonged heartache bred from the endurance that it takes to actually be human, the loss of all that isn’t, combined with the possibility of all that could be. My daughters add the meaning to everyday that I breathe. They are sweet, charming, adorable little ladies. We learn together, we feel together, we love together. And mostly we laugh together. They are everything that I never knew that I needed. Thank you to my own mommy who taught me how to love unconditionally and freely, to exercise and practice graciousness in the face of adversity, kindness in the place of greed and who taught me how to be everything that my girls need.