This boy

This boy, with eyes of blackest night.
Lashed feathered butterflies
That rest on his cheeks
Surprised me.

I seek nothing more than what is freely given
I want nothing more than honesty,
Thought; prior to the preponderance that leans it towards something, or against it.
Thought; as truthful as it comes

Rest your head on my chest.
Hear my heart breaking its cage.
That fury is you.

10-26-15

You don't know which one I am anymore, but it's okay, I remember who you are.

I remember who you are, Mom. I remember those words that you always somehow knew to say, the way that you held us, even from when we were little, and you would pat us on the bum.
I remember how smart and decisive you were. I remember how you didn't mince words if something meant that much to you, how you were passionate and strong willed, yet so gentle, the hallmark of a lady.

I see that even in your death, you are giving us this gift. Just like babies weaned from their mothers, you are weaning us from you. You slip away slowly, yet your presence is still near. We reel in the abstract paradox of a mental illness, and you comfort us with your warm soft hands, even though your gaze is often focused afar. We have these brief instances of lucidity where we connect with you in a flash, and then like vapor, it dissipates. It could be seen as a loss, but Mom, I see it as your final gift to us. You knew we couldn't handle losing you in one go. So you somehow are being leaked from this realm, to the next, like water droplets, a slow flow from here to eternity, a tide leaving this place to form yet again somewhere else. 

You make us strong Mom, in all that you were, in all that you are.  In the silence in the car every day,  instead of focusing on the fact that you have been voiceless for most of this year, I now recall the things that you did in fact say. I fall asleep with your words swimming in my head. Last night the memory between my seven pillows, one sheet, and one perfect winter weight comforter, was of how you were so proud of us, each one of your babies, for being so eccentric. You took pride in knowing you raised three separate individuals, who were all so different.

I strive for that daily Mom, to practice acceptance without judgment the way that you did, and to love on a broader scale. You knew no adversity worse than not being able to provide for your children. You saw no distance greater than the lack your children faced. You saw no ends to your love, or your self sacrifice. You wore a burqa for four years, your finger tips were split open from years of hard work and that antiseptic hand soap at the hospital.

My tiny human mind can not fathom why this happened to you. But I know that there has to be comfort in knowing that we will carry on. That this will not break us Mom. You made us so strong. You showed us how to look for answers, when others only saw insurmountable problems and dead ends. You showed us creativity and tireless dedication. You showed us the kind way is always the right way. You gave us the world, Mom. We are not bound by geographical locations or fixations on dwellings, or possessions. In our hearts, we are free. You gave us life, and we choose to live.

Against the dying.

There is this natural state of abhorrence for the dying. It isn't personal. It isn't meant to be a rejection. But it is. In many ways it is the separation of the cloying stench of a departure to the netherworld before it muddles with the scents of the still living. The freshness of life. The mirth. The expectation. All that we wish things to be. Those things are precious. And we try to shield our state of living away from the used up shells of who humans become when they are close to their departure from this earth.

I never thought that I would look at things as an energy efficiency type study. I never thought I would look at my life and say those four hours, they were a waste of time, a devotion to an exercise in futility. But I now have begun to see things that way. I am beginning to become more protective of the people who have more time left on this planet, who still have longevity, who still could benefit from those four hours, versus those who on some levels may not even know that I was there, or that it was really hard for me to be there, and that my time is the ultimate gift I can give.

But this personal abhorrence I realize isn't just my own. I look around. Besides the cards that a few sent in the beginning and despite flippant offers of "help",  only one of her friends regularly shows up. No one phones anymore. All of this unpleasantness, the starkness, it isn't appropriate when the rest of us are just jolly trying to be alive and carry on living. How dull to bring an almost dead person to a birthday party. Just like there are age limits on certain movies, perhaps there should be death limits on people too. "OH... sorry.... He's too close to death to bring to this side of the shopping mall, we only deal with people in the 1-5 year mortality range. I would suggest you take him over on the west side, they will know what to do with people like him better than I... Plus all that mortality and humanness is upsetting to the customers".

You upset people in your life whilst you are living. Everyone always has an opinion of how you could have done things better. And you upset them in your death. You can follow all of the rules, work your fingers to the bone, be an upstanding and honorable person, a good person, a courageous, kind and caring person yet die the most undignified of deaths alone. Everyone too will have an opinion of how you went. Like you somehow were able to choose this personal hell that you currently live and are dying in. Maybe you should have chosen a better way to go, a more peaceful, or socially acceptable, polite, or perhaps a way that was easier on the eye.

Your last days, although your family means well, are strained. They cant help but want you to be the way that you were before this ghastly illness consumed you and ate you up from the inside.

Your daughter, she balances the life of two glorious babies, aged ten and six, as she balances hers, as she balances trying to help you enjoy a semblance of yours. She is just lost in this muddle of hating the oppressive yoke of the guilt attached to this duty. And knowing that one day soon she will miss this day more than anything. She watches you drink your latte. She tries to make peace. She tries to bring joy to that place behind your blue sapphires. And she wonders how she is going to ever continue on without you. 

When I leave.

When I leave, it is the most unnatural thing to do. I find myself sitting in the car for several minutes beyond the time that I have watched you follow your dad inside, windows up so the mosquito's do not invade my space and travel home with me, dive-bombing me as I drive along the winding country roads.

When I leave, I leave you with him. I leave my reason to wake up in the morning, my everything, with the person that I divorced. I leave you with the person that I said I do not want to be around me. I leave you with my ex. I leave you with my past. I leave you with the broken pieces of the life I discarded. I leave you with your dad, and I get to drive away.

You are ten and six. Little ladies, so full of love, so full of trust. My six year old suddenly talks on the phone. Do you know how unnatural it is to be that distant from your babies that you have to talk with them on a phone? My children had never used a phone up until six months ago. I noticed that last night, my six year old now carries on full conversations on this talking device that connects the span between two now distant lives. I am used to conversations where their breath tickles my face, where I can wrap my arms around their baby bodies, where they have no concept of personal space, because we have always been so close.

You sleep in a bed, in a house, and eat food, off a plate, and do things, I assume, of which I have no knowledge. In your absence, I hang out with the dogs, I let the cat sleep in my bed. Yes he did wake me at one and pick his nails with his teeth. I potter around, I eat cereal. No point in cooking if my babies are not home.

I watched you follow your daddy into the house on Friday. He had bags full of treasures from the store. Yahtzee. A pink inflatable furry chair. You helped carry in these things... Your heads were cocked with the pride of little girls so enamored with their father. Your arms held these bags of treasures ahead of you, like some spoils from some battle. You entered the house, shut the door and I sat, like some third wheel in the drive way.

I wish that bags full of colourful treasures, that all the board games in the world, could make up for your loss. I wish that adult politics never had to cast even a shadow, yet create a rain cloud, on the sunny days of your youth. I pray so much for your lives. I pray for the influence of people who you will meet along the way. I pray especially for the people that are brought into your life by your parents. I pray for you to retain your innocence... Lord Jesus... I pray your precious blood over those babies...The adults in their selfishness have hurt two beautiful little girls. Forgive me dear Lord and help me to be the mom that they need.

Eyebrows

My fingers explode into a thousand memories. A starburst nebula of all that you have been.
My first everything is encapsulated by all of you. Center of my universe. The original tableau from which the stars were strung.My mum.

We drive each day to the same place. You want your Grande Latte and I provide the mechanism for which your desire is granted and obtained. Some days my entire body revolts against the monotony of where it is that you want me to go, or what it is that you want me to do, or who it is you want me to pretend to be. But I bite my tongue.

The children are more vocal of their displeasure of the new routine. They don't want to be caged in this place where each day we sit with Granny and do nothing but wait to eat. They want to be outside. In the sun. They want to be with their friends, running amok in the streets. Boundlessly bouncing on a random trampoline.

I corral their seemingly selfish desires and speak to them words that I too need to hear in my heart. This time will pass all too fast. This time escapes every feeble attempt to contain it. It marches forward with its own impetus, with blatant disregard to our stupid feelings, our senseless emotions or our vociferous cries of "foul!" and "no fair!". The time engulfs all of our plans for the future, how we thought that things or normality would be. It erodes such mundane seeming possibilities and replaces them instead with questions that we do not care to answer or with riddles to which it seems that there could never be a sensible solution.

In the car, in the fading afternoon sun, on our gorgeous plateau, where the horizon fades into an endless expanse of sky, I watch her face. A favourite thing of mine is to grab the faces of people that I love. I squish them between my hands, I tickle ears and squeeze earlobes between my index finger and my thumb. Her blue sapphires contain all the mysteries of a hidden universe, a nation of only one, a nation now without a voice, where her desires are only to be guessed at, her needs interpreted by intuition and common sense.

I look ahead to the red light in front, then turn to her, and spread my fingers across her eyebrows and down over her eyes. A sweeping gesture that my children loved. She loves it too. She slowly closes her eyes and laughs. She turns her face towards me for more.

The moment that my fingers touched her brow they became electrified by the personification of the loss that is going to be her. You feel that loss is this thing that you should prepare yourself for, for in the future, that it will come on one day, that you should appreciate every day now whilst you can. But what you don't realize is that the loss is already here and now with you, in this present. It is a sadness that seeps into the fibers of who you are and it changes the way that you deal with life, with how you carry yourself, that which you can handle as a person, and with what you can tolerate.

The loss makes you a target for other people to prey on your weakness, to use you for your kindness, to take advantage of your inability to protect yourself. You don't realize you are weak. In fact, other people may not realize you are weak at all, they may mistakenly marvel at your ability to cope or at your strength. They do not see the cracks in the veneer or feel the ache in your soul. They think that death (especially of a parent) is a natural part of life. And whilst this is true, I can honestly say they only feel that, because they never had a mother like you.

I think I knew

I think I knew, in the way that I looked at you
Like you were every beginning and never an end
You were this timeless, ageless bridge to all of me, to all that I need.
You were the rarest quality, a true friend.
I think I knew, in the way I looked at you
I looked beyond your wrappings, your dressings,
Your sugar coated exterior, your scent.
I looked beyond your glossy charm, everything that you present.
I looked at your self. I looked at your fears.
I looked at the way you offer yourself to me.
I looked at how it truly matters.
I looked at the depths of how you care.
I think I knew, in the way I looked at me.
One smile from you or a compliment fuels a myriad of endless possibilities.
One wry frond of your tenderness unravels my resolve.
I want to melt into your body, I want to exist somewhere in that realm
Where you think I am so good.
I lie in my bed and think of how much it hurts me.
I can't imagine anyone better than you. 

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.

You gave me more

In one silly little game, you gave yourself.
The words were direct enough
You left them here.
And then you retreated.

I sit here in this empty space
Trying to salvage all that you said
I wish I had kept your words somehow
So I wouldn't feel like I imagined it.

You said the things that I had thought.
You said the things that I had felt.
You said things that I didn't know that I needed or wanted to hear.
In you, I saw myself. 
I grew to trust you.
I ended up giving you the whole truth.

I gave you everything you wanted.
And you gave me something I never knew I needed.
You gave me more in those couple of weeks
Than a decade of tears. 

heartache

there is a certain heartache in loneliness
in the words you have swimming before your eyes
the things that are left unsaid
in the silence of the night

there is a palpable pain in discontent
in knowing that you tried and it didn't work out
that your heart is closed
the moment has passed

i hear shuffling in the other room
sometimes mumbling too
i don't reach out
i dont want to know
my heart is closed
the moment has passed. 

Melancholy by the sea.

In my stupidity, my lack of foresight, I never thought of how I was returning to the ghosts of happiness past. I just thought 318 miles, 70mph highway, and endless sun. I didn't think about how the last time we were there, Mom was a different person, how I was a different person, how my kids were not from a broken home, or how bereft and isolated we would all suddenly feel.

The hotel was a total shit hole. I can't believe we paid that much money for the displeasure of staying there. The rooms were fine once you were inside. The outside spoke of better times, forty years ago, when perhaps it was cool to stay at a motel. Not a hotel. The desperation of the place only added to my insecurities in myself. Maybe I had just fucked this all up too? Just like my marriage, my life, my children's happiness?

The whole time I was there I felt like I was hiding from my Mom. I didn't want her to see I was sad. I didn't want her to feel responsible in any way or shape or form. I mourned her as she sat beside me. On the long highway stretches I held her hand, she rubbed my knuckles, I squeezed her knee. I had a bit of bronchitis/ strep this past week so I have a cloying cough. She told me to get medicine and to go to the doctor. The lady with a terminal disease, the lady who can't swallow water without choking, is worried about my stupid seasonal cough brought about by being allergic to the state of Georgia.

I asked if she wanted a beach chair. She said yes please. And now I, husbandless, was my own sherpa across the sand. Other husbands actually volunteered to carry my stuff. I know their wives would kill them. So I decline, stubborn, I can do this by myself. I carried an entire carload of things from the hotel to the beach. The children ran ahead of us screaming, their boogie boards floating in the breeze. Mom shuffled slightly behind, me her breathing laborious, her mouth agape, eyes intent on the prize, focus on the sea.

I sat next to her, watching her sapphires sparkle. My mom has the most incredible blue eyes. She is so silent now, that any word from her is like the holy grail. Her tongue is her own worst enemy. Or perhaps it is her vocal cords, her brain riddled by dementia, how to force the meaning into a slur, how to phrase questions when you have lost the desire for answers, how to ask specific things, when no one can understand you. She said "it is so relaxing".... And just sighed... content.... and my heart weeps. My heart breaks. A thousand times through and through, the selfishness of this comes to the surface. I am losing my best friend. I am losing her. The her who filled in all of the gaps in my lonely marriage. The one who taught me how to be a mom. My 7h30am driving in the morning best friend who would worry if I called her a minute late. She. Our mom. Our granny. She doesn't deserve to go so young.

At night in the hotel room I watch her. She cant put the shower on for herself anymore. The first night, in my haste, the haste of an impatient person, you know the one who wants her children to grow up fast and be potty trained and learn to talk so theyre not so much of a chore, that haste, she hopped in the shower and the water was too warm, and fortunately I heard her say "ow". I felt so bad. It didnt burn her, fortunately, just it was uncomfortable. I learnt on the following showers to test the water on my wrist. My mom who had always loved scalding water, now required more tepid water, the water that would be more pleasing to a child.

In so many ways she still is a grown up, autonomous, with dabs of perfume behind her ears. She cares for herself. She has all of her toiletries organized in a striped bag. She packs very, very well. She even brought extra towels. But I brought home her washing to wash for her. I sprayed her stains on her shirts for her. She dribbles when she eats. Or sometimes she sprays when she chokes. In many ways you can sense her frailty.

Her hair is so painfully thin, you can see the pink scalp underneath. Her hair was fine before, as mine has really become of late, but this awful thinness, like that of a person undergoing chemo. Her muscles around her jaw are slacking. The faces she pulls are not her own. She makes "puppy noises" at night, unaware. I didn't mind them. I could hear her breathing and compared to snoring, I was happy to have them. She is physically changing in front of us. She now has a limp. She cant open bottles of water, medicine bottles, or strange packaging. She brought me the zip on her beach coverup, where the pull on the zip had twisted upwards, and had me fix it, akin to one of my daughters.

And inside the turmoil rages.

She herself is blissfully unaware. It is we who are all falling down, broken. My poor dad. My poor poor father. I was watching her comb her whispy-spider-web hair over her pink frail scalp and thinking I wish I had someone to love me the way that he loves her. Virtually toothless and broken. When you are wordless and silent, useless and easy to forget, who will love you yet?

I fell in love with the barman once.

I fell in love with the barman once. It was past a long summer, and into the autumn chill. It was during the phase of my life where eternity was suspended on the fronds of smoke that swirled in the club, shifting rhythmically to the thud of the music, illuminated by piercing and pulsating strobes.

I fell in love with the barman once. It was in the depths of a room so black we had to learn to navigate our way around by memory. If the strobe fell we were plunged into velvet black, the breath of the people next to us so close and so sticky, our sweat intermingling. We grew to know and love those we saw frequently. And Jon was no exception.

I fell in love with the barman once. Except he wasn't at working when it happened. I think it was over a mushroom burger at Ba Pita on Rockey Street. I don't know if he wowed me with his love of a good book. Or because of the fact that he had loved our Mix since the beginning of time.

I fell in love with the barman once. Our Mix gave us full permission. I still remember his whorl-less fingers, his baby smooth feet, the smell of his hair gel on his temples, the blackness of his hair, the milkiness of his perfect skin and how when I was wearing heels, his face only came up to my chest.

I fell in love with the barman once. I would sit on his bar, listen for the last song, ride home with him in a taxi, and fall into bed. I fell in love with the white socks almost up to his knees. His black shoes. His hand curled around a cigarette. I didn't fall in love with him per se. I fell in love with how he loved our Mix. I fell in love with how Mix gave him to me.

Lack of reason

I don't know where I am going. Or how to get there. Every day feels like Christmas morning. I am so excited to fall out of bed and get my coffee and just get started with all this living and doing, and being and existing. The only thing I question regularly is the lack of direction. I have direction when it comes to the girls. Be the best bloody mom I can be. Listen to them a lot. Support them. And love them through it. The love part comes naturally. We all can make a concerted effort to be more emotionally available to the people closest to us, especially when we're busy.

I have my personal goals, I mean I carry on like a harpy about my school work. I know its dull as hell for everyone around me. Its my schtick. Its where I get that little bit of validation that although I appear to be rolling around like a tumble weed I seriously am anchored or grounded in some sense, at least in an academic sense, and I can produce fruits of my labour that mean something to some professional somewhere. It also helps clear out my head. I would rather be consumed with external input than obsessed with my own inner churnings.

I have my job which I have grown to love. I love the at times challenges, I love having a shipment arrive and not knowing what in the world I am going to find, or how greasy or oily my fingers are going to get, and sorting it all into what goes where, the paperwork to follow it, the shipping labels (although sometimes I goof up), and then making a record of it all so we can work backwards a couple months back from now to figure out what went where and why. I love the interaction and the banter I have with a couple of my vendors. I just got invited to stay with one of our machinists and his wife in Arkansas. And to drink copious amounts of whiskey. Very funny. I love taking bank statements and reconciling them down to zero. I love how perfectly it all fits. My life may be chaotic, crazy, harrowing, but there is order there too.

It just really comes to where I am personally. I love the silence in my house. I love the freedom of thinking where do I want to go today, and just going. But then I also think that life is for sharing. And who do I turn to to share it?

Yes I have my friends. My beautiful, beautiful friends, who swoop in, and rescue me from me and my necessity to stay hidden away at home, force me out into the sunshine, make me go to places and experience things I never would have else wise.

But I am waking up at midnight, at one, at two. I switch from the blackness of sleep, to the starkness of awareness in an instance. No grogginess. I am acutely aware of my silken sheets, knowing in the light that they are aqua, exactly the colour that I wanted. I have seven pillows, four that stay in the bed with me, three that I throw off to the side. I sleep towards the middle, phone on the right by my head, in hands reach. I feel for my pillows, making notes of where each of them are and turn over, to readjust. And all I want to do is put my hands on his bare shoulder, to touch him, to make sure he is still there. In anticipation I imagine his skin is warm and smooth, the sheets are cool. But he is an illusion. The illusion vanishes and each time, I am overcome with sadness.  I doubt he will ever be here.

The cruel dance.

Daddy sat opposite me at the restaurant. Mom sat next to me in the booth. Daddy sprung into a one man performance. Glee. Mirth. Zeal. He packed a power punched line up. "Hey Diby...!" he said expecting my mom to engage with him. "Hey Diby....!" She smiled. Nodded. She retreated to that space behind her eyes, the place only she can access. She made her shoulders small. I grabbed her thigh and rubbed it through out the meal. She didn't return the contact. Turning 45 degrees to almost face me was all she could handle.

That didn't slow my dad down though. Unperturbed he carried on speaking in exciting tones. I realized then our roles for the night. Daddy needed me to keep the conversation going. Daddy needed to pretend it was all normal. That he was normal. That she was normal. That we were just a normal family eating a normal meal on a normal Saturday night. I actually had zero desire to go out that night. But seeing them all washed and ready in my drive way was all that it took for me to pull my sulky self out of my sulky socks and set myself straight.

Daddy has this thing about Mom's car. He says it is just perfect and so smooth. The second we got on the road out of the subdivision, he floored it, going 80 for a short stretch. I told him not to accelerate whilst turning like that, someone has to be the adult here, but actually the short burst of speed was thrilling and it left my heart pounding loudly in my ears.

Moms laughter burst through her lips like a guffaw. When she turned to me her sapphires were glistening and lit with an inner radiance. I think Daddy risks getting super speeder tickets just to make mom smile. I wonder if the state troopers would see it was a necessity and not necessarily risky behaviour.

Across the table, Daddy and I joked. I told him about bringing "guns to the gun show" and made him feel the place where my muscles are supposed to be. I told him that my brother had told me he would bring the guns, I just had to bring the beer.  Daddy told me I should work on my triceps. I then showed him hey we do this, and we do that, all whilst being comical to make mom laugh. Her laughter is kind of breathless. There is no mimicry or reinactment or comments. It is the hollow sound of someone watching who can no longer engage. It has an eerie sadness of a perpetual observer.

The thing is I think we all subconsciously know it is not real. I just think we're not ready to give up pretending we're normal.  For as long as mom can eat her mashed potatoes and her ribs, we will be doing our little song and dance. And Daddy when it comes to Mom's car. I say floor it.

The Bed

The bed was, and is, as it lay,  a foreign land waiting to be fully conquered. Only half of its territory was claimed for full use. The other half lay dormant, rejected, uninhabited. The wife refused to sleep in it, to be there, to relax there, to engage in this partnership of what it took to be a married team. In fact she procured another bed in another room, at times on opposite sides of the house, at times on another floor entirely, that she called her safe haven. She did this the entire time they were married. She did this the entire time that the relationship changed from "just having fun" to "suddenly serious".

She knew that it was not supposed to be a forever. In her minds eye, she tallied the decision, weighing pros versus cons. She checked boxes, and crossed items off systematically. She decided that based off of  a 1 out of 3 ratio, that this situation worked for 2/3 so therefore being in the 66th percentile (almost 67th if you round up the recurring partial decimal)  that this relationship and continued establishment of this association benefited most parties and therefore should continue for the greater good of all. She did this because she didn't want to cause heartbreak, or upset or anger. She did this because she thought perhaps the flaw in being unhappy lay within herself. And that just like other serious character defects, she could work on herself, and correct said flaw.

In between the hours in her bed, her quiet space, she was up frantically often before dawn. She washed, she cooked, she swept, she raised babies, and then kids. She iced birthday cakes. She blew up party balloons. She worked, she studied, she set goals for herself, and she achieved them. She hugged her friends and her family, she lay in the sunshine at the pool and often times thought that life was fine, just so. She retreated to her quiet space behind her closed eyes, and slept. Alone.

Her mind often went back to that mental spreadsheet. The odds were now 3/4. This worked for 3/4, her vote didn't count. This was a majority rule. A democracy. She slept, she wept, she swept, she kept, she dreamt and she left herself somewhere hidden away.

By the twist of some strange fate, indeed a paradoxical miracle of sorts, she found herself alone in that married house. The husband moved on to another master bedroom in a new abode not even five miles from hers. The children were frantic with worry and she sought to console them in any way she could. But she could not invite their father back into the space where he had been before. For as much as she loved her children, and the odds were still in their favour, that magic ratio she had concocted all this time, the reason why she had to stay, why it was her lot to endure this life, she could not utter the words.

For she had moved her bed into that master bedroom. And in fact she had bought a new bed, and new linen too. She had painted the walls. She had taken up all the drawer space in the adjoining bathroom and spread out all of her clothes and shoes across the master closet. And for the first time in a long time, she no longer felt like she merely endured. She felt like she was this person, in this house, that was hers. She was not a voyeur to this life happening about her. She felt like she could be herself for the first time. And despite all the heartache, anger and pain that this would cause. She just had to be free.

Second Hand Wife

"Special Today: Second Hand Wife, gently used"... Is that even appropriate? I just don't even know anymore.

Everyone should have a friend like my Stacey. I fall into her house, three days before Christmas, with both of my kids and their bags packed for a sleep over. As they rush up the stairs, their mother already forgotten, I slouch onto the couch next to her Andrew, to catch the tail end of a nature documentary, replete with little baby birds. Their home is a sanctuary of love, happiness and childhood memories. Stacey fills up their stomachs (and memories) with delicious Italian meals and fills  their hearts with happiness, mirth, and girlie shenanigans, excitement, trepidation, anxiety, counting down the hours until Sugar Plum Fairies dance in their heads and reindeer hooves scratch the eves of our houses.

They kept my children for three days, two nights, and I rushed to them the day before Christmas to gather my girls back, hopefully in a better state than which I left them. But I really don't know, my objectivity is always the first to go.

Who are these people who have so much to give? Who are these people who live and laugh and are pillars of support? How do some couples just work. From their time in high school until their days now. They just are. Together they are StAn (Stacey and Andrew)... And I really couldn't have done this without them.

"Stacey!" I said.... tears rolling down my cheeks.... "Stacey, I am a used wife"... "I am a second hand wife!"!!!! "No, bern... You are not a second hand wife! You are a certified pre-owned model, like at the BMW dealership!".... The words just roll off of her New York tongue like this is God's honest truth, pages out of the bible. And in an instant I feel alright again. Well hhmmm... I didn't look at it that way. I am so glad I am not a used wife at the $99 per week no credit check, buy here pay here lot in Gainesville! Suddenly I feel alright. I am not used. I am merely "certified". Stacey told me so!

it occured to me...

it occurred to me... that if... and only if...

IF. If there were anything left to do, or say, or feel, or cry about. I have already done that. There is nothing more of me left for you. The proverbial barrel was scraped a long, long while ago. I essentially am "empty" when it comes to you. My love has run dry. My patience has met its limit. I am over any past drama, or current drama, or future drama. I don't feel any way about you.

It occurred to me also, that I feel the polar opposite about other people.

I will lay down my life for my kids. Or my brother. Or my sister. Or my mother. Or my father. I will wake up in the middle of the night for my friends. I will drive long distances just to be with other people. I hear their voices and I feel excited, alive, well and refreshed.

You chastise me because I am doing something so "un-christian"... I honestly believe that God will forgive me. He knows my heart.

Birthday cards.

My mother has always remembered our birthdays. She has taken the time to fill these large rectangle tupperware containers full of the most simply angelic, yet delicious cupcakes you have ever tasted. They were her traditional way of saying happy birthday to you. The cupcakes themselves were Angela Day's cupcake recipe. And the icing was quintessentially mom's butter cream icing...Cream butter, add icing sugar, vanilla essence and maybe a drop of milk. They accompanied (depending on whether it was feast or famine) a lovely present, but most importantly, there was always a card.

I remember specific cards through out the years, not so much the pictures on the front of them (which often were Beatrix Potteresque scenes of anthropomorphic bunnies, frolicking in the woods, having tea parties), but the words. Her incredibly exacting, solid, perfect script, always written with a blue Parker pen (never black for birthdays, that was too dull),or in the later years with a purple Vector fountain pen, complete with hearts instead of dots on the tops of your i's... The cards always professed how much she loved us and how wonderful we were. I thought this was hilarious at times, because I was such a little $h!t, how in the world could I be so fantastic just because it was my birthday, but I graciously accepted them (as did my brother and sister) and honestly, genuinely, birthdays were always wonderful. Dads dyslexic spider scrawl also used to accompany mom's handwriting in the cards, although his was harder to read, would have been perfect for a doctor.

As the years have gone on and I have been lost in my own fog of regrets or things I wished I had done versus the choices I had already made, mom and dad's cards have punctuated my life and our lives and become (like all written forms of expression are to me) part of my favourite things. They would perk me up and give me that little bit of oompf or validation that I needed to face this cruel and brutal world.

 I often times go without birthday presents simply because I don't honestly want anything, and I would prefer a card. My moms serious card giving has influenced my sister, and now we receive cards from not only my sister but her husband too. I keep all the cards you know... They go in my favourite memories of the year boxes... And they seem to me now to be my most treasured possessions.

Part of my moms' illness, the cruelest bite through our hearts, the part that leaves a palpable ache, a tangible loss versus this intangible theory of what is happening inside of her, is that she is losing her words, and her ability to express herself. Someone who used to talk to us all day. Someone who would have very in depth conversations with us about sexuality or choices, or doing the right thing, she now is silent. When she does speak, we're sometimes not too sure what it is in reference to. My dad says she especially speaks "Japanese" at night. We feel like we're losing our best friend. Which in effect, we are.

We're losing the matriarch, the keeper of the family history, the one who kissed all of our wounds, the only one we wanted when we were sick. I remember waking up early with her before she would go to work at the Park Lane Clinic, just so I could have those few special alone minutes with her. She would make herself Nescafe and she would make me Frisco, which was basically like chicory. We would be alone together whilst the rest of the house slept. It felt like we were in cahoots together and the rest of the world could just fall away, it failed to be important anymore.

 I look forward to those minutes with her now these days. I visit her daily after school and after work. My kids run upstairs to play at her house, and we are on the couch, with our cups of tea. Her leg is glued to mine on the one side, from the hip to the knee. The words often catch in my throat when I wonder what I should tell her about, what I should let her know, because most things confuse her now. I watch her opening her mouth trying so desperately to tell me what she has been thinking about all day. I practice my patience, as best as I can. When she grows desperate I try to substitute some words for her, or help her out. Some times I can get it and she nods with agreement, her vivid blue eyes flashing. Sometimes I feel like I have failed her, because I cant decipher what she wants to tell me. She read her own text messages that she had sent to her sister last year December and then thought her sister was having dental work. She is living in a strange and scary place, the vacuous passages of her own mind, a personal labyrinth with limited access, the echos of her own thoughts, and the racing of her new compulsions.

My birthday was last week Tuesday. I went to go drop my daughter off there so she could spend the day with Granny. My mom was in her blue dressing gown, and was asking me if I would come and see her later in the day. I said yes. I hugged and kissed her. Only as I drove away, I thought wow my mom forgot my own birthday.

Once I got to work she sent me a text message wishing me happy birthday. But I am sure that my daughter had reminded her. She seemed embarrassed that she hadnt told me in person. I took no offense to it, as honestly I know she would never forget on purpose. To forget is totally out of character with the fibers of her being. Two days later for Thanksgiving, she noticed the cards on my mantle and said to me "I have your card I must give it to you"... I said "Cards are for people you don't see every day, don't worry about it"... Which honestly is true. 

Finally yesterday, 8 days after my birthday, I received my card. It was there in the kitchen, in top of the insurance paperwork we're trying to keep up with. Long term disability, health insurance, social security applications, all the things that surround the chaos of someone with a terminal illness. My dad had written my nickname on the front, which is, if you dont know it, "Bendy boo". My brother actually routinely calls me "Bennie"... which is funny because Africans would also call me "Bennie"...My dad wrote in the card, thanking me profusely for all that I had done for "them"... I can't honestly even begin to think that I have done enough. There is nothing really that I can do, other than listen or be there.

Then the reason that I write this post, the thing I don't want to forget, was this tender moment I shared with her. She came and showed me the card she bought for her sister. She then asked me to write in it for her as well as address it for her. I said "Come here mommy, sit down, you tell me what to write". I pulled a chair out at the table for her. She sat on my right. My knee was touching hers again. She sat and then had this look on her face, the one you pull before you recite the Odyssey, or the Iliad... Her eyes looked over my hair, to the wall, became blank as if she were trying hard to remember, and she then told me " write 26th of December 2014"... and she pointed where, in the top right corner. She spoke again "Dearest Debbie"... and then "I love you so much!"... labored breath... tongue forcing itself to form these sloppy guttural words, so unlike the girlish voice my mom always carried,  "I wish you were here! Love from Diana"... And I wrote as she said. But then I said "mom, you have to sign your name". Which she reluctantly took the pen from me, wrote her name, and added three x's...

I write because in the depths of her breakdown, in the depths of her loss of self and our loss of her, there is this intimacy, this beauty that only can be there because of true love. I love her still. I love her for the way she raised us. I love her for the tenderness that she has shown us, and for the tenderness that we are now able in return to show her.

She

She will be leaving us soon. Her and all the memories of her. The first places I began to exist, she was there. The first person to show me things, was her. The person I wanted more than anyone in the world, the one who could make anything right again, is her. Yes, she. That, her. She will be leaving me soon.

She who knew everything, now asks me for my help and my opinion. She who had everything all worked out, who had all the solutions, relies on my logic now, my decisions. She who had a solution to any problem, now asks me for help for the simplest things. She holds my hand, like a child, and implicitly believes that I know all the answers. When I simply know only what she has shown me, and simply all that she has told me.

She, who would talk so much to us, our drives when were together, when the three of us were kids, were full of discussions, in great detail and such length, full of facts and feelings and opinions and exact terminology; now sits alone in a chair and watches TV, content in the spaces behind her blue eyes, content in the inaccessible space of her mind.

She, who would laugh and giggle, is now silent. She, who is my number one sounding board, barely speaks anymore.

I want to run to her and tell her I miss her and need her back. That I am not ready for her to leave me. That I need a "do-over", go back and spontaneously reenact every precious memory of my life, so I can remember it for always. I want to time travel back to every birthday cake she made me or to every dress she hand stitched, or every time she brushed my hair. The problem is that when you are living life, you forget to fully appreciate everything that you have, in that exact moment. You are incapable of fully enjoying every nuance and subtlety of your intimate connections with another human being, until it is almost gone. 

Clutter

Today is "trash" day... The word "trash" really annoys my sister, so I say it here in reserved mirth for the irritation that it brings. All of our temporary rubbish is swooped away from our existence, and shuttled away to the dump.

Since I have returned from my UK, have had my sisters' wedding done and dusted, my mom's diagnosis determined, the frass has settled, my heart has not. I just am overwhelmed with anxious energy. The only thing that makes me feel better, is to purge. Not like some bulimic. But like a person whose life is in chaos and disarray.

One common thought I keep returning to: we have all this stuff to distract us from how miserable we really are.

If we are with the people we love, the ones who fill our hearts with glee, happiness, joy, etc... then you don't need all this stuff.