Nothing is ever gone or... being buried under a tree.

Spring time is here.  I've been digging around in the dirt, starting my seeds and I even hung up the hammock.  Being outside, meandering between tasks in the yard, makes me think about things.

Yesterday, I asked Kurt if he would be weirded out eating vegetables from a garden where I was buried.  He said, "Yes, but I'm not overly fond of vegetables."

I thought that this might be a good idea, the way people are always saying, "I want to be buried under a sapling so it can grow big and strong into a tree, using my body as life."

It's strange to me that decaying things feed plants.  Actually, it's strange in a way that makes me feel like I've understood something about life just by thinking about it.  I think to myself, "Yes.  This is what I want to do.  I'll be buried under a tree.  That way, I won't be gone, when I die."

But then, it occurs to me how silly this is, the notion that I'll just be gone when I die if a tree isn't feeding from my body.  We eat food and the food turns into energy and helps to build parts of us; we can feed the plants in the same way.  Nothing is ever gone.  That's kind of the point of life, that we're a part of it and that it goes on.

 Holy crap, too.  It does go on and on and everything slips through my fingers.

my baby is pretty much all grown up

my sweet, amazing big girl will be 5 in a few weeks

when i came home wearing these sunglasses, kurt asked me if we were late for the inxs concert

photo by scouty

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Mermaid - Writing Challenge Piece

A trail of bubbles exploded behind me.  I wore a tiny conch shell around my neck on a string.  I fastened a pair of coral spirals onto my forehead like horns.  Holding the net, I set out to find the angel fish.

She was magical, and she had healing powers.  She lived in the shipwrecks.  My daddy told me stories about seeing her, two glowing eyes through holes in the rust under the water.  He said that she fixed the bend in his spine; she healed his scoliosis.  "You have to seek her with the heart of a sea creature," he told me.  "You have to become a citizen of Atlantis."

I spent all my life working on my clothing.  The necklace and horns were finishing touches.  I weaved a length of fabric from strands of seaweed dried in the sun.  Down at the dock, after the fishermen had gone home for the day, I sifted through their garbage with my fingers, carefully selecting the scales and bits of skeleton that glittered the best.  I sculpted tailbones from branches of driftwood.  I painted my head with algae, smearing handfuls of it against my hair, so that it glowed blue and green and fell around my throat like wet sea grass.  I would find her, and she would know me for what I was.

A girl with the heart of a serpent.  A mermaid and a princess from the city under the sea.  She had to know me.  My mother was dying.

photo by kai schreiber

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This post is an entry at Trifecta Writing Challenge. The deal is that you have to write a piece using the third definition of a given word in 33 -333 words. You should give it a try, too and link up here. This week's word is trail.

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Lunch with my dad...

We had lunch with my dad this past weekend.

Having lunch with my dad is complicated.  It's so hard to explain him.  I feel like I'd have to start at the beginning of my life, and tell you about every moment of every day until you understood.

He isn't a monster.  He did drink when we were kids, or beat anybody up.  He didn't love us, either.  Or, if he did, not more than he loved his whims and urges.  I almost said, "Not more than he loved himself," but that's not quite right.  He doesn't love himself, either.  He doesn't love anything.

The thing about him is that he probably thinks he does, sometimes.  He's been in love with a few women since my mom left him, three years ago.  He probably believes that those feelings equal love.  He's never worked hard for love, though.  He's never gotten down on face, for love.  Maybe he's been on his knees.  Maybe he's begged and lost things, but that's not love.

He's never been up, night after night, with a life in his arms.  He's never loved somebody so that they became a part of him.  He's never born anyone on his back.  He's always climbed over love to reach for the sky.  He's always pushed at love and molded it, trimmed its edges, made it bleed.


He brought home cookies, the special kind with raisins and white icing.  He sat with the bag in his lap and the children lined up in front of him to get one.  I was older.  I was the oldest.  I didn't want to be like the little kids.  I didn't want to seem so eager over such a little thing.  I wanted to be mild and unassuming like my mom.  I wanted to be grown up and reigned in.

He asked me if I wanted a cookie.  I did.

I said, "Um, sure, I guess, if you have an extra one."  I gave a little shrug to show that I wasn't so little.  I was polite and dignified.

"You don't really want it?" he asked, holding up my cookie.

I shrugged again.  "It's okay.  I could have one, if there's enough."

He wasn't a monster, but he was mean.  He had meanness inside of him.  He didn't love me more than he hated my mother, their tenuous marriage.  He didn't love me enough.

He said, "Well, if you don't really care either way -"  And he took a huge bit out of the cookie.  He sat on the couch and I watched him eat it deliberately, bite by bite.


This is why he is hard to explain. Can I tell you that I know my dad didn't love me because of a cookie?  My whole life has been like this.  Little things, stacking up against one another.


On my fifteenth birthday, I got to choose anywhere I wanted to go out for dinner.  I picked somewhere my dad didn't want to go.  We got into an argument as we pulled out of the driveway onto the street.  I said, "It's my birthday, I thought I was supposed to pick."

Just like that, he put the car into park, the back seat stuffed with the four of his children, bundled up in our second hand coats and scarves.  He left us sitting in the middle of the road and stormed into the house and locked himself into his bedroom.

My mom sighed and opened her door.  A few cars were backing up behind us.  This was my fault, their impatience.  I watched through angry tears as she scurried around the front of the car, waving in apology and jumped into the driver's seat.  We didn't go anywhere for my birthday dinner.


Is that enough to say I know?  I didn't have a dad, like lots of people did.  He was there, his presence dictating everything we did, but he wasn't a thing full of love.

He was recently treated for prostate cancer.  They say he is fine, now.  He's getting older, though, and I am full of anger.  I can't bear to be wrong.  I spent my childhood being humiliated.

I tell myself he doesn't matter, and he doesn't.  We see him a few times a year.  He buys lunch and brings the girls a present and it's fine.  Any more contact than that, and I'll start yelling.  He'll start accusing me of ruining his life.  That's the way it's always been.  He wasn't a monster, but he was enough to change the way I saw the world and myself.  He made me, in a way.  Every time I boil over.  Every time I am destroyed by criticism.  The way I can't have anybody above me.

He's going to die, someday, and I'm not sure how I'll feel.  I imagine I'll feel confused and hurt, but I've always sort of felt that way.  I imagine I'll have a shard of resentment lodged in my guts, but it's been there for as long as I can remember.  Maybe I'll feel sad, but I always feel sad.  I'll worry about my sister, about the way she feels things.  They come at her strong and overwhelm her, she's a lot like me.

my 4th grade school photo

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We can't have another baby.

"We're not going to have any more babies, are we?" I asked Kurt, last night.

He shook his head.

"It's too dangerous, isn't it?" I said.

"There are other things, too," he said.

It is hard to believe there are other things.  There is something wrong in my body, something that might make it risky to have another baby.

The thing is, the risk was there with my first two babies, I just didn't know about it.  I can't help but feel like everything would be okay, again.  There is about a 5% change something could go wrong.  That chance is so small, and it is SO HUGE when thinking about having another baby.  There is only a slightly elevated risk that I won't live until I'm old.  (That slight risk takes over everything when I can't sleep. It is bigger than the sky.)

"Being pregnant is awful, anyway," I said.  "And I'd have to have another c-section, and that would suck."

He nodded.

"I'd get tremors and fevers and cold sweats," I said.  "I'd go crazy for a little bit after giving birth.  Not to mention that there would be months of sleeplessness, of feedings in the middle of the night.  There are lots of reasons not to have another baby, not just the big one."

"It's not even that big," he said.

"We don't even have enough room," I reminded him.  "The girls would have to share a room."

None of these things take away my longing to hold a newborn against my breast.  I said so.  I said to my husband, "It's hard for me to reconcile the fact that I'll never hold a newborn.  I mean, really get to hold one.  To hold it like it's mine."

"You'll have grand kids, someday," he said.

Maybe I will.  (As long as the slightly elevated risk doesn't turn into something less slight.)

We've been talking about what it would mean to have another baby.  There's no denying it would mean another person to love.  It would mean a multiplication of all the beauty in the world.  It would mean that my heart would break again and grow, grow, grow.  It would mean all of those other things, too.  It would mean long nights and one more person to cry, when things got tough.  It would mean that life would matter, a whole person more.  It would mean that my motherhood would be a whole person bigger.

It's hard to reconcile.

It's even harder to reconcile that 5%.

We simply can't have another baby.

My heart isn't broken over it.
After all, it was only an idea.

one week old scouty

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Today's post is a link up with Heather of The Extraordinary Ordinary's Just Write. If you want to join in, write something about the details of your day and link up! Be sure to read a few other pieces and get to know some great new writers in the process.

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I am beautiful, girls

I've started telling my girls that I think I'm beautiful.

It's been so easy to tell them how beautiful THEY are, because it's obvious.  They are the thing beauty is made of.  They are the reason we started worshiping beauty.  They are milky and porcelain with dark eyes that see right through you.  They sparkle and dance.  When they're sleeping, they turn into soft cloud babies, little perfect tufts of white on the moonlight.

There are a lot of people like me.  Women who know things.  Women who have seen things.  Women with diseases in their livers.  There are a lot of women with scars on their arms and words that carry themselves like sparrows.  There are women who were too big for this town, who had their backs bent carrying things like religion and a history that originated somewhere in the crook of a branch that extended over a stream.  A place where a patch of the sky was visible through the leaves, where a little girl let her bare leg dangle too far down.

There are a lot of people like me, because we're all the same.  We're all blood and electricity.  We're lonely under the gaze of god.  We're all wet with dew and swallowing hard against DO THIS, CONSUME, SHUT UP and BE AFRAID to die.

All of you women with lines on your brow, with cracks between your fingers... it's been a long winter.  All of you, you are beautiful and so am I.

The thing is, my children are perfect.  I am the grown up, so I'm supposed to show them everything about life.  When they wake up in the morning, though, I stare at them and they're new.  They teach me everything.  They are babies and they teach me what it means to be a person.  It's easy to see that they're beautiful.

I am slow and I am tired.  I am round and sagging. I am harried.  I am sexless.  I am getting older.

I am beautiful.  How can this be?  How can any of this be true?

I don't want my girls to be children who are perfect and then, when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly and so they will be ugly too.  They will get older and their breasts will lose their shape and they will hate their bodies, because that's what women do.  That's what mommy did.  I want them to become women who remember me modeling impossible beauty.  Modeling beauty in the face of a mean world, a scary world, a world where we don't know what to make of ourselves.

"Look at me, girls!"  I say to them.  "Look at how beautiful I am.  I feel really beautiful, today."

I see it behind their eyes, the calculating and impression.  I see it behind their shining brown eyes, how glad they are that I believe I am beautiful.  They love me.  To them, I am love and guidance and warm, soft blankets and early mornings.  They have never doubted how wonderful I am.  They have never doubted my beauty.  How confusing it must have been for them to see me furrowing my brow in the mirror and sucking in my stomach and sighing.

How confusing it must have been to have me say to them, "You think I am beautiful, but you are wrong.  You are small and you love me, so you're not smart enough to know how unattractive I am.  I know I am ugly because I see myself with mean eyes.  You are my child and I love you, but I will not allow myself to be pretty, for you.  No matter how shining you are when you watch me brushing my hair and pulling my dress over my head.  No matter how much you want to be just like me, I can't be beautiful for you and I don't know why."

I am beautiful.
I am beautiful.
I am beautiful.

It's even been working, a little bit.  I've even stopped hating myself, a little bit.

I'll be what they see.  They see me through eyes of love.  I'd do anything for them, even this.

I am beautiful.

Carbon Dating - Writing Challenge Piece

How he laughed when we talked about carbon dating and the dinosaurs!  A great, booming "Ha!"  He had proof, he said.  Scholars studied the bible. 

The world was 6,000 years old to my father.




photo by alvinmci

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This week's Trifecta Weekend Challenge went like this:  This weekend's challenge is to give us a story or snippet of a story which includes, in exactly 33 words, a justified exclamation point.  Make us believe that your exclamation point simply needs to be in your story.  The writer with the most believable exclamation wins.

Can you justify your exclamation?  Link up here.

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Kindergarten

I signed Scouty up for Kindergarten today.  I feel a little disturbed.

 I mean, this is her.

She's a baby and she exploded the world with light and color.  She came into my life and she changed everything.  We grew up together.  She taught me everything about being a person.  I wasn't a person before I knew her.  I was walking around in the world feeling invisible, like a monster.  I peered at people with tiny pebbles for eyes.  I was a creature.  I didn't know anything about living.  She is the baby that changed the world.

Sending her to Kindergarten reminds me too much of my childhood.  The bright, happy, echoing hallways of an elementary school remind me of how I was sick a lot, as a child.  I went to the nurse's office every day.  I cried and begged her to send me home.  There wasn't anything wrong with school, I just didn't like being trapped.  I didn't like being with all the other kids.  I didn't like navigating friendships and wearing my stupid secondhand clothes.  I didn't like participating.  I just wanted to curl up on the floor at my mom's feet.  My mom didn't have any time for me.  She had four kids.  I just wanted to go home.

When I was in fourth grade, I started getting strange pains in my legs, like my thigh bones were stretching.  I think maybe I used to jump rope for hours at a time.  I'm not sure, though.  In my mind, now, the jumping rope and leg pains are connected, but it couldn't have been that simple.  I was scared because sometimes I woke up in the morning and I couldn't stand.  My muscles wouldn't hold me.  

Once, this happened the morning after sleeping over at a friend's house.  She taught me how to peck out the theme song to Cheers on a tiny electric keyboard.  I woke up and couldn't walk to the bathroom.  My friend had to get her mom to help me to stand.

Nobody ever took me to the doctor about my legs.  I guess it just stopped happening.

The lobby of Scouty's big girl school is shiny and the secretary is friendly.  There were a lot of forms for me to fill out.  I almost lost my nerve by the end of the pile.

I told Scouty today, "You don't want to go to Kindergarten.  You'll just learn things and make new friends and have fun.  Doesn't that sound stinky?"

She told me it sounded awesome.

I said, "Why do you want friends?  You have your mommy.  And why do you want to learn things?  I can teach you everything.  Like, look at this orange.  I'll teach you about this orange.  It's... orange.  And it's round.  See, you know everything you need to know about an orange and you don't need to go to school."

She laughed and told me that oranges are stinky and having a mommy instead of friends is stinky.  I believe her.  I get bored a lot and frustrated and sometimes I snap at her when she messes up the zipper on her coat.  She's so bright and happy and smart.  She's confident and kind and patient.  She's going to do great.  I can't help it that I'm scared.  I'm nobody, compared to her.  She's the baby that changed the world.