I was going to write about the mornings in our house as we get ready for school and work, but I can't write these days. The creativity is gone and the words feel leaden even in my head and they certainly cannot be expressed in any meaningful way. They are awkward, clunky.
I was going to tell you about how rushed I feel in the morning, the last twenty minutes before we walk out the door are spent in chaos, with our two year old running from us and the only way we can get her dressed is to hold her down with our feet while we struggle to pull her clothes on. Like dressing an octopus, but those words are too old to use, because I've used them too many times before.
The reason I feel rushed is that my daughter is still, and quiet, and sits on my lap for the first half hour that we are awake. And I feel peace, and I don't give a shit that I'm going to be late for work because I can smell her hair as she pats my hand. When I finally break away to take a shower I pour her Cocoa Pebbles and threaten her with big trouble if she decides to put her hands in the fish bowl while I'm in the bathroom.
She glares at me and laughs at me like a little pole cat and I realize my words are too clunky and awkward to threaten my daughter properly. Life is a battle in our house and I'm going soft, and I'm pretty sure it's her fault.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Angels Among Us
for every demon
ten million angels
think about it
you're surrounded by angels
you've only seen demons
on the news
ten million angels
think about it
you're surrounded by angels
you've only seen demons
on the news
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Stuck
It's like she woke up from a dream and started writing.
Someone had taken my life and my diaries and written a book: Truth-isms and In-Your-Faces by Crazy Coppertop, edited by So-and-So.
Chapter One
In this time of economic woe, nothing makes you feel better than remembering the good times, when your friends actually liked you and put their arms around you and told you how awesome you are on a daily basis. That doesn't happen these days at work where a commonly heard phrase is "Night of the Long Knives." And in this time of mortgages and kids and SUVs and car seats and food permanently stuck under the table, it helps to go back to those wide-eyed days when your friends dropped these Buddha-like bombs and uttered truisms about the world, so certain that they were the first to see it and everyone slaving away at their muckity-muck jobs were blind sheep.
"The world cannot support more mouths, therefore it is my ethical duty - hee, hee, she said dootie - to forebear procreation."
We walked in the rain because it was brave and romantic and we had fucking hours to kill. Hours. Every day.
"A great artist is one who can transform herself, over and over again, to reflect the time in her life and the art the world needs for the moment."
And we had hours to pontificate and read poetry and ascribe meaning to the latest song from Third Eye Blind.
I want something else
to get me through this
semi-charmed kinda life
baby
baby
And what consequences to any of this? A vague sense that at some point our choices were going to matter but more of a sense that life was happening to us and there was nothing we could do about it.
"Don't get a tattoo. You'll never get a job with a tattoo."
Love was cruel in the way that since we couldn't control the world we were aware that we'd better have all the sex and the long talks we could before the real world sucked us far away from each other, and we used it as an excuse to make no promises other than non-binding blither.
"To thine own self be true. Always. No matter what happens between us."
The unequivocal laughing acceptance of me, the pleasure of seeing each other. Scorn. Unadulterated scorn of where I come from, like a soft nest I could settle into, the pet names designed to love and belittle. The rare moments of serious shared life.
And then blindly we trade one language for another and we learn the acronyms at work just so that we can be blindly accepted, and we invent other truisms about life and love and motherhood and we stop questioning because frankly with car seats and a mortgage questioning becomes dangerous, and there's too much at stake.
"No. We tried that before."
"It doesn't fit the rules."
"Motherhood is full of joy and disappointment, but I wouldn't trade it for anything."
"I am a worker bee, infinitely replaceable, therefore I must behave."
And thirty-five becomes old, and we look back at fucking milestones, like a fucking project timeline where the next 50 years consist of gray projections.
"A great artist is one who can transform herself, over and over again, to reflect the time in her life and the art the world needs for the moment."
Someone had taken my life and my diaries and written a book: Truth-isms and In-Your-Faces by Crazy Coppertop, edited by So-and-So.
Chapter One
In this time of economic woe, nothing makes you feel better than remembering the good times, when your friends actually liked you and put their arms around you and told you how awesome you are on a daily basis. That doesn't happen these days at work where a commonly heard phrase is "Night of the Long Knives." And in this time of mortgages and kids and SUVs and car seats and food permanently stuck under the table, it helps to go back to those wide-eyed days when your friends dropped these Buddha-like bombs and uttered truisms about the world, so certain that they were the first to see it and everyone slaving away at their muckity-muck jobs were blind sheep.
"The world cannot support more mouths, therefore it is my ethical duty - hee, hee, she said dootie - to forebear procreation."
We walked in the rain because it was brave and romantic and we had fucking hours to kill. Hours. Every day.
"A great artist is one who can transform herself, over and over again, to reflect the time in her life and the art the world needs for the moment."
And we had hours to pontificate and read poetry and ascribe meaning to the latest song from Third Eye Blind.
I want something else
to get me through this
semi-charmed kinda life
baby
baby
And what consequences to any of this? A vague sense that at some point our choices were going to matter but more of a sense that life was happening to us and there was nothing we could do about it.
"Don't get a tattoo. You'll never get a job with a tattoo."
Love was cruel in the way that since we couldn't control the world we were aware that we'd better have all the sex and the long talks we could before the real world sucked us far away from each other, and we used it as an excuse to make no promises other than non-binding blither.
"To thine own self be true. Always. No matter what happens between us."
The unequivocal laughing acceptance of me, the pleasure of seeing each other. Scorn. Unadulterated scorn of where I come from, like a soft nest I could settle into, the pet names designed to love and belittle. The rare moments of serious shared life.
And then blindly we trade one language for another and we learn the acronyms at work just so that we can be blindly accepted, and we invent other truisms about life and love and motherhood and we stop questioning because frankly with car seats and a mortgage questioning becomes dangerous, and there's too much at stake.
"No. We tried that before."
"It doesn't fit the rules."
"Motherhood is full of joy and disappointment, but I wouldn't trade it for anything."
"I am a worker bee, infinitely replaceable, therefore I must behave."
And thirty-five becomes old, and we look back at fucking milestones, like a fucking project timeline where the next 50 years consist of gray projections.
"A great artist is one who can transform herself, over and over again, to reflect the time in her life and the art the world needs for the moment."
A Place for a Prayer, or Rest in Peace Jessica Ridgeway
She came to me in the red leaves outside my window
the sunlight shining through her color so that my bedroom was filled
with her glow.
I had put her and her mother and father from my mind
because she reminded me too much of all I had to protect
every day
every waking and every sleeping hour.
Little girls have Heaven in them
and she in Heaven as sure as she is in the leaves outside my window.
She came to me two days ago
in the quiet eyes of my daughter
but I wasn't ready to look.
the sunlight shining through her color so that my bedroom was filled
with her glow.
I had put her and her mother and father from my mind
because she reminded me too much of all I had to protect
every day
every waking and every sleeping hour.
Little girls have Heaven in them
and she in Heaven as sure as she is in the leaves outside my window.
She came to me two days ago
in the quiet eyes of my daughter
but I wasn't ready to look.
Monday, August 13, 2012
The Goddess Lounge: I Want To Go To There
Yesterday I read The Goddess Lounge from start to finish, in between Sunday afternoon laundry and taking the kids to the park, cooking dinner and doing the dishes.
Just wonderful, delicious, funny, etcetera. I copied some quotes from the book into my diary, and it takes a special book to do that.
Sometimes you have to put brush to canvas, pen to paper, and whorls to keyboard. This book made me want to do that again.
The Goddess Lounge
Just wonderful, delicious, funny, etcetera. I copied some quotes from the book into my diary, and it takes a special book to do that.
Sometimes you have to put brush to canvas, pen to paper, and whorls to keyboard. This book made me want to do that again.
The Goddess Lounge
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Her Words
She keeps a box under her bed, way in the corner nearest the window. The box is the size of a small jewelry box, but wooden and plain. In the box are hundreds of scraps of paper, one word written upon each scrap. Sometimes the words are scrawled quickly in pencil, sometimes they are boldly written in all caps with ink. Never names, although she wants to write the names of the ones who came before him. Just impressions or feelings or objects, enough to capture the thought but not enough to damage anything if the box were discovered.
Bench.
Coal.
Caramel.
Skin.
Cotton.
Smoke.
Dance.
Unwittingly.
Desperately.
He can never know about the box, should never know, but if he did, he would probably be puzzled and wouldn't bother to read more than a couple of scraps, and he certainly wouldn't lay them out to look for patterns.
When she feels tethered, she fingers the paper. With her eyes closed she can feel the bold words and the soft ones. She lets them slip through her hands to the floor and listens to the whisper on wood and wonders if the breeze blew them through the window could she follow.
If you were to paint her she'd be in a cotton dress, in bare feet, sitting on the edge of the bed in a plain room. It would be a hundred years ago, and she'd have rough, worn hands for someone so young. She might be looking out a window, or she might be looking at her papers near her feet. He'd be working in the field, visible through the window behind her, but small compared to the vast horizon.
Bench.
Coal.
Caramel.
Skin.
Cotton.
Smoke.
Dance.
Unwittingly.
Desperately.
He can never know about the box, should never know, but if he did, he would probably be puzzled and wouldn't bother to read more than a couple of scraps, and he certainly wouldn't lay them out to look for patterns.
When she feels tethered, she fingers the paper. With her eyes closed she can feel the bold words and the soft ones. She lets them slip through her hands to the floor and listens to the whisper on wood and wonders if the breeze blew them through the window could she follow.
If you were to paint her she'd be in a cotton dress, in bare feet, sitting on the edge of the bed in a plain room. It would be a hundred years ago, and she'd have rough, worn hands for someone so young. She might be looking out a window, or she might be looking at her papers near her feet. He'd be working in the field, visible through the window behind her, but small compared to the vast horizon.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Family Portrait
I used to wake up at five a.m. and write my guts out. This morning I woke up at five a.m. and itched to write, so here I am. The cursor is doing that blinking thing and there's an awful lot of white space to fill.
Crap, I'll just jump right in knowing it's not going to be perfect, and I don't have time to make it perfect, because my job and my family take all my time. That and sleeping and reading Game of Thrones and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
The Kid is five years old now, going on six. He is not laid back. He is high strung. Change is hard for him. He has reddish-brown hair and freckles and bruises all over his legs because he randomly falls down. It's like watching the out takes at the end of the movie, the blooper roll, where the actor is standing there one minute and falls on his back the next, and the crew laughs. The Old Man and I are laughing all the time. The Kid asks insightful questions like, "Who is the boss in this house?" and "When do I get root beer with dinner? Is there a system, or are you just saying no tonight for no reason?"
I gotta say too that I totally deserve how happy he makes me. I really do. He and I go to the movies together and watch The Avengers and Cars 2. I love the movies because all the truths are universal and black and white and there's heroes and villians and no regular people who just screw up because they're human. There's no giving anyone the benefit of the doubt in movies - you might as well just shoot them with a laser and get it over with.
I used to call her The Baby, but she is now two years old. I'll call her Chica I suppose until a better term pops up. Remember from the story two years ago how I looked in her little baby one day old eyes and saw that she totally forgave me for being a messy human who desperately needed someone to give her the benefit of the doubt. Chica is incredible. She is assertive. She is wickedly funny. She is laid back. When I go to work and she is sitting on The Old Man's lap, watching Little Einsteins, she lazily waves goodbye to me with one hand, kind of a ghetto sideways wave and says "Bye Mom," never taking her eyes off Leo. I think, in fact, that she has a crush on Leo, the little red-headed ringleader, from Little Einsteins. She's kind of obsessed. She's also got the reddish-brown hair, but no freckles yet on her olive skin. She has something against shoes and socks. Her favorite outfit is a black t-shirt and a hot pink taffeta skirt fringed in bright yellow. I think she rocks.
The Old Man is still my better half, and I have to say that I absolutely deserve him too. He is patient and gives messy humans the benefit of the doubt as a default of his personality. He's not a morning person but he jumps out of bed to sit with Chica and let her play with his fingernails as she drinks juice from her sippy cup and watches cartoons. He comes home from work Sunday afternoons and sprawls on the living room floor to take a nap and lets The Kid and Chica sit on his back like a sofa. Every once in a while Chica swats at his head to make sure he's really not sleeping. I've given up suggesting he take a nap upstairs because I realized he likes the torture. The Kid has two loose teeth, so The Old Man spent yesterday morning at the bank getting shiny new one dollar coins so we can play tooth fairy the correct way. I was just going to give The Kid some nickels from the change jar. See? My better half.
There's a little pocket of magic where I live, and I'm probably the lynchpin of it all maybe, or maybe I'm just lucky. When I come home from work the first thing I do is take off my underwear because it's constricting, and then change into shorts and a t-shirt, and I get to play dodgeball and have water fights.
All I will say about work is that it's annoying right now and takes up way too much of my time, but one thing about having this particular family is that they force me to remember what is real, and what is just fluff.
Crap, I'll just jump right in knowing it's not going to be perfect, and I don't have time to make it perfect, because my job and my family take all my time. That and sleeping and reading Game of Thrones and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
The Kid is five years old now, going on six. He is not laid back. He is high strung. Change is hard for him. He has reddish-brown hair and freckles and bruises all over his legs because he randomly falls down. It's like watching the out takes at the end of the movie, the blooper roll, where the actor is standing there one minute and falls on his back the next, and the crew laughs. The Old Man and I are laughing all the time. The Kid asks insightful questions like, "Who is the boss in this house?" and "When do I get root beer with dinner? Is there a system, or are you just saying no tonight for no reason?"
I gotta say too that I totally deserve how happy he makes me. I really do. He and I go to the movies together and watch The Avengers and Cars 2. I love the movies because all the truths are universal and black and white and there's heroes and villians and no regular people who just screw up because they're human. There's no giving anyone the benefit of the doubt in movies - you might as well just shoot them with a laser and get it over with.
I used to call her The Baby, but she is now two years old. I'll call her Chica I suppose until a better term pops up. Remember from the story two years ago how I looked in her little baby one day old eyes and saw that she totally forgave me for being a messy human who desperately needed someone to give her the benefit of the doubt. Chica is incredible. She is assertive. She is wickedly funny. She is laid back. When I go to work and she is sitting on The Old Man's lap, watching Little Einsteins, she lazily waves goodbye to me with one hand, kind of a ghetto sideways wave and says "Bye Mom," never taking her eyes off Leo. I think, in fact, that she has a crush on Leo, the little red-headed ringleader, from Little Einsteins. She's kind of obsessed. She's also got the reddish-brown hair, but no freckles yet on her olive skin. She has something against shoes and socks. Her favorite outfit is a black t-shirt and a hot pink taffeta skirt fringed in bright yellow. I think she rocks.
The Old Man is still my better half, and I have to say that I absolutely deserve him too. He is patient and gives messy humans the benefit of the doubt as a default of his personality. He's not a morning person but he jumps out of bed to sit with Chica and let her play with his fingernails as she drinks juice from her sippy cup and watches cartoons. He comes home from work Sunday afternoons and sprawls on the living room floor to take a nap and lets The Kid and Chica sit on his back like a sofa. Every once in a while Chica swats at his head to make sure he's really not sleeping. I've given up suggesting he take a nap upstairs because I realized he likes the torture. The Kid has two loose teeth, so The Old Man spent yesterday morning at the bank getting shiny new one dollar coins so we can play tooth fairy the correct way. I was just going to give The Kid some nickels from the change jar. See? My better half.
There's a little pocket of magic where I live, and I'm probably the lynchpin of it all maybe, or maybe I'm just lucky. When I come home from work the first thing I do is take off my underwear because it's constricting, and then change into shorts and a t-shirt, and I get to play dodgeball and have water fights.
All I will say about work is that it's annoying right now and takes up way too much of my time, but one thing about having this particular family is that they force me to remember what is real, and what is just fluff.
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