Happy Birthday

My mother would have been 68 years old today. 10 years ago, she celebrated her last birthday.

Her absence has transformed from a gaping. bleeding hole in my chest to a shadowy, peripheral thing. Ephemeral yet always present. Not always noticed except when it’s all I can see

My life is so different now than when she was here. The world seems so different too. Macro and micro. Those of us still alive have seen and survived so much since 2011. But I never cease being her child. I still foolishly seek her imaginary advice or approval. She is still the yardstick I measure everything against, especially my shortcomings.

I wish she could have seen me become a mother, meet my kids. Enjoyed retirement, and some years with less caregiving responsibilities. I don’t know that longing for the impossible serves me, but on this day I can’t help myself.

Happy birthday.

first tooth

Her first tooth erupted on Saturday after a prelude of drool and night nursing. She is six months old, it seems too fast, but isn’t that the way it always is? For every new milestone represents a loss as well as a gain. She’s a different baby this week than she was last week. She is the river I can never swim in twice, the shifting clouds, the unfurling leaf. I gasp as I smile, I embrace the new child I meet while I long to hold her a bit longer as she is, to keep her small. 

Perhaps it’s the curse of an older mother. We know the heartache of loss, and these mini ones sting old wounds. I’ll never know what kind of mom I would have been in my twenties, but I suspect more like my own, with a sunny optimism that pushes away the painful realizations. Or maybe not. Maybe it is part of me, this longing to have things be as they are, yet also different. Maybe Mom experienced some of these feelings too, but I can’t ask her, and she never would have shared with anyone if she did, for she kept close vigilance over her darker thoughts and generally did not give them the dignity of breath. I can only go my memory of her and her words, spotty and inaccurate as that can be:

Do you miss me being a baby?

No. I always feel like I love the age that you are. It’s fun watching you grow up. Plus babies are a ton of work. 

Well, then. Was she protecting me? Giving me the answer I wanted to hear? Or was that really her truth?

I guess I want to shield J from my sorrows, the twingy sadness that comes with every leap forward. I want her to feel my love like sunshine, warm and shining, not heavy or mournful. Her victories we can share but my grief will be my own to hold.

her hands

If I were to claim any part of her as my favorite, it might be her hands. They dance when she is alert, fingers waving,coaxing the air into becoming her own invisible instrument.  When she is startled they bunch up into tight fists and she gives them a shake or two. Often a finger or five can be found in her mouth, shiny with drool. Lately she has started to explore the opening and closing of her hands. She touches fabric or skin or anything really, and her little starfish fingers  joyfully leap forward only to immediately spring back to nestle her palm again. Open close, open close. And sweetest gestures of all happen during nursing, as more frenzied activity slow to sweet caresses. She feeds quietly, eyes closed and gracefully, ever so gently traces her fingertips along the outside of my breast, my sternum, my chin. The very light touch of her fingers, so tiny, not yet hardened by life’s labor, feels more like a brushing of butterfly wings than the touch of a human, but here she is, real and mine. 6 months after her birth I still check her breathing while she sleeps. You are okay? You are okay.

no words, only beauty

I got the news– her father passed away.  Cancer.

The news detonates a dam, and the tragedy of another triggers a flood of memories. I remember the quiet that pervaded the house during my mother’s final days, even while streams of thoughtful friends and family trickled by with somber faces.  The flocks of grey geese, a silent V slicing the grey skies above. The terrible disbelief that sets in after the final, jagged breath.

There are no words to comfort.  Maybe I can say that I understand what she is going through. Afterall, I too have lost a parent, but everyone grieves differently.  It is a lonely road, and she is a mother, she must carry on for another. The phrase “I understand” seems a bit inauthentic.

I can tell her that I’m sorry, because I am.

I can tell her everything will be different going forward, but how? I cannot predict. It is for her to discover. The truth will dazzle gradually.

What I can say, and what is the greatest truth: the only thing that knit me back together again was beauty.  People, with their awkward hugs and concerned faces, tried to comfort me, but I was beyond reach. There is nothing that anyone could do or say.

But there was poetry.  There were brilliant Arizona sunsets. There were songs that managed to fill a broken heart with joy and hope.  There were mountains that touched puffy white clouds.  There were birds, so many birds.

The beauty of the world can deliver you from her horrors if you open yourself to it.

 

he gave me a backpack, he showed me the way

His last gift to me was a backpack.  A royal blue, 60 liter, Gregory backpacking pack. Rugged, heavy, built for the wilderness and paid for with drug money, or maybe it was stolen. He smiled while he extended the pack and I felt his glassy, bloodshot eyes trying to read my face. I hesitated, as this gift-giving stank of another tactic to delay me in throwing his ass out of the house we bought three years earlier with the blind optimism of newlyweds. A new build, as young as our marriage. I can recall the smell of the fresh plywood as we wandered through the partially framed-out structure the day we signed the purchase agreement. We were two children playing house in a half-built skeleton, wondering where the ceiling fan would hang in the living room.  If I had known what demons lurked in the shadows of the not-so-distant future I would have fallen to my knees in the construction dust and screamed.  Instead, I innocently grasped his sweaty hand with mine and contemplated ceiling fans. It was better that way, better not to know of the impending storm. It wasn’t long, after all, before the demons stepped into the light; we saw their faces and whispered their names, and began the long slog of suffering which brought us, too-thin and broken, to that moment under the whirring ceiling fan when he handed me a backpack. A bulky manufacturer’s tag swung back and forth in the circulating air and the body of the pack was slightly slumped, begging to be filled with camping gear. My toes curled on the standard-issue, builders-grey carpeting while I steadied my face, trying to suppress delight at the pack so as not to confuse the giver, for I had no delight left for him. But I smiled, I couldn’t help myself, and I took the backpack from his shaky grip. Sliding it on my thin shoulders it felt foreign, but somehow right.

How did he know I needed that backpack? He was nearly as shattered as a person can be, consumed by addiction and rocked with grief. Was he informed by whatever love for me that remained lodged in his big, broken heart? Was some higher force working through this tortured man, transforming selfishness into charity? I may never know, but this gift, this final act of generosity in our doomed marriage, was the answer to the question I had yet to articulate.  In giving me a backpack he showed me the door to my salvation , although I didn’t walk through it in earnest for many more years.  I had more suffering to do.  I had to fall further before I was ready to rise.

Oh, and I have risen!  Nature has soothed me.  Freedom has saved me. And this pack has been with me through it all, my trusted companion while I strolled through forest meadows, gazed at the sea, smelled temple incense and gulped thin mountain air. We shared the adventures he and I only dreamed of. It has traveled in trucks, planes, trains, but mostly on my sweaty back. We have been rained on, hailed on, snowed on, and baked in the desert sun. I have kicked dust on it, I have thread wildflowers through its numerous straps. I have dropped it, propped it, hung it, slugged it. It is starting to show its age, but I still adventure with it proudly.  From misery to ecstasy, we have been through a lot together.

a sweet contradiction

The holiday season harbors a sweet contradiction.  We gather around full tables.  We feast until our stomachs protest, until we collapse on the couch in a food coma.  We eat and we drink and we enjoy the bounties of the year, the gifts of our family and friends.  It feels good, so very, very good.

And it is a simultaneously a season of longing. quiet moments masking an internal cacophony of regret and longing and grief and sadness.  We miss the ones who are far away, the ones we have lost.  The ones that are gone, the ones that were never here. We want things to be different, we want what we cannot have. 

This Thanksgiving I remembered my friend, who died 17 years ago in a car crash. She has now been dead as long as she was alive. I was mourning her absence, feeling the echoing hole that her departure left inside of me so many years ago, and in that moment of missing her a turkey vulture soared above me, the Great Purifier. Call it God, call it science, but there is a mysterious force around us and above us.  Something which takes the dead and decaying and turns it into life, into that which sustains us. And in a strange dance we can transform grief into merriment, our losses into the joy and essence of life

Life is an undulation, it is a gentle swaying between the dark and the light.  A step forward, a slide backward. So we gather for another holiday.  We hold each others hands while old songs play on the radio and we laugh about the days which live on in our memories and collective recollections. We are sad, but our grief allows us to feel more poignantly the joys of what we do have.  We can taste the sweetness of pie and the tartness of the cranberries and we can take it all in, every bite.  In this way we honor the ghosts that haunt the quiet moments, but embrace the living, embrace our life.

Ozark butterfly, July 2013

i have my mother’s feet

The combination of emotional suffering and regular exercise has given me what feels at times like superhuman strength.  I have endurance, I have grit, I can hike for miles on end. I ran marathons in my twenties, but this feels different.  I can dig down deeper.  I have removed the limitations of my mind, and I am healthy.  My body can carry me far if I get out of her way.

I spent last weekend hiking and backpacking 30 miles in the Grand Canyon.  It tired me, but it seems as though I could have gone further.  I could have done more. I wasn’t spent. But even so, the milage did take its toll, and my feet were blistered, my muscles protesting for several days after the trip.  The first evening after returning to work and to my regular life, I eased my swollen feet into the tub and did a double take.

I saw my mother’s feet.

Well, not the feet that flew around her kitchen, making dinner.  Not the feet that walked the beach in Mexico.  They were the feet she had when she was dying.  Puffy, tender.  Like a baby’s. I would put lotion on those feet and ease them into her trousers when she was too weak to do so.  I rubbed them when they were sore and set Epsom salt soaks to ease the discomfort. She would lean on my arm as she walked, hesitantly and slowly, the pain in her face evident.  I couldn’t cure her, but I could care for her, and every slipper I slid on her feet and every pillow propped beneath her swollen legs was done with a frantic enthusiasm of a daughter that had to do something, anything.

We got pedicures about a month before she died and she went to the morgue with pink toenails tipped in white. She looked cherished, and she was. My toenails have canyon dust wedged beneath them, appendages ragged from hiking, swollen due to inflammation from long exercise rather than a failing lymphatic system.  I think I’m far from my death bed;  I’ve never felt more alive. But still, if you squint in the bathroom , you can see them there, my dying mother’s feet peeking above the bathwater.

Galveston, August 2011

She doesn’t visit me often in my dreams.  I don’t hear her voice echoing in the quiet. She feels far away, she feels gone.  But I have visions like this one, where she and I are a circle, an ouroboros. My legs, her feet. My eyes, her smile.  I am not superhuman. I am just a person, fleshy and messy and powerful and weak. I am living, I am dying. I carry my mother with me, and she carries me forward. Her death is part of my life, as my life was part of her death. We ended, and we have only just begun.

We are one.

a flowering

I wanted her to live, but if she had to die, I wanted her to die like a flower blooms.  The final opening, an expression of brilliance and beauty before the end. I wanted her to experience the greatest joys in life and reflect them inward and outward.  I wanted her to smile. But if there was any flowering in her illness she was a bloom sliced off from her roots, struggling to survive in murky waters, head bowing towards a dusty tabletop that supported a tiny vase. She turned inward, leaves curling, becoming brittle and thin until the silent fall.

I still judge her for allowing this to occur.  A cure was denied but she could have gone to yoga, or Mexico.  She could have sat in the sunshine more.  Right?

Truthfully, I was the one that wanted to flower.  I wanted to take in all that life offers, from the minuscule to the infinite.  I wanted to find joy and laugh and more fully exist in the world.  But I was scared, and instead of facing my own choices or unwinding what bound me in inertia, I aimed to live vicariously through her. Her looming death frightened me, because I felt half-dead too.  If she could show me how to live in the final months of her life, I thought I could find my way..

It didn’t go down like that. She died the way she needed to- surrounded by love, but walking her final steps alone. Now I will live the way I need to.  I’m still not sure what that looks like, but I am dedicated to finding out.  And maybe Mom didn’t teach me how to to go to yoga, or spend more time with my friends, but she showed me that I too can stay true to my path.  I too can walk it alone.

 

the cultivation of a new life

The last six years have been mired in suffering:

Marital strife. The illness and death of my mother. The drug abuse and addiction of a loved one. The uncertainties of grad school and a new career.  Financial stress. Infertility. Miscarriage.

My life looks nothing like the life I thought I would have.  I’m 33, twice divorced. I am staying with my cat in a home owned by my parents.  I don’t have a couch, or a television. I don’t have a garden. I don’t have a husband.  I don’t have a baby.

The past six years may have taken away my dreams, my home, the woman who was my best friend.  But in all that I have let go, I have cultivated the gift of personal truth.

This may not be the life I planned on, the life that was expected of me.  But it is mine, a tender seedling nourished by solitude and the relentless beating of my heart. I feed my reborn life with crimson blood, honoring my truth by making it my own. I travel. I plunge into the wilderness.  I take big bites of the foods I love.  I listen to great songs twice, and then I listen again, but only if I feel like it.

Are finer things beyond the horizon? I don’t know. It is by some strange grace that I can I open up my eyes and appreciate that today, despite grief and uncertainty, is actually pretty wonderful. I’m healthy, with strong legs that carry me to mountain peaks and canyon depths. Legs that stroll the banks of sacred waters and skip along Manhattan sidewalks. Perhaps as months and years pass, the seedling of my life will transform into a wizened old oak tree, all craggy and leafy and deeply rooted. But at this point, there is too much uncertainty. I don’t know the direction my branches will ultimately point. But the missteps, the pain and the loss of the preceeding years have cultivated a new start, an opportunity to discover what to do with this one wild and precious life. I know this much is clear–

I am the flurry of beating wings at takeoff.

I am the unfinished symphony.

I am the unexpected breeze that lifts your skirt.

I am free.

mother’s day without you

the ring I gave you for Mother’s Day- 2007?

It is hard to be without you today, every day. My soul still seeks you, a message in every throb of my aching heart:

I miss you.

Thank you. 

You were wonderful.

On this day, I would buy you flowers, or a piece of jewelry.  Some small, stupid item that could never say enough the good you did the world, how tremendously kind and loving you were to everyone and everything you touched.  Mothering is more than giving life- although you did that for me too. I was your only child by birth, yet you were a mother to many. You nurtured, you encouraged, you eased, you pushed and you believed. And we miss you here, in this life, in this world.

The Mother’s Day gifts of the past were inadequate, but it felt good to do something, to make even a lame attempt at showing gratitude. I miss the simple joy of sliding a necklace around your warm neck, or watching you close your eyes as you inhale the aroma of roses. These days, I have no such recourse for showing thanks. Maybe your spirit is at such great heights, a little fleck of firmament, too distant to hear murmured prayers of thanks. Or perhaps you have absorbed into my skin, or disseminated into the air I breathe, and you are so very small, so omnipresent, so close there is really no you anymore. In either case, I cannot reach you. You are too close.  You are too far away.

So, I could do nothing else with today but surround myself with beauty, to ease the aching loss of you. I went to Sabino Canyon with my dear friend. The one I believe you sent for in the last hours of your life, so she could be there for me at the moment of your departure. You loved her, I love her, and we remembered you today, as we gazed upon the wonder of it all.