spring fever

I cut hearts out of paper, and string them together for the children. Parenting is nothing like I thought it would be. Demanding and challenging and alienating and enlightening and lovely. My neighbor asked me if I am sick of staying home yet. I ponder it, spin it around in my head, look at it on all sides. Am I sick of it? It's a valid question, though I'm not. I feel blessed, honored to watch these little babies become adults, and make connections and learn about love. I love hearing their philosophy and their ideas about the way things are. But I have waves of feeling lost in a sea of kid. A lifesaver shaped like NPR floats by and I listen to stories about the Dead Sea Scrolls, or something else VERY MATURE and ARCANE and BORING, though I don't find it any of those things, because I am very mature, arcane, and boring too. I seek pockets of adultness in my day. Away from stickers and play haircuts and baby meditations. A place where I am a woman-artist, a sorceress, a goddess, an anonymous lady listening to music on my iPod and sipping a latte not watching if anyone is about to bump their head. Or a space with another adult where I can talk and walk and drop the f-bomb and laugh.

My body is deflated--breasts without milk, a belly of too much skin from repeatedly being stretched past its maximum capacity, and a soul that feels sexless and unattractive. I wear this motherhood on every inch of me. I greet people at meetings, hug those who have been touched in years, the stinky and unloved, as well as those ones who reap rewards of a life well-examined. It is all I can give of these breasts, arms, belly. A maternal embrace that tells someone they are home now. 

Do not be afraid, I whisper. This is a safe place.

I'll tell you a secret. I worry about being lured from my absolute comfort of everything being okay and fine and really quite contented by someone who makes me feel womanly, beautiful, seductive, sexy, not motherly. A quick glance at my cleavage reminds me of who I once was--sex and youth, abandon and strength. Maybe I am still that person. I keep vigilant, and distanced, but part of me wants to fall in love with love. The crocus that pop up in my front yard much too early. I find them just delightful.

Why, hello, sailor, why don't you come over here?

I am not young enough or old enough to get away with that kind of talk to flowers. I have been on a creative tear, painting and arting and letting the house go to shit. No cleaning, mister. There is art to be done. I buy an album on I-Tunes, an artist I've heard only snippets of. It's jazz and raucous and noise, but something about that feels so much like the Angie before kids and mortgages and daughter-death that I want to bury it deep in my iPod to pull out when I need to feel like me. 

Laundry has been taken down to the machines five days ago, and slowly, I am eeking through dirty leggings and scrubs. But the painting and meditating and laughing and listening to new music has been good for my soul. It trumps the chores. Fuck the market. The sun up early, lasting longer, reminds me of other things that used to happen in the morning light. I sit and watch the backyard change from snowy to greenish. I walked last night in the crisp air, home from class. It felt like a Spring night. The moon hung in the west, a crescent of orange. I found myself enchanted all over again with this life, this night, this world. Something like love opening my anahata, or perhaps more like the randy swadhisthana, or sacral chakra. 

It's just an old case of Spring Fever, I suppose. But God, this world is hunky.

What afflictions are you embracing right now?