mourning moon

Every so often, I paint a picture of our family.

I draw it in pencil, then I stain it with watercolor. My old paint dries to my plastic palette. I reactivate it with water, and it gently spreads across the paper. I love the process of making this dried old smear of paint come alive, and useful again. I fall more in love with all of them when I sketch them out. It doesn't seem possible, but my heart center expands. I try to capture Thomas Harry's little mouth just like him, his smile which is both sweet and shy. And the way Beezus always tilts her head off toward her brother every time I pull out the camera. I put the lost babies on my dress like appliques. The raven and the ladybug.

My husband barely acknowledges it. He likes photographs, honestly. I'm not offended. But I like art, stacked together, making something like a symphony of images. Maybe he has made that concession for me, but he never questions the ever-changing art wall in my living room. Artwork from all the people I love, pieces I adore, and work that is significant to us as a family. When I explain it to people visiting, my husband seems just as interested in hearing the whys of each piece.

The process of painting our family has become an inadvertent yearly thing, or maybe every other year. I replaced the painting of me and the children from when Thomas was only two weeks old with this new one. There is Sam and the dog. We are all smiling and Sam's arm is around me. I almost put no background in this painting. Us on white, but in the end, I painted all that negative space yellow, because it is positive space too. The space of possibility. In the last painting I did, Spring 2010, everything was grey and mostly colorless. There was no Sam, or Jack the dog, or Lucia or Michael. It was just me and the kids, but mostly me. Sad, but grateful.

There is a circle of women that I have joined, both a virtual circle and another in real life, and my soul feels alive again. I see images for them--goddesses, angels, vistas I cannot control, pictures that have no context. As this sight opens in me, something else closes. Doubt and attachment, I suppose. I resided in a place of rejection, or rather, perhaps, I sought to paint the negative space around everything that I actually have first. Gratitude an afterthought. With this opening, the fear of alone closes.

This month in the healing circle, all the women chanted our own names, staying on the last sound.

Angieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. 

Like an Om. The vibration of our discordant names together resonated through my spine, my cheeks burned with the truth of it all. It felt close to the sound of God, or compassion. Many years ago, I remember my friend Sid and I reading poetry to one another. And she said, "When a poem is really good, my cheeks vibrate and I can feel it in my jaw." And that is what this felt like the vibration of truth.

I have never felt so free to be Angie, a person that I cut off for years with booze and resentments. The uncool believer in things unseen. The joyous clapper in a gospel choir. The psychic who believes in her gifts. The weird little kid who cannot wait to go on vision quest.

I admit that depression has seized me the last few months, crippling despair almost, but not quite. I couldn't keep up with everything, or anything, really. The process of letting go seemingly a paradox of impossible odds, almost Sisyphean in its absurdity. My health issues gripped me too, and then I was all body--injured and unsteady, weak and damaged. But the letting go was simple once I let go.

In the last thirty-almost-nine years, I have needed confirmation and witness to every single thing I have felt. Love. Friendship. Anger. Resentment. Fear. Kindness. Hurt. I sought it from everyone around me. It is only now that I have realized I do that. Tell my sad story, or my happy story, paint a picture of it for judgment, for a nod of understanding, for justification of my solitude.

I think of the end of the Prayer of Saint Francis as the talisman behind the talisman card I draw this morning, (perhaps I should see that one as the joker).


Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort that to be comforted,
To understand than to be understood,
To love than to be loved.

This last moon, the Mourning Moon, comes on me strong. I wrestle in the night with sleeplessness and exhaustion. They grapple, roll over me, kick me in the jaw. Athena asks us to look at the moon in June, what happened then. For now, you should see the completion of that cycle. What have we released?


The new baby was just dead then, and my breeding years died with him. (I am not lamenting, just stating.) I spent these months releasing one lousy resentment, understanding it, letting go. But it was a much bigger process than just that one resentment of that one person. It was about letting go of judgment of myself, of that person, of the situation, of Lucia's death and the repercussions of grief. I forget what the resentment was about some days now. That is magic. Truly and completely magic. But it is more than that.

In June, I went to a spiritual counselling session. It is not exaggeration to say that she changed my life. I didn't see it then, but now I can see this path she laid out in front of me, suggesting I take it. When I asked her about my circle of friends which seemed depleted and gone, she told me that those souls needed to leave, so that resonant souls could come in. She told me to release them. And I skeptically smiled. I got what she was saying, but the last few years of grief had still been an deeply painful process. I didn't have to release them, I thought, they left.

I needed rituals, prayers, candles, sage, meditations, dreamwork, and conversations with them that ended in hugs and a letting-go. I needed to truly release them, so I myself could be free. I sent them off with prayers of everything I wanted for myself. Those rituals of release and opening have brought friends, resonant vibrations, I suppose, people I love and trust and laugh with, where I can just be corny and psychic and recovering from the spiritual malady that has plagued so many of my people. I can see the cycle from the Flower Moon to the Mourning Moon as this journey of less of becoming who I am and more of releasing who I am not.

My cheeks vibrate with the truthiness of it all. When I paint my family, it is the beginning of the circle of trust and love and non-judgment, and it spirals out into the world. This is the talisman I draw--protection from painting what isn't.

integrity

You are nothing without your integrity, I say to my daughter after the neighbor girl tells me that she lied about something meaningless.

She looks at me, confused. I say nothing but that.

She is five.

It feels brutal after it is out there. I don't want to be brutal to my daughter, nor do I want to be strict or shaming. And I think about the way that my writing has been brutal, strict, and shaming and in that way, perhaps, lacks integrity. I don't think brutal and honesty need to go together, but there is a reason they often do. I strive for honesty without the brutality, but I fail often. Honesty can sound brutal when it isn't your truth. And that is the thing. I believe in honesty, but I don't believe in truth.

It is true in my grief I expected people to be flawless while I tattooed my flaws on my body, or carved them into palo santo, written in sanskrit, burnt them with incense and Buddhist chants then wrote a post about it. I strive not to be brutal anymore, not to be exacting, but alone, I find myself falling into the habit of deep judgment, silently writing scathing biographies of people who hurt me years ago. I no longer write out that judgment in a public forum, true, but I catch myself nonetheless. Big changes happen slowly, I remind myself. Sometimes, it is as though my release of those habits was nothing more than an exercise in who I wish to be, rather than who I am. Other times, it feels permanent and enlightened. And maybe that is the secret of the universe, we must suffer through changing--one step forward, two steps back. We may like who we are becoming, but we cannot force that woman into existence before her time. Now, I turn the anger into a prayer for those people to have everything I want for myself.

+++

It is the full moon. It is the time of releasing old patterns, opening doors to healing, banishing unwanted influences. And so I need to make amends to you, so I can stay sober and write comfortably and look you in the eye.

I have let many people down through my writing.

I think it is part of the reason I want to walk away from here, because it is so exhausting. I cannot make it right, and I cannot make it without writing. I get caught up in a story, I admit. I am prone to exaggerating, and following an analogy to the point of absurdity. I always assumed all my readers liked that about my writing. I have always thought that if I don't write about my truth, my world, my experience, I have nothing to write about. When I wrote of certain friendships where I was hurt and sad and felt absolutely brutalized, I generalized and exaggerated. I do that. I know I do. My feelings of isolation were exaggerated and not entirely true. I mean, it was true about those friendships, but not all my friendships. And that is just it. I wrote about my truth, not THE truth.

For example, when I wrote pieces like Ghost Town, it was not literally true that everyone left, but rather that I felt that way. I felt abandoned. I felt alone. I felt patronized by people. Those people are no longer in my life and hadn't been for a long time. I have friends. Old friends. Some friends I would talk to about that very experience, my sister for example. I talk to my sister at least once a day, more like two or three. So was I isolated? Truly isolated? Of course not. Talking to her is like talking to myself, I say to her. She nods and says she knows. And sometimes old, good friends are like that too. I apologize to S. for that, if she reads here even, and D. And others, all my babylost friends too. There were people there, and the people there felt abandoned when I wrote that I was abandoned. It was a cycle I started, not them. That has always been my fear.

What I fear, I become. I repeat to myself endlessly. I forgive myself, but I know other people's forgiveness is not so easily come by.

I cannot take back the hurt I caused people. I ultimately hurt me, probably more deeply than anyone. Those people could walk away from my brutality, but I can't walk away from me. I have tried through the years to mention it in posts, take responsibility for where I failed my friendships, not where they failed me. Certainly, that was the intention of Ghost Town, but I fear people just heard the latter.

I apologize if you felt beat up in my writing. If you were there, I remembered. If we argued, I know our conflicts were not black or white. That is how I saw the world after Lucia died, but I can see how misguided and unfair that is to everyone. I trusted and assumed that blog writing was given a free pass to explore my dark emotions. That wasn't fair either.

The truth is I felt isolated for a long time before Lucia died. I have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. Before going into recovery, I thought it was her death that pushed people away. I acted like a victim, because that is what I felt like--a victim of life. It is part of my disease. I no longer live my life that way. I can see now that I victimized people, rather than the other way around.

I wrote publicly about my friendships, and I need to apologize publicly. I didn't feel I could write here again if I didn't write that. I guess it is a pitiful amends to the world of people I hurt. Private apologies clearly are only heard by one people, when all the people judged with me. I appreciate the unconditional support my fellow babylost mothers and fathers have given me here throughout the years, despite how poorly I behaved, but I know it hurt people outside this community to read those comments at times.

I make the vow to first weigh my writing's effect on others, to squelch the tendency towards exaggeration, to talk to people in my life, directly, if their behavior has hurt my feelings, to write in a way that is both honest and with integrity. Public art needs to have a certain ego behind it. We believe in ourselves enough to put it out there regardless of reaction. I am spiritually working on balancing the ego and writing as best I can. Writing publicly has taken its toll on me emotionally, but that suffering is pushing me towards being a better woman, friend, artist, writer, wife, and mother. I have to believe it is.

I am writing here now about more than just grief. I have made that vow for a long time, and never quite followed through with it. My spiritual path has been impossible to ignore, my artwork can no longer live on another blog entirely. Everything is getting integrated into this space. I have been working on this growth and grief publicly for almost four years now. It has been painful and torturous to go through the brutality of writing about things that should have perhaps been kept private. I made those mistakes, and I can only move forward, changing the way I write and protect people in the future.

My daughter is five and she is learning about others through me. What would she learn through my writing in the last four years? What would she learn about how to treat friends and those suffering? That only I can suffer and be human, and make mistakes? That everyone else needs to be perfect, so I can misbehave? I have failed her in that way, and you too. And for that, I am sorry.

I have wrapped my arms around me, and whispered in my ear. It is a delicate kind sentence...If you don't have your integrity, Angie, you don't have anything.

blue moon

Wind takes pity on my battered soul and torn up legs, moves through the backyard, first caressing the chimes, then moving the mosquitos to the neighbor's backyard.  It is night. The dog is patrolling the yard, scaring squirrels, chasing phantom cats to prolong outside. I don't mind. I look both ways, then I open my arms and close my eyes and see the moon as a photo negative behind my eyelids. It is so bright already. Strange in this place that steals organic light, sucking it into some suburban ambient dull orange aura that surrounds our town. A second full moon this month is the moon of intention. Deliberate abundance. It is the one of synchronicity. "Ask your spirit guides," I read on a blog. "Watch for signs. Open yourself to them. Make connections. Then act on them."

I feel the magic run through my body as I soak in the moon. I am not eaten alive by bugs. That should be enough magic for this long summer. I ask for nothing, rather I tell the universe what I have in my mind's eye. It is what the blog shaman says to do. Use affirmations.

I inspire my children. 
I bring joy. 
I am driven. 
I know. 
I awaken. 
I am confident. 
I am clear-headed. 
I forgive. 
I am healthy.
I am a source of light and love. 
I am my higher self. 

Then, I whisper the vain requests, I am thin. I am strong. I am beautiful.

I am run by the moon. I howl to energize and turn inward, my cycles match up to the moon, perhaps like all women. But I don't know what to do with the power I harness from the night sky. I squander it on resentments and dream work that I am too lazy to write down and deconstruct.

I like the Native American names for the moon. August is the Sturgeon Moon which makes me happy for the fish (don't forget the fish.), and yet the blue moon, the second one this month, takes the name of the first, like a shadow self. Amore radiant, special, important shadow self.  Last full moon, I was packing for our trip, and praying and I forgot about the moon all together. I felt disconnected from the space outside my house. Heat and mosquitos kept us inside in July, bouncing on furniture, wrestling until someone cries. I am trying to let go of my shadow self, or rather maybe I am trying to make her more radiant, special, and important, like some kind of blue moon goddess. Can that be the shadow self I don't discuss in proper company? The one that is luminous, forgiving, pious, full of God and light, as opposed to the angry, resentful Angie? I realized a few weeks ago, that I hadn't thought about my righteous indignation in a week or more. I scratched my head and thought, Yeah, but I can fire that up if I want. Maybe that means I am still damaged. 

But I don't want. It is exhausting to let it go string by string of the cord that binds me to curses, abuse, and neglectful spirits. After more than a year, finally, I feel almost free of the cord that bound my heart and prevented me from letting women get close and know me. It occurs to me that I have already set my intention this year. I want to allow another woman into my life as a close friend, someone to confide, share, open up to and who I can do the same. I miss that in real life. Perhaps it is a friend of my daughter, or the pagan yoga instructor, or the psychics who ask me to join their group. I am asking the universe for a friend in my town, someone who makes me laugh and brings out that part of me, someone who likes far-out gypsy topics and oracle cards, art and crafts, and remembers that women need each other. Someone I can listen to for hours, someone who I trust.

I signed up for this two-month project called the Magical Sabbatical. It was everything I wanted to accomplish, and it felt divinely given that I even found it. It follows the full moon cycles, starting this blue moon, and ending on the full moon of October. It contains lectures and affirmations, rituals and intentions. The website says it is "an intentional disruption in your status quo." I am open to opening. I am open to the shadow self, the luminous goddess that she can be, if I only let her.

What are your intentions this blue moon? What are you accomplishing spiritually, emotionally? Share with me. 

wild injuns

I am listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue and drinking black coffee. I gave up walking back and forth to the kitchen and placed the entire thermos on my printer. I am wearing my husband's boxer shorts, Uggs, a black t-shirt, and a deer antler strung on a delicate ball chain. The deer antler was found by this hippie in the Oregon rain forest. A women in Philly strings them and sells them. There is something lonely and strange about the antler. Yesterday, I called it a deer horn and people laughed at me. Then I told them I killed the deer with my bare hands and they stopped laughing.

I am painting this scene because I can't capture the particular mood I am in any other way. The mood I am in involved moss, antler, black coffee, men's underwear, and something not quite loneliness, perhaps solitude. I miss Jess in a way that I hadn't noticed before I could see her walking around my little house, talking about the differences between American and British supermarkets.

My truck is larger than one of those Tokyo pod hotels. Seven Japanese business men could sleep in it. When it is just me and the kids, I feel so bloody American. I am self-conscious about it in the parking lot of Whole Foods, and when I pick Jess up from the airport. We don't need this big truck, yet it feels like we need this big truck. We build things. We camp. I don't explain it. I am a bloody American.

There are things you can't imagine about a person when you read their words, like what they are wearing when they write, or how they take their coffee, or what kind of car they drive. But most things are unsurprising in a surprising way. The most surprising thing about her is that it felt like we spend the weekend together all the time. It felt like someone pressed the "pause" button on a conversation we started a few months ago and when stepped up into my large truck, we hit "play" again.

I don't know if it reflects where I am in my life, or the connection between Jess and I is just different, but I was remarkably unanxious to have her here for an entire weekend. I remember the first time I had coffee with another babylost mother. I was a month out from Lucy's death. My uterus was still hanging outside of my body. My breast dripped milk. My heart slow-danced on my sleeve to maudlin accordion music. I felt like I was on a first date. I emoted some inappropriate vocal responses between giggle and ugly cry. I was still wearing maternity clothes and cringing at babies. My hands shook as we spoke. Occasionally I wept into my latte. It was awkward, but cathartic. I had wanted a few weeks in between meetings to recover and prepare emotionally.

There was nothing maudlin or emotionally taxing about meeting Jess. It was easy in a way that makes me feel so much more easy than I actually am. We just hung out for a few days. We found an ofrenda in a bodega on ninth street in South Philly. We had a tarot reading from a women whose left eye rolled up in to her head right before she nailed something. Mostly, though, she went fishing with a hand grenade. I took her to the Italian Market where the cheese guys at DiBrunos swooned and flirted with her. You could see the gears shifting into another mode around her.

She speaks beautifully. She is stunning. This woman can talk about Shakespeare and gangsta rap as easily as a Pecorino. She really knows all about cheese, just like me. I know about cheese. Let me tell her everything I know about cheese. I have a tattoo of Montgomery Cheddar on my ass. I should show the beautiful British woman my ass.

We went to the art museum. I quietly mentioned if she wanted to see the dead baby picture, and she got excited. "WOULD I?!?"

And we stood in front, and took snapshots of it. We grew solemn and talked about the piece. We briefly discussed if we should get a tourist-y picture of our thumbs up in front of Rachel Weeping. (Come on, that's hilarious!) and a tween girl asked her mother why the mommy was crying, why the baby was laying still and grey as Jess and I walked away. Jess whispered in a perfect dead baby mummy cackle, "Because the baby is dead, Kid!"

I can't explain it. It just was perfect.

I am convinced there is a strange shop somewhere in the world. It is on an alley with junkies and drug dealers loitering about. When they notice us holding hands, they point to a door without a sign. There is a small makeshift shrine next to the door covered with marigolds and moss. The door has a rope of small bells on it. There, they sell small dead things strung on chains, and faux fur vests. They paint your face like a calavera, and pose you in front of 19th century paintings of babies dead from the small pox. The women dress you Nauhatl textile dresses with large chunky belts. You hold a large beeswax candle lit with the end of a cigarillo from the old cowboy photographer waiting for you to stand still. The old Mexican women make cafe con leche for you and add dried flowers to your hair while the mustachioed cowboy photographs you and your bestie from the dead baby world. He looks at the British woman, "How does it feel to be away out here where the wild Injuns grow, Kid?" And he points to me. We laugh, but try to pose with no expression. The women read your palm, and tell your fortune very specifically. She holds up four fingers. "En cuatro semanas, the dog will bring caca into the house." They feed you cannoli and cheese. And you will never want to leave.

When I find that shop, I can post pictures of Jess and I that accurately reflects the weekend, but until then, here is a photograph on top of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps. We didn't run up them like Rocky. That is the magic of the internet. We just made it look that way.

Tell me about our internet besties. Ever meet? Ever want to meet? What kinds of things do you think would be in the shop on that alley?




* That is from Benjamin Capps' book The Trail to Ogallala.

sober

Three months after Lucy died, I wrote this:

I am both drastically different, and exactly the same. I am exactly the same person living a drastically different life that looks exactly the same. 

In the beginning, I told myself my own story. I had just quit drinking and was going to meetings listening to people's stories of drinking and recovery every night. I stopped drinking and stopped being able to sleep. I tucked into bed, read books about alcoholics who make drastic changes in their life, thought about the layers of lies I told myself through the years about my drinking. Everything was beginning to make sense about me. Alcoholic--that is my tribe name. Now I know. I wondered how I could be here at 37. I felt lost, but on my way to home. And then I would tell myself my own story, in the dark.

Hello. My name is Angie. I am an alcoholic. I took my first drink when I was four.

At four, I blacked out and threw up and asked for more. I was a four-year old sot, a drunk. An alchy, I think. A four year old boozer. I couldn't stop, even then.

It is a family legend. Told around the Thanksgiving table. A party at my grandmother's house, I began drinking wine glasses filled with frozen berries and a Riesling when my aunts, uncles and grandparents walked away from their glasses. All my older relatives thought they were distractedly drinking too quickly. They repeatedly filled up their glasses. I would drain them again. Before long, I became violently ill. After hours of throwing up, I asked for some more berries with juice. And also asked if we could go to McDonald's. I guess I got the munchies. I was four.

There is a man I know who always says that the first time he drank, he drank too much and threw up. To sober him up, his friends gave him coffee, and he threw that up too. And he never drank coffee again. Because alcoholics will keep drinking, even though we are dying.

I was dying spiritually, emotionally, physically.

Beezus is four. She has never seen me drunk. She has never been drunk. She once pointed to the liquor store and said, "Remember that time you bought wine there?"

Yes, I do.

I am sober nine months. Nine months without a drink. I have gone longer without a drink. Still, it means something to me. I had never done the work to get out of the way of thinking that makes me an alcoholic. I have never really comprehended the wreckage of my drinking. I thought it was victimless. I thought I was a drunk Buddha. I thought I could have it all--spirituality and drinking. Looking at God and myself through a bourbon bottle distorted everything. Made it wiggly and aggressive.

For me, those two things are not compatible anymore. Drinking was but a symptom, that is what they say. I believe them. For most of my drinking, I was alone in my apartment.  I stopped going out to bars, because it seemed to get in the way of me drinking the way I wanted to drink. And the writing. ("You know, I'm a writer. I have to go home, because I am working on something.") I started isolating a long time before Lucy died. I thought I should tell you this because I have complained about my friends and my support on this blog. I complained about how alone I felt.

I did that to myself.

Maybe you didn't know that. Maybe you parsed it together through the years. But we used to drink together, my friends and I. Then, I guess, I crossed that invisible line between heavy drinker and alcoholic. Maybe I crossed that line at age four when I stopped drinking like the other four year olds. I didn't realize how isolated I had become. I would treat people like we were having a conversation:

Sure, we'll get together next week.

Six months go by and I would contact them ready to go out. Alcohol exaggerated everything for me--grievances, time, depth of friendships, people's tolerance for my bad behavior. Maybe I stopped hanging out with my friends because I stopped drinking like my friends. Maybe I stopped hanging out with people because I wasn't able to hold it all together, because my alcoholism was seeping through my every move--the self-pity, the resentments, the anger, the depression, the desolation. Maybe I stopped hanging out with people because alcoholism wanted me alone. Isolation is a symptom of this disease, but one not every alcoholic has.

When I got married and had kids, I thought I had kicked all this bad drinking business, if I even had drinking business. I drank infrequently after I had children. But when I did, I drank until I fell asleep, or passed out, whatever your perspective, because I had trouble sleeping. That's what I told myself. Drinking in the last few months before getting sober, I realized that I immediately could not quit. My alcoholism had been doing push-ups during my years of birthing children. It was getting stronger. Sure, I still was accomplishing things. I still had my marriage. I still was parenting. I still was waiting until the kids went to sleep to drink. But those things would have fallen away. Sometimes I think I got sober the day before I lost everything. Not the day before I lost many of my friends, that was a process happening for years that was my first indication that something was seriously wrong with me.The only thing all those friendship break-ups had in common was me.

I thought I was a person who made no impact on the global suffering of the world. How could drinking affect the way I treat people? It seemed as though it didn't. I deserved a drink, for the love of God, because I worked hard, and helped others, and my daughter died, and eff it, because I am an adult. It's just a drink, for the love of God. I had no idea that drinking was simply a symptom of a larger, more profound, spiritual malady. That might sound dramatic, but I am downplaying it.

Today, I am drastically different, and exactly the same. I am exactly the same person living a drastically different life that looks exactly the same. And I am incredibly grateful for that.