crutches

This last moon was particularly hard on the earth people. Us, grounded, soil-smelling creatures suddenly uprooted, moving like the tides until our feet dangled inches above the floorboards, swaying into a moody petulance. The moon challenges us to face crisis without our crutches.

TRY YOUR HAND AT LIVING! The moon bellows. TRY YOUR HAND AT BEING YOU!

I am constructed of crutches. Weakness for all things vice. But now, I just drink coffee, cuss to myself, take a handful of candy every few days, shop for antique fortune-telling teacups and old carnival signs. I write on a blog. The crutches of recovery, I suppose. I ask my sister to ground me, to check my chakras, align them with gemstones. But I keep floating up, looking at knots in the tops of trees, waving to a plague of grackles that swoop low like the finger of an ancient god. The last few months, I simply could not keep things straight. There are abandoned kid drawings all over my floor, laundry piling up. I cannot return phone calls. Emails starred and unanswered. My heart races. And the way I used to regard myself, competent and responsible, feels like a house of tarot cards. All my fortunes fall to the floor, and I have to stare at the empty remains of my foundation.

I take a talisman deck from inside an old vase. I pull the card that reads, "protection from your mind turning against your body." And I stare at the sketch of a belt pulled taut against a skeleton.

My mind turns against my body daily. My friend says that given ten minutes alone after an awkward conversation with a co-worker, he can go from fine to quitting his job, moving out of state, and drinking again. Alcoholism makes death by slow, distilled suicide an option some days. I admit that I am prone to that type of thinking, but instead of acting it out, I write about it, construct a story from it, write an unhappier ending, or, even more surreal, a happier one.

I didn't feel depressed until I stopped writing. Maybe it was there in the spaciness, the ungrounding. But it comes to me in a flash as I stare at the card. Even the art couldn't make up for the not-writing, and this is the crisis the moon throws at me. A crumb of doubt about my writing and how it affects my ego. I took a blog break. I thought with my blog break, I should take a break on writing wholesale. No journal notes, no short stories. Just me being a stay-at-home mother. Being present.

Yet, in a matter of days, without writing, I felt defeated and crazy. Within two weeks, I had sent a resume to an anonymous email for a job as a secretary, even though I knew I would have to pay more in childcare than it would pay me. And besides, I have never even been a secretary. It didn't matter. I just wanted an escape from the dialogue in my brain, the constant story without a book.

When I stop writing, I go crazy. I turn inward and feel out of sorts. I plan to become a dairy farmer in Iowa. Other days, when I think no one is looking, I fantasize about walking away with just the clothes on my back, a mystery unsolved. That could be a novel, I think. Actually, I think that already is a novel.

My crutch may be writing, but it is a crutch without liver damage and lung disease. Writing is a scalpel and my brain is the fetal pig dissected, pinned open, a heart lying next to a notebook. Writing puts it into perspective. Instead of hug it out, I write it out. With two weeks of not writing, I saw my life set out in front of me a long series of things never written. Characters taking on lives of their own. The stories in my head are constantly dancing, arguing, fighting, fucking, snapping photographs, remembering, until they turn inward and wage a deep, unrelenting war in there, oozing out of my dreams, and twisted bedtime yarns for the children.

Writing can be a kind of mythical Ancient Greek torture. Write, write, write, no one reads, then I write more. In fact, the less people read, the more I want to write, just to change their mind. Write. Write. Not write. Go crazy. Write again. With more zeal, more mystical shit, more bells, more whistles. But write, dammit. Until there is nothing left to say.

+++

When she withholds love, 
I want to smother her with kisses, 
cover her with flowers and tea 
and read her my writing again and again.

She didn't really love me, I think.
But that was never really the point.

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. 

feather

This past full moon, the Strawberry Moon, I sat down to write again. Full moons always make me write, but I grew pink at that impulse to write about another full moon and grief. Maybe my grief is cyclical like the moon, growing large, then whittling down to nothing again. There is a longing there when the moon hangs full and heavy in the night. An excitement in me that translates toward insomnia and a pull towards more grief and introspection. My baby died. I give myself the moons.

It is strange to edge into summer solstice and not feel a bottomless pit of darkness. She will be gone three and a half years. We will have a house guest. We cannot even dance in the late sunset by a bonfire. Undress like pagans. Drag charcoal across our faces like warriors. We won't plait our hair, dance until it knots and we look like tramps. We cannot burn charged candles and draw totem. And cry, scream, sing. We won't wrap our regrets and the people we want out of our lives around sage and burn them.

We will be proper people, nodding and forgetting. Toasting to the summer! Long live the summer! Short death for our daughter! May she come back next life soon! May she find us and hug us and be our friend!

I feel so obligated right now. The dog wants to come in. The baby wants jimmies for breakfast. People need to know now. The garbage needs to go out. Bags of our Lucia's almost-future need to go to donation. The school needs a paper bag and a board game and a short day, but still a day. So and so needs their whatsit. And I am just tired. The baby died again, albeit she was not a baby at all, just an empty sac we thought of as a baby. We heard she died, or never lived, at 12 weeks, but it could have been eight, or six, or anything, really before twelve. She was small and not quite a baby yet, but she died. She came out of my body and I bled on everything. Then I had to clean the toilets, using the brush to scrub the blood from around the rims, because I am the mommy. I felt lost in my role at those moments. Or rather I felt found. I didn't imagine it our baby I was cleaning, or the toilet, or the bathroom, or the blood I kept wiping from my palms. It was just a job I do everyday. Like parenting and grieving.

Beatrice cried the other night because all her sisters are dead. Though we never knew if our little dot was a girl, we assumed. Another gypsy sister, all curly hair and the color of Thor. And I teared up too. "I always saw you with little sisters, Beatrice. I'm sorry they aren't there to play with you, honey."

"Me too, Mama," she said, "I'm sorry your sisters aren't here to play with you."

I feel like I'm grieving the loss of Thor and Beezus' little sister. It feels more their loss than mine. I only grieve Lucia and all the life that came with her, which is quite a lot, and might have included another little sister.

To be honest, I hadn't called anyone in the first few weeks of my miscarriage. I have spent three years thinking now that I know better, I will do better. But I just couldn't call. I let people call me--people with issues bigger than mine, like people who wanted to drink, or who lost their jobs. The calls helped, even. There was a palpable lightness of being after talking, particularly when the person on the other end didn't mention the miscarriage at all. I really do not want to talk about it. I don't want to hear her name, if she is even a she, because she doesn't have a name. We only called her little dot, because that is all she was--a dot inside of me. One that never grew.

This pregnancy was destined to fail. I absolutely willed it to exist. I gave our family one try to expand, and it did. It expanded, a nova, came together again, stronger, denser than before. There is no more baby. There never was. I wanted the little sister, sure. I wanted another child in my home, but when she left, I found myself looking at my living children and exhaling. Ahhhhh, no newborns. Not anymore. No worrying for nine months. No anxiety. No comments about how big or little our family is. No sleep deprivation. No blow-out diapers. No all the things that come with newborn life that was scaring the shit out of me.

I told my friend that I saw ravens before the miscarriage. I saw them all over. And she said, "I see death birds before my people die too." I nodded. That was it. She isn't a raven. The death bird was there to tell us she was dead. She is nothing, but the sister that never was.

I bought a three buck feather earring at Target. It was black and looked like a raven feather. I wore it, because it reminded me that my babies died and death birds come. Someone said they dug the Native American thing I had going on. And I wanted to scream. Just scream, like a wild thing, a scared thing, a terrifying thing.

STOP MAKING MY GRIEF INTO A FASHION STATEMENT!!

But it is a fashion statement to someone who doesn't understand. I find comfort in symbols that belong to my babies, even when they weren't babies, just empty sacs where babies almost grew. I want to cover my body in the symbols of all my children. I wear a feather and a deer antler and a wooden moth in my hair. Golden locusts in my ears that remind me of Jess.  I wrap myself in long gauzy skirts and chanclas from Panama, and nursing bras, because some times, I still nurse. I make necklaces out of beads, and I want another tattoo. The tattoo would scream:

THEY DIED!!
MY OTHERS LIVED!!
I AM A MOTHER!!
WIDE HIPS AND LONG BREASTS!!
STOP GAWKING AT THE GRIEF GYPSY!!
THE MOON GUIDES ME!!
THEY DIED ANYWAY!!

There would be a moon and an old woman weeping. Maybe there would be a raven.

dreams

I wear my hair in a knot on the top of my head, a wooden moth hair clip holding it in place, locusts earrings I bought to remember Jess, and an antler around my neck. My vest is moss woven with fiddleheads and forsythia. I have tightly cropped bark pants and pretend I can fly. I am the mother butterfly, Beezus tells me. I demand the children go collect nectar for our meals. Thor creates the cauldron with loose stones. I feed them nectar smoothies until they are giggling and flying away again. It is just pretend, but it feels real. I see my wings scorched and darkened from flying too close to the sun. The girls giggle and beg of me, "Oh, Mommy Butterfly, what should we do next?"

Perhaps I just have a normal case of spring fever, hormones coursing through my body reminding me of that carnality, that impulse of Spring. It turns me into a butterfly mama, or the 100 yard stare remembering a blanket and an orchard and a boy without any other goal than a blanket in an orchard.

There is a Picasso exhibit. I am with a large man, almost twice my size. He has no hair, except a mustache. He doesn't have much of a neck. It has become part of his shoulders. But there is something about him I find irresistible. We are kissing. His head is so large, it dwarfs me. It eclipses my head. His lips cover my lips. It is sloppy, and makes me squirm. I feel swallowed by him, but I am more powerful after the kiss and a little drunk. I wonder if I am dreaming of a Greek god.  The God of Log Throwing, or Yoke pulling.

We drive away. To a train station. There is snow and ice. He is laughing, a big belly laugh, and I kiss him. My truck spins off the road. The large man whispers, "Nothing will happen to you. Breathe." He has an accent of undisclosed origin. It is much sexier than his kiss, but then again, anything is. I try to be fine, but I am frightened of the truck being ruined, and my husband being disappointed in me. Disappointed by the large man I am kissing and the accident it caused.

I dream wildly without abandon. I am sexy there, bawdy, ballsy. But when I follow through, lay a man with no neck, he is boring, and breathes through his mouth. I am afraid at the freebie of a dream.

I have insomnia on the full moons. I always seem to write then. I call them by their proper name as though it will banish them from my sleep. The Snow Moon. The Storm Moon. The Worm Moon. I whisper it, count the stars. The full moon was six days ago now, but I am still awake too late. I tire easily in the afternoons and when I drift off, it is always like this, adventures and crashes and Picasso and kissing strange gods on icy streets.

And then butterfly kisses wake me, reminding me of my whole truck and long-necked husband.

What sorts of things are you dreaming of these days? Any spring fever in your, ahem, parts?

the hunger moon

I am hungry.

It scratches at my insides, and knocks on the enamel of my teeth. One bite tears through my face, up into my skull. Food cleaves right through the skull. Hi-Ho, right through the sinus cavity we go.

That will leave a scar. Or just an emotional chasm between pain and not pain. It is all you can pay attention to when you have it. The pain. I scream at the children to quiet down when they are chewing too loud.

STOP ALL THE CHEWING! IT IS SO ANNOYING! I AM HUNGRY! MY TOOTH HURTS!

My tooth has a heartbeat. I have been spitting blood. My tongue finds the pain over and over. Pushes at the pain. Bloody, cruel tongue forsaking the body behind her. I have terrible teeth, a mixture of bad genes and terrible drink-addled habits from spending my late teen nights in nigh squats and sweaty bars. My front teeth are cracked and yellow from being knocked out and gutted by dentists. My back teeth have pockets of carries and bruises, and large gaps from teeth that I don't remember losing.

Last night, I had two dreams. One I arrived in San Francisco and traveled by bicycle through the city as a courier. I saw my friend Charles. I stunk, but was happy. In the other dream, I cut my rotten tooth out of my mouth with a knife after drinking whiskey. Maker's Mark bourbon. There was a campfire, and a farty dog. I think this was a movie I saw once, but last night, in the middle of the night, when the fire went out of the woodstove and the over-the-counter drugs wore off, I was cutting it out. The tooth stunk. I was probably smoking rolled cigarettes, and had a holster for my boobs, like the tough broad that I am. But the bourbon was the first thing I saw in the dream. Maybe that is one of the only ways I would drink again, if I were removing my own abscessed tooth on the frontier with a buck knife. Once I saw liquor, I just wanted it on my gums, over my tongue. I'm still a drunk. No matter how brightly I try to see the other side. I could smell it when I woke up. The bourbon, that is, not the tooth. The tooth was just throbbing.

Give me, Bourbon. The deformed molar was chanting. Or give me death.

But I am hungry. For booze, or food. Mostly food, like a green salad with lots of pointy, hard things that I cannot eat right now. The drink-pulse comes every once in a while. I have to pray away the desire. I had to learn how to pray. I had to learn how to be trusting and ask for help. And say, I don't care how ridiculous this sounds to cool people, I want to live. And sometimes I want to be a cynical bastard again, kick shit, and say FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! And then I do. I just say it. And it turns into a meditation. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this." But it always goes back to something better than just fuck.

I am a joke.

I get it. It is funny. Jaded miserable miscreant figures out she's a sot. Gets gratitude. Finds a spiritual path. Now she is a corny motherfucker who oms and adores nature without irony and likes playing with her kids and thinks there is a connection between everything. I used to be a boozy, bitter cynic. I'd laugh too if I wasn't me. In my dreams, I am still a scruffy, miserable bastard slugging whiskey and cutting rotten teeth out of my jaw.

It reminds me of a party I once went to at my friend's house, and this dude walks in. Good-looking guy, suave, cut. My friend K said, "Is that Jon Secada? Tell that corny motherfucker that we don't drink his box wine around here." I get the feeling that I am Jon Secada and happiness is my box wine.

Ah, where was I? Yes, I am hungry.

Hungry for justice. Thirsty for liberation. I tattoo "BERSERKER" on my forehead and get pissed at people who stare at it. Don't you get that I feel a little crazy with all this oral pain? I slather on the Orajel, and someone asks me if it is alcohol-free, or if I prayed enough. I am praying for patience with them. I cannot use mouthwash, or vanilla extract, or cooking wine, or NyQuil, or cough syrup, but I'm using the damn benzocaine. It just numbs and doesn't get you drunk. It is safe. I slather it on, and drool. I pray again. Meditate. All the things everyone hates hearing about, except they saved my pathetic fucking life.

This afternoon, I am going to pay some cowboy to get me high, then pull my tooth out with some pliers and a knife. He will show it to me. It will be grey and disgusting and I will hope that he is mistaken, though I know he won't be. I am a nigh-Buddhist, after all. Nigh-Buddhists are supposed to have good teeth.