mothers

My mother' home bursts with magic. Pheasant feathers and gourds in an antique glass vase. Moss growing in the sacred circles of her brick patio. A skull and a broken pitcher near the garage. The pitcher used to hold spider plants growing long tentacles in water on their way to earth. Somewhere between a glass of water and a pot of soil. There is a cauldron with a dead plant coming out of it under the nectarine tree. She has a makeshift altar above her sink. It has a chalice of water for her spirit guide and Buddhas she finds at flea markets. One looks like ivory and she tells me how she bought it for a few bucks.

The sunrise here is a marvel and the coffee tastes different, like cozy socks and a hug, even though the robusta beans coat my tongue with extra caffeine. My mother and I talk and talk about psychics and spirits and grandmothers, Of emigrating, moving, changing space. We talk about retirement and staying home and my childhood. Then, she mentions to me in passing that mother-daughter relationships are complicated, and I chuckle. Heh heh, yeah, Mama, I heard that once.

My children run through the yard like wild things--they climb trees and track rabbits. My mother tells my daughter she used to kill birds with a slingshot and roast them in the cemetery. She grew up poor and my daughter's mouth gapes open in amazement. My daughter spots a woodpecker in the valley. We sit by the stream, tossing red leaves into the current as the visiting neighbor's weiner dog barks. We climb over the weeping willow the hurricane tossed out of the earth. I used to sit under that tree and play guitar in the summer. My stepfather is non-nonplussed. "I'll put another one in. This bank was too loose. In spring, I'll put in a cutting up a few feet in sturdier ground." I strum my daughter's favorite song there anyway, while she sings.

Oh, my Mama. 
She gives me 
These feathered breaths. 

I made my way here on Wednesday morning to pick my mother up from the hospital after surgery. My step-father received a call when she was rolled into surgery that his mother was not going to last much longer than a week. She could no longer eat, or drink, and the morphine was all they could do. She died an hour after my mother and I arrived home from the hospital. She is the last of the grandmothers in my family. The last of that generation. Sixteen years ago, my paternal grandmother died at 67. My mother's mother died at 95 two months after Lucy, now my step grandmother at 86.

While I mourn for my stepfather, cry with him, his mother suffered from the death that most of us fear. Forgetting our husband and children, experiencing the indignities and humiliations of rotten people and a body betraying its soul. She was surrounded by love, though, and she was never want for anything. I wonder if there is a good death and what that would look like.

The children and I tramp through the woods, and my daughter points out that in the summer this place is filled with poison ivy. She tells me a story about my own childhood. It is the story about poison Sumac. I couldn't see well because my face was so swollen. My aunt had to take me for the day, while my mother worked. My Titi, as I called her, had no idea what to do with me, so se taught me to dance the cha-cha with a record and a mat with feet prints. My mother waits for the children and I at the top of the hill, right by the sweet cherry tree. My children call to her, "Abuelita, Abuelita, we walked through the poison ivy." I want to be an abuelita some day.

My daughter's death was as good as it gets. It hits me. She died in her mother. She never feared. And we loved her like she was going to live forever. There was never pity or grief in the love. But still, how good can it be if you never really got to live?

Being in my mother's home soothes something broken in me. My mother rubs in salve and aloe when she makes white rice in the same pot she's been making rice in for forty years. She puts on another pot of lentils, despite my protestations. She just had surgery. She doesn't have to make my favorite meal, but she insists. We talked about making rice. She taught me when I went to college, but it still took me many years to make it like her. She breaks off sofrito from the freezer and adds a can of tomato sauce. She tells me about being the second youngest of twelve and learning to cook Panamanian food in America. I watch the birds out the window beyond her shoulder, and think that this land is the land of my mother, even if it is far away from the land of her birth. But it is both for me. I feel attached to this land. I dug my feet into the dirt this morning, the dew almost frozen hurt my feet, but I refused to move.

This is the land of my people.

As I stood there, I realize that the hardest part of writing is learning you are mediocre. And in that mediocrity, you still sometimes nail a good phrase or two. You sometimes write something amazing. But mostly, it is just mediocre. But the world is constructed of mostly mediocre. It is part of the suffering. You feel the extraordinary bubbling underneath its surface, but it hasn't (or perhaps never will) quite burst through you. It is like rice-making year three. The phase in which you change from mother to grandmother.

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.

lifesavers

I have no grief to give you anymore.

No, wait, maybe I do. Maybe it hides behind the confusion. It crouches behind the spaciness and flakiness and the general feeling of being overwhelmed with life. Or maybe that is grief itself, dressed up for work.

Lucy died.

I write about it here. There. Everywhere.

After the last baby died, I grieved for a little, then it was over. I cried only once. I didn't name her. And I wondered if this community had space for not-naming, or even not-grieving as much as it has space for grief in whatever form it arrives. I didn't want to exaggerate the experience. It was physically grueling, but I didn't feel sadness over the life she didn't get to lead. Life was over before it began. On the grand scheme of suffering, it was barely a blip. We get behind anger. We get behind indignation. We get behind sadness. But what about no-grief? What if I felt like I grieved the grief I needed to grieve in two weeks?

Grief is something I poured out of me onto the trees, the flowers, the internet, for three point five years. It flowed into every piece of art and writing I did. Grief isn't a controlled essence. It is not a tameable beast. I couldn't control when it was a torrent, and now as a single tear, I cannot will it into a keen. It drips into this post, of course, but it is a different grief. It is the grief of an inevitable ending.

I have replaced my addiction to bourbon for Wint-O-Mint life savers. I eat them like candy. I chomp them, and imagine the blue spark.

CHOMP. Blue Spark.
CHOMP. There is another.
NARFLE...not quite a spark, perhaps a faint ember, or a fizzle of aqua.

I want sparks in me. I want to feel a passion. I have one. It seeps into all the posts I write now. I don't know how to manage it quite yet. I don't even know what to call it. I would basically live in my studio if I didn't have to manage everyone else's life. There was a time I wept here constantly. That was a grief we all know. I cried about the death of my daughter and drank bourbon. I put the bottle on the floor by my feet, and thought about dying. Not suicide, but it was just that grieving and drinking while being me was torture. This room was a dark place.

But now, I would spend all my time here if I could. All this writing about grief and acceptance and living with her death transmuted that sadness and heaviness into something beautiful and healing. My hands are strong and muscled, and in the nooks and crannies of this room, there are letters from babylost friends, thank you cards, artwork about death. There are skeletons, and political poetry, old love letters, and a dictionary. There are milagros, and sins, if you look hard enough. There are baby spider plants in water, growing roots, ready to be put in soil. All my sacred objects are here, except Lucia.

I burn incense constantly. And when I write, I draw it in through my nose. It becomes part of me, part of my writing.  I write because writing is a compulsion. I don't understand why I feel the words in my fingers, and need to get them out. But I do. Words flow out of me like a faucet turned on, until I have to eat or sleep or tend to a child. I write now into a word document and sometimes post something that no one reads. It smells of sandalwood and sage. There is wax dripped on everything in my studio from the candles I burn to light the incense, and the children leave a trail of the sandbox on the floors. Sand and wax. Wax and sand. It all mixes up together with the smell of fresh, clean mint of Lifesavers. This is what I am now. Sand and wax and mint and incense all borne of grief, but not grief.

If this space becomes gypsy, or fortune teller, or recovery, or art, it isn't grief. And if it stays grief, it isn't me. It isn't my truth anymore. I struggle with it constantly, because this space never meant to be forever about grief. I have a post a month in me about grief, but not five, or even two. I want a space for that post, intermixed with all the others. I start to write about other things here, but it morphs somehow back to grief. I used to think it was because every suffering was a form of grief. Now, I think it is because I want so desperately to stay a part of this amazing community. This blog is like this old bourbon room I'm sitting in, it hasn't quite been changed into an art studio.

After six years in this studio, I rescreened my screen door. I open the glass door to hear the chimes, let the wind blow through the space. It changes the dynamic in here. The art hangs like prayer flags. The wind carries out the old bourbon smell, and the incense, and peppermint. And sandalwood. It carries out bits of artwork, and grief. The wind carries joy in too, and music created by the mourning doves, but no mosquitoes, or flies. I need to start writing about the things being blown into my life right now. I don't quite know how to do that yet. I think it involves new paint, and a different flavor of lifesaver. I hope you stay and read. But if not, I understand. Until then.

new moon.

The new moon quiets me, wrings me out, challenges me to be a better person in thought and deed. I want to bathe in salts with smelly herbs and burn incense on small charcoal rounds. And yet the children are underfoot, and a FB video of father-daughter wedding dances has me weeping in the afternoon, head in my hands, missing my father, even thought I see him every week. I miss the father he could have been. I miss dancing with him, even though he never danced, even when he could. I wonder if he regrets that.

I have a disease. I share it with my father, and crying in the afternoon after wedding videos makes me remember how important it is for me to care for it, treat it like a volatile thing. I underestimate it sometimes. That never does me any good. I respect it. Fear it, sometimes. Think I will be struck drunk, as my friend says, like bourbon will come into my home and pour itself down my throat. I make dream tea and herbal remedies instead. It wards off the sudden surprise drunk.

I found a photograph at my mother's house. It is of an old Indian woman. I used to think she was my grandmother, since my mother told me that my grandmother smoked a pipe and cussed like a sailor. But I learned later that my mother's friend is a photojournalist and took the photograph for some tourist brochures in the late 70s. The Indian is Panamian and covered in malas. Her nose is pierced in the middle and she is smoking a pipe. There is a parrot on her fence. I dream of her. And others. They come on horses, and take me deep into the desert. I don't know what the metaphor is anymore. I sit with it and seek answers from oracles and psychics and astrologers and they always tell me that my heart knows what the answer is.

But it doesn't. The heart aches for what once was, some days, and we all know that is a crock of not-right. I was a drunk. I couldn't get out from under grief. Today, I am a free woman. I hang the picture above my computer, next to the sign that says, "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK."

The baby keeps turning on his fire engine's siren. Whee--ooo, whee--ooo. I read tarot for my cousin and feel  like I should warn her, even though the cards are all positive and lovely and point to love. "I hear an alarm. The guides tell me there is going to be a fire." Love is a kind of fire, and I drift off in thought as I order herbs to make teas, oils to anoint, salts to draw out impurities. I listen to guided meditations and see nothing, but a huge indigo orb. The truth is the herbs and tarot and meditation is such a small part of my day, it is hardly worth noting. I do crafts, and clean-up, and make snacks, and scold the children for fighting. The hours sit on top of one another.This full school schedule makes writing almost an impossibility, yet here I am writing, mid-afternoon, as the children turn on sirens, and use meditation cushions as weapons.

I just needed to take some time to think, and write, and order herbs and print out my novel. I vow to work on it after nine months. To just read it again, perhaps. I wore out an ink cartridge halfway through, so I changed the font to purple and continued until there was no more colored ink. I secretly wish I would have chosen dragon's blood. Can you get that for a laser printer? I would run my hand through the top, and print it in some medieval font that is only used for fake certificates. It would be written on my body, written in magic, written in myth and religion. I fear that is all it would ever be. It is a novel about UFOs, and ancient Greeks, and being a halfie and war. It is mostly about war.

Jess and I went to a palmist last weekend. He gropes hands. Studies hair. Sensually grasps arms for information, reading something no one else can see. His fingers go over tattoos, taking it in with no fanfare. His personal mannerisms and lack of spiritual connection made me feel sorry for him. I asked him if he wanted my hair down. I unfurl it from the stick that holds it up. Mass of curls come around my face, making me look feral and exotic. I would have draped it over his neck, in his hair, anywhere for more information. But he takes it in his hair, turns it around. "Oh, see, now I am cheating," he jokes. "It is clearly written right here in this curl. Wait, no. Yes. Of course."

What do you see? Tell me more. Tell me what I can't see. Tell me what is next. I feel so lost. Tell me what to do.

He told me I had a weak uterine wall, and when I asked about a career, he said I would be a soccer mom. I cringe, and nod and wonder if he's right. It's probably the first psychic reading I have ever had that is just a series of mundane things, probably much more accurate than anything I have had before. To many people, that is all I am. Jess gets indignant after.

DID HE EVEN LOOK AT YOU? NOTHING ABOUT YOU SCREAMS SOCCER MOM.

Oh but it does. I AM A SOCCER MOM! I drive an SUV! I buy clothes at TARGET! I watch my daughter play actual SOCCER! With SHIN GUARDS! I am a soccer mom! Albeit one that wears crystals, and gypsy clothes. I smudge my children before practice, and spray them with a reiki-charged spray to cleanse the aura. I commune with the angels, and hang onto dark crystals so I can tell your fortune. The local crystal shop asked me to interview for their tarot reading position. I stare into my fake crystal ball.

I see myself, draped in deep red fabric, nose pierced, smoking a pipe. There is a woman sitting across from me. She is wearing a high ponytail and a sweater-cardigan set. I kick the mini-soccer ball under my crystal ball. I sage her. She coughs a bit, and adjusts her Coach purse. I ask her if she wants to know everything, even if it says she is just a soccer mom. Then I ask her if she minds if I put my hair down.

curios

When my daughter died, I kept all the cards. There is a manila folder that says "Lucia" on the tab. Every card and note that came to my house, I tucked into the folder. I didn't look at them again in the months or years since. I know they are there. That is enough. The condolences were never lost on me. They were there, the words meaningless and important. What it did was made me love, feel love, feel loved, because of that, they did the most important job ever. Things change, some of those people are gone. But those condolences were the possibility of them staying, and it meant something.

There are so many things about the time of early grief that I want to study. The way I reacted to normal life, for example, or the feeling of being skinned alive and sent on my way. "Your baby was born dead. Then we removed all your skin. You are now free to leave the hospital. Watch for sharp corners, lemons, and salted foods."

I soak the photographs of the girl I once was in formaldehyde. I add in the compassion I had before, and the belief in me and my body. I have another jar entirely with luck, fortune, and giggly spirits. And one for good behavior and doing what I am told. I have a jar filled with the callouses that protected me from holding grudges. They fell off after she died. I put all those little fancy parts of my grief in jars, and keep them on the internet.

I tuck that grief away in yellow liquid, because it feels so unnatural, like a disease. It feels like it needs to be extracted, even though I know my baby died and I am supposed to feel this way, even three years later. I want to study my grief. To float it in liquid. I want to dissect it, pull the blackness out of the moldy chambers of me, weigh it, examine it, pluck out the lungs of it. I want to find the source of our fevers and weeping. I want to find ourselves in the lostness of our lives. I want to lose ourselves in the finding. "We are animals," this strange Victorian curio cabinet of my grief seems to say. "There is a natural connection between us all in this grief, even as it feels lonely and strange." I admit that there is a strong desire in me to make this grief feel natural and beautiful and at the same time, wrong. I wrap it in beautiful, curious words, nature scenes, very tiny spores even. It makes me invent scenes involving organic matter in formaldehyde and science labs. But the truth of it, something in me is dead and floating in dirty liquid.

There is a curio cabinet inside of me. I collect things in it. Symbols and full moon names, like tattoos on me. Strawberry Moon, Harvest Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Hunter's Moon...Lucia's Moon. I see them in script across my back. In the cabinet, there are the jars of who I was, and all these bits of grief. The grief looks like animal fetuses, unformed yet sleeping. They are the emotions I stopped and replaced with anger. There are also bones of animals. Any animal. The ones I crossed in the woods and saved, just because they were some other animal's child. And I would want a wolf to pick up Lucia's bones and keep her somewhere, gnaw on her and think of all we missed. There is a raven feather, because death birds surround me. And there are locusts dipped in gold. They are for Jess and the plagues that seemed to come to my home. There is a deer antler found in a bed of moss by a hippie girl who makes necklaces. She says they are naturally collected by her. I want to believe a caftan-wearing urbanite with Frye boots and a beaded headband tramps through the forest foraging for deer horns, rubbed off in spring, then strings them for grieving mothers. That seems like part of this mythic world I created on the internet after she died. We are magic here.

I am leaving for the weekend. It is a retreat with nuns and prayer and artwork and meditation. It is nestled in the woods. I might have a cigarette, even though I haven't smoked in a seven years. But I might. I always think that when I am around smokers, but I probably won't. I am not grieving this miscarriage. Not a right and proper grief like Lucia's death. My friend said there is a space in this community for not-grief too. The space to just be with a death. It just makes me think about all these years of grieving, collecting jars of the more curious parts of me. I still don't quite understand what happened to me in the last three years. I am different. Not better or worse, just different. Since I began bleeding a month ago, I have been expecting to wake up and be in early grief again, keening and uncomfortable, but it hasn't happened. I remember reading Monica saying that first miscarriage was harder than her son's stillbirth, because she wasn't expecting it. Or maybe I got that wrong, but what I said makes sense to me.

I drink down those jars of the old me, some days, expecting to be that person again who looks welcoming and smells good. I know it would work the same way as if my severed finger were in a jar and I tried to drink it back on. And maybe I don't even want to be that person, it's just sometimes this person's head is too loud, too morbid, too dark. And so I write in jars and put them on the internet.

light rain

I stood in the rain last night listening to my friend talk about suicide. We lost another person in our community last week, which makes three people in a month. It felt good to be covered in a cool, light rain when our conversation was so heavy. I wore a light summer tunic and yoga pants, so I was soaked in fifteen minutes. The night was beautiful. I thought about my new flowers, my vegetables, my newly planted fig tree. I thought about the men that died, and my baby in the ground under her sister's tree. The conversation flowed easily, and we pooled around the subject of faith and the book of James. If he had realized, my friend would have stopped talking about Psalms, or he would have invited me into his car, but I wanted to stand in the rain, let it wash over me.

There is no figuring any of it out, but we retell the stories to each other. We witnessed those people. They lived. They died. My friend says that they chose a peace, the peace with a decision made. I never mentioned my miscarriage, or my hemoglobin levels, or my dead daughter, but they were all there running down my back, puddles of them around me. My feet wriggle into the wet ground, sprout hard knotty roots out of my toenails. They lift the cement, and I reach high into the air, branches and leaves, taking in the rain. My trunk covered in lichen and small burrowing insects. I bleed into the soil. I sweat all night into the air, covering the grass around me in dew. My sapling is gone. I need the rain to let her go.

My strength is slowly poured into my body through dandelion leaf juice with lemon and apple. It is a bitter tonic. My friend brought me vegan potato soup. It restored something earthy in me. I roast veggies all day. My husband reminds me that a steak would be best for my blood, but I shoo him away with his insights. I am no longer willing to compromise that part of my belief system. I did that for many years, told people I was once a vegan line cook, a vegetarian for a decade, but I eat some meat now and again. They'd cringe. No one trusts an ex-vegetarian.

I will tell that story one day, the one about me compromising my beliefs about eating flesh, but not today.

The rain suits me. Lately, I have been fantasizing about moving to Oregon or Washington state, where the weather seems perfectly suited to my personality. And the lifestyle, let's be honest, seems perfectly suited to me too. We talk late at night about creating a gypsy caravan or camper. We pin ideas for each other on Pinterest, and think about making something eco-friendly where we are completely off the grid. It has a woodstove and solar panels, a composting toilet and a veggie oil diesel engine. We sell our house. We take our family on the road for a few years, homeschooling and traveling across the country, then we end up in a rain forest, creating an ice machine. The children are young, they will manage quite nicely. And we can grasp onto all the second chances we were afforded in the last few decades.

I am a tree walker, a large creature with moss and bark and hollow crevices for small creatures to create a home. I stomp through the forest, and I don't make a noise. I want to live on nothing with nothing but my children, my husband, the dog, then the bare necessities. To create art with my children, and sleep in one large bed with blankets made out of old sari silks and turmeric dye. To learn about the world by seeing, touching, doing. We cling to each other now, Sam and the children and my need to protect us overwhelms me. We sleep together, and think about how we can create a larger bed. We want us all close, skin touching other skin. Someone's knee juts into the crook of someone else's knees. I search for protective herbs and plant pansies and snapdragons by our front door. I burn black candles charged with a white light to surround my family. I wonder what psychic harm I have endured by being so public about my grief and pregnancies. About my drinking past and sober present. I grieve and parent in this space. That feels so vulnerable lately, so much like a felled tree, rings counted at the whim of any passerby, made into a stump bench, gawked at and marveled at and confused by.

The last few weeks, I have been thinking about this space, my writing about grief and death and my daughter and my pregnancy. Sometimes I think the hardest part about this space is that I don't have any idea who reads here. My site tracker is vague. I check it infrequently at any rate. And I grow deeply self-aware that people in my daily life can come here and read my ugly thoughts, or my fears, and I know nothing about them. But that is not the hard part. It is not any of my business to know who reads here and it is certainly not my business to know what they think of me and my writing. What is hard is that I am changing. I want to have a conversation. I want a community. I offer up my writing, my vulnerability, in some strange forest ceremony, a large bonfire in a circle of trees, beckoning others to me, then I grow self-conscious when others watch, when I think they watch and offer no dance themselves.

The rain has continued all night into this morning. We lie in bed and read books, dreaming of the road and Sequoia. The babies ask me if our new baby is okay under Lucia's tree in the rain. And I tell them she is growing and changing into something more marvelous than we can imagine. We have to trust the earth to change her into something rich and loamy, and us too. And change us too.

pee run

I sometimes run to the bathroom, when it is morning and the pressure to pee comes on my like a fierce competitor, on my tiptoes, quickly, my arms flailing by my boobs like I'm an impotent, useless, miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is a strange run. Silly and feminine. Yet I growl.

ROWR, get outta the way. I need to peeeeee...

When I talk to my children about Buddhism and compassion and connectedness, I never talk to them about the pee run we all have. That completely unself-conscious run we do when faced with a tiny tank. Desperation and pressure and fear of wetting oneself is the great equalizer, loves. When we hold our water, us humans run silly. We are all under the same great sun, crouching over the same dark hole in the ground.

I've decided that I don't have to write here anymore. You know, just when I feel like it. But I want to write here. I want to paint still, but I don't want the pressure to paint. I feel slightly lost, wandering the hallways, wrist bent slightly in mimic of the pee run. I feel like that--a kind of pressure to get somewhere, but I don't know where. I think in blog post length after years of this writing.

I have organized all my drawers in the last few weeks. My junk drawers dumped and sorted, my utensils decluttered. I took out every piece of food item in my pantry, wiped and organized and inventoried. I checked dates. I cleaned my art studio. I put craft and art supplies in bins according to their use. The kids have had their too small clothes weeded out. My desk drawer, my sock drawer, my bathroom shizzle. I am avoiding writing, you know, the big book. I asked a nun if I could sit and have coffee with her. My main character joins the convent at some point, after years of drug abuse and alcoholism, after she sees God in the desert.

The nun laughed.
"Sure. I'd love it. It is a crazy process to be a nun."
"Can I bring a tape recorder?"
"Sure, Angie. It'll be fun. Can I ask you about writing a novel?"
"It is a crazy process to write a novel. So crazy, I haven't done it yet."

I don't know what to ask. I just want to do something productive towards the end. I have this thing. It hangs out on the computer, and mocks me. "Don't you have something to go paint, lady? I'm not sure if you are disciplined enough to write a whole book. You are like a gnat with an espresso habit. You like shiny objects, and I am dull and I don't make any noises. I don't whirl, or growl, or run like a girl."

I am hard on myself. I have this internal voice that is much like a basketball coach, perhaps Bobby Knight. On a good day, it says, "You can do it, kid. You are money." When it is a bad day, I throw chairs at myself. It is abusive and harsh and reminds me that I am nothing if I don't work. Obsessively, and without pause. That can be both good and bad. I am working on the internal voice. It has gotten nicer since I have gotten sober, which is a cool bonus of not drinking. Still, when I sit here in blogger, rather than Word, I know that my inner Bobby Knight is going to rage.

It makes my bladder weak. And then I have to run.

I have been reading about writing lately. I highly recommend Ann Patchett's the Getaway Car. I find her extraordinary. Anyone else have any good writer-y writing you want to pass on? What have you been reading lately? Any good motivational advice for an itinerate, unmotivated writer? What are you procrastinating on?
 

question eleven. creativity

Sara: You do a lot of creative stuff. How/when do you get it done with two little kids around? 

Hope's Mama: How do you find the time and motivation to keep up with all you do, especially online. You maintain a handful of blogs, all very well, and you post very frequently. And when you are posting, you're often talking about all the things you're doing when you're not online - crafting, cooking etc etc! Just wonder how on earth you fit it all in, and do you ever get any time just for you? How does Angie unwind and rejuvenate herself? xo 

Great questions, Sara and Sally. Thank you for asking them.

The most basic answer I can give is that I just do it. One thing I have learned in the last few years is to simply prioritize creativity. I have woven art and writing into the fabric of our daily life. I prioritize it with my kids and I prioritize it alone. So when I start making commitments for our family, I definitely think art or writing as part of our schedule. And I have to say that art and writing also means that I prioritize me and my mental health, because I also unwind and rejuvenate with art and writing. That is something that used to feel selfish, but now I see as a vital part of my mental well-being. That is a huge change in who I was--to do something solely for the sake of doing it without regard for being paid--I used to judge my worth on how much money I made.

I am incredibly fortunate to be married to someone who supports my art and writing habits in any way he can. He also works forty-four hours a week in three days--one twenty-four hour shift and two ten hour shifts. It affords us lots of time together as a family and gives me the space to do art and writing. In those forty-four hours of him being at work, I try to be really present with the kids. But when my husband gets home, he also wants to spend time with them, bonding and doing the stuff he loves with them --wrestling, building forts, running, climbing high things, hanging from the ceiling and flipping around. So, he likes the hour or two alone with them if I work where I am not freaking out and telling him they are going to break their necks.

Less formal, more personal art, craft or cooking for our home, I tend to do with the kids--either I set the kids up with a creative project of their own, or get them involved in some way. That took a lot of discipline for me, because I am impatient. But now, I am used to kid-pace and I like it. They slow me down and that is good. When I have jizos and do meditation paintings or something from my Etsy shop, I wait for Sam to be home and take the time to close the door and not answer the phone. I cannot do meditation paintings with the kids coming in every few minutes. In general, I would say that it is a mix between formal, set-aside art time and just doing art and writing whenever I can. When I add it up at the end of the week, generally, it is quite a bit of time.

I always want to be writing or painting. Usually both. It is a constant gnawing at me. If I could sit at the computer and write from the time I wake until I go to bed, I would. I write sentences, ideas, phrases, paragraphs throughout the day. I am always thinking about art and writing, so I have about fifteen windows open on my computer at any given time. When something hits me, I go back into the office, wake the computer and just add those lines to the file I am working on. I also have a few files on my smart phone and write ideas on there. So, I have a ton of three line pieces in my "In Progress" file that may or may not become something some day.

Creativity--art and writing--brought me a peace. It was a way of being right in the moment in a way that was absolutely impossible for me after Lucy died. It was like meditation. Hell, it was meditation. It still is meditation for me. Meditation for the addled, grief-fried brain who cannot sit still. Others find their thing--knitting, baking, running...that is why I set up still life 365, because I knew other grief-stricken parents were doing something too, something for a moment of peace, and I found their moment beautiful.

That was probably too much information, but suffice to say, I have alone time to do art, blogging, writing, crafts, which is important. I am motivated to do it, because it brings me such a sense of wholeness and calm. When the kids go to sleep, I write. I don't always want to, but I know if I start, I will get into a zone. I believe in my writing in a way that I never did before. Not that I am a great writer, but that something will be discovered if I write. The best thing I did for my creativity was the Creative Every Day project and still life 365, which I did through 2010. It gave me the discipline for writing and art that I was lacking. It transformed my thinking about virtually every aspect my life. And kept me accountable every day. Now, I don't need that project to do something creative every day. It just is part of my schedule and my life and my children's lives. Last year, I also did NaNoWriMo, and wrote a novel in a month. That experience was difficult some days, but mostly, it was like every other day of my life. I write, write, write.

Anyway, you asked me HOW I do it. How I did it was firstly by setting up a daily art time with Beezus after Lucia died. I wrote it down on a piece of paper. It was part of a whole day schedule after Lucy died, because I had no idea what the fuck I was going to do with Beezus when Sam went back to work. I was a wreck. How am I going to take care of a little twenty-one month old baby when I can't stop crying? I tell this story a lot, because it changed my life. I just penciled in a time every day that we painted. Actually, I made a whole schedule for my day, that is how I thought I would survive. It said:

8am-Brush teeth. 
8:15am-Get dressed. (Then fill in lots of daily chores.)
1pm--Art time.

Then, I bought a book on how to paint still life with watercolor, and did the lessons. Because I thought maybe taking a painting class would be good, even though I didn't want to be around people. I had been painting since I was a kid, but I had wanted to pick it up again for years. I gave Bea washable paints, and just didn't correct her work, or if she painted on the wall. I just let her paint, and I just painted. We listened to Tegan and Sara or Bjork. It took almost no time for me to begin painting about my grief. Now, I have integrated art and writing into my life more or less daily.

Sally asked me what other things I do to unwind and rejuvenate. I play guitar. I read. I like to read books with other people and talk about them, or just read them. I would join a book club in a heartbeat. I like literary fiction, mostly and memoirs. This summer, I have read the Paris Wife, State of Wonder, the Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Fearless, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Mummy Knew, Dead Reckoning, Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore and I am currently reading the Magician King. I also love playing Scrabble, or doing crossword puzzles. When I get a free fifteen minutes, I do a crossword while sitting in the really hot bath. I also am really dedicated to my sobriety right now, so I hit meetings most days of the week, call other women in recovery. I sponsor a woman. This weekend, I am going on a spiritual retreat for other women in recovery.

In general, I just be. Part of what I love about being a stay-at-home mother is the freedom to do all of this. I don't take it for granted, so I really try to utilize my time in creative, soul-satisfying ways. I will have to do back to work soon, so I am trying to get all the writing I want done before that point, because I just don't think I will have time to do it. I also love just being with my kids. We paint for a little. We talk. I play guitar and they sing. They draw. I write a blog post. We color. (I love coloring.) It feels busy and very relaxed. Relaxed is the crux of it. Basically, I find my life to be extraordinary in its ordinariness. Art and writing have a lot to do with that.