Incessant Scrolling

It is in inevitable. I’m walking toward myself, and the weight of old ways has to go. Some of it has fallen off, like old skin I didn’t even notice disappearing. Other pieces have to be pushed away, scraped off like a scab, and I know I will be raw as I heal and grow into a new form. 

Incessantly, we are rebuilding our cells, our skin, our look. We have the same constant nature, but shift form and presence, depending on light, water, or environment. How far I have come; how much more I have to grow. Still the desire to do so pushes forth from within and I wonder whether I am drowning or flourishing in this space? 

I have existed in so many forms. My energy currently feels like an unharnessed force. My desire is to put forth something new and authentic. But I am not plugged in anymore; I feel lost and fumbling. 

I never tell stories. Even when I recount moments, I stumble and lack true memory to what happened. I go for humor instead to camouflage the parts that feel uncomfortable.

I must conspire my own magic to go after what I want. It doesn't feel like a grand pursuit, one that will surely evade me, but rather more a coaxing, like with a vulnerable animal that I ache to help.

I want to yell, "I AM HERE!" and make something happen, yet it feels like I am standing alone in a great valley surrounded by mountains, and the remains of my voice and my energy are bouncing off matter around me. Echoing. I am left my own devices. 

_________
This is for after your escape. After all the heavy breath and tears it required to tear you away from your chains. 

This is for when you have already felt the elated freedom of being on the outside of it all. 

This moment comes once you have settled and started to look around and consider what you should do next. 

When you consider whether you made the right decision and fear failure is right at your back. 

Don’t look back. 

Now you are truly alive and you only have your internal devices to survive. 

Anything is possible. 

It is up to you to decide.

Spiraling Through Time

My 83-year-old mother told me she didn’t feel 83, she felt younger. She said this from the comfort of her recliner spread back, not having moved for a while, her walker nearby. She said it from the comfort of her dementia too. It seemed a moment of clarity in an otherwise nonsensical conversation that had me laughing and falling down rabbit holes to catch facts and distill what I could from her memories. She rarely shared them while I was growing up and so now, though they aren’t 100% true, I still feel compelled to follow them and knit the truth from their pieces.

I am 46 now; I don’t feel 46 either. My mother tells me I look good, perhaps it’s because I just got my haircut. I am not happy with how my body looks. I’m getting old but in her quiet room on the fifth floor of this assisted-living facility, I feel my youth and vigor, my ability to pop up and walk across the room, to Google photos of her childhood boarding school in New York, to write her a note to leave on the table for her to find later so she does not feel so alone when the night sets in. 

I visit my childhood quite often in memories. I am reminded of moments in the presence of my eight-year-old who walks around like a hologram of me when I was young. It is a gift to be with her and to view myself from a parental vantage point since I no longer have my parents to give me perspective. Time is as contrived as all the other systems we have been indoctrinated into. We are caged by this framework since the day we were born rather than freed to flourish throughout it's entire spectrum. 

I do not feel old but my body is slowing down and the waxing of years has built up faster than I anticipated. Yet in a heart beat, I can jump back to learning how to ride a bike, to my first place in college, to being pregnant and moving in to our home. I watch my mother jump around in her experiences too. Her neurons misfiring and jumbling the facts, making a relative a brother she never had, handing me names I’ve never heard. Somehow though it’s soothes her; even when I have to break the news that my grandmother is no longer alive or that my dad has been dead for 11 years. Often I derail her plans to move to Florida with him or to choose to stay in Colorado while he moves, which makes more sense because they were unhappily married and divorced for more than 15 years before he kicked it. We never talk about the divorce. 

I watch her feel her way through this web of thoughts, get disappointed about the deaths, and then asked to go shopping all in one or two minutes. I know the real treat is that I am just sitting with her, listening to her, and relieving the loneliness and confusion that sets in when she is left to her own devices. I see her struggle to escape the confusion by falling into old patterns of what she would do as a homemaker. She tells me she needs to go grocery shopping, to the bank, and to get light socks because the heavy ones are too much on her feet now that it is getting warm. She tells me her feet sweat, she tells me things she would never have revealed to me as my caregiver, as a woman bread in the '50s with the expectations of that generation. 

I remember how she would cobble six fruit cocktails together as dessert in thick glass cups with stems that felt fancy and fun as a child. I tell my kids about this, about the things she would do that seemed delightfully odd and now almost mythical because that person is slowly disappearing and they see how nonsensical she has become. I tell them because they would have loved it, because she still believes she can watch them for a night and spoil them the way she wants to while she gives Andy and I a break. I find myself making Shirley Temples in wine glasses for them because that’s something she would’ve done. The Gen X parent in me worried I’m indoctrinating them into drinking while the caregiver in me appreciates the lightness of something familiar from the happy moments of my youth. I too am still a nine-year-old longing to be fancy and I have a real wine glass with a fun drink to cheers and clink like an adult.

I look at my girls as little people. Perhaps I am too candid with them about life and death, about things I should hold off on explaining until they’re older. Then I imagine their trajectory, about how fast life flows and how I can’t control the moments they will find their way back to when they time travel. I remember how their entrance into my life saved me in many ways but mostly from myself, mostly from my desires to not care. I admit how quickly this journey we are on will pass. Each step feeling whole and true right now but it will be no time at all before we are looking back at all of this "so long ago" and seemingly only yesterday.

My mom is spiraling along this wheel too and time has been tossed away as irrelevant. As I sit with her sometimes she can’t quantify my age, so I am simultaneously a teen and an adult with a husband and two kids. To be honest, I find it refreshing and true now that I am no longer disturbed by the lack of sense. Aren’t we all different versions of ourselves at any given moment - pulling from every phase and experience we have lived over the years? All those moments remain in our being whether as part of the trunk of our existence holding us up or as flowers that have bloomed from something so powerful it made us become.

In this moment I am walking my mother home. Each day she moves slower, she’s practically in a wheelchair. She has moments of clarity and frustration, embarrassment, and moments where she grasps to recall the woman she was. She still feels compelled to her duty as a matriarch, to the story she told herself about her marriage, to the society she lived in so long ago. Now she stares out the window, wandering her memories, aching to control the lost words or make sense of what once seemed so easy.

I cannot figure out why she won’t let go or admit she wants to let go. At the same time, I admire her compulsion to mother us still, mother us always, to not leave in case we need her help. This is what I like to believe in to make sense of this ending because otherwise I get frustrated and angry at the slow progression of her exit.

Magnetic

How she came to her art felt like a dance, it was the same sensation. There was an awkward cadence to it, as if she was young and fresh and didn’t understand her own existence, let alone her partner’s. She felt nervous and new and she wasn’t sure of her actions. She held steadfast to the moment and followed the motions through her body begging to understand, to learn how to move. She wondered if on the other side the curiosity was mirrored?

From things unseen, there was a patient pause; a sense of grace about being recognized. There was no judgment or malice about how long it took. Time was uninformative. Rather there was a steady open listening, a gaze from across the room waiting to be returned. It was true and required nothing more than authentic recognition of what she wanted. 

Passion is not a such a strange thing. It is in fact a flowering plant that craves to bloom. She did not understand how to cultivate it and she expected that it would sprout wildly in her and grow uncontrollably taking over her being, leaving her old self cracked open, a husk to feed what was new. But no this was part of her, one she had to welcome and coax; assuring it she too was ready and would not abandon it. In this way it started out as an affair of sorts: she stealing away in fits and fear for being discovered. All the while feeling more live and aligned with each rendezvous. 

It is not hard to want, to crave something. It is much harder to be wanted, to be watched and release control of being carried away. It is never clear what story will wait on the other side. Truth be told, it is a web one gets entangled in long before they realize they are caught. There was not much else to do but throw fear aside, to relinquish it as a shield. She would stand naked across the room staring back into the eye of a being she did not yet fully comprehend. All the while knowing it was kin to her, all the while feeling magnetized to its presence.