Drifting Off

Sweet child, though you may not think it, you are not alone. In the silent blanket of night there are signs to remind you of the love that surrounds you. The day retires and whispers moments into your memory that ripple throughout your being. 

As you wrestle your body down under the blankets and let the last surges of movement leave your being, you soften to the stillness that is to come. You remember the turning leaves popping against the blue afternoon sky. The warmth of the sun while you talked to your daughters at the playground. The way the dog reminds you he's always by your side. 

Release the heavy thoughts and wrap the warm feeling of love around you. There is peace in the air and the promise of love - unexpected after so many moments of disappointment. All that remains true is the feeling you are not alone. The gentle unseen forces are softly by your side. 

Reframing

How lucky I am to have time to visit my mother and observe the crazy changes she is going through as a result of dementia. It is a non-cohesive mess she is in. Engaging with her seems like a duty but also like a min-adventure. I have no clue where she will take me - certainly no place she has gone before.

Space and Place

I am at the end of a girl's weekend; it’s Monday morning and I can hear the traffic building. The fence along the street of this corner lot is lined with a hedge, so it creates a secret garden. I can see into the backyard of the house next-door, which faces another direction. The sprinkler under the huge elm in one corner is gently dusting the grass. Purple sage lines a curved brick path along the side of the house to the front gate. It is alluring and it makes me want to follow the hopeful feeling of this backyard. 

I haven’t even looked in all the beds around the edges of this lawn but it is clear someone is tending to this escape. It is lovely; I sense a wise person is caring for this place. The birds seem to love it too. I truly think it’s the best part of this rental. 

In the room my old U of A roommate and I shared, a small shelf called to me, not all the books but rather the curiosity of pulling from the books and finding quick wisdom with a flick of my hands: a note on the inside cover of one that said "Arizona rocks!" and a business card from a bookstore in Waltham from another. I smile at the synchronicities and felt kindred to some unseen presence. I was drawn to Earth Song, Sky Spirit – a book I surely have seen before but not read. It's an anthology of Native American writers. I randomly opened to Paula Guinn Allen’s Spirit Woman. 

I could barely fall asleep after I read the story. I was charged, felt energetic and anxious. It could have been that Dahlia was gone and I was the only one sleeping upstairs. It could have been that I had just spent the weekend with some old college friends I've known since we were silly kids. It could have been I found an escape I greatly needed. It could have been that I was searching for what to do next with my life. All these things. 

I was reaching out for that grandmother feminine energy. I felt encircled by it. It was as if I was waiting for it to deliver a message, assigned to me. It led me to think we are all grandmothers, even tiny Amelia. We all have the wisdom of the ages in our being and the companionship of each other. We are grandmothers from the get go, with our knowing solidified and perhaps just untapped and undiscovered. Age is not the only way we get to the river. Some of us are just naturally connected, some of us wander for years to get there, some of us assert our wisdom and some coax it, carry it like a fine light veil. Still we all have our space, our birthright to the knowledge, to the moment and to the flow of the great river of knowing.

I have come to fear the company of women. I have come to feel apprehensive of a coven of us coming together. Deep inside I wonder if it is because I am not aligned with myself, though I am more aligned than I have been in forever. Perhaps it’s that I sense so much worn out emotion from the women I know: the ones working and raising children, tending a home and taking care of family, frazzled and fearful for the spiraling path our society seems to be taking. I don't fear the world though, this living earth, this grandmother so entrenched in the circle of time, knowing this is but a mere story, a moment, all drips in a much longer lifetime.

I feel these things and yet I do not speak of them to my friends. I sit silent or let their stories take center stage or fall flat without battling back. I hide in humor and use alcohol to relax. Alone I feel free and alive and vibrant but I do not express myself the same way in the presence of others. I am scared of myself, I am scared of others; I don’t know how much to give and what boundaries to draw. I should release all fear of giving and do it with a gracious heart.

I'm thinking now that this house came to us for a girls weekend. The space, not perfect but kind, and just fine for us. Perhaps us too, bringing our energy to this house, as we had to a few others in Tucson, letting it shelter a few kind travelers since it has not had many guests.

Enough.

This morning I’m gutted. I couldn’t take anymore. I was feeling so emotional about 19 kids getting gunned down in their elementary school in Texas yesterday. I finally felt it was my duty to tell my kids before another kid shared the news with them about school shootings. So for the first time I told my own girls how some kids go to school and don't come home. 

All the while thinking I should be recording this because this is disgusting. The innocent eyes, the gentle questions. The sheer clarity of how obscene it sounds. I agree with them whole-heartedly. This is our world, this is America, and it’s not OK. 

I told them that the drills that they do at school are drills for this situation - they hadn’t really known that before now. I told them that the person who did this in Texas was sick and, when they asked, I told them yes he was dead, a police officer shot him. 

A didn’t want to go to school. M asked if we could go now. I’m not quite sure which is more disturbing in the face of this: the desire to just shut down or resolve and resilience.

I can’t believe this has been repeating itself since Columbine - that moment still so fresh in my mind. All the parents, family, and friends who have gone through this each day since they’ve lost a loved one.

We are all victims here. We are all entrenched in damaged communities and I have no misjudgments that some communities have been surging for years because of decades of disproportionate resourcing. But still it indicates sickness in our streets.

I had to tell them it’s not just in schools. It happens in grocery stores and places of worship, it happens at concerts, it happens in yoga studios, the list goes on and on. What the fuck is wrong with us?

Morning

Waking up this morning, the sounds of early spring are so hopeful. I open the blind by the chair I sip coffee in and scare the duck that’s been hanging out searching for food. He’s been showing up lately without his partner. Since there are no squirrels to be found, I’m hoping he can eat. It is chilly and Martha is out in the coop so I give the chicken some corn too. 

Now I’m sitting here trying to piece together my day and my life. I woke up feeling hopeless but the birds would not hear it. They called to each other from the trees. Their songs so light and so confident, not for one moment did they remain silent. The sprinklers hummed to life too and the traffic on a distant road. I joined the buzz. I went out into the morning and felt the cool air through my unbrushed hair. The coffee brewed, the dog stretched his bones and went back to bed. 

I will carry on like this, hoping that somehow a lighter feeling will come soon and I will be free of the weight of this mess.

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.