December 2, 2022
I wake up in the middle of the night, my arm pinned and numb beneath my body. The thing that convinces me I’m still alive is the compulsion to check that everyone is in their place.
Fear is more powerful than paralysis.
You shift in your sleep the moment my feet touch the floor. You’ve slept this way all of your life-holding onto your defenses.
I used to sing you the Beatles. I wrote you symphonies. I read you chapters.
Nothing was ever yellow. It was always marigold.
I didn’t know that the world was designed to be absorbed at a slower pace.
Now you sit in your room and compile lists of all of the things that you hate. You don’t trust anyone and nobody understands you. Including me.
Numbness is foreign to me. I feel everything.
Standing in your doorway, in the middle of the night, I wish that I could unveil the world all over to you again.
This time will be different.
There will be dandelion.
January 15, 2023
In daylight, the lines beneath my eyes betray me. They tell a story of the ghost who has been walking around in my skin.
Don’t ask me to be in the photo. My face has become a dress with pockets that hold nothing meaningful. My angles like a Picasso, that nobody would want to buy.
My husband is having none of this. He takes my imperfect face in his hands and says “I dare you to find a flaw in that face.”
I find many.
I’m still hiding in corners at high school dances and sitting in back seats of cars my friends are driving to get to places where boys are waiting for them.
None of them are waiting for me.
I have spent the better part of the last six months trying to make peace with the damage my daughter has done to her own body and facing the truth about my own.
The world is full of beautiful women. They are unaware. They invite you to sit by the fire, assuming that every house has a chimney.
January 26, 2023
This morning’s rain turned to snow, which nobody predicted. We all stood around speechless- stumbling through the day unprepared.
None of this mattered to the heron, sitting in the creek- her white wings in direct contrast to the grayness surrounding her. Uneffected by life’s spontaneity, she flew off into the storm.
Beside the porch lies a pile of white feathers in the grass. The stray cat has been feasting on his instructionless days. His taming is a matter of his own choice and not my own.
Moose cast their antlers, often one at a time-waiting for the inevitable, wandering broken in the wild. The human heart is incapable of withstanding this inbetween.
I think of Joan Didion, losing her husband and child, casting both antlers at once. Crawling back to civilization, knees soaked in grief.
All we can control in this world is our own usefulness.
February 7, 2023
Predictions
Groundhog Day. We toss out our predictions-as if the future is a piece of Halloween candy that we can trade for something better.
On the dresser, there’s a pocket knife within my daughter’s reach. All my life, I’ve been avoiding catastrophe, only for my children to design their own disasters.
Somewhere along the way, I swallowed a watermelon seed and now everything I need to grow is already inside of me.
You can choose to believe that something miraculous could happen. Or you can wait.
Either way, you might slip your hand inside the pocket of your coat and find something you misplaced last winter. A strip of foil, a feather from a Blue Jay, a piece of stone from a wall.
All this time you’ve held on, predicting one day it would be useful.
February 11, 2023
Swords
3am. The witching hour. A stray cat runs across the yard. The house is quiet. There is evidence that my daughter has been crocheting. I find stuffing in the leaves. She’s building an army out of yarn-giving life to lifeless things-choosing needles over swords.
She is re-writing Frankenstein- outliving her own monster.
And so the mob shifts, like a tooth that has grown in place crooked.
There are those who would prefer to watch the world burn instead of save it. I don’t want to tell anybody who they should love or what they should do with their own bodies.
That makes me a pariah.
All the saints sleep soundly while the poets weep.
We are monsters and paper dolls. We stand on cliffsides and we leap.
February 16, 2023
Three
Today my life is a broken bowl- scattered across the floor like good intentions.
There is a fox lying in the middle of the road. It’s a tragedy of days when there are more foxes on highways than in forests. And it makes the world seem so infinitely destructible.
It won’t be long until the vultures descend. The cars will swerve as the raptors remain steadfast in their work.
When you are hungry, not even death is a distraction.
On the path, a dog with three legs veers towards me and runs his nose along the inside of my palm.
Amidst the broken pieces, the carrion and the birds of prey, there is softness.
It is enough to be reminded that there is still good in this world.
Three
February 16, 2023
February 25, 2023
Buttons
I am sitting with my eight year old daughter in the parking lot of her school. If I threw a rock, it would hit the building where my son is hiding under his desk.
This morning I dropped a handful of goldfish in a plastic bag. Now I sit in a sea of red and blue- pulsing, like my heart inside my chest.
If I let them go, I wonder if the fish would survive.
My daughter begins to cry. We take deep breaths in the front seat.I drink cold coffee. I take a bite of a pop tart.
What was the last thing I said when he left this morning- as he sighed one last time before getting out of the car?
Will that be the last time I hear my child breathe? While I was eating a pop tart, was my child being shot?
Today’s lunch is hot dogs.
Today’s special is gym.
There’s an assembly.
Parenthood is preparation. I tried to prepare them for life, not for death.
Police with rifles are entering through the auditorium doors, where last month we watched Alice in Wonderland- reimagined.
I wish I could reimagine this whole world for my children.
“Are the windows in the school bulletproof?” My daughter asks.
Just a few months ago, I moved her out of her booster seat.Sometimes she asks me what’s nine times nine.
I know that answer.
Are there more police than weekends ahead of us? Will we miss out on parallel parking? How long can I keep pulling both sides of the wound together? What good are bedtime stories if I cannot keep my children safe?
I double dared them to love this world. I should have been sewing bulletproof sweaters instead of buttons.
March 19, 2023
Tilt
There’s a clock on the curb, mixed in with the trash. Someone is throwing away time.
A man in a wheelchair is swearing to me that things haven’t been the same since we put a man on the moon.
Nothing we make now is of any value.
My son tilts his head back towards the stars and says “Tonight I saw the Big Dipper for the very first time.”
It makes me wonder when I stopped pointing things out to him. Or when I began believing that everything good has already happened.
Winter is riding his bike through the neighborhood- spring holding on tight to his waist.
“Everybody loves me at parties,” he says, “because I always show up with a bag of ice.”
For every footprint on the moon there is a constellation that goes unseen.
Everything we value now we must create.
April 7, 2023
Sons
That was the year the kids changed their own names- deciding they didn’t like the ones we had given them.
They returned them like a sweater that was never going to fit, along with our expectations of who we thought they would become.
All along, they knew exactly who they were.
We tucked away our daughters in scrapbooks like ghosts.
We tried to keep our houses haunted.
“Knock knock,” they said.
“Who’s there?” We asked- guessing their identities as if they were trick or treaters.
They cut their hair and drew on their skin with permanent marker. We just kept handing them chalk.
They jumped off of cliff sides, while we stood in places that were safe and dry, holding up beach towels, waiting for our daughters to run into them.
But our sons came out of the sea.
Stones
I stand outside the hospital. Only one person can go inside. You are already taken.
I brought you a blanket. I know you’re not five.
The last time I saw you cry you were standing at the bus stop, with gravel in your skin.
I dismantled each pebble as if it was a tiny bomb.
Across the street, people stop to watch a family of ducks cross a stream.
The cherry blossoms are falling like rain.
Your brother has been catching toads in the woods.
“I still feel like I’m holding them,” he says after he lets go.
Your sister has been taking swimming lessons. Today she is practicing with a life jacket.
I wish I could give you a life jacket as permanent as a tattoo.
You’re carrying stones.
I’m standing beneath your window with a wheelbarrow.