We Must be Small, Fierce Animals

-

The view from here: almost full moon, and in the middle, slightly to the left, the tip of Mt. Hood lit pink in sunset, Mt. Tabor (a shield volcano left over from the Boring Lava fields) sloping gently to the right.

 

It has been difficult to focus on anything. I've had a spate of good writing news: two poems accepted at Colorado Review, an essay at Heavy Feather; 20 poems in this newest cycle published or yet to be published.  But the world (--election, supreme court, fires, hurricanes, COVID, continued extrajudicial murder of Black people, etc etc etc)--presses its heavy hand against my throat. Our throats.

I have baked bread and cookies and cake and more bread and made chicken alfredo and pizza and beef stroganoff and manicotti and  and three of the four hens are laying and they've eaten the entire lawn and daily dig up the garlic beds. I am running more, upping my milage and listening to podcasts about cults (the latest is about NXIVM) and I'm singing again, though only on my own (working up a recital set list, but for who, for when?) and with a virtual choir. J. and I have a splits challenge, to see who can do the splits first (as a former gymnast and current runner and current 43 year old mom, I have both advantage and terrible disadvantage) and J and I are running a mile together twice a week. I have a meeting tomorrow with a potential new therapist because Shit is Hard even though some (ahem, we KNOW who we are) would attempt to argue through their bombastic Walrus attorney that daring to write about my PTSD and anxiety is a weakness, it is in fact why I have landed here, happy and determined to make sure I am the best parent and wife and human possible. 

R. and I celebrated our seventh anniversary this month--we've now been married (officially) longer than I was the first time, and I still cannot believe my luck. ( I woke up this morning thinking about the first time he took me to the ocean and we sat on the sand at Cannon Beach, how he smelled like salt and water and sunshine).  Right now he is writing in his office,  the boys upstairs doing homework, the chickens asleep and the dog snoring by my feet. 

And I write this having mostly disassociated from the terror that is our nation right now: the perilous and garbage fire tipping of the Supreme Court, the election in a week, the prospect of true facism without artifice if the orange rage Cheeto is elected again, or steals the election (more likely). I have donated and written letters and emails and donated some more but. Please know that this is Trauma with a capital T. Maybe the reason I am so obsessed with cults, with those who have escaped, with the reasons people get sucked in. I get it. I also get how you get out, how you spend the rest of your life doing everything in your power to make sure no one else gets sucked in, that the abusers are held responsible and brought to justice. But look: in this country, if you are a Cis-het white man, you are likely to not be held responsible for anything. 

As the mother of two boys, my fight is there. To ensure that they not only are full human beings but also inherit a world where White Supremacist Patriarchy is an embarrassing, shameful historical footnote. 


So I run and I walk and I cook and I write and I tell my faculty It's going to be okay, I promise you I've got your backs and I love my little family fiercely.


I dreamed the other night I was made of flame.

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Summer, Still

-
Image
 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...
Read more

Spring and All (redux)

-
I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.   It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together. Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was ...
Read more

High Summer

-
 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...
Read more