Of Cats and Camellias, Boys and Girls

My son doing boy stuff, back in 2010, when he had his hair long and people kept thinking he was a girl. Picture by "B" Gordon

I stood on the sidewalk, watching the boys. They were playing, hollering, running—doing the crazy things that boys together do. I’d walked to Daniel’s house hoping to find him by himself and instead he had a friend. With the friend here, the rules of our usual friendship did not apply. No tea parties or dress-ups, no complicated fantasy book schemes. Should I go home? I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, which was wet with recent rain, shifting my feet and waiting for clarity about what to do. On the ground around me, worms were drowning, and sodden flowers fallen from the yard’s camellia bush lay flattened on the ground. The sky was ready to erupt again at any time.

“Bam!” yelled the second boy, a redhead. A wet camellia went spinning through the air. I dodged it—barely.

“It’s a bomb,” he said. “You’re dead.”

I didn't want to be dead. I stood there, calculating stubbornly my response to a scenario in which I did not want to play my part.

“Come on, Tara,” entreated Daniel. “Play along. You can bomb him back.”

Well, I supposed. I bent, picked up a flower. It was as soggy as a sponge. Pink like Pepto Bismol, rose-like, damaged by the rain. In my hand it felt substantial, a water balloon ready to be tossed. I chucked it. I couldn't aim and it missed the redhead by a yard. It landed with a satisfying splat on the concrete by the steps. The boy ran away, whooping. The war was on.

Racing, smacking through wet shrubberies, running over saturated grass, we gathered up camellias and lobbed them at one another until out of breath. I was hit once. Surprisingly, it stung. The flower smarted when it smacked me on the cheek! Nothing but petals and yet there it landed, hard as a mother’s warning slap, leaving my cheek red. I felt anger rise up in my gut.

“I’m going to get you now!” I roared.

I came home later, covered in mud, the marks of petals on my skin. The world of boys was enchanting. A world of war and terrible aggression—of letting go and going after—it was a carnival ride, and sword wounds just a bloody grin.

Boys had never really been interesting before, as boys, as suddenly they were.

*

"Come back here!" I yelled and then muffled my voice. The cat with the leaves in her tail would not consent to let me place the tail in water, and relieve her of the leaves. And if someone caught me at this, I was definitely going to be in trouble. Adults, who never really undertook anything of importance, would not understand.

"Bear-Bear!" I insisted.

The bowl of water slid and tipped.

"Mraaaaaooowww!" the cat complained.

Finally, I got hold of the tail, which was interminably tangled, always filled with leaves and things. Her nose was filled with snot. She breathed it in and out—she was a snot-dragon full of tangles, knots and the leavings of old trees. "A permanent cold," my mother said she had. Pneumo-something. 

She looked to me like something needing care. Holding onto the captured tail with both hands, I directed it into the mixing bowl. 

"You're going to be fine," I told the cat in a motherly voice. "You need a bath."

Submerged in the cold water, the leaves got wet and the tangles stayed in place. Over the course of several seconds, it occurred to me that perhaps I'd miscalculated. Lacking a brush and the necessary fortitude to work the tangles out by hand, I let the kitty go, and she scuttled off and hid. I emptied the bowl into the sink and left a small, hairy puddle on the floor. Then I set about making her an apologetic milkshake made of milk with cat food sprinkled in.

*

Right now, I'm thirty-seven. I have three boys and a husband. A boy dog who chews up garbage and a boy cat who pees in anything rectangular which I leave in the kitchen corner that he likes. Two male ducks, one of whom likes to bite my jeans as I turn and leave his coop. There are my egg-layers, of course—six of those; two white ducks who spend spring underneath the boys with the feathers wrenched out of their necks, and four hens, who squat obediently when I go out to pick them up. They all live outside. Inside, there are penises wall-to-wall.

Except for a few moments of wild abandon, I spent my childhood preparing to nurture things. I dressed cats in little outfits, placed them into various houses and set up a battle triage for wounded shrews. When shrews kept dying anyway—because of the activities of my cats—I set up a war memorial for them on the refrigerator door. This was a stark exposition of life lost, bearing simply a date, the cat responsible, and the posthumous name of each shrew. I wrapped them in paper towels and masking tape and deposited them in the earth, where I said a solemn prayer over their souls. And so it was that I prepared myself for motherhood.

The boys, while I was doing this, were preparing themselves for war. They were throwing down their lives for a cause greater than themselves, unnamed, and collapsing in splendid agony on the concrete to die with howling cries, only to rise again later and launch a last attack. Every day on the agenda: Kill. Die. Rise from death. Kill again. Perhaps die. Win, if possible. Then, snack.

I have given up combating this tendency in my kids.When I initially forbid cartoons and movies, Rowan pretended he was a lion and the girls at playschool were gazelles. The last thing they heard was a roar in their ear before they died. I kept on getting phone calls with requests to cut his nails even shorter than they were. If you want to comment on my parenting, don't. It's too late for me to parent him differently now. He's fifteen and, happily, he's stopped roaring in people's ears. Nobody cares anymore how he keeps his nails. At any rate, it was then that I introduced superheroes. At least they were "good." Rowan stopped being a lion and started being Spiderman. I think this may have been an improvement, ethically.

Boys on the playground, forbidden to play-fight, play-fight surreptitiously or simply get in trouble all the time. Not every boy. Lots of boys. The ones I'm talking about. What is this war they are girding themselves for? Am I missing something about adult male survival that they really need to know?

"I didn't want to play World War II games," confided Mikalh to me, "but that's what everyone was playing, so I just pretended I was an archaeologist in World War II."

"It sounds like a good compromise," I told him.

Later on, he killed his evil brother with one powerful kick to the head. I hope this training will prove useful someday. 

On second thought, I fervently hope that it will not.

Night Wind

The wind kept me up last night. It was groaning, barking, clamoring at the roof. It tried to get in the bedroom window, tried to freeze the hand that was holding my book. I wouldn't relent. I got a frumpy sweater and wrapped myself up—sectioned and bowed—like an old lady in her bathrobe, and I lay down again with the covers pulled up right over the tops of my ears. Only my hand and my eye were exposed. My hand, my eye and the book. Winning. That's me.

Exactly why was the heat in my room unable to combat this infernal wind? It didn't make a sound—not one that I could hear. The vents were cloistered mutes. My heating system had left me to die of exposure, there in my own bedroom, just as if I hadn't been feeding it for years—feeding it money and turning its little thermostat in expectation of hospitality returned.

Wild things tore the night into a thousand pieces while I tried to be asleep.

Cats were picked up by gales and carried away from fences, keening, to be plunked down next to the open maws of dogs. Dogs were beaten stiffly with clubs of air about their naughty heads. The songbirds were taken and fed to the north, which was sucking the whole world in. February, February. I know it's you. You want to lift the dark world up and shake it a little bit. Set it back down and pretend like nothing has happened. Hide behind a corner and make us think that it was March.

My dreams were disturbed by the ripping of the world.

This morning, though, all is silent. The house, except my bedroom, is all warm. My cat comes in, reassembled, and now begging to be fed. No new snow has fallen and of course there will be school. All it was was wind. And the world looks almost the same. But for the cracks on everything, you'd think it never happened while I slept.


Author's Note: Most of this is metaphorical, except for the terrible sound and cold. No animals were injured in the making of this blog post.

Physics with Poets

Photo Credit: Morguefile by earl53

"Do you know the moon actually falls around the earth?" asks my eldest son. He's taking physics this year, moving inexorably and permanently into the world of things-Mom-does-not-know.

"No, I didn't," I say. I turn and look at him. Poems full of moons crash hard against my brain. My hands itch for the keyboard. His face, too, is passionate—for him; passion means something very different at fifteen than it does at thirty-seven. His mind is full of measurements and math.

"It's only the tangential velocity that keeps it from crashing down," he continues. He says something about attraction, something about gravity. I am lost. The moon is falling around the earth. It is swooning, sweeping, crashing in grand displays of emotion in its drop and, yet, it's always going 'round—tracing a path of inevitability in the footprints of its whereabouts the very year before.

This. This is how to live. We are born and fall from our mother's womb. We never stop falling. We cascade past stars and planets, never suspecting the largeness of our own expanse. In space, we are small and we fall, lonely all our lives, around the purpose we are made to make. Around and around, effortless and without control, the sick rising up in our guts, we fall. We fall. We fall. We fall. We fall to terror and to thrill.

We meet a man or a woman or we bear a child and fall into the orbit of our life, around the thing we call togetherness. We think we're steering, but we're plummeting around our growing mutuality. They smile, we smile. They speak, we answer. They hurt, we cry. We fall in answer to our love, our desire not to fall alone. We think we are walking or pushing the cart. We think we are strolling with them. Then, sometimes, they turn and make revolutions of our lives. In chaos, circling bloodshed—we know then that we are crashing into airless space. Space seems to suck us into empty, hollow cold. We don't know that we have never left the orbit that we set. Until we see that we remain in motion, have never stopped, are tracing our own steps around the known.

To fall with grace—oh! what a beautiful thing that would be. Adored by gravity and held up by faith; creatures of flight, creatures of courage, heavenly bodies we'd be. Freed from illusion of command, to swoon all our lives and be carried by a force beyond our sight.

Not me. I fall kicking and screaming and casting about. I think I am charting the course. I will get 'round the earth by Friday. Hurry, dammit, we are going to be late!

"Mom! Do you understand?" he says.

"Yes," I say. "Yes. I understand perfectly."

The Mathematics of a Weekend Morning

Photo Credit: Morguefile by kconnors

"I set you for 6:30 AM, " I tell it. "And here it is 6:35. What is the problem with you?"

The cell phone remains obdurately silent, a closed coffin glistening ebony and the finality of mysteries unsolved. It makes no more sound than it did five minutes ago. No matter, I suppose. I am up anyway. I am disappointed, though, in the refusal of responsibility inherent in its flat little play-dead.

Virtue rests on the teetering point of decisions to shower deferred. Surely, I think, this can wait. Bedtime plus eight equals 6:30. 6:30 minus shower equals 7:00. Subtract Facebook, email, coffee and the letting out of dogs and you have yourself 7:30. The war begins at 8:00. First shots fired at 7:55 or so with the trudging sound of sleep-stupefied feet. Carafes are bounced, boffed, settled. Clatter arises in the vicinity of the sink. Commotion ensues. When the child awakes, I am enveloped in mustard gas. I lie dying, writhing and clutching my throat. "That's it! I'm not writing anything today!"

Ergo, the shower is off. I look like Medusa before she combs her hair. I've got jammies and a t-shirt, coffee and a pile of live snakes which are nibbling on my ears. Mascara has settled into the cracks of my face. Surely, you say, you've washed that off before you go to bed! Hardly, my friend. At bed, I was chased under my sheets by exhaustion which menaced me with a club. Mascara removal was well out of it. I am starting a small zit farm operation on my face.

I know I'm getting old because I awake now suffering symptoms of anaphylaxis, an allergy to time. My face is somewhat swollen; my skin seems poisoned. It's reacting to the unkind use I put it to, facing the mirror every day. Perhaps, one day my throat will close up and I will collapse on the bathroom floor. My hair is going grey to keep the snake bellies company. I look like someone's grandmother in a crack house, part of anti-drug campaign.

I sleep in my socks. Knee socks with skulls and crossbones, black on white, protecting my feet from the South Pole relocation which has ended up under my sheets. At 3 AM, the climate shifts and becomes tropical. The socks turn into Venus fly traps and start digesting my toes. I pretend that I'm still asleep. Nothing is eating my digits, I mutter. It's dark out. I haven't traversed the number line eight marks. Finally, though, I realize that there will be nothing left of my toes. I bend and release them from the jaws of the socks, and the seam angrily slinks away. "You haven't seen the last of me," it says. I growl.

So, I'm tired from all this activity. My toes still hurt. The snakes on my head are hungry and, tangled into Tantric positions, are trying to eat each other's heads. I open the document I'm working on and read it one more time. Because I'm sleepy, I murder all the characters. I'm sick of them. Let them choke their last on their own blood. Ill-conceived and ill-wrought, stupid, pointless things. I hate people like that, don't you? At some point, you just have to end those relationships that aren't feeding you at all. "You'll never prove I did it. They lived their whole lives in this file!"

Now, I feel just a little bad. If I had showered, things would probably not have had to end this way.  The kind of person who has clean hair is much less likely to massacre her imaginary children while no one else is awake. And I would hate to have a mug shot taken while I look this way.

Twelve cups of coffee minus one travel mug equals nine. Time for my second cup. Two cups equals two wholes. I will have had two cups of coffee. 48 fluid ounces equaling two. If I could lift up a small barrel with a lid, I could call it one. Given enough coffee, I will look more like Helen and less like a gorgon any minute now, lack of hygiene aside.

I sip and consider resurrection, the power of Control Z. "No," I think, "Let the dead stay dead. Bring me more characters! If they impress me, I'll let them live." I am a god, or a monster, the necromancer of files. I am just sipping my coffee while fictional characters live out their tortured lives. I will subtract them if they vex me and add them only if they charm. In the end, they have less power over me than socks.

Fact vs. Fiction

I have decided, without really telling anyone, that I am writing only fiction in October. But I am interrupting this fiction-writing to tell you about this fact: the fact of my fiction-writing.

Are you confused? Me too.

I have been, for a while now, writing a book. It's about my life. Rather, it's a book about the life I remember having, threaded through several layers of muslin, memory and interpretation. I think, on reflection, that it's fiction. Historical fiction, maybe. The main character is either a prophet or a tortured soul. It reads like the life of a saint before they reach salvation. You keep waiting, hoping, and rooting for the character, counting moments 'til the quiescent bliss that comes at the other side of  revelation. But this character instead has thousands of revelations as commonplace as small grey flies. She changes, grows, responds to life's circumstances, and all the while remains frustratingly the same.

How does one end such a thing?

I have waded in too deep, gotten right up to the present time. Here I am then, standing in water up to my neck, afraid if I step down off my tip-toes I might end up sucking down H2O. I am surrounded by my ego, by my current story-line, by a self I cannot fully see, a life I do not know yet is fiction.

Fact? It seemed time to take a break. So I decided to write fiction, to take scissors and chop up the world into stories that go where I want them to go. I decided to draw characters and see what I can learn from them. I am not a fiction writer. It's a bit as if I took a break to learn to play golf.

So, bear with me, gentle readers in October. And be vewy, vewy quiet. I am writing fiction. 

...consciously, for once.

*The above image, by the way, was done for me by the inimitable Merisha Lemmer and will ultimately become the banner for a complete blog re-design. Pretty awesome, huh? You should totally hire her.

Please don't steal my words or images. All rights reserved. 

Can't Delivery

In lieu of tenable art or a contribution to advancing human dialogue, here are some random facts:

1. Periodically Life sort of bashes me up against a rock in the course of natural events. I call this rock Growth, or sometimes Transformation. It is possible that, rather than Life bashing me into this rock,  I am the one swimming into it. Either way, there I am, happily drifting on the surf and, next thing you know, up against the granite ledge I go. While there, I try and feel around to figure out the nature of the rock and the reason for my presence there. Then, the tide swells outward again and I drift gently away, not too badly damaged, perhaps wiser. I find I am up against a rock again this week. Not a huge one, but a rock all the same. It is a little hard to write from here. Everything I say or scribble sounds like cats mewling at 2 AM and the nattering of crazy trolls. Afterward, I'm sure it will be very inspiring. Sorry for the general silence. 


2. Last night, I woke up at 11 PM. 11 something PM, to be precise. Which meant I slept for one and a half hours. After that, I thought repeatedly and involuntarily about a problem at church that is troubling me and read The Financial Lives of Poets. It is an excellent book. However, I am at the point of exhaustion where I believe that I could easily begin having auditory hallucinations.


3. This week, I ordered a Tibetan singing bowl from China. I believe this bowl will solve all my problems. We have a huge one at church. When it chimes, like Pavlov's dog, I fall into a trance-like state for just a few, blissful moments. (I don't salivate, so perhaps my analogy is weak.) 


4. When I ordered the bowl, I received a communication on eBay from the seller. It said: "Dear friend: hello, a few days ago because the network of problem eBay cannot open, can't see information, can't delivery, I'm very sorry. I thank you for the great buyers like you. Your project has been put through the China postal mail and you should accept it within 15-25 days." I read it several times. All my communications this week can be exemplified by this message, which seemed to contradict itself in a friendly way and require an endless cycle of need for more communication. 


5. My hens need a qualified hen therapist and it turns out that is not me. I am disillusioned beyond words by this lack of aptitude on my part. They simply cannot be made to like one another. My little red hen is intent on the death of the lovely little hens I have raised so that she could have friends. I cannot get across to her how wrong-headed she is being. If you can help me with this, please send reinforcements. 


6. I have lost my ability to appreciate disagreement this week. I will have to temporarily rename this blog "Faith in Avid Temerity and Intolerance."  I am a fraud. I have to sit on my hands to keep from posting snarky and dismissive comments in reply to everyone with whom I don't agree. It turns out if you subtract sleep, this is my personality. I find that disturbing.


7. Sometimes it is like that. So it goes. 


8. Keep the faith for me. For a short time, I will lurk like an angry troll under my bridge, flipping off songbirds until I get a decent night's sleep. Send espresso and friendly comments. Also, I need hen advice, links on homeschooling children with APD and someone to thin my garden beds. I can pay anyone in roasted green chile and troll faces. I also have feathers of various sizes and shapes.


9. Popcorn. Just for perspective. 

I Will Give You What I've Got.

BOOM! I walk into the oral surgeon's on time for the extraction of my wisdom teeth. BOOM, BOOM. Everything says BOOM because I have had a migraine for three days already and was throwing up the day before. Light switch BOOM. Shoe scuff BOOM. Metal instrument on pan BOOM. How are you, they ask, all politeness, looking elsewhere, fiddling with things. Fine, I say.

Pull up your sleeve, they say. We are going to start an IV. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. An IV. Fasting. I have no veins, kind lady. You will find on inspection that I simply have no veins. I do not wish to disappoint or inconvenience you. I am merely bloodless and cold. I am not a mammal. No veins. It will be fine, they assure. Certainly it will be fine. We are professionals, obviously. Start the nitrous. Stick. Poke. Squeeze your hand. Keep squeezing. Objects are going funny. Am I supposed to be awake? Is this Wonderland? I am cooperating. Cooperating means I squeeze. My blood, there is none. Four sticks. Your wife, says the doctor to Mike, has very small veins. She has very little body fat. They are hiding in the muscle. He has faith in them, though, these veins. They are in there, like tiny bits of soul wound through my flesh.

One more stick, he says, and if I can't make it work, he says, we will do this with the nitrous only. He nods. I nod. Consciousness bounces about the room like balloons. I am cooperating. I squeeze. Shut your eyes, I tell myself. Close your eyes and let that needle in. Let it into your vein. I imagine blood gushing forth to meet it. It presses. There is an ache. I'm in, he says. Then blackness.

Can you get up? Are you dizzy? Can you walk? No. Lie back down. Take more oxygen. Try again. Can you get up? Can you get up? Hold the wall. Sit here. Have a blanket. My husband appears solid out of thought, manifests out of a question unvoiced about his whereabouts.

Her upper jaw was supposed to spongy and soft, says the doctor. But it was made of granite. This surgery therefore was a ten on a scale of one to ten. We chiseled. We yanked. We cut. We grabbed. It will hurt. Take care of her. Special jaw, special veins. Uncooperative body parts. Should I still be squeezing? Ice now. Rest. No more need to squeeze.

At home, I cannot feel my mouth. How does one drink? Oatmeal is too textured, too rough. My hair is a wreck. Bloody gauze comes out, fresh gauze goes in. New pills appear. I sleep. What can I eat? My insides are on fire. I think I still need to eat, yes? How shall I get it in? The next day it occurs to me: Refried beans. I can eat these. Moving my jaw is difficult, like drawing with a cast. Somehow the beans get in. This is satisfactory. I am taking hydrocodone, it turns out. Isn't that what Rush Limbaugh took, my friend asks. Yes, and I think that's why my face is swollen. Perhaps I am also lilting right, spewing vitriole. I clean my mouth with salt water, in the hopes of expunging Rush. He comes out in tiny little fragments every time I rinse. I must be careful to get all of him.

Today I try with only ibuprofen. The pain is rather profound. Distracting, it is. I think I shall spin circles chasing my heels until I collapse in the ecstasy of centrifugal force. That'll shut out the dull, piercing ice pick to each cheekbone. I get up my Google Calendar. I will now Do Something Important. Spin, spin, spin. I call my friend Amy. Spin, spin, spin again. At noon, administer more refried beans, gargle salt water and repeat the exorcism of Rush. Perhaps I can write. Yes, but nothing leaks onto my page but the detritus from the inner spaces between each tooth; bitter-tasting, pinched and worked-over globs of unwanted waste.

I think, I will share it with them anyway. Because I'm big that way. I like to share. I will hand you whatever is in the dirtied-up napkin on the side of my plate, so you can have a bit. I am not selfish. I will give you what I've got. This is what I've got. Send a self-addressed stamped envelope and I will include a bit of bloody gauze.

Teasers from my Untitled Book

Photo Credit: Morgue File by Johnny Pixel Productions

I don't have it in me to write a real post today, but I want to update my blog, so this is what I am going to do: I am going to post snippets from the book I am writing to entertain you–not enough that it could be said that this material has already "been published." Just enough to make sure you know I am crazy. Hopefully, you will keep in mind that crazy people are often fabulous authors, especially when writing autobiographically. Let me know what you think.

From The Alien:

"Of all the people I have ever met, I am the only one I know to have had a childhood messiah fantasy. While others indulged in the minor grandiosities of pretending to be a princess, a superhero or a mortal policeman, I essentially believed that I was God."

From Forsaken:

"In middle school, we moved from a little rural hippie town in the San Geronimo Valley, from a landscape with hills like the green breasts of a Goddess dotted with oaks, to affluent, pretentious Tiburon, with its yachts, tennis ladies and pickle grass watersides. I moved with my roller skates from a wooden deck where I could practice to hard and uneven asphalt where I fell, scraped my knees and gave up learning to skate. Every rose in Tiburon was all thorns. Magic was illegal."

From Stranger in the Dark:

"Addiction is a cauldron into which I have poured my anger, my bitterness, my loss. In the arms of this boy I have found both an answering pain and an answering love. My friends are arranged around me like barbed wire. I hold a cigarette that can go off like a gun."

From Amazing Grace:

"On one occasion, I can recall watching Montel Williams with a panel discussing eating disorders. I nodded my head vehemently, recognizing the insanity and the societal pressure that drove it. At the commercial break, I vomited up my lunch."

From Bondage a GoGo:

"'Bondage a GoGo.'

Even the words were a tease. Bass boomed in a darkened room, alive with dancers slick with sweat. I wove among grinding bodies decked in liquid black laced up corsets, knee high stiletto boots and lingerie; the world was delicious and innocuously dangerous, like the tiger behind an invisible fence."

From Warp and Weft:

"Five days and two hospital transfers later, I have a baby boy. Thirty-five weeks gestated, he is five pounds, three ounces and still curled up like a bud. He can fit in the large palm of my fiancé’s hand. His jaw is angular, not yet softened by baby fat, and he is almost never awake, but he can breathe on his own. He lies in an incubator, wearing the diaper of a doll and a tiny hat. Rowan."

From Boadicea:

"Which matters more–quilts sewn by dear friends, moments of joined laughter ‘round a circle as your child is blessed, tears shared in moments in still rooms, safe from ridicule? Or the power of a voice raised among many, the authority of initiation into influence? Again and again, in the intervening years, I have wondered. And again and again, I have chosen my own voice."

From Genesis:

"I was lying on the bed and it was 11 AM. The skies had leaked rain for days. They had oozed rain, like a full sponge slowly left to drain in the sky. Now it was July and the weather was sunny, but I hardly noticed. Moss grew on the interior of my soul. I had a baby whose single goal in life was to climb everything and a house with a large stairwell and a baby gate he regarded as a personal jungle gym."

From Driven:

"And that image–my bent and twisted body in the passenger seat of someone’s car, leaned back to let a hysterical infant suck on my pinkie until it grew numb because of my misgivings about pacifiers–that is all you ever needed to know about me. The rest of this book is wasted paper."