grandmother

you crawled from out the dirt of mississippi,
inbred with perfectly set curls and impoverished but clean and pressed dresses,
gap-toothed and matte-skin, ever smiling,
had all your war babies,
maria in the soft grass and crisp white dressing gown,
maria ever the focus of your prayers,
maria,
the name of the virgin goddess,
maria forever frozen, two years old,
the water sucked out of her by the dust

war planes and war marches,
grandfather perpetually overseas,
crawling again in mud
mud of japan,
mud of europe,
mud of korea,
the blood-splattered flag with bullet holes
plastered in his prayers,
the mind full of holes,
eaten away by the terror of having done what no man should do,

coming back, the mind a mess,
full of smoke
and hatred
the anger broke your china and your finger,
francis in the bathtub,
the others huddled in their nightclothes
and every one of them
leaving leaving leaving you
running away and hating you for staying

then another daughter gone,
her darling d's left behind to have their bodies drilled with holes
there are holes in everyone
holes to fill up and always emptying again like a sieve
you filled your holes with prayer,
saying the rosary and reading your prayerbook all day long
in the easy chair
as you decayed
and his mind's holes leaked faster and faster,
growing bigger gaps between knowledge and memory
he died not knowing anything anymore,
not even the burn of war could singe his sallow skin any longer

you coughed and choked,
holes sinking into your throat
catching your words and skewing them

you died on a sunday, a holy day,
prayer bringing you to peace by drifting you off to sleep
and never waking.
they dug a hole to bury you and filled it up up up with mud,
sprayed it with holy water and singing prayers,
keeping you soft and warm,
moist and no longer dry or draining,
the holes of your heart, at least, finally laid to rest.

separation

the intense painful passion of first love in ultra youth
was replaced by a failure to resolve conflict
and an equally intense method of argument

never wanting to have been a predictable statistic
fighting hard for every breath was necessary
and chewing at the air came naturally

hanging on determinedly
fists clenched around ideals
and never met expectations

dishes piled amidst failures and letdowns
while children circled underfoot
casualties of infinite rays of hope

now squashed by the barrenness of reality-based thinking:
food in bellies and shoes on feet
how to pay this month’s rent with next month’s money

wanting touch to be enough to speak the language of love
aching for deniable truths
and discussion based on real-life needs, understood and appreciated

instead of tilted heads and uneven laughter,
callous unhearing with eyes stuck to televisions
an inability to care the result of abject fear

how do i pay for the sins i’ve committed?
how do i place one foot before the other or breathe the air from out my lungs?
not see your face in all the mirrors, not sense the fingerprints left all over the entirety of my existence?

there are no holes in the scrapbooks
this is the truth of our endeavor:
though the pathways of our lives move in opposite directions, they remain ever and ever intertwined,

we are bound by the youthfulness of our indiscretions
we are tied at the helm of our mutual experiment
we are the parents of our progeny.

uncertainty

poised at cliff’s edge
no adventure to be got
no comfort to be gained
no promise of fortune
no suitcase in hand
no swell of music
no crashing waves
no laughter
no sweetness and starlight
no warm breath
no whispered love
no catch of breath
no burning jealousy or lust or rage

the turned look over the shoulder
reveals only the green of envy
the icy depths are silvery and silent
the flutter is not affection, not anticipation,
only the nervousness of stomach-churning horror
the heart aches with sobs stuck in the throat
all is dark and frigid.
the unknown
ticking clocks, decaying fruit,
the passage of time does not lessen,
but merely intensifies the wide-eyed wait,
filled with fearful blinks
muscles tight as rope,
clenched against bone,
waiting
waiting
no crescendo
no sudden shift
no end.

sebastian’s scent

munchkin breath,
sugar boot,
my squish,
the smell of you intoxicates me,
i sigh, long for you,
i breathe you in, your hair rising in my nostrils
the plump skin of your cheek
moves forth and back,
ears rising and falling
sucking,
it does not react to my inhale
your brown eyes stare off
as your fingers twiddle
and legs kick lazily.

you are home as i cannot remember feeling,
my embrace your sacred feeding, weeping, sleeping ground,
soon enough you will outgrow me,
yet i will forever remain open to you,
i will hold you in my lap and breathe you in
when you are twice my size and the weight of you crushes me
when you are a man and have given your heart to someone else
still i will cherish the pheromones seeping from your scalp,
and hope to recognize the bit of you that came from me.

switching sides

baby boy expels the other breast from striped knit v-neck with tiny fat fist
tugs it by its nipple to agape mouth, tongue reaching
fresh milk
for continued sleep, for further dreaming
he flops, rest-deadened limbs hot and heavy across my chest and belly

for three nights straight he pins my left arm so the hand falls to aching numbness
on the third day it does not wake
remains a stranger to objects it touches
like a fellow commuter on the subway,
unknown hips pressed intimately, swaying with the train ride, earphones plugged firmly
never speaking or looking,
my fingers grasp and do not know
the whole of the arm twitches,
trying to shake off the irritation,
tries to wake the radial nerve

on the fourth night i move from the right side
of the bed where i have slept the last eight years,
mostly in rooms where this was furthest from the door,
an odd, unintended feng shui of my marital sheets,
a silent quivering mousy voice that wants the husband to protect me from intruders,
or the voice of my genes that says to last longest, to survive

in the home where this baby was born, the family formed,
the bed angles me closest,
summons my transformation into the mother bear,
putting myself between the nighttime killers and my offspring.

my numb limb forces me to switch sides,
to let the nerve plump again,
forcing the fingers to feel
the husband protects once more from the unseen beyond the door
and my arm straightens to relieve itself

baby boy notices not,
goes on with his constant back and forth dance,
preferring the furthest nipple at all times,
regardless of what it gives

switching sides is his envy of the other,
knowing that it too drops what he desires
his sleepiness craves it, craves me
drinks me in left
and drinks me in right.

in quiet preparation for that i nearly forgot, i sit and stew with half-formed phrases in my brain, nursing the baby to sleep. tomorrow is february. i promised myself that i would try to become a real writer by writing every day, beginning in the second month of the year with poetry. i chose february because it is short, which is something like cheating, except that i also chose it because it is soon, the better to hurry along this notion of becoming a real writer. will i then print these poems out and send them in manila envelopes, like once i did, off to literary magazines? will i try then to become pedestaled by publishing? to be a really real writer? i don't know. i likely won't have the time with all the other things i squeeze into my life like a mad collector, collecting things to do, places to go, people to see. i squeeze in doing yoga with my husband and folding the diapers, sitting on the couch and drinking tea. i write it down in my planner in my to-do list. i refuse to cross things off until they are completely finished, lest i jinx myself, lest i move the universe to move against me in all my optimism. i love to cross things off. today i crossed off two things: updating the photos of my children in the growth section of my website and cleaning out the silverware drawer. insanely and pathetically, i am quite proud of the silverware drawer. it is bizarre that i take to this life so well, despite my shouting and the moments where i'd prefer to throw the nursling across the room than take both breasts out of my shirt so he can suck on one while twiddling the nipple of the other. it is bizarre that i choose such a life. wasn't i born in the seventies? shouldn't i have gathered from my intensely feminist mother (she who showed the slide show of my homebirth at her radical women united meeting) that the last thing any woman ought to be is in servitude to children and men? i have been over this and over this of late, reading the bitch in the house and discussing it online, as well as engaging, or, perhaps more aptly, cornering my husband in discussions over dinner (vegan dinners that he cooked) about just how feminist are we and what exactly does our setup imply politically? i don't know that i've come up with any good answers. it is as messy as our life, this arrangement. it is what it is and we chose it for the reasons we chose it. so i am trying to buck the system further, to follow my dream, to understand everything and spew it all in word, in twenty-eight poems crafted at the dining room table after breakfast, once my children have run from their half-empty bowls of cereal or flax and blueberry toaster waffles off to their toys, returning briefly to me in form and perhaps also in written word, carrying some thing they wish to show me or dragging me off to see the lego construction or demanding both my breasts from out my shirt yet again, and i relating it all onto paper, loving them as i do, extracting meaning from their cries, pulling metaphor from their urging. or maybe i do not. maybe i merely run off with them to the lego starship with its interstellar weaponry or pull my shirt open and lean over my paper awkwardly, ultimately unable to continue with the poem, forced to participate in the subject of my life and work, against or with my ever-changing will. it is terribly terribly difficult, i know from even blogging, to form a thought with all this life going on about me. kai ryssdal speaks like a ken doll in the radio, my husband cooks an amazing south indian kale dish in the kitchen, and sebastian shouts at me from over his beans and rice beside me. i can't even begin to hold the thought that started this all. this is my life and this is what i write.

i am having a lengthy discussion in a yahoo crunchy mama book group about relationships. it has been illuminating and useful to me to examine what it is we do in my relationship with my husband, how we operate, the ways in which we negotiate our life and our responsibilities. i don't often speak of it here. i'm not sure that i ever really have. we are dedicated to ending oppression globally. we seek with our choices and our actions to do so. we want to fight it, we want to educate and discuss and discover. in so doing, we must first always examine ourselves and our relationship. we are in a very traditional arrangement. we married one another with all the hidden-meaning accroutements of western weddings: the white dress, the bouquet, my father walking me down the aisle (though not giving me away), feeding one another cake - all that crap. i'll never know what possessed me, what compelled me to do it. actually, i suppose i do know. it was this world, it was its magazines and its television shows, its martha fucking stewart. i was compelled by being raised here, by bearing witness and by internalizing all those messages to which i was exposed from birth. my mother had a white wedding and i'll never know what compelled her to do it to be certain (unless of course i ask). it makes no sense to me that she would make that choice when so many of her peers did not. she was radicalized in so many ways, and yet they made this entirely traditional choice. she and my step-father were likely pressured by their parents and he probably wanted to, though knowing him i doubt he considered exactly why. and here we find ourselves, years after that initial decision to stay in line with our culture, yet again in total keeping with the arrangements of the patriarchy. i know what compelled these decisions and they are decidedly not in keeping with the patriarchy. i stayed home with my children firstly because i couldn't afford not to (okay, so that's not very radical at all), but secondly because i made choices to do things that had been stripped from women by the patriarchy - the ability to nourish children with my body, the ability to give birth free of chains, the ability to make decisions for my children free of the demands of patriarchy-appointed experts, to teach my children free of patriarchy-established institutions, to self-govern, to have autonomy, to be a (gasp!) self-possessed woman and to pass self-possession on to my children. so how we got here was not what it looks like, exactly. we are trying, hard as we might, to follow our dreams and to support one another in so doing. i have been helping my husband to become a professor of history since first we met eight-and-a-half years ago. in turn, he has been helping me to figure out what it is i want to do with myself, which of course always comes back to this, to writing. in that time, i did many things i didn't necessarily want to do, but would have had to do whether he was in school or not. perhaps he doesn't always acknowledge that. perhaps his ignoring this feature has to do with his indoctrination by the patriarchy, or maybe it's just a feature of being decidedly human, of being caught up in what he is doing. maybe it's both. maybe we could do better to insure that our attitudes towards one another were free from the indoctrinations we received from society since birth. maybe instead of me sitting here, typing furiously as our children destroy things around me, considering this fact of life, this matter of our attitudes towards one another being in keeping with our feminist and leftist philosophies or not, perhaps it should be he thinking these thoughts, wondering and considering and trying to figure what better approaches we might take. and i go over it and over it in my head - when i come home at night from one of my meetings when he has been caring for our children who are decidedly insane and capable of such stunning destruction as to inspire us to change our leftist thoughts on matters like the death penalty, is his grumpiness towards me justified because he is human and the children are so difficult or is it not because he has been inculcated by a lifetime of sexist bigotry and is not at this time acknowledging and confronting it as perhaps i think he should, especially when one considers his profession, how he spends his time ruminating on historical matters from that leftist pedestal, giving weight to the people that formed societies and economies on their backs against those whose biographies are instead credited for shaping that history, those societies, those economies, those "great men" who we consider in those patriarchy-appointed classrooms that i keep our children from so determinedly? is he right or is he wrong? what more could he be doing to fight the dogma with which he was raised? what more could i be doing to encourage re-thinking it all? we are generally very open with one another, certainly me more so than he given my tendency toward talking rapidly and excessively, much like my typing, though he is open and honest. i am sure all it would take is a conversation about the matter in a kind, non-confrontational manner. but then, with children who destroy and all the things that we constantly have to do and deal with - the doctors appointments (four this week alone), the meetings (four this week as well), the work, the dissertation, the boy reunion, the environmental history conference, the co-op newsletter, the blizzard, the twice-daily yoga, aleks' rash, bastian's cold, selling books on amazon, as well as the typical and ongoing cleaning, cooking, laundry, grocerying, diapering, bathing, dressing, wiping, scrubbing insanity - when do we have time for a conversation about whether or not our attitudes are a result of dogmatic upbringing in a bigoted society? it would need to be such a lengthy conversation too in order to give it the proper time and to allow jon the space to contemplate the possibilities. it could go on for months. it could likely go on forever and it would be one of those things, like yoga, where we constantly evaluate and self-correct. it would be a practice, one which we are already involved in, of course, but which requires occasional emotional revelation (the result of constant self-reflection) and dedication to perpetual exploration and archeology of meanings and ritualized compulsions. at this moment, with my living room covered behind me in all the contents of the giant drawers beside me (envelopes, diapers, a keyboard, printer paper, a box of tissues torn asunder, dvds, stationary, a blank book, varied four-year-old scrawlings), the energy required to explore feminist theory with my husband feels a bit overwhelming.

i am determined to be something other than what i am. i am determined to find the something that is me, to write, to be, in fact, a writer and to not feel helpless and emptied next to the colossalness of the phd in my midst. to not project colossalness onto the phd beside me, that which i helped to create and mold and grow with these hands and this heart in constant and unwaivering eight-and-a-half-year dedication. i am determined to determine what it is that becomes me without him, that becomes me without dependency, that becomes me with this brain and heart and eyes and these now half-crippled hands that can again type at least thanks to twice weekly visits to the hand clinic where i am stimulated electronically after being warmed with pulverized corn husks in swirling hot air and before being cooled from the aching with frozen gel packs strapped to the wrist. now my unfeeling fingers can move by memory and with the aid of sight across our ergonomic keyboard and can hit the "h" key far too often for some unknown reason though the words that would make me a writer have not exactly come yet and have not precisely been forced out in such ways to help me not fall into the unknowing and constant doubting of this self, this soul, this body that left-handedly is yet still dedicated to ceaseless housecleaning and wiping running nineteen month old noses and the chasing of the four year old from out the kitchen away from the vegan chocolate muffins. i go to occupational therapy and am confronted with the boldness of boys who utilize their mother's suburban cash flow to pursue an art career, pointlessly painting rubber tires with justifications of texture and explorations of the mundane. i wonder what made me so underestimate my self worth as to never pursue a higher education in art or writing creatively then recall how much i hated school and hate it still, but feel ultimately diminished to "just a mom" status yet again. then i witness the working poor, injured while working and ignorantly postponing filing for workman's compensation and feel flooded with intense and heartbreaking gratitude for my own privilege and sense simultaneous pressure to transcend my skill-less, money-less position in life, to never get old or broken again and never to face the bottomless pit of despair that is that sort of acute poverty. i have witnessed and learned of it and while wishing and working to transform the world, also am compelled to run far far away, to avoid the level of understanding and knowing look in my eye that comes only with firsthand experience. and so i am determined and i point myself in the direction of self-worth via me defined as i am, me the writer, me the written, typing daily and furiously, at times stuck and staring, yet determined with half-assed ideas in hand to whittle and work it until i've got it, until i've got something, whatever it might be or become. in honor of my renewed sense of dedication and thirty to forty percent regained use of the right hand, i propose that i write one poem daily in the month of february, and continue it as long as i can sustain it after. i find that poetry is a mode of writing that can change to suit one's mood, thus moving from abstraction to narration and back again day to day whilst remaining the same author with largely the same intentions and still necessitating skillfulness and mindfulness which will fit my limitations as well as my need for a challenge to keep me focused and forward-moving. i am set. here i go.

my hand bending back due to self-inflicted therapeutic electrocution

i was crippled and bed-ridden and my grandmother died and my children and i had to be cared for by a hired friend and my husband had to re-take his comps and i had to start occupational therapy and go to the pain specialist and the hand surgeon and my sister had her wisdom teeth cut out of her head and my uncles came for the funeral and everybody drank beer and played risk while i rested my swollen hand atop piles of pillows in irritating splints of one kind or another, my scab peeling and itching, my skin crawling and aching, my brain a fog, my stomach churning. then jon passed his comps and we returned home and i began therapeutic exercises and my mother-in-law visited, and i bought and tried to wrap christmas presents with my teeth, my elbow, my feet, and my weakly left hand. then we returned to my mother's house for christmas and my youngest son got sick and for a moment we suspected whooping cough, but then it got better and his tooth popped out. that is where i have been. i am using two hands to type: one knowledgeable and weakly though strong enough for typing and the other clumsy dead weight, numb and not at all nimble; a giant hand trying to thread a needle. i am tired and intermittently pained, sniffling and fumbling about with a head cold. i get the urge to perform tasks i cannot do or which are decidedly difficult with one hand. i am sickly skinny. i am bored yet exhausted by the slightest exertion of energy. blogging has me spent.

annakiss vs. casserole dish: a photo tour

saturday dinner
note green bean casserole dish, smiling family, feasting on poultry carcass (not i - i had eggplant parmesean and turkey seitan (praise seitan!))


in a flurry of dish washing, right wrist becomes slashed, lands me in an ambulance wrapped in gauze with an iv drip in my left arm, preventing almost all forelimb movement. morphine ensues en route (scary needles in moving vehicle!)


sterile field prepared for cleansing, further inspection and loose, superficial suturing to await surgery two days later


frankensteinian stitches, still detached tendons tucked carefully within


sunday nap, on the phone with ana, pondering the philosophical implications of near death


monday migraine appears sensuous on the table at the hand surgeon's


ana calls it "creepy sexy"


exposed


monday night before surgery, left-handed myspacing, talking to everyone on the phone


jon on way to surgery center


annakiss and clyo the hand-bandage ready for action


awaiting sedation


examining iv: discomfort


i wanna be sedated


post surgery disorientation


my stoned, confused method of telling jon "no more pics"


recovering at home in the electronic chair for geriatrics


sebastian and i discussing important matters


sebastian sucking down the narcotics via boobyjuice

nothing went according to plan. i didn't finish my fifty thousand word novel in thirty days. i got to forty thousand when my journey was abruptly halted by the usual bizarre personal tragedy. i am currently typing left-handed and poorly, i might add, as i sit in a bed at my mother's house recuperating from surgery on my dominant right hand which was made necessary by a freak casserole dish accident. the saturday after thanksgiving, an evil zombie casserole dish tried to kill me while i was kindly scrubbin' it clean. i was washing the dish after a belated birthday celebration for my husband at my mother's house when it slipped from my yellow rubber-gloved hands. i tried to catch it, but instead it broke and slashed through my wrist in a more serious manner than a suicide attempt. five inches long and mighty wide and deep, the cut included four cut tendons and a cut nerve. there was a stem off the cut nerve that controls sensation in the palm side meaty part below the thumb that was too damaged to repair and will likely never work again. i am facing physical therapy and weeks and weeks of healing. it will take years for my nerve to function properly if it ever does. i am sad. gruesome photos.

out to nanowrimo. see you next month.

it gets worse. more and more i battle with trying to figure if all these tragedies, all this struggle, isn't particularly unique to us or if it is simply par for the course. all i can figure is that some of it is and some of it isn't and it could always be worse. this does not really help. i suppose the question is simply am i justified in praying for a break? i try to figure if it isn't just my karma or a wrathful god or whatever, if i am not simply deserving of all my heartache. yet i do not believe in any of that shit. still i ask the questions, trying to determine if i am a fool for complaining. in my logical brain, i believe that your life is your life, your struggle is your struggle, and your emotional reactions to your experiences are valid. i have trouble granting myself that same validation. i am always minimizing the emotional realities resulting from my experiences. for instance, i probably, in all actuality, have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. a truck fell out of the sky and almost stole the breath right out of me, stopped my heart, ceased the unfolding of sebastian. i am permanently anxious because of this. i am heartbroken for my eldest son and the struggle and laboratory examination he endures as a result of what i feel but logically deny to be my body's total incompetence. i deal. i move on. the holes in my heart remain. then this past summer, my husband suffered his own heartbreak that has left our entire future more uncertain than it was to begin with. i don't even know how to summarize how we've been struggling with everything that spiraled out from that. every day we have less and less money, or rather, more and more no money, which, as standard as that is for most of the planet including us, is nonetheless more and more terrifying and anxiety-inducing. i go over lists in my head of all the ways in which i do not budget appropriately and spend too much and try to move things about and get a feel for what all this might be like if we did The Right Thing and embraced our poverty. it is painful to imagine a life of staying at home literally twenty-four/seven with my children for lack of funds to leave, subsisting on rice and beans (which in large part, thanks to veganism, we already do). there is, of course, no question that this is entirely possible, but with all the major trauma in our lives, how would our marriage and our sanity survive it? i suppose in some ways it seems too much to demand of the universe that we strive for happiness and aspire to ideals. i could put my children in daycare and head off to some cushy, dreadfully boring, and completely-antithetical-to-my-being corporate job answering phones and creating spreadsheets. i could potentially climb a very short little corporate ladder if need be. but then my children would be in daycare, i would be more miserable than i am, and this life would be ten times more complicated than it already is. jon could give all this up and go into the corporate sector himself. we have already reduced our grocery bill. we already do not buy toilet paper, cleaning products, diapers, formula, ridiculous toys. jon does not buy books. our craft projects are from things we already have. i can imagine a life with less and it is bleak. i feel guilt at even thinking it though, because most of the known universe does live with much less. we are clothed and fed and privilegedly up to our eyeballs in debt, all for the promise of a better life than the lower-middle class intellectual's "simple" existence we already enjoy. yet my skin shivers, feels tight around my spine at the fear crept into my heart by so much stacked up in the red. i mentally negotiate the differences and all my inadequacies. i perform this self-examining trapeze act, turning over and over all the possibilities for how i might have avoided all this and seek to realize how i failed, What Went Wrong. i am consumed by guilt and terror and in the end simply accept the truth of this existence and ignore it all, know that something will come through and there is, at present, nothing to be done about it.

i am fluctuating day-to-day, at times hour-by-hour between being fine and being empty. i am tired, it's true. i have small children who sleep less than i'd like them to, i nurse half the night, i go out too much, and i am always trying to do too much. maybe it has caught up with me. maybe i really am just sad. i am broken out, perhaps hormonal. i am not currently on speaking terms with the moon to know the whys or hows of that, however. maybe it's just too much. maybe i rush around my whole life flinging things into the great hole in my heart, the inferno that eats everything, uses everything, burns it up into smoke and ashes. perhaps that is a little dramatic. i am yelling at aleks. i am punishing, threatening. i don't want to, but at this moment it's all i have. it is not so entirely bad, but it is terribly far from ideal. that's everyday though. i long ago finished with guilt over it. all i can do is recognize what is happening, think on what i'd prefer to do, wonder why it happened to begin with, and move forward, hoping to perhaps short-circuit a causal relationship here and there, reminding myself in the moment what is happening. i can only move forward. with my children at least for now, i seem to have learned that lesson. one down. eight hundred fifty-eight million more to go. eh, maybe i'm low-balling that figure.

it got cold overnight. jon is away. i turned the heat on again. now we're all bespeckled in slippers and long-sleeved jammies, moving about in our laid-back morning routine. i am sneezing a bit and blowing my nose. i don't feel sick, but i don't feel good. i feel lonely. empty. it's the only word for it. trying to root out the causes is like searching for a needle in a stack of needles. i wish my feelings came with wikipedia entries so they might be catalogued and numbered and cross-referenced. perhaps then it could all be sorted. maybe i could make sense to myself. i have felt intermittently empty for so long now that it hardly seems unusual or unique. it seems almost normal. but just now i am tired and do not wish to do all the things i need to do. i just haven't the inertia. if i just keep going all the time, i don't notice the hole. i can ignore it, even as it nags at me from out the corner of my eye. go away, hole. leave me alone.

i am trying to have a life here. i am trying always always always to realize and to know, to walk around with the knowledge that this is my life, that my life is occurring right now. always. i am filling my life up with halloween decorations, trips to and volunteering at the food co-op, the planning of vegan meals, baking, re-learning how to knit, attempting the study of midwifery, particularly fertility, drinking wine, figuring the proper manufacture of bath bombs, coming up with an idea for nanowrimo, cleaning and re-cleaning and re-cleaning my house, trips to the library, strange dreams that look not like the texture of dreams that belong to me, picking up, picking up, picking up, coming up with new ideas for new projects to fill up my time and make this look and feel like a life. i want to read nothing but things written by women for a year. i want to undo my scarf and start over, make it skinnier. i want to notice the moon. i want to paint something new for the bathroom. i want to finish the quilt. i want to crochet amy a plant sweater and sew bonnie her bag. i want to get the stupid bath bombs right - especially since i ordered a pound of citric acid that will be here tuesday. i want to mend the quilts. mostly i want to want all those things. or maybe i just want to gain the sense that this is anything other than needing something to do to fill the time.

i have this problem where i think of all the things in the world, the horrible happenings everywhere, the great big things that people do, the simple things that gain any sort of recognition at all, and i feel so small, so invalid in all my crises. i feel as though my emotions are minor irritations, unimportant, dwarfed by the enormity of infinity. it's a battle, ultimately, as i give so much voice and thought and time to the miniscule tragedies that unfold in my heart and mind. i am an emotional bulimic, gorging on self-absorption and total obsession with each tiny nuance of my existence before denying it all as unimportant and insignificant. yet i know and will be the first to advise others that realities do not negate one another, that varying perspectives are equally valid (if not equally valuable - i'm not into moral relativism, here). i know that my perspective is what gives me these challenges, that makes my experiences difficult or easy. my perspective and my history, my collection of experiences, inform this life and shape this heart and mind, rendering these varying reactions and struggles unique and valid. i am what i am. if only i could figure it and pinpoint what it is that is making me feel so empty. why do i necessitate constant motion to distract me from myself and from my emotions? there is nothing here to figure, i suppose. i have children. it is difficult. i alternate moment-to-moment with doing an okay job of it and fucking it up. it is how it is and how it will, in all likelihood, continue to be.

i feel empty of words, things to obsess about. yesterday i got the sense that my life is empty. i have nothing for me that i do. it comes and goes. in truth, i do not know what i am doing exactly. i am coming up with things to occupy me, trying to focus on being a mom. sort of. i've been running errands, cooking, cleaning, hosting, going to events, avoiding balancing the checkbook, crafting, learning to knit all over again, and in some ways, on some days, trying to learn about unschooling and midwifery. i pick up the books occasionally and thumb through them, or get momentarily absorbed and then distracted. that's actually a much better description of my entire life right now: mild absorption followed by distraction, usually the result of mild absorption in something else. this skipping about makes it difficult to sense the general texture of my life, leaves me feeling as if i do not in fact have the slightest idea about what i am doing. i am doing so much so half-heartedly or with spurts of enthusiasm that nothing appears to be the thing i am doing. i keep inventing new projects for myself. haven't i always done this? is this perhaps just who i am? it doesn't look like anything specific. i saw a children's book recently about career options - one of those "when i grow up" things - each of the options was this one thing, this singular, defined, limited, specific-yet-general occupation like baker, teacher, firefighter, etc. i realized that i internalized that sort of thinking growing up. we probably all do, but it is not a reflection of how the world operates. most professional careers are inter-disciplinary to some degree or at least have specialties that make a job so much more than "scientist" - try instead "explosives expert" or "biochemist researching drugs to halt the spread of lymphoma in females." no three-year-old ever wants to grow up and become a systems analyst. frequently i examine objects and wonder about how someone was paid to think them up - like the new method of dispensing gatorade in convenience stores: the bottles hang from their lids. someone had to think that there was a better (or, er, different) way to dispense them in glass coolers and they somehow set in motion this whole process of inventing and designing and patenting and selling and distributing and installing these big hunks of plastic. one might also consider the whole process of drilling the petroleum out of the earth and shipping and refining and shipping and using and shipping it to create that big hunk of plastic. how fucking useless is all that? just to reinvent the goddamned shelf. all those little people doing all those tasks (and all the people pushing paper to make those tasks happen: managers, receptionists, ceos, administrative assistants, janitors, computer technicians) for what? couldn't their time be spent doing something much simpler and interesting? growing food, building a tool shed, cooking, cleaning their home, painting a picture, playing an instrument? all that sounds much more valuable to me, frankly. and that's what i do for a living. and yet i am compelled to devalue those essential tasks, probably due to the lack of value for them in this culture. here i am, hiding out in the bathroom to write without distraction or interruption, feeling like my life has nothing in it that gives it meaning. how fucking asinine. the whole purpose of me wanting my children to unschool is so they can sense the value in just living and being who they are, without the compulsion to become a wage slave, supporting the weight of empires with their blood and sweat. i want them to feel like who they are and what they do is valuable, whether that is to struggle to support themselves with a less-than-desirable livelihood because that it is what is available while they enjoy doing whatever else they please, or if it be to struggle to make a life for themselves working in some more noble profession like a non-profit organization or as a researcher of history or culture or biology. whatever it is they choose or come to do, or all the multitude of things they choose or come to do, i want them to appreciate that as the thing they are doing, that as the life they are already living instead of waiting around for society to tell them it has begun because they have earned a degree, gotten married, bought a house, chosen a profession. we are many things at different times. we are changing all the time. we need - i need to be able to recognize that and embrace it as what is real and what is true. i am who i sought to become. the real trick of this truth is realizing that i always was.

i was all nicely absorbed in my tedious, melancholic self-reflection there, but suddenly i find myself drawn into being pissed off about real-life drama. i'm not too keen on my husband right now - people i love, so when people i moderately tolerate come into view, i am acutely irritated by their very existence. i am not particularly kind, i don't suppose, but neither am i overtly mean or judgmental. maybe i am overtly judgmental actually, but not mean. i don't condescend to people. i just state my facts as i know them with my typical passion thrown in of course. aleks is obsessed with this ramones song right now. he runs around the table in the dining room while singing it. he calls it the "oh yeah" song and we fight over the cd player over and over. two songs later is an elliot smith song he refuses to let me listen to. sebastian flicked smoothie all over the dining room with his straw and i said, "this is why i hate children," under my breath. of course, like any good mother, i don't really mean it. of course. they are pretty cute after all. i have nothing interesting to write. my self-obsession seems to have subsided for the moment, so i cannot sit and reflect endlessly on why everything sucks for me or for the world. elliot smith finally made it on without aleks noticing, so i can sink into a nice warm puddle of despair. what can i despair about? the state of my relationship with jon's ever-present but fluctuating depression and the moodiness that accompanies it and how i struggle to support him through this, taking the children on excursion after excursion, abandoning my own aspirations (though admittedly i was markedly ambivalent about them), and all the while getting almost no thanks and therefore drinking and smoking too much, the latter the greatest of crunchy sins? the empty place in my stomach that churns when i think of mothering and all i left and all the terrible stinky drama the internet inspires, how part of me misses it, but part of me is disgusted i stayed as long as i did in that addiction and that i still participate and get worked up over our own local board and the discussions there? my struggle to be a good mom, to not scream at my children, to teach them, to facilitate their learning and not want to throttle them half the time even as they fight over blocks and make ungodly loud noises at me and each other? my feeling of lacking something that belongs to me or in some way proves my worth as a person in this society, intimately related to my lack of affirmation that anything i do is good at all, though there are certainly moments when fellow housewives admire my home, the things that i own, my baking or my entertaining skills and then i feel like i should be dressed in heels and curled hair like some goddamned donna reed clone though i'm sure i look exactly like the modern version of that with my choicest outfits donned for occasions of visitors, my properly mussed hair, my jewelry, my makeuped face (good lord i am donna reed!)? i think perhaps i've hit on something here - what does it say about me that i go to bars after the children are sleeping with my girlfriend to chainsmoke and as usual overestimate my ninety-two pounds' ability to metabolize three beers in two hours and meet random hipster-potentially-gay guys who gasp at the fact that these ninety-two pounds have created two children and high-five at the fact of their intactness and get wide-eyed at the truck-that-fell-out-of-the-sky story which i always bring up when i'm drunk? what kind of fucking mother am i then? when i stumble home at two-thirty in the morning and shower the smoke off as best i can and climb into bed and nurse the baby with my drunken breasts? what does it say about me that i do this while taking such care to not vaccinate my children, to not shoot mercury and other neuro-toxins into their veins; such care to feed them organic, now nearly-vegan, always whole highly nutritious foods; such care to not send them to school to have their love of life and love of learning drilled out of them by the rote memorization required for standardized testing; such care to give birth to them at home to keep them safe from cold hands, harsh lights, super-microbes invented on linoleum, eager nurses and doctors who order spinal taps for infection or inject drugs in my (and thereby their) bloodstream; such care to take them all over town exposing them to art, culture, diversity, civic, environmental, and personal responsibility; such care to honor their abilities to know their own bodies and when they are hungry, tired, hurt, sad, angry, joyful??? does it simply imply that i am burnt out? or does it say that i have failed, that i am a hypocrite, that i should know better? does it say that i am human and imperfect, that i know my own limits and honor the space that i need? or does it just say that i am muddling through all of this as best as i can? surely i am not totally void of conviction here. surely i am not just a miserable excuse for a human being. surely i am just in deep need of some comfort, some nurturing and i get it however i can take it and my friends who are also miserable love company and can at least commiserate and respect that we all get through it however we have to and it'll get better and it'll get worse again and fuck it, maybe-gay guys are fun and it feels good to make someone's eyes light up, to be shown deep respect for my intelligence, even in a hipster bar on a nice autumn night.

i was thinking last night about writing about the commodification of experience, but i just don't have the energy for it now. too much thinking and i'm not sure what to say other than i hate it, i think its bullshit, i wish our culture were different, yadda yadda yadda. i probably need to talk more about it out loud with friends or find other examples of it in society in the media, etc. before composing an article or proper rant. of course, this morning i can suddenly think of several examples. the whole of the tlc channel, for instance, or extreme makeover: home edition, or the original variety. the whole game show thing, competition, the need to win. it's all built into the american dream, but we've exploited this concept to a really sick point. the phrase, "kodak moment." it's all part of advertising, part of a capitalistic society. cooperative culture must not have this. but it's come so far now that even the left view everything as a commodity. we talk in terms of buying and selling everything. al gore is on a mission at the moment to sell global warming and his whole solution is all about buying or selling things, about maintaining a growth economy while reducing the toxic output of such an economy. i have such little faith that that will do more than curb the planetary meltdown, but then global warming is but one of my many concerns regarding the environment. sustainable cultures do not intend to grow, and by very nature, our growth economy will one day outgrow our resources. eventually the demand will outpace the supply either due to population explosion or that whole made-up idea that we need all this shit to begin with. i believe in the need for something better. i believe the need is here and the need is now if we intend for our genes to carry on. i never wanted to be alive during planetary crisis, but neither do i want my grandchildren to experience it either. sadly, i sense the two basic motives of the species everyday in all that i do - 1) to sustain myself (survival) and 2) to reproduce myself. that's it. that's the whole point. i wanna live. i want my children to live. i know that in order to do that i have to cooperate with a lot of people, a lot of different concepts and perspectives all the time. so i aim to be inclusive as possible. that's the great idea about the left, really. that's why even useless fucks like the kkk have the right to say whatever they like.

spending the morning recovering from hangover - the result of not quite enough sleeping-it-off - drinking coffee, listening to fiona apple. it's bringing back memories and feelings of crazy that never went away. crazy that keeps coming back. i don't know. i don't know how the brain works or why i feel my heart swelling and emptiness closing in on me. the first thing i wanted to do was call someone and tell them, but there is no one to call. i forget all the time that there's been no actual witness to my history as i know it, that i don't really share this perspective with anyone and that what i do share is but bits and pieces. it seems so weird to me though because these memories, these feelings, this crazy is all the undercurrent of my existence. this is what there is when there is nothing else at all - this frame of reference of the seventeen to nineteen-year-old self, forever frozen in time. it makes me wonder if everyone is like this. is every story really a coming-of-age story? is the great american novel always a dedication to the author's youth? is that what it all always comes down to? or am i confusing myself? maybe i don't know what i'm talking about.

heather and i had this conversation last night when we went out for her birthday - she said how happy she was to be getting older, to be inching her way to thirty. i was rather confused about this, but she explained that she always imagined her thirties and forties to be when her life would really happen - the meat of things, the outcome of everything she's been building up to. i completely related to that, though i'd never really connected it to getting older and each birthday passing. as much as i try all the time to accept and embrace that this is my life happening right now, i've barely ever achieved it and have truly always imagined that i will have this all worked out or perfected somehow by the time i'm in my thirties and that then i will know that my life is happening and i will no longer be waiting for it. i don't know if this is true. more than likely, we spend our whole lives waiting for something and wishing for it still as we lay dying. maybe that's a spiritual puzzle that exists everywhere on earth - the feeling of disconnect between us and god or us and the universe or whatever it is. maybe it's our culture that disconnects us. maybe if we lived in the woods and were theoretically closer to the earth we would sense our place in the universe and never question that or feel that longing. maybe our hunger would be more real, more mundane - the urge to merely sustain ourselves instead of conquering everything. maybe our comfort is what disenfranchises us from the universe. maybe we could be part of it. maybe that's what i sensed that day in the woods when we laid on the ground looking at the sky - the great emptiness of matter and how the energy within it makes us all the same. maybe i was enlightened for a minute. the only thing i remember is that it was so beautiful i wanted to weep. the truth is i have the life i wanted and still i do not feel accomplished. and of course i still have the struggle of everyday, which i knew and wanted with it. i just feel crazy and confused as ever and still so much a child, so in need of mothering. i need a being greater than me to tell me the answers and to point in the direction of what is good and what is right. i am still searching everyday, always for answers to all the questions and i have not yet been convinced that i myself hold the power of that, that i myself am capable of shaping my reality, of making choices despite my circumstance and despite my experience. i am not yet convinced nor do i know how to escape the confines of my history - that which determines that i will do the same things that i have always done, that i will be here years later feeling so unchanged, still so uncertain and driven mad by my quest for knowing. i was shaped when i was seventeen. i became who i will always be. i do not know how to change that. trucks falling from the sky have not taught me to love god or to understand who i am and what it is i am to do. though i think, if anything, the divine is here in our daily lives, not simply reserved for the extraordinary moments. and of course, i am an atheist, so what difference does it make? except being atheist does not mean i am entirely divorced from the divine or from the wonderment of existence. i want, though, to be in awe instead of in despair. i would rather witness the infinite array of possibilities and feel hope rather than always noticing all the asinine shit we do with that infinite array of possibility and choice. i wish for that very much. but by nature, i seem to be a skeptic and a pessimist. i know that even with all that i know and as much as i strive to do good in my choices and benefit not only myself and be mindful in all that i do, i fail and i make greedy, arrogant choices that i don't have to make, but that i have come to live with and perform repeatedly as the result of my circumstance, as a result of the conditioning of my culture, of this era in which i live. i make terrible choices and i am limited despite that endless array of opportunity. i limit myself. i chose day in and day out to be the same as i have always been, to be shaped as i was when i was seventeen, to be now who i was then. i decide that in all that i do, over and over and over again. so how could not everyone make terrible choices over and over? only through great change, through sudden mutations of cultural consciousness do we effect change in individual perceptions and perhaps self-conceptions that might in fact change those choices and decisions and open people's eyes to the possibility of something else. but surely then we will argue about how that something else might be conducted before advertently or inadvertently deciding upon a choice that we will make again and again and again ad infinitum. when viewed in this way, the world becomes so sad and pathetic in its inevitability. even though anything is possible, only some things will actually come to pass, and that, though perhaps not exactly predetermined, is entirely probably and likely to be repeated. the grooves we dig in our brain, those neural pathways we clear by repeated use, are so depressing and so difficult to supersede and paradigm shifts seem completely improbable. what if i just shift my paradigm? what will that look like? and how the fuck do i do it?

illness is creeping up on me. my children spread it in their kisses and snotty noses and nastified fingers where the nails have grown too long and dirt and goo and sludge collects. my nose and my throat and my forehead all have a slight pinch in them despite copious amounts of vitamin c, echinacea, and tea. i should have gotten garlic and zinc while i was out today. despite all this, i have been incredibly productive and feel good about what a good mommy and housewife i am being and how not stressed about it i am. things are good-ish for the moment. i bought a resin ganesha statue today just in case, though. jon left an offering of a quarter. this is pretty amusing for a couple of atheists.

little boy makes darth vader sounds,
the deep in and out of an iron lung
he jumps and punches the air,
tries to cram himself beneath the couch
for an unknown cause.
he shoves the plastic mask on baby brother
who stumbles and removes it
over and over without complaint.

my mornings are pierced with
whining, weeping,
wooden blocks flung across rooms,
running noses, sticky fingers,
made-up songs in made-up languages,
and these shoddy china-made
facsimiles of fallen galactic warriors.

writing poetry at the dining table
with lukewarm coffee in an earthenware mug
baby boy climbing up the table to meet me
with wooden tool kit pieces,
threatening to dunk them in my drink,
i find this is a life.
this is worth all of it
this is the texture i sought,
the extraordinary disguised as the mundane.
this is what i wanted,
what i want still.

at times, this desire rises quickly into rage,
when things don't go my way
or hormones shift slightly.
i sink into failing
i let go and my frustrations pour out
in awful, hurtful ways
my words shouted and spitted
are pitiful and pathetic
my mood changes in ways i cannot predict or understand fully
i lose control.
i have not yet learned in my life how to embrace uncertainty
or if it is a good thing to do so even.
mostly i shrink in terror.

i have lost sight of what was poetry and what was narrative.
i seek to flay confusion,
split it wide into knowing,
but i flail and flounder
and do not know
and no insightful words come of it.