Life is, changing.

Many of you know, hiding in my hidey-hole, exactly what’s changing, and maybe we can come right out and whisper

(divorce)

in a small small voice so no one hears.

Terror? It comes in corners, scatters and clatters up against me, scoots up my leg and straight into my heart. To be responsible for me, well now, I’ll eat Mr. Noodle and wear out my shoes. To face a future where my kids are totally subject to me, in at least some capacity-flabbergasting. A future where running out of bread and money at the same time is possible again, but this time, with hungry little mouths.

Screw horror movies. This is what keeps me up at night.

And now, it’s reality.

******

Of course, we won’t be alone, desert island eating each other alone. Their father will be involved, likely only away from us a few blocks, ready and willing and able to take them according to plan, and sometimes likely not plan, when one of us is sick, or wants to take them for walks or dinner. We won’t be isolated and stuck, but it feels that way, the vision of life without another adult in the house, something to lean on, someone to protect you and tell you it will be ok.

I’ve never been that totally on my own, not ever. There’s always been someone in the background, just in case I fell. The anxiety rising in my chest oozes from that newness more than anything else. It makes me fear for my children-if they get sick, or grow too fast. All the variables I can think of-they scare me breathless.

This-the potential to be alone, absolutely alone, not stuck in a place we can’t leverage or change, but the only one on the couch watching Dexter or alone in the bathroom, cleaning the hair from my brush for the first time in years. This alone where you take a shower with the door open so you can hear what’s going on, and have to drag the kids with you when there’s an appointment.

Sure I could find someone else, someday. But they won’t know me the same way. It won’t be the comfort of 12 years. It won’t be easy again, not for awhile. The house will still echo, only bringing back my own voice and thoughts.

I’m equally terrified and thrilled at the prospect of starting again. I’m sad that it’s happening, I am. But there’s also a relief in the inevitable, the necessary starting. Staring across an abyss at someone you love, but more as a sibling, or a friend than a lover, and knowing you’re better apart? Sad, scary and yet so right. I can love him again this way, as the father of my daughters, as a friend making fun of me. As a lover-it was just too hard, too much, for more reasons than I can count.

It’s like an exhaled sigh really. A glance out a window, a coy smile at a bud in spring. Growth, and change and fear-they all hold hands while singing Bird on a Wire.

*****************

Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
it’s just that I thought a lover had to be some kind of liar too.

Like a baby, stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry no more. It’s over now, it’s over babe, don’t cry no more. I say don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry anymore. It’s over. It’s finished. It’s completed. It has been paid for.

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

Ever have one of those weeks where the sky is falling, you’re a horrid nasty person and you just want to move to Australia?

Sweet fuck I’m having one of those weeks.

The problem with me is, specifically,  is that when PMS comes, in it’s glory, sometimes I turn into a person not so much myself. It might be for a few hours one month, a day another, or like this past week, nearly an entire week.

I can feel the difference. I go from rational, relatively normal to the person that was. The bipolar freak full of rage and sadness who is filled with more loneliness than makes sense. A person who can push away every single person in her life without even really trying.

I hate this. I hate this reminder of who I’ve been. I hate it’s intrusion into my home, the havoc it creates, the fear it instills in me as I worry that one day, my pushing will work too well and I’ll find myself alone. I hate waking and wondering what I’ve done, and how to fix it.

I’m awfully tired of having to apologize.

I don’t know how to stop it. Any pdoc I’ve talked to shrugs, tells me they’ve never seen any research on PMS/Menstrual Cycles and Bipolar Women. Tells me they don’t want me on SSRI’s just for a few days a month-and I agree. But they have nothing to offer.

I change to someone else on these days. Another woman, a monster. Ask the people who live around me, who are burnt to crisps by living with a cypher. Ask them how tired they are-it’s worse for them because they can’t separate the people, the me from the total shift in my brain. I try and control it, and if it’s only a day, I can, but for days on end, I can’t escape the whispering in my head, the slightly shadowed view of the world that infects me.

I’ve started living without all this-without the fear, without unhappiness, almost normal. And one week-one week returns me to who I’ve been and I’m helpless and filled with worry. Worry that I’m still destroying a life, one full of people who just can’t take it anymore.

Considering my obsession with age lately, I’ve decided to give myself a bit of a writing project for the winter-I have no real endgame with this, aside from perhaps, for once, completing something.

I’m looking to basically wrap the narrative of events of my life around some very cardinal themes-with those being specific to age-growth, death, change, love. I’m looking to survey a number of people, and for those answers to become part of the current narrative, part of the answer to the question of what does age, what do change, what does growing up gift us, or take from us?

I have a list of less than 20 questions that I’m looking for a medium sized varied group to answer. Now, I am looking for largish answers-not just yes or no’s, but answers, from experience.

I’m looking to start sending these out this weekend, so if you’re interested, please, comment or email me at thordora AT gmail.com

And thanks. Like I said, I have no idea where this idea might go, but I’d like to chase it down the rabbit hole.

I was raised to nibble on the old chestnut that youth was the most perfect, achingly lovely thing around. When I was a kid, it was perfectly normal to hear some Rothman’s chain smoking old man mutter about the best years of my life as he slowly leaned back in his old recliner, hands rustling the paper while the cigarette dangled like a dare from his mouth. From a kitchen a woman always seemed to agree he’s right you know. Enjoy it while you got it. It’s all down hill from there! and she’d continue on frying pork chops in lard or taking all the nutritional value out of carrots and peas, her own cigarette bouncing on her lips.

We’ve all been to that house, watched TV there. Hell, for some of us, it might have been home.

As a small child we were dazzled with the idea of “growing up“-growing up was magic. When you grew up, you could stay up all night if you wanted, watching the scrambed channels, or maybe Bleu Nuit. Grown up, you could spend your money on anything, run through the streets, wear “those” jeans, a pair of which each of us had. Our older siblings were gods, blessed it seemed with power and knowledge and a casual will they rarely hesitated to use.

We crept towards puberty, then like a Mac truck we hit it, full stop, and in an instance, in a howling second of hormones, felt the innocence leak out from us. How did we not see? Our brothers weren’t smarter! Our mother’s couldn’t MAKE us not go to Joan’s house. We had power, even if we rarely weilded it in the interests of seeing tomorrow. We were growing up, and getting that adult look. A few years in, looking back at 5 or 6 was full of nostalgia, of that damn it, I wish I knew then feeling, and a soft longing for the sandbox.

But wait!, they’d yell, this is THE best time of your life, high school. Treasure it-life will never be this good again.

A teacher told me this once, and I stared at him, puzzled, and asking how anything at 17 could be the best of an entire life. He smiled a wry grin and told me I’d see, someday.

(I’m still waiting. Mr. McNeil, I’d really like that answer now if you don’t mind.)

You crawl, gasping from high school, into the maw of university, college, work, and suddenly, you aren’t a kid. You aren’t young. You’re just another adult clinging vaguely to a dream they made you write down at 15, and wondering how exactly you could get out of this mess.

Adulthood. Past the best time of your life, and now in possession of a recliner suspiciously like the one your best friend’s dad had once.

*********************

I don’t buy it. I never have.

Think about it. Most of us are living in North America, or some other fairly developed country. For the most part, we’re lower-middle class-we eat well, roof over our heads. We’ll live to be 78 or some random age. We’ll have full lives.

So why should it only be good until 18 or 19? Why the shelf life on joy? Why delude generations into thinking that old age, aging itself, is something worth fearing, and actively loathing?

Wasn’t the moment you laid your eyes on your children one of the best things? Building your own house? Writing that novel?

Planting the ultimate garden? Dreaming the perfect dream, spun on air at 48 or 66?

Our dreams don’t end when we haul up the big girl panties and get our own apartments. Our lust for life and newness doesn’t just drain out with lochia or muscle tone.

Our vibrancy does not have a shelf life. It does not become irrelevant with age.

I’d argue, instead, that it matters so much more as we grow older, as we absorb the world around us in so many new ways, as we make connections between how our mother held our hands at 6 and how she cradles our children now.

There are moments in life that are incredible, and some of those, for me, happened at 17 or 19, I can’t lie. But some happened later on as well, at 25, or at 31. The best time in a life is now, the present-the constant wave that makes youth, the time behind us that creates the very ground we walk on, somewhat useless and weakened. We use our past to feed the future, it’s thought and knowledge molding who we become.

We are so very much more than the very hormone drenched years we’d mostly like to forget.

******************

I find myself, these past weeks, finding a new comfort level with age, a respect, a guarded honor. It is necessary and good. I do not have to change who I am to age-I can still listen to black metal and cyndi lauper in one day. I can still have tattoos-I can age as I wish, instead of according to a created timeline that was pulled from air one day in about 1967. My aging is what’s relevant-not the aging of others, be it slow, or quick.

My relevancy is only for me, and my road to the best life ever.

I just wish it hadn’t taken me this long to see it.

I wish to climb inside of you

sweet, to be cradled my small body

warmed by yours, heated.

I’d shape my body as a walnut

round edges and soft youth

shrunk to where you can hold me

this body will raise unfettered

glorious as part of you

flesh blood and years.

Gift me this time. Gift me

your moments, hands held in quiet snowbanks

kisses on eyelids and fingertips

the squaling of your newborn hold me here

in your hot belly, tell me stories.

Give them wings, glued satin to their backs

your lovers, give them seasoned breath which

reeks of yesterday and gift them forgiveness for

breaking the heart that I wish to listen to

forever.

Bring me to you. Wrap me in

denim and petals from the wild tree you planted

that spring

scent me with memory and years uncounted,

carry me

let my small fingers pull from your lips

the aching wisdom I desire.

The sunrise makes me think it.

The pocket of time, like air, entitled in our hands. The golden reach of the morning, shuddering into pinks and purples, gently stretching across the horizon, languid. In moments, small steps, the light reaches for me, cups my chin, laughs her soft laugh and presents her glory to me, my eyes alight with fire and the new day, her wings wet and fragile.

I was as this once, dew in my pocket, my mother’s hips at the east of me, my hands in her blue skirts, clutching. Eyes wide, skin so soft it would make you fear for tomorrow. That light, those morning limbs, they would reach right into that small kitchen with the brown square carpet, lift me up, baptise me in the morning air. I would return blessed, redeemed with the surety of my being, the constancy of love which surrounded me, awed by the magic of it all.

I would grow, sure. We all do, from suckling beast to unsteady youth to breathless adulthood. But my eyes know the fire. They make communion with the light that pours from the frosted morning sky, ask it’s benediction as it’s beloved. My body feels it’s vacancy well before the sky opens, the melancholy breaths that trace fingers and lips. The dream forlorn.

The dream fragile. The dream held over, infused with longing. The dream which cradles us through the womb, and through that bright light, leaving us  only the faintest taste of what it was.

That which we chase, ready to collapse our skin to touch. Our code, our keys, trapped inside our heads, bronzed by morning light.

The dream where anything is possible. This fire makes me think it.

girlchild

honeychild.

like molasses you are over me

clinging, sticky in your demands

tiny pursed mouth opened to a

black hole of you, of

squirming pouting need.

The

needs of being 2 on this planet.

Soon, sooner than I think

sooner than warned

you will shun my aching arms, you who

finds me, prone

1 am, blurry eyed dragging teddy wordlessly

your airsoft skin gentle on mine, perfect

scented head on my pillow. The candy of an age.

My girlchild to

womanchild to woman, no child.

yet I will always have this child.

I cast my eyes into your future. I cast

lines north to south for

warm mornings, cereal that stays in bowls

wet kisses, tears. They find themselves

tethered, unseen.

I shall hand you reeds to breathe above this. I shall

grasp your hand tighter down stairs. I shall

paint stories with the greenery that frames your

tiny impish glow.

Honeychild, let the bees come. Your sweetness

flows freely as it should.

(originally written in 2007-wanted to post tonight, but lazy, thought I’d rework this a bit.)

It’s early, it’s dark it’s raining and I’m just too tired to crack open a book, opting instead to look at the window and strain to listen to any conversation on the bus. Not that there’s much-it’s 7am and people can barely muster the will to move towards a seat, let alone cobble together a coherent sentence. I should know. I fell over twice just getting out of bed.

There’s always this one woman who rides the bus-put together in the 1987 way of thinking-shoulder pads, oddly heeled boots, and a full crust of pancake makeup that I can see the cracks in 10 seats away. Her lipstick just can’t keep up, and she’s rather sponge like as the foundation heaves and falls as she speaks, like a busy road during the winter freeze and thaw cycles. I find myself frequently starring at her in awe, especially her over coiffed hair which totters like a scared child on her head. There’s womanhood, and then there’s Bundyhood. She strains the bonds of each.

But what catches me today, as I’m sniffing from the cold and wiping away the early morning leaky eye, is her conversation. Namely, one sentence.

“Oh, boys are just DIFFERENT. Girls like all the same things are easy to figure out. Boys? Well…”

I was struck then, with how bloody offensive that sentence is to, well, just about everyone.

Sure I don’t have boys. I have two girls. But are any two children ever the same? Are girls the same? One daughter of mine loves dinosaurs, insects, Bakugan, Ben 10…things mostly considered “boy”toys if you have the misfortune of buying a happy meal. Rosalyn, the youngest-very pink, loves Barbie, Care Bears, My Little Pony, princesses, playing with dollhouses. Traditional “girl” toys.

They ARE different. As your daughter or son is from you, from me. My children have complete opposite in temperment, and again, Vivian is more masculine, Rosalyn feminine, at least in how the world defines it. I make a point of not doing so. Toys at McDonalds are not “girl”or boy”-it’s the car toy or the kitty toy. We don’t refer to what Vivian likes as boy toys-it makes no sense, since she’s not a boy and she loves them. Vivian is very much mad then over it, as I’ve heard others attribute to their boys in the past, Rosalyn, well, she’ll be the kid in grade school that remembers exactly when you tripped her in the hall in Grade 6 when she’s 25. Rosalyn gets so vividly angry or happy…

The point is-there is no singular, defining moment for gender. We can’t point and say “yup. That’s a girl”. I have two who are so vastly different some days that I wonder where they came from and how they can be so much themselves. But that’s just it-they are themselves. I was told constantly to be more “ladylike” to stop acting like a boy, and in one inspired moment, to keep my shirt on, girls don’t run around without one. Girls wear skirts. Girls don’t wear black.

I’m who I am-not because I wore skirts, and not because my mother had a rigid view of gender. I am, inherently, who I am. Sometimes I’m difficult. Sometimes, I’m not. Just like my daughters.

This constant way we, as a society have of minimizing, making everything common and grouped, like a herd of antelope startled-it bothers me.  A child is never him or herself. He’s such a BOY. She’s so girly. She’s just like her mother. He’s acting just like his father did at that age.

Regardless of any of it being true. We must fold our children into small shapes, until they fit. We must never allow them the freedom of themselves.

***************

It was early, but I felt sad. I felt sad for this little boy, judged before action, framed in the perception of a stranger’s eye, now marked, ever so slightly, in the eye of his mother.

If we aren’t accepted, even there, what then?

We go to a show to see these guys, an all ages show, a rarity around here, most places really. It’s good-when you’re a kid and you live anywhere that’s not Toronto or Montreal or such, see a band while underage-nearly impossible, like gaining the grail from some wizened old man who didn’t want to let it go.

But lord, it makes a girl feel old.

It’s not just the age. It’s the thought that takes hold, the one that makes me shake my head when I see a girl who I could have been, one with that same loose coordination of I don’t give a fuck and please, love me?, the one with the weird pants and the glorious hair. It’s that thought that rolls it’s eyes and mutters what we all mutter lately-has it really been that long?

And my favorite-if I had fucked up at 15, I could been the mother of one of these kids. Truly.

Youth. It’s shiny and brilliant and awkward. And utterly fucking awesome.

***************

As bodies bounced and flew, through their set (which I loved and thankfully we bought the record!) and continued into theirs (which wasn’t terrible but it’s been done…), as the colors circles, emeshed with hair, with laughter and grunts, feet kicking and hands flailing, I couldn’t help but smile.

There’s an age, and we’ve all been there and held it softly in our hands. For all the fear, all the heartache and worry, at 15 at 17,  there is a fire inside that cannot quench itself-and it burns electric. Over hair that flailed and waved, hands that threw the horns, laughs and gasps and “fuck ya’s!” floated a whisper, a simmering veil of possibility.

Of course it floated out of my grasp. And when you’re 16 and the world consists of your mother telling you the car needs to be filled up and you better get to sleep, it’s hard to see past yourself enough to see, just over there-the future.

The power we held then! The power these kids had-all at once I say, overlaid like gilt, their futures. The children they would hold, the book, the song, the formula they would write, the lives they would save. I looked into that potential saw future, now. Saw in a startling moment that these are not children, never just children-they are people, alive and vibrant with the truth and beauty only that age can bring.

The bands switched, and the coalesced group they had become splintered, into corners, and I saw as well that which we refuse to admit.

That we’re the future too.

Maybe we don’t burn with the same vivid colors we did at their age. Maybe we don’t shine as brightly as 18 does. But we aren’t the past. We aren’t stagnant, unless we choose so. We have that same potential that the girl who reminded me so much of 17 year old me does, grasping on to her boyfriend in that thirsty way you have of loving then. We can meet on a plane, on the continuum of change and want.

The only difference is that now, I’m a lot more afraid to try.

I looked at that crowd, and saw fearlessness. Swagger. Fear, loathing, love, the emotions you remember feeling like a flame in your belly the last time you had to ask permission to stay out all night. But I saw hope, and power. I saw a want for difference, a lust for creation, the potential for anything.

The power to make, the power to be, the power to become. And it lit up the room.

***********************

It’s hard to feel old when you see yourself, ghost like, running in front of you, ignorant to everything that isn’t what you want. It’s hard to feel old when the people in front of you give you so much hope for yourself.

I read my email, my breath stricken, sliding down my chest, a friend, writing in response to my everything ok? her response most definitely not ok, not to me, not really.

I’ll leave her to out herself if she wishes, but she’s wonderfully aware of the magic our world provides and harbours a distinct talent for molding words into her wishes. She writes as I wish I could have already, years ago.

My mother, she admits, diagnosed bipolar, meds again.

My heart, could it freeze and shatter, would be shards in my chest.

I think of me, crawling on a floor, blindly crying filled with black rage and pain.

I think of my rejection of my children, my inability to think of them as people I need to protect.

I think of the paranoia which poured from my eyes, my arms, my mouth. How daggered and poisoned it was.

I imagine my daughters dealing with it, newly born, as teenagers, as children old enough to understand just enough what’s really going on. I imagine them handing me my meds or calling the doctor if I’m manic.

I imagine dealing with this while fragile and fifteen.

I can’t.