ODE TO A LITERARY MOTHER

It has been only slightly more than a day that I have spent in the company of my mother and father, yet in being more fully washed in the status of 'daughter' (while at the same time helping to launch my youngest child as she moves into her first apartment to commence the first chapter of her adult/student life), I am taken back to the days when I was a young mother of small children.  

To say I was frustrated because the demands of mothering prevented my being able to write would be an understatement.  While I regret none of the sacrifices, I did at the time pen my angst in this poem as well as in the accompanying illustration.  I recall it wound up being widely distributed from mother to mother/friend to friend at the time.

But it is good now to be here in the company of those who knew me and loved me before I knew or loved myself and even more wonderful to know my daughter will be watched over by those same true hearts.  And while I cannot commit to writing a full post during this time, I can share a bit of what was once my reality.  I don't doubt there are young mothers today pacing in those same shoes of sacrifice for their families.  Perhaps they can relate and can take heart not to give up the dream even as they feel compelled to set it gently aside for a time.

The dilemma with my writing poetry these days

-apart from sporadic writing malaise

and trying to make sense of a life that does not;

translating a heart which I’ve long since forgot-

Is being prolific while wiping a nose

or changing a diaper....you know how it goes:

invaded by Gerbers and juvenile faces

my renegade soul mocks its domestic paces

foregoing the remnants of artistic ambit

 to service a far more conventional gambit

And while I resemble whom I was before, 

I reek now of pablum and wax from the floor

I’m still awake nightly, though not writing prose

but placating infants refusing to doze.

How does one remain a staid woman of letters

when one is surrounded by chronic bed-wetter’s?

So lost in dispassionate, suburban gloom

my most literate challenge is now GOODNIGHT MOON

While there ARE mightier tasks than with pen or with sapier

I’m still Auden at heart, but I’m Big Bird on paper.

ADIOS O.S.!

What?
Everybody else is doing it!

Besides, it is not entirely untrue.  Tomorrow morning I am driving my 19 year old daughter to Scottsdale, Arizona from Kansas City, Missouri in her tight little black Nissan.  She is going there to attend Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute having decided against Nuclear Physics as a career and opting for that of Pastry Chef instead.  For the next fifteen months she will be sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other female students.   I am slightly concerned for their mental well-being.

Am I a bad mother because I am looking forward to an empty nest?

We've already shipped five boxes ahead to my brother and sister-in-law's home in Scottsdale, but I am quite certain that she plans on transferring the remaining contents of her room into her compact car insisting that the trunk is MUCH bigger than it looks.

I already have that familiar gastric knot in my gut in anticipation of the histrionics that will ensue once she realizes that lampshades are not collapsible and it probably isn't a great idea to strap an oversized, stuffed platypus to the roof no matter how many childhood memories it holds.

Once we arrive, it will be fine.  It is the three-day road trip that has me worried.

Out of my three kids, this one is my toughest critic.  She is bright, beautiful, energetic and independent.  She also contains enough moxie to easily run a small country and has the genetic disposition of her father in that she does not suffer fools lightly.

According to her subjective inventory, I hover in ranking somewhere between one and three.  I don't know exactly who occupies the number one and three slots, but my guess is that number one is most people in the world and three, everybody else.

But I have to give her credit.  The girl knows what she wants, who she likes and almost always has a well-thought out plan as to how she will get wherever it is she wants to go.

Up to this point, that usually involved heavy emotional and financial investments from her father and I, but we take it in stride as part of our job description.

In any case, I've noticed that it is deemed routine to alert those among the OS Crowd who care of any departure that might be regarded as permanent or otherwise lengthy, and since I have no backbone, I'm just following suit.

I am assuming that two weeks is considered lengthy.

If I am wrong and won't be missed for such a brief period of time, can we please pretend I never wrote this?  I've got enough self-esteem issues as it is without adding conjectural hubris to the mix.

Hopefully, I will still find it possible to check in every now and again while I'm away. I will be staying with my parents, whom I don't often see since moving to Kansas City five years ago, and want to spend quality time with them; time when I am not otherwise obsessing about what to write for OS and fretting about whether or not I've read and commented on as many of my favorites as possible.

I don't know that I can go cold turkey, so my laptop is coming with me and I've scanned a bunch of old drawings that I can throw up on my page from time to time just so I won't be forgotten.  I don't want to have to start over here, and I don't want to miss out on any news from my OS friends and the stellar writing I've come to count on to color my days.

For the next three days, however, I will be on the road.  I am trying to conceive of it as being a non-violent, non-sexist exploration and bonding opportunity aka Thelma and Louise, which we rented and viewed together the other night.  (No way would I ever let this kid anywhere near a firearm.)  If Mussolini and Eva Peron had a love child, I'm quite certain my daughter would still scare the hell out of her.

So, off we go!  And if I fail to resurface on OS after couple of weeks, please send a search party to the desert Southwest, as it is a certainty I'll be tied to a cactus somewhere, likely also bound to an over-sized, stuffed platypus.

RE-RUNS

Tried and True

Amazing Grace

Opening portals

Just to taste

Forbidden fruit

Behind closed doors

What's done is done

For rich or for poorer

Life is for living

Tomorrow can wait

A watched pot won't boil

The hour is late

With heart in my hand

I'll keep truckin' on

To reach for the stars

To sing a new song

The bigger the better

The harder they fall

I can't live without you

Just give me a call

Tomorrow's a new day

But heaven can't wait

Just call if you need me

I'll be home by eight

The clock on the wall

A bird in the hand

A babe in the woods

A small grain of sand

If ever you need me

I'll be by your side

And into the sunset

Together we'll ride.

a poem for K.

The Writes of Passage

There is too much to question in this world to ever arrive at a perfect understanding of why we are here, and if we spend all of our time in myopic traction doting on those larger questions, we are bound to miss the point.

Answers to big questions are almost always found in small and benevolent movements.

They seldom come in thunderbolt revelations and almost never gift flawless enlightenment.

They may inspire but rarely are they able to sustain an unabated and life-long transformation.

Answers to our questions are going to be flawed by our interpretation because we are flawed in our constitution.

When I posed the question, "Why Blog?" the comments from everyone were just as subjective and individualized as each person is themselves.

Obviously, we blog because we like to write.  Some aspire towards publication.  Many have already achieved that honor, but we write here because of a desire to measure our worth against the crowd and gauge the impact of our efforts by their response.

We blog because we don't want to be alone, which is something that can happen whether you are surrounded by a bustling family, living in a frenetic city or town, or working in a vibrant office.

We blog because we have things we want to say and wonder if others might share in our perceptions.

We blog because we want to belong.

Soon, if we are paying attention at all, we realize that this is not a vapid exercise.

Is it narcissistic?  Of course.  But so is our daily preening.  We put on makeup, shave our beards, iron our shirts, wear hats, pretty dresses, variegated ties, and classy shoes.

When we look to another and smile, we hope to receive one in return.

Saints and sinners alike have the sublimely self-indulgent characteristic of caring about themselves as well as about how they are regarded by others.  It is called being human, and it is a noble calling.

There is an ineffable fabric of both kindred and disparate hearts that becomes embellished with deeper colors and unpredictably salient hues every time we step out from behind our cluttered lives and the deep tread of our personal inhibitions and apprehensions to write and to share our thoughts with people whose names and faces we may never know but whose hearts are often as present to us as our own.

It is a pure connection, this blind alliance.   We are not distracted or disturbed by appearances, by political or sexual orientation, by race, creed or color; by economic or cultural classifications or by ability.

Yet we despair when we read that someone's dog has been hit by a car or another is longing for a peace she cannot find in an abusive home.

We cheer when strides are made in the life of a writer  whom we know is struggling with depression and laugh in conspiring delight when one calls us all out into the unflinching light of clean parody.

It is not by accident that we are here or that we glance off one another's posts like stars caught in the pool of gravity.  Nothing is random in the universe and certainly not in this microcosmic literary reflection.

We may have originally come here in an effort to understand ourselves and to find our own voices, but we soon learn that the only way we can truly accomplish that is by finding each other and listening to those voices.

And while ratings and popularity and Editorial Picks provide the occasional high-five towards our human endeavors, the nod most worthy is the one we get from those lives we have touched; the ones we have reached out to and supported; the ones we have rallied around; the ones we have commiserated or laughed with;  the ones we have said goodbye to or welcomed back.

It doesn't matter whether two people read our post or two thousand.  If we trust that whomever is brought to us is exactly the person or people we are supposed to touch that day, then we are already ahead of the philosophical curve.
 
We are employed by a firm quite apart from this terrestrial warehouse whose purpose I doubt we will ever fully comprehend while tethered to this mortal outpost.

If we can sustain that kind of faith as we write your soul to a better place, then we know why we are here.

In our thoughts, we are always alone.  In our hearts, we never are. 


So, in the end, we blog because we can.  But we stay because we care.