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The World on my Back.

May 22, 2008 Personal

When I was younger I thought I felt the world.

I don’t mean so much the earth beneath my feet or the wind on my face or the sun in the sky; but I felt emotions, I held great empathy with people. I loved deeply, was moved easily, and was hurt just as deeply.

Remembering childhood moods or even teenage outlooks now, looking back from here? It seems almost like we were insane doesn’t it? How easily we could just fly with the smallest compliment then turn around and crash so very hard at the smallest negative quip. Our egos and emotions were fragile beginning little-things in our chests as children and teenagers; we hadn’t learned how to grow a shell around our hearts.

I’m nearing thirty and the closer I creep toward the supposed big three-oh the more I have been reflecting on how I was, how I wanted to be, and how I turned out.

There’s such an amazing divide between all of it and I am a little amazed at how entirely different I turned out to be, how different I am.

I’ve built my shell firmly around my heart and emotions. Instead of harboring heart break for longer periods of time, harsh words spark small little fires of anger and then in just a few days, fade. Instead of keeping things which make me maudlin or angry close to me, I have learned to push them away and keep them on the outside of my shell. I am still terribly empathetic; I cry during the sad parts in movies, I cry when other people are moved to tears and I cry when being moved with the plight of others.

But now, I don’t feel other things so deeply. I wonder really, if during the creation of this shell that I’ve mistakenly filtered out some of the things I should have let through.

I remember laughing louder, longer and stronger when I was younger. I remember laughing until my stomach hurt, tears came then hiccups following. I remember loving with everything I had in my heart, being in love with the stars as well as the moon, spending nights below a black sky that never ended just to listen to the music of crickets and watch the sparkle of stars.

A friend of mine, youthculture, calls it magic. And not the wriggling fingers sort of magic, but the everyday magic we had when we were children, when everything was endlessly fascinating and the world pretty much laid at our feet.

I wonder then, if, over the years of building my shell to protect my heart from crueler words that I’ve mistakenly blocked away this simple magic.

The question I have for you is: would you tear away your shell if you have one? Or would you tear it down only to rebuild it in a manner to let the right things through?

Thanks, Mom, for leaving me in that grocery aisle.

May 7, 2008 Personal

I couldn’t think of a tribute that would fully encompass all of how I feel about my mother. I wasn’t able to write something moving about the bond between daughter and parent, every time I started something this week I deleted it.

So instead, I give to you a list of Thank-you’s to a woman far braver than I.

Thank you for leaving me to scream, cry, and flail alone in the grocery store aisle. As I reached out with chubby little hands and demanded you buy me a bag of chips—you put your foot down and said no. The louder I became, the more adamant about your decision you were. As my face turned purple and I started screaming my lungs out after hitting the floor wailing and carrying on—you didn’t give in. You simply told me quietly that when I am done and was ready to act like a decent human being you’d be in the car. You took your grocery cart amidst the gaping onlookers of the store and left me there in the aisle to continue on with my idiocy until my teeny tiny child brain could catch onto things.

You could have caved and bought me those chips just to shut me up, to stop me from making a scene. You didn’t. Thank you for teaching me that acting like Paris Hilton gets you nothing in life. I have not forgotten your lesson.

Thank you for spending the first three years after I was born in a near perpetual sleepless state, washing baby clothes, cleaning up spit-out peas, trying to figure out why I cried for hours on end for no reason and not going insane from it. Thank you for not giving up in those long nights when I wouldn’t be comforted as a baby. I didn’t know it then, but this was part of a lesson in unbending patience and love.

Thank you for not strangling me when I came up with the stupidest ideas on the face of the earth. Like that one time I decided to pull up our neighbors tulips simply because one of the older boys told me it would be an awesome idea. You made me march right over to that lady’s house with my most precious doll in hand and made sure that I handed it over in compensation to her flowers. At the time, I thought that you were tearing my heart out with toothpicks and splattering it on the wall, because that cabbage patch kid doll was the most important thing in my whole world EVAR—but I realized as I grew older that you were trying to teach me that stupid decisions hold consequences. I am trying not to forget this lesson.

Thank you for getting mad at me when I wouldn’t do something I should. Thank you for hounding me about the home work, the science projects, whether or not I was taking notes in class. Thank you for the heart-wrenching disappointment when I failed—reminding me that there was someone behind me in the first place cheering along side me. When I was a teenager I hated this with the passion of a thousand white-hot suns. The constant push to do better, to study, to get good grades; I did not believe I could while you did. I did not think it was worth it while you did your very best to try and tell me it was.

I failed you in this—I didn’t understand you weren’t doing this out of some sick pleasure because OMG LIKE, YOU TOTALLY JUST WANNA LIKE, RUIN MY LIFE!—you were doing it because you loved me and it broke your heart when I did not succeed.

Thank you for telling me outright when my friends sucked. You always knew; either it was mother’s intuition or just plain keen instinct, you always knew when a friend of mine was going to be trouble. You were older, wiser, and you knew what to look for yet every time you told me a friend was no good, I, like the idiot most children are, thought you were some how trying to take away things that made me happy.

This wasn’t true of course, and I was being the usual teenage retard. Inevitably, the friend you’d warn me about would hurt me deeply and leave. I would conveniently forget your advice then and wonder why that person did what they did and how I didn’t see it coming. Thank you for not smacking me upside the head hard enough to leave a dent then, as I would have deserved it. You taught me to listen to people.

Thank you for being my mother. Most of my teen age years were spent lamenting over how awful I thought things were. It is a shame how much time I wasted before my eyes were opened and I realized the best thing I ever had, had always been by my side.

We never truly got along and we don’t always see eye to eye. But I understand now and I will always love you.

Happy Mother’s day.

Sleep: 0, Insomnia: 1

May 1, 2008 Personal

Image via Wikipedia

I have my battles with sleep.

I don’t remember specifically when they started. There’s no pin point of light brightly resting on the year of my life in which sleeping at night time became difficulty.

It just…became.

One year I was a good little girl who could not stay up past ten p.m, and the next year I was an adult watching the time and hours tick by me while it seemed like the world slept.

The biggest, most overwhelming feeling I have late at night when trying to rustle through all of the many different cluttered-thoughts inside my skull is how much of a waste of my life sleep essentially is. How many more photos could I snap at night with the right equipment? How many more awful poems could I write? How many more words? How many more people could we reach out to if we have those eight hours back?

I don’t think I’d want to be a Beggar in Spain, however, never sleeping ever again, never dreaming. I think I’d be alright if two or three hours a night were enough to keep me going.

Eve has a really good post about how to get back into sleeping like a human being, as well as tips for sleep–but occasionally, just nothing works anymore.

Have you found your sleeping patterns futzing up as you’ve grown older? What are some of your personal tried and true remedies for insomnia?

I Never Loved my Grandfather.

Apr 11, 2008 Personal

Image via Wikipedia

I never loved my Grandfather in the way I think most grandfathers secretly want their little granddaughters to.

As a small child my earliest memories of him were of a blue-eyed man who laughed under his breath and teased me a lot. I think he loved to hear me yell at him for pulling my hair, or calling me Calista (the way he said it rhymed with Melissa). The louder I yelled, the more the corners of his eyes would crinkle up in the ever growing tight-lipped grin that pruned his face.

My memories of his scent is always mixed; not quite right. There was aftershave, soap, that undeniable old person smell that I cannot describe very well—it wasn’t too unpleasant, more like dust warmed by sunshine with the faintest trace of something else my young mind could not comprehend. I didn’t know what that scent hiding behind his grandfather-smell was. It was something he carried with him for as long as I knew him, but back then I didn’t bother trying to find out what it was.

When I was very young, he’d always get up to leave in the middle of things. He’d say, “I’m going to the barn to make sure there aren’t any bears in there,” and, “I’m going hunting for baby-bunting.” And as a child, I always thought that was exactly what he was doing as he arose and meandered off in uneven patterns outside.

I wasn’t enlightened to the reason behind my grandfather’s wandering ways until I hit the age of thirteen—maybe fourteen. He went out to the barn, or out back in the trees behind the house to hide his drinking from me and the family who already knew what he was doing. I don’t think he truly believed he was hiding it from his wife, my Grandmother nor my mother nor our entire family. In fact, in hind sight, I think our entire town was well aware of what my grandfather was doing and what he was: he was an alcoholic.

No one talked about these things where I grew up, however, in a sleepy little farming town of Aylesford, Nova Scotia. It just wasn’t the thing to do. You never talked about the neighbor who beat his wife, or the neighbors kids that did drugs and you certainly never talked about alcoholism.

I can’t say that in the early years I thought anything was wrong with our family life. All that I knew were the things my parents and my grandparents taught me. My world started and ended with them, so whatever they did and said around me or to me was normal for me. I assumed all grand kids’ had a grandfather that smelled a little funny and couldn’t really walk very straight—or who liked to go out to the barn several times a day.

Things changed as I grew up. I realized obviously, what was wrong. I was presented the grandfather’s of other families and noticed a distinct difference. I was growing out of a care free child into a monster of a teen ager. I began to feel cheated with my grandfather. Why wasn’t mine sober? Why wasn’t mine nice? Why couldn’t my grandfather be perfect and happy and smiling?

I was a silly, over hyper child who must have seemed to turn into an awful, hateful teen right before parents and family. Because I, like every teenager, thought I knew everything and I spent most of the latter years with him spewing vitriolic crap. How much I hated him, how awful a person he was, how ashamed I was of him. We’d spend hours yelling back and forth at one another and he’d yell at my Grandmother. I’d yell at him for yelling at her, she’d yell at me for yelling at him, and he’d yell at us both. And he drank and he drank and he drank.

The cycle just kept going until all the memories of the blue-eyed grinning man whose cheeks crinkled when he smiled, faded. All I remembered was the sour-smelling angry little man that loved to use the word cocksucker to describe what dinner tasted like. I began to hoard all of the awful memories of him and forgot any of the good.

He turned into a pale reed of a man I thought I knew.

And now that time has passed and it is too late, I also remember that in spite of it all, all that was wrong with him and I, he really did try.

He used to sing to me old songs that I sometimes half-hear the melody too if I am very still. When I was very, very, very ill as a young teen with a fever so bad that I had to be soaked in ice water, he sat on a chair near me and the nurse rubbing alcohol over me to bring the fever down to watch me as much as he could during the course of the flu.

One time during a particularly enthusiastic charge from the top of the stairs—I tripped instead and fell down all thirteen of them. These were steep steps from a 100 year old house; wide to a child in addition to being almost too steep for adults. I fell from the very top of those stairs to the very bottom, stomach first, knocking the wind out of my lungs. This short little man with sticks for arms flung himself from a laying position on the couch, came to my side, and picked me up to carry me to the couch and lay me upon it before I could recover enough air to wail in panic.

I remember so many things, now.

I remember that I could not love him the way he wanted me to. I was angry that he did not seem to care what he was doing to himself, to his family, to my mother and especially my grandmother. I was angry at myself for being such a horrific grand daughter. I was angry, angry, and angry and did not want to see anything he did as remotely worth caring about.

When he died, I was quite ready to tell the world I did not care, and I did in an old journal that no longer exists. I said I didn’t care and I was glad that he was gone.

This wasn’t true. This was an echo of the sixteen year old spoiled brat within me still angry at a man who couldn’t win over his addiction.

Several years have passed since my grandfather, Cecil Rawding has passed. I’ve had more time and more life shoveled into me to consider the things I have done and haven’t done and I’ve had time to grow up enough to look back on who I was and feel shame.

I wonder, now, if he ever knew that I could not love him the way he wanted me to, but now that I have grown older I can see him for what he was and should be—that I love him for that.

Did he know how he taught me unwittingly to stay away from drinking as I grew older? Did he know I remember the good through the bad? Did he realize these things before he died? Is he somewhere reading this and the corners of his eyes are crinkling up, slow, the way I picture it in my mind a thousand times?

I’ll never know. I was miles away and before he died the drink didn’t leave much humanity left to him. It’s too late, now, to say these things. All I have is the wind to carry a murmur and a wish.

All I have to give back to him is this digital piece of parchment to tell the world the story about a man who tried.

I love you Grampy, I’m sorry.

The World Reflected

Apr 5, 2008 Personal

My garden is filled with basil once again, the cherry tomatoes are taking over one corner, the oregano has created a thick bed of itself all along it’s single row, like a guardian of dirt and everywhere there are lady bugs. I caught through our bedroom window, a bright orange butterfly flitting off to do whatever butterflies do yesterday morning.

As I watch my garden sometimes, my cat, Flora, enjoys watching the squirrels. She also enjoys watching the finches, blue jays and mourning doves landing on the bird bath and chirupping to them. I don’t think the chirrups are very convincing; none of them have tried hopping into her mouth through the window, but she’s very earnest in her attempts at hypnotizing.

I swear someday I will have a clear few snippets of video showing her churring at the birds.

Tags: Flora

Painted, in honor of NaPoWriMo

Apr 1, 2008 Personal

Pastel touches canvas,
giving light to shaded background.
I’m coloring myself unwanted.

Memory coughs down another lecture of perspective
and I’m ignoring it, blending grays away until
I explode; whispering bright patterns against the dull.

I live my pretend life in pretend beauty,
crying with angels,
dancing with spirits,
kissing pretty boys on their pretty mouths;
happily forever after into a sunset I painted lemonade.

My reds bleed to wistful pink mists,
my forest greens to neon envy.

My mind is the turpentine to all my dreams.

©M. P 2008

Did you know that this month is NaPoWriMo? National Poetry Month is a celebration of all things poetry, from reading it to writing it to learning all about it. Several poets will be taking this month to attempt and write a poem for every day. If you aren’t a poet or a writer of poems, you can still encourage this wonderful artform by doing so many things! Leave a poem in a random place, read a book of them, learn about a form, go listen to some of it being spoken, memorize a favorite!

While I don’t have any ability with poetic form, this month I will be making a conscientious effort in attempting to branch out of my hub of favorite authors. What will you do?