More Wild

Taking care of myself becomes something elusive sometimes, I can feel that I need to be taken care of, I deeply feel that ragged sense that I am not at ease, not whole, not holy any more, and this seems to turn in on itself, to feed on itself as I grapple to get back to just a sense of everyday OK-ness. I tell myself of course you feel out of sorts, you have spent weeks of having your daughter move, then your mother move, and in the course of moving my mom, sorting through memories that I’d forgotten for good reason. And now, now I am behind in my own housekeeping, bill paying and general life upkeep. I am behind and I am left with this residual feeling of growing up in a home that was chaotic and thrived on fear and mistrust. I have worked really really hard to create a home that is filled with love and trust, and yet I still haven’t gotten the chaotic part totally in check. And I hate it. And it shows me exactly that my life is too busy and where I need to change. 

And so, to take care of myself in the midst of this chaos, I bought myself a book that I’ve been wanting to read, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Once I got past wondering if it would be as good as all the hype (it is), and being jealous that she is published and awesome (she is), I let myself sink into her story, her adventure, her own hero’s quest, and it dawned on me, how un-wild I have become. How fear has crept into corners of my life where I’d never want to admit it to anyone. How when I decided to make myself take a walk yesterday morning, I told Megan this story that I’d kept to myself for a really long time, before I left. Well, Megan, there is a part of me that is afraid to walk around the lakes, it sounds silly, I know. The lake I walk is always full of people, it is daylight, it is Minneapolis, for Pete’s sake. But a long time ago, when I was 12 or 13, and I walked around a city lake in the evening, I was in a bad mood, a defiant mood, mad at my family. And so when a man in a car called out, hey, do you want to go for a ride, instead of walking quickly away, I approached this man in a car. 

And when he said, get in. I did. Once in, I knew I’d made a mistake. He was not young and cute, but older and disheveled looking. We chatted, he drove down Hennepin Avenue and by the corner of Hennepin and Lake he had his hand tangled in my long brown hair in a way that made me feel sick. He turned down a side street lined in mansions and parked by Lake of the Isles. It was starting to be sundown, and I was starting to be afraid, and I was definitely afraid when he locked the car doors and grinned at me. I told him I needed to get home, and he wouldn’t listen. He started to undo his belt and I was trapped. As he talked about how he’d love to have a girlfriend like me, I went along with it. I told him I’d like to be his girlfriend, but we’d have to date for a while before anything happened. He told me he wanted to take me on a picnic and I agreed. I agreed to be his girlfriend, but he’d have to be nice to me, and he had to take me home, now. He softened, and agreed. 

I stupidly let him drop me off near my home. He knew my neighborhood, and I said I’d meet him at the lake the next day. When I never did, he started stalking me in the neighborhood, yelling things at me from his car. This went on for months. Of course I never told my parents, as they would (as they always did) have blamed me. And I blamed myself. And so, I told Megan this story, feeling a little like maybe she would think less of me. I have a few of these horrible men stories, tucked away, untold, unwritten, because as a young girl growing up, there were only two kinds of girls, good girls and bad girls, any evil men perpetrated on girls would then become internalized in the girl, the man remaining, well, only a man. If folks knew about the evil you were a bad girl, if you could hide it, pretend, store it away, you could fool folks into believing you were still good. I always wanted to be good, to be careful, not to be wild. 

After I told Megan this story I headed out to walk around the lake on a beautiful, sunny, Saturday morning. The walking path was crazy full of people. I walked a long time behind a couple of women talking loudly,  and so, I decided to walk away from the path, to walk on the sand, on the water’s edge. At first I thought, I will get my shoes wet and sandy, and then I realized that I’d become too careful, too worried, too unwild with myself. I thought of Cheryl Strayed, walking the Pacific Crest Trail, and I pushed myself to be more wild, and realized that what I thought was taking care of myself, was really, too often, living in fear. Fear still, of what people would think if they knew, fear still of someone lurking, fear still of not having the information I’ll need to keep myself safe. Fear that I’ll never figure out how to take really good care of myself and others, to be safe. Fear that the stories I tell should not be told. So, I just kept walking on the water’s edge, not caring if my shoes got wet and sandy. Instead of chatter and cell phones and the sound of shoes on paved path, I heard the water hitting the sand, I heard the wind in the trees, I felt the ground underneath me both soft and solid, unmovable and moving. I whispered to myself, become a little more wild, wild is not the undoing of us, it is us. 

Only Love Lasts

little plastic pink colored babies, one with wings
mom what are these?
oh those are pro-life things
hmm, really, little one inch plastic babies
thrown in a drawer with old receipts, recipes, faded photos
can i thrown them away?
ok

after years of being clutter in a drawer 
we can finally throw them away
as my mom is down-sizing
really down sizing this time
to move from a large condo
to a small apartment
in a senior building

the things we save 
we think we’ll need
the power invested in palm fronds
that cannot be thrown away
because they are holy
and plastic babies saved
because they are not

an old photo of cub scouts in blackface
which turns into an ugly family fight
over whether or not minstrel shows are racist
about white privilege that my brothers have always had
passed on to them by my parents and my culture
when we are all old and should know better
as we struggle with the changes that life brings upon us
i know now that this privilege brings with it a price 

i never wanted to inherit this mess of stuff
along with the inability to throw things away
a horrible curse a spell that only my daughters have 
been able to break for me
to step into the living 
to care about the experience
to feel my feelings
to throw or give it away
throw it or give it away
only the love lasts

long time passing

Usually when I write it feels like a good thing, like if I’m not even really sure what I’m talking about at least I’m admitting that hey, I’m not sure here, but I’m writing it out. The past couple of months I’ve felt too unsure to write much, too unsure to open the pages and to put anything down, and this has somehow not made things better. I wouldn’t call it a writer’s block, I’ve never liked that term, because it makes it seem that all there is to writing is, well, the writing and it’s more than that. But what I have come across lately, that makes some sort of sense of all this, is that researchers studying creativity have found that people need to feel safe to be creative. 

Much of this research is being applied to the workplace, this of course, being the dominant place for most people’s lives (sarcasm). I shouldn’t go off on a tangent here about home not being a safe place for way too many people, women, especially, because, my brain is too tired for tangents lately, and this, this is partly why I’ve been not writing. I’ve been too tired from trying to shake off my past, trying to dart in and out of my family of origin, like time travel, like portals, like something sci-fi where your whole head is just not wrapping around the information that is coming in.  

This past week we moved my mom from her three bedroom condo in Edina into a one bedroom senior apartment in Northern, Minnesota. To a town just at the Canadian border, this I know, I drove the one hour into Winnipeg years ago with my two youngest. My oldest sister and her husband live there, and they are happy to be able to spend more time with my mom. This is actually a wonderful thing, a good thing for my mom, as her days in her condo this past year were getting increasingly difficult. It just has been a lot of me interacting with family members I don’t see very much, and realizing that family often just doesn’t not only not feel like family, they often feel like enemies. They feel like the ones you have to suit up for to protect yourself, and even feeling like this feels really awful, but then you have to admit it to  yourself, admit it and know it is true. 

It is also that I have been very close to my mom, for my whole life. For my whole life we have never lived more than an hour’s drive away from each other. For my whole life, I have somehow been the one my mom felt she could rely on. Being a daughter has been a large part of my life. Now I know this part of my life is not over, but it is changed dramatically. Between the managing this change, and going through the things my mother didn’t take with her, I find myself inserted into my past, like I have abruptly fallen through a portal to the past, remembering things and feelings that I’d just as soon forgotten. 

Suddenly remembering how unsafe I felt most of my growing up years, and then realizing how it’s taken me a long, long time to feel safe more often than unsafe. And so as I shake this feeling of sadness, grief and not-safe, I realize that to write out our feelings, to write out our pain, requires a modicum of safety. If I can step back into that safety, I can make sense, I can create, and in this circle of safety create my way either to, or back to a life that makes sense. I am retrieving that child that I was, carrying her out of the debris that was my life, and I don’t have time for the making sense of it yet. 

Chasing

Summer has run off from me, like some wild and unruly child, and all I can do is stand by the back door, staring off at them as they are too far down the block to chase after. I am tired, the summer was too full, my phone rang too many times. I drove too many miles back and forth across the city. Picking people off, dropping them off, going to St. Paul for Izzy's ice cream, barely able to savor it, before it melted. Then getting on the freeway again, time like dew, evaporating.