my butt cheeks are cold
Here’s my idea of a perfect way to start the day.
I get up at 5.45, layer up, make coffee, and go walk with my friend at the park around the corner. It is cold and dark but as we round the corner at the end of the track and head into the second half there is a sliver of shiny crescent moon and the sky is blue and streaks of pink cloud reach across. How can you not think this is a good day starting?
We catch up with each other in that quiet way of early mornings when it’s just the two of us. We’re part of a large, vibrant group of girlfriends and we tend to go places en masse and it gets overwhelming rather than nurturing. I don’t know why, as it is colder than a witch’s — in a– well you know. I and my friend are very busy, rarely get time together, and are perfectly human, and heaven knows getting up so early is a misery, but these walks are a highlight of my week. Making time to nurture ourselves, the very first thing in the day? The gorgeous morning? The inherent need for at least some fresh air within each human, that is so badly ignored in our busy society?
I drive home through our sleepy neighborhood, stuck in a very pretty place between fall color and christmas lights that have not yet gone off because it’s still dusky. I still have 45 minutes or so before I have to get the little one up and start our day. I clean up a bit, go upstairs to check email, have some quiet time.
It’s going to be a good one.
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Currently listening : Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga By Spoon Release date: 10 July, 2007  |
today
Today’s myspace post:
just today
Current mood: 
calm
Going today up to way in the country to see the dear friend who kept shaky baby back after maternity leave ended but she was too young to go to Montessori school. She doesn’t drive these days, but even so, it’s a lot to ask her to be the one to always drive down here.
She’s such a neat person. Among many other things, like me, she abruptly left a youth of recreational drug use (although for me it was pretty strictly alcohol and cigarettes only, and she grew up a lot earlier than I did) to become a mother. She is a wonderful caring hippie mommy. She trusts her instincts and is suspicious of The Man. She is much stronger about parenting in a way she believes in… at some cost to herself, I might add. I am far too selfish and unsure of myself to be as strong as she is.
She cloth diapered. For the first few years I knew her every time I came to her house there were stacks and stacks of adorable clean cloth diapers. She cooked healthy home made foods instead of giving her kids processed foods. She breastfed for a long time. She had her second baby at home, pretty much by herself before the midwives showed up. She is staying home with her children in spite of her family’s limited income. Like me she still has that punk edge, and issues aplenty, but her babies come first.
This girl and her sister– well they are ten years and more younger than I am, but they remind me of my best friend in high school. The day I met each of them I just got this good feeling from them. There’s just that deep, real, been there done that honesty and sense of humor about them that I would like to associate with country people… but I have never met anyone like these girls.
Their backgrounds are different yet similar… trailers yes, but my best friend in high school had wonderful loving parents who stayed together and these girls had hard, harsh broken home childhood– and came out just as hard headed, beautiful and determined, more so really than my dear friend from high school. You know how redneck girls are often so much better groomed– better haircuts and makeup– than city girls? None of them went to college. They are all three very smart, big fish in small ponds who breezed through high school without having to study, but without bothering to worry about college. They all have horse sense and an ability to see through the bullshit, their own bullshit, and others’, and call it like they see it, that sometimes just has me rolling with laughter. They are nice girls, but they don’t let being nice keep them from seeing and telling the truth.
I can’t describe it. There are some people who just remind you of the good parts of your childhood in such a way that you can truly be yourself, whether you’re seventeen or thirty seven, as if those twenty years never passed.
Twenty years… I’ve been thinking a lot about that number, as my reunion is coming up this summer. It hardly seems possible. I am still just as frivolous, just as cool, and almost as stupid, as I was when I was seventeen. I hit a turning point about thirty, and another as my baby began to grow and I slowly became a mother. But inside… my essence is pretty much the same. I’m a party girl. I am deeply introverted and shy– but I need my friends and community. My imagination paints huge beautiful emotional and visual pictures in my head, and after all these years I still can’t manage to write them down. I love, love, love to work, like in the garden or cooking or quilting or on the house, but I fucking hate doing the grind of someone else’s routine if I can’t see the bigger picture.
I don’t know how it can be that this time has gone by. Time goes faster and faster, and while life doesn’t necessarily get easier– okay, I must admit I prefer my problems now to the problems I had in my twenties– not easier, but… I dunno. Anyway, life becomes more and more precious every day.
I have some deeper and darker thoughts regarding just how precious life is but I’ll have to save them for another day. I want to tote the baby quilt up there
to work on while the kids play and we talk. I want to get some garbage out of the house because it’s trash day and it’s good feng shui to keep this stuff moving all the time. I wanted to take some vegan cupcakes up there too but I’m starting to run out of time.
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Currently listening : Bareback By Hank Dogs Release date: By 02 February, 1999 |
blessing way
It was supposed to be for the pregnant women, but I felt awfully blessed myself.
Don’t think I’m a freak (even if I am, you don’t have to tell me) but there’s just something really special about massaging your pregnant friend’s hand after her paraffin dip. Our society so rarely allows touch to be comfortable unless it’s between a mother and a small child, sexual partners, or a paying client and a massage therapist. It’s sad. But I’m so acutely conscious of that taboo that I really respect it all the time, even when I’d rather not. My mother’s family, and my Best Old Friend’s family, are touchy. I love it and I miss it in my life.
It’s nice to have a context in which it’s appropriate to just do healing, caring touch because you like someone, no strings or weirdness of any sort attached. Energetically speaking (because that’s what I do) that was the high point for me, I think. That was the moment I could feel really nurturing and grateful for the friendships.
Everyone brought yummy food or craft or gift items. I was particularly proud of the fuzzy slippers, but it was all yummy — beaded friendship bracelets and paraffin dips and foot spas and scrap book pages and flowers and eye pillows and aromatherapy and food food food!
It wouldn’t have happened without the generosity of the attendees… and my husband spent about two hours cleaning this morning– things that bothered me, of course, but I just didn’t have time to fool with it and so was going to let it go. Then he hid away with the kids upstairs for three and a half hours so that we could have girl space.
This is one milestone I really needed to clear before I could get on with my life. And I have much to get on with, but that is fodder for another post.
Now I have to bust my ass to finish the baby quilt for the next pregnant lady event. It will be my pleasure. I got my sewing machine out to do the eye pillows so it’s just a quick step to starting to sew that quilt top. Maybe I have enough for two to even three girl babies, if the one whose mommy won’t find out or reveal his gender happens to be a girl–but I predict boy, let me go on the record as predicting boy, cause of how he sits– hope we get to find out soon!
a shout out
My darling brother, it was your birthday, yesterday or the day before. I should have called my mother and congratulated her for bringing a truly wonderful human being like you into the world. I worship your spirit, your sweetness, your sense of humor, your kindness, your edge, your commitment, your willingness to go there. I couldn’t ask for a more special friend– how is it that you are actually related to me, and permanently in my life? When I think of how other of my friends aren’t close to their siblings or families… man.
I see you, at about fourteen or fifteen maybe? coming around the side of our house in the dark, with a flashlight covered in brown paper in your hand, and a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of your army surplus jacket– you’ve been out smoking and seriously contemplating the night sky. What a guy! The car wrecks… the brushes with the cops somehow always satisfactorily concluded… the stunts nobody would believe if they hadn’t been there… terribly funny, at least to me, or at least it was funny then, when we were sort of superhuman, and… angels must wrap you with their wings. I know they gave me a brother like you.
I love you so. I am so tickled with many of the turns your life takes, even as I kibbitz from the shore. You are so willing to just do it. I am just thrilled with your latest especially… caring for your baby and your amazing wife, my sister, and following your writing star. You’re the greatest.
2x pajamas
I had my 33rd birthday shortly after I found out I was pregnant with shaky baby.
My husband– oh wait, we weren’t married yet– babydaddy brought home a small but loving offering. We were probably broke at that time, we were perennially broke. It was a beautiful dream journal and a pair of pajamas.
The pajamas were from Wal Mart, but they had a small botanical print on them that was lovely, satin trim, and they were so soft. The ADD, or HSP, or whichever, in me is so grateful for clothing that does not rub my skin in any way whatsoever. Such clothes are hard to find.
As he handed them to me with this sweet aww shucks look on his face he said, I know it’s not much, and you aren’t this big, but you will be, and you will need something soft and comfortable for while you are pregnant. It is one of my sweetest memories of our time together.
Fast forward over four years. I’m still wearing the pajamas. The elastic is soft and gentle but tight enough to hold the britches up. The satin covers have come off the buttons. I have stained them with the various fluids and substances of my humanity. I wash them and wear them over and over. The fabric is softer than ever, and I think they are lovely. The crotch hangs almost to my knees.
A while back I forgot them at my friend’s house. I was staying with her on a healing school weekend… her mother runs the school and she’s my best friend from library school and that’s how I know her mother and ended up in healing school. Anyhoo I forgot them on the floor in her bathroom when I got up and left for school in the morning. Now that I think of it… I had run away early when I had a sudden and huge late grief explosion regarding my miscarriage a year and a half before. No wonder I forgot them.
Anyway. I went there last weekend and spent several hours with her and her new precious little baby, born Dec. 31. It was such a special time. I can never spend enough time holding a tiny baby.
She said, I keep forgetting to give your pajamas back to you. I said, those are my pregnant girl pajamas. She said, I know. I wore them to the hospital.
I teared up then, and I am tempted to cry now. I am wearing the pajamas. I finally unpacked them from my trip. They smell sweetly of whatever fabric softener she uses.
She and I have been through many years and many friendship obstacles. Not least, she lives five hours away and has a busy life of her own. If it weren’t for the healing school I mightn’t see her ever. To have her silently reach out and affirm our friendship after so many years, in that way, to need me, I guess is the only way I can think of to say it, when we are so far apart– I had felt like a pretty fraudulent friend, not to be at the hospital for her c section. But she took me with her.
Snif.
