There has been a furry heat lining the inside of my skull, throat, and lungs. It wraps around my bones, leaving my muscles tired. It is familiar and frustrating but mostly, I’m grateful that each time it occurs, it is a little less than it once was. After a week of getting on track with my writing, my exercise, and a declaration to blog twice a week, everything was shoved to the corner for a week of rest. “Go to the room,” Dan would say, pointing. “Put something heavy up against the door, put in your earplugs, and sleep.”

And I would. I would do it because I’d just gulped a 16 ounce energy drink and all my body wanted to do was let gravity push it down, down, down into the bed. All my foggy-thick mind wanted to do was dream. I would say, “Thank you. Really, babe, thanks. I’m sorry.”

And then I’d move down the hallway, away from the Mommy’s, the sunlight, the plants to be potted, the thesis to be written, the fence to be stained, and I’d climb up on the bed and meditate on God until sleep rolled over me, sudden, complete, only to roll away again, revealing my dreams.

Even when I rest, I don’t rest entirely. I dream about the underside of things. I climb to the top of a ship and look down at the shadows of sharks and leviathans moving silently. I pull my arms through dark waters to avoid a plague of locusts in Egypt. I learn to fly and narrowly miss a crash.

I would wake up to the sound of splashing outside in the pool. Sunlight warming my skin. My nerves, raw and tangled. To the coffee, the tea, the whatever, anything to try to push back the heat crowding my body, the fever that was thickening, as it does in cycles, and has done, for years.

Dan took the children back to Hamilton for the weekend so I could rest and get work done on my thesis. I spent the first day sleeping. The second day fighting anxiety at the way my body does this to me. The third day, thanking God for the way these waves of illness wash over me less and less as I learn about what to put in, what to keep out, of my body.  My mind.

Now, tonight, I climb on the elliptical and open my book. I move blood through my muscles, words through my bones. It is close to 11 p.m. Dan moves in the body of a woman on Skyrim. He is that kind of man. It doesn’t bother him to carry my handbag, or to play the High Elf female character I created. He is almost inhumanly strong but its not the first impression you get from him. The first impression is that he is gentle. That he has integrity. At least that was my first impression.

As I keep my legs moving, the fever pushing out of my skin, I look to Joaquin sleeping on the couch, and I say to Dan, “It’s just such an honor to be the parents to these three amazing human beings.”

I battle against every moment that is stolen away by my fatigue. I hate that sometimes I’m responsible for it because I resist being ‘that woman’ who can’t eat the things everyone else can eat, that I can’t do the things everyone else can do.

What I am learning, slowly, is that integrity is found in honesty. It is found in acceptance.
My friend Darryl reminded me tonight of my promise to blog every Tuesday and Friday, even if the only thing on my mind is this, the boring story of the way my body sometimes scares me and the energy I often expend trying to cover this up and pretend it isn’t who I am.

So here I am, being honest, limitations and all.

It is now nearly midnight. I will post this and then move on to scribbling notes on my thesis, following through on my commitment to do a little bit of the important things each day. To build on this.

As I read my daughter a story tonight, her fingers resting on my hand, her head pushed into mine, I thought of how I’d read my firstborn, Sol, the same story over six years ago, and if I’m honest, could feel nothing more than the surface knowledge that I needed to keep going, to do the right things for this precious responsibility placed in my care. I was so exhausted, it was an act of pure will.

Tonight, as I curled my body around Zaviera and began to pray, as I felt her body soften, and then twitch, I felt the waves of my fatigue surge and pull away from my body, again and again, and I gave thanks for the simple fact that I am alive, that we are alive, gathered here together, and that between all of us, there is love.

http://mustachepictures.blogspot.com/2010/11/women-mustaches.html

I saw a woman with a mustache the other day. A real mustache, not a shadow or a few bristles. As solid and tidy as if it had been penciled on, stroke by stroke, until the lines sprung from her face, declaring, “I’m a real mustache!” Nothing else about her was out of the ordinary. Her hair was long and curly and very black. She wore a flowered dress. She pushed a baby in a pram. I think her eyes were blue. She might have had crow’s feet as she smiled at me. I know for sure she had a mustache.

I was standing in my sweat-damp clothing, smelling of old industrial carpet and the perspiration of strangers straining, focusing, faltering, inhaling and exhaling. I was feeling very unconcerned with my post-yoga appearance when my eyes met the mustache lady’s eyes. I glanced away just as my eyes lit upon her upper lip but I believe she still heard my thoughts:

That woman has a mustache! Why does she have a mustache?

I think this happens more than any of us would like to accept. Our eyes connect and we receive information – these dark universes of thought tightly curled and hurling silently through the space between our bodies. I think we hear, feel, know more than any of us would like to most days. At least I used to feel this way. I think it might be more truthful to say that these days I don’t mind moving through a meteor shower of thoughts and emotions.  I don’t fear being smashed or singed. I enjoy the illumination.

I don’t mention the mustached woman to anyone. Not until now as I write this blog. I hold the moment of eye contact like an ember in my mouth. It softens the tension in my jaw, the ache in my teeth. It relaxes my tongue.

I would like to say that I am becoming kinder, my heart stronger as my feet meet the curve of the ground and my spine lengthens. I would like to say that there is something about this stretching out of the tension in my body, in all of this exhaling and inhaling that is working a kind of grace into my body, and this grace is what keeps the mustached woman cradled in my mind.

Earlier that morning, my sister-in-law, Alziere, and I were stretched out on our mats, preparing for class. The room was quiet and I was nervous because it was Alziere’s first Bikram yoga class and I didn’t want her to be miserable. After a few moments of a quiet that was too quiet, Alziere whispered, “This quiet is almost unnatural.” Or something like that. I whispered back in my best whispery-whisper voice that it wasn’t always this quiet-quiet. Somewhere in the middle of our whispering I heard a voice in my head rudely demand that the two of us “SHUT UP. YOU NEED TO BE QUIET.”

I laughed, finished my whispering and then closed my eyes. It was then that I realized the rude voice hadn’t been in my head. I sat up, “Alziere, did someone just tell us to shut-up? Did that really just happen?”

She nodded like she was confused as to why we weren’t already tasting blood. We both laughed. It was hard not to. It was hard not to howl but we’re women of a certain brand of self-restraint.

Class started a few minutes afterwards. I didn’t have enough time to figure out who the offender was but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t angry. Maybe a little offended but mostly amused. As the class moved on, it continued to roll off of me, sweat and heat and curiosity as to what the Shut Up Woman’s story was.

After class, Alziere and I sat in the parking lot cackling over the incident. Alziere identified the Shut Up woman and we were still laughing as she drove past us, still looking miserable after two hours of sweat and heat and stretching and collapsing.

“Smile!” called out Alziere. We had both noticed she had stretch marks on her belly. We figured her to be a mother on the edge of madness. It was enough to forgive her.

As we drove to the shops, the Shut Up Woman pulled out of a grocery store parking lot and nearly smashed into our car. It only sent us back into laughter. I said to Alziere, “We need to stop being so amused by this whole thing.”

Alziere said, “Yeah, God’s going to make us hug her or something.”

Because that is how things work in our lives. Trespasses become doorways. They are always lessons.

And later, as I stood in the sunlight, sweat drying on my skin, thinking of the mustache woman, I understood that I was no different than the frustrated Shut Up Woman when my mind declared, “Look at that mustache!”

I wasn’t angry, but I was rude. I was judgemental.

The dividing line was nothing more than an exhale.

The Shut Up woman said, “SHUT UP.”

I looked away but I think the mustached woman heard me all the same.

Next time, I hope I won’t look away.

I hope that there will be a quiet love behind my eyes.

I like to imagine that the Mustached woman looked at me in my stinking, ill-fitting yoga clothes and forgave me just the same.

The year rolls over with words clutched to its belly. Some of these words fall, torn confetti at our feet. They are blurred, unreadable, already disappearing into the mulch of things to be let go of. Other words become dust as soon as they are exposed to the air, as if, purpose-served, they simply cease to exist.

The words with weight remain. They step away from 2011 and stretch. They politely assert themselves into our conversations:

Courageous, Perserverance, Kindness, Love

This morning I tidy up the bedroom, folding the top blanket, throwing it over the boat of our bed, arranging the pillows, stepping back to admire the way it all comes together neat and quiet. The sounds of six children sprawled on the couch slip beneath the door as I open my notebook, run my finger along the rough edge of a chapter that Belicia has chewed to pieces.

And I feel another word stepping into this new year.

I flop down on the bed, my bones still waking up from a night of sleeping sideways because the urge to have Dan’s hand resting on my head, to have his belly rising and falling against my cheek wouldn’t leave me. A night of Joaquin’s body, electrified and warm, moving with an animal-like pounce if contact was broken between our skin. He searched me out in his sleep; leg against leg, fingers curling and uncurling.  In that moment before sleep swallowed me whole, the rough sole of his foot was pressed against my mouth and I remembered the same imprint of his foot pressing outwards when he was curled inside the womb. I remember the same curling and uncurling of his fingers, the fluttering sign-language of his presence.

This morning, as I begin to write, this new word eases apart the two words that have presented themselves to me personally: Love and Kindness

This new word is Consistency.

It is humble but unafraid of its power.

The past year has been about big movements forward. Surges and retreats.

Now, I feel a deepening. A quiet tending to.

Just beyond the door of the bedroom the voices of Andy, Charlotte, Dan, Alziere, Jon, and six children fill our home. Joaquin opens the door, a satisfied smile on his face.

“Mommy, fuck!” he says, waving his truck in the air. I don’t try to correct his pronunciation.
“Is that right?” I ask.
He nods.
Yes, that is right.

Outside, I hear Tumanako yell at Sol, “Ah-Sol!”

And I know I will repeat the story over breakfast. Andy was the first to notice that when Joaquin gets angry at Sol, it comes out sounding a lot like he’s calling him an asshole.

These are the words that weave us together, the pretty and the profane.

We have been gifted with a new definition of family this year. Over the last months as people have entered our home and played games and shared food and conversation, the old definition has been erased and rewritten:

Blood is spirit and spirit is blood. Love is love. Family is family.

So what I realize as Joaquin pushes on to my lap, babbling at me like an old man, is that this year is about the small daily acts of tending to the way we define our days. To consistently writing our stories with pages of love, kindness, courage, and perserverance. This family made of spirit and blood, blood and spirit.

I find Zaviera crouched by the front gate. At her feet fallen petals and leaves in various states of decay exhale the scent of spring turning into summer, of days of rain followed by short, intense periods of sun. Sun that strips back fabric, sunblock, and keeps pushing on until it moves through our skeletons and down into the earth.

Zaviera looks up at me, a delicate animal, fragile-boned but fierce.

“Hi Mommy,” she says, her voice vulnerable and surprised. She thought she was alone, in the clear. She didn’t expect to be caught scampering after her desire.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?” Her hands are clutched to her heart, guarding something beneath her shirt.

Her shoulders round against my gaze, she looks at me through eyelashes, shadows, and a naked honesty that fills the space between us like sunlight without the demand of heat.
“You won’t tell daddy?”
I squat down.
“No, sweetheart. You can show me.”

But I already know what it is. She reaches down into the sports-bra top that she insists on wearing at all times, just like her mommy. And just like her mommy, she has a way of storing her valuables in this handy garment. She pulls out a dadu, a pacifier, warm from her skin. I imagine I can feel the hummingbird flight of her heart trapped in the plastic of it. The want that she can’t help wanting even though we tell her, “You are almost five, you’ll need to stop using your dadus.”

She watches me, waiting.
“Did you feel like you needed your dadu?”
She nods.”Can I please have it? Just for a little bit?”

It is a quiet request, a moment of trust that stretches between us. A net that will receive our weight if we fall into it. If we jump, it will fling us high into the sky where we can look down at all that we are, all that we have been, all that we might become.

“Yes, but take it into your bedroom.”
She thanks me in a tangle of limbs and skin-scent.

I’m left with the intimacy of this moment where we both balanced between being witnessed and loved or witnessed and shamed. That place where our desire can uncrouch from protecting its fierce hunger, to step back and look at what it is we want so fiercely.

Often, it is not the thing we thought.

Sometimes it is just to be seen and trusted that we will not be needing a dadu forever, but for now, we are not ready to let go.

Zaviera is obsessed with her father’s Ipod. I understand this obsession. With her finger, she shifts reality. An angry bird flies through the sky. A letter lifts and drops down into a new word. Music pours out of this thin object she holds in her hand. There is something dreamlike about this level of technology. It is intoxicating.

Because of this, I expected that when Dan said, ‘If you come to basketball tonight you can play with my ipod’ she would nod, jump up, forgetting all about me, my headache, and my need to rest. SHe didn’t. She sat, her eyes fixed on the carpet, and shook her head slowly.

“No, I want special time with mommy.”
“Are you sure?” Dan asked, raising the bargain-impact of his voice. “You can play with my ipod the WHOLE time.”
She shook her head, eyes still fixed on the floor.
“I’ll even buy you an ice cream.”
I watched her, thinking for sure that the temptation would be too much. I know my daughter loves me, but we’re talking about ipods and ice cream and a nearly five-year-old.

Zaviera sighed.
“No, I want to stay here. I want to be with mommy.”

I looked at Dan, confused. He shook his head.

“Okay, last chance…”

Zaviera didn’t budge. As Dan walked away to get his basketball gear, my daughter looked up at me, relieved, as if she had just passed through some tunnel of torture and I was the light on the other side.

She smiled shyly at me.

I reached out for her, gathering her small, ferocious body in my arms, and whispered, “I love you, too.”

Beneath that whisper, was another whisper.

It said,  “Dear Alegra: you have so much to learn about love and the capacity of your children.”

My mind has been receding for weeks, thoughts evaporating in the heat of illnesses and the constant movement of clean clothes becoming dirty, fresh linen torn from beds, thrown into piles, the vacuum pulled out, lines drawn through the hallway, living room, the tumbling blur of requests from my children. I’ve been at the bottom of my mind, looking up as the surface drew closer to my face, and I wondered why I couldn’t find any words. They were hiding where the shadows pool, where they could still breathe, where the water pressed back against the walls, fighting the heat, the thirsty, thirsty heat.

I’ve flopped, gasped, pressed myself deeper, wondering why I couldn’t find any sentences. The last of the water dried on my skin as I hung sheet after sheet on the clothesline, listening to the fragmented thoughts in my mind, the narratives that trailed off as I kicked at the laundry basket, bent down for another broken peg, stretched another sheet, and swallowed, my throat dry, the space beneath my skull pounding with the need for rest.

I felt the thunder as I hoisted our bedspread over the last remaining space on the line. A rounding out of the sky, a damp breath on my neck, a whisper across my scalp, giant jaws gently settling on my heart. In their power, the single word, “Surrender.”

Inside the house, animals are wild-eyed, hiding beneath furniture as I pull back the curtains, push open windows, and try to pretend I don’t feel the way my husband is moving resolved on the surface, but inside, his back is turned to me.

I’ve asked him to stay home tonight from a basketball game because my dreams have been filled with holes that I go free-falling through and I’m exhausted from being home all day with Zaviera and her fever. I don’t know how to tell him that when I wake up from my dreams, I feel those holes lining up through our lives, like a tunnel, when he is absorbed in the poker game on his Ipod, the small square of light illuminating the handsome lines of his face. I want to push into his arms, curl up, feel those gaps close in the comfort of his fingers that have always reassured me. His touch whispers to my skin that life extends beyond this moment and comes back again.  The solidity of his arms gives me permission to let go.

The rain begins and I am pulled back to rest in the shallows of my mind.

Drop by drop, heaven and earth mingle.

Drop by drop, I am restored.

Outside, fireworks disintegrate in the night sky. The washing machine and dryer hum and rumble. They’ve been working nonstop since Dan phoned to tell me that the dreaded ‘nits’ had finally found their way to our children’s scalp. A day of writing transformed into a day of stripping bedding and cushions; my arms full of dirty laundry, my skin crawling with imaginary creatures. At one point I was convinced they were swinging from my eyelashes up into my eyebrows and scurrying along the curve of my spine, their language the scratchy itch of locusts, threatening to condemn my family to a neverending cycle of cleaning. I chased my nails along my scalp, digging, drawing lines,mapping out the distractions of my hours, leaving my hair follicles assualted and bewildered.

Tonight, I rest my head on Dan’s lap and hand him a brush. “Strand by strand,” I tell him. He runs his fingers through my hair long after we’ve determined that my scalp is mostly suffering from my imagination. I remember how, at the slightest hint of an itch, I used to come home from school and put my head on my father’s lap and demand that he search my head for bugs. I didn’t actually believe he would ever find anything, I just loved having him draw dividing lines across my skull, each hair on my head loved and accounted for.

Later, I will wake up to my daughter climbing into bed, wrapping my arm around her small body like a safety belt, her fingers stroking my arm as if she knows she can mesmerize me into obeying her will: Hold me, just like this. Don’t let go. My arm will eventually go numb. Joaquin’s feet will land in my face. When we wake, I will check through my daughter’s hair and find nothing sinister. I will kiss the top of her head and whisper, “You are perfect.”

The morning will carry me along a wave of details: animals to feed, leaves to sweep out of the pond, lunches to pack, children to dress. As I shake out a bedspread, watching its silver embroidery turn purple in the shifting light, I remember my dreams. A child lying still and breathless, turning pale blue, and then a needle plunging down, reviving her. Hundreds of tiny, golden cobras, their hoods like wings extending and collapsing as they chased me down. As the bedspread lands, I will feel a voice in my heart, a knowing in my bones, that no moment is lost, nothing is wasted, our dreams merge with the tasks of removing lint from dryers, wiping small hand prints from windows.

All of our moments are untangled, preened through, accounted for.

Every moment loved.

I sink into the hot bath, watching small bubbles form on my skin:

Thank you for the luxury of hot water, for the three scars braided between my hip bones, for the loyalty of my body.

These thoughts lift from my mind like steam. Sol cries out, “Mommy! Mommy! Where are you?”

He comes thundering down the hall, his heel bones striking the floor with precision. I hear his arms swooshing through the air, the material of his track pants rubbing together.

“I’m here,” I call out.
“Where?” His voice is high, anxious.
“In the bath.”
“Okay.”

His momentum stops.
“I thought you were gone.”

“I know.”

To the strain in my voice I whisper: Thank you for a child whose love builds in his body until it is too much. 

He returns to the lounge. There is quiet and my thoughts and the knowing that in five more minutes, the cycle will repeat. His voice tearing through the house, searching for me. My reassurance that I am still in the same place, I am not going anywhere.

In these days of waiting for our future, of waiting for the answer to Dan’s job interview last week, I’ve become aware of the stories I tell myself. Stories about motherhood, self-worth, marriage, friendships, and The Way Things Are.

I am grateful for the lessons of my mother’s stories. Her beautiful mind is like a powerful animal that has been wounded. She has taught me to trust that whether or not we can see it, there is always love surrounding us.

I am grateful for my father whose stories have been wild dogs, their breath hot on his heels, barking and howling, daring him to stumble. He has taught me that fear is nothing but a wind at our back, pushing us on.

The stories I tell myself don’t belong to the media, society, past hurts, or any particular set of circumstances.

Stories are stories.

Stories are woven into the air. Some of them climb on our chest at night and crouch, stealing our breath as they whisper, “You will be forsaken, abandoned, punished. Who are you to think you are worthy of love, success, joy?” Some of them lift gravity from our limbs and smile, “There are no limits. You are perfectly loved.”

Sol calls out to me, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

“Yes, Sol. I am still here.”

“Where?”

“In the bath.”

“Oh, okay. I thought you were gone.”

“No, I’d never go anywhere without telling you.”

“If I can’t see you, I don’t know you’re here.”

“I know, sweetheart, but I am. I’m here.”

I sink deeper into the water and listen to the story surrounding my family in these days of waiting:

Everything you need is here, even when you can’t see it.

http://www.artbylindayates.com/new_art.html

In the dark, we are trees with strong, curving limbs, our roots woven together, our branches touching wherever possible. Between us, Joaquin rests as if the space is a hammock suspending him high above everything. Protected as thunder tears open the sky and flashes of light fill the room. The dogs bark, the cats complain, Joaquin kicks my chest with his feet. If toes could smile, his would be twinkling with mischief.

The rain is thick outside, so thick it blends into a rushing of continuous sound. Through the roar, I imagine all of the pockets of light and warmth and the walls surrounding other families. I imagine the conversations, the thoughts gathering in the air, becoming dense until they are a substance being inhaled and exhaled, recycled continuously. Zaviera comes stumbling into the room, her recently cut fringe sticking up. She burrows her way beneath the blankets, finding a space behind the crook of my leg where she rests her head, aligning the rest of her body so that our edges blend together seamlessly.

Sol is still out on the couch sleeping. I worry about him waking up and finding himself alone.

Earlier, he came home from school in a rage to find that I’d cleaned his room and taken out some of the toys. I had given him a choice: Clean your room or I’ll clean it for you. If I clean it for you, I’m going to take out some things to make it easier for you to keep it clean. You choose.

We’ve been working hard to remain rooted in our word with Sol, to weather the storm that happens when we follow through with the consequences we have set for him. Sometimes it means hours of having him threaten us, plead, and negotiate. The same cycle over and over again, but we’ve learned that it will pass eventually. And then it will return again, but with less strength.

I had been fair in what I chose to remove from his room – only extra pens and crayons that he didn’t need, a few toys he couldn’t name when I asked him what was missing, but still, he raged at me. He went into his room and wrote a note: I hate you Mommy.

He handed it to me and I said, “Oh dear, this is too bad.”

I put it on the table.

“I won’t hate you if you give me back my toys.”

“I’ll give you back your toys when you show me that you’ll take care of them.”

“But that’s too hard! You’re mean!”

“I know.”

“That’s unfair.”
“Maybe, but you made a choice.”

“I am never, ever going to like you again!”

Our housemate looked at me and said something along the lines of “Wow, you must just want a long time-out in your room sometimes!”

Yes, I said, but we’ve built up an endurance. And then the conversation led into a discussion of taking Sol for assessment. After our initial burst of ‘we need help’, Dan and I went back to searching out resources for ourselves, evaluating our own parenting weaknesses, and making progress. As I discussed it with our housemate, I suddenly understood it was nothing more than another step on the path of parenting, part of the adventure – who knows what we might discover?

Later, Sol came out with a picture of a horse. He thrust the peace-offering at me and ran away, knocking over Joaquin in his rush. I gave him a few moments and then I went to his room and repeated the lesson with him. I told him, “I love you.”

As he finished his dinner, I picked up the ‘I hate you’ note and asked him, “What would you like me to do with this?”

His smile was shy as he said,”Um, throw it away? Rip it up.”

“I think that’s a great idea. Or, how about I toss it in the fireplace. We can burn it.”

His smile lost its tentativeness.

“Yeah, burn it.”

Another flash of lightning fills the room and I think about the way life prompts us in unexpected ways. Joaquin’s hand snakes its way into my hair and he strokes the curve of my skull. His fingers still, he sinks back into sleep.

My children are teaching me that love has a depth, an underside that can be misunderstood.

The raging storm of ‘I hate you’ sometimes means ‘I need you to stand steady.’

When my children throw themselves at me, swing from my limbs, yank at my branches, they are testing me.

Please, mommy, bend, but don’t break.