deep

Exhausted. Body aches. Moving, sorting, cleaning all day. It started at IKEA. Need I say more? Well, I will. I am surrounded by things. Things to do. Things to put away. Things needing. Things wanting. Mouths to feed and bottoms to wipe. Stories to write. I am deep in this home. Deep in my head. I don't even know what's out there. I don't want to know. When I finally fall into bed at night, I lay there and think about the ocean. Blood of the earth. I send reiki and healing prayers. I go deep into the healing and feel more than I am ready to feel. Sleep.

[deep]

I am in over my head/out of my head/the green tables the white foam flower the dissonance/I travel a distance to get here/destination unknown/strange life gets stranger/a former coworker/a doppelganger/you hurt my feelings with your words/with your silence/violent/my heart bruised/caged without a key/travel without piano/delicate nerve endings/tips/its not all black and white there is red/the brown of his eyes/the dark of his chin/a bright blue awning, flags wave singing my prayers/there is so much to feel/I know myself/I know the withdrawal signs, the exile of the self/the longing for connection and the fear of overscheduling/not meaning to be shallow, a creekbed full of smooth rocks/start your own band and call it/off

[need]

[need]

i am only human. and i need to be loved. just like everybody else. is there something special here? the nightmare came alive for me. the neurological. emotional island. i'm out to sea, cast out, floating. pirated. searching for treasure wherever i can find it. the ruby in the sunrise. cannot get it. together. light as a feather. stiff as a board. dead in some ways, more alive than ever in others. i was given such bad news. i need to learn. i need to create. i need space. i need to create space. i need space to create, to keep up the pace. it's the whole human race i'm running. i need a meeting. i need you too. and i need you to. understand. give me space. let me. allow. deepen your breath. settle. go down. get out of your head and into your heart. my need is great. everybody needs a little...ventilator. i need to clean my ducts and get my ducks lined up. need, weed, read, seed. need to reach into my core. some more. my little boy is my world, and that's the way i want it to be. need it to be. an outpouring of love, a reaching and a holding on. squeezing til all the tears have pushed themselves out. i need to be empty. for the bliss to pour in, for the sunlight to shine out. i need rest. to be my best. to open the chest and let the spirits fly.

Spill

I'm spilling out all over. All that I could contain inside is no longer tucked neatly inside. It is my guts and my love and my aching and my fire. Right there on the table for everyone to see.

In the world, I feel you spilling out all over too. The sea of humanity is almost too much for me to handle. Your life and your struggles and your ugliness and your beauty. Driving around in the gas fueled cars, walking and sweating on the hot pavement. I see you and feel you in me. It makes me want to run home and hide but really all I can do is take a deep breath and let us be in this together.

There is so much falling away. So much dizzy, wild shifting. We don't know what is going on. But old, old stuff seeps out. Faster than we can even process it. I don't understand it. I bet you don't either.

But something new is coming. All I can do is trust that.

[spill]

i often wonder when my son will read a book on his own and when he will desire to spell his notes himself? and i wonder if he'll pronounce it "spill" and adopt our hometowns accent. will he defy my covert NY accent? will he co-opt david's midwestern drawl, that is peppered with hick influences. pen becomes pin. laura / lara (lah-rah).

i kind of want him to have a central texas drawl. i've totally embraced this town as mine own. i am very amorous of austin and texas proud. sam having an accent would be icing on the cake. but i think spell becoming spill isn't indigenous to this area and i am romanticizing having a southern accent. with spill could come offensive iterations.

projection, my spill, should not flow and when it does it needs quick action, to be soaked up.

--anonymous mama

Swing!

Miles loves the swings. We started taking him to the little park near our house as soon as the weather turned nice in early March. It was the first nice day after an entire month of snow, three feet or more on the ground. We couldn't wait to be in the outdoors, together as a family. Miles had just started to be a good sitter then, and the swing seemed incredibly new and fancy to him.

Now, even when they could be old hat, he loves them even more. He is getting braver in those little bucket swings, bending his body forward and nearly tipping out if we aren't careful. He loves it when we duck our heads out of the way and pretend he chopped them off as he swung past.

One of the sets of swings near our house has a picnic table nearby. Depending what time of day I happen down there, big kids are sitting at the picnic table smoking pot and drinking coffee, which seems like a strange combination to me. While I wish they wouldn't smoke their pot in the park where young babies swing, sometimes I feel incredibly tempted to just walk over and ask for a puff.

How many years has it been since I smoked pot? Wouldn't it be amazing to play on the swings afterward? Who am I kidding. I would likely fall off the swing and be too stoned to care as I lay there on the playground.

Instead of joining them, I just turn about and head for another location, maybe another set of swings, where Miles can feel the wind whipping back his fluffy hair. When I watch him enjoying the swings like that, I realize that these are the moments parents live for. Small, seemingly mundane things like a day on the swings can feel so, so miraculous when it's YOUR baby giggling his face off at the feeling of weightlessness.

Chocolate

I went to about 5 different grocery stores before Easter searching for Cadbury mini eggs. Nobody had them! I am telling you, I drove all over Pittsburgh. Turns out, all the mini eggs were stockpiled at the ghetto Giant Eagle in a shady neighborhood near our house. I popped in there to buy some stuff for a road trip and was affronted with $.99 bags of the mini eggs. I bought 5.

Then I hid them from my husband, knowing he eats as many of them as I do. Which is a lot. I've been doing my best to ration them out, to only eat a few per day. But this has been one of those weeks. I have been eating so much of the chocolate. I just cracked into my last bag. What will I do til next spring?

To try reserving the precious mini eggs, I've been supplementing my chocolate cravings with Trader Joe's dark truffle chocolate bars. I force myself to eat only one square at a time when things are rough. I put the screaming, napless baby in a jumperoo or in his room and sink into the sofa, slowly enjoying my one square of dark, dark chocolate while I breathe and count to 10. Or 11.

What is it about dark chocolate that has made it so valuable to me in these 9 months of parenthood? I honestly don't think a single day has passed where I haven't had at least one square. If a day did pass, I'm sure it was an unpleasant one. I guess that makes me pretty addicted. I'll take it. I haven't had any beer or wine to speak of since I got pregnant in 2008. And I smoked my last doobie around then (two wonderful puffs to last a lifetime...).

I think I convince myself that I need and deserve the dark chocolate because I abstain from all of these other pleasures, like caffeine. To be quite honest, I greatly prefer this to even a good Belgian wheat beer with dinner. If chocolate is my new vice, I'd say I'm not doing too badly.

sleep

I haven't had sleep in days. 90 minutes here and there...that barely counts. I kind of feel like I could shake the person who invented the phrase "sleeps like a baby." sometimes I hold other people's babies and those babies just become asleep. POOF! Asleep. No marching up and down the stairs. No nursing while an angry baby digs a hole in my upper arm. No pleading with Jesus for the baby to just become asleep. These other babies just enter that state and stay there. It seems like magic to me.

Sometimes I wonder if my son will ever take after his father and become a champion sleeper. Corey's party trick in college (and beyond) was his ability to fall asleep on anybody's couch, no matter how rowdy the party or gathering. Corey can sleep for 14 hours in a row if you let him. He sleeps through thunder and alarm clocks and...crying babies. I hate him a little for this.

Miles sleeps through nothing. Except sometimes car rides. But today, I am too tired to take him on one of those car rides to put him out. I fear I will run over a bicyclist or drive through a red light.

It's been 9 months since I've had sleep. To look at it that way, think about how long that really is, makes me feel humble. I know I'll sleep again someday because Miles will eventually move out of the house, right? But man, I need a nap.

Snacks

We're heading to the zoo and it is law that when you go to the zoo, you better bring snacks. Ugh. Dirty zoo hands – inevitable – touching food, touching lips. I am so bad at packing snacks. I usually forget – rushing out the door, trying to find the keys, lugging all the stuff – and snacks just don't quite happen. My kid looks longingly at other kids' snacks until their mom (who didn't forget) offers some.

I had a friend who hated the word “snack.” It creeped her out, made her skin crawl. I would tease her by using the word way too often. She also hated “goopy.” Pairing the two – goopy snacks – was even better. Snacks are often goopy. Especially when those little zoo hands are touching them.

So here I am, writing instead of packing the snacks - attracted to the word and thoughts but not the doing. I'll do anything other than pack snacks. I mean, what do people even eat?

Grasp

I have been hungry non-stop since I gave birth to my second daughter four months ago. I am a floating head, detached from its body – chomping hungrily at the air. I grasp for something – anything – to fill what is missing...which,I guess, is my self. I grasp for my youth and the days when I would meditate for hours on end. I grasp for the beautiful moments happening now – the sight of my daughters laughing at each other or the soft, warm back of the baby's neck- things I want to hold on to because they are leaving me way too fast. I grasp onto my fantasies about the future – my future fit body, our future financial stability – these things coming right around the corner...right?

I grasp for the earth like I did at age 17 when washed away in a flash flood. I grasped at the grasses on the river bank as the water carried me away, my hands slipping off each time. Just moving so fast. I swear it was an angel or an act of God that pulled me up eventually and landed me on a fallen tree. And I survived.

Now the waters move me and I don't know where. But I am hungry and lost and really all I want is to feel myself in my body again. Right here, right now – feel the fullness of this moment and feel sated.