4kids3pets2moms1..

4kids3pets2moms1 Mother of a Road Trip -- Issue #3

2004-12-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

The Odyssey

We leave at 6:00 a.m. on July 12, 2004 South on I5 (briefly) and East on I90. Stop in Spokane and find ourselves much too close to a small closed amusement park that Caleb locks his eyes and his desires on. It feels like we are on the edge of Idaho for a long time, but hit Montana, where eventually we will stay for the night. We fall into bed at dark. It takes Nemo to get Caleb to settle down.

July 13 It’s like 3:00 in the morning or something. Sal and I try and sleep, but Caleb wakes and we laugh hysterically. Shuttle kids into the car in their jammies and blankets. We are going to head toward Yellowstone National Park. Find our prebooked campground on the Montana side. Maia vomits. Pit toilet but better than the night before. Long Walks. Beautiful Falls. Yan obsesses about keeping the car orderly.

July 14 Caleb wakes way too early again. Yan walks him while others try and sleep. Drive through Yellowstone. Hike a bit. See Old Faithful and impressive wild life. Eat at that tiny little hole in Wyoming. Drive all night after a bit of ice cream. Caleb asleep by 2:00, no one sleeps well and all are crabby the next day. Sleep from 2:00 to 5:30 a.m. at a rest stop in the western part of South Dakota.

July 15 Start the morning with showers at the Flying J in South Dakota. Many a male stare. Drive to the Badlands. AWESOME. Aiden's turn to vomit. Drive to one campground then the other. Drink a lot of water. Heavily drug Caleb. Wind, heat, water. Wind, heat, water. Attempt to watch the sunset, it’s purple, but children have other plans. Hooray, flush toilets.

July 16 Make the long ass trek to Minneapolis for the gathering. Arrive. See Coleen and Jenn A. and Jenna and Amy right away in the parking lot. How About That! Walk to the potluck picnic. It’s still hard to have a wacky kid even among all these other kiddos. A little hitting, a little eating, everyone is tired and the kids freak out. Maia finds teens. We swim.

July 17 More Gathering. Maia hangs out with teens, we barely see her all day. Swim. See Ariel at the dinner thang and hang out a bit afterward. Swim with children again. It’s so good to see everyone.

July 18 More Mama Gathering! Maia waves from the elevator. Swim. Go out to dinner with Coleen. Stay up chatting with Coleen and Lli.

July 19 Brief chat with Rosana on Coleen's cell phone. Say farewells to all. Leave Minneapolis and drive to Indiana Dunes. Unable to find campground so we turn around and get a motel near Geary. We’re really tired.

July 20 Drive back to Chicago and meet up with Aunt Lynda. Walk Michigan Ave. Yan takes the girls to the Art Institute. Aunt Lynda and Sal play with the boys in the Millennium fountains, where Caleb shits. Take the kids to the Aquarium. Caleb loves the red devil cichlids – 2 hours at one tank. Dinner with Aunt Lynda and Uncle Carl. Uncle Carl puts us up in a room at his private club. Stay cloistered in room till morning to avoid possible run ins with the wealthy.

July 21 Drive from Chicago through Detroit to the Phyllis Wheatly campground in Ontario. There are lots of bugs, but also flushing toilets and showers.

July 22 Drive into Toronto to get marriage license. Drama ensues. Cry. Work out a plan. Camp at the Bronte Creak Campground just outside of Toronto. Shower and shave. Paint our nails for the wedding. Write vows.

July 23 Get our marriage license first thing in the morning. Drive and arrive at Uncle John’s apartment in Toronto get ready to marry. Head toward the courthouse, stress out over the amount of traffic. Hooray WE’RE married. Have a little party back at Uncle John and Aunt Jodi’s. Spend the night of our wedding in a hotel room downtown with four children. Have very quiet sex.

July 24 Drive to Sauble Beach and get a little mad trying to find the resort that we don’t have adequate directions to. Find It and Mum, Dad, and uncle Morgan and cousin Quinn. Visit the beach. Settle in.

July 25 We play at the beach and walk around the town a bit. The rest of the Dempsey gang (all 30 of them) arrives. We (this includes Mom and Dad and Uncle Morgan) feed the gang. Folks are tired from traveling and go to bed early.

July 26 Play at the beach. Cribbage tournament after dinner, cousin Trish wins the pot! Uncle John and Aunt Jody feed. Lots of milling around from cabin to cabin in the evening.

July 27 Play at the beach. Uncle Steve and Aunt Joy feed the gang. Cousin and uncle chat fest and Rumolli on the porch of Aunt Lynda’s cabin.

July 28 Uncle Bill and Aunt Joan feed the gang. Aiden and Maia go to the Sauble Falls with Aunt Mary and Grandma Cheryl, children jump from “cliff” into the water. We take the boys to the beach. A little tension in the evening. Fireworks and frisbee at sunset on the beach.

July 29 Sal and Yan go out ALONE. Caleb’s a little nuts. Visit the beach, cloudy today. Aunt Lynda and Uncle Carl feed the gang. Rumolli at cousin Nathan and his wife Trish’s cabin.

July 30 Aunt Mary and Uncle Greg feed the gang (can you believe how many aunts and uncles?). The Dempsey grandparent’s friends and extended family show up, including second cousins Pat and Vi, who keep looking askance at the lesbian couple. None of the other shirt-tale relatives notice we’re a couple. We take a break from the beach. Wait out on the porch for cousin Jace to arrive. We get too tired and Grandpa Vic ends up staying up waiting alone until 2AM.

July 31 One last trip to the beach. Pack the car. Dempsey family party at the Sauble Beach Community Center. Visit and say our final goodbyes to the family. Great Aunt Vi looks skeletal, feels like warm paper. Drive out of Ontario to the North West Corner of NY for camping. We’re right by the water, but the kids can’t see it cause it’s too dark when we arrive and they’re too tired when we leave.

August 1 Drive through NY and through Pennsylvania. See Niagara Falls and prevent Caleb from jumping in. Drive to Aunt Sue’s house in Altoona Penn., arrive a bit before six p.m. Meet Katie, cousin Joey’s wife, and Riley, their son. Joey is away at basic training. Meet Aunt Sue’s husband Dan. Pitch tent.

August 2 Walk a few of the streets of Altoona with Katie, Aunt Sue, and cousin Sabrina. Chat about babies and houses. Look at pictures of cousin B.J.’s wedding. See the house that Sabrina and her boyfriend just bought.

August 3 Wake and leave Altoona in the wee hours of the morning. Drive through Ohio and camp at Ross Lake in Indiana. It’s really hot; we swim in the lake and have lots of fun splashing each other. The kids are happy.

August 4 Drive from Indiana to Nebraska. Camp at this funky oasis in the prairie type of campground just off I80. Kids play on the play equipment, we shower, the campground is full of RV’s.

August 5 Drive from Nebraska to Flaming Gorge Wyoming. The adults are a bit bitchy with one another. Caleb vomits in the car. We get a motel room after we can’t find the campground.

August 6 Caleb breaks hotel window as we are trying to leave. Drive from Flaming Gorge Wyoming to Sacramento California. See The Great Salt Lake on the way. That’s right Utah and Nevada in a single day! Arrive at the folks house at almost 11 o’clock pm. Very Tired.

August 7 Rest and hang out at mom’s and dad’s apartment. Swim in the apartment’s pool. Teach Uncle Naz (Yan’s brother) cribbage – he’s amazingly bossy and sharp.

August 8 Family gathering at Folsom Park and Zoo. The family segregates among paternal and maternal lines. It’s HOT (109 degrees)!

August 9 Go visit great grandma C. Then later chat with Aunt Ronna and visit old family friend Auntie Donna.

August 10 Go visit Aunt Judy and her grandchildren. Go to Aunt Laurie’s and Uncle Ed’s. Forget that we have plans to meet old friends at the park.

August 11 Raft down the American River (at least a little bit of the river). Meet Melissa, Ross, Chloe, and Zarah at the McKinley park. Caleb is heartbroken that we aren’t going to swim in the park’s pool.

August 12 Play at Funderland with Papo, Melissa, and her kiddos. Early celebration for Mom’s 54th birthday.

August 13 Leave in the morning, drive up I5 North, and arrive at Angie’s and Leroy’s. Chat with the Mamas (Angie, Natalie and Riverafire).

August 14 Drive from Eugene to home after visiting with Angie and Leroy. Crash HARD.

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4kids3pets2moms1Burnin' Education Issue

2004-10-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

Transitions
By Yantra Bertelli

In the Fall Sal and I attended a relationship workshop for queer parents. One rather chilly Thursday evening a panel of queer parents visited our group to share bits of their lives and experiences. After a couple rounds of questions I asked if anyone’s children had struggled with gender identity issues and if so how did they negotiate that situation? I wanted to know how they dealt. How did they deal with their kid’s interactions in schools? With their peer groups? How did they support their children when they were harassed? Did they blame themselves? How did they remain positive and ward off fear? How did being queer influence their reactions toward their child and the outside world?

My question was met with a little shifting in the seats. Some of the participants had questioned their gender identity themselves and attempted a little advice. One woman’s child muddled through articulating her sexual identity, feeling like she needed to pin it down, to know. But the overwhelming tension squelching discussion in the room translated under my skin as internalized homophobia. For the queer folk in the room there seemed to be this extra pressure to raise well-adjusted “normal” children, to be just like the neighbors. At that moment “normal” glared middle class, aspiring toward whiteness, and heterosexual. Or maybe asexual.
I offered up the possibility that my girl child could be responding to feeling invisible and was creating visibility for herself, or that maybe on some unconscious level she feels like her family is invisible, or that her Omom (her non custodial mama) is invisible? Or maybe it’s a class thing, or maybe she’s trying to create visibility for herself within our family? Or maybe what she articulates as “boy” to herself just feels more like who she is? Sometimes I think she’s rejecting the status quo girl gig because that’s not what she sees in the mirror and she’s preparing herself for some kind of rejection. Sometimes I think she’s merely putting it all on the table so she can cut through to who are her friends and allies and who should she avoid. Sometimes I think she’s just screaming “Fuck you!” on the inside and what I witness is the bubbling over. My personal delving reaps not so much around the room, a little head nodding, a peeked interest possibility. I feel my body shake a little, beginning behind my jaw and running through to my knees. I push my thigh against Sal’s and try to relax into the couch, feelin’ thirsty. Feeling like I need some one to hear me, to understand what this exact living is like.

At the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year our kids started anew, new city, new school district, new schools. The girl child and the woman child began the year at the same school, but as time passed the girl child began to grow more and more disgruntled. At first she complained about how boring her class was, how things felt like chaos, how she was scared of the older kids on the bus. She’d cry daily when returning home from school and begged me to take her the next day or stay with her. All this from a kid who previously loved school, who embraced the security of structured learning like a typically over-achieving stress case tends to do.

Within a month came the complaints of bullying. Kids calling her “boy” and asking her about her clothes and why she wanted to dress like that, “why did she like school work”, followed by catcalls of “gay” or “lesbian” as she walked down the hall. The girl child responded by melting at home, raging, and then waking the next morning and dressing herself in the butchiest clothing she had available in her drawers. We responded with frequent visits to the school, helping out in her class, and providing a “Safe Schools” training via mama Sal for the staff and principle of the school.

Our conversations were filled with her girl child observations like “when I look in the mirror, I don’t look like what I feel like.” In those moments I wanted to run over to her and kiss her toes, the tips of her fingers, her earlobes, her eyelids, and tell her “I know baby, I know, mama knows what that feels like”, but I say things like “You are you, sweetie, and you’re awesome” or “That sounds hard A, I love you” or “What does it feel like to be A”? I can’t soothe her with any of this, and trying hurts. I find myself lost in her rage or intensely missing her and wanting to hug her up when she wants to be left alone. After a few months we decide to pull her, to change schools and use our privilege to get her a second chance instead of struggling through.
The months pass and she adjusts to the new school. There are higher expectations for kids’ behavior, the academic end of things are rigorous - something she’s craved, but things are bit more homogeneous, culturally and socioeconmically. She feels safer, but there are costs.

I hoped the worst was behind us, then on the weekend before the last day week of school the girl child cranked it up to another level. On Monday morning she left for school with a shaved head. I spent Saturday night tossing and turning, worrying something silly before I could finally drop off to sleep. She had wanted to do this for a year or so and a classmate shaved her head in solidarity with a friend who has cancer. So the girl child had been asking and asking and begging for a week. I picked her up from her Omom’s Sunday night and she was in tears the whole way home, “Why won’t you guys let me do what I want to do?” I tried to answer her truthfully. A while back I told her I thought she should wait till middle school, to make sure shaving her head was something she really wanted to do and hoping she would know more about how to deal with the world’s irritation at her need to question rigid gender roles. With the woman child in middle school now, I realize how flawed my thinking was because 9-14 is all about insecurity. So I ended up telling her I was afraid for her, I didn’t want her to get her feelings hurt. I didn’t want kids to pick on her. It’s been a year of that already, not so bad at this new school, but I’ve been here every day when she has come home from school in tears. Ultimately, I’m worried about the girl child’s mental health in the end of all this sorting out.

A part of me says - okay she’s got a short haircut and she dresses in “boys” clothes – whatever the fuck that means in our family’s paradigm. She already catches the shit. What am I afraid of? Why does this feel bigger? She’s fucking eight years old!

In the car, driving home from the Omom’s she says, “It’s like when you’re doing a math problem and you see it on the paper and you know the answer and you just want to write it down, but the teacher says wait and think about it, take your time. How long do you have to think about things when you know the answer?” She added a few “I’ll be okay mom!”’s for good measure and “I like looking like a boy even when I cry about it sometimes.” So I did it shorter and shorter and then got Sal to go shorter when I felt like I would lose it. And she smiled and was thrilled with her reflection in the mirror.

I did weep on Sal’s shoulder after she’d gone to bed, crying myself to sleep. I’m angry that I’m having a hard time with this. I’m grieving that she’s rejecting girlhood in this way. I don’t think this is about sexuality for the girl child; it’s gender right now. All gender. I want to be this supportive, loving mama. I want to be her champion, her cheerleading section. She is a take-on-the-world-and-ask-questions-later kind of kid; she puts her head through walls and then grieves every scrape. It’s coming together for her that the world is a messy, unjust place and it seems to break her heart and then leave her testing, pushing the boundaries.
I recognize my fear as a similar shifting of thighs on those community center couches during the fall. It’s all about internalized homophobia and class and guilt. Swallowing-the-queermama-blame-whole kinda fear. There is a fear of not being able to pass that’s tied in to whiteness too. Unconsciously, as a queer white lady I rely the anonymity of skin privilege to pass as middlish class and somebody’s mini-van-drivin’ mama – which looks like heterosexual at times. Part of my fear is about the girl child not being able to pass as “normal” that I won’t be able to pass and we will be out there for the picking. Spiritually and intellectually I want to reject this illusion of safety. I want to be braver. Less raw. Less confused and embarrassed. All this ugliness to face and I can’t protect them from so much, and I remind myself that I’m not supposed too. That, again, it’s all about the process, the joy, the struggle, and standing next to them, to her through it all.

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4kids3pets2moms1Churin' Education Issue

2004-10-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

School of Fishing
By Sarah Talbot

It’s the first real day of teacher summer – the summer that lags just a little behind kid summer and ends just a bit ahead – and I’m watching a little boy ecstatic over a fish his father just caught. The boy is beside himself, jabbering and yelling across the beach to an uncle. He’s poking the fish, and the men are trying to get him to quiet down. Fish don’t bite when you make a lot of noise. I wonder what the boy is learning.
When I was a little girl, my father fished. On the luckiest mornings I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes with a smelly sweatshirt sleeve and impaled a worm on a hook. I cherish those mornings now, remember them whenever I feel cold and smell low tide. I wonder what I learned out there, being silent in the wet mornings.
On this morning beach I’m thinking about learning. Maybe it’s just my natural teacherly state in June. Every year I question my role in my students’ learning and wonder if I’m helping them learn more or impeding them from learning the things that really matter. Here on the beach, the little boy is truly alive. I think he’s learning about being alive in the morning.

When I fished, I learned how beings give their lives so that others may live. I learned to kill worms and to bang fish heads on rocks to kill them quickly and without anger. I learned how to be quiet inside because the fish can hear the voice in your head. But I never talked about any of that with my father, and though I’ve remembered those mornings a thousand times, I never thought about them as learning. I doubt this little boy is wondering what he’s learning. I doubt anyone will ask him tonight what he learned today. My father never asked me what I learned fishing, but I don’t doubt that if I ask him whether he thought our fishing together mattered to my development, he will say yes.

I wondered what I was learning in school, though, every time I looked up at the clock to see whether the day was over yet. I wondered every night when my father asked me. And now that I am in charge of teaching, I ask my students what they’ve learned regularly; in fact, I require that they show empirical evidence of their learning and articulate the ways their skills have improved. And that, I think, is why I keep teaching: because I can believe they have learned something.

I don’t know if my students fish. Sitting on the beach this morning, I think that perhaps some of them don’t. They should. They would learn a lot fishing, and I think many of them would enjoy it. The little boy in front of me is doing a fast dance over a shell his brother brought him. His father is disparaging over the two hours it took to catch that one lousy fish. If my students were here it would take far longer. There were 120 of them, because I lucked out with small classes this year. I might be able to teach three at a time to bait their hooks, then I could dispatch those kids to teach others, but they would be inefficient because they just learned themselves. My father baited the hooks for me the first few times, though it was a skill I mastered by the time I was four. There would be several kids, maybe half, who already knew how to bait hooks, and they might be bored and think the other kids were stupid for not knowing how to do this simple thing. Some of them would bait hooks for friends, but few would bother to teach another kid, even if I told them to. The kids with the skill would be wealthier and better cared for than those without it. I’d focus on remediating, and at the end of the day, when I asked the kids what they learned, many of them would reply, “nothing.” And just as
when my students say that in my classroom, this would be a fair response.

Back in my room, I don’t teach fishing. I teach my students to write. I teach them to use people as the subjects of sentences and to use actions as the verbs. I teach them about semi-colons and rhetorical arguments and to reflect on their experiences. I teach them to state their theses and support them with evidence. They learn those things, some slowly, some quickly, some in frustration, none with abandon. While they are occasionally excited when some frustrating concept finally comes clear, they never screech with glee as the little boy on the beach is now doing, having found a crab. My students never screech with glee over their school learning.
I loved my father when he taught me to fish, though he criticized and shushed and enforced the rules, but I hated him when he tried to help me with my homework, when he tried the same techniques. I say tried, not because he didn’t have the skills I was trying to master, but because he never taught me anything when he helped me with my homework. He made me mad, and he got madder. We gave up doing schoolwork together before I reached junior high. It was just too hard on our relationship. We also stopped fishing together. I’m not sure if there’s just a developmental age at which a person does not want to fish with their father any more, but I suspect that homework ruined it for us.

My homework rarely confused me. For the most part, I didn’t need any help, only time and space to think quietly. I didn’t get the time and space necessary to empirical reflection in my house. We were too busy living there. TV and radio blared, music played, people talked loudly. I lived in apartments and mobile homes, and quiet just wasn’t an option in my world. At least not away from school.

I remember Ms. Karaholis’ classroom and its quiet. She enforced a certain amount of quiet through our day, including 30 minutes of silent reading time. It was the kind of quiet that you get in a classroom full of bodies shuffling and turning pages and sniffing. I loved that quiet. If I’d been alone in the silent room I never could have concentrated – the silence would have been far too distracting – but the comforting sounds of reading, thinking kids calmed me down. I knew we weren’t hiding from anything dangerous, we were just enjoying an inner quiet that we didn’t find elsewhere. We were making the sounds of thoughtful reflection: the sounds of bodies so absorbed with the turning wheels of thought that they simply went about their business. You couldn’t fish with that kind of noise. The fish hear the metaphysical cacophony in your head and swim to safety.

Some precious days my classroom is like that for 30 minutes at a time. Though the days are segmented so badly that we can never concentrate for more than that, some days for 30 minutes I hear the sounds of students so absorbed in ideas that they’d scare the fish away. Students discussing, writing, thinking, debating, talking, and reading make an inordinate amount of noise. On these days they bust out of the cool shell we teach them to build and I hear the ways they care about the world and each other. A girl will answer a question I’ve asked with some seriousness, and some boy will pop off – call her a commie or something. Then I can question the boy about what he said, take it seriously, and draw him in. I can ask him to take the girl’s comment seriously. They melt when I accuse them of important thought. And pretty soon, teenagers are discussing, say, the political implications of Zora Neal Hurston’s work in terms of it’s communist values, and though no one is dancing with glee, I feel the buzzing of their dendrites in my feet.

If these kids were learning anywhere else but in a public school, they would not have this conversation – they would miss the bizarre combination of diversity, bigotry, structure and chaos in my room that allows that boy to have developed the unique social skill of calling a serious girl a commie. They would have too much homogeneity to disagree on matters of any importance. These kids only get the chance to learn this way at school.

I finished grading reflections just yesterday. The students claim to have learned all kinds of useful skills, everything from mastering the thesis statement, to reading deeply, to using commas. While I’m not certain that they did, indeed, master all (any?) of those things, at least they learned that some one wants them to. Even those who learned nothing else learned to write a fictional account of their learning that fits a particular set of criteria. I think it’s worth knowing, but they inspire no buzz with lies. Those students who spent their evenings inventing skills and thoughts they could have had, perhaps, would have been better off fishing.
So on the first day of summer, I sit here on the beach bringing my two worlds together to compare them. I’ve spent my life on beaches and in school, and though I don’t fish any more, I think I might start up. I don’t like baiting the hooks, don’t like thinking about the sacrifice the worm and the fish make so I can eat a truly nourishing meal, but maybe I should think about those things. Maybe I need to feel the life of another being leave my hands now and again in order to remember my own life. You don’t get that at school. At school you get the ability to identify that experience and to write it down so someone you don’t know and maybe don’t even like can think about it with you. And you can’t catch that on a hook.

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Writer Mamas Weekend Special Issue Sample 2

2004-10-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Reaching Back
By Yantra Bertelli

And the grandma woman shouts
I am your strength.
And the grandma child clucks
I am your tears.
And the mama woman weeps
I’ve shared your hope.
And the mama child whispers
I don’t know you.
And the girl woman chimes in
I remember you.
And the girl child giggles
I am you.

Eight years back I stand searching into darkness, gazing at an orange tree surrounded by cement and rotting fruit resting at her roots. I bounce my baby, one hand under her bottom and one hand across her middle in the bedroom near a backyard-facing window. We’re hiding. A slow deep tone pushes from my throat as I attempt to reach as low as my voice can handle, slurred gurgles, soothing her tired eyelids and lulling her to sleep. She appreciates random glum notes and constant, steady, tedious bouncing. Up and down. Up and down. The tree empties herself in late spring, letting go, her branches stretching toward the sky. And I’m holding on knowing in every inch of flesh that she’s leaving. My baby. Slowly.

I hold up my mama body with a child’s remembrance. The top of my little girl head seen from above, a part separating yellow sprouts of hair from a swirling cowlick and pushing it toward my forehead, toward my brow. I follow a banana slug. I measure steps beside its glistening trail, watching our individual progressions across red earth.

I piece together visceral memory, physical remembrance and accentuate the details, remind myself with picture album recall. Musty earth and my girl child hands threaded through each other around my mother’s thigh, hiding beneath her heavy skirt. There is a wide porcelain sink sectioned off in the center, spacious enough to scrub two babes at the same time and exposed pipes underneath. My mama washes dishes while I crave a closeness I don’t know how to satiate. But maybe that’s not memory, maybe that’s the years calling themselves into a single moment. One flashback. A tiny gas stove shoved snug next to a sink and a partial wall separating our shower and toilet from the kitchen. There are no doors, only doorways. And my memory recreates a dirt floor, tiny granules of sand caught between toes, and warmth radiating from something more along the lines of unfinished wood than my powdery granules.

Her movements, her anxieties escape the tense sway of her hips and push to the tips of my girl child fingers. I am an extension of her flesh, the weighty sigh escaping across her lips. Her fingers slip and dishes clatter against the bottom of the sink.
yellow, carefully combed out, nestled behind my left ear.
Deep blue eyes
round shiny cheeks
freckles and a long chin
dippin’ shy toward my collarbone.
Corduroy hand-me-downs
crisp brown oranges,
a raucous combination of florals and strips.
Bare feet
dirty feet
and crusted red earth shoved beneath girl child fingernails.

Once my mama made me a white cotton with purple flowers and gathered straps nightgown. It brushed my ankles and felt airy underneath. I remember walking flatfooted across the cool hardwood floor to the bathroom off the laundry room, in a different house altogether. I watched the fabric move against my legs, toes peaking out. I loved that nightgown. I felt like a little bird, crisp, new, a pretty little girl twisting hair around her fingers.

My mama matches her fabrics to long chestnut hair and yellow-pink skin; synchronizing her mama self into a cool auburn hue except for the washed almost white blue eyes. Open wide. Staring with an intensity that hushes her girl child into silence and a firm grip.

The first time I understand myself as separate from my mother’s body, I’m afraid and calm and absorbing the delicateness of my surroundings through pores. We had a neighbor that shot birds out of trees near the house-cabin we lived in on Dr. Diane’s property. The same old lady pet doctor that fed me moldy toast because she couldn’t see too clearly anymore and promised me that I could feed her parakeets even though they preferred her soothing chatter. My mama would tell me not to go far, not to go near the sleepy drunk’s cabin. I call to my girl child thighs and the long grass tickling as I move away from her side to wander in the yard. I’m timid. The ground is warm, like how my mother’s embrace might feel. I lie inside the chaos of blades and inhale the rich dirt, listening to my brother protest something while riding my mother’s hip. My hair moves back and forth against my shoulders, tickles my nose, and I watch the grass bend faintly in the barely noticeable breeze.

I remember my mama leaving me the first time when I was five and in the first grade. She picked me up from school and I wore a frilly white number, a dress hanging down to my ankles at my Aunt’s shotgun outdoor wedding, but now it just covered my knees. A slight yellow stain spread wide across my backside. My teacher-fear prevented me from requesting a trip to the bathroom earlier in the day. I climbed into the car and my mama pinched my thigh, grasped little girl flesh between thumb and index finger.

"Why did you do that?”

Her embarrassed flush, cheekbone-to-cheekbone, imagining me all day at school, the stench, my pretending that nothing happened, denial and silence.

I left my baby girl when she was four months old, four hours a day, five days a week, in the arms of her other mother. My breasts ached. Her other mom held her close, propped her limp melting baby girl body against shoulder and cupped her hand around the bulging diaper. I walked through the door, cried the five minutes it took to get to work, and called twice during my shift. Each time my arm accidentally brushed against my nipples I’d feel a twinge and then soak the breast pads a little more. When I got home the baby girl was waiting. She had cast away the bottle, rejected the Dixie cup and eyedropper, refusing to be cajoled into placidity. She was pissed.

My mama left me over and over again since my pee-stained moment. My mama left me on the other side of the bedroom door as she wept. Her anger louder, her frustration like tiny shards ripping down her cheeks. My mama left me when she looked me over and pointed out all my “flaws”. When she felt the inside of my waistband round my middle. My mama left me for jogging an hour and a half a day. When she measured food, when she cried because my brother or I ate the last of something she had her hunger on. When I was eight or nine and she stopped feeding us, left us to forage in the cupboards and fridge. My mama left me when she stole food in the next aisle at the grocery store, when she forced us to walk faster to work up a sweat, to work harder. My mama left me at eleven when she told me she couldn’t hold my hand in public any more. My mama left me when she escaped the car, the house, her children, afraid of herself, looking for somewhere to run to. My mama left me as she laid in front of the T.V. near midnight after she ate a half-gallon of ice cream, afraid the depth of her sadness was too much to bear, oblivious to the girl child in the hall, watching, too scared to go to sleep.

Afraid her mama might be gone in the morning.

My baby girl is now a girl child, not yet woman child, sandy short hair, freckles, deep blue eyes. She shrugs her shoulders, tears up and says things like “It feels like I’m different than everyone else,” and “I look in the mirror and I don’t look like I feel.” I’m always amazed when she articulates her claim to this sense of disconnection. Her isolation. A sense of how she sees self and how the world’s image reflected back on her doesn’t seem to fit. I’m reminded of my mother’s running. My silence. The future struggles I won’t be able to shield her from and the gravity of her understanding.

I have left my baby girl over and over again since her four months old rage. I’ve left her out of impatience, exhaustion, fear, because I was too angry to stand in the same room. I’ve left her so I could care for her siblings, care for my body, my mind, to spend a little time with my partner. I left parts of her when I moved us hundreds of miles away from her other mom and her extended family. I leave her when I push her away because I’m afraid. When I just can’t wrap my head around her anger, her complete inability to hold it together and swallow her pain. And she’s leaving me too.

Leaving my paradigm, my stretched belly, her snug fit resting against my curves. She’s leaving me for size ten slim pants and shoes bigger than her older brother’s. She leaves me each time I fail at answers or understanding or knowing what it feels like. She leaves me to see her girl woman self, to contemplate her differences, to become the woman who is altogether separate from me, but connected, apart enough to comprehend her uniqueness. And she senses the ghost umbilical cord still tugging at her middle and the tension feels contradictory to her growing up process.

In one of the multiple phone calls we have every week my mama and I talk about the girl child’s rage, her discontent. My daughter is digging her heals in at every request, playing a martyr’s tune each time I ask her “what’s up?” I visualize my mama nodding at the other end of the line, folding clothes, and getting a little distracted by the breeze that knocks the mini blinds against the window sill. She’s quiet, almost laughing to herself, comparing my daughter’s behavior with that of her own. My mama encourages me, tells me, “You’re doing a good job. You handle it so well. It’s really hard.” And I don’t know what to say.
There is nothing to say.
My measured guttural song catches at the bottom of my throat.
Sits there uneasy, lost, and without a release.
I will self to trust
trust our collective pasts
and allow the girl child to push her self
against our steady rhythms.

Read more in the Special Issue!

Writer Mamas Weekend Special Issue

2004-10-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

Between
By Sarah Talbot

The bench my mother bought on sale the first time I moved home is olive with age. I am, for the moment, still young. The boards on my bare thighs itch for sap. The varnish is long gone, but when it failed the wood remembered what circulation feels like.

I remember what circulation feels like because my own drones on interminably. I wish for a reprieve from the warmth my body generates, which matches the sun’s perfectly today.
Why do I always end a marriage in the summer? In the winter I could stay numb, stay in the familiar house. But for the second time I retreat to this childhood home to seek asylum from a failed husband in the full light of summer.

Caleb runs down the hill to the barn, a matched pair of dandelions lead him like he was a water witch with a pronged stick. It’s the third night he’s slept only three hours, and I can barely look at him with his blinding flowers in the sun. They wave and tug him toward the frog pond, the old well house; water to drown in.
Though I’m numb from the light and far too tired to do it, I raise my pulsing body up and walk after him. Lack of sleep makes me feel every muscle tug against each tendon. Fighting gravity speeds the blood through my veins and I feel it pushing against my skin as if it’s searching for an exit. I walk across the scratchy backyard anyway. I’m barefoot and ashamed that even though my very blood would desert me, I still fill with pleasure from the cool moss growing in the shade of the barn. Can a woman like me allow herself pleasure even now, while in retreat from the last failed attempt at a normal life? With no sleep and a son like this? I suppose nothing could block the relief of cool moss.

The barn, which is really a garage built too far from the pocked dirt road to be used for a car, smells of rat shit and shade. I peer in to see whether the dandelions led my son to seek this dangerous shelter. My father’s cut one rotted support beam out, leaving a disaster waiting for an autistic little boy. But my Caleb’s not there; only the relieving dark, the empty rabbit hutches, the sweet dirt floor greet me.

I push the stiff door closed and pad past the long-dead Chrysler. Moss grows in the seems between pink metal parts so the colors of the rotting car match my thrift store dress. I cross a fallen tree my father will bark and treat and raise with pulleys to fix the barn, even though he could hire some one to tear the structure down and build a new one. As I step over this wind’s victim, I don’t yet know my father has marked the corpse for utility. It will be a year before his plan sees its own end, but the barn will stand and wait and surprise us all with patience.

Sticker vines poke through the moss on the way down the other side of the hill. I savor their sting – thorns for the crowns on my toes. This steep hill is unnaturally green in the full sun. It burns my pupils. Scares me. But Caleb follows his flowers closer to danger, farther from me. I have to follow, though I consider finding his body first. It’s brief. I decide, mind you – the decision fires electrically, consciously through my personal brain. I decide to go drag him up to safety.

Twenty feet, a curve in the wide path a logging truck cut thirty years ago, and the sun vanishes behind third growth. It must be ten degrees cooler, and I no longer squint. Pine needles are kinder than the sticker vines on the hill. I almost forget why I came here and savor the pleasure of my feet on the planet, but then I see him.
He’s pulling lichen off Mt. Morgan – the big rock named after my brother, a lost child of some long-gone glacier sunk deep in black soil and green moss. He’s cleaning a place for himself on its jagged side as if it were a father. His shoes are gone.

I can still lift him, so I do it to save his tender feet. He rides my left hip – the one that holds children - up through darkness, over vines, to the soft moss before the barn, the top of the hill, past the bench and through the sliding glass door where I seek asylum in the house my father built.

When I was a girl, watching him bark the log and mill the boards and lift them into place, I thought of digging myself under the dirt and melting into the hill. I thought of becoming the place that my father loved so carefully and well. My mother’s garden would grow from my body, my father’s saw would cut trees I pushed into the sky for him. Now I can’t responsibly imagine my disappearance; fatherless, my son would die without me here to care for him. He only has me stumbling numb to pull him out of the wilderness. This hill, I think, will have to become a new kind of dream.

Read more in our Writer Mamas Weekend Special Issue featuring Cherry's and Sarah Tavis' work too!

4kids3pets2moms1rejection

2004-10-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

Writing Anyway
Beginnings

The baby is sleeping. She’s two weeks old, and has been silent for at least 15 minutes. It’s an eternity. I haven’t been dressed or left the house since she was born upstairs. I’m wearing the same cotton nightgown I wore yesterday, and I smell sour and miserable. My hair rats around my shoulders, threatens to dread; my teeth, brushed four times today, feel soft and furry. A thick pad keeps blood off the furniture, feels mean and bulky where my stitches are healing.

I don’t know what to do.

I’m sitting at the little desk in the living room. I’ve sent the T.V. to the dump, and I can’t bring myself to read. Everything makes me weep. The Teen Beat Magazine my friends brought to cheer me brings convulsive sobs. The mere cover of old an National Geographic elicits a deluge. It’s not a safe world to bring a child into, and she knows it. She has already cried angry and deep like a blues singer, though nothing bad has happened to her yet. I take it personally, but I’m so sick of crying and bleeding and spurting milk across the room I don’t care if she doesn’t love me. I’m sick of my smell. I’m sick of my baby, and I know I am the Worst Mother In the World. I cannot possibly do this; she will die in my care, I’m sure of it. I can barely nurse, which I’ve told my friends is the most natural thing in the world, and so she will starve. I am unnatural.

An old journal sits on the little desk where I left it a month ago. I filled it with fluffy-cloud dreams of how lovely my baby would be, and as I read it, the words cut holes in my reality – the baby is lovely, but so much more than that. I read passionate treatises to art I wrote back when, and maudlin descriptions of the way I MUST WRITE BECAUSE I MUST BREATHE. I can’t believe I ever wrote these dramatic lies. I know that I claimed necessity in my panic to continue writing after the baby, but I haven’t written in two weeks, which proves I don’t need to write. I haven’t died yet.

I open the spiral to a blank page, begin to write a letter for my baby to read when she’s older. Maybe when she’s a mother. I tell her I love her. I apologize. I try to describe the visceral need for her that has swallowed the happy, confident person I used to be. I try to describe the physicality of loving her, the stabbing regret of having birthed her into a world that makes her cry.

As I write, the flow of tears begins, then stops. I keep writing. My face dries. I fill a page. I fill two. My shoulders fall. I stand and stretch. I take a shower and put on a pink dress my aunt sent. I smell like soap and my aunt’s laundry detergent. I open a door and let in the cold world. The baby wakes. I nurse her for two and an half minutes – 17.5 minutes less than the book says she’s supposed to nurse, then write a one-sentence explanation of my epiphany to myself – articulating it so that I will not loose it. I don’t have to write, but silence really is death; a slow drowning, stinking, pathetic death.

I pencil onto the blue lines: “Death is always an option."

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I dissect the six by four inch cream pages in my Holly-Hobbyesque diary etching a distinct place in the memories of my childhood. A bonneted-doll-girl holding a few pale violet pansies stands in the center of the cream blue-rosebud speckled vinyl cover, locking clasp on the side, clover shaped key tucked safely underneath my foam mattress. The first few words were usually “Dear God”. A clear penned “D”, a careful straight line and rounded curve forming the letter’s belly. “I’m sorry I don’t believe in you. I know I’m supposed to, but I just can’t. I don’t”. The last line typically more erratic, scratchy, “I hate this diary”. I erased and started over again, the words always eluding the angst I tried to recreate on paper, ending with a sheepish voice inside my head saying, “You can’t do it Yantra”. I couldn’t write what I really wanted to write. I wasn’t skilled enough, I didn’t know how.

My seven-year-old daughter Aiden writes vignettes on bubble-gum-pink stationary. Scalloped sides and curvy corners, her stories centered almost perfectly on the page, “Once upon a time there was a girl named Emily. She lived in the woods with a little cottage. One night when everyone was sleeping she sneaked outside and went into the woods it was dark she had packed a bag with a jacket, flashlight, shoes, and binoculars. She saw a black hole she turned on her flashlight it was a bears cave she herd roars….” Erasure smears dot the sentences, thinning the paper's fine pulp and her carefully articulated imaginative observations. Each “n” lifts slightly at its end, almost lilting as the tail curls upward like she’s been practicing the raising of her pencil over and over. I wonder if the individual letters fail her sentiment, the bubbling expression hidden between her dark woods and the mysterious cave.

She unearths the past, layering memories haphazardly without regard to time sequence or poignancy. She shows me her story, performs every line and I visit my mother’s fairly contentious relationship to “correct” grammar alongside dad’s crumpled notes and my Holly-Hobbyesque diary.
My daughter’s attention to straight lines seems oddly related to the rashes that crawled down my mother’s arms. Patchy raised irritation, anxiety, mouthfuls of defeat ingested and oozing through her pores. When I was in elementary school my mother attempted pre-colligate English courses repeatedly at the local community college. Her stints were cut short by eczema and frustration. She avoided completely swallowing the line that she merely wasn’t good enough, not smart enough, or just too old in her mid-twenties to apply herself to commas and grammatically correct sentences, telling the air falling around her shoulders that her “brain just doesn’t work that way”. Her “College isn’t for everyone” resonating in each corner of my kid-reality. So far it looked like it wasn’t for anyone in my family.

The peeling erasure marks, my daughter’s self-corrections, echo the notes my father wrote to excuse my lateness to school, notes growing more numerous as the years passed. From his work truck’s single seat he’d write a rough draft of a four-lined note. Then a final copy. He corrected any mistakes caught, changing one word for another. I’d watch him, impatient, nervous, sitting on the floor among files and drapery cord spools. As a kid mixtures of frustration, embarrassment, and an insistence that my parents were merely
misunderstood permeated each careful interaction with the outside world. It seemed like we were always hiding some lack, running away from a language that threatened to expose our ugliness.

continued in issue #1