I have something to say

“But I have to say something! I need to speak!” This is what I hear from my 3-year-old little mister after I tell him, “No, that’s enough, do not ask again”, after he has asked fifty million times to eat tons of candy, or if he can watch television at midnight, or if he can take off all his clothes in public.

“I need to speak.” He tells me this through little clenched teeth, like he’s holding his words in and if he doesn’t utter them they will explode out of his chest. “Okay”, I tell him, “Say it.” And he will, for the five million and oneth time, ask me for something that he knows he will not get.

And this is me. I stopped praying after my sister died. I had been raised to believe that if I had faith enough to fill a mustard seed, I could move mountains. I prayed every night. I prayed for forgiveness for every sin that I imagined I did. I prayed for blessings for everyone. I prayed prayers of thanks if something good happened to me. But mostly I prayed when I wanted things to change.

I can remember the first time I prayed desperately and vehemently. I was probably about six or seven years old, and in an attempt to bring my parents some joy, I prayed that I would wake up the next morning and be a baby again. An infant. I wanted them to smile and hold me and forget any troubles they ever had. I wanted to make them happy. I can remember praying so hard that sweat rolled down my back. I can remember lying in bed and crying and pleading. I had faith to fill ten mustard seeds.

When I woke up the next morning, still very much six years old, I laid in bed and sobbed.

I prayed when my sister was dying. I prayed and I begged. I prayed out loud in the hospital. I cursed, and I knew. I knew that my prayers were just whispers. I knew they weren’t going anywhere. And maybe it was the doubt that came in when I woke up in my bed at six years old, but I knew I was all alone.

When my sister died I felt completely betrayed and lied to. Everything I had ever been told was a lie, a trick, and I felt so supremely ignorant. There was no giant man in white robes with outstretched arms who could both love me if I obeyed, and torture me if I sinned. I had been made to feel guilt for actions that were natural. I had been told stories that warped my perception of who I am. I felt full of rage for being made to feel that I was being taken care of by a giant father, and that the sins that I had committed were causing me to suffer.

I felt cut off and I refused to ever pray again.

Sometimes prayers would enter into my mind and I would stop them, “No. That’s not real. No one is there to hear that.” And I would move on and go forward except with something that felt like a sore and tender part in my chest and emotions that were almost always on the verge of tears.

When people would talk about God or religion I would smile, but inside I would think of their ignorance and pity them. All the while something inside of me felt like a rubber band being pulled tighter and tighter. Something like anxiety and fear and anger. Like a dog in a corner.

This past year, though, I have been allowing myself to let go. The caged dog inside of me yells out, “I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY! I NEED TO SPEAK!”, and I say, “Okay, it’s okay to believe in God. It’s okay to pray. You can pray.” And slowly, I have allowed myself to whisper prayers.

I don’t pray like I used to. When I used to pray I would imagine a giant man with a beard sort of smiling at me and sort of frowning who would nod as my words entered his ears. Now, when I pray, I think of the stars. I think of the blackness of the sky and I think of spaces that exist deep inside of the earth. I imagine energy flowing out of me. I imagine all the people of the earth and all of the animals and I pray to them. I wish for them. I used to start off my prayers with “Dear God” and ended them with “Amen”. Now, when I need to speak, I just speak. I speak almost constantly. I look at the sunshine and I thank it for it’s beauty. I look at the road and imagine the hands that built it and thank those people for their hands. I look at my sweet little babies and I thank their souls and I thank their hands and I thank their noses. I also thank myself, I thank myself for allowing me to speak. I thank myself for allowing me to believe in a God, and for allowing that God to be something different than the God that I was always told about. And I thank the world for teaching me that maybe even if I ask five million and one times for something I may never get it, but that it’s okay to speak anyways.

And so, I have something to say, and that something is thank you. Thank you for you beauty, your kindness, and your prayers, and thank you for allowing me to speak.

Lately

Oh, hello old friend. Fancy seeing you here. I know I haven’t been around in a while. It’s not that I don’t want to. In fact, the exact opposite. There’s not too many a day that pass by where I don’t have an idea that comes into my head that I want to take here to transmit to the rest of the world. Except, once I have the “time” to put that idea down there is something that stops me. Like, writing up lesson plans for the next day, completing art projects, convincing the Jude to sleep/shower/put on underpants, brief and wonderful dances with that thing we used to call sleep. I don’t necessarily feel busy, but maybe I am. I get to do this job where I work with these really beautiful and wonderful and infuriating young people that I love, and I get to spend the vast majority of the day knee deep in cuddles and giggles and drool and poop.

It’s not bad.

But, I guess it doesn’t give me a whole lot of wiggle room. The Jude, in finding himself as a toddler and therefore and adult, tells me more about life every day. Lately, when I find myself having to take toys that are thrown at the baby or food that has been smushed into everywhere, he pushes out his lip and says to me, “Mama, you just broke my heart.” And it breaks my heart. I imagine him with his lover far far faaaaarrr in the future and I almost pity the person. He’ll be like his father. Too charming. Too silly. Absolutely beautiful and special, and they will be so deeply in love that any indiscretion he commits will be automatically forgiven. I imagine that he may break some hearts.

The baby princess is now noisy. She sits on her own and chirps her morning afternoon and evening songs until someone presents her with whatever her chirpy little mouth desires. Her chubby rolls are lasting and get coos and smiles everywhere we go. I like to kiss them while her scratchy little paws pull out clumps of my hair. 

My heart feels sort of torn. Everyone says that when you have more than one little person gripping at you day and night your love is not divided, but multiplied. I think of this saying a lot. I feel like my love is multiplied. In fact, I feel this overflowing of love. This strange happiness follows me everywhere and makes me believe that only good things will happen from here on out. But, I still feel like I’m gypping one kid when I do not slather this abundance of love all over them and instead dividing it up between them. There is more love, but it is still divided. Like, when we go to bed. Sweet baby D goes down around 8:30. We snuggle and we nurse and she’s out within about five minutes. Snuggled up around her little chubby baby body and smelling her little pheromone head and breathing in cadence with her short baby breaths without fail sends me into the first phases of the REM cycle. And then, without fail, Jude comes with pitter patter toes and a three year old voice and three-year-old bouncing feet and even when I start to send some kind of prayer plea desperate cry to the universe he jumps up into the bed and on my head. At this moment my love feels divided. I feel like I want to stay curled up with baby D and warm and dream about mermaids and pizza all night, and I want the three year old Jude to climb into his own bed and settle in and just go to sleep.

It is at this moment that I usually cry. I cry those real desperate oh-my-god-what-have-I-done-this-is-not-life tears. Then I slide my arm out from under baby D, and I rub my eyes, and I entertain and brush teeth and read books and finally finally finally lay my head down beside him. And then, we cuddle up, and before bed he rubs his nose on mine, for snuzzies, and love is multiplied once again.

So, what is feminism anyways?

What is feminism anyways? One of the girls in my prevention class asked me this the other day. She has this long brown hair that reaches down her back and sometimes she wears red lipstick and Metallica shirts.

Feminism is the idea that women have the same rights as men. It was the only thing that I could think to tell her, the easiest way I could describe this idea, even though I knew that it left questions unanswered and that it didn’t fully answer her question to begin with. Do you think that women today are treated the same as men are? I asked the question to all of them.

Yeah, I mean, women can do the same things that men can. I mean, we gained the right to vote a long time ago, right? They told me that, and various other things about women’s suffrage and how we can go to work, just like men, and then the conversation switched to boys and boyfriends and I had the fleeting idea that maybe, possibly, they were right. That in their world women and men were treated the same. Maybe they were too young to understand the various inequalities, and maybe they were young enough to change those things and to live in a world where feminism doesn’t exist, where it doesn’t need to.

Then we talked about one boy, one boy that they talk about a lot, who has lots of girlfriends. Girlfriends that he cheats on and more waiting in the wing. They told me that if he attended my class he would tell me I have nice legs.

Why do you think these girls stay with this boy that treats them badly?

And they told me because they really like him, and then, with more prompting, because they may have low self esteem.

What if the roles were reversed? What if the girl were the one with lots of boyfriends? What would people think of that?

Well, then she’s a hoe.

And my heart broke a little then. At twelve and thirteen these girls, most of whom have never had a boyfriend and have never been through heartbreak and have not yet even had a first kiss, told me without even knowing that women in their world are not equal to men. Girls are not equal to boys. Some part of me had held on to the idea that my little princess bird could understand that she is a girl woman child, that she will be different than her brother and that she will grow differently and that she will understand differently, but that the rights that they share will be the same. I had hoped that maybe her world wouldn’t need feminism.

I knew that even after I explained the unfairness in that situation, and how harmful the word “hoe” is in the first place that it was one of those conversations that will take years to catch in their minds, if at all.

When I left class that night I stopped at the gas station to fill up so that I didn’t end up stranded on the side of the road. When I walked in to pay I blushed. I wore my work clothes, a conservative skirt with tights and a button up blouse and as I handed my money to the cashier he mentioned that I was “Dressed real nice”, as I turned to walk out a man nodded at me, another winked. I’ll be honest when I say I was embarrassed. Ashamed that I had worn heals to work, that maybe my skirt was too short. I’ll be honest when I say a very real part of me was terrified. It was 7 o’clock at night and my car is small and old and not very fast, it was dark out and cold and had any one of those men wanted to attack me, wanted to act out any scene that began to play out in their heads when I walked into the gas station, they very easily could have. I was defenseless. Because I am a woman and I am small I am almost always defenseless.

Girls from my counseling class, girls and women everywhere, and my tiny Wren baby, and even more my beautiful little boy-this is why we still need feminism.

Feminism is the idea that no matter how small bodied we are, no matter the outfit we choose to adorn our bodies with, no matter the way we walk or drive or speak, we have the right to be viewed as something other than an object. Feminism is the idea that I should feel safe when walking into a gas station. It’s the idea that men do not claim us or own us simply by looking at us or ever at all. It’s the idea that rape is rape and there is no in-between-and those that say otherwise are ignorant, because no matter how drunk a person is, and no matter how much make-up that person wears or doesn’t wear it is never okay to take from them the right to be a person and not a thing that has been put to use.

This is the frustrating thing about my job. I feel like most of the time when I’m confronted with these issues from these young people I can’t think of the right thing to say fast enough and before I know it the conversation has turned to boys or clothes or how “rancid” so and so is. How do you empower people this age? How do you change what their parents have told them and what they have seen on t.v. and heard on the internet? How do I, being a woman and small and maybe too young and inexperienced tell them that I’m learning with them (of course without telling them I’m learning with them), change things?

 

My dreams

At this moment my life is kind of sort of playing out like some of my dreams come true. I can’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t want to be a mother. As a child I wrapped my arms around my dolls at night, one cradled around the waist, one around the neck. I honestly believed that they existed past the plastic and fiber fill that they were made of and I apologized when I felt they were neglected. My little flesh and bone babies now occupy the spaces between my arms and against my chest at night. When I wrap around and cuddle them to me some part of me is that little girl again, and I hold them and smell them and whisper to them. Sometimes I feel like I can smell the Cabbage Patch kid baby powder that filled so many nights of my childhood.

It’s not just the babies, though they would be more than enough, but I have a job that I love. I get to work with Middle School youth. I get to encourage them to speak without fear, to talk about what they look like and what they feel like and their fears and their accomplishments without being afraid of being judged or laughed at. I get to pretend that I’m guiding them, when in reality I’m just listening. The girls that come to me all have names that remind me of flowers; as if their mothers could feel them growing and blossoming inside of them and they couldn’t help but form words like petals that would belong to them for the rest of their lives. The boys are skinny wonderful half-men who take pride in the cracking of their voices and the way that their skin will blister with acne, “Like a man.” They tell me that they don’t speak Spanish, but as they describe their family in far off Spanish lands their voices take on a poetic tone and every word comes out uncracked and beautiful. Every time I’m around them I smile. I can’t help but think of my beautiful little people. My tiny little rose bud who will grow and flower and my silly little man child whose voice will crack and splinter and become entirely new one day. I love their baby years and mourn every day the loss of them, but I do get excited for watching them grow and seeing the wonderful people they will turn into.

Other than the babies and the work my life has taken on this chaotic and wonderful rhythm. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in a ball of string that keeps on bouncing down a flight of stairs, wound up pieces of me being left behind. We are almost always on the move, my little family and me, and if we’re not I’m finding time between feeding the baby and snuggling the toddler to write up lesson plans and do artwork. It’s a good feeling, like my body and mind have finally settled into the kind of pace that they have needed all these years.

That’s not to say that it’s easy. Even dreams can be difficult. Our days are hectic and most of them have at least a few tears (and usually not only from the babies). And the job, even if it is a dream and I get to work hours that work for me and do things I love and have a boss that encourages and understands me, does not pay much (as is the case with most dreams). I also miss writing. I also miss reading. I also miss bathing regularly. But, I know that all of these things will appear again in due time, and in the mean time I’m living my dream.

Morning time

The Bird gets up early, around five o’clock. If I could, I would stay in bed with her and cuddle and coo and wrap the blankets around our heads until big brother woke with the rising sun. But, this is the noisiest darn baby I have ever heard. She rarely cries, and when she does it comes out in short caw-like bursts, but she twists and groans and clicks and tweets and grunts and makes all kinds of sounds that aren’t fit for a baby. Pure animal. So, in order not to annoy and wake brother before the dawn, I wrap her up and snuggle her close and we exit the big bed and carefully descend the stairs.

In the mornings my little birdy likes to look up at me with her swollen sleepy eyes and she gets this big, sweet, open-mouth smile on her face. I feel like I’ve known this smile my entire life. I felt similarly with my Jude. I don’t know if it’s some kind of spirit inside of them and if we’ve all been connected before any of us could remember  or if it’s that they resided inside of me for nine months and some of them was left there forever.

Whatever it is, the chirpy bird and I sit downstairs in the dark, and sometimes she gets some special grandpa time where they sing together and dance, and sometimes it’s just her and me. When it’s just us I look at her and I can’t help it, the words “Princess baby” just come out of my mouth. I don’t know why. She’s not actually a princess and the way that she grunts and snorts and turns red in the face as she wriggles doesn’t exactly make her of the princess and the pea variety, but I can’t stop myself. Sometimes she will give me that open mouth grin, and move her shoulders up so her chubby face is even more covered in rolls and I just Loose. My. Shit.

“Oh my God. Princess Baby, Beautiful beautiful princess baby!” I squeal it, and then I kiss her cheeks and her tummy and her arms and I rub my nose against hers and smell her hair.

But, I guess that’s my right as a parent. How could I fight it?

Brokelynn

The small man and I made a trip to the pediatrician’s office a little while ago for his three year old check up. The nurse asked us the usual stream of questions; the ones about about his eating habits, how he speaks (or a better question would be if he ever stops), sleeping, if he puts on his own pants (which, ahem, he can…but normally doesn’t), and if he had an imaginary friend. Imaginary friend? Is this a milestone of childhood? I don’t ever recall having an imaginary friend. I remember imagining that my toys were friends, but they were tangible objects that I spoke to and cuddled and pretended were real. They weren’t a non-existent entity that I named and spoke to and spoke about. My Jude had always done the same, naming and speaking to his toys, but never had what would be considered an imaginary friend. This is what I told to the nurse and this is what she quickly typed into the computer and then never mentioned again. She didn’t seem too vexed by it, but I sort of kind of was. The small mister, who has hit every development goal spot on and whom I stare at in amazement as he recounts every detail of his day, and as he uses terms like, “Doomed” correctly, was maybe possibly not doing something that he maybe possibly should be doing.

And then, the very next day, Brokelynn showed up.

Brokelynn is five then one then three. We don’t know what his hair looks like or his face, or even how tall he is. I don’t pry. Brokelynn became an inhabitant of our household after the new babe showed up, and then after the trauma of a doctors trip that included three shots. I assumed that Brokelynn would become the whipping boy. Spilled juice and torn paper and snips out of the rug could all fall on Brokelynn. I assumed that this was what imaginary friends were for. Instead, when nuts or sprinkles or something else messy ended up on the floor I jokeingly turned to the small man and asked, “Did Brokelynn do this?”, and he replied, “No, I did.”

Instead, Brokelynn exists as a kind of fair-weather friend. He shows up sometimes when we get snacks. Jude pours out juice and takes an extra cup, “For Brokelynn”. In the morning Brokelynn sometimes walks out of dreams. Sometimes he joins us for a swim. But mostly he just kind of hovers around, someone that exists and doesn’t exist and who I thought would mean more than he seems to mean.

Sometimes, all of the time, I’m sure that Brokelynn exists because Delila exists. It is at these moments that I close my eyes and in my mind the words, “What have I done what have I done what have I done” echo like rain drops. It is not that Brokelynn is bad, or even abnormal, obviously he is a part of childhood that is so normal that he is included in the three year old check-up, but he is also a very viable mark of a very huge disruption in my three year olds life. I think of us before. Our cuddle time and our walks and the talks we had that were so much more deep and important that all the talks I’ve ever had before him, and then I look down at the sweet little person in my arms, who I can’t seem to stop looking at and smiling at and cuddling, and know that those moments will never be the same.

I know in some ways that a sibling is a wonderful asset to a single child. But, I’ve never been an only child. All I ever knew was having an older sister, having someone. Most of the time I think that it’s okay. The small man seems happy, he wants to hold the baby and to kiss her and is interested in the things she does. But then, when we snuggle up in the big bed at night, things are different. The small new baby squirms and squiggles, and even though I know that she’s okay some instinct inside of me says that I need to pull her in close and pat her back and feed her until she’s calm and content and sleeping. At this time I turn, and my back is to the little man and he’s sort of alone there when once not too long ago he was the one in my arms that I was cuddling to sleep. And sometimes he cries and yells. Sometimes he gets out of bed and plays and jumps and wakes everyone up and I cry and yell. But then there are the sometimes that I whisper to him, “Come snuggle with us” and he lies on the other side of Delila, so that we’re kind of this little family sandwich with the baby between us, and then he wraps his arms around her so that he can grasp on to me, and he kisses her, and he whispers back, “I love you mommy, so much.”

And then I close my eyes and I think, “Maybe it will be okay, Maybe it will all be okay.”

Delila

Surprise Surprise Starlight Eyes

That up there is my little internet secret, making her second debut, the first being her round little face’s appearance on Facebook.

Some people may be a little confused as to why I never officially announced her, why my rounded belly and widened hips never showed up on their news feed, or why the first pictures of her, nestled inside of my womb were never proudly displayed. I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure. My first pregnancy was so public. I displayed my growing belly, my ultrasound pictures, the name my partner and I picked, love songs to my little boy. As I contemplated all of this it just felt too personal. This was mine, she was mine, and as many feelings I may have hurt by deciding not to share, I wanted to keep the little ball of human safe and secret and hidden deep inside of me.

As a result of my secrecy, or maybe just because she was tiny and petite inside of me and didn’t begin to show herself until she was nearly fully formed, I felt like maybe she didn’t exist outside of my body and maybe I didn’t exist outside of housing her. I tried to remember how I felt through my pregnancy with my sweet boy, how I felt not myself, full and round and exposed in public. This wasn’t the same. I forgot that the roundness of my body existed and along with it forgot that a tiny person would soon be naked and squawking her way into this world. I went where I needed to go and did what I needed to do and carted the Jude bug around. Squawking seemed appropriate, as her little body felt like wings that flapped and shifted and settled into my hips. The little Wren.

Her birth was nearly as secret as her formation. It happened early Tuesday morning, 1:35 am August 21st, nine days before her expected due date. It seemed like something was tight inside of me, but as I waited and snuggled the wee boy I figured I had hours left for the tightening to progress. I ran a bath and laid down in it. When I was in labor with the boy everything I read told me that water would sooth my body and the baby inside of it. When I was in labor with the boy this was not true. This time as soon as I laid myself down something that felt like the word calm surrounded me and something that sounded like thunder cracked outside. As the rain came down I wrapped around the tight little ball of my body and talked to the baby, “Little birdy, together, we’ll do this together”. By the time I realized this was “labor for real” I had about enough time to cry out to my father, hop in the car, and crawl through the emergency room door before the nurse on call delivered my little, surprisingly quiet, bird. At six lbs and 5 oz she seemed like a dream with tiny little feet that I couldn’t help but trace over and over.

So, no epidural this time either. Go figure.

Our little family is settling in together. The small mister needs maybe a little time to adjust, but that’s okay, maybe I do too. Our little bird is just as sweet and chirpy as she was in the womb.

Us