Be Vulnerable: Be light

I broke my daughter's favorite Batman cup.

I threw it against a wall, and in breaking it, I also broke her for a second. 

We had the talk about anger, and about how even adults get angry and do the wrong thing, and I kept my cool while talking but inside I am screaming at myself.

When she was born I was convinced that I wasn't supposed to be her mom. Something went wrong and she was born to me, but her real mother was out there somewhere and if I could manage to walk away, her father could find that woman.

-----

I think being a mother is the hardest thing I've ever done and that's been said so many times that I don't know how to say it again without sounding cliche. It's like someone tore off all my skin and now I'm in a job meeting trying to talk about promotion profiles and I'm bleeding and talking through the throbbing of exposed nerves, and my voice is so so far away.

Break me instead, I pleaded with god, but he or she or it or they aren't listening.

----

Their school says they notice a change in their behavior after being at my house. They say they regress. They don't tell me this directly. I walk in and out like a ghost.

They have their reasons; good reasons. They aren't trying to hurt me, but the wounds we carry are often made in truth.

---

This is how to be sad. 

---

It is empty space all around.

It is the vacuum in my chest. It is the part where I text all my friends asking them how they are doing, what they are doing, have they read any books, how's the baby, how's the family.

I sit and wait as the notifications begin to blink one by one.

And I type come.

please come.

please be here, I need you.

but what they see is that's wonderful to hear, let me know if you need anything.

----

People spend a lot of time communicating between words.

I read somewhere that some person wondered what life would be like if we could always read what was being typed and erased as those three bouncing dots appear in our text feeds. 

What would life be like to be so vulnerable? 

I'm a language teacher, and so the pursuit of words is comforting to me. Each word we say has a rich history that ties us to other cultures and other times in ways we barely understand. Little strings of history and connection like our human DNA.

Pablo Neruda called it La Palabra - The Word.

Vulnerable comes from the Latin vulnis meaning "wound."  To be vulnerable is to expose our wounds, to sit in that space open and honest. 

It hurts and it frightens. 

Whenever I find out someone is pregnant, I have the conversation. I tell them that if they hate their babies, if he or she is born and they feel nothing, to call me. I understand. I will get them help.

No one ever has, but it's important to me for mothers to understand that these wounds are a mix of hormones and life changes and sleep deprivation and not an indication of someone's ability to love these little humans resting in the bed beside us. 

I say, let me carry this wound on behalf of all of you. May you never feel it how lonely it is. Let me be there.

---

And so I do my best to be there, and to fill in what is said between words, to understand at my core the wounds we carry.

Your light is important to me. Each of you has a tiny flicker that looks only like you and no one else in the world. When I hold out my hands, you let me hold your tiny, vulnerable lights for a moment and I am reborn.

---

There is a story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called La luz es como el agua, and in it, two young boys beg their father for a boat if they win a prize in school. They live on the 5th floor of an apartment building in a city with no body of water, but their parents agree, and soon the boys have a boat in their living room.

They break open a light bulb and the light pours out. The boys believe that light is like water, and when they release it, it flows into their apartment and they sail.

Let me believe that light is like water - that if I am vulnerable, that little light pours out and meets each person, building momentum, filling the wounds.

If we are here to learn to live in these bodies, then may we be baptized by our spark.

First Steps

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

            - Funes el memorioso, Borges

I am sitting in my friend's living room.

We have a fledgling business, and she is asking me "What is the first step?" but I don't know how to answer.

I'm an idea person. 

What I'm not is someone who knows how to implement my own vision. My dreams are islands in the middle of an ocean. I know they are there, but I have no idea how to reach them. I skim the surface and decide to stay immobile on my current path.

She is still waiting for my answer.

I lay my head down at night and plan hope for the future.

---

I want to talk about Orlando. I want to discuss how even public space dedicated to a minority community isn't safe. 

I want to talk about how vulnerable these two communities are, how their struggles are pitted against each other in our political sphere. 

I want to talk about how guns attract violence, how sick I am of this country's obsession, how we are all armed to the teeth and it never saves us.

It will not save us.

 I look at my children and find myself hoping for one second that they are completely average, straight and white, and knowing that even then it won't save them; they are women. 

That one second is fucked up. That one second is so much privilege talking. 

I want to talk theory. Any theory. Political linguistics. Feminism. Queer. Something intersectional. I don't pray and so the theory gives me comfort, but it's still non action.

Pray all you want, but you need to do something. Same with theorizing.

I meet a former roommate. She is a professor of liberation theology. I do not follow the same religion but we speak the same language of ideas. 

I lay my head down at night filled with questions.

----

Instead, I find myself screaming at people changing lanes without using their blinker, and then I understand. 

I'm not angry. I am scared.

I cannot control the actions of others and that scares me when I know that so often the actions of others are hurtful, violent actions. People will change lanes and they will not let me know. I can only hope that I am not occupying the space when they decide to take it.

They are destroyers.

So far, my girls and I have been lucky, but someday, we might not be.

I have a student seeking asylum in the United States. She is a human rights lawyer from Venezuela and they shot her son because of her work and I think "I can blend, my children can blend," we can bow our heads and pray to some unknown force and cross our fingers that privilege will cover us.

Amen.

I lay my head down at night with no thoughts of deity, only my own beating heart and the hearts of my children.

---

So much suffering. 

Sometimes I have no faith in humanity. Humanity will betray, cheat, lie, and still call themselves good people. Humanity will quote the bible and famous lines about being a light in the world, ripped from other facebook posts, ripped from the very first google search result, without knowing the context, the beauty, the depth, without ever having read a single word from the writer.

You aren't light. You are swarms of darkness. You destroy.  

---

First step. 

I know who I am. 

----

I want to tell you a story.

A woman births a child and feels nothing after. She is lost and afraid. The people around her try to reassure her but she does not hear them. 

She lashes out at people who hurt her. Their stories are her stories.

-----

First step.

I acknowledge their suffering is showing.                           (read this . and read again. and again.)

I have created you as someone who destroys and this is a projection of my own blindness.

I am sorry.

---

I will tell you another.

One night he comes home late. He is sad and alone. He is hurting. I know this, but instead of walking across the divide in our paths, I harden. I turn away.

I say

 maybe you shouldn't come home at all.

---

Time moves forward for me and no one else in this story.

- or -

Time moves, and we all move together towards the forking paths ahead, we weave in and out, we die a thousand times and we find each other again. 

In every one... I am grateful to you for your recreation of the garden...

Not in all. Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.

- El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Borges

----

Turn this back on myself.

Am I worthy to call myself clean of all these things? Have I chosen my true path?

The way is narrow.

There is an ugliness to me, a darkness, and unchecked it destroys much the same way as those above. We are enemies now, but in reality I am my own enemy and I stare down only myself. In the garden of the forking paths, every path I choose I find pieces of my own suffering and I realize that the ways are all one.

She is my "enemy" but this is an illusion. She is a mirror held to my darkness. I can deflect or I can look and find the lesson.

It means nothing that I've understood the words of writers, philosophers, but I've not reached out to understand someone entwined with me.

She deserves kindness. She deserves to be heard.

And I am the destroyer.

I fight this tendency. I fight to understand what causes me to hurt others instead of help. I hold the mirror up and close my eyes. I ask "is it necessary to look?"

They have caused my suffering, and I, in turn, have caused suffering for others.

Look.

Keep looking.

Keep looking.

Keep looking until it hurts. Keep looking until that pain washes over you and nothing else remains.

I have caused suffering. I have caused suffering and I acknowledge. I turn and I say

darling. darling(s). I suffer.  I need help.

Keep looking.

Memorial: Kindness and Growth

I went to my favorite nursery and garden center early Memorial Day morning.

I went over budget. They had my favorite clematis, Duchess of Edinburgh, and when I picked up one, it was hopelessly entwined with another; so much so that I bought them both. Best friends. Lovers. They will live their lives together each year at the corner of my porch.

I went over budget this year because I bought what I wanted. Not what was half dead on sale. Not what I thought would grow and feed me through the winter.

I bought clematis. I bought a rose. Ghost pepper and one new tomato. A hosta. Beautiful things.

----

Last year, I gardened as if my life were ending.

I have anxiety - at times deeply unsettled, sourceless anxiety, as if someone has set me on fire.  I poured all my stress and all my worry into the ground. 

Most of my plants died.

Understand this. Willing something to grow does not make it grow. I neglected the foundation of gardening. I stripped the soil of everything it had to give and expected it to give more.  

This is the meditation of my life. I was a philosophy major. Every big question is answered by a bigger question. Questions upon questions. I stand in front of the cosmos and only questions tumble out. 

But I understand plants. 

I understand their parts, their needs, what they are telling me each day. I understand the soil and the water. This is my only religion, a growing plant. And on purpose I pushed those limits; I ignored what I know to be true. I listened only to the fear and in return the ground gave me nothing but dust and broken roots.

—

This year I scaled back to the basics. 3 tomato plants. Two winter squash. Flowers. Sacred blue corn. A ghost pepper and a sweet pepper. 

The soil has to be rebuilt. 

If I am impatient and neglect the basics, I cannot garden. There is unseen work done in preparation for the showy parts of the garden. When people visit, they appreciate the towering tomatoes, the lily beds, the mint growing like weeds, but no one ever comes and says

your soil is beautiful. 

It isn't the flowers they appreciate, but the healthy, unseen microcosm curled around the roots. They appreciate the dirt.

—-

I was reading an article in the Atlantic about what makes couples stay together or break up. According to  "Masters of Love" by Emily Esfahani Smith, there is one major factor for determining the longevity of couples.

One secret: kindness. 

Many things happened to my marriage last year. Things that uproot and destroy. But more insidious, over the years before, a small loss here and there. We turned away from each other. We lost our kindness. 

It is no accident that I lost everything in my garden the same year I lost my partner. There are universal needs for all living things, after all. We are connected.  

I neglected the soil. I demanded that things grow without first working on the environment that causes that growth.  When we lost our kindness towards each other it was only a matter of time before things withered.  

The article describes couples turning towards each other. Couples that were together after a few years showed interest in small parts of each others' days. And I lost that. 

It's difficult to admit these things. I've struggled for two weeks over this piece. I do not take on culpability for my partner's actions, or the actions of others involved, but I understand where we were before 2015 happened. 

---

My anxiety has expanded. I've struggled to keep my public face together. I recite words when I start to lose it, words I've memorized, usually poetry, The Kaddish, 1000 lines long, I go as far as I can

strange now to think of you gone, without corsets and eyes, as I walk down the sunny pavement of greenwich village, downtown manhattan, clear winter noon and I've been up all night talking and talking, reading the kaddish aloud and listening to ray charles blues shout blind over the phonograph

the rhythm

the rhythm

and when I can go no further I start again at the beginning. 

And when it gets really bad I switch to Spanish and the words become mantra

preguntarais,  Y dónde están las lilas? Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas? Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba sus palabras llenándolas de agujeros y pájaros?

My liturgy of anxiety.

-----

I've been reading a lot. My boss posted an article that killed me. The Context of Love is the World: Liturgies of Incarceration, and this is what I hear. Over and over.

"look harder and more humbly at people I'm tempted to dismiss when I believe they've wronged me, to not reduce a person to the madness of a moment, as if it's the whole of who they are, as if they are nothing but the outburst or the dark decision they've made and the effect their action has had on me. As much as I want to cut an aggressor down to size, nobody's ultimately just an asshole, an idiot, a murderer, or an addict."

This.

I believe in this. I tend to my own soil first, the hidden unseen parts of me that can forgive and let go of the past. This brings peace. It doesn't matter what I say about what happened; what matters is that forgiveness, kindness, becomes my liturgy, my soil, and when things grow in me they resemble the lilies. (tweet this)

---

Love Yourself: Heal Yourself

On Saturday mornings I make tiny pancakes. 

It takes for-absolutely-ever, and my tiny chef dictates exactly how many she will want on her plate for each serving. They must be hot, and it does no good to make them ahead in anticipation of her second, third, fourth serving because if they are not fresh from the pan, she will not have them.

This is patience.

This is mindfulness.

I drink my coffee in between. I help her to stand up to the kitchen chair next to the counter so she can direct. I decide to make my own breakfast right there instead of forgetting. I have eggs with leftover spaghetti sauce in a tortilla and it is glorious. I do not beat myself up over eating something weird. If my three year old can decide her own breakfast, her own happiness, then so can I. 

---

Let me tell you a story.

A woman I know, her lifelong partner has a second family. Fifteen years worth of a second family. Fifteen years of secrets and lies. Fifteen fucking years, what is this? And she does nothing while he spends half his time with them during the month. We can all say this won't happen to us but it can.

There is no convincing her of what she is capable of. She will see it or she won't.

---

I will tell you another.  

A woman I know, her lifelong partner walks out of the house one day. Texts her after 17 years together that he doesn't love her and won't be coming back. He disappears. He lives with another woman. More secrets. More lies.  I want to start a project with her, but she hesitates, 

I have nothing. I have only a silly hobby.

I don't need her to see yet. I don't need to convince this woman of her value; I wait. I believe.

I see it.

---

Another.

I wanted to start a business with a friend, but this time it is me who hesitates. I don't believe I can do what is required for this business; I don't have the experience. No one will listen to me. And so I procrastinate until she is frustrated and we let the domain lapse. 

There are things that happened last year that I cannot put into words yet, but they are coming.

Words are all that I have. I am piecing the story together; I am finding words for what is only dark space now, words for the sweat in the middle of the night, words for the hole in my wall, words for the bruises on my heart. 

You wait. And in this period of waiting together I will tell all our stories through mine.

---

I say

Get up.

Get off the floor. 

You get back up when you are ready, not when you want to, and your heart knows the difference. <Tweet This>

---

I cook. The children cook.

On Saturday, I cleared out space in my kitchen for my children to play. I took out a shelf, threw away everything it contained and put their play stove in its place. They promptly made me a cake omelet for breakfast and we sat together at that little blue table while I wrote out my first meal plan in months, possibly years. 

I won't be eating cake omelets, but I could see the joy they got in making something for me. I wonder, why can't we enjoy taking care of ourselves? In all this time we spend looking for our person, we can't see that we are our own person.

---

I am ready and so I get up no matter how my heart feels. 

Roommate Wanted: Must Love.

I am looking for a roommate.

The requirements are simple. Safe. Sane. One month's security deposit. 

Roommate Wanted: Must Love Dogs

Must love pets. Must love a dog that will mark belongings until he is sure that you will stay. Must be willing to enter and leave the house as if leaving a rapidly submerging submarine, vigilant of the open door and the dog waiting for you to forget how fast he is. You will chase him down in your car until he is no longer on the road, and you abandon it, doors open, to run through a stranger's back yard.

He will not come easily.

The house is quiet half the time as I am in and out with restlessness. The silence is heavy. When I am home, I want to be out, and when I am out I want to be home, and nothing in between, only the driving, the music playing. I drive too fast. I forget to change my oil. I will call you from the side of the road one day and not say a word as we head back. 

Must love children and all their weird.

Must love children. When my children are home, there are no late nights. No company over. We all go to bed at 8pm because I miss them and I feel guilty that I no longer live with their father, and so they sleep all over me, kicking covers off in the middle of the night, wandering back into the hallway, asking to take a bath at 2am because they forgot they took one earlier. They open and close all the doors and wonder what the lights are outside. The house is always dark, as I've never gotten in the habit of keeping nightlights. I've memorized where the empty cookie box is laying on the floor and exactly where to turn to get into the living room, and you will too, eventually.

There will be much left unsaid. 

Hearing me mutter in the living room about a shelf, understanding as I move it across the room that I have won the battle of where this furniture should go, but in winning this small thing, I have lost everything around it. The shelf stands where I choose and I lay my forehead on the kitchen table and cry.

Watching me tear out weeds until I am bleeding under my nails and then laying down in the grass and closing my eyes. What I see is not for you.

---

I've spent a long time wishing I were easier. 

I've wished that I could change enough of myself that I am unrecognizable, that I minimize all the ways I don't connect with others, but I've found in the last few months that this was a lie I heard and believed. 

You are abrasive, I hear. You are unlikeable and unbearable. And I believed.

I remember in my bones. I remember the loneliness. I remember the way it felt to isolate myself and wish that it would change.

A friend is with me. I hear her say "I'm easy," and my heart lurches across the room, teeth clenched, my breath leaves me

you don't have to be easy, I hiss, you don't have to fold into yourself until the world snuffs you out.

But I don't say it.

--- 

We want things to be easy. 

I want my roommate to be easy when I, myself, am difficult. This is the catch. 

We ask others to accept our quirks and flaws without understanding theirs. Because we live with ourselves, our inner worlds are rich with context and nuance making our own flaws grand. We can explain the way we are, explain away, make excuses, be kind to ourselves. 

We do not give this same courtesy to others. We flatten them until they are composed only of simple, irritating flaws. We don't understand why they refuse to change.  

Why can't he just listen? Why won't she remember the time? 

Why can't he see me? Why can't she love me? 

It spirals until kindness disappears and things fall apart.  

--- 

I am seeking a roommate. 

I am looking for someone who wonders in the night if he or she is worthy of the short time we have in our current lives.  

I have questions. 

Do you feel the ache when the weather changes? Do you feel the subtle drop in temperature, smell the embers from a fire and begin to take stock of all the things you did not accomplish? Are you trying to root out that anxiety, succeeding only sometimes but recognizing that these are the moments where life is lived? 

Do you make your weird and wild claim on this earth? 

---

Sunday will be my old anniversary, and when someone mentioned the date,  I stopped breathing. 

But things are new. The pain will come and it will leave again. I am looking for a roommate who can walk silently on that day, someone who will join me in the evening for a beer, someone who will listen to my conversation about the flowers and understand that between each word I am saying other things - this is hard; this season will pass - and in return I will listen and understand the meaning between words when he or she aches.

These spaces hold us all together if we will listen close.