savagemama

Betrayal isn’t pretty.

Like Carl Sandburg’s fog, it comes on little cat feet and sits on silent haunches.

It’s beguiling, it’s oddly seductive. It’s always a slap in the face.

The worst kind comes from people we trust, people we’ve pulled into the inner circle. They give us reason to trust them. Then, they don’t.

I have a friendship in which betrayal has become a big component. Incrementally, and over the years, it has become the dark cloud under which the threads of our friendship twist in a gentle wind.

Over the course of this friendship I have created distance, I have drawn boundaries but it seems to have done little to ebb the tide of mistrust. It’s uninvited here, a sly conversation there that have added up to an undoing.

I think about what I would say if this were my daughter’s friendship and she was deciding what to do. Stand up for yourself I’d tell her. Be kind but be firm. Focus on the good friends in your life. Let this friendship fall way.<Read more.>

Today I got a message from my naturopath’s office. Just checking in, the receptionist said.

“It’s March,” she said. “And it looks like we always check in with you in March.”

Am I that predictable, I thought.

The answer is yes. March can be a rough month here in the Northwest. We all so desperately want spring and blue skies but what we get is two-day blizzards that melt into a muddy, gray-brown world.

Last year as I was unloading a winter’s worth of woes on my naturopath as she flipped through her clipboard noting dates I’d come to see her.

“Did you know you’ve been here every March for as long as I’ve seen you?” It must be my seasonal breaking point, where something must change immediately and I get myself to my doctor’s office hoping she has a cure all pill for job challenges, family stress and child rearing growing pains. She doesn’t but she comes pretty close. <Read more.>

Do you remember having just one child? I had only one for such a short, sleepless time that I barely do. When Eliza was fourteen months old I found out I had another on the way. So her solo time was limited because, really, once you know about the bun in the oven your heart is beginning to create another tether, another life line. As my belly grew, Lucille inside, I wondered how I would drive to town with two babies in the back seat. How would I go to the grocery store, I wondered. Target? The bathroom?

I have a friend who must have been on the same celestial clock. Her first daughter was born hours after Eliza and in the same room. Those two have been like soul sisters since. Like twins separated at birth, their actions, reactions and general moving through the world mirror each other even though they don’t see each other every day. When this friend had her second child, I was eight month pregnant with Lucille. We ran into each other once at a mother’s day party and shared the names we were thinking of for our second children, our bellies well into our laps as we perched ourselves on the lip of a hot tub.

She went first. <Read more.>

Evidently, he’s older.  Pre-K. And an animal on the playground. Usually, an elephant. My daughter, she’s smitten.

Lucille has a crush.

“Mama, Maya said she’s thinking about kissing her boyfriend,” she said the other day.

“Really?”

“Who’s her boyfriend?”

“Cole,” she said.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked totally taken aback by this conversation I was having with my four-year-old but trying not to let it show.

“Yeah,” she said looking down, blushing. “Jackson.” She drug out his name a little and smiled.

“Are you thinking about kissing him?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said cheeks full of fire. “But it’s not okay to kiss at school.” <Read More.>

Photo by Seth Quackenbush

I love a new year. I love the clean slate, the fresh start and all of the symbolism that comes with it. I like looking back at last year’s highs and lows. I like the process of realizing what I’ve let go of and what I’ve held onto.

It also doesn’t hurt that a new year gives me an excuse to dig deep into my Virgo soul and vacuum behind the dryer. Organize the bathroom cabinets. Clear off the refrigerator. Organize the junk drawer. It’s a free pass, a ticket to ride. I relish every stack of papers that lands in the burn pile, every floor swept, every cupboard organized. When everything is perfectly in its place on New Year’s Day I look around at the three people living with me. They look back with serious WTF expressions. <Read more.>

I think I have control issues. Actually, I know I do.

I can’t let my husband do the grocery shopping and I’m having trouble letting him balance the checkbook. It’s not that I do such a stellar job at either of those things that I’m worried he’ll screw it up, it’s just I can’t let it go.

I have to be the one to turn in school forms, I have to be the one to call the mechanic. I have to make the bank deposits, call the doctor, buy the Christmas presents. Seth is not asking me to do all of these things, he’s actually begging me not to, but I think all of it – everything in our lives – is my job. I’m not sure how I’ve come to this place and I’m really not sure how to get out of it.

Seth and I recently switched banks. The idea was after the transition he’d take over the finances for a while. I cannot even write that sentence without holding my breath. He’s a grown up. He spends less money than I do. He owns a calculator. Why is it so hard? Maybe it’s because I’ve always been the one in charge of our finances? Maybe it’s a feminist/gender/power balance thing? Or maybe I just have issues. I’m going with the latter and hoping I can actually hand over the checkbook when the time comes.<Read more.>

For all of my life and most of my mother’s, my grandmother’s phone number has been 824-1719. It was as constant as her steady voice on the other end of the line.

When I was at her house in June I replaced the batteries in her portable phones, hoping to correct some static on her line. When I’d call her from Montana, there was a thin line of interference in every conversation. I’d asked her if she’d had her line checked by the phone company. She said she had and they said nothing was wrong. Various family members, noticing this noise too, had replaced her phones over the years but the noise was still there. In the past few months it was turning into more roar than whine so I made one last effort get her phones in working order by replacing the batteries.

A few weeks after I got home I got a text from my mom telling me that my uncle had had enough and bought my grandmother a cell phone. 824-1719 would be disconnected by the end of the week. I was, on one hand, relieved because I might actually be able to hear what she had to say but I was also a little heart sick that her number was disappearing back into the phone company’s soup of possibilities. When it gets reassigned, will the people who call it theirs know that it belonged to another family for more than fifty years? Will they care? Will they answer those who do not know that my grandmother isn’t on the other end of the line anymore with frustration wondering who the hell is Dula or AR and why do people keep calling asking for them? <More>

Every year as the light starts to glow curiously fall on the fence posts, the tall golden grass and the mountains in the distance, I engage in ritual. It doesn’t start with my hands in front of my heart or my eyes closed in meditation. It doesn’t look like neatly folding and putting away one season while cracking wide the next so much as it looks like one big mess in my kitchen. This ritual is characterized by boxes of ripe fruit all over the floor, canning jars on every counter surface and walls sticky with hot peach, apple and cherryness.

This is the time of year that I leave my austere tendencies behind and let lids, bands, ladles and fruit overtake every spot in our big farm kitchen. I hoard in ways I never thought I would. It’s pathological, really, and I don’t care. <Read More>

Last weekend we took the kids to see a movie in the theater. I’m not sure we’ve ever done that and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s seemed too expensive, maybe they never seemed to interested but Sunday it was smoky and hot in our valley. The thought of an air conditioned two hours in the theater felt like the right thing to do.

We went to see Brave – or Bwave – as Lucille called it, about a princess who wants to let her hair blow wild and shoot a bow and arrow. She doesn’t want to be a princess but she is and when the idea of marriage comes up it all falls apart between the princess and her mother. The princess goes to a witch to get a potion that will change her mother and the princess believes this will change her fate. To Pixar’s credit, no one ends up getting married. There’s only a promise that the people of the kingdom can marry for love.

Sitting there beside my own wild-haired bow and arrow-shooting girl I couldn’t help but draw a few parallels. Eliza, however, only wanted to nibble her M & Ms , tug the popcorn bag out of her sister’s hands and hide her face from the scary monsters in the movie. She saw no parallels. She only saw a story unfolding in front of her.

I sat there wondering if I was like the animated mother on the screen trying to fit her daughter into a box by asking her to comb her hair, to wear shorts above the knee (this is our latest clothing battle) and, when asked, tell people that, yes, she is a girl. My feral girl steps across gender lines and has become to me her own species. The love I have for her is deep and pure. I think she’s perfect exactly the way the she is. Out here, on the farm in summer, she runs shirtless, she wears boy underwear, she climbs to the top of the swing set and I just see her as Eliza. There is no backdrop of other children her age out here but with school starting that is about to change. And it’s then, when I see her in a class of other six-year-old girls, that I realize, again, she’s different. <Read More>

Lucille wakes up every morning asking the same question.

“Do I have to go to school today?”

Sometimes she rubs her eyes, stretches and yawns before she asks. Others days she screams it, her hair standing this way and that. On this morning her little body, soft as the belly of crab, flops all around the room until she settles, usually on the floor, wearing nothing but a pair of princess panties.

When she balks about going to wile away her day at maybe the best preschool on the planet, I remind her about that Benjamin and Moana will be there, that Mina is waiting for her, that there are naked baby dolls in the water table.

“You don’t want to be stuck here with me,” I often tell her. “You’ll have a great day!”

So recently she’s reframed her question.

“Mama, am I stuck here with you today?”

“Yep, you’re stuck here with me,” I tell her when she doesn’t have school.

“Yeah!” she says.

I’ve tried to figure out why she says she doesn’t want to go to school. When I talked to her preschool teacher, a seasoned veteran of the three to four-year-old crowd, she encouraged me to watch Lucille after I dropped her off.

“She comes right in and finds friends,” she said. “She has lots of points of connection here.”

I watched and Lucille is as happy as can be.

“So, she’s yanking my chain?” I asked her teacher.

<Read more>