What Passes for Normal

I spent years, painstaking and arduous, aching 

to fit in

working 

to fit in

Only to find fitting in

ached more

once I had achieved that elusive and unworthy state

Trying to be good, to behave

like normal

Now you see me

You think you know

my careful middle class childhood

The love that surely showered over me

the joy at my successes

the comfort at my failures

Ha, you are a fool

These are roles we play, the bunch of us

The aching ones

The ones who have bound the pieces of themselves in a careful cloth 

to craft some semblance of truth 

from whatever we have survived.

photo credit:  http://www.quotessays.com/

First Flight

photo credit qthomasbower

I wait near the gate until she boards. Tall, lanky, her dark blonde hair pulled tight against her head into a ponytail that cascades and expands as it sways against her back. Her hair suits her, sleek and smart with an untamed streak. Clever, aware, she carries herself with the wisdom of having grown up in New York City. A daughter to be proud of, a daughter born of a mother's fearsome wish that she be better, better always than me.  

I watch her walk, a bounce in her gait I am as familiar with as I might be a lover, as I am her father. I ache after her departure in the way I once ached after her father, my husband, my lover. But different too, for this is the longing of a mother, the ache of a piece missing. A piece I cared for, nourished, nurtured both in and outside myself. A piece of myself I must surrender to this wayward world.  

Love, romantic love is the stuff of completion, a love of fulfillment, of recognition, of a common self. Looking together in the same direction. Romantic love is a needing love, a longing. This love, the mother's love is a giving love, a love of responsibility, protection and guidance. Mother love is an offering, my life for yours, always slightly unbalanced. Romantic love, good, lasting, martial love finds that balance. Mother/child love is an endless push/pull dance of need and desire, autonomy and clinging, clutching and shoving off, and trying always to discern which to do when.

And so I let her go.  Straight into the arms of my own mother, a safer place I do not know.  Whatever my own childlike objections to my own upbringing (and they are both many and complex) still and always my mother is a safe space, a woman I would trust with my life, am trusting with this life my husband and I created.  A life we are letting become its own.  

Free Time

Am I just going to waste these hours - well - this hour and a little more?  Am I going to play Words with Friends, or finish the NYTimes Crossword?  Or maybe turn on "The Little Foxes" which I have yet to finish in my otherwise "family-scheduled" evening?  Or, might I get back to the novel I am writing which never really sees as much of my time as it should?  

Any or all of these things are viable options.  But the one I "should" do is, of course, the latter.  And yet instead I decide to write a first blog post on a long dormant blog.  Why?  Well, yes, why?  Because first I took up a pen and paper to write essentially the same thing I'm writing here.  To examine, to explore my reluctance to do what I should but my own primal wish to ease my anxious thoughts with words on a page.  It is writing after all.  The virtual equivalent of essay self-publishing.  And, what is wrong with that?  I, among others, read blogs, sometimes finding valuable info, points of view or plain laughs to brighten my day.  So, yes, a new blog post.  Because at least I am writing and well, if someone googles upon this blog and reads it, perhaps the meanderings of my procrastinating heart will ease the tricky burden of another's wasted minutes.  
--JC