Right Now

To be fair, I'm sure that no one really knows how to do this, especially the first time.  You would have to understand time enough to split a moment open and peer inside.  You would have to have already wrangled your wild self.  Broken it in.  Made it soft and pliable and you would have to have armor enough to guard against every breeze that threatened to harden it back to feral.

  There are women who have wanted this forever.  This thing that I have.  This thing that I am.  But the universe has a sense of humor, and though I fancied myself a great number of things, I never did think that housewife would be among them.  It's not among them.  Despite the fact that this is what I'm doing, this is not who I am.  And if I take the narcissism out of it, I would have to assume that this isn't who most of us really are.

  How do we hold onto ourselves?  How, when we don't own a single one of our own minutes, do we find the time to look in a mirror and remember why we have scars?

When you're a stay at home mom, it can be quite easy to stop existing entirely.  If you're not careful, you melt into whatever wall you're next to, or whatever chair you're sitting in.  You match the hum of the refrigerator like breath and you become what you are doing and lose track of what size jeans you wear, and the city you loved grows like tall grass and you get lost where you once felt at home.  Home becomes a life that would have bewildered you not even that long ago.

It is a cliche to say that none of it matters, but I don't need to qualify any of this.  I understand my privilege here.  I won't cave to the itch at the base of my skull telling me to gush and scream and flood that I love my daughter and I am lucky to have this life (though I suppose I just did, didn't I?).  No.  I need for this to be mine.  Something has to be mine without the nearly Catholic guilt that accompanies being a mother and still, shamefully, being a human being.

When I look back at this time in my life, it will shimmer like soap bubbles.  It is magic, all of it.  I will remember the first time I heard her giggle.  I will remember what it was like the moment we found out she was ticklish, and the moment I made the grave, trust-crushing mistake of giving her spinach.  I will remember crying when we began giving her formula, and crying as I packed up the clothes that she managed to outgrow in what felt like a day, and crying when she got a bump on her head because I turned my back for thirty seconds.  I've got videos and pictures of these events just in case my memory ever takes on sepia tones.  I will not forget her.  But there is only space for so much there, and the bare truth is that when I look back on this time in my life, I will only remember being her mother.  Right now, I am only her mother.

The First Motherhood One (is barely about motherhood)

It's September 10th.  Clara, my beautiful, perfect speck of a daughter is sleeping now, though God only knows how long that will last.  In eight days, she will be 4 months old.  Babies are time machine magicians, somehow turning your longest days into your shortest weeks.  I'll have to ask her when she's older how she manages to do that.

  I am in Denver now, house and dog sitting for a friend until we close on our own house.  The sun is out today, and it means business.  An early September heat wave is here, taking its toll on the green bits still holding onto their Spring youth.

 Yeah, well, me, too.  Not much to be helped there, I'm afraid.

  I've given myself permission to sit in the sun until she wakes up.  It's been a long time since I've sat in the sun.  That would be unusual for pre-baby Jamie, but seems to be par for the course now.  Some things in life change every other thing.
 
    I miss the sun- that has not changed.  But nothing puts into perspective how reckless we are with our own bodies like being tasked with the well-being of someone else's brand new one.  I check my blind spot twice now, and chasing those tan lines is far less important than making sure she doesn't have any.

Motherhood, man.  You lose yourself if you're careful and if you're not.

A few years ago, I wrote about ambition.  I'd have to read it again to get the details straight, but if I was being truthful, I probably outlined how little ambition I actually had.  I had been climbing the ladder but pining for the ground, and didn't know what that could amount to, really.  How do you win a rat race that you'd be happier losing?  Regardless, there I was.  Successful by most people's definitions.  Even by my own, though I felt lost in it.  All the while, wondering if the top had a good view of the versions of myself that I had loved better.

  And now.

I'll spare the details of this progression, though it should be noted that plenty details exist.  But give me two years in the Pacific, and I'll show you how to turn into someone no one recognizes.  What a magic trick to place a round-peg girl into a square-hole life and see upon her removal how her shape has changed.

    There is more to be said, here.  Pages to be written about the abrupt loss of freedom- financial and otherwise- that accompanies a quick-change into the privileged title of “Stay at home mom.” Pages about the struggle of holding onto yourself when your world is no longer about you.  Pages about how I have been under-qualified for every job I've ever had, this one included (maybe most of all).  And, to be obvious, there are chapters and volumes and libraries to be written about motherhood.  What it is.  What it isn't.  How it changes you, and how it doesn't.  The mind bend of knowing what's coming, and still being entirely unprepared. The gravity of being this in love with someone, even if she is biologically obligated to love me back. 

  But today, the best way to end this aimless ramble might be just the way I started it.  It is now September 14th.  My beautiful, perfect speck of a daughter is asleep upstairs.  In four days, she will be four months old.  And I am in the sun.

i listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul.

I can close my eyes here and breathe until everything disappears into itself.  So deceptive, the softness of sea foam.  As if the ocean didn´t have the power of everything this Earth has ever been pulsing with each swell.  It is no wonder that the sirens are island creatures- the sea itself is a siren and a liar, its flower petal shore break making promises it doesn't even know it can't keep.  We know not to turn our backs, but do we really want to see?

     I've never had a God, really.  I've never prayed to anything but The Universe, and even that has always been born more of hope than belief that anything was listening.  I suppose I could be convinced, though, sitting here like this, the dragon whisper of the Pacific breaking me down until I am as granular as the sand.  Not convinced that there is a God, exactly.  To be honest, I do not think I could find value in one diety who decided the then and will decide the next and who chooses the now.  I've never been one to worship, and I can't imagine breaking that rule for such a control freak.  Nor do I think that our souls and spirits will be carried on the wind into whatever our perception of heaven is, where we are greeted by long lost grandparents and family pets, where ice cream doesn't have calories and we are forgiven our every earthly misstep.


    Rather,  in a very literal sense, I think we are the wind.  We were the wind before birth, and we will be the wind after death.  We speak of life cycles as if they are archways, with a beginning and an end through which we might be able to spy the shine of something bigger.  Something with more purpose than we could possess on our own.  I'm not sure why we don't give ourselves more credit.  The nature of a cycle is circular.  Beginnings and endings fade into one another just as we can close our eyes and feel that maybe the ocean is a part of us.   Like we belong to it.  Truly, it is, and we do.  We are made of the same things, rearranged.  We are the same thing.

     When my grandfather died, I did not know what to pray to.  His God?  The God of my childhood? The God my friends know, and speak to, and love, and trust?  Even on the off chance that those are all three the same, I wouldn't know that God's face if he was staring straight at me.

    Instead, I went to the beach.  I sat facing a little North and a lot east, towards the last place where  our feet were firmly on the same ground, his and mine, and I said goodbye.  And then I said hello as the sea lied about its gentleness the same way hearts do, and as the wind played with my hair the way it does the wild grass and the wild waves.



   

The Trouble with Plants

     I can't really keep plants alive.  I bring them into my home with the promise of light and water, cool from the faucet, and an easy place to shine.  I have visions of green geranium leaves crawling like sunbeams, and cushiony aloes, plump with medicine, and red pots teeming with herbs whose aromas battle one another for space in the air.

But I can't really keep plants alive.

     I smother them at first.  A helicopter mom, hovering and feeding and anxious.  I fear they will suffer thirst, and so I make them drink.  I am proud because they don't have to ask.  It works for the cats- they love me most in the moments before they feel a meow might be necessary.  But if anything is more fickle than a cat, it's cilantro, and I can't really keep plants alive.

     I move from over-attention to near neglect, wounded from rejection.  I avert my eyes when I walk by them.  They have asked me for space.  But if there is anything more fickle than a cat, it is cilantro, and they are wounded as well.  Like a girl who just broke up with a boy so he might care more, their heads hang low and moping.  Their fingers curl into delicate fists, for sadness and not for fighting.  I bet they'd weep if they had water enough for tears.

  Tough love does not work for plants, however.  And I can't really keep plants alive.

When I Left

     On May 24th, 2005, I left everything for everything.  I did not do it responsibly, or with kindness.  I left a wake.  I told everyone I knew and loved that I would see them in August, and then boarded a big plane to a tiny island.  I didn´t know it was a lie at the time, but I think I´d hoped it was.  August came and went, humid and on fire.  It would be November, and November would be a round trip back to the islands.  I had been on the ground in Colorado for just long enough to pack a Goodwill suitcase with all the home I thought I would need, and that was not even enough to fill it.
   
My sister moved me out of my college house.  It was up to my roommates to find a replacement.  I would not see my friends and a family until the following August- a full year later than I had promised.  Even then, I would never really return.

I traipsed around the Caribbean, carefree and tanned, and my friends graduated.  And my friends got married.  And my friends had children.  And my mother missed me the whole time.

It wasn't romantic, what I did.  Nor daring, nor brave, nor particularly interesting at its core.  It wasn´t about being a wild girl who needed to chase the wind, and it wasn´t about some Eat Pray Love journey to self discovery.  It was selfish, and reckless, and cruel.  With no regard for the hearts I left behind, it was abandonment.

I needed to leave.  That became obvious the second I realized I could.  But the callousness with which I left has plagued me in the decade since, skewing my perception of home, hitting a reset button on many of the people and places that had been sacred.

The first time I ever checked to see if the grass was greener, it was.  I´m not sure you can ever recover from that.  Instead, you wonder and wander, only recognizing anything that felt like home after you´ve left it, constantly imagining that it might be better somewhere else.

Being on the Narnia side of the wardrobe has served me well for the most part.  I stretched my arms to fit the whole wide world inside, and they were almost big enough.  I have found wanderlust to be a dressed up way to assume that the best part of that wide world is the part you have not yet seen.

And I´m not sure that´s true.

Conditional Truths

     This will be a very brief love affair, I know.  It's quite strange to know that.  To live in a place- to call a house a home at the end of a long day, to accept that the sun sets in Princeville and that avocados are more expensive at the farmers' markets because the vendors buy them at CostCo, and that the swell belongs to the North in wintertime- these are truths of my life.  But only my current life.  Only right now.  Geographically conditional truths.

      I am at a beach today.  Anahola, a place of locals, which I will never be.  The sand gives easily under my feet, and the sun and clouds are holding hands to create that perfect, pot of island gold beach day.  The ocean does not need to roar here, and so it whispers, softening driftwood and coastline, making question marks out of edges.  I am mostly alone.  In my periphery I can see a few tanned, black-haired boys with spear guns slung over their shoulders, an octopus who melted into the saltwater an hour ago hanging limp from a holster.
 
     The sand crabs are my favorite companions.  I watch them, and they me, each half carefully respectful of the other's space and quiet and reverence for the Pacific.  We say hello and politely move on when we find ourselves too close to one another.  I like the way their clean their homes, climbing to the surface handful by handful, a careful assessment followed by a spray of sand.  They leave the soft beach pocked with two-dimensional archways; grand entrances to hard-fought abodes. Sand crabs have no reason to run from the ocean.  They understand it.  I have seen them predict to the quarter of an inch where the surf will draw its line and sit calmly at the end of their world, winning their games of chicken.  I wonder if they sleep well in their tiny homes.  If they notice the constant, guttural groans of the sea in their ears.
   
     This is a truly beautiful place.  A siren island, entirely aware of its own appeal and peril.  Green mountains thrust out of the ocean like spires of a church where the structure is the deity.  You are meant to worship what you sit inside.  It stands tall, and alone.  The oldest of its brothers and sisters, Kauai does not need us.
 
    When you are here, you sit in the very center of the earth.  Everything else is a satellite- less blue, less green, less fierce, less gentle, less kind, less cruel, and so much smaller.

It is a little known fact that most of the Earth's gravity is generated by a 550 square mile island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  (The rest is generated by my grandmother, whom we can all thank for Denver's population boom.)
 
      I have yet to see a Kauai spring, but I imagine an atmospheric rush of warm-color flowers and sweet mangoes and seafoam spray from the whales as they say their yearly goodbyes.  Spring in a place without winter has to try harder, be louder.  Without the swell of torch gingers, or the purple orchids, would we take notice?   The desperation of Christmas lights in a tropical place is easy to spot.  We feel it like we feel how far away everything is.  But spring?

     We are not quite friends yet, this island and I.  It seems to [correctly] suspect that my allegiance lies elsewhere, and is unwilling to pester for new congregants.  As much as that is the case, our fondness for each other grows every day. I am clearly the more difficult half to love in this scenario, Hawaiian islands being paradise and all, and so I do what I can to earn my keep and stay in its good graces.  And while I may not pray to its spires, I can certainly understand those who do.

     I will be sad when I leave here.  Devastated, I would think.  I will mourn the sunsets, their shades of pink folding into more shades of blue than there are words for colors.  I will miss Kapaa Town. This strange, tiny place.  This slow-moving mobius strip of palm trees and blue sky, and shops custom-made to mirror the aloha shirts that wander in and out, shave ice in hand.
     I will close my eyes occasionally and wish that I was back here under the thick canopy, listening to birds sing to each other about how the sun springs from the sea in the mornings and sets the clouds aflame.
 
     There is so very much to love, and so little time to love it the way it deserves.  Inevitably, our exit from this pretty, green place will rush on us like a riptide, will grab us without apology and without permission, will happen so quickly that we might forget to breathe deep the eucalyptus that one.last.time.

   The best any of us can hope for the ability to look straight ahead, even with the blinders off.  To decide to be where we are.  To love everything there is to love with ferocity and intention. To notice.

   For me, I will live happily inside my geographically conditional truths for a few years.  I have time to get sticky with mango juice in the springtime, and sing with the birdsong choir in a place of worship that is not my own, but madly beautiful just the same.  And when it is time, I will have a squeeze of lime over velvet papaya, wake up with the curtsy of a sunrise, and find my way back to my grandmother.

The Feeling of Feeling

     I could have driven home with the windows closed last night.  The sky was lavender and the air was brisk and sharp with the teeth of a December Pacific.  It was windy.  One hand rested on the steering wheel.  The other seemed unable to stay still, instead caught in a cycle of surfing the breeze outside the window and pushing unruly hair back behind my left ear.  My toes had adopted a layer of sand as their own.  I could have let them stay dry.  I could have packed my beach day things and driven away, skipping the barefoot run back to the shoreline, alone, watching the Hawaii clouds blush as they shed their daytime sun.
     At some strange point in my beloved busy-bee city life, I stopped splashing in rain puddles, opting to watch from a window until the weather passed.  Safe and dry. Grumbling with the rest of them about the inconvenience of a cool spring shower.  Worried about my shoes.

     I am not sure that we are aware of losing ourselves as it happens.  I suppose we call it "Growing Up."
    You let go of island loves.  You trade the treehouse for an expensive vintage apartment downtown (It's quirky!  I'll buy a yellow couch! I'm still whimsical!). You start painting your nails all one color and you begin to care what people think of you.  You stop writing.
   
     But mostly, I think, you decide that it is less important to feel.  Or I did.  When I say feel, I mean touch.  Taste.  Smell.  Feel.  With your heart, sure.  But also with everything else. As we leave whimsy behind, we tend to neglect our senses.  We neglect our human need to have some understanding of the piece of Earth we wake up with every morning.

     I could tell you what Denver smells like right before snowfall.  I could point to which stars you should follow to Vail in September, and then in May, and which to follow home.  I could walk you to the most fragrant roses on Ogden Street (they're at 10th, across from The Kensington Apartments).  I could show you the most picturesque block of 16th St at Christmastime, and where to get roasted poblanos, with their desert smoke which fuses with the air the sting your eyes and fill your breath with earth and pepper.  And I know where to find the softest grass at Cheesman Park because ever so occasionally, I would kick off my shoes and remember to be a part of the world around me.  I would remember how important that is.

     When you lose bits of yourself, the collect like charms on a shining bracelet.  They clink together, and you can see them, each one, glinting in the light every time you give them movement.  They tend to be confused for memories and they cant hurt to look at, like the slow ache of old pictures.

  But they live and they wait, hoping to some day catch the light.  Hoping that you will move back to an island.  Hoping that you will play in the rain. Hoping that you will run barefoot through fallen palm fronds and stop to inhale the ribbons of jasmine and stare at the marshmallow sunset.
     Hoping that you will drive under the lavender sky, push wild-wind hair behind your left ear, sing too loudly with Billy Bragg about California stars and welcome back the feeling of feeling.