Posted on by d

Here we go.

prompt: a young teen with long brown hair and brown eyes and an olive complexion and full lips is looking at the camera, blushing, with little hearts coming off of her. She is wearing a masquerade mask that covers her eyes and nose really well and leaves the rest of her face exposed. and she has a scarf over her hair to help disguise her further. In the image she is standing, wearing a tank top and baggy jeans, a shorter black pea wool pea coat, realistic comic art portrait style ~ Bing image creator

This is a post about mothering. Just mentioning that in case someone needs to keep scrolling for whatever reason.

But for those who have been here, or are coming here, or care about it, maybe you will appreciate this sharing.

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I saw my daughter crush blush for the first time tonight 😀😍💘

I’m living for these moments with her right now, grateful to have the time to dedicate to them.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with her when we were up north and I was in school. My friend basically adopted her and I took that space to get a degree done. I am grateful to that woman and her beautiful family and I know she loves my girl. And over that span of three years my daughter shot up a foot. Now at barely thirteen, she is five six and borrows my shoes.

And so I am glad to have this time right now. Though I am constantly being informed of the *right” way of doing things–yes, even though I am so wildly out of touch that my recognition of a Harry Styles song comes as a great surprise–she still wants to hang out with me, watch movies, go shopping, take the dogs to the woods, go over to grandma’s next door and hang out with her… Pretty soon she will be off on adventures, and I know this – but I will always want her to know that home and mom are safe spaces and that I will always have open arms for whoever she is.

So I try and take note of each of these new moments because they are the only ones that will ever happen, and they happen more and more quickly and frequently by the day. It’s wild to witness this so closely, but who am I to deprive her of this thrill? I want her to love it, and to be smart about it. That’s where I’m putting my focus instead.

Tonight a young person (I don’t assume to know their gender) walked by and dropped a folded piece of paper with “my socials, let’s be friends” on the table in front of my daughter while we were out with my mom. I tried to maintain a decently nonchalant manner but there was nothing I could do about my eyebrows and as she focused very, very casually on the burger in front of her, her cheeks became inflamed.

The only other time she’s ever had cheeks that red, I had to rush her to the hospital because I could not get the fever down, and it was dangerous.

Posted on by d

night blooms

Photo by Fabiano Rodrigues on Pexels.com | petrichor, cyclical release | sanguine meander

here we are again. this cyclical expression of reproductive desire manifests in all sorts of strange ways. i have no desire to be out and about, but i want you to come to me. with me. in me.

my bookshelves and my seed bank are really organized but domesticity has never been my strong point. i am a person of regimen about many things but I often leave the vacuum in the middle of the living room floor. i have three dogs. i walk on land. my feet reflect that. i am grounded, rooted to the earth. I have befriended the soil and sometimes it comes inside. i have a child and a cat and a small population of spiders who reside in busier corners. Together, we keep the home and the ecosystem as balanced as we can, so leave me be, leave me to my motherhood, my books and words and spiders and dirt, plants and animals. these too, provide harvest. i want our love to be an interlude, the stuff of a troubadour’s song. i need to yearn.

there is thunder, such a joy to listen to but even so, where lightning strikes there is often fire. this rain is blessed, extra welcome during this driest time of year, yet the fear strikes, always, and today the sky filled with smoke. It made for spectacular sunsets here while two hours away, 4500 acres of grassland burned and was 0% contained. Here, midnight summer rains left crystal drops on glowing tobacco flowers which exuded the most utterly intoxicating scent (to be present for this was to understand the origins of every cliche that just happened). The tobacco plants are beginning to go to seed. I have saved some and I have scattered others. Even through this long, dark winter there is a future of infinite opportunity, just as long as it all doesn’t burn down. Now we fear the storms.

We cannot learn to fear this wet necessity, the most natural and encouraging delivery of life. Sometimes now, water here rumbles and burns and people scatter. Water, she’s been in our deepest, darkest places, washing off the leftovers and sending them on their way. She has announced her arrival with rolling booms and flashes of light and we have danced in her court. It’s a blessed and ancient ritual. If only it were simply power to respect, but it engages all our senses. Dangerous territory. We don’t always know what kind of magic we really weave when we draw down the moon.

Posted on by d

I’ve got my back to the moonlight.

For the moment, anyway. The window ledge is extra wide and lined with plants. i’ve got pillows propped up against it, but later when i go to bed, i’ll lie flat, and fall asleep with the moon in my face. the bed is on the floor since my daughter sleeps in it with me and I have, for many years, been pretty much a floor dweller anyway.

I like most things low.

Of course, saying this I am remembering those last moments of pregnancy where my daughter had gotten a lot more low, and those were aching days. I loved being pregnant until then, until I became cumbersome and so did she and I was ready for the next step of miracle to begin.

My due date came and went. Days and days went by. Finally, she came.

Now she sleeps next to me each night. I love sleeping with her, mostly. And then there are times when I miss my own life of defining who got to sleep in my bed, when, and how…

But like any love relationship, this here and now of having her there is something sweet that I can count on right now.

This now is fleeting as many things in childhood are, except those things we fight, and then relax into saving…

So I accept that no one else will be joining me here for the moment. It is worth that small sacrifice for this, though, for the regularity of this sweetness and comfort, for the gifts of the present.

I know, too, that my choices from here on out, and that the others who may eventually sleep in my bed, will be and are affected by her presence, regardless, in a way those choices and people never were before – thank god, it means I have more respect for myself, more responsibility to care for myself, to do only those things (and people) that serve my highest good. This is actually a very good thing.

This does not mean, however, that I feel any guilt whatsoever about going out last night, enjoying some social lubrication, dancing to great live music and exchanging pleasantries with a really good-looking someone else who “didn’t have the kids tonight”. It’s nice to be understood in that respect.

I am pretty sure I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself except in all the very best ways, and I drank a lot of water the last hour I was there, went to bed sober, got up on time, did a quick excuse for yoga and resumed the everyday tasks of feeding and wiping and dressing and Duplo-assembling and hugging and kissing and redirecting impending blowouts and I thought to myself, there are some times when the high road is appropriate. And sometimes, such a rare and unpredictable sometimes, tequila is what gets me high.

Shaking an uninhibited ass on a dance floor does the same thing as often as I can (which at this rate is about four times a year). And all this makes me a better parent. Swear it.

Just an hour of silliness and flirting reminds me of how I became a parent in the first place – there is a me that has opened, fully, that has flowered and then bloomed, ecstatically.

Eventually, I believe my daughter will look back upon me and see my faults, see the things I have fought to learn that the following generation is always so lucky to have handed to them. I hope, too, tho, that my daughter can look back at me and believe that I loved as wisely as I foolishly allowed myself to, that I laughed a lot and danced when spirit (or good bass) moved me, and that I had a good understanding of my medicines.