Back to Soul on Mother’s Day

Mission: Get back to soul.

Method: Writing

Locations: Time to Tell online workshop, writing group, International Women Writer’s Guild.

Date: Spring, 2019

The busier I am, the harder it is for me to still, slow, and simmer with my soul. I can go from being a pan on the back burner I’ve put myself on to the lids under the oven to the dusty box of stuff for giving away for when someone, somewhere, gets their first apartment. How often have I thrown out what became useless, covered it mold or decay, because I saved it for some future maybe than claiming it for myself in real time?

“Mend my life,” is the line in the Mary Oliver poem that I’ve always loved. It’s about the voices of others clamoring, clutching, insistent and holding on. I’ve always loved this line.

I’ve been a mender and the one in need of mending.

I’ve been the seeker and the one longing to be sought after.

I’m the one with a million pressing questions and the she who has ached to be another’s answer.

But this time I hear the Mary Oliver poem different. Instead of “Mend my life,” the words whisper

“Tend my life,” – an instruction from me to me.

The 50’s are forgiving. The 50’s are opening me up. Now, I know what I need even if I don’t know how to deliver it to myself. Now, wisdom is in reach even if it is still a dreamy thought more than muscle memory. Intuition is still more abstract than the actual guiding system I use to follow.

I refuse to turn on myself though for being such a slow learner though. I won’t do it.

I know it took decades to be where and who I am today. It took most of my life to claim my life. It took most of my self to have a self that feels like mine. It took determination and devotion to be a break-the-cycle person. But I’m tired of trying not to be broken. Breaking the cycle is not the same as being whole, healed, and at ease.

What if the work of the next phase isn’t work at all? What if the work of the next phase is play, ease, freedom, and all the things a child knows when hijacked my danger and living in survival mode? I will age backward. I will stalk joy the way fear has stalked me. Can I work less hard and let myself be?

My mending days are finally over this I know. I’m no longer about making an occupation of fixing myself or others. But I’m having trouble letting go. I’m so good at fixing, fighting, judging. I’m so good at resentment, anger, and willpower.

I’ve fought my whole life, and my body quickly assumes fight stance.

It’s not a writer’s block I have but something else. My own voice feels forced and unfamiliar. My own body and postures are more like statues and less the fluid, flexible, and breathing human being.

The women in my writing group ask:

“Can you stay in that place where you describe being in your body?”

“Can you stay in that place where you are inhabiting the feelings?

“Can you stay in that place where you don’t pull us out and rush into the head or into argument?”

These are the perfect questions. I nod rather than answer.

I don’t know if I know how to do those things. I’m not even sure how I learn them. I’m not sure I know how to not work less hard at being human, to trust myself to be a human with ease and without effort.

I’m not sure I trust myself to get to where I’m headed by doing less.

I’m not sure I know how to tend or be tended rather than to defend or be defended but at least I want to find out.

So much has left, is leaving or about to leave.

My father, reproduction, fertility, three men I thought I’d spend forever with, my identity, and my baby.

My girl is a woman who has suddenly stepped into stunning independence, has her license, and driving herself through the world. Now, it is me who is the passenger who must be invited when she starts the car to drive her own directions.

Wasn’t I just singing “Mama always comes back?” Was I just putting red heart stickers on the top of her hand before pre-school to help her manage three hours without me?

My house seems too big now. The man I bought my house with is building a tiny house in Canada, for one. Turns out, he needed land, quiet, and not to be a step-father, a message he delivered last year, on Mother’s Day. The life I worked so hard to build now seems empty.

The two hands on each side of my heart, for my daughter, and for my lover, couldn’t meet in my heart. I tried to split myself in half to meet their needs.

I bought him out of his interest in what’s now just my property, the home I’m helping ready my daughter to leave.

I do not trust who or what I will meet in my sorrow, grief, and loneliness. If I tend mainly to me with myself be enough for me?

Can I tend to tenderness itself?

Can I make a home where my daughter always feels anchored and safe to return and one in which I also feel at ease?

Can I find out how it feels to free myself of goals, plans, budgets, or even the war I’ve waged inside my skin for five decades and figure out what I need next for the next phase of my own life?

Mostly, I have been on a mission, in a movement, and fight for or from a cause. But lately, it feels like less like steel calm, righteous fury, or determined clearing.

Lately, it seems I’m on a class four river in a boat without oars, a guide or even a life jacket. I’m afraid to be tossed out of the boat and pummeled on a rock and also afraid I won’t be, that the ride will never end, I’ll never find my ground.

Can I stop doing planning, shaping, making, and fighting? I wonder what will happen if I slow down and get quiet, if I whispered to myself, “arrived,” 1000 times and believed it even some of the time.

Would I go to more museums? Would I look at art and make time to travel? Would I find more time to sing, play, and dance? Would I host more parties, have more company, if I open myself up to love life?

What would happen to my mind if it wasn’t planning an argument, working the defense strategy? I’ve needed to be fierce, firm, and feisty, to stay clear so as not to get sucked down into denial. But not now.

Now, I am tired of fighting in a ring I never suited up for. I am tired of battling with the past I had so little part in making. I’m tired of my life and body being a punching bag for others working out their own pain.

Can I let the ring be the floor where the war is not won or lost but is just over?

Can I say to myself: Not my fight. Not my gloves. This isn’t what my hands were made for.

Can I meet the heroine of my own journey by disrobing entirely?

Can I be the heroine of my own journey by stepping out of the ring?

Can I feel my own skin, hands, heart and fist unfurling?

Can I settle-up, acknowledge the punches that have been thrown and landed and say I’m in the wrong place.

Can I let go of fighting back, knocking out, or simply surviving and retire? Can I get out of the cement building where all are screaming, wagering, and watching and say, “This isn’t for me.”

Can I know I’m on the wrong path even before the right one appears?

I can. I do.

Can I retire the occupational hazards of childhood as a half century adult and give myself permission to do little more than explore?

I can.

Can I be done with the fight prep, the hype, the matches, and then the recovery time after knock outs?

I am.

Can I find it’s not the end of anything but the chance to be simple, ordinary and at ease in my body, bed, and the world?

I’m about to find out.

P.S. Rock art with Margaret Bellafiore on beach.