Voices

  • HerStories Voices: Solidify

    Like our HerStories Voices contributor Jackie Cangro, I am not one to initiate or encourage conversation in public places with strangers — on public transportation, at the library, in line at the grocery store. I’d rather be left alone in my (quiet) thoughts. It sounds, you know, unfriendly, to admit something like that. And sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out. So that’s why I love this essay about an unanticipated — and not necessary wanted — conversation. – Jessica

    It isn’t often that I get a seat on the subway ride home from work. As luck would have it, today I am standing in front of someone who gets off at the Park Place stop in lower Manhattan. You can’t hesitate for a moment if you want to sit on a crowded train. Polite people stand a lot.

    This gives me the opportunity to get engrossed in my book without being jostled. I’m nearly transported from the gritty bowels of New York City to antebellum Virginia when the woman to my left asks me a question.

    “Do you know what this word means?” She points to solidify in her book.

    “It means ‘to make stronger.’”

    “I’m going to write that down in my book so I don’t forget it.” She flips the pages to the back cover to show me a long list of words on which she needed clarification.

    We smile at each other and return to our books. I could tell you that I had warm, fuzzy feelings about this exchange, but that would be a lie. I could also tell you that my guarded nature developed only after moving to New York City fifteen years ago, but that too would be a lie. The truth is that even when I lived in the suburbs with grassy spaces between houses and expansive views of the sky, I was not one for idle chitchat with strangers. I’m not the person who will talk your ear off on the flight from Albuquerque to Atlanta or the one holding up the supermarket checkout line while telling the cashier my life story. I wish it came naturally for me to be one of those people who love people. Many New Year’s resolutions of my youth involved being more loquacious, but by January 5, I was exhausted.

    That’s not to say I don’t try to be helpful. Need to know how to get to Harlem from Brooklyn Heights? I’m here for you. Want a hint on which hipster coffee shop has the most reliable Wi-Fi? No problem. But I’m not going to divulge personal shortcomings to a stranger on a train—the way this woman will in just a few minutes.

    I nod at her, unsure what else to say, and give her my polite this-conversation-has-run-its-course look, but she hits me with another question out of left field. “How do you know if you’re a visual or auditory learner?”

    The train rocks and sways under the East River heading into Brooklyn. As a captive audience in a subway car, I’ve learned that the worst thing you can do in this situation is to make eye contact. Even a hardened glare only serves to encourage some people. Yet something about her earnest question makes me look. She has a pleasingly round face and a shaved head with a five o’clock shadow. The lack of hair makes her pink lipstick stand out against her chocolate skin.

    “I guess whichever comes easier for you,” I say.

    “Which one are you?”

    Now, this seems a bit personal. I glance out the window to see that we are only at Clark Street—a full six stops from home. There’s no way to end this conversation, so I know I have to let it run its course. “I suppose I’m a visual learner.”

    “How do you know?”

    “I’d rather read directions than hear them, for example.”

    She writes this down on a separate piece of paper, under the heading ‘Visual Versus Auditory.’ It seems that she is also a visual learner; she just doesn’t realize it. Her smile is wide, and she gives off a kind vibe, not a creepy one. “Do you have any tips for taking tests? I’m always looking for tips.”

    It’s been many years since I’ve taken a test. The last one, to complete my Master’s Degree, was the most intimidating of my life. We were given one essay question from each of seven courses completed and allotted one hour per question to write our answers in exam books. The proctor looked at us coolly as we entered the room, trying desperately to retain all of the information we’d memorized until we could regurgitate it on the page. She sighed. “Most of you will fail today and have to retake the exam next semester.” A fellow student leaned over and looked at me with a fierceness that comes from a combination of being sleep deprived and over-caffeinated. She whispered that we were going to make it through. I’d only had one class with her and couldn’t even remember her last name, but I believed her.

    On the other hand, it wasn’t too long ago that I gave tests as an adjunct instructor at a local college. So I tell the woman next to me what I would have told my students. “Be confident and don’t second-guess your answers. Your first instinct is nearly always right.”

    She smiles again—a big, broad smile that takes up her whole face. “Yes, I usually have good intuition. All my friends tell me that.”

    She goes on to tell me how inspired she is by the book she’s reading and since she’s read all three books by the author, she doesn’t know what she’ll read when she’s done. Now she’s trying to read very slowly. She also thanks me for talking to her. “You know, every time I get on the train I ask God to put me next to someone smarter than me. I’m trying to learn all of the things I didn’t learn when I was younger. I know I’m kind of old for this. It’s not easy starting from scratch.”

    “No, it’s not, but please don’t give up. It’s never too late.” I suddenly and deeply care that she not quit. I want her to dream big. I am prepared to dream bigger for her than she is allowing herself to dream. I know sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going—to feel that someone else, even a stranger, believes in you.

    The train pulls into Grand Army Plaza, and I take my leave of her. In a fifteen-minute conversation with a woman I’d never laid eyes on before, and probably never will again, I’ve been reminded to trust my instincts, let my guard down, and remember the power of tenacity. All things on which my soul needed a bit of a refresher.

     

    Jackie CangroJackie Cangro’s short story “Secrets of a Seamstress” was selected as a finalist in the Saturday Evening Post’s 2013 Great American Fiction Contest. Her fiction has also been published in The MacGuffin and Pangolin Papers, and her nonfiction has appeared in Narrative.ly, Prick of the Spindle, and History Magazine, among others. She can be found on her blog, on Twitter, and Goodreads. When she’s not riding the subway, she works as a freelance editor and creative writing instructor. 

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  • HerStories Voices: I Am Here

    Today’s HerStories Voices column is by Suzanne Perryman, who blogs at Special Needs Mom. It’s a lovely meditation on the relationship between Suzanne and her oldest daughter, as well as the triumphs and struggles of her entire family.

    Sometimes our most precious moments with our children take place with them asleep, beside us.

    My daughter Olivia is breathing gently in a rhythm I know well. For almost 14 years I have studied her stages of sleep.  With her hand tucked in mine, I stay stretched out beside her. In the shadows I study the new curves on her body and the way she fills her childhood bed. The way her long curly hair falls in thick bundles off the ends of her pillow, the dark hiding its rich reddish brown. She called me here me tonight, overflowing with excitement and anxiety, unable to sleep.

    “ Lie with me, Mama,” she used to say. When her curls were just a cap of copper penny red and still shooting in all directions.  And I would resist then, empty and exhausted by the end of my day. Wanting the touch of my husband’s skin next to mine, wanting my own turn.

    Her curls grew into a mop of deep red during the years she favored Strawberry Shortcake. The feather-light weight of her five year old body made her steps small and almost silent in her Strawberry Shortcake slippers, and I could barely hear her coming each early morning when she slowly shuffled down the hall .

    She would find me at my desk most quiet mornings and climb into my lap, whispering in a sleepy sing song, “Whatya doing?

    Looking at pictures,”  I replied one morning, as the softness of her body settled and snuggled into mine, she reached for the photo I held in my hand. “My favorite,” she sighed.

    She studied that image of her four year old self, dressed in pink and red, raincoat and boots, standing in our backyard holding her umbrella. 

    I woke up from my nap ..” she began, “and Zoe was still sleeping and we snuck outside to the play in the rain. We ran all around my playhouse and splashed on the patio until we were wet! You remember, right, Mommy?” She questioned with her eyes wide. “I can’t see you in the picture but you were there.”

    You were there.

    She didn’t say it, but with her subtle reference, I know that she remembered those times when she woke up and I was gone. Beginning when her sister Zoe was born and I disappeared into the night, returning home a week later. My first night home, when I had finished singing and rocking her to sleep and after quietly tucking her in her crib, she awoke screaming and crying for me, and then finally flung her body out of her crib and across the room.

    And times after that, when Zoe fell sick during the night and I had no choice but to take her to the hospital, and Olivia would wake up with her Mommy missing. Her mommy wasn’t there. 

    In Pre-k, the psychologist called it a slow-to-warm temperament, the way she would wrap her arms around my legs, and refuse to say goodbye. The way she would clutch and climb my nearly six foot length, from bottom to top, the way a child can scurry up a tree. While I stood solid with the weight of Zoe in my arms, the weight of the guilt in my heart made me weak.

    Slow to warm, like the careful way I would warm her maple syrup for our pancake lunches. She would stand then, hugging the back of my legs as I poured the pancake batter and then start to giggle as I carried her plate to the table, over the silliness of our eating pancakes for lunch. Pancake lunches were special, for the days we missed our pancake breakfasts. For the days she woke up and I wasn’t there. 

    Kindergarten at an early age was a better choice for my smart and spirited happy child.  A smarter alternative to spending her day visiting Zoe’s specialists and therapists or playing quietly while her sister napped.

    And like a fragile flower, well-nurtured, she flourished within our simple family life.  She grew strong until fall came along every year, and with new transitions and new teachers, she would falter and wilt a bit, until slowly opening wide again strongly rooted again by spring, and warmed by the season’s sun.

    Until one spring, when she didn’t. And I grieved for her. I missed her smile, her charm, her affection, the way she shimmied across her bedroom floor as she sang her favorite songs. And that way she always started her day by sleepily climbing into my lap where I too found comfort in her body still warm from sleep. I missed her then and I tried everything. I went back to my mothering basics: more attention, more love, more sunshine, more backyard time.

    And when nothing worked, I sat down at my computer and Googled “how +to+make+my+daughter+happy+again.” And knew then I had reached my rock bottom, and her anxiety had outgrown me. It was a psychiatrist who helped her to find the right words,  to identify the panic attacks she was experiencing, and it was the medicine that eventually brought my happy girl back to me.

    Olivia just kept growing, taller and smarter. The color of her hair began to turn an auburn brown. She took to reading big books, piling them in her room, and carrying three or four in her arms to school with her each day, admitting quietly the comfort they gave her, how they helped to ease her anxiety.

    With growth came more truth. One day Olivia asked if her sister Zoe would ever get better, when Zoe might begin to walk, without using her walker and if she would ever someday not need her pink power wheelchair.

    I looked at my oldest then, knowing she had outgrown her little girl eyes. I took our routine each day for granted and never realiized that Olivia believed the medicines, the therapies, and the doctors would someday make Zoe better, help her learn to walk and speak clearly.

    I watched Olivia’s eyes fill with tears as I explained that although Zoe’s body would grow taller and maybe stronger, her condition would never change. I waited for her words of grief.

    “Does Zoe know, Mom?” was all she said. Protective  of her little sister, she was trying to imagine if Zoe knew this truth too, if Zoe, who was full of life and laughter, always smiling knew this to be her truth or if there was more hurt to come.

    Through her middle school years there were times when Olivia hurt, feeling the pain of her anxiety and in those moments, I felt even worse. There were other times too, with friends and pool parties and school, her first concert. Through these years she found comfort in our family, and at her school.

    My “fix-it” years of motherhood filled with research, identifying problems and then applying my best mothering skills, were soon coming to an end. We gave up the medicine and I worked on developing a specialized set of coping skills. I started thinking about the tools Olivia would need to take with her one day. What she would need to know about herself, how she would need to be the one to “fix” things in her future.

    I never imagined lying beside my teenage daughter like this, thinking that someone else will lay next to her one day, someone else will love her this fiercely. Thinking about how her world will grow beyond this home, beyond her father and me, beyond her sister who will always stay here with us. That I will still be here, but the someday is coming when she will be gone.

    She is in high school now and everything is new. The scratchy uniforms, her friends, the community, the higher expecations, the honor classes and study load. I am here for you, I tell her. I try to comfort, try to help her to pack and prepare the toolbox she will take with her when she someday goes. I watch her struggling for social approval when even her most familiar becomes uncomfortable, like when she straightens her hair, as if denying her true self, and can erase the memory of her corkscrew curls like they were never there.

    She raises her voice in anger when she is worried, anxious. I raise my own voice in fear and frustration.Then I pull her into me saying, “I am here.”

    She cries many different tears, raindrop tears that trickle, as she slowly tells me her story. Tears of a thunderstorm that come fast and furious lashing out that it is my fault she feels this way, and finally with no warning, the torrential downpour that falls hard and steady and seems to have no end. “ I am here,”  I tell her as I try to be her shelter from the storm.

    These moments of darkness, like weather, sometimes come with no warning, are unpredictable and follow no pattern. They interrupt the sunniest days of sweetness, and light and the calm of our family life.

    No storm clouds follow. The outburst comes and passes, and with frustration I accept that she has outgrown my own ability to fix it. I can hug and hold,  coax and plead. After, we talk about what worked, what helped to guide her through it and soothe her fears. And we pack that too into her toolbox, to take out and use again someday.

    It is late when she calls me to her bed tonight. At first I sit, listening to her talk about her day. I hear hesitation in her voice and then it grows stronger and then smoother. High school is hard but she is finding her way.

    Lie with me, Mom,” she says and I hear that little girl voice again, I can see her little girl curls.

    I don’t resist because I know my turn with her is coming to an end.

    Her hand reaches for mine, and our fingers find their familiar places wrapping around each other. We lay connected.

    I close my own eyes and now it is my little girl I see, the way her curls fly as she runs. The way she likes to hide behind me, her body aligned perfectly with mine.  I see my husband, waiting for me time after time, his eyes full  with care and understanding as he too chooses to put Olivia’s needs before his own.

    We do all we can to prepare our kids, to pack their tool box full for someday. We push them out into the world — when really we want, for just a little while longer, to pull them back in.

    Olivia’s fingers are still wound tightly through mine, and I know that years from now, she will be gone, finding her way in the world with her confidence in full bloom, and it will be this moment I will miss: the simple joy of being the one who holds her hand, late into the night.

    I am here, I whisper in the dark.

    suzanneperrymanSuzanne Perryman began blogging at specialneedsmom.com to celebrate the simple, inspiring every day, one story at a time. Her work has recently been featured on HuffPost Parents, Brain,Child, BlogHer, Mamalode, Project Underblog and QueenLatifah.com and was chosen as a BlogHer Voice Of The Year.

     

     

    -Mother.Writer-We still have a few spaces in our “Mother, Writer” class starting next week! Find out more here….

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  • HerStories Voices: How Do the Dead Drink Tea?

    Alison Lee of Writing, Wishing is a blogging and writing dynamo. She’s a valuable member of our HerStories community, as a contributor to My Other Ex and as a coordinator of our blog tours for that book. Most recently, BonBon Break is lucky enough to claim Alison as an editor. Today Alison writes movingly about a powerful family influence: her grandmother.

    HerStories (3)

    “I want to die.”

    My grandmother said those words to me, my sister, my mother, my father — anyone who would listen, every single day for a period of time which seemed like forever, but it was probably for the few months she was laid up after a stroke. She would call us several times a day, say those four words, and we would mouth well-practiced lines, assuring her that she was very much loved, and no one wanted her to die, least of all herself.

    She assured me that yes, yes she did. What good was life, confined to a wheelchair, unable to go to the bathroom on her own, the last shreds of dignity gone? The cycle of life is cruel. To be old and frail, is cruel.

    She did not die then. She recovered from the stroke, only to break her hip not long after. The death she spoke of so often, in those days of my teenage years, would creep in on us slowly and painfully.


    “Slow down, Grandma!”

    “I think you should hurry up. You and your sister.”

    She always walked quickly, as if her destination and purpose pulled her against her will.  My younger sister and I spent weekends at Grandma’s, where at the crack of dawn, we would wake excitedly because it was market day on Saturday. I loved everything about that huge maze of a place, with perpetually wet floors. The smell that came before the sea of colors. All my senses would be ablaze as I soaked in the freshness of vegetables just pulled from the ground, the sweet stickiness of Malaysian cakes, made with rich coconut milk and rice flour.

    I remember the metallic smell of blood from the poultry section, where we watched with horrified interest, chickens as they were slaughtered.

    Grandma would begin her route, never to deviate, mind you, through the market. The vegetable section was our first stop. Cabbage, spinach, green beans, spring onions, carrots, sweet potatoes, yam, and lotus root (delicious in soups). Of the dozens of vendors, Grandma had her favorites. The bargaining was fascinating, the conclusion always the same. Grandma only paid the prices she wanted to.

    Moving onto the fruit section, Grandma picked the loveliest oranges, always handing my sister and me one each, for us to savor later. Or it could be a distraction from her next stop — for chicken.

    We would peer down from half a floor up to the slaughter section. There was no ceremony in the death of these creatures. They were simply pulled out, held up, and their throats expertly sliced. Sickened as I felt in my stomach, I never turned away a good chicken dish at dinner.

    I became a vegetarian when I was 21.


    “Why do you do that, Grandma?”, as I watched her clean the urn full of what looked like ash mixed with dirt, with stubs of incense sticks embedded deeply.

    “To keep things clean and neat. It’s a sign of respect to your ancestors, those who came before you.”

    My grandmother’s ancestral altar was never a thing of fascination for me. For as long as I could remember, it was always there, prominently placed in a space at the back of the open living area, facing the entrance. At least six feet high and red, it was not just a piece of furniture; it was a physical reflection of my grandmother’s culture (Chinese) and religion (Taoism). It was a thing not to be touched (unless you were cleaning it), but a place to show your respect to the dead, with offerings of fruit and hot Chinese tea.

    I always wondered how the dead could drink tea.


    “You better make plans to come home. It won’t be long now.”

    I was not surprised to receive my father’s call. His mother had been dying for a long time. She seemed ready to meet her husband, long dead at the young age of 45. How do you live without the love of your life for 40 years?

    I was 27 and living in the big city, two hours from home. I had to stay late at the office that day, frantically finishing up work so I could drive home the next day to see my grandmother. My dying grandmother.

    She died that evening, after her youngest son made it to her bedside.

    I did not get to say goodbye in person.

    During the traditional Chinese three day wake, I did not shed a tear. Her dying was expected. She had been bedridden for years, her once robust body, shriveled to a mere 80 pounds. She had gone blind a few years ago, and her mind slowly went with her. She remembered her youth vividly, but could not recall the names of her 30 grandchildren. When I would visit, sitting by her beside and holding her hand, so papery thin, she would run through the names of all her granddaughters, while I silently wept.

    I wish I had visited her more often.

    The dam broke when they nailed her coffin shut, just before the procession to her final resting place. They may as well have driven that nail into my heart. My beloved grandmother was really gone.

    The days of going to the market with her had become just childhood memories. Those angst-filled phone calls of doom (“I want to die”) were reduced to anecdotes, oft repeated for a laugh. However, in that moment when the last nail went into her coffin, they were not just memories and anecdotes. They were tangible reminders that this woman loved me. She was the cornerstone in my young life, a life in which I felt invisible around my own mother.


    One of the only photographs I have of my grandmother, pictured here with my sister, me, and my cousin (I am perched above her left shoulder).

    Rarely a day goes by that I don’t think about Grandma. I miss her of course, but mostly, I regret that I didn’t know her better. I took her love greedily, and in my own childlike way, I loved her back. I never asked why she married my grandfather, a man I never knew, his youthful face enshrined in a large frame at her house. It was a marriage born of matchmaking, my aunt told me. Grandmother was only 18 when she became a bride.

    I never asked her about the two daughters she lost, I only knew that she had lost them.

    I never asked her how she coped with losing her husband when she was only in her 40’s, alone with eight children, the youngest only a few years old. Her oldest son was halfway across the world, pursuing his university education. She did not tell him immediately after his father died, worried she would distract him from his studies. He made the US his home country, years later. Did he regret missing his father’s funeral? Was he ever angry at Grandma for making that decision for him?

    I never asked her what it was like, living in occupied Malaya*, back in the 1940’s. My father told us that sometimes, all they ate was rice soaked in dribbles of soy sauce, for flavor. How did she make money? Who supported them? How did the children get to school and back?

    I only knew her as my grandmother, a gentle quiet woman, who only raised her voice when she really meant business. A woman who bargained with vegetable vendors like it was her job, enjoying every minute. I knew her quirks (ironing her underwear) as well as any child who spent the majority of her childhood at her home, would. I knew her entire repertoire of Chinese dishes, and they were all delicious. I never met anyone else who could reproduce the dishes of my childhood, although my mother gave it a good go. I knew that as much as she enjoyed the huge celebratory party her children threw for her 70th birthday, she was slightly uncomfortable with all the attention. I can see that in the family photo we took, probably the only time all of us were in one place at the same time. I knew that she hated relying on other people, when her health problems took away first, her physical abilities, then her mental acuity.

    I did not know how much her death would blow such a big hole in my life. For 100 days after her death, I wore black. It was not a conscious decision — I was in my 20’s and black was my go-to-color. After realizing I had worn the same color for two weeks, it seemed like the most natural thing to do to honor her memory.

    I have a lot of bright, happy yellow in my life now, because at 38, I am honoring her life. I enjoy a good back and forth on prices with market vendors. I give a nod of respect to any bright red ancestral altars I see in public places. I scour her old photo albums, looking for more hints into a life I am itching to learn more about. I ask my aunt and parents endless questions, probing their memories about the woman I only know as Mah Mah (Cantonese for paternal grandmother).

    I do not, however, iron my underwear.

    I honor her life with the stories I will tell my four children about the great grandmother they will never meet, but who lives on in me.

    I am no longer a vegetarian. Mah Mah would approve.

    *Before Malaysia gained independence from the British in 1957, it was known as Malaya.

    Alison Lee bioAlison Lee is a former PR and marketing professional turned work-at-home mother. After a 10-year career in various PR agencies, and of the world’s biggest sports brands, Alison traded in product launches and world travel, for sippy cups, diapers, and breastfeeding. Alison shares stories of motherhood on her blog, Writing, Wishing. She is one of 35 essayists in the anthology, My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends. In 2012, she founded Little Love Media, a social media consultancy. Alison lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with her husband and four children (two boys and boy/ girl twins).

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  • HerStories Voices: The Mommy Inside the Rocks

     We’re so happy to present to you the second HerStories Voices column. This week’s essay is from Kathryn Wallingford. In Kathryn’s own words, her essay is about “rocks, remembering why I love Toni Morrison, and teaching my son to put apples in his pocket. How do we allow the continued growth of an imagination when we send our children to a system of order, structure, and real time? This is a mother clinging onto her son.”
    For May, in recognition of Mother’s Day, we’re looking for essays about a moment or an experience during early motherhood that changed you. Our upcoming anthologies Mothering Through the Darkness: Women on the Postpartum Experience and So Glad They Told Me: Women on Getting Real About Motherhood both are about these early days, months, and years of new motherhood. Tell us your stories of about a “moment of change” as a new (or new-ish) mother! For more information about submitting to HerStories Voices, read here. Submit your motherhood-themed essays to us by May 1st!
    HerStories Voices--The Mommy Inside the

    In the beginning, my beginning, I marked time with a rock in my pocket. The smooth glass of the eastern shores. The Bright Angel shale reminded me of the hot Arizona sun. I stole the granite of Wyoming and lined my freshman dorm with pieces of Appalachian quartz.

    Eventually the rocks were thrown into one box. Sand, dirt, silt, and clays sifted together. They were the hot desert air, those cool Montana nights, and the Himalayan sunset, bounded and carried from home to home.

    Until finally my four-year old found them.  One cold, winter day they made their way into his hands.

    “Can I paint on them? Can I give them to my friends at school?” he asked.

    With no hesitation, I replied, “Of course.”

    What else was I saving my memories for? To be thrown on another window sill?

    So he pulled the rocks out one by one.

    It was his Mommy Before.

    Mommy in-love on Roan Mountain.

    Mommy scared, almost ready to jump into Crater Lake.

    I tried to tell him the life behind each rock so he could be there too. In the 5 years that he has been on this earth I have had two additional children. As a result, I have been pregnant for approximately 550 days, a nursing mother for almost 720. He deserves to know this Mommy.

    The Mommy inside the rocks.

    As he paints I also remember how much I love these places. But it is hard to describe what he can not see. His Mommy before. I do not have many pictures to correspond to the collection.

    He picks up the rocks one by one and his questions multiply.

    “How cold was the lake? What did the lake look like? Were you scared? Did you want to jump? What did it feel like? How big was the mountain? You climbed into a canyon? Where was Daddy?”

    The questions seem to exhaust him too. Moving away from my stories and the rocks and my geology 101 lesson, he begins to create a picture of his own. He goes into his own world and I migrate to the laundry pile that needs to be folded. But he soon comes to me with his creation.  His work is red paper smothered in glue and white dots.  I make out my name. I make out his name.

    “It is beautiful. What is it?” I ask.

    “It is a rocket ship taking us to the moon and people are throwing snowballs at us,” he answers.

    “I love it.” And I do.

    I am not sure how my rock collection gave away to the artistic expression or how to explain if snow could or could not land on a spaceship.

    This was his understanding of our conversation. A new world has came alive.

    He has started kindergarten and real time replaces the abstract. School supply list- a plastic, red folder. 24 twistable Crayola crayons. Room- # 223. Rules- three warnings and then time out. “Zero-voice” in halls. 10:45 am- lunch. Curriculum- Science and Math in Spanish. Reading and Writing in English. Estoy contento. There is a correct way to say contento. He will be corrected.

    Before his first day he asks me how to open a 3-ring binder. There is a correct way to do this too. By the end of the day he is tired. There seems to be less time to chat and rummage through a box of rocks.

    In her poetry collection, Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith writes, “We move in an out of our rooms, leaving our dust, our voices pooled on sills. We hurry from door to door in a downpour.”

    I read this and think about how badly I am getting drenched. My forgotten voice, my racing legs. Where am I going? In and out. Drop off kids at school. Change dirty diaper. Nurse the baby. Time to cook, for who else is going to cook?  Cook dinner. Stop, snap a picture.

    And now he has homework. He knows the bad kids and the good kids. He joins the race. The downpour continues. We both get drenched.

    We race for explanations and for the finite moments, to explain and to store memories. When are we left to imagine, believing in what you can not see?

    As a teenager I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon when I heard about Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide.  Thirty-nine individuals from Heaven’s Gate took their lives with the belief they could reach an alien spacecraft following the comet Hale-Bopp.  I watched the news coverage from a condo in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It was my spring break. I obsessed over the news reports when I was supposed to be snow skiing. I tried to imagine the world was really going to end.  It seemed crazy. It seemed unimaginable.

    But as I dismissed the cult members as lunatics I read Song of Solomon engrossed with the character of Pilate, the woman born without a navel. “She was a like a large black tree,” Morrison writes.

    I tried to imagine such a woman. I remember feeling small and that the world was large. I did not know how 39 people could kill themselves. I did not know if a woman could really be born with a smooth stomach.

    I was 18 and and my world was being deconstructed.

    And now here I am again. I have a five year-old to remind me to raise my eyes a bit. To look a little farther. He needs to see outside the present moment. He wants to see a dinosaur. He wants to know how you get to heaven. On an airplane? I need to get him there. Life past our five senses.

    I pick him up for school and he tells me about the fire drill and sings, “Down by the banks where the watermelon grows…” It is his favorite from preschool. He tells me about the school rules and what he had for lunch. I watch him fasten his seatbelt and we drive in silence.

    When we get home I put away the book bag and the homework and we walk outside.We dig at ants, we suck on popsicles. We smell cut grass. The sound of rockets in sky become catalyst for the microcosm of the unknown. He asks if the rocket ship can see us. He asks if I would rather be a bird or a rocket.

    What a damn good question! I tell him a bird.

    He begins to climb our crab- apple tree.

    In two years, he will probably not want me to watch him climb the tree.

    In five years, he will have soccer or band or art practice after school.

    In ten years, he will have his driving license. He will not want to climb the tree.

    In fifteen years, he will will likely be living elsewhere.

    He sticks an apple in his pocket. I do not tell him that the apple will not fare well in this pocket. He finds another apple to store away and climbs closer to the sky.

    FullSizeRender (17)Kathryn lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her three sons and husband. On good days she writes about religion, mothering, and the natural world. You can find more of her work in Brain, Child and Literary Mama. Visit her blog at http://thisisenough.weebly.com/

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