Casting a Line

Ok, here I go. Cast the line out there, invisible thread merges with the air, and I can't see where I end and that line will land. But I am connected to it with some force this morning. Hell of a night.

Hell is when we hear things about ourself that beat even our worst silent thought.

She walks up, pulls on my pant leg, and when I let myself bend at the knee, she reaches up to receive my tears. This is backwards. I always receive her tears. This is not in the rule book. Only two, she does it like she's a thousand years old. Tiny back of hand, curled like a tulip, strokes my cheek. "K, Mama. Sad, Mama." I fight it for a moment - I am the mother and I should pull myself together. And then I think fuck it, this is my life. This is her life. And we will be real and straight about how it is to feel, and how it is sometimes to hate to feel deeply.

When I'm five or eight or twelve, I can't get out. Can't take a yoga class to make it all better. Can't diet or meditate or drive away. Can't even find a companion yet to distract myself from this bitch of a feeling.

He stands in the doorway this morning, "Yeah, well, just because you don't want to isn't an excuse. You have to take care of yourself if you're suffering. And we'll get through it together."

More than hating him, I feel how he is right and it doesn't make a bit of difference that he is right.

"Mama, no talk Daddy. No talk Daddy," she says from the potty, counting piggies in her book.

He looks to me for a response, but I am three quarters in sand, feeling the gravity of water at the end of my line. One hundred percent full-moon, full blood, smack in the middle of the womb, in here, out here. My feet, paws. Belly, spotted fur.

Passing through the eye of a needle isn't as easy as it sounds for those like me, she belts out, and I sing with her, alone at the house. There's laundry and a million mindless tasks to do, but not yet. Not yet. Please just believe in me. I scream it to myself. Don't lose out so easily. I scream it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm alive in here somewhere cause I can feel myself twising. I'm so far beyond my years, so don't be fooled by today. Hey, so please just believe in me......

I don't medicate so I pull up to mind the files again. All those years of study about trauma and how it works in the brain, in the nervous system. It used to be a lot worse. On bad nights, I would sit on the bathroom floor, close my eyes and ride the tremors, talking to myself: Oh, right, here we are, at the top of the bell curve. It will swing soon. Breathe into this bag. Feel the cold tiles? Good, your're still here. It's passing.

There is a reason Rumi was a drunkard! St. Theresa spent years in painful contortions, pleading, "Why, God? Why?"

When it was just me, poetry books all around. When it was just me, teachers and practices and many, many thoughtful prayers. But now, marriage and motherhood and turning forty - ugh. What happened?

The end of that line? I squint and see myself, way way out there in the current, and begin to reel her in. Slow and steady, panther in my bones, poems and songs and a drop of love, remain on shore, ready and waiting for the return.

He calls and I read. "Wow, that's getting to the nitty gritty. Oh. You're really going to put that in the blog?" Yep.

Pause. He says emphatically, "Family will no longer take you down. But it has to take you through . By doing so it opens all the original crap. But we are not going down. River will come through it with us, through places we never made it across with our parents."

Marriage: 4. a blending or matching of different elements or components: i.e., The new lipstick is a beautiful marriage of fragrance and texture.

River: 1. a natural stream of water of fairly large size flowing in a definite course or channel or series of diverging and converging channels.
2. a similar stream of something other than water.

Prema: 1. divine love

Steven: 1. crowned one