Thursday, May 3, 2012

Essays by Jennifer Misiurewicz


Hero’s Journey


Have you ever felt compelled to thank somebody for loving you? A secret, dark part of me always felt that everyone should just DO that love me thing. Yet, somewhere deeper and even darker, I’ve always felt that no one has.
These aren’t the inner pinings of a narcissistic teen, twenty-something or a panicked thirty-something making a last futile attempt at figuring out who she wants to be when she grows up. It’s a desire older than baby teeth and the capability to physically produce the sound of simple phonics.
I can remember the void left “where love goes” far more easily than my first memory or experience of love. The fact remains, as a child, despite my best efforts to turn off the plain, obvious, total envelopment of love my life was, I passed it by or tuned it out like an Autistic Vulcan.
In aging, developing and coming into my own, my life’s trail is paved with the carcasses of self- inflicted denial, rejection and failure in the implementation of love. Like an amoeba, designed to live off as little as possible in the temporal world’s physical chaos, I existed and flapped my arms, at best.
Now here I am, ravaged, compromised, contused and stripped bare, and somebody loves me. Whether or not I was the heiress of a loving culture, family and inner worth, I now am left feeling begat of love, born of love and clueless. There’s another living, breathing, thinking, human being who voluntarily loves me. And, I’m more than okay with that.
My past inclinations to run, sabotage, victimized myself or manipulate have disappeared from my bag of tricks. I don’t even WANT him to love me. I simply have to accept it. Raw, simple, genuine, uncontingent, not even offered, just there for the taking, LOVE. And somehow, I’m functioning, in the stillness of it all.
In the wee hours of the night, I dissect it, carving it into tiny, emotionless, lifeless pieces of things “not-me.” Every morning, I wake to it fully assembled, fully functioning, smiling at me and reminding me it loves me. And, though I think it would look fetching in a straight jacket, it’s there. It’s real. And smiling.
Whether my thirty-something years of loveless childhood are fancied or real doesn’t matter. The reality I live in, this state of lovedom is thick, warm, and as safe as the womb, legend has it, I once escaped from. How in the world am I expected to handle that?! It appears, by just being what I was designed for: love. Much to my scowling chagrin, all the accoutrements of my survival are blessed little attributes. So, I give up. He wins. I guess that means I win too. Hopefully he’ll help me figure it all out, or  remind me I don’t have to.
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DOB


Being 38 years old and childless, there is a chasm between myself and mothers. My not being a mother was a choice regarding birth control for health that spanned decades and became a choice regarding my present and my future. Ask me today, I’d still have the 5 kids I wanted at 20, if I could.
I noticed the difference in me with my own mother first. My adulthood marked the beginning of her failing to relate to me. At 17, she was a high school drop out, a mother, and the wife of a 21 year old ginger haired musician. By 20, she lost her own mother. We hit the wall on demographic commonality before I had sex for the first time. But me, I never stopped looking for it. Or craving it. Empathy.
As my friends began having kids, there’s that phase of baby doll dress up, baby daddy drama, and them realizing the golden age of the mythical stay at home mom had ended. They were more tired than I was. Their financial resources went elsewhere. I felt like a braggart with my bars, boyfriends, nights in the city and 12 noon alarm clock setting.
Friends married, produced more spawn, I had a miscarriage. Friends divorced, remarried, more kids. I moved back home, switched jobs, suffered depression and often felt I was just surviving.
My brother married before me. Within a year, almost to the date, he had a daughter, my niece. I’ve never really told anyone in my family, but it took me 6 months to feel connected to her. Even through some testing and a trisomy scare, I was unaffected, apathetic and surprised at my personal coldness. She wasn’t mine in any way. And she surely wasn’t that baby that would’ve been her 8 year old cousin.
As I dated into my 30s,and saw my brother’s world and marriage unravel, I  saw parenthood in a whole new light, a masculine light. I saw my brother, a few boyfriends suffer the absence of their children. It was devastating. Their identity was replaced by their position as appointment keeper and automatic teller machine. Their children would cohabitate with strange, adult men that they didn’t approve. The women they dated, including myself, were judged as over bred harlots, or unequipped lowerings of the survival of the fittest, too flawed to breed.
My mind is now clouded by two decades as a spectator in the world’s failings and successes in parenthood. Yet every child that passes me, catches my eye. Every child I share words with or run my hesitant fingers over in moments of “they’re so cute” burn my heart and the cavity inside me that’s laid dormant for so long. I never made a decision that I didn’t want to be a mother. I never judged you if you did. The only thing that I decided, was that I wouldn’t become a jaded mother or grandmother. That means I’ll make my decision when I have a formidable partner I am looking forward to making that decision with. If that never happens, it wasn’t my life’s plan. I see 20 kids a day I can smile at, be kind to and preserve the Earth for. Don’t pity me. But don’t expect me to pity the plight you may have in being a parent. I won’t be jealous. I’ll just keep doing what I do. The world needs the childless just as much.

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Down Will Come Baby

 

There are parents who put their kids in front of the T.V., my parents, mainly my mom, put me in front of the radio. My love for and addiction to music has always existed, without fail, without choice. Though my dad, for all intents and purposes, is a musician, this hunger and appetite comes from the woman who loved him. It is the biggest gift anyone has ever given me.
My mom once said, “I know you’d go crazy without music. That’s why I always made sure you had stereos and radios.” And she did. From transistor walkmen to turntables to boom boxes to shelf units, she’d supply the needle for the vein in my soul that throbbed and begged for the sticky, thick, melodic dope. When I’d stumble out of my self-constructed fortress of musictude, I’d be in the midst of hers.
Cleaning, cooking, driving, showering, sitting. Music was her white noise. I’d see her moving about in the trails of her mundane activities with a look of warm, emotional, vacation. What was she thinking? Who did she miss? Where was she? How did she end up here? Very often, my dad would be simultaneously concocting his own cacophony in compulsed madness just ten feet below us. Though you could hear it, we didn’t. Not really.
Life had dragged her and I over, around and under the country, following his dream. Seedy bars, dirty hotels, Colorado ski resorts, Ohio beach houses. It’s rumored I slept in a mostaccioli box in the back of van. Kentucky commune, faceless roadside motels, lake cabin in Wisconsin, all interspersed with stays at gramma’s, music watched over our souls.
My dad’s dream never came true. Or so I assume. Everyone grew up. We started staying in one place and sleeping in our own bed every night. Music keeping it’s position,  yet now more of a follower than a leader.
I once read that music activates the same brain activity as math. Math being a thing I excelled at without effort, I attributed science to my attraction, just like any other junkie looking for a justification. But that’s a lie. Music is my mother’s milk, my history. It is the home movie chronicling a love story. The story of two teens who fell in love, got pregnant, got married, chased after and ran from each other, leaving their blue eyed, towheaded baby in the care of what brought them together only to tear them apart.

 











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