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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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