Home

We wake up in the morning, make our beds, move through time because it won’t wait for us. We vacuum the carpet before the inlaws come over for dinner. We sweep out the garage on Saturday morning. All the while circling and circling that cold hard fact, planted in our front yard for all the world to see.

From where I sit I can just glimpse the sign, slightly bending to the wind’s strong will as it stakes its ground. It waves back and forth. The sharp red letters blinking in the corner of my vision: FORECLOSED, FORECLOSED, FORECLOSED.

When I married you, you didn’t promise this. You made me laugh and tilted your head just so, then and there creating the only criteria for my love. I watch the fading sun spread fingers of light across the bare floors. It doesn’t seem like love is enough anymore.

I'll Eat You Up!

My friend posted today: Inside all of us is a Wild Thing.

How did he know?

How to be inspired.

How to be inspired?

How to be inspired, when your day is padding back and forth to the copier.
When your to do list reinvents itself with every passing hour
When your email inbox announces the crises of the day, and you wonder if there are really people on the other end
or if you only answer to a machine.

How to be inspired, when you want to make it home in time
to fit in a run
and did you remember to take a frozen assembly meal from the freezer
so there is something to eat tonight?

How to be inspired, when you crawl into bed
and you wonder if you really looked someone in the eye that day
or did you just do your job so that tomorrow there will be a
roof
and food, and
even cable tv

Punctuation Lesson

“He burned up, they say.”

My brain doesn’t register what I’m hearing through the phone. “The house caught on fire, middle of the night. Damn kerosene heaters. Ms. Lacey pulled Marquis from bed, but when they got to the doors they were melted shut. They went for the windows, busted the glass, but they have the bars on them. It wasn’t any use. They say they just huddled together and waited to die.”

Waited to die… waited to die. Somehow that part gets through to me. All I can see is his face. Marquis grinning guilty as a cat with a canary in the cafeteria after school. Marquis huddling with his grandmother waiting to die. “Okay,” I reply weakly. “Yeah, okay, right.” Michelle’s strong voice comes through on the other end buoying me to the earth. “Prayer service is all set for tomorrow at the school. I’ll meet you.” We hang up. I’m sitting in my car with the engine running. Just a moment ago I was annoyed, waiting for red lights, waiting for grocery lines, waiting for perscriptions. Marquis, yeah, he was waiting to die.

I get home and throw my keys on the counter. Scout looks up. “Marquis died today." I walk through the living room to the bedroom. I lay down on the cool sheets and press my face into mattress to get my bearings. There was this gigantic rip in time just a few minutes ago yet I find myself in my house, time moving forward still. I don’t get it. Scout comes in and sits on the bed. I’m thankful he knows not to say anything. I don’t get why I think I should be comforted. Why I have a right in this moment to think about myself. Here one of my students dies at the age of six and not ten minutes later I’m already about myself. Is our selfishness part of our survival instinct? He’s gone, now you must survive, says your body. Breathe the next breath; make a way.

It hit me as soon as Michelle said it, but I only now feel the fury rise up. Marquis would not be dead had he not been poor.There would have been no kerosene heater, no bars on the windows to hold him in. How do you make sense of a world like that?We aren’t really free, I think. Any of us. We think we are, some of us are fooled more than others.For Marquis, the truth just snuffed him out.Fury turns to ache. “It hurts,” I tell him.

The kids line up on the damp, green grass. They stare at the adults who somberly look into space. Their faces say: we should be sad. “Marquis died,” James tells me, waiting for my reaction. Like he’s getting to share the latest news. “Yeah, he did,” I reply. If I can’t process this, how would a six year old? Michelle walks among the school staff and parents. Her presence holds it all together it seems. Like some magnet that keeps us all from floating away. Later, when the art therapist comes the kids draw pictures. James writes in big block letters: WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE? I trace the question mark with my finger. We were just working on punctuation last week, and here is James learning better than I could teach him how to put a question mark when you don’t know the answer.

I look hard at each of my kids. I want so badly to believe there is choice out there for them. For a moment I picture bars on the classroom windows and suddenly I shoot up from my chair. “What is it Mrs. Jackson?” asks Kayla. What is freedom, anyway?

Bedtime story

When I was a little girl, I would sit beneath my window and hum stories into the air. I would write words in a melody that floated away on my breath, freed from the swirling, ruminating trap of my mind. I had no concept of audience, no fleeting fear of how my story might be received. It was just a simple truth that the story must be told; the walls of my bedroom layered with the joys and tragedies of a ten-year old imagination.

My bedroom was my kingdom, my hiding place. My bed had been passed down to me by my mother from her days in college. I liked to picture it in her dorm room, pressed up against the corner where she would curl up, biting into her pencil as she wrote a term paper or crying into the pillow after an argument with her boyfriend. She told me once in passing that my grandfather had built the bed for her as a going away gift for college. This precious slip of information sent me scurrying to my room where I traced the finished, painted wood with new eyes and memorized the moldings with my fingertips. What thrill to know that I possessed this overt display of my grandfather’s love for his child. A rare, subtle surfacing of expression for a man who owned my heart utterly.

I liked to imagine why he chose to build the bed. What inspired him to give her a bookshelf instead of a headboard to lay benath each night? Did he think that books might bring her comfort when she felt far from home? Did he imagine that his granddaughter might one day run her fingers along the spines of her favorite novels to soothe her in the dark when she couldn’t sleep? Did he build this bed to cradle her each night while she sang stories into the folds of her sheets?

Choose me.

Pregnancy takes my body hostage. My body given over to another being and there’s nothing I control. The thought is fleeting; I just want you. Sam has put the children to bed.

“Do you really want this life with me?” he asks.

We are sitting side by side on the front porch steps watching evening settle like a blanket over the neighborhood.

“ Of course I do,” I reply.

We sit silently for a few minutes and then he speaks into the dusk:

“I mean, if we could go back and start it all over again would you have chosen this? Now that you know what its like, would you have?”

I lean forward and wrap my arms around my knees.

“I don’t think that way,” I tell him. “You are so wrapped up in me now – there’s no extracting it.”

Even as I look at him loneliness shoots through my body. I think we need to feel lonely like we need food and water. Like we gulp air.

The Mother's Club

I’m mad because I feel like I have nothing of interest to offer you unless I am a mother. I’m mad because you just disappeared emotionally. I’m mad because you are in another orbit now – a beautiful orbit – but I’m not worthy of it. I’m mad because I feel like I have to have a baby for you to be interested in relating again. I’m mad because I know you have felt lonely among our friends and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m mad because you are absent – you aren’t fully there. I’m mad. I’m mad and it is selfish and wrong; I know. I’m mad and I shouldn’t be. It is silly. It is not worth it. You deserve better.

I don’t want to be like you. I always did, and now I don’t. I miss you so much, but I don’t see you anymore. Even when I see you, I don’t see you. I feel like I did something wrong. Not having kids when you did. Not wanting to talk about baby stuff all day. You are a fantastic mother – perfect, really. And I know I’m going to be messing it up something fierce when I get there. I am quite positive that I don’t know what you experience. I know you can’t understand it until you’ve been there. Until you have carried a baby nine months in your swollen belly, birthed a brand new person knit together in your own womb, of your own flesh and blood.

I just… I don’t want to be a mother like you. Perfect as you are. Attentive and patient and selfless as you are. I can’t do it. I’m so mad at you and it is so wrong of me. I just want to yell and cry because I miss you. You just left! You disappeared! You fell off the face of this earth and have never come back. We speak two different languages now, we are deaf to one anothers whispers. I can write this freely because you will never see it. I will regret it because the emotions are all wrong. I am all wrong. You don’t deserve this tirade. It is my own failings, my own insecurities, my own neediness that drives these words from my soul onto paper. There is no reason to be angry or even resentful. There is only reason to be kind, to show and receive grace, to be thankful for one another. There is only reason to believe that we are all doing the best we can and that is good enough.