25th August, 2018 Saturday
Farmer’s Market Day 1
I dreamt last night water and sludge were pouring through the ceilings in our house and the way I found out was while I am out with a friend she shows me a photo on her cell phone of my husband standing straddling the counters in our kitchen holding a huge pot up to a stream coming out of a hole in the ceiling which has already drenched the house. The house is a dream house, not our real house, that exists in a development where several of the other houses have had the same waterfall happen. Its not raining. No storm has passed. I am on my way to a store which has had the same problem. When I arrive back to the house, my husband is shuffling furniture and swabbing surfaces while I look up at the seams between the walls and the cielings and notice they are swollen but mostly still holding.
I dreamt about a woman driving past our house as we are tending our front garden’s road edge. She is suddenly driving on the almost vertical downward slope of our garden as it touches the road edge. We expect her to drive on through but she stops, fayly saying she is frightened the car will slip which of course it does and we rescue her. She is unhurt and tells us she is a real estate agent on her way to an appointment and, “By the way, here’s my card.”
The drift from yesterday is holding me still.
The first move from Central California to Washington was about shedding the life shells we both had been carrying for many years. We found each other in the middle of things. We started walking together weaving what we could into each other’s rivers but they were two very distinct rivers with no organic overlap. My mothering, xing, and daughtering ie, two daughters in shared custody rhythm with an x husband and an aging mother living close by who drew extended family regularly. His ranch managering managing three generations of owners of the four he had built trust with for the 30 odd years he’d tended their world. My kids had flown, my mother to my sister’s fruit ranch also. His body had done its duty for the Ranch as the older of the three generations handed off the reins to the next rising and weather in California was getting hotter. Time to go.
The draw to the house in those trees was undeniable.
We arrived in the house in Washington and framed its hollows to receive the next stage of life. To fit his workshop in one of the three blank garage spaces was no small feat. Creating home flavors for my children in this alien house in an alien PNW culture based on what I had left of their belongings was both joyous and heart cracking because they had grown well past the needs for those belongings and my need for them to need me.
Mothering is not for the faint hearted. The shock of the awareness your body is host to a being which is both physical vampire and reason for being source that mandates chemically and soulfully your full tilt boogey commitment that everything you have and can generate for the future to support their wellbeing, certainly until they can self sustain and procreate, is self annihilating. You either rise to the mandate and dive for it hell for leather, or you dodge it. I dove. I had never known love that deep before, this time round at least. For a time, its both amazing and exhausting while the wee mercilessly cry, pee, poo, eat, vomit and hopefully mercifully sleep. There is this sense of connection to a deeper time through their early gazing. You are a goner. Then they roll over, start shimmying their way forward and the knees and hands become their ground and their sounds are so clear to you alone. The tunnel of Mama Baby Love is so very beautiful. And then they heave up and totter forward on their teeny feet and you move, constantly assuring them of freedom and safety all in one. Years tick forward, they school and friend and run and talk and write and soon, ah, way too soon, the God and Inspiration you were as their whole world is gone as the hormones load and you, rapidamente, become the obstacle and enemy to get past to their future. The job description shifts to a choice, no longer a mandate, to support them no matter how brutally they need to reject you which they must do before they can fly. That part is breaking. Its supposed to be. “Goddamn you, BE GONE, you little bitch or bastard,” whichever is applicable. Worse than any lover betrayal. But somehow you can never lose the memories of their tininess, their abject unabashed adoration when they needed you as their Divine before they started the search for theirs.
And of course they have subsumed yours. So where the fuck did it go!!!??? You guys left me here and I gave you what I had and what do I now? Waiting for Godot…
But Divine is the gift we all come in with and have to find inside. Some of us have better early guides to light it up than others. Some fall prey to the command it has to be external, not yours by right because you are inherently evil!! Ha!! Always felt like Bullshit to me.
Its easy once the mother mandate anchor has embedded in the seabottom of your soul to lose sight of your Divine if you had sighted it at all previous to conception. And cannot imagine where to find it after. There never actually is an after. They have altered you if you allowed them to and they are supposed to. They taught you. They stretched you. They grew you as determinedly as you grew them. You cannot go back. And your Divine has never left you. They are part of its gift to you.
“You have to start from where you are.” My Dad’s most useful advice when I flailed. He was one of my clearest early guides.
So where is my Divine as I stand next to my Divine grown daughters? I have been blessed with the self drive not to be denied force to periodically venture forth out of mother space and be me as artist in the world. Singer, actor, astrologer, and sometimes, as now, writer. Using those titles may seem arrogant to some, never having been paid for many of them as yet, doesn’t negate the fact that they erupted, gifting those who witness them.
What I am dancing around saying here is that mothering can be addictive in its way of masking the Divine. In the same way other drugs become a screen to hide from the things we fear, past a certain point mothering is a highly respected drug that women stuff their Divine in…but you all know this…
For those of us who loved it and chose it even if we came to it by accident and tried our damnedest to do it well, the not for the faint hearted part is to stop doing it. To all those around us…
I admit, it is my default activity when I am avoiding me.
I drift…and soapbox.
So that move from Ca to Wa was about shedding the past. It was a sheltered transition. Trees and a lovely cave of a house.
This move is different. This is about who we are now. What we have become, warts and all. And the choices we make towards each other going forward. Its about allowing all our Divines to “Double Double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble…”. There is cauldron here and eye of newt and toe of frog and my Divine and my husband’s and my daughter’s and her husband’s and their Divine Frigging Chickens’!!! Oh and yes, the Pack of Six and Harpo…
The tea is green, the day is grey, chill. The radiant heat kicked in upstairs, our bathroom floor was warm this morning as I peed. The wind is sure making the maple leaves wave at me. Fall is coming…
Tea With Me 