Time for another strange journey into the mind of me,
twists and convolutions to be expected.
My urge to protect the sensitive ears and minds
of my readers comes as much from my own self-judgments
as it does a shyness that sources from childhood in the woods,
nothing much to do and nobody much to do it with.
Encounters with strangers (relatives were ubiquitous,
too familiar to be real) were rare and intense with significance
and those times I engaged, enragingly dense
with a maddening mixture of implied meanings.

Dark shadows tugged at words that emerged from
the mouths of aliens called ‘Others’, who
each were linked by invisible cords to other Others,
felt but unseen. When these folk spoke,
I heard faint ringing echoes, strove diligently
to decipher their meaning and ultimately found
that in nearly all cases I guessed wrong.
I reacted with humiliated outrage,
swore off unnecessary interaction
and withdrew into my dark corner called ‘shy’
but was more properly ‘sullen’.

A certain simmering bitchiness lingers in me still,
if I would but admit it.

Ah, love, its mercurial moods, its rewards, its pains, its comforting presence and crushing absence. Where would we be without it? Some say “Love is everything, everything is love.” It is also said that love is endless and eternal. These things feel true; rather, they feel as though they ought to be, and perhaps they are.

But to parrot Pilate, what is truth? Because a thing is true in the abstract doesn’t mean we may experience it in the concrete. In our daily experience, time passes. Moments appear to end, and relationships terminate, often agonizingly. How can this be?

This mystery has come to obsess me, as it has so many others. Tom Robbins, in Still Life With Woodpecker, explored the question, “How to make love stay?”

I thought I’d solved that one. I was positively smug about it. I knew I had a love that would stay, as certainly as any fairytale princess. Nowhere will you find a fairytale that ends, “And they lived happily ever after until he fell in love with someone else and betook his bod from their shared bed.”

So many love stories end thusly, alas, and my own as revealed in the grit-grey aftermath proves not so different. Of course, ‘the end’ has not arrived since we both remain very much alive, but the bottom-line agreements that seemed so solid have evaporated into the thinnest of airs.

“I changed my mind,” the universal human prerogative. When heart’s eggs are placed into a single basket of love, however, a simple changed mind can result in serious breakage. I’d reached an age at which one is expected to know better, but really, how could I know? I had never been in love before.

And what an intoxication, what a sweet vacation to neverland that love proved to be. Still, since somehow now the ground has met my butt with a jolting, daunting thump, I must grumpily cast about for a replacement for the soft bed I’d made with my once-heart’s mate, all the while cursing the fickle fate that shuffled our cards into this new shape, with a new Queen of Hearts slipped into the deck to take my place.

That wild card, old Joker, tickled my lover with new choices and new temptations. New voices now whisper sweet nothings in his ear, while, I imagine, fresh new ears listen raptly to old words that must have grown stale in his mouth when whispered to me.

Love went south, and my bitterness is bottomless, yet hope doth spring eternal, doth it not? My heart leaps and crashes these days with painful regularity. The leaps are caused by visions of my love returning to me in some new day, his current fling flung, he falling back to land on our bottomline where we stood so long.

The crashes, of course, come after, cold water coursing down my spine with the recurrent realization that he is no longer mine, that he does not think of me when he comes, and that no further love will be made by us.

It seems, then, that when love is no longer made, memories of past love must fade, replaced by new which grows stronger as it is fed.

I protest, futilely, that this is not the way it was meant to be. We merged in a vision of limitless love, with a polyamorous plan to expand our bond to include others in the fullness of time with the ripening of trust. Time filled and trust swelled which led sideways to this shock, this choking hell of loss.

Irony abounds, yet I lack humour to appreciate it. My love surrendered his side of our vision with a swiftness that sickens my once-faithful soul. Out of sight has proved, indeed, out of mind, while love remains, as ever, blind.

Still, this cynical, burned state of being can revolve surprisingly into renewed faith in renewal. Some dauntless, indomitable part of my heart insists on faith, insists that love, tears and willingness may yet bring once-bonded hearts around and that dreams may still come true.

My mind conceives rosy images to illustrate how this might manifest, yet always faith is laced with fear. I may be delusional, about to waste essential life carrying a still-smoking yet extinguished torch for one who may move on, never to return.

He shares my dream, or cares to, but the desire that inspires it, I fear, is mine alone. I’d simply abandon the thing by the roadside save for a nagging sense that something essential may yet remain in the dirty bathwater of used love. Regardless of his ability to stick to commitments, my own are non-negotiable. Babies must not be tossed.

Life comes without guarantees, but I would give much for the gift of precognition, that I might focus my energies along the direction of life’s flow and not against the stream of change. Too often I have been blindsided by unpredicted shifts that left me reeling, pow, didn’t see that one coming.

Once again, I return to my default position of openness to all possibilities. Closed doors can rust shut, and though the wind blows through the holes, it feels like a cleaner way to be, to me. And love may surprise me, blowing from unexpected directions, manifesting in bodies currently unknown.

I will not say no.

What does one say? In the aftermath, post-blossom and pre-crash, I feel bliss and a wish for more. To heap praises upon my own head is considered crass, yet praises were heaped and I would but repeat them. Ego and over-inflation of same is a problem in our world, one I have strained to avoid. I trained myself (as I was trained) to wait in shadowed corners, to applaud those standing brightly brandishing their wands in the spotlight, and I politely diverted attention inadvertently directed my way.

“Don’t notice me,” I’d state primly, virtuous in girlish modesty. “Don’t look, and don’t listen. I am no one. Look at HIM.” When I took the stage with others, it was them I sought to support, whose voices supplanted, superseded and defeated mine. Now, for the first time, I stand alone, and I have grown.

To stand in the light, to allow others to look at me, listen to me, notice me goes against every habit of my soul, yet these solo flights have ignited my flesh with fresh awakenings. At last, I believe that the shining eyes of those who receive must mean something. I am finally shedding my monstrously egotistical modesty (thinking myself special in being the one with nothing special to offer). At last, I acknowledge that I have a voice that gives pleasure, that enlightens, awakens, moves and soothes. At last, I believe.

I sang. I opened my mouth, shaped it around words and melodies graved so deeply I need not struggle to remember, and I let the wind blow through me. I grew. I filled with light and life, I smiled, I was (in the words of one present) “so charming.” This feedback disarms my cynical self-hater who sees nothing to admire in the mirror, which has slowly attenuated to a ghost, a wisp from past realities, losing credence and power. Now, I can stand on the ground and own my sound. I have a voice. This is what I do.

In short, I blew me away, that self which identifies with what others might think (as filtered through the judgments, self-shaming and belittling which has passed for ego, the the opposite and inverse of self-importance: self-negation). This doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a pillar of confidence, but I now have some ground to stand on. I’m still shy about initiating—(it takes a huge surge of motivation to compel me to attend an open mic)—but once there, newly centered confidence displaces the habitual shame.

Lyrics to my newest songs reflect a freshly-fledged sense of readiness: “I have a song, and I’m not afraid to sing it.” “I’m ready to become the one I really want to be.” “I have a choice, and this what I do.”

Alas, it is a sad statement on the state of my internal atmosphere that I actually feel ashamed of feeling good about no longer feeling bad about myself, and embarrassed about that. How convoluted, how twisted, how strange!

This is me, changing. This is me, learning who I am, accepting and transforming.

Glory hallefrigginlujah. And about time.

You may have noticed that this blog has been down, and while I expect that my blogular disappearance didn’t suck as bad for you as it did for me, still I apologize for any inconvenience. It’s all good now–I exist again! O frabjous day! So, continuing with the blog, currently in progress:

I am ready to shed the pursuit of money as a motivation. I am willing, should my life moment-to-moment choices lead me there, to end up walking strange streets with whatever I can carry and defend. This does not mean I want that, but as long as fear and desire to prevent a poverty-stricken fate remain my sole driving force, then my attention stays sourced in what I think of as the struggle for survival but is really avoidance of inconvenience.

Some way-in-the-back fey part of me longs for and seeks some kind of life on the street, covertly awaits the circumstance to compel me out there where I might be seen and recognized by others of like kind. Oh yeah, a city speaks to me; eventually I suspect I’ll be drawn in to one or another, at least for a while.

Still, the bulk of me would far prefer to feel (and be) empowerful and functional, and one of the measures of empowered function is, or ought to be, the ability to choose one’s path unforced by circumstances such as lack of cash.

I release myself to find the level on which it is right for me to live, with the understanding that I will enter windows of opportunity with alacrity when they open and that I will perform the work that I am called to do with all my heart.

I am open to the possibility (among many other possibilities) of utter bare bones poverty. Being open to it is not the same as desiring it; certain socially paradoxical parts of me do, of course, while other parts of my multiplex brain emphatically desire something entirely different. Come to think of it, the same would be true for just about any possibility I might imagine. In my heart, I encompass the full spectrum of desires, so I need to choose my actions based on other criteria. My many hungry desires compete and strive to be the ones that survive to be fed, and I now relax the controls I’ve imposed on that chaos. Let it seethe, I don’t have to worry about it.

I’ve finally released the pressure it’s taken to keep the doorway to my most-feared futures closed; the friction of resistance was starting to seriously compromise my structural integrity. My last ten years has been at least partly devoted to a mad inner scramble to avoid some form of destitution. Some of it was not my stuff, for when I entered my relationship, I merged identities to a large degree. I used to be more comfortable with poverty before we met. Of course, back then, it was more like: “I’ve always been poor, it’s my lot in life, oh well.” The relationship and the new perspective my partner brought into the mix has helped me to evolve a new way to be with the prospect of being poor and homeless.

Now, it’s more like, “Been there and done that; there’s nothing more to be afraid of there.” No matter what the future brings, I will already have survived worse, barring of course, the diseases of age and death, which this article does not address (can you say ‘can of worms, don’t go there’?).

Still, I do expect my efforts to be materially rewarded; I expect to be supported for doing the work I am here to do. I am giving in to doing what I’m best at, and I do believe that is the path to some kind of, whatever you want to call it, abundance (I am soo tired of that word, but can’t think of a better one).

I do know that I will give my gifts and receive in return as part of the natural ebb and flow of life. Still, I don’t yet know the shape of my future. I will learn more as I experience more. I know that I have the power to jump off this cliff and survive, but whether I’ll learn to fly or drop into the ocean at the bottom and swim hasn’t been determined. My life feels as open as it ever has since my birth; more so. I emerged into this life, took a look around, sighed and slumped into unconsciousness. How boring. This is better.

Issues around poverty go way back. My childhood was spent poor. We used to wake in the morning in the winter to find the drinking water in the bucket by the stove had frozen over.

We lived in what most folks would call squalor, no running water, no electricity, down endless miles of mucky, rutty back bush roads that led straight up the butt of nowhere, at least from the human standpoint. From Earth’s point of view, of course, it was a wealth of wilderness, thronging with ancient spirits and wild innocence, and I was blessed among humans. This innocence was beginning already to be violated; little logging operations like the one my dad worked at were already chewing away at the bush. Compared to now, though, it was nothing. It was true wilderness.

The scale of human encroachment on the wilderness I was born into has exploded on a nuclear scale. From the air, the whole vast province now seems to suffer from mange. Helicopters rake kilometers of trees from mountainsides so precipitous that olden loggers could not get to them. It makes my stomach turn, my heart clench, my temples throb to imagine. The fuss made over the pine beetle seems hypocritical, given the scope of the very deliberate and intentional destruction by humans that has been taking place.

Oh, grimace, groan and gag me with a greasy spoon. Okay, enough. I have to go sing now.

I wrote this yesterday, September 20th. It’s taken me awhile to gather the courage to post it publicly.

—————-

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of my identity as a mother. Another way to say that is, it is my daughter’s thirtieth birthday. I feel as emotional about this transition as I did when I myself turned thirty, which is to say, plenty. It is the Saturn Return of that time, so now I am compelled to turn back and face my mothering history, to evaluate what has and has not worked and to change what I can to improve the workability of my parenting.

My daughter is a private sort of person who doesn’t appreciate being written about, and I am a writer. I write about myself and my life, which includes my children and my family. I have so far focused mostly on my own internal poetic and philosophical processes because of my uncertain boundaries around telling stories that reveal personal things about people I love. According to “The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear,” the agreed-upon ethics are fuzzy in this area. Different writers make different choices about what to write about where their families are concerned, and it is always difficult, challenging and potentially traumatic.

Obviously memoirists can be ruthless when it comes to divulging their families’ stories, but I don’t personally wish to share publicly any details or story that might cause my children to feel their privacy has been violated. At the same time, I am compelled as a chronicler of crazy truth to bespeak my discoveries and to track my experiences for the benefit of the collective brain.

It seems I find myself in the role of one who speaks publicly, a rather heavily populated niche these days. It is true that I am only one of many, but I speak from my own singular viewpoint, and in case my theory of bloggers expressing the collective thought processes of Earth (and thus facilitating human social evolution) should prove correct, I dare not suppress myself.

So. On this thirtieth anniversary of my first birthing, I am experiencing a personal epiphany around parenting. This essay explores some of what it meant to me to be a parent in times of internal and external chaos and change, and perhaps offers some excuses to get me off the hook that I currently dangle from in my own twisted mind. I write to untangle my own confusions as much as for any other reason. I share my writings because I can—it is technologically possible and I have the tools—and because of various astrological factors (Leo Moon touching Pluto, Gemini Mars on the Midheaven also touching Pluto) which translate to mean that I am compelled, nothing I can do about it. All I can do is wake up and hopefully shift from spilling my guts to sharing my experience and perception in a balanced way. I am doing my best, but between compulsion and confusion, discrimination is a challenge. If I mess up, let me know, I will try to do better. I am all about doing better.

What follows explores feelings that I am still not comfortable with, and it reads awkwardly, but it’s a start, an opening. Warts and all. Bleah.

I first became a Mom at age twenty, a time when I was incapable of love or much consciousness. This is not a self-criticism, merely an observation, and it’s not a hidden poke at young people, as though youth is incapable of those things. This is about me and how I was, and I don’t believe my journey to be typical or representative of others. My children, for example, were more sensitive and aware, emotionally and intellectually, at ten than I was at twenty.

There were at least two of me in the early days: one was a marionette with feelings and reactions. I thought about things, but I was not aware that I was thinking or what I was thinking about. “I lived in a dream, a nightmare, it seemed.” My actions were reactions, programmed responses, not considered choices. This was a shocked-out self, a damaged child who, having been re-traumatized at regular intervals, had frozen into a trauma state, unable to process new information, as if the moment of trauma had never passed.

The other part seemed wise, magical, a pair of knowing, loving eyes that looked through mine and gazed upon life with compassion and truth. I did not personally feel that love, but it was there, separated from the rest of me by a veil of fog. This part could see me and through me she saw others, but I could not feel what she felt except dimly.

She came into me, met and merged with me so that I became one whole being, alive and capable of loving, when my daughter was born. In her wide infant eyes, I saw a reflection of myself, the all-loving, all-knowing Mother. I felt her inside me, I felt my heart open like a flower for the first time. I had no words to describe this experience then, only that this little person who had emerged from my very own body was the most precious, perfect, wonderful creature ever.

Oh, did I fall for that baby. I fell so hard, I was smitten practically back into unconsciousness. I wanted her never to experience a moment of hurt, trauma or deprivation in her life. I wanted her to have everything I had never had, every opportunity, every protection, every hope, every possible dream come true. I felt for her, in other words, as most any mother feels toward her new baby. I’m not claiming that there was something special or unusual about my love for my child; in fact, it’s entirely likely my own mother felt and feels the same things for me, her first baby.

What was striking was the difference that love made in me. I count the beginning of my spiritual growth from that moment they lay her on my breast, fresh from my womb, and I first met my daughter’s eyes. I changed. I became a human with the capacity for love.

The marionette who still made up half of my self continued to act as programmed, though. When my baby girl was a month old, I returned to my office job as I had previously agreed to do in response to my husband’s urging and my own nascent ambitious promptings. I vaguely enjoyed the idea of having a career and being independent in the world, and I knew we needed the money. At the time I did it, though, it wasn’t right for me or my child. It was far soon to return to work. She was too young, and I wasn’t able to handle the stress. Our premature separation tore the fabric of the bond between myself and my baby.

For the first few weeks, I gave her a bottle of formula for the middle of the day while I was gone and nursed the rest of the time. She was a quiet child who rarely cried, but once I went back to work, she howled constantly. My mother-in-law insisted that it was because my milk was ‘bad,’ so I weaned her from the breast. It didn’t occur to me that the real problem might be that she couldn’t handle the formula bottle, or even that she missed me, was frightened and traumatized. Even when her crying continued unabated after she was weaned, I didn’t clue in. I was overloaded, juggling a stressful full-time job full of intrigue and office politics with an unhappy new baby, and I had no focus or awareness to spare.

Still, deep down I knew it was wrong to be leaving my baby, wrong to stop nursing when I did, and I worried constantly. This doesn’t mean I believe all working mothers are wrong; other mothers and babies make their own choices. If childcare is high-quality and caring, and if Mom knows what she’s doing, then returning to work can be a perfectly viable choice. However, that was not the case with me. I didn’t want to work, I wanted to stay at home and bathe in milky bliss with my beautiful new baby, and the childcare we were able to find was far from high quality. In fact, I was horrified to learn that my precious girl was being left in a darkened room all day with the radio on, so we pulled her from that place and the stress of trying to find substitute adequate childcare was added to the other stresses.

I stayed on the job for three months, finally leaving that job only after collapsing in tears in the boss’s office. I caved in under the pressure and found myself quitting without planning to in order to be at home with my child. I tried a month of working midnight shift at another job, but that proved impossible, since the baby was not a daytime napper. After a month of nearly no sleep and several near-accidents drifting off the road while driving home from work during morning rush hour, I quit for good.

Things were never the same between us after that. The ease and comfort, the bliss was gone. I had needed the bonding time to last longer, and so did she. She had been left in the hands of uncaring others and our mother-child relationship suffered the consequences.

I learned better, and my sons benefited. However, it was clear from an early age that my daughter was angry with me, and all her life, she has found new reasons to be angry, to blame me, to push me away. And I was guilty beyond bearing. It has been agonizing.

So what’s the epiphany? Simply that now I understand that despite the fact that I did it, there is nothing I can do about it now. I can’t fix her infancy, and I can’t fix our relationship. All I can do is be here for her when she reaches for me. And I will.

One thing has not changed. I am still in love with that girl. She is my perfect, precious one-and-only firstborn, the one who taught me what love really feels like. I had other children and each of them opened me wider, but only one can be first. I firmly believe her to be supernaturally gifted, intelligent and gorgeous beyond belief, and I defy anyone to contradict me. I love that child. I love that woman. But bottom line, I won’t impose myself on her or push my unwelcome love into her world anymore. It’s here, though. I’m here.

Happy birthday, firstborn. I love you. Welcome to your thirties. They’re not so bad, once you get used to them. May they be better for you than they were for me; I want everything about your life to be better than mine was for me. Not because mine has been so terrible—since adulthood, my life has steadily improved, actually—but because that’s what parents want for our children.

It is a time for a purge, a breath of fresh air to sweep the cobwebs from the labyrinth of my mind. Too much clutter, no room to move! Out it goes, that good idea from two days ago that I didn’t act on, that fantasy conversation with someone I’d like to get to know better, that letter I didn’t write, all gone. Make way for some sunshine in my windows.

Everything is in turmoil, topsy-turvy’d by recent firestorms. Who I might become is still a crap shoot, the wheels are spinning and waiting to see what will line up, waiting for a click to snick something permanent into place, for gears to engage and momentum to build.

I feel I have been saying this kind of thing for a long time, and as always, want to exclaim that this time it’s really truly for real, yes indeedy sir, while cringingly fearing that the inescapable fact that I’m not perfect yet must mean that my moebius path is merely a twist and not a transformation.

Heave ho to this perverted, perfectionistic nit-picking bull potato too, that screw-eyed blue scowler whose foul stench and incense condense to a single nauseating breath of death. Time for some serious exorcism here! Internal schisms are calling for intervention from the divine within (which would be me).

Time to take some responsibility for the sordid state of my internal affairs. Fiends and fanatics have been driving my bus for too long, while all selves with an ounce of sense have been occupied, fantasizing better ways to be, carrying on imagined conversations with more interesting others and tut-tutting at the state of things while my world is pushed to the brink by shamers and blamers who drill their finger-pointing way into the heart of my darkness, making my mother and all my ancestors wrong to have contributed to my existence.

Awake, damned fantasy-islanders, shake off your dreamsmoke and get your feet in line with these feet of mine, here and now! This body exists and needs some real guidance, and if you know best, then put your theories to the test and help me evict these unwelcome guests, break and shake these rules of law and judgment from afar, and let’s see what life might really be.

Thirteenth camp, a congress of women, and what a full and far-out journey it has been, swimming in smiles in a honeymoon of helloes, meetings, openings, peaking and panicking, left gasping in the aftermath. Groping for awareness amid resurrected childhood fears, the past reared its serpent head, found a crack in the egg through which it could slither. This was not safe, but it was not wrong and healing happened, as it can and will when allowed. The chattering crowd dispersed at last to leave me safe in the hand of She who held me in the hands of women, all loving, embracing, soft and strong.

Here I am, returned from wombland to the world of men, after being squeezed like toothpaste through the tube that led to life and more. I don’t do extreme changes well, I said, and she said, nobody does. Seems I’m not as terminally unique as I thought, though I may still lay claim to being somewhat unusual. The dark crisis which came later may have dimmed the shine (at least in memory) from the show I put on the previous night, but if I allow myself to focus there, it still glows bright. What a bliss trip it was, singing with throbbing throat to a sea of glowing faces embracing my gift with grateful hearts. It’s recorded for posterity, so watch this space for further updates on where and how to listen, if interested.

Without prejudice, may I say that it’s been a journey through heaven and hell, coming to ground in a neutral zone neither one nor the other, perhaps both. Here in this rivendell of flowers, I take daily dahlia trips, snip and sniff sweet wafts and whiffs, walk barefoot and naked in damp sacred soil to bring my sore self into balance with recent rebirthings. Though I sleep indoors, these daily groundings do good things for my growth.

I do have a tent which I wish to pitch in the shadow of the mountain outside the fence, though I am aware of bear and cougar which do exist here. I don’t fear maulings or caterwaulings, having grown up in the north where large predators predated humans and are respected but not venerated as gods to guard the woods from our peregrinations.

Bears do shred tents, but I shan’t keep food in it (I tell myself). Scared? Not me. That’s somebody else shivering in her shoes, fearing fantasy fangs. Lions, tigers and bears, all part of life, this world of balance, and I am just another predator, not prey after all. Still, I’ve not seen one this near, though others have, and such a close encounter might prove profound in a good way. A bear might pause and notice me; I imagine a moment of awe, held breath, reverence and resonance with otherness, but that’s all. A vision might be visited upon me, revelation to open the space in my darkness for the future to be seen and followed, and that would be good.

More likely, though, neither hide, fang nor fur will be manifest and it will be just me, sleeping under the mountain, dreaming the dreams of this land.

It had to happen; I saw it coming. My teeth have been slowly crumbling and I’ve been letting them go, no dentist for this girl because who would pay? We may have socialized medicine in Canada, but dentistry is another thing. No pain, but this crack down the middle of my back tooth scares me with its potential for problems. Right now, it jiggles a bit when I tongue it, but those little wiggles cause twinges and make my gum bleed. It goes right down to the root, not just splitting off pieces like the others, which I have been letting go as the wind whistles through the leftover hole.

Fantasies of pliers and bloody extractions flash like ‘what ifs’ in my brainpan, but that’s not going to happen, sorry baby. Another solution must be sought, the whole mess complexificated by being only a few days from leaving for a week of eating and play with the women. Amid that feasting frenzy, my tooth will be further at risk (assuming it lasts that long). As I type, I feel twinges in other teeth which have waited their time to turn me into a writhing wreck on the rack of pain, excuse the melodrama, but this little momma is scared.

I want to run shrieking in circles, gulp ice cream with espresso, smoke joints, guzzle beer and all of the above, but instead I sit paralyzed at the screen, ticker tape words streaming through my fingertips, lightnings sparking in my veins and that broken tooth sitting like an untripped mine in the back of my mouth, right where I chew because there’s a previously broken one on the other side.

I would ask for help, and might, but the questions of who, and how much, and where do I go jangle like broken links of chain in my brain.

This is the split, the line down my middle between paralyzed victim and powerful creator of my world. Along this line am I fractured like this solid enamel, eroded by gooey sweets I force down my throat. My world might rot from the outside in, fall away in pieces as the peace I cry for and might die for (if that would solve anything) proves elusive, a carrot dangling forever in the forever-future, made of endless possibility and potential but never substance.

And all the while, the positive part of me tirelessly scans for solutions and will—I hope—present me with a good one once this panic has swelled and ebbed.

The heat is sweet while it is, but no escape lest I live near a lake, river or sea which welcomes spontaneity. Okay, the lake is near but it’s a long way to the closest pier, the public beaches are tiny, crowded and bounded by barriers, the whole thing singularly unattractive to me. There is the sprinkler, which I’ll be using soon, but in the meantime, let’s complain about this energy drain, the downward spiral of emotion.

Have I mentioned in this space how weatherbound I am? Too cloudy, rainy, hot or cold and my soul shrinks. There are things I could do to get through differently but I’m too damn depressed to bother: a classic catch-22. If I could cry me a river I’d have a place to swim, but the tears dry too soon, leaving me gloomy, heavy and disheartened.

Eh, fugeddaboudit, some sweat-streaming face-fanning part of me wants to grunt, who ceahs, so what (this voice has a Boston accent, which makes sense when you consider how uncomfortable my one summer there was), whaddayagonnado…

Somewhere down there I do care, but I’ve lost my reasons and don’t trust the ones I come up with. This heat (a classic example of ‘beware what you ask for’) is cooking my brains into a stew of insecurity and glue, wanting to stick it all onto you, whoeverdafug you are.

Nobody likes me, he likes her better, they don’t want me, I’m not good enough, I’m too much, too little, too intense, too bland, too short/fuzzy/fat/old.

He, she, we, they, it, them, the stew cooks as I use the heat of the sun as a gun to shoot my ownself in the foot. Nobody can be amazing all the time, and in these moments, I feel heavy, amazeless and dazed by my own past reactive triggerpoints, irrelevant though they may be to the actual moment happening now.

Still, I can gently allow my own tears and fears to swell and overflow until the squall has blown over and I return to equanimity. This is not calm, quite, but more a dynamic state of intense presence and insistent acceptance of what is, whether I like it or not. This includes, of course, acceptance for the fact of my like or dislike along with all the mess and baggage that come with being me.

It wasn’t my first job, but it was the most memorable. I was seventeen, freshly fired from my first, low-paid, boring stereotypical waitress job for attempting to drink beer in the hotel bar. Well duh, of course they knew how old I was, but I was trying to be cool with my friends and hated working there. It was worth the risk, I thought, and when the axe fell, I went for the only job in town that paid real money in exchange for doing real work, down at the sawmill.

It was a guy job, in fact, all the guys in town worked there, but in the seventies there were already a couple girls at the mill so I thought I’d give it a try. It appealed to my tomboy side, always strong in my girl heart. As a kid, I was the one who played outside making roads, towns and tree forts with the boys. When I did play with dolls, I put them through their paces outdoors, chopping off their hair and staging elaborate space-operas (including some disturbing scenes of torture).

Thrilled to be hired on at a job that paid so well and came with such a coolness factor, I invested in the required pair of steel-toed boots (hard to find in my size), donned jeans, plaid shirt and hardhat and strode off to work. I was assigned to pair with an older woman (in her forties, but she seemed quite old to me—older than my mother) piling one-by-fours. The lumber landed beside us via chute from the guys upstairs who cut it to size; we piled it neatly on pallets and strapped the finished loads for the forklift to haul away.

Once I got over the considerable aches and pains of the first few days, I loved it. The machinery broke down regularly, so whenever we fell behind we were assured of a chance to catch up. We paced ourselves, worked hard and steadily and were able to rest during some of the breakdowns once we caught up. The first two weeks I worked day shift: then I rotated to afternoons, 4pm until midnight, which meant going to parties late in work boots, covered with sawdust and sleepy most of the time.

One day, one of the men approached us, a dark, heavyset Portuguese man that I didn’t know well. He said in a heavily-accented voice, “Girls, you shouldn’t work so hard. You work too hard!” He kept looking around as though worried that someone would see him. At our puzzled stares, he only repeated, “Please, don’t work so hard, it’s not good.” Then he anxiously hurried away.

We quirked our eyebrows at him, shrugged, laughed and went back to work. Obviously, the guy was threatened by our ability to do the job so well. It made us proud and motivated us to work even harder.

A few days after that, the foreman sauntered over to us. He hooked his thumbs in his vest, smiled toothily and said, “Girls, you’re doing very well. So well, in fact, I’m going to have to lay you off. The job’s too easy. I figure one man should be able to handle it.”

So. That was that. There was no possible argument to that logic, not in the seventies in the North. In a daze of helpless rage, I packed up my steel-toed boots, turned in my hard hat and went home. I took a job as a waitress down at the Chinese restaurant, trying to decipher the lesson I’d learned. Working too hard was wrong? Success was failure? Only if you were a woman, it seemed, and I added it to my every-growing list of all the ways it sucked to be female.

They hired Gordie from down the road, a burly young guy, to do our job. A few days after they hired him, they had to hire someone to help him, but we weren’t called back. I was crushed, but it was worse for the other woman, who had worked there for years with a family to support. I was just a kid, and I tormented myself with the fantasy that I had caused her to lose her job.

The only positive result from that fiasco was that it compelled me to return to school and graduate. I hated waitressing, but I might be at the sawmill today if I hadn’t been laid off.