we celebrated halloween in a house

we celebrated halloween in a house. with pictures on the wall and cushions on the couch. pumpkins on the porch and toys in bins and the baby's bed just his size next to his bright climb in red wooden train engine. with fruit on the table and books on the shelves and laundry hanging in the laundry room. I'll miss the vine covered windows, the fenced back yard, the wooden floors, bright curtains, the shed and weeping willow tree. I'll miss the old part of town walks down the street, friendly neighbors at the park. colors of fall. Dear home, first home, last home for a while. I'm hugging you, trying to imprint you in my memory. capture the love and serenity... we filled and felt and fueled between your walls. we wanted to settle in you, planned to settle down for a while... but then Tyler Texas called. we'll go, and be together, and let our hair curl in the humidity, and catch a southern drawl. but house, little house that I love. I'll never forget that we celebrated halloween in a home.

the victim

I know there are pro’s and con’s but what are the cost of them? How much can you help someone you hate but can tolerate. Who needs help but will refuse it unless it is rose colored and depicts her a victim with an arm to lean on, no matter the cost. And will close her eyes and claim she never saw a thing. Woman, do you deserve the fate you chose for yourself? Are you capable of owning it even if you do not deserve it, but hold on to it with every gripping, leaching fiber? A weak thing that will not own its weakness except to garner justification and sympathy? You claim we hurt you. It has never been us. Simply pawns in your game of victim, or gone. Gone because I will not play with you. But if you ever chose to enter my world I will lend you a steady hand to make the leap.

with time, if only in my memory

It's strange to think of what matters in life. what strings the day to day together. what you believe matters one minute is so subject to change and circumstance. nothing grew me more than becoming a mother. perhaps because i did it on my own. my sister pulled herself away for reasons i struggle to comprehend and will likely never accept. The gulf between my circumstances and the beliefs which had lead me there and those of my extended family widened as the proof grew inside me. In my belly and my attitude. conservative christians for the most part and wildly liberal agnostic born from the christian culture. they could have believed my thoughts closer to theirs until the moment i shared the big news. and i was all to aware of it. few acted out the strangeness, but i knew i had proven the distance, and i felt the solitude. my badly wanted, pre-marriage, "surprise" baby. He became the turn in the road for me. the point at which i must begin to act out my beliefs. i was never false to them, but with him and the great responsibility of birthing, loving and raising a child i realized i must speak where, once, had just listened.
i am anxious of the hour. resentful that sleep alludes me in my deepest exhaustion. i want someone to blame. every moment of un-necesary wakefulness becomes sleep lost forever in my never rested parent-of-a-young-child brain. the truth is i have been tireder. it's the isolation that haunts me. and i resent it, for existing, for everyone who is distant, for keeping me awake while my son and husband slumber. it's okay though, it will take time, but this bump too, will smooth, if only in my memory.

Nothing's ever simple is it. Had a dream day today, in many ways. Eric took Kristoffer out around 6:30 and I slept in till after 8:00. After breakfast and a long bath took off for my first prenatal yoga class. Came home gave the baby lunch, then took a nap with him. took a walk and got ice cream. played at the park for a while on the way home then watched tv all evening.

but all is not well. i'm sad. eric is holding in an anger, hurt, resentment. I don't know. i am tired. and i want to remember the good day i had. maybe he feels cheated. i don't know. and i'm falling asleep as i write. i guess we'll see what comes tonight. i hope he can reach over in the middle of the night to hold me and I will know everything is okay. i love him. and i need him.

have patience in your dreams, self

Just remember who you wanted to be. It said. Remember who you wanted to be. And I did. I remembered dreams I dreamed before one of them came true, no two and took up my whole future. They’ve grown and grown until they’ve become a complete horizon that I don’t know how to pass. What am I doing here? What have I been thinking? What does my future still hold? Why must you always trade one happiness for another? I need someone to level with. I feel like I’m floundering, drifting like the meaning I once believed my life held has drifted out of reach. It was never going to be what I thought it would be, I knew I couldn’t know. There is a way. Self. There is a way. It’s just a slow way. And it’s not the way you thought it would be. But you are still on it. And eventually it will lead you to the next dream. If you believe and you keep taking the next step. One step by one step in time makes many steps. And the path becomes clear when looking back. You’ve been here before. Remember? Remember not only who you dreamed you’d be, in relation to who you are today, but also who you were before. And there is so much victory in that. If you chose to remember your dreams, you must remember all of them and see that where you are is where you have come to. Not just what you want to leave. remember that arrival is also a new begining. each time you end you begin again. and have patience

wonil

If I hadn’t met you…
You changed me.
For the better.

I am stronger for the simplest of love that you gave me.
Perhaps the most transparent person I’ll ever know.

I am grateful to you.

Maybe I will take your idea.

I just might.

Maybe I will listen to you.

I’ll consider it

Rare to find a soul like yours
I celebrate you with warmth in my heart

Thank you for watching me.

wisdom, do you remember when you were young

I am resistant. not hesitant. not timid. not shy.
a little angry. and a lot more. i am not a follower.
I believe that I can make waves, though I rarely do.

when I was a small child i dropped a glass jar of peanut butter and it shattered; held together by the glue like substance within. terrified I picked it up and put in the refrigerator like I had been told to do.

that is the end of my story and the beginning of another.

well, it is not the end. It was later discovered by my someone. and my father, who had instructed me to carry it in and put it away, locked me in a dark room until i promised to tell him the "truth" about why I had carried it in. I was terrified of the dark. I snuck out and hid under the bed in my brother's room, which was lighted, until I was discovered and dragged back into the dark, sat on the bed and asked why I was doing this. eventually the softer side of my father resurfaced and he told me not to do it again and let me back into the light with everyone else. I had been forgiven. or he had remembered. i do not know. I was relieved that the monsters were gone, for the moment.

but that is the end.

except there never really is an end, is there?

no story ever ends. no human story anyway.

but my other story is that I am that jar. a cohesively shattered jar. held together by the glue like substance within. left in a refrigerator because what is there else to do. because when the world is not a trusting place (and those of you who think it is, i have to tell you that you are wrong. if you believe it is, you have been very lucky, or you have been lied to, or you are lying to yourself, but it is not. the simple truth is that the world is an ugly and horrible place with a lot of love and potential for joy and peace.) little girls are pulled out of themselves by there vaginas and become frozen women, long before they are women at all and have even half a chance to find their voice, or not.

and many do not, because it is a much harder, much rougher, much more trying journey than you might think. and it involves dragging beautiful people into the mud with you. and finding beautiful people who want to do this is quite the challenge. there are not enough of them.


wisdom. do you remember when you were young?
you think i am angry, and I am. but that is not it.
you think i am wounded, and I am. but that is not it.
you think i need help, and I do. but that is not it.
you think i need healing, and I am. but that is not it.

you wonder if I am sad, and I am, but you are wrong.

If I were more of an artist with brushes than words, I would paint my life a large and beautiful mural full of colors; birds and flowers; waterfalls and lakes; bright tropical fish and snowcapped mountains; laughing faces and weddings, births, friends holding hand; and somewhere in a canyon, almost lost in the shadow between the orange and brown layers under a luminous setting sun a child by herself, surrounded by wolves, a human hand, angry teeth or blood... i do now know. I rarely flush it out. just a small fearful sorrow in the shadow. that you could miss, but must include.

so why am I writing this to you?

that. i cannot answer. perhaps I wanted to splash a little black paint in your garden.

or perhaps I just stumbled upon another human soul who knows. and wanted to cry and say, "it still hurts" for as many of us as there are, we are hard to find. and some of us, myself included, don't want to be told we are ok.

grieving and questioning and not knowing what to say or do

I can only think so much. I'm tired of fighting. I'm not seeking out that you should feel guilty. you have had a crazy year. but what do you have to forgive me for? having a baby you didn't think I should in a way you didn't envision? well it was my life. and it was my baby. and i was ready. and we were ready. and where were you? suddenly you treated us like you barely knew us. You were the first people we told. and you didn't care. you can say you did all you want but it will never FEEL like you did. you threw a last minute baby shower and didn't really do either of the two things i asked for. invite the men too, or encourage people to help with the stroller. you came the day he was born and never called or returned to the hospital or to our home for weeks. every time we should have met you came late and left early wrapped up in "prior engagements" you later disclosed weren't even really real. michelle had seen and interacted more with kristoffer than you in the first year of his life. when we followed a suggestion of yours and planned a weekend together in the mountains you refused to come b/c god forbid you might have to be around friends of yours and when they weren't coming anymore you had to work. you said yes to every church engagement that ever crossed your path and no to every attempt we made to get together. you were "unavailable" to help us move twice. once when I was vomiting the whole time but a month after my son was born you insisted we go help marquita move without invitation instead of god forbid just spend time with me and my son. most of the times we saw you we packed up our infant son and drove down because it's so much farther from denver to golden than golden to denver. i made every attempt i could to spend time with you, invite you in and encourage a relationship between you and kristoffer. but you stonewalled me. because you had decided to. i excused you and excused you and excused you until i couldn't any more. you know and have seen that we will do our best to support you every chance that we get. but the truth is i don't even think of you when i need something. unless i force myself too. and when i do, it's hit or miss whether you will come through fully or halfheartedly or at all. i expect something else will come up and too often i am right. you make decisions i disagree with all the time, but I've never pulled away from you. until now. because i'm hurt. and it's just one more thing to deal with. and i just don't know what i want. you're having revelations now i've had a million times over in the past two years. i'm not belittleing them i'm just saying you would have known that i had if you'd bothered to know me when i became a mom. i feel like you act childishly and selfishly when it comes to me. even now you refuse to acknowledge that i might actually know something about parenting and go out of you way to dismiss anything i may have thought or said to seek it out from everyone else. the reality is i already lost my best friend. i lost my best friend when you decided not to act like one during arguably the most important year and a half of my life. i want you back. i've missed you. but right now, in this moment in time. i'm sad because i've lost things i cared about for what i feel were stupid reasons and trying to be there for you is hard because it reminds me of how we just did this without you. and i don't know how to get over that, especially when you still don't let me in and you still don't show that you respect me or my thoughts or advice as a parent.

worries

My life is full of worries this year.
that is life. that is youth. that is age. that re-mains the same.
but they always change.
I called an old friend to ask if I was wrong.
but I was right.

My life is beautiful and the struggle of being 26.

My life is beautiful!
I sometimes forget.
I get caught in late night memories of things I can't forget.
I see old friends and know they'll never be my friends again.
My job seems more confining each year I fail to return to school... when fate conspires to keep me out, and from my dreams it seems.
I am lonely when I have to fight for the friends I know I have. to keep my family intact.
and wonder whether to walk away from the other family I've never had.
when the things i say don't seem to make a difference, even to myself.
when the whirlwind ends, maybe never to return, and I am left celebrating everyone else's.
when money's tight and we have the things we thought we wanted...
but there's still nowhere to sit in the living room, or downstairs.
years mean different things than they ever did before
when I find I feel old in the midst of my youth.
when i must convince myself that what i am is still mine. and mine still
when we bore ourselves (and we never thought we would)
But the story's not over, not over, not over
The stories aren't over, aren't over, aren't over
we have many more to build.
and I can forge them any way i dream, if only the world will let me
but it will, it will, it will
this buildings empty still, but it will fill, will fill, will fill
my life is beautiful.
If only, and only if
i believe it is.

it's midnight and I"ll be bitter if I want to. I'm tired of empty railings. I want to hurt you. You are wrong. innocence may not have been my lot in life. many loose that battle. i'm outside a glass wall. and no one knows it.

thoughts from the successful child of a very broken home...

I am neither Danish nor Hatian. I am no ones. My father died a Swedish, Norwegian, Dane when the truth was told. he is gone. I know his family's name. I carry another. I know who they are. I don't know them. My sister never needed a sister. She has two. She needed a friend. That was me. Who am I? I am no ones. Don't talk to me about orphans! I am an orphan. I told my husband, 'I love you're family, I just thought I brought some too'. But in the end, they're all just tokens, empty currency.They can't be traded in for counting on. In the end they were meant to supplement the missing thing. re-placements... well, you can dream. But dreaming hurts. in the cold air between the stars and the moon you know the pain of overreaching and the stars don't look as good from above. I am no ones. I can be yours to stand beside. But first let me remember what I am missing. when there is no one to stand behind me. i am. alone.

highschool friends

dear friends that I knew in high school...
it is Insane seeing you all crop up on facebook. none of you have changed. I'm sure you all feel like you have but I don't see it in your pictures, your faces, your friends, where you went to school, what you've become, the things you do for fun, your nostalgia for those times we remember in common. I hated them. unbeknownst to you my life was hell. The day i left home is the day my life began to improve. I still wake up from nightmares born in those early years. my god, my family, my personality, my home have all shifted away. to a better place. you're whitened smiles and designer clothes feel like an of course to me, you would have those things. your snowboards and desert trips, spouses, weddings and attended reunions all look just about right. I have no beef with you. but i wouldn't know you now. good luck with life, I hope it's all it should be to you. I hope you find everything you seek in life. we're all proud of where we've come i think. I just can't bring myself to like you anymore. you feel so insignificant to me. I'm sorry for reducing you to... i just can't bring myself to care. so peace. peace. peace. many blessings on your lives. I hope i never run into you b/c i doubt i'll care. chances are i'll not recognize you and that won't bother me at all...

today I want to learn

I will sit at the feet of the wisest teacher I can find.
I will seek you out like a thirsty animal in the desert
I will store your wisdom and use it wisely like a camel uses water
rationed carefully for the highest yeild. I will take as freely as you will give
and when my time comes I will give again
but today I want to learn

mommy dreams

Last year I was treading water watching my dreams come true and realities sink in
This year, I am…
Waiting for my chance at school to come back around, my chance to make an escape into the future I planned for
Trying to be the wife I promised us and make sure my husband knows how hard I love him

Watching my world grow up before my eyes
Watching my world grow up before my eyes
Watching my world grow up before my eyes
Watching my world grow up before my eyes
Watching my world grow up before my eyes
Watching my world grow up before my eyes
Watching my world grow up before my eyes


Biding my time in the hopes I’m still making some positive impact at work
Trying not to feel the passing time, knowing it’s pace is not what I once thought

Realizing I have some amends to make

I no longer own the time around me
My son does… little that he may know of it

But each night I sleep through I remember a little more of what I was and what I wanted
And these other dreams creep closer to returning
And I am caught in between motherhood and everything I knew before
As a search begins… for the new me. The identity that can hold it all
For I’ve outgrown the old ones as my family went from one to three
Because oh where am I !?!? and is this the same road still, that always stretched before me with all its branches and forks, twists and turns? Had you brought me here in my dreams I would not have recognized it in a million years…

But my heart... ! ...I think… I think it IS the dream I dreamed

accomplices

Summer. I'm with you. Please release me into your breeze and your heat. I've been two years winter's worth away from you and I'm ready to flirt. Remember me? Let me brush you. Let me return. Youth, I don't remember you. I just want my summer back. I have a son, a messy house, a job I hate and dinner on the stove... but there's a new me somewhere to be had. A new old me. I just need accomplices!

The file to remind me why...

I’m looking at my “happy file” and I don’t know how to clear my head. I haven’t put a single thing in it since I started working here. I think to myself that there have been good moments. Times when I know I have touched someone for the better. Small victories. But each one is tainted. Something was taken from it. A break through with a young mom a week before I was moved and replaced by a teacher who doesn’t know or care what it means to be a social worker. A good clinical conversation with a women with an unwanted pregnancy who proceeds to have everyone else here telling her what she should do and/or taking calls in the middle of the night to rescue her from herself… running a project well for two years to have it undermined by people who’ll just use it for their own gain… it’s all a mess. My personal life is what has kept me going. My husband. My son. But how long. How long can they be my only source of satisfaction? ???? Did remind me though, that I am not alone. Other’s knew I would feel this way before, even before I did. So, to them I say thank you. Thank you for believing in yourselves and me.

This year of birth and death

I want to tell you about the birth of my son and every man I have loved as a father, brother, lover or other… Can I tell you the stories of the women who taught me about mothers and daughters, color, wisdom and strength. I would like you to know all I have overcome… and how I know, oh how I KNOW what it means… what it means… means to grow!

This is the beginning…

praying with your hands too (draft 1)

What do I have to say?
I do c are. I do.
I’m doing something with my life. I am.
I just don’t believe in what I did. I just don’t.
I need to breath and I need a direction… and an ear. I
really need an ear.
Will you listen to this overfull chapter? Will you, dear? Will you hear?
The problem is all these other lives crept into mine.
And I am left reeling with my inability.
See this thing happened in Haiti.
But don’t worry… don’t fret.
Not yet.
My only connection to Haiti is this pilong for crushing garlic and other herbs.
My sister brought back when she went there to vacate last year. Oh, and my sister(1).
That was her first trip to the place her parents left so long ago(3) to raise their children(5) in more stability.
And my sister’s husband (6) of course.
And his sister(7) who just came back with them.
Homesick for her native land and her parents (8), both doctors, and brother (9) and his girlfriend (10) who was hurt so bad in the earthquake Papi Jo was still working to save her life last I heard.
And then there’s all his Patients (?) and Mummi’s who were children (?)mostly.
She’s a pediatritcian.
All coming to their clinics.
Many of the staff were lost (?).
And then there’s the hospital that was just going up, and everyone who would have been there (?).
And the college where they were heading to lecture which collapsed before their eyes in the shaking and everyone in it (?)
So many staff and students under the rubble and their families(?) and neighbors(?) and friends(?)
All these people creeping into my life. My circle of care.
But what do I know. I’m Danish American.
I only speak a handful of kreyol phrases.
About one for every Hatian I know.
Let me think, theres…
Edwige, Bianca, Phedora, Joanne, Kathy, Pearl and Andras, Miriam and Moise. That counselor back in Riverside who told us looking for a partner without knowing yourself is like looking for the “other” shoe in a pair you have never seen. And even that crazy Spanish professor who told everyone his name was juacim, b/c he was not proud of his heritage. And Rose Roni and Rose Filongen and Soveir oh, crazy Soveir who believed not only that Jesus was the first social worker, but that he was the first to have this thought…
And these are only the Americans… I guess that’s why they say, Hatian by association…

What if I just gave a dollar for everyone I know every month, for a year. Just 25 dollars a month. That’s less than a dollar a day. Would be 300 dollars. Which isn’t much. But it’s something I guess. I dare myself to. And I dare you too.
That’s not just praying with your mouth, but praying with your hands too.

the nature of my heavy heart

dew soaked grass, just washed linens, rain dripping off a gutter, the puddle below rippling with each splash of water from above, minor key tonality, rythm, mud on the side of a dirt road durring monsoon season, a horses hooves rumbling over damp earth, grey across the sky from a rainbow, whispering and thunder this is the nature of my mood. my heart is heavy with the pains and the loves it knows and remembers and knows it doesn't know