Hallelujah

 It was the best day in a long long long long stream of days, wasn't it? When Kamala came out in her white suit, the tears started falling, and I felt absolutely nothing but happy when she spoke and then Joe spoke and then all those people in their families walked up there and all those silly fireworks went off and for a moment -- yes -- I felt glad to be American and to be a part of it. I remember going to a resistance meeting in another lifetime, shortly after walking with three quarters of a million people in downtown Los Angeles on the day after Dear Leader inaugurated himself and we talked so passionately about grassroots activism and what we'd need to do to change things and we did do those things but damn the years went by and wore us down and everything, literally everything, that we thought might happen did and more and nearly destroyed us and did destroy hundreds of thousands of lives but we kept it up. We kept up the calls and the postcards and the letters and the writing and the marching and the protesting and the talking and the arguing and holding people accountable and calling out bullshit when we heard it. We stopped when we were exhausted and other people stepped in. We laughed a lot but we were fucking sick of it all, too. And then this week happened and it was probably the weirdest three days ever, waiting to see what would happen, hunkered down in our homes, stepping over the homeless, ordering our groceries, teaching our kids, wearing our masks and posting memes and wiping up drool and comforting our seizing daughters and reading Twitter and novels and Louise Gluck poems and not sleeping and all the while trying to wrap our minds around the fact that nearly 70 million people who live on the same land actually wanted Dear Leader again, actually voted for the man and justified their votes with their usual talk of pocketbooks and Jesus and Israel and socialism and godlessness and killing babies. 

So, yeah, I'm very happy tonight. It's as if a weight has been lifted and thrown off, far off and we're all ready to do what's next. We hopefully won't ever have to hear from a leader who not only mocked disabled people but actively worked toward and supported and put into place policies that harmed our children. I don't want to ever talk about him again. Tonight, President-Elect Joe Biden included persons with disabilities in his speech and spoke in complete sentences with vigor and not a trace of malice or threat or law and order. He spoke little of himself and much of those who'd put him there up on that stage in Delaware and how wonderful that bells rang in France and people shouted in Germany and people danced in the streets all over this country, this grand and terrible place.

A Short History of August*

Sophie had a hard month
I turned 54
My feet hurt
My son started college
I'm looking for work
Ends aren't meeting
The world is melting
I've never been happier













*Zen priest Karen Maezen Miller inspired me to write this koanish post. If you haven't read her work, you should. Here's her website: Cheerio Road

Antonyms for Harridan

The Sign of Letting Things Go

Harridan: a strict, bossy or belligerent old woman 

Synonyms: Termagant, fish-wife, battle-ax, shrew, virago, harpy, vixen, castigator, nitpicker, pettifogger, scold, railer, dragon-lady

Even though I'm down one child (Oliver is off to camp), I can't seem to get it together and be The Mother and Woman I Used To Be. At best, that person was amazing, actually. That's enough of the third person. I was always on time, was organized, made my bed every morning and made my sons make their own. I won't belabor the twenty-one years of caregiving of a severely disabled daughter. When it became evident in the second year that the McMansion workers behind me were probably not just building a monstrosity but actually digging a tunnel to bring in drugs from Mexico (because why else would they be still drilling after two years), I marched over to the site and demanded to speak to the foreman. I wrote long, articulate harangues to the developer and even shouted at the guy who was cutting down the trees that bordered my yard. I've refused to sort or fold boy socks since those who wore them were about six and eight years old and could do it themselves, ordered them to get that dirty lacrosse stick out of the living room! or something similar and yelled who left that here! multiple times a day. I strapped on an ax every single day to protect my daughter from bullshit and fight for her rights and dignity. I made dinner every single night and cared about whether my children were eating fruits and vegetables.  At best, I was -- well -- formidable. At worst, I was any one of those descriptors up there in italics and proudly, if ruefully so.

As the great bard Bob Dylan said, I used to care but things have changed.

The third time I woke up this morning at 8:05 (the first time was at 1:00 to tell the dog to go sit down! as she was walking back and forth in the hallway, her nails clicking and I thought there was going to be an earthquake but apparently not and the second time was at 6:30 when I drew up Sophie's CBD oil and shot it into her mouth, rubbed her cheek and made sure that she swallowed it), Henry staggered into the room and told me that he felt sick and couldn't go to work. I said, go take some Advil and go back to bed. I then went into the bathroom, glanced into the mirror and was not  even horrified by my appearance but more profoundly curious because -- well -- how the hell has it happened?

I had one glass of wine yesterday afternoon with a high school friend visiting Los Angeles and then about four hours later a Lavender Collins with one of my best writer friends at the Culver City Hotel. I was not drunk at any time, not even buzzed. I went to bed at 10:30 after reading Trollope for an hour and giving Sophie her last dose of CBD oil.  Yet, the woman who looked back at me from the mirror had hair sticking up as if moussed, sheet lines on her cheek, a deep groove running vertically down her forehead and red eyes. Weird, I thought. I look hungover. Someone knocked at the door, and the dog started barking. I asked who is it? and simultaneously remembered that I had made an appointment with The Disability Bureaucracy for a site visit. I was wearing my nightgown, a revealing black slip thing (and remember my hair), so I grabbed a cardigan and ran a brush through my mop and let The Disability Bureaucrat in to my house. I should italicize that last bit: I let the Disability Bureaucrat into my house. We sat at the kitchen table, I in my nightgown and she in her wrap dress, and I never once considered unsheathing the ax or blowing up her head with my mind, even when she asked why Sophie wasn't conserved, and I said she was conserved three years ago and your office finalized it and she said she had no record of that and checked off a box. Honestly, Reader, I just shrugged my shoulders and said, Huh, that's weird.

There are dishes in the sink this morning, a lacrosse stick leans on the couch, a lacrosse ball is wedged between two dirty sneakers on the floor, Sophie is lying on her bed because summer school didn't work out due to the LAUSD not providing a trained aide and I didn't fight for it (I didn't fight for it), it's 11:26 in the morning and I'm still in my black nightgown.

I'm happy.

There are no listed antonyms for harridan. 

Grounded

I took that photo with a fancy camera that a friend let me borrow. I felt almost giddy when I peered through the lens and saw these magnificent creatures. That's the female bald eagle on the right, and the male has just flown in. The sky was impossibly blue, and the nest was perched high above a canyon and dam, at the top of a spindly tree. The male flew in and the female left. Then the female flew back and the male left. Eagles soar. The chicks poked their heads up every now and then, I sighed and felt the same sense of exhilaration each time. It was breath-taking, a sight I will never forget.

I also saw my first owl -- four Great horned Owls up in a tree behind a library near Huntington Beach. Some of you might remember that I lived in the woods for three weeks on Whidbey Island last summer. I had a three-week residency at Hedgebrook that seems like a dream today, but I swear it happened. What didn't happen there is that despite all of the other women seeing owls and my hearing owls, I never did catch sight of one. I didn't take it personally and decided that perhaps I was meant not to see an owl, but I've had an obsession with owls since childhood when I collected them in the way that nerdy, bookish girls collected things in the early seventies. I even hooked an owl rug in green and orange that hung over my bookshelf whose top was covered with them.

So there you go.

After seeing the four owls sitting in the tree, I teared up. The tears ran down my face when one of the adults swiveled its head and looked right at me. I could swear I had one of those spirit encounters. My friend gave me that gift, that encounter. Over the last fifteen or so years, I've felt, often, like I'm stifling panic, like I'm going through life strongly but more willfully than naturally. It's a pick your baby up and stash her under your arm and run away, away, away kind of feeling and I've had it more often than not. It's a lonely feeling. It's a Dickensonian my life is a loaded gun kind of feeling, and when I gazed into the owl's eyes or she gazed into mine I could feel the wind at my back but peace ahead and maybe even right there in front of me.

After I saw the owls, I wandered with my friend through the park, looked up through bark and branches and leaves to green and a portal to blue sky. It was almost too much so I lay down on the ground and closed my eyes, felt the good good earth at my back.

Happy

I can't stop looking at this May Day photo of Henry and his Friend Emma (friend is capitalized so that the world knows she is not his Girlfriend). They had just made those flower wreaths at a May Day party a few days ago. Evidently, my son was game and actually made his own. There's something about how sweet and joyful they look that makes me happy, too. How in the world did we get so fortunate to have these beautiful creatures grace our world?

Happiness is red

I don't know why this photo is so red-toned -- perhaps the light bounced off of Sophie's red pajama top -- but lying with Sophie on her bed tonight was such a strange and quietly wonderful experience that I was compelled to photograph her face, smiling. Sophie's face has lost most of the affect it once had, presumably due to eighteen plus years of drugs and seizures. She rarely smiles and never laughs or cries. Her eyes are expressive, but her brow is generally furrowed and she's at once "out of it" and intensely distant. When other parents or caregivers of the severely disabled talk about how happy their child is despite his or her issues, I wince. I can't honestly say whether Sophie is happy or whether she is even capable of what we think of as happiness. I think she is often content, and I know what intrigues and interests her -- she has an ineffable gentleness and remarkable grace that exude from her tiny frame -- but it's been many, many years since she's showed happiness in the form of laughing or smiling. I was typing at my computer, and she was walking around her room, when I heard what sounded like a chuckle. Henry heard it, too, and he came out of his room at the same time as I walked out of mine. We both wondered what was up, thought she was having a seizure (she hasn't had one in over a week!) and realized that she was lying on her bed, softly laughing. Smiling. When we sat down next to her, her eyes followed us, met our own eyes, and she chuckled again and smiled. It went on for many minutes, and while I thought it might be a type seizure, I wasn't entirely certain. Gelastic seizures are usually far creepier, the smile more a grimace, the laugh a cackle. Is she stoned? Henry asked, and I wondered. She's at the bottom of her first bottle of Charlotte's Web -- there's inconsistency in the dosing, you have to shake the tincture vigorously. It's possible that there's more THC at the bottom than CBD. Who the hell knows? Whatever was happening in her brain in those minutes, though, was good, I thought. I took a photo. Happiness is red. She fell asleep, eventually, her head in my lap, her amazing curls laid across the bed. She breathed slowly and peacefully.

I think she was happy.

When Your Underwear Starts Talking to You

So, this is going to be a deviant post. Not deviant in the sense of obscene, despite the use of the word underwear in the title (I despise the word panties), but deviant in the sense of skewing away from parenting, politics, disability or poetry. What I want to tell you is that while raising three teenagers and one very disabled teenager is not a job for the faint of heart, it's okay to be faint of heart and maybe not entirely on board with the ordeal or even not happy about it. Happy. That's the operative word. I'm struck by the irony of our culture being a sort of tyrannical one in regards to happiness -- the pursuit of happiness. We can, evidently pursue happiness, or it's our right to do so. We can also choose happiness and are often told to do so. We are to be grateful, and happiness follows. Happiness comes from within, we are told, even after a long journey to pursue it. As long as you're happy is a phrase perhaps over-used, in my mind. I only want you to be happy is a parent's prerogative, over-ruled by the scowl of you. Today, I sat on the toilet to relieve myself after at least three hours in the family car, and when I'd finished my quick bodily duty, I glanced down to pull up my underwear and read inside the waist-band, in large letters Every Woman Should Be Happy Every Day.