staycation

staycation

all the kids

all the kids

Friday, December 28, 2018

Emma Missouri

When I was in my 20's I spent a bunch of time crossing the country because I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to live. One of the times across I was driving on the 70 and there was a sign for "Emma, Missouri." I thought hmmm. That's a good baby name.

Years later I had an Emma. And years later, now, this very as we speakend, I just put that Emma on a plane to Missouri. I texted her: hey I almost named you Emma Missouri. And now you're actually living it.

I didn't think it'd be that hard to put Emma on a plane. She's the middle kid, she's used to being shoved aside, or just shoved in general. At our house she's kind of the morality police, she's also the social one, the social media one, the bendy one, the dancer with the filthy pirate's mouth, the one with the cleanest room. She's not outdoors much, she's too busy taking every advanced math class there is. If he were alive, Einstein would be saying "cmon, man. STOP WITH THE MATH ALREADY." We don't have that much in common, so putting her on a plane, I thought, ah, she'll be fine. I'll be fine. It is kind of far. It is 6 days. It is kinda long.

We took her to the airport. We took her to the gate. Part of me was irritated because nobody took me to the gate when I was going back and forth all the time across the country as a kid. She's so protected, she's old to still be so protected. We got her a salad. We sat with her and waited while talking to a tattooed biker from Tennessee. Whom I told immediately that she was traveling alone. And then a small section of my brain cried silently at my idioticness.

Emma got on the plane. Got all the way to Missouri. She's with her friend. She's fine.

I am finding out something weird. Which started in the quiet drive on the way home. That when you have a person come out of your body and they're only 6 pounds and they hand that person to you...I don't know. There is a sense of ownership. Especially if you hand raise your own kids, using all your own Earth time. It doesn't matter that she is 16 and all the way in Missouri. That is me, way out there somewhere near Kansas. She is wearing 16 years of me, that's me at my best, all poured and molded and resembling an Emma. You wanna know what I've been doing, that's what I've been doing, people of Missouri. I'm not even there and yet my representative is there. She's my heart project.

Of course she's happy. She's beautiful, and she's on vacation. And I know she's a whole person, shut up people. I'm saying, there's more to this mom stuff than they spell out on the hospital forms or in movies. That ain't it. There's this whole OTHER THING. That feels a lot like some kind of weird spiritual journey if I had the velvet drapes and wore more beads and was comfortable with barefooted bearded guys. I feel that road less travelled connection. That road more travelled. That road that I paved in my guts and that is now wearing new leggings and eating chicken wings in Missouri. It's maybe so basic that nobody cares about it. But I didn't just make this person. I feel it all, then and still.

So I'm not sad, I think more I need Moms Anonymous. A place I can go and admit that I'm a mom and being a mom means that your real true heart life has become bigger, and unmanageable. You're not sorry, at these meetings. You're more just exhausted, honest and bewildered. The way it's supposed to be, because that's a sign you felt everything right.

A friend once told me that anyone who walks around and isn't completely bewildered by life is just a big liar.

Musing about all of this on my couch, another friend texts me and says that Emma told her "my mom is my best friend." This news is silly. Because here we are not at all the same person, and not even in the same time zone, and this person from my house for the last 16 years (and before that, previously of my body, and before that, of the stars) - even on this couch, temporarily empty of her, this person hasn't left me at all. All that noise that follows her and all those years I have logged her into my bones, and it's in her voice and her slippers under my bed. So I sit grateful for the person who came into my life all those years ago, and who flowered under my watering can, sprouting right up through my shoulders and through my chest. I think maybe Emma Missouri might have grown me, I just couldn't see because I was busy thinking I knew it all. After all, I was in charge.

I should know better from taking so many walks in the rain with my babies and following them through muddy puddles in wet boots that I'm not in charge at all.