For someone who doesn’t wash her hair until it is gummy, moms everywhere, I feel your love pain and explosive well of happiness and soulrage.
To be awarded for putting my daughter on the porch when I was done with her the other day – because the award is for the NOT KILLING of the children but the everything else, the everything that is mothering, not just the days at the beach which are beautiful and sand filled momentary dreamscapes but also involve lugging, managing, spraying, feeding, yelling, lifting, digging, stacking. Protecting. Takes a lot of my time.
I’m not even that protective and yet I am internally and externally yes that’s all I’m doing for 20 years now. I’m happy I’m standing up here and still alive to take this award actually. No wonder I look like this. Old and used and beaten. I believe my body and soul are the reward for this valiant attempt at raising 3 people from egg to nuts.
I am wiped out. I am the wicker chair outside that has been outside a long time and if you sit in it your ass falls through and makes you think about dieting, while also hoping no one saw you and that you can get fat ass back out and not wear a chair around for the rest of your life.
Let’s call it, I’m done. My youngest is 12 though, so I better skate thru these last years like I know what I’m doing when let’s face it, I know less and I remember nothing.
But man I can appreciate cool water on a hot day, and I can see beautiful light around 5 o’ clock on the trees outside and I never stop worshipping the earth and the sounds of nature here in my own backyard.
I am raising myself just right.
But this award is for mothering, okay, man, then thanks. I HAVE made a lot of things with cheese. I have poured many a banana pancake. I have been lucky enough to chase a baby with a saggy diaper and wrestle naked wet babies into a towel on a bed. I have loved loved loved loving all my babies, and watching what they do and listening and providing. They grew me.
I don’t mind the overlapping of anxiety and anger and frustration and work and yawning impossible tiredness and looking up at the huge children with my hands empty with nothing left to give having given all sometimes. I have reached that place where my spoon scratches the empty bowl, sometimes every day. And where does it all renew? How does it?
I think if you give it all to something you are wrung out and tossed aside and grow a new skin. I’m scared every day that I’m not getting it right. Then somedays – how? you just float.
I’m alone in that I’m me and no one else is in here, and it’s loud in here what with all the critics and the jokes, the police and the laughtrack. Lately there is the sound of ending maybe it was always there but I shut that storm door and put bricks on it but there is a fierce wind coming.
Until the door gets torn off I’m going to buy an apron and fill it with raisins. Because I decided as I am now almost 54 which is ridiculous if you knew me, as I age the only things I keep seeking out are more things to put raisins in and more pockets.
I want to keep everything close by. And it’s good to have a snack.
So back to my Mom Oscar speech, I am honored to be among you. Even though damn I see a lot of you doing a shitty job sometimes right in FRONT of me and I just watch with huge eyes and it doesn’t actually matter what you’re doing really, because I just want to do well at MINE. I sowed 3 rows and I have killed every plant I ever had but these 3 rows I have REAPED buddy, they are glowing, growing tall and there is a lot of passion in there I mean passion with a capital PAIN STRUGGLE PUSHING WORK RESOLUTION DETERMINATION RECKLESS ABANDON
That’s the most important part! The haphazard reckless loving, getting in the toboggan on the steep snowy ice, packing in the kids and heading straight down, fast, for that tree you will certainly hit. The kids are in fact aiming for it. Because the terror and the hit and the flinging out onto the snow breath knocked out, right after that is the laughing wheezing in cold freezing air, fam scattered all around like puffy jacket starfish dominoes and you know hot chocolate is inside because your mom is here. Everyone’s okay, and your mom is here.
I love the world, I love my 3, and I love being nominated in the category Most Likely to Never Be Nominated for Anything Else.
Also can I just say, my favorite parts were the dumbest parts. The routines. The McDonald’s we go to after the Fair every year when we’re hot, tired done and happy. The little mechanical horse you ride for a quarter on the street in Montrose. The giraffe on the way home from the beach. My mouth’s bleedin, Bert every New Year’s. The living with people you like, the best you can do it, all those days in a row and not leaving. Trying again, and then the light on the trees right before night. Every day, the world hands you that momentary light show. For free. For everyone.
I see it.
