R.M.

~ Essays. Poems. Written Meditations.

R.M.

Tag Archives: sadness

The Baby

23 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by racheltejas in Denver, divorce, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

baby, children, depression during pregnancy, divorce, family photography, growing up, loss, love, motherhood, Philip Larkin, photography, preschool, sadness, short meditation on childhood

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.
                                   ~~ Philip Larkin

 

She started school today.

Gold sparkle shoes.
A lavender shirt, bell sleeves, skirt of delicate flowers over leggings of a dark pink, motif of tigers at the ankle. Enormous Hello Kitty backpack over her slender, already elegant-goodbye shoulders.

“I do not want to go to school,”
she said.
I said
“you will have SO much fun”
lying about both the fun
and my enthusiasm.
I could not get to my car fast enough,
the tears hot like river-lava, unstoppable ~
as though someone had died.
I thought… perhaps I have died.

 

 

 

 

When the child grew in my body I lost my fucking  mind. I did not sleep for 7 months. I went to 6 emergency rooms for suicidal impulse, was an in-patient for a few days of living Hell.

I took drugs that did not work.
I did not gain enough weight.
I was told she “might lose IQ points” because of the drugs/medication but that I of course needed to take them anyway.
No one measured my thyroid, which turned out to be so hyper it is a miracle she made it. People with those numbers don’t sleep. They buzz and humm and go and go and go.
But no. I was insane.
And I was indeed.
insane.
She was born, fierce force, hungry all the time. Perfect. Perfect beauty, perfect nurser, every hour eating and eating from the breast. She could not take enough life into her body.

She hasn’t changed. She is the same at almost 5 as she was at birth: life life more life. She speaks like an 8 year old, has the vocabulary any parent of a 10 year old would be happy with; she dissects moods like a scientist and has a Goddess-cruel streak that runs the family like a toddler-matriarchy. She is the mascot, the feared one, the adored one. She pronounces and announces; she uses the word “sarcastic” often and correctly.
She looks exactly like me, and has sophisticated opinions about my mascara, my manicures, my heels. She is a dictatorial femme and I absolutely worship her.

The baby.
The baby of the family, the harbinger of my divorce, the perfect being born to chaos, born to a father already living in loathing of the mother.

My child.
Je suis tres desole.

May your brilliance and strange strength carry you to horizons infinite, adventure without end, curiosity with no fear. May your life be the embodiment of Love, and Happiness. Remember to not ruin people with your wit and beauty. Go easy,
Baby.
Je t’aime. Toujours.

 

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Circling

09 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by racheltejas in divorce, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood, photography

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

depression, divorce, free verse, free-form essay, politics and grief, sadness, sex, single motherhood

Circling

1.
I do not write anymore.
I do not write.
Lists fill my mind, purse, journal, which used to contain
ideas.
The lists remain undone,
my hair shows strands
of silver.

I would find this beautiful on anyone
but this body,
the one I must live with, and watch
with the contempt of a house cat
who has lost her perch.

Do not worry, this is not a poem. Or an essay or a study
there is nothing scholarly witty or worthy in these lines
– a journal grants great indulgence. “It’s mine,” 
as my 4 year old might say.

These are the briefest jots of grief
I simply miss the act
of sitting with
and then dispensing with
thoughts along a digital page.

Here:
This is why I do not write.
In the last 2 months
I sold my house.
I searched for another
(43 unlocked doors for sale –
no sale)
And found myself with a full account
and an empty end point.

And this is why I do not write.
I have this Ex-Husband. Father to three
little children who grew within me
and now can somehow grow
without me.
The Ex-Husband (how does a person become an X?) prefers the three
small beings to be split down the middle,
two houses two lives two families…
and I am unsure
if this will not make for more than 6 huge problems:
Identity, Security, Consistency, Home(lessness), Displacement, Confusion –
in the age of the refugee
there are more than a few sorts…

And so I asked
begged bullied pleaded
for the little creatures to have 1 house life family. Avec moi.
“You’re dreaming.” He said.

Well… no one could deny or argue with that.

But… who is not dreaming?

My dreams are image and wisdom
pulled together by invisible synaptic string.
The string becomes a hum:
“the children need a home.
the children need a home, singular
Not in the singular, spectacular manner of fantaisie royale
just a simple home. One home. One room. One bed.
You must give this to them, as a womb outside your body.”

I did.
This is why I don’t (can’t) write anymore.
I took an apartment in a neighborhood filled with trees
a block or two from their fairytale school.
It is a flat with windows and a sunrise that
uncurls without impediment
every morning into my high bedroom
a wall of windows open
to the Eastern light.

The apartment is a place to sleep.
Keep my books.
My obscene amount of clothes.
It is a flat to hold my body during rest,
while I tend the children
at their father’s house (their Home)
during the days and evenings.

I have a beautiful flat
I am homeless
I am city-less
No country
or state
with this Ex
with this president
I have a beautiful flat
filled with boxes, neglect

My children have
a Home.

And lest you think
I am filled with self-pity
or self-sacrifice
I beg the reader to remember:

a woman with three children
has lost her mind
to a complicated math:
three hearts, none
in her possession.
And as long as the three hearts
are beating as they should

steady
steady
steady

it does not matter where her frame resides.

2.
As I write these words
these petite
phrases
that reach for a meaning
the writer herself cannot grasp

I am text-fighting.
This is the primary manner
of communication, the chosen
form
of intimacy
my Ex

prefers.
Form
Intimacy
Two words
both sacred and necessary
and absent utterly
from gadgetry

Do you ever catch yourself
in the modern mirror?
Your reflection a recreation
and an editing
flesh-less,
like a weak and fearful
god
in the ether
of the digital world?

There is no love.
This, a cocooning comfort
to the man
whose rage used to grip my thighs
(“fucking” he always called it)

Do I hate him?
I do not know
what hate is.
But I do know
now
what fucking feels like.
A scar.

3.
I told
a psychiatrist
that my soul
is peripatetic
“ownership
is alien,”
and he stared at me
archly
the way they do

like dancers
they train for an expressiveness –
the grace of wisdom
even if they
stand naked
with stupidity
when the initials are stripped from the name.

This is what I needed to say:
I am cast
out.
There is no family for this life or body or heart
my children live in a home ringed with spiked wire
and all I do is bleed in the crawling
my torso is mud
vertical lines of blood.

I cross him
every day to reach them
he is a man one does not cross.

I am on the run.
Therefore
ownership is alien
or dangerous
for a mother with no family
a stranger
a stranger
a stranger
one day I might hold them
in peace
and whisper the Gayatri
in their spiraling sleeping ears
hair damp with dreams –
I wide awake as dawn nears.

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After

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, photography

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

free verse, imagistic poem, photography, poem, poem of childhood, sadness, solitude

After

Little girls
know a certain sort
of alone-ness –
empty blue-white
summer sky

a single plane

flying high, high, high
overhead

The thin plume
trails behind
widens and opens

like a single wing
lightly feathered
against the domed sky –

It is
the moment
remembered lifetimes later
as the small upward-turned mouth

whispers
they do not know
my name –

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Morning before Mysore

25 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by racheltejas in Colorado, Denver, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography

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Tags

Ayurveda, children, depression, divorce, dreams, grief, holidays, marriage, motherhood, moving, North Carolina, photography, politics, sadness, travel, Trump

Morning before Mysore

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;

   – – Keats, Ode on Melancholy

“I cry so much I could turn to drops.”
“You’d just roll into the waves…”
— from “Moonlight,” Tarell Alvin McCraney

First Thanksgiving in solitude. First Thanksgiving without A. in almost 17 years. First Thanksgiving, of course, without my children. Between Donald Trump, the depression of my middle child, my own middle age, missing the vision of the toddler I dressed this morning in sheaths of gold and silver bows, red sequined shoes that I would certainly click three times if I thought it could wake me, wake the country, from this wretched state…. She is gone, though, and has taken the shoes, along with her fat little gold-dressed Buddha-belly, to dinner at the home of my estranged husband’s brother.

I am unhappy. Deeply unhappy, and not in a wild, romantic sort of way: it is an unfamiliar unhappiness of dullness, of worry without end, of knowing that divorced middle-aged women with three small, rather complicated children and not much money don’t usually wind up taking long midnight walks through Dubrovnik in late spring, or getting into epic Liz Taylor/Richard Burton rows in Venice, or even just having sex. Occasionally. This haunts me because in my youth I was lovely, my ex used to describe me as having the sort of face that would cause college boys to have fist fights in parking lots; it is difficult, then, to let go of beauty (which I always identified as lacking), youth, and my marriage, in what feels like some drawn out but oddly simultaneous moment of Hell.
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Like all other thinking people, I am devastated daily by the living nightmare of Trump. The take over of conservative white nationalists in this country makes me want to leave. Portugal? Southwestern France? Buenos Aires? But I will not leave. I cannot leave, not because I am committed to staying but because A. would never leave, not even Denver.

After we separated I begged for a compromise: I have stayed in Denver because of his career. “Let me go, let me go, let me go,” I begged. To the East Coast, where I most resonate with others; we discussed Eugene, Oregon, where it is beautiful and inexpensive and the ocean beckons, the wide grey waters of the Northwest.

I am made of water and air. In Ayurvedic terms one might say I possess much vata, the energy of air, of lightness, of dream. I find it horribly horrible to be grounded. I hate to stay. My mind is in constant play with images of the past, of dream, of beauty and myth. Sometimes I think Artemis is walking next to me, and when I set myself free, as I am doing in this essay, the quality of my thoughts are weightless, but glimmer like sun-peaked waves. Discipline is hard for me, and joy is often short lived. Everything cycles through me. Including, apparently, my marriage.
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I worship water and green things and hidden places. Great cities and country fences that stretch for miles along borders of Kentucky grasses. Empty beaches and old white farmhouses, feral children running nude, ruining my Guerlain lipstick, knees bloodied and fingers raw from a deep-red football.

Finally, North Carolina. “Yes,” he said. I found a farmhouse, a real one, on four acres. White and huge and renovated, with outbuildings and sheds. A gazebo down a little lane, already in place. It was a house for children to ride scooters in, and get lost in the dark, carrying candles. I had dreams of homeschooling and long train rides to New York City, short car trips to the coast. The Outer Banks, springtime in Savannah, visiting the Martin House, owned by my family for many years, in Blowing Rock.
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It seemed an odd but perfect landing spot: it would be loathsome to be around the conservative South, but I have had people there, on my father’s side, since before the Revolution. And I am expert at creating and finding bubbles, whether they be political, personal, aesthetic or cultural. I wouldn’t be alive without them. This is not a happy admission, just a true one..

That white house, with its original wood floors and untouched oak filigree filling the arches that separated endless rooms, the 13 foot ceilings and the windows that stretched the height of whole walls – it became my obsession. I had visitations of vision upon vision: the wet winters, the nights of storm, mornings all steam and heat and bloom. Outdoor and indoor cats, a few huge dogs, my children wild with play in the afternoon, books left on hammocks in the afternoon rains. I could see the covers run, ink stains of purple and orange. There, on the first floor, a living room empty save a grey linen loveseat and a couple of swing chairs. Next to that, the former parlor, now my library and study, where I visit with Virginia Woolf and my greatest friend, Henry James, who entirely approves of this arrangement, given his own itinerant homeschooled life. A house mainly empty, all space and wood, with music everywhere, all the time: Mozart quartets at dawn, Coltrane at 5:00, dancing to the layers of disco and hip-hop of Kaytranada in the dark.
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At the last minute, we stayed.

We stayed here, in Denver. A city alien and huge to me, dry as death, polluted, overcrowded, flowing with second tier hipsters and second rate museums.  A. has a career here, a family, and not much need for newness; he is a fairly content person, which makes him far wiser than I, with my visions and fancies and this hidden life outside of Life.

I dislike cities unless they are Great Cities. I would gladly live in and raise my three children in Paris, New York, even Boston, but I am not wealthy and without wealth any city, even a Great one, becomes a Great Prison. So, as I speed toward middle age and beyond, I yearn for the rural. For a life of sweet slowness, some village close by with a bookstore and a good cafe, and a decent small school. A home with a bedroom window that looks out on endless green, tops of trees, and nothing in the distance but hills and space and sky, and, if I am truly blessed, water.
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Existence at this moment, both politically and in the most intimate manner, is utterly charmless. This word, “charm.” Its Latin root, carmen, is a song, an incantation. One might think of Orpheus, and the mesmerizing music he created and gifted to the human race. Or, the music with which he charmed all those lucky enough to hear him. Charmed, then, also means to be caught in a spell, and this meaning is found as far back as the Old French of the 12th or 13th Centuries.

How can one live without charm? By this word I do not mean a casual insouciance – though this element of life, too is necessary – but more that a life without the spell of music, of lightness, of civility and intelligence and wit, is…. empty. Barack, my huge and only political hero, possesses more charm than any person has right to own. Charm, in its old sense, the sense of the cultivated melody that delineates a life thoroughly lived, is leaving the White House, and has already left my house.

However, there are moments. Aren’t there always? Moments.  Just moments, and when we are awake I suppose they occur despite Trump, despite a departed husband, despite the abandoned white house on the hill.

Two days ago I woke my children early so that I could attend a morning Ashtanga Mysore practice.

I took my smallest child, a little girl with a 70’s shag and a sort of verbal precocity that exhausts her companions by 11AM, and asked her to “use the potty.”

“Oh,” she said, with some surprise. “No that’s OK Mama. But thank you for asking.” And then she laughed, as if aware that a small creature who is still in diapers should not be using the Queen’s English to speak with such eloquence about her own incontinence.

I wanted to eat her. My love was too big, the charm too great.
20160809_083749-3 (1)

After finally corralling all three small beings into our large car, my eldest, who is 8 and has been immersed for weeks in British books, heard me speaking to his grandmother about a playground.

“No,” he bellowed, in his usual ear-splitting tone, “I do not much fancy going to a playground.” I looked at the child to see if he was kidding, or if he was aware he had just used a term that might well get him an ass-kicking on a school yard, but he was utterly without self-consciousness about his gorgeously arcane phrase. This child, my son, happens to be particularly brilliant, particularly complicated, and hearing him adopt the language of his chosen world, found in pages upon pages of the books he reads obsessively and everywhere, brought me a momentary joy so large I forgot, for a spell, how bad things were all around us. The charm of this child, his brilliance and anger and confidence, swept me in and held me suspended in time and love. Charm, then, cultivates the greatest gift: gratitude.

We were almost to our destination when my deeply troubled and depressed middle child blurted from her booster seat: “If I am unconscious am I asleep?”

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This sparked a rather amazing 10 minute dialogue on the different states of consciousness the brain is capable of occupying, from dream-state to manic awareness and everything in between. We talked about synapses and eye movements, drugs and surgery and dreams and what it feels like to wake up. We talked about death.

My son finished it. He said, “Bebe, when you die your brain doesn’t move anymore.”
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“That is right,” I said, trying to keep it technical, knowing the neurosis of my little girl’s mind. Then he said, as if he had been up for three nights reading Keats:

“Death, Mama, is an everlasting sleep.”

I looked at my son, with his long lashes and alien wide eyes. His hair is wavy and dark and his body is lithe like a baby panther.

“Yes.

Yes, my charming son.

Sleep everlasting.

Be good for your Nana.

I love you.

Toujours et toujours et toujours.”
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An Ending: Paris

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by racheltejas in art, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography, Seasons, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, children, dancers, depression, divorce, grief, husband and wives, joy, modern society, Paris, photography, sadness, single motherhood, the Louvre, travel, winter

An Ending: Paris

I was in Paris for a long time in February. It rained every day, and the chill sliced one’s skin open, leaving the body naked, wounded, despite the layers and layers of scarves, wool, fur-lined gloves. I loved it. I loved it because I am solitary, and something of a masochist, and because people were so busy hurrying away from the weather I could take my time watching them, and watching the buildings, wet limestone glistening in the dim grey light.
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One evening I was walking home in a knife-like drizzle. It was impossible to comprehend that the drizzle wasn’t snow, the cold was so deep, so encompassing. It was early, but dark. Headlights doubled in the streets, and cell phones glowed, and stores shut their lights. I was walking toward the rue de Seine, where I was staying in a small lofted studio. I had chocolate and wine, and I had been walking for hours. My feet ached, or I think they ached, but I could not feel them. I passed a small square and a movement caught my eye. No. It wasn’t a movement. It was a spirit. A phantom.  Or pure prana, as my spiritual practice might name it.

It was Joy.

There, hard to my left, was a beautiful man. His hair was chic and short, he wore the expensive wool overcoat of a conservative banker – certainly someone in finance, someone with wealth. His shoes were perfect, unmarked, and his narrow, fashionable pants hung in magically dry creases down his slender shins. Handsome. Confident. A person one would notice almost anywhere.

But on this evening, and who knows, if the world is lucky enough on every evening – even the nights Paris is bombed, or Nice is bombed, or the hard nights of the streaming refugees from the Jungle of Calais – on this night he had headphones in his small ears. He was dancing. When I say he was dancing I do not mean he was listening to hip-hop and his head was moving to the beat.

No. This man, so well dressed in the freezing rain, was moving with a feline practiced grace, taking up extraordinary amounts of space with amazingly few steps, his feet sliding into pas de chats, his hips circling like an Ailey dancer. His arms were slightly lifted, giving just enough space to his torso to keep the rhythm in check. Reader, I tell you it was a vision. It was beauty beyond beauty. This man, dancing with himself, or with his own private sorrow or new love or lost love, no matter; he was dancing in the dark in the rain. The oddest thing, too: no one noticed, or stopped, or even glanced up; it was is if he was invisible to all eyes save mine.

People who know and love Paris often encounter gifts like this, gifts one knows, instantly, will stay forever, and become part of the mosaic of memory, of how one defines joy, and when joy departs, how one defines its absence.

When I think of this man, and the striking, clear love for the Moment, for humanity, he evoked in me, and then I think of the events that later unfolded on this trip, and continue to endlessly unfold, like an unwanted, hideous cloak from a wizard in a cruel fairy tale, I find myself wondering at the nature of joy.

What is joy? Perhaps because it is so totally absent from my life, and has been almost from the day I witnessed the man in the rain, I can think of joy with some distance: joy as concept, joy as a philosophical toy to be played with by the mind, held to differing angles, histories, stories.

The world in general is a joyless place, particularly right now. A lying carnival barker leading the (now not) free world, Barack departing the political stage to the sorrow of those who love him, and know that if it were not for the sickness of our country this great man could have accomplished ever so much more. Racism ascendant in every corner of our planet, from the Buddhist monks in Burma to the nationalist Hindu government in India to the formerly tolerant societies of Northern Europe. The Middle East burns, North Africa is worse, and the United States is quickly turning into a banana republic, an embarrassment to the rest of the world, and becoming unbearable to inhabit. Fear and violence, one cannot the latter without the former, are the defining characteristics of the human race.

The macrocosm of our society, from what I can see, is fundamentally hopeless, despite the valiant efforts of a brave and enraged few. My own life, the tiny little microcosm that has meaning only for me, is much the same way. Depression, a true and old depression, one that has the consistency of granite rock and the familiarity of a dull dry face one has stared at for far too long, has returned to my body, has taken my body, and inhabits it, leaving me shelled, face down, waiting for a departure that doesn’t come.

Have you ever read the great and terrifying Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan?” Depression is something like this: the angry god descends, the young girl lies helpless in the field.

So, Joy. I think joy is primarily a stunning of the senses. And when the senses are both paralyzed and brought into line all at once, as if by some electrocution, the ego dispenses itself, and what remains… what does remain? The emptiness of pure observation. This capacity to see, to witness, and in the witnessing take part in a Moment not created by a small self, is, I think, Joy. In a way, the beautiful title of C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece on Christian faith, “Surprised by Joy,” possesses an element of tautology: Joy cannot exist without surprise. How else does one approach the wonder of God, or a beautiful man (perhaps a god) dancing in the rain?

Remember when Woody Allen was a genius, and he created Manhattan? Remember at the end, when he sits on that old couch, and speaks into a recorder? “What makes life worth living,” he asks. Groucho Marx, Louis Armstrong, the Jupiter Symphony, Sentimental Education.. the list is perfect, though I would add to it. A lot. But I think one could dispel the list to this: what makes life worth living? Joy. The joy of brilliance, the unexpected vision, the higher realms that occasionally open themselves to us, as when one catches a first glimpse of Venice at dusk. Joy is granted by a generous god, but a fickle one. And what the god grants the god can take, leaving an abyss of absence.
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Not long after the evening I saw the dancing man, I spent part of an afternoon, one of many, wandering around the courtyard of the Louvre. I love the light created by the elaborately carved limestone facades and tall glass windows of the square: it feels as though one has entered a delicate music box and the lid has just opened to the sky.

On this particular afternoon I was fighting, bitterly, with my then-husband. He was in a fury: my passport had been stolen and he blamed me for it, and couldn’t believe the extra work of phone calls and bullshit I had handed to him. He was in a fury that I was in France, he was in a fury to be with our children, and working, and totally overwhelmed. He had supported the trip during one of our ever shrinking moments of affection; by the time the journey came to pass his regret, I believe, was total.

I looked around the courtyard. There were happy tourists milling around. Paris! Uncrowded Paris! The Louvre and friends and drinks later: what more could one want?

My headphones on, looking at the sweet laughing faces and beautiful stone surrounding me, I took out my phone to take pictures. I am fairly good with a phone camera, it’s the only reason, really, to even have a phone.  The photos were quickly forgotten, though, when I saw The Texts. My husband had let loose his rage, and the rage could be felt, read, in real time, an ocean and half a world away.

It is not necessary to repeat the content; everyone is entitled to pure anger and the details only distract… even though it is details like the words on that phone to which I return, in my grief, often and too much. All around me, cinematic joy. And suddenly, violently, the private misery of my marriage encircled me like a noose, from which I have yet to see any escape or relief.

It could have been a moment of grand, romantic reckoning: “Here I am, in Paris, with no passport, my children far away, my husband clearly out of love and done. I can take a lover. I can be reborn and release myself from these years of suppressed rage. I can come home, call a lawyer, and file for divorce. I can be strong.”

It was a moment. But it was not grand, and it hasn’t lead anywhere but to this slow, hideous, increasingly lonely dissolution of a 17 year affair. Children, property, “assets.” If I hear the word “asset” one more time I think I shall go deaf. There’s not time even for grief, it’s all taken up with the trivial problems of housing and the profound, irreparable suffering of my children.

Joy. The memory of joy is inversely proportional in pain to the happiness of knowing it. Each day, for me, is a precarious balance, knowing that the depression within my body is caught and held by a thin net of phenelzine (thank the gods for chemicals), and if the net fails all will fail. Actually, all has failed, but the failure must be a secret, and my children must see this change as chaos, as difficulty, something malleable, workable, but ultimately resulting in the steady reborn happiness of two shiny new homes, as if we had planned it all along.

There is no reckoning, no grand conclusion to the end of my marriage. I have been a housewife, taking care of my children, a lost late pregnancy before that, for ten solid years. Housewives often have the worst of it when a marriage ends: there is the great, private grief, indescribable in depth; there are the children; there is the total loss of love and reliance on a sweetly imagined future of age and the mutual support needed through the passage of time, change, death, disease, suffering. All these things must be set aside, however: a newly single housewife must re-imagine herself as a person, a woman, in the world, capable of taking care of her children, making money, managing finances, ensuring the stability of her children’s financial, educational, and emotional future. She must become father, mother, worker, therapist, caretaker, organizer, all at once and immediately, with no gap.

I am old. I have three children, two of whom have unusual needs and minds. How many hundreds of thousands, millions of women have gone before me in this exact situation? Did they reinvent themselves, or just get through it? Did they know joy again? The dry new territory of true solitude and age: what is the nature of the terrain? Does even the occasional mirage of sex disappear? Where is the refuge for women who must suddenly be everything, and so become, within, nothing?

This past summer I spent nine days in New York. Like everyone, I adore New York. It is probably one of the most photogenic cities in the world. I was there to practice with an Ashtanga teacher. And to take pictures of the city at dawn. Somehow, I’m still not sure how, I forgot my phone.
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Never Ends (two dedications)

11 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by racheltejas in art, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

children, divorce, fatherhood, grief, honor of Sally Mann, mother love, mothering, mothering small children, sadness, Sally Mann, sibling love, siblings

The older boy taught the younger girl how to tackle. She already knew. On the black rug, the one with large red flowers and a beige border, they wrestled. My back was turned; a mother knows when the pups are at play or have entered a competition in which she must intervene and exert her judgment.
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For a long time, there was only friendship. The older boy, insistent and brilliant and angry and old, and the younger girl, sensitive, all-seeing but with oddly blurred vision – they are twins, really. The boy lived eighteen short months before the girl appeared in his life; there is no memory of his body without her body, his mother without the love, and the race for her love, that feeds both of them.

I was painting stone. Huge granite rocks. Punishingly, I pressed the brush on their surface: the rocks belong in a river, not in my house. But that is the residue of another era, and the stones on the wall, after I am done with my gleeful shading, will be just another palimpsest of taste and time, fashion and comfort. Still, with my husband gone, painting the rock felt like an attempt to pull myself further into this home, and close the door tighter against his ghost.

So I listened. The wrestling had turned into a small war. Whoever lasted the longest in pinning the other won – how on earth did they know the basic rules – and then the game was over. No.

“No,” said the younger girl with long legs that bend like a stork. “It never ends. It never ends.” Her voice was a plea and a challenge and a question and a request. In essence, she spoke a language both of her and beyond her, the language of space, of stars, of time, a universe of meaning in those three words, spoken to her brother, who agreed.

“Right,” he said. “It never ends.”
sally

***This small vignette is dedicated to two people: the father of this boy and girl, who is no longer my husband but will always be their father. And to Sally Mann, whose son just died, and whose art truly never ends.***

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Buena Vista Park

07 Saturday May 2016

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, Travel

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Tags

Buena Vista Park, children, essay on family, existential suffering, family life, grief, marital problems, marriage, personal essay, sadness, San Francisco, solitude, travel

Buena Vista Park

Dissolution is not describable; I think that might be part of its definition. The taking of an element, or a contract, or a branch of government, or a brain or a body or a relationship, and creating something else: liquid, breakage, chaos, malaise, ending. One might observe what was once there, and the ensuing result, but who can adequately describe the process that leads from one step to the next? We skip the lines that matter, the ones in-between, the ones that set the stage for the dissolution to occur in the first place. We live in patterns invisible to the eye and mind, like a spider so ambitious in her architecture she gets lost in her own threaded palace.

I am in San Francisco. This afternoon I walked for hours after visiting with my very dear (wonderfully dissolute, actually) oldest friend. She is a mad-hatter of a woman: bohemian and wild and part of the old San Francisco landscape, before it was ruined by the garish and unrefined wealth of the boys with all those absurd computers.

The fog never left today, the streets were crowded and the smells strong. The city seems so delicate to me, and is always lit like a pearl. Soft is the sunlight, embracing is the fog, the damp defining the air that defines the light. It’s as if one sees the softness first here, the light second. Nothing is blinding, except the beauty of the water and the fecund greenery of the parks.

After leaving my friend I listened to music, which had the doubly beneficial effect of separating me from the river of people around me and also of opening the utterly repressed channels of grief that are woven throughout my life at the moment. One reason I think we love tapestries so much is that they almost always tell a story, and the tapestry of my life has reached a point of…. well, of dissolution.

I sat at dusk in Buena Vista park, tears streaming down my face. I took out a pen, and I was thinking about Morocco, thinking about Paul Bowles, and the disrobing of the self. And how necessary it is, how vital: the abandoning of hope is not, as Dante would have us believe (if we only read half the story, that is), a terrible thing. To leave behind – a brave act, as long as the vulnerable, the innocent (Archer, Delphine, Isadora, there I have named them) are not left in the refuse as one hurries out the door.

Write it. It was a dare. An aesthetic and moral dare. Write it down, the impatient urging came from the depths of me. I could not. I tried. I am trying. I cannot. The disrobing, how I have always been drawn to it, as if the nakedness and then the subsequent morphing to something else is an act of temporal salvation.

When I was 17 I lost my heart to a beautiful red haired boy. A brilliant boy, filled with anger and sarcasm and lust and ambition. I became very very thin. My sister was dead, the rest of my family half dead from her absence. One drunken night a friend put her hand on my tiny knee. “Too small, my friend. Too much.” She loved me a great deal. And I turned to her, cigarette smoke trailing from my mouth. “Spare,” I said. “I need to be spare, nothing but the necessary. No extra.” She smiled, a half smile. A wise smile, too wise for our age. “I understand that,” she said. “From you, I understand that.”

Many years have passed. She is still my sweet friend. And I still cannot write it, the naked and stark beauty that lies in dissolution. It is a desert dreamed by Paul Bowles. It is the aching pause, heavy with death and threat, in the Shostakovich String Quartets.

The disrobing of all surplus: I imagine gathering the children. I imagine boarding a plane. I imagine finding a house with a glass roof that opens to an empty sky. And then I cannot write it, cannot even imagine it, fully. Because here I am, in a park at dusk. And two days from now I will be home. And the children – a baby, a child barely past toddler years, and a brilliant son now in the full tumult of boyhood – must be protected from dissolution as much as I am drawn to it.
Buena Vista Park

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