Time to write

There comes a time to write.

Not the time to write that I take for myself, the daily journal, the morning pages, that fill notebook after notebook, after notebook.

I have a stockpile of bins in my office closet.

I slowly fill a notebook and then quietly transport it to my office, place it in a file box, or an old leftover plastic bin retired from Burning Man.

I look at them and reflect on the past 18 years that I have been assiduously putting pen to paper.

I wonder what to do with them.

They are precious.

And they are markers of passing time.

And they are just words.

Words that help me process the world that I walk through.

Words that, to few others mean very little.

They are both everything and nothing.

I could go to the office and make a few trips up and down the steps and load the boxes up in the back of my car, drive out to Ocean Beach, find a fire pit, and have myself a little bonfire (of vanity) of my words and I would be ok with that.

I am attached and detached to both the idea of keeping the notebooks and letting them all go in a whoosh of flames.

I don’t have anyone to leave those words to.

Perhaps to my younger self, see here, girl, look what you have wrought.

I reflect on this as I think about this past week and the travel that I took.

I was in Florida.

First to see my mother and make an amends for having to cancel a trip over Thanksgiving.

I saw her for Mother’s Day.

Made good on being a daughter.

Traveled across the country to a land that seems so far away and different to me than San Francisco.

Then I met my beau in Miami.

And no.

I won’t be writing about him.

I long to in some ways, there is much to process, but that goes in the notebooks.

That is for my eyes, my heart only.

Suffice to say I was not alone in Miami and what I did and felt and saw was so vastly different than the last time I was in Miami, that it stirred within me the urge to write my blog today.

Aside.

I wonder about taking this elsewhere, this blog.

Am I loyal to the platform?

Is it just a historical document, my millions of words, my thousands of blog, my endless ego, that keeps me here?

I don’t often write, as I used to, once a day, every day.

A kind of hiding in plain sight I think.

A way to be seen and of the world, but also away from the world, away from socializing, dating, going out, making friends.

The blog has been a protector, a glimpse into my life, my psyche, who I am, the places I have gone, the things I have seen, felt, touched, heard–a way of mirroring who I am and also, frankly, not who I am.

This is just a part of me.

Not the biggest part of me either.

It is me.

And.

It is not me.

I don’t know exactly how to formulate it, how to describe it, the words they come out of my head, they flow through my fingers, I am just dictating my thoughts as they move around my brain.

This is not me in entirety, it’s a thread, a gossamer, a glowing line of words that meander around some segment of my brain.

I just follow the trail, like a silver snail, and pick up the words and put them here.

I know it is me.

It is not me.

Something else.

Something divine.

Something that has its way with me, through me, in me.

There is more me than this me.

Like all the levels of death, the small deaths, the ego deaths, the different manifestations of death, le petit mort.

A conversation that rattles around in a part of my brain that writes the poetry.

There is a line from a conversation on a couch in a hotel in Miami that has a poem waiting to be breathed into life.

But it is not here yet.

I am here still.

Writing.

Thinking about writing.

How it feels.

Fuck me.

It feels.

So.

Good.

And I am a pleasure seeking missile and this is what I think about.

This flow, this ease, it is so luxurious.

I don’t have to do much and the words just flow like jazz scat scattered on my skin, kissed with music and words.

It is a drug this.

Such pleasure.

The writing that I am thinking about is the writing that both scares me and pulls me along.

Write the book.

Write the book.

Write the book.

I have written tens of books, if you layer all the blogs together, there are books, upon books, upon books. The dissertation, the three memoir manuscripts, the boxes of notebooks.

The proliferation of words is not hard for me.

I think you have gotten the gist of that.

It is in the crafting and the vulnerability of really looking at what I have.

31 years ago I was an unhoused, terrified (I wouldn’t have said that, I would have said, “curious” or “adventurous” or something that belied the obvious dissociation I must have been in to do the things I did) living in Homestead, Florida.

Aside, I just Googled Homestead, Florida.

I have never done that before.

I won’t do it again.

Gave me ugly goosebumps.

Anyway.

I wrote a memoir about that time.

One of the things that I reworked and worked on more and I think took into five drafts?

But still I think is shit.

And I spent a lot of time on the fifth draft when I lived in Paris.

I sent it out to a lot of agents.

I queried almost daily.

I got almost nowhere.

Very few responses.

Very few interested people.

But I did it.

And I think now, I think, do I unearth it?

Do I rewrite it, fictionalize it perhaps.

Very few people in there that would be affected by my writing it, very few people that I even remember the names of.

Leon.

E.

Billy Ray.

Myself.

Three major players.

One bit player.

One love triangle.

And a lot of crack cocaine.

Under the table construction.

Living in shacks on the edge of the destroyed Fort Andrews Air Force base, sometimes cars, sometimes tents.

Trips to the Circle K for roller hots dogs, generic cigarettes and wine coolers.

When there was money.

And when there wasn’t, stealing from the gas station a couple miles away.

I never stole, I was a patsy to a couple of different thefts though.

Sigh.

So much fodder.

Alligators.

Moldy hotel rooms.

Cold showers in the dark at construction sites when I had not showered in days.

The smell of wood lath after being smashed by a sledgehammer–I did demolition at some of the house sites the boys worked on.

Sonic Burger drive in when we were flush.

Dine and dashes, my first one at a Keg South bar and grill with Billy Ray.

The taste of really bad Rose in a cheap wine glass.

Coral rock.

The sunset that I will never forget, 31 years later, it is still seared there on my brain like a still in a movie that I can’t quite shake.

And this girl, me, this woman, young, brash and brazen and running, who just kept surviving and putting that next foot in front of the one in front of the one in front of the one in front of the other.

Going blistered footed ever forward.

She is there too, in the cracks and crevices of me.

Maybe.

Just maybe.

I go back and I write a epilouge.

I write framing it in this now.

In this moment of my life.

Aged fifty.

Aged with lines around my eyes that crinkle far too deeply.

Aged and achy for the heart of that girl/woman/child.

Oh am I ever just a child, adrift in the stars over the dark water of the Lake, the warm nights, the sparkle of Miami that was so far away, so unatainable.

Little did I know where I would go, where life would take me, and that one day, many, oh so many years later, I would make my return.

And the sun on the face of the man in the car is not the sun on the face of the man in the car.

It is there bright and washed pink golden orange red burnished in the sun setting behind the Miami skyline, promising me something more than I had thought possible.

If I so chose.

And.

I think.

I think this time I do.

I think it is time to make that choice.

It is.

Time to write.

Nothing’s Sunk In

I have not yet felt the reality of being done with my Master’s program.

It has not sunk in at all.

I bumped into, and invited, a former employer who I ran into today in Noe Valley to my party, who replied after giving me a huge hug, how much the boys would love to see me and that they would of course come.

It was very sweet.

She and her partner are both psychiatrists, so it was really nice and quite validating to get some of the recognition from them when I worked for them regarding my abilities.

The last time I bumped into them I had just begun practicum.

Now I’ve completed the program.

It was a touch surreal.

The time has gone by fast, even though it was such a slog too.

So much work.

She insisted that I needed to stop and take it in and take a moment.

But I don’t have any moments.

Not right now.

Not right yet.

To appreciate and reflect and give myself a pat on the back.

I just jumped right back into work today and before work I had to go to Hayes Valley and drop of my paperwork that needed to be signed.

And of course.

I fucked it up.

OHMYFUCKINGGOD.

What is my problem?

Tired.

You are tired and overwhelmed and want everything to be completed and you just finished a Herculean task and haven’t really sat with the reality of what it all means.

And.

I didn’t fuck it up that bad.

But for a minute there.

I was so mad at myself I could have screamed on the corner of Gough and Hayes.

In fact.

I did say a couple of profanities out loud in frustration.

I was so set on getting the paperwork to the right place, to the right mailbox on to the next thing that had to be done, so über focused, that I didn’t realize the door code to the building I was using was the wrong one.

I made the presumption (as it has happened in the past when I met with my supervisor that I would occasionally get to the office before it was open and I would have to wait until he arrived to turn the dead bolt) that when the code didn’t work it was because there was no one in the office and the dead bolt was still in place.

I was so mad.

Why wasn’t there someone there?

There’s always someone there by this time.

What the fuck is going on.

I was so frustrated, thinking that I had come all the way down and there was no way of getting my paperwork to my supervisor and shit, I’m going to have to come down again and damn it all to hell.

I sighed.

I turned around.

Then.

I noticed the mail slot.

I could put the envelope through the mail slot.

I hemmed and hawed, the post it note with my supervisor’s name and suite number  could come off, then how would anyone know where it was supposed to go.

But.

I figured if he didn’t get it I would just print off another form and run it back down.

I slid it through the mail slot.

I decided I had enough time to mail out my Mother’s Day gift and I headed off to get into my car and wait a second.

The code.

Did I use the wrong code?

What code did I use?

Shit.

I think I used my therapists code.

My therapist in Noe Valley.

Hallelujah!

I ran back, I looked up my supervisor’s code, I let myself into the building, I went to the mail slot and looked at the floor.

There was nothing there!

Where’d the hell it go?

I dashed upstairs.

The door to my supervisor’s office was closed, I know better than to knock, he could have been in session, but I hoped fervently that he was there and had gotten the envelope.

There was nothing left to do but go and send and e-mail and feel a bit chagrined and not beat myself up too much, I still did a little, and get on to the next thing.

Mailing said package.

Which I did.

Then ran into the former employer.

And yes.

I did acknowledge she was right, I need to stop.

To sit.

To savor it.

But honestly.

All I feel like doing is crying.

I’m in a lot of pain again with the reflux and I haven’t enjoyed the ending of the program partially because I haven’t had the time to do so but also because I’m in gnarly ass pain again.

Fortunately.

The GI’s office got back to me today and booked the three procedures with me the doctor wants to do.

I will go in on May 17th and see what is going on.

I have taken that whole day off from work, I’ll be doing a ph test and wearing a wire that will be inserted through my nose into my esophagus and into my stomach, for 24 hours.

I had already asked off for the 18th, figuring that I would be socializing with my mom who’s coming for my graduation.

I really don’t want to deal with a parent visit and the wire test, but what the fuck can I do?

I can’t take being in pain like this much longer and I’ll deal with the visit the best I can.

The doctor will also do an endoscopy.

The procedure will be done at 1p.m and I can’t eat 6 hours prior or drink fluids 4 hours prior.

My mom called today, she’s back from her trip and wants to discuss her trip.

I don’t even know what to say right now.

I feel like I’m just hanging on, I’m not sure I can manage more.

I’m just in pain.

I know it will pass.

I won’t die.

I mean.

I hope not.

I want to wear my cap and gown.

I want to walk the stage.

I want to celebrate on the beach with the people I love.

I really do.

I CHOOSE HAPPY

I CHOOSE HAPPY AND LIGHT!

I hollered out loud scootering down Lincoln Avenue like a maniac.

I have no idea if any one heard me, but I am laughing out loud thinking about it.

I had previous to that moment been a little in my head.

I was feeling small and sad.

I texted a lot of people right as the day was ending.

I had an unexpected thing happen and it threw me for a loop and I found myself in a quandary trying to decide how to proceed.

Breathe.

There’s a start.

Um.

Do the next thing in front of you.

I have two small boys in a bath tub, attend to that, wash the hair, condition it–it was not suppose to be a bath night with hair washing but how the 3 year old got cheese dip in his hair, well, it’s a long story, suffice to say, hair washing happened.

Heh.

God I love these little boys.

Even when they drive me bats.

It took me a good fifteen minutes to get the little guy into the bath, he’s definitely going through a bit of a rebellious phase, and he did not want a bath.

AT ALL.

And of course once I managed to get him in the bath he did not want to get out.

So often that child could be me.

But, but, but, I’m all focused on this thing here and I want this thing here and it’s not good for me, but so what, let me get all engaged with what I think is right and you’re wrong and fuck me.

I’m an emotional three year old.

However.

I do have some tools and mama opened up the tool box and took them out.

I prayed.

I texted my people.

I got some fantastic suggestions.

I couldn’t really use the phone, mom and dad were down stairs and I was not inclined to have the conversation be overheard.

I never am.

I’m either on camera or the monitor and I would rather just keep it discrete.

I can text at work and that feels ok, as long as I am paying attention to what is going on with my little guys.

That being said.

I practiced some restraint and I am grateful for it.

So grateful.

I am also grateful to know that I have choices and though, yes, for a little while I did feel small, sad, and though my heart hurt, it didn’t hurt for long.

I had a bit of conversation in my head about how to respond.

No response is a response, Martines.

No.

No, is a complete answer.

And this nice little tidbit, I don’t owe anyone a reason or a response.

I can choose to not engage.

I can choose happy.

I can choose light.

I can choose joy.

I can choose to get up early on a Monday and go to yoga and work so hard that my arms are literally shaking, I mean, I am holding the pose, but I can see the muscles in my arm twitching and vibrating from the strain of holding the pose.

That was a first for me.

My arms had quite a bit more of a work out than I was expecting.

But it did lead to an enormous release of energy and I was able to turn my heart up to the ceiling in a certain pose and suddenly.

Light and happy.

I saw a crown.

I saw a bunch of daisies.

I felt a wash of joy.

I felt dipped in happy.

It was a pretty swell feeling leaving the studio this morning, climbing into a super hot shower after, putting on my favorite Big Mac vintage overalls and zooming out the door and off to work.

Just a little early so I could throw some gas in my scooter and also get to the post office before I went into work to send off my mom’s Mother’s Day package.

It felt good to do that.

Get my mom’s gift into the post.

I’ll be in school all weekend, though I am sure I will find a minute to reach out and call, I wanted to make sure that I had the package in the mail before the week got a head of me.

I showed up.

I got present for work.

The family wasn’t there.

The boys in school.

The parents out.

It was really sweet and nice to have the house to myself for the first hour of work.

I kicked through most of what I needed to do before the mom came back, cleared with me the day and what to do for dinner, talked about menu planning for the week, and also got my doctor’s appointment approved for next Friday.

I had a nice little Monday afternoon reunion with the boys when they got home from school and did a lot of reading with them before heading out the door to gather a few things from the market, the cleaners, and Lucca Ravioli.

I also found a bird’s nest.

It was so beautiful and small.

It was in the middle of the sidewalk, soft grasses and small twigs, tiny little white pin feathers all interwoven.

I took some photos, gave it to the oldest boy and enjoyed the small gift of beauty that I was given.

So many small gifts of beauty.

Perspective being one of them.

“Of course you feel sad,” he said via text.

“Have your feelings.”

Oh yeah.

That’s right.

I get to have feelings and they will be fleeting.

I can be sad.

I can feel small.

And.

Then I can let go of those feelings and reach for others.

Which is why I was hollering “I choose happy, I choose light!” at the top of my lungs on Lincoln Avenue as I was riding my scooter home.

I choose to not engage in a story or make a drama.

I choose to be happy.

I choose to be an artist and joyful and silly.

And.

“Are you really 43?” He asked me as we leaned up against The Addams Family pinball game at Free Gold Watch.

“You do not act 43.”

“I really am,” I said.

Forty fucking three.

And astounded with happy, joyous,

(lightness)

And.

Free.

All the fucking time.

 

 

Be The Mother To Yourself

That you wished you always had.

That statement takes on new meaning as I develop a new relationship with my mom.

I almost said with my current mom.

And that actually makes a kind of sense, she’s a different person, I am a different person, and we slowly construct a kind of relationship that neither of us have had before.

I am not real interested in reconstructing the relationship we used to have.

It did not work.

I will leave it at that.

She did the best she could.

I did the best I could.

I learned a lot of new behaviours that started to happen when I really asked for, and received some help.  I have had a lot of recovery in this area, I have done a fuck ton of inventory, gone to therapists, psychiatrists and counselors.

I have worked through a lot of the collateral damage.

But sometimes, I still will have my feelings about it and I found myself crying for no particular reason after I got off the phone with my mom this afternoon.

It’s Mother’s Day, that’s what you do, you call the mom.

I had to eat breakfast, pray, meditate, and write before doing it.

And the phone call only lasted six and a half minutes.

I think mom might have been talking for a while, but we had gotten disconnected.

I waited a few minutes, chuckling, thinking she must be chatting away over there in Florida, filling me in on all the doings of her partners daughter.

Like I care.

But, I listen.

I picked up the phone when she rang back and listened to her talk.

That’s probably the best gift I can give her, listening to her.

I don’t need to ask for or rely on my mom for anything.

I never really did, even when I should have been as a kid.

However, for years after I became an adult, I continued to look to my mom for emotional and financial support.

I never really expected it, but I would hope for it, I would long for it, I would go to the very dry well and expect a big bucket of cold, refreshing spring water to slake my thirst for all things mom.

So today, I did the best thing that I could do for myself, I took care of myself like I wished my mom could have when I was younger.

I made myself soup.

I sat outside in the sun.

I went for a bike ride.

I cleaned the house.

I read my book.

I balanced my checkbook, paid my phone bill, dropped the check in the mail to my friend for the Lighting in a Bottle Memorial Day weekend camping trip.

I did all things mom like and responsible.

Then I had a realization.

And perhaps it is like marrying yourself, I don’t know, but I have bought things for the little girl in me when she has needed them–pajamas, stuffed bunny rabbits (all since donated and gifted away to little girls I used to nanny) hair clips, stickers, etc.

I have gotten things for the teenager in my psyche too–lipstick, trips to Sephora, bottles of Essie nail polish, magazines–she like W and Vogue–but I have never, until today, thought about getting something for the mom in me.

I am pretty maternal when it gets right down to it.

I was my own mom, my mom’s mother at times, my sister’s mother at times, I am a care taker, especially in my first long-term relationship,  I was definitely the mom to the man I was dating.

How then should I celebrate myself and do for myself a nice little thing–acknowledge that the mom in me needs a Mother’s Day gift too.

I mean, who doesn’t like getting presents?

So, I took myself to Sloat Garden Center here in the Outer Sunset and I got myself a hanging plant.

A spider plant, to be specific.

I love the green.

I used to have one in my bedroom in the house I grew up in, Windsor, Wisconsin, a land very, very, very, far, far away.

I like them.

They do something for me.

Don’t care to analyze it, but I have had one in a number of the more stable housing situations I have been in.

There’s something about it that puts the final stamp of approval on my place for me.

I got a black metal hanging bracket, screwed it into the wall, threaded the hanger (bought a cloth one in blue with pink roses–yeah, hey, it’s got to have a little mom feel to it you know), and hung up the plant.

It makes me absurdly happy when I look at it.

Again, I don’t know why, but it does.

There’s something fulfilling about having green plants in my home.

In fact, I distrust people who don’t have plants, they’re homes always make me nervous.

There’s something nurturing about having plants in the home, flowers are sweet and I love them too, but just a good healthy green plant, thriving in some sunshine, makes my little space open up and grow too.

It is therapeutic to look at greenery.

It soothes me soul, it does.

Going out to Sloat Garden Center also helped me to get back on the scooter.

I checked it out and pretty much found it to be doable, I wanted to ride it to my evening commitment at Church and Market tonight, and figured a trial run was needed.

The Garden Center was a perfect little jaunt.

It’s at 46th and Sloat.

I am at 46th and Judah.

Just a few blocks to go, then a nice meander through the green house, the flowers, the geraniums and Gerber Daisies, the orchids, slender and beguiling with lush yellow purple sunbursts of petals, the African Violets and baskets of begonias and bouganvilla.

I wanted the spider plant, though, and that’s what I got.

It rode back with me, tied down to the back seat.

I got my scooter legs again and took it to Church and Market and back with no problems whatsoever.

Which is great, since I am working in the Castro tomorrow and want to ride it to work.

It appears i will be making that commute again for the week.

Wednesday I will drop it off in the evening to get the dent popped out of the front fender and I will chalk it up to part of the learning curve.

And when I feel overwhelmed I will soothe myself and regard happily my new plant.

Happy Mother’s Day to you and you and you.

New mom’s, old mom’s, grandma’s, and to those of you who get the gift of mothering yourself too, may it be joyful and everything you need.

Even if it’s just as simple as a green plant hanging in the corner of your soul.

Uh, I mean home.