Sexy Got Her Homework On

And her yoga on.

But not her sex on.

Well.

Not true.

I took care of business after my second yoga class today.

Yes.

I said that, two yoga classes today.

I have never done that before.

It’s not that big a deal and at the same time, it sort of was.

I went to my normal 9 a.m. Sunday morning class and got a very good sweat on and proceeded to watch my entire day change in the span of a few text messages.

When I got back from my yoga class I got a cancellation then after I got out of my shower and was getting my breakfast ready, my coffee date cancelled.

So.

I sent a lover a message.

And.

Nope.

NO response.

That kind of day.

So.

I got to do extraordinary amounts of self-care.

Which was needed and much cleaning and house hold attending.

And.

Cooking and grocery shopping.

This next few weeks is going to be busy.

I will be working two weeks straight for the family, the dad will be leaving Thursday for a business trip out-of-town so I will be working next Saturday and Sunday.

It’s actually going to be three weeks of work and school before I have another weekend off.

It’s going to be intense.

So I’m grateful I had today all to myself.

I was good company.

I took some extra time this morning for my writing and I made myself the most delicious coconut/almond milk latte and decided to just let the day unfold and not worry about anything.

I knew I also had to get a paper written for my Trauma class, my step-father made it into a paper this go around, and do cooking and food prep.

But I didn’t force myself or stress.

I just took each moment as its own little exquisite experience.

I washed all my bedding and did two loads of laundry, even washed the rugs in the bathroom, and swept, vacuumed, washed, polished, and cleaned my whole house.

It looks so nice.

I also went grocery shopping for two weeks of food.

I will probably have to re-up on fresh fruit, but I have enough coffee, eggs, oatmeal, brown rice, almond milk, organic carrots, frozen blueberries, and prepared food to get me through the weeks to come.

I roasted a chicken today and I made jambalaya.

I froze the majority of it and canned the rest of the chicken soup I had leftover from last week.

I have meals for days and I feel happy to have dealt with it.

I didn’t leave the neighborhood.

Although I did take my scooter to the Safeway on Balboa to get my groceries.

I wasn’t going to take it further, I knew there was going to be one more episode of rain and sure enough, there was, but not before I had run all the errands I needed to do and the next week and a half looks like sunshine.

That is going to be super helpful, I have my first therapy session with my new therapist Tuesday before work and I have an appointment to see my advisor at school Thursday before work.

The before work, work begins.

In actuality, I realize, it began already last week, I have been doing things before work for the last couple of weeks since the last school weekend.

Which reminds me, I need to swing by the post office before work in the morning and pick up a package.

I think work is going to be pretty busy, not just with working next weekend, but also, its Spring Break for the kiddos, which means I won’t have reading time for school work.

I feel like I’m ok though, I have done a lot of the Couple’s Therapy reading already, finished all my Trauma reading and I wrote my Trauma paper today.

I had some push back on it.

I realize I have been having some feelings of, “over it,” move along, I’m tired of this stuff.

It can get exhausting looking at the trauma minefields in my life history and how I got through some seemingly unscathed, but the patterns of the things I did to survive stay with me, little bombs of shrapnel on my psyche that explode without warning and leave me tired on the side of the road picking the stuff out of the pockets of my emotions.

“I feel brutalized,” I was telling my person yesterday at Tart to Tart, that place has seen a lot of my tears, about an incident that happen last week and how I felt and why I was angry.

We did a lot of work around it and I got some very good suggestions and I took them, I’m still taking them, I will keep taking them as the days move forward.

I hadn’t realized how much I was carrying until I said out loud that I felt brutalized and that it reminded me, I later saw, of my step-father and my mom and some stuff that happened to me growing up.

All the things that happened growing up.

Glad I start therapy on Tuesday, Jesus fuck.

Of course, under the lens of my graduate school work, of course, a lot of stuff is going to come up, the pot just keeps getting stirred and things pop to the surface, so when I sat down to write my paper I realized just how much I didn’t want to write it and I let myself start out that way.

And.

Five pages and 1,562 words later.

I was finished.

In fact.

I finished it so fast that I realized I could go to the restorative yoga class tonight at my studio.

Yes, I had already practiced today, but the restorative is really meditative and relaxing and it’s not about getting a work out, it’s about being in your body and supporting different parts of it that don’t typically get support or rest.

It was just so what I needed.

I came home, lit some candles, checked my messages, saw nothing from anyone, and said, well, I’ll just take care of me and took care of me.

I am actually a little surprised that I had so much sexual energy today, I just finished my period yesterday, but as I am getting older I can tell that sometimes it comes out in different ways energetically.

I also had some fodder for fantasy running around my head that I just let myself have.

I could say it was counter transference from the work I did today, which is another entire blog and far to clinical for me to delve into here.

Or.

I could just say.

After getting flowers, a home cooked dinner, and a restorative yoga class I was just in a yummy, dreamy space.

And I let myself go there too.

Yes.

Thank you self-care Sunday.

You rocked.

Ready for the next weeks work.

Bring it on.

You’re The Carmen Cat

He whispered to me and cuddled into a little ball in the corner of his bed.

“Don’t eat my toes!”  He admonished me as I reached to stroke the tender little balls of his feet.

“Not even one nibble?” I asked.

“No!” He giggled and burrowed under his blanket.

I hate waking up a sleeping bunny, but the nap was going really long and I knew I would get what for if I didn’t get him up and out and on the move, but fresh-baked boy is so delicious, especially when he is drowsy and warm and sweet, his deep brown eyes battened with eyelashes blinking slow at me.

He sleeps with his cat–Meow Meow–a little grey thing that is actually white in the original.

He has another stuffed cat, black and with white socks, that he calls, I kid you not, “The Other Meow Meow.”

Today he asked me to juggle for him.

I sing the theme song from the Ringling Brothers Circus and toss balls high into the air.

He sings along with me and moves his hands like he’s juggling.

Most of the time the balls get flung around the room and he laughs hysterically.

“Juggle Carmen!  Juggle!”

I taught myself how to juggle when I was 18, had just dropped out of college was living with my pregnant sister, her boyfriend and her best friend in the trailer of said best friends mom and dad, who were on vacation in Mexico for a month.  The trailer was in Stoughton.

It was cold.

We were broke.

Except when I was writing bad checks at the supermarket to buy food and smokes for the entire household.

My sister’s boyfriend, baby daddy, and general sleazy older guy preying on young stupid women who were blind to being used for having already been raised by their usury parents, had us all convinced that he was in love with each one of us, but betrothed to my sister.

God bless him.

He had it worked out.

He was 29 or 30?

We were, from oldest to youngest, 18, 17, and 16.5 years of age.

We all smoked, did his bidding, fetched him food, bevvies, wrote bad checks, and generally ran amok in the wilds of Madison and the local environs.

He was tall, dark, handsome, had thighs I wanted to just look at all night, they were so long and plied with muscle and a way of looking at you from behind a shank of oily dark hair, that had you smitten into doing his bidding, that you, and only you, were the only thing he was looking at in the world–the only thing that mattered at all, ever.

For whatever reason he had us all believing that we needed a street skill.

Some sort of trick or song and dance or number that each of us could fall back on in case we needed to beg or busk on the streets.

He played guitar.

I don’t know what my sister’s skill was.

Looking pretty, I suppose.

I’m not sure what her friend’s was.

Being annoying, I suspected.

I had no skills.

Aside from allowing myself to be talked into letting a middle age man kiss, really, just slobber over them, ugh, my poor feet, when the “family unit” whatever we were calling ourselves, the self-styled coven of idiots we were, was broke.

At, of course, the suggestion of my sister’s boyfriend.

I have never done porn.

I suspect it would be like what I sat through, the slurping of the toes, it was one of the most humiliating things I have ever done for money, and by far the most ghastly.

I stripped once, that’s another story, in a long line of weirdo things I did to help sustain the family, that might have actually been easier than the foot fetish dude.

Aside.

Ever watch Shameless?

The American version.

Yeah.

Well, sometimes it hits a little too close to home.

Enough said.

So Damien, that was the name he went by.

Note to self, really?

I fell for someone who went by Damien.

It was either that or Wolf, but I think he was dating my sister’s best friend.

I slept with him, none the less.

Are you wondering yet how I went from cuddling with a little boy and juggling to this line of thought?

I bet you are.

Damien, assumed name, not his real name, decided that we were going to learn how to juggle.

My sister was bored to death with it in five minutes and went back to painting her long nails.

Her friend tried for perhaps ten minutes, then too, joined my sister on the couch (leatherette bands with the high wood curved corners and that stale brown/mustard/black/cream plaid that all couches seemed to be at the time) and began filing her nails.

I, however, was down for the challenge.

It took longer than I thought it should, hours, I think, but in the end, I had mastered the art of three ball juggling and could even do a trick or two.

I never did it for money though.

Until I nannied.

Then, well, it’s like you’re the Pied Piper of nannies, or Mary Fucking Poppins with tattoos, they come running.

“Juggle Meow Meow! Carmen Cat!  Juggle Meow Meow and The Other Meow Meow and Kitty Kitty.”

He rolled over in the bed, “please, oh please.”

I laughed.

Of course, my little kitten, I will juggle for you.

Juggling stuffed cats is easier than juggling live cats, not that I have tried, but it’s still a lot harder than juggling balls.

I tossed the grey cat, the black and white cat and the all black cat up in the air, I sang my little song, he clambered out of bed and tried to catch the cats then threw them all over the room.

“Let’s play Meow Meow Ball,” he said and whipped the stuffed grey cat across the room.

The kid’s got an arm.

He might be throwing more than a cat curve ball one of these days.

“Honey, let’s take Meow Meow downstairs and have a kitty cat snack,” I scooped him up and the stuffed cats and we went down for a cracker with sun butter on it and some milk before heading out into the wild world.

“I didn’t know you juggled,” the mom said laughing, “I thought you meant it metaphorically, like herding cats, you were referring to the boys, juggling them like cats.”

I laughed.

I told her about one winter in Wisconsin, it was cold, school was cancelled and I taught myself how to juggle.

I left out the part about dropping out of school, running away from home, bouncing checks all over Madison and beyond, chain-smoking cigarettes, doing prescription speed out of the medicine cabinets of my sister’s friends parents in their trailer in Stoughton and running amok on State Street with the other gutter punks, playing pinball at Challenges, and older men with dark eyes and salacious agendas.

I mean, my back ground check came back clear.

Why go louse it up?

It did, however, sink home, once again, how far I have come and how grateful I am to be where I am today.

Just another Carmen Cat doing the soft shoe shuffle for another two and a half-year old boy, juggling cats and singing.

This Old Cat, he plays one, he plays knick knack on your thumb, with a knick knack paddy whack, give a cat a ball, this old Cat goes rolling home.

“Meow Meow loves you.”

I love you too.

Sweet boy.

I love you too.

And

I hope I always get to be.

Your Carmen Cat.