Sing me a new song

I love music.  I'm a fan of sappy emotional songs that are often, sadly, linked to TV Dramas or Indie Romance Films. Although I'm a sucker for most country songs too.  I'm mostly a fan of lyrics over the actual music.  Lyrics speak in ways that I can't, and express my feelings so beautifully over my own awkward ramblings.

When I was at my most happiest, content, and "normal", I listened to a lot of contemporary christian music.  I was deep in my relationship with God and loved using songs to praise Him and to just be joyful.  When my life got really hard and then quickly spiraled into something resembling a Made For TV Hallmark Movie of the Week, I ran as far away from God as I could.  I figured if He couldn't protect me, then I should focus my attentions elsewhere.  But hey, that is an entirely different story.  I'm talking about music.  So, when life got crazy, I gave up my contemporary christian except for a few favorites that I sang to myself and I moved into the TV Drama/Indie Romance soundtrack period of time.

Certain songs I assign to certain experiences. I'm pretty sure a lot of people do that, but I have a lot of experiences that are rooted in grief and loss and confusion that have an entire soundtrack built around them.  The problem for me is that I do it, assign these awesome songs to these not-so-awesome experiences, and then every time I hear that song, I RE-experience all the feelings I had originally.

I just watched Silver Linings Playbook and had such compassion for the way the character totally loses his composure with one certain song.  I also really understood how he could hear the song even when it wasn't playing - and have the emotions and reactions play out even though there was NO SONG.  I get it.  I'm not an undiagnosed bipolar on serious meds, but I have my own reactions to songs and I too can hear them playing when they aren't.  And I don't like it.

I don't like that, while listening to Pandora and cleaning the house, a song can come on that makes my thoughts and emotions all jumpy, fragile and brittle, right there in the middle of what WAS an ordinary safe and vaguely pleasant time.  I don't like that while I'm putzing around the grocery store or driving to work and a song comes on the radio/P.A. system that sends my heart into a solid lump dropping to the bottom of my stomach.  I don't like that my son can be looking up songs on you-tube and something comes along that takes me back, back, back to a time I do NOT want to revisit.

I need new songs.  I need to find the music that is a soundtrack to THIS life, my life NOW.  I need songs that remind me of the times my kids and I laugh until someone cries or pees, songs that take me to the moment they put my newest baby into my arms for the first time, songs to make me remember sitting outside roasting marshmallows over our fire pit while the stars shone overhead and everyone I loved most was there with me.  I need songs to make me smile when I hear them, laugh and sing along, to dance.

Sing me a new song...

Two Weeks

My son has been living with me for two weeks now.  After 4 years of every other weekend visits, two weeks seems like the blink of an eye, and an eternity all at the same time. A joyful, amazing, awesome and inspiring blink of eternity...

I suppose that is what life is like though, anything hard as well as anything sublime - time speeds up and slows down all at once for an incredible time-warp sci-fi illusion in your heart.  It must have to do with the fact that even when your heart stops completely in your chest from fear, or anger, or joy, life simply continues on and the mundane minutia of life continues.

I have worked with my son on a final project for school - hours of editing and pulling words out of the air to compose one extra paragraph for an essay, using our imaginations to expose what we think an artist meant to convey by using a certain color - and it has been bonding time for us.  But during those hours camped in front of the computer I have also had to wash dishes, sort laundry, feed the baby, pull the baby out of the garbage/toilet/pantry countless times, taken the dog out to pee, and still had to go to work and come home again.  Like I said, mundane minutia a midst amazing bonding.

I've also had to nag.  Can I say that nagging has been a joyful experience without sounding like I'm mentally unstable?  Actually, my son and I have both enjoyed the nagging.  For me, it's a pleasure to have to remind him to pick up his underwear or wet towel, to move his shoes, to shut the door - because those are words of love, of training, words that a "parent" must speak.  For him, it's been a pleasure because it speaks of love, of attention, of someone looking out for him, words meant to surround him with "mother-ness".  Something he has missed so very much.

I worry.  I worry about my daughter now left behind at her fathers house.  She doesn't seem to mind, really.  Shes a simple soul, easy to please, easy to love, easy going, and is glad that her big brother is safe, happy, and finally at peace here with me.  She is glad there is less stress and fighting in the house where she is.  She is glad, even more so now, to actually spend time with her brother when they are here together.  But I worry anyway.  I worry that she is lonely, alone, defenseless.  She assures me, and so does my son, that there is nothing to worry about.  But isn't that what a mother does? Worries?

Four years of worry... chronic, aching, pinching, overwhelming worry now pared down to two weeks worth concentrated all on her.  Ouch. I'm so tired of worry.

Two weeks of bliss, worry, bonding, nagging, and laundry...  two weeks of a decidedly messier house, a louder house, a busier house, and yet the empty place where my daughter should be seems even MORE noticeable now that I am so aware of her being alone.

My son will be off to college after next year... the time will fly by so fast that I will hardly have time to love him enough before he's gone.  But for now I am going to relish the two weeks we've had and I will let tomorrow take care of itself.

I wonder if you know...

…that I cry for you.

i wonder if you know that i think of you a bajillion times a day, wonder how you are physically and emotionally, what you are wearing and if you are warm enough or clean enough, how you are feeling about yourself or your life, what you are doing when you aren't at home or at school – when you are out there on your own and alone, and full of raw angst over not knowing all of those things innately.

…that I ache for you.

i wonder if you have ever felt the need to be with me, the longing to be held and touched and mothered the way i so desperately need to be with you, hold you, touch you, and mother you like i did before all of this, if you cry for me and i agonize over the image of you needing me.

…that I die a little more without you.

i am not who i used to be, when i was there – and it gets harder and harder with each passing event, to find within me that same spirit, that i am more and more dead to myself, dead to the past, the same way that i see you slipping away as time goes by.

…that I did, indeed, really, do everything I could, within my power, and with my own sense of morals, to avoid this very thing.

i wonder if you think that i didn’t try hard enough, didn’t just produce from thin air the money or time or magical ‘thing’ that would have fixed it all, wonder if you’ve slid into that camp of “against” instead of firmly rooted in “for”.

…that I didn’t do what you might, at a more grown up time, think I should have done, that I didn’t do what he thought I should have done, but that I did what was right to do.

i wonder if you carry the thought that i should have done, should be doing, chose wrong – and in your limited perspective it is the only truth you know or if you carry the conceptual thought that i am doing all that i can and should and holding up my own preservation for the long term benefit and silently rooting me on from the sidelines.

…the sheer strength and courage I possess is admirable and inspiring – that the giving up of something because it preserves it is better than trying to hold too tight and causing the destruction of it – and that is true love.

i wonder if you’ll see the strength for what it is, see the stubborn grasp on courage that i refuse to release, if you’ll be inspired in your life for watching this quiet tenacity at work in me, if you’ll thank me for not causing more damage or if you’ll hate me for not blindly desperately flailing to grasp the very thing i want at all costs just to show that i DO want it.

…that I love you so much…so much…so much…

…or if you’ll think i loved myself more, loved someone else more, or if you’ll feel abandoned when i meant for you to feel safe.

I wonder if I even want you to know...

Kings or Rebels

He has one gray hair.  Just one.  One silver strand of hair mingled into his silky mop of brown.  It's been there since birth I assume, but I only noticed it a week or so after, once he'd been bathed and shampoo'ed and had lost that glowing pink newborn color and settled into his real live skin color - peaches and cream of course.

Now, at almost 11 months, I look for that single silver strand every time I hold him close. I rake my fingers through the slippery silk of his baby fine gold/red/brown hair and seek out that one special strand.  I will be heartbroken when I can no longer find it.

It reminds me of the story of the Rainbow fish with all her beautiful scales and how she finally learned to share.  I wonder if some angel somewhere decided to share some special angel beauty and my son received it as a single strand of silver in his hair.

I think about how when God touches you, you are indelibly marked forever more as HIS.  Is this single silver strand the mark of God upon my child?

I love that single gray hair. I love every hair on his little round head, every lash lining his huge brown eyes, but I treasure that lone gray hair. I imaging Mary treasuring over Jesus, over his curls or his eyelashes, or the sweetness of his dimpled knuckles. Us mothers, on the whole, we treasure our babies be they kings or rebels.

Good Night Son

Four years.

Four first day of school days each of the past four Septembers.  Four last day of school days each of the past four Junes.

Four of every imagineable holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Fourth of July, Mothers Day... Birthdays...

Four years of missing out.

Four years worth of "go take a shower" and "is your homework done?", and "I said turn off the lights, it's way past bedtime".

Four years worth of dinner around the table and holding hands for saying grace and "get your elbows off the table" and "use your napkin NOT your jeans!" and "eat your veggies...okay half... ok fine, three bites... no that doesnt' count as a bite... fine just clear your plate".  Four years worth of sighing.

Four years worth of, "wake up, good morning!" and "are you up?" and, "lets go, come on!" and,  "GET UP!" and "RUNRUNRUN we're late!"

Four years of uncountable things gone, missed, lost, irretrievable.

Four years worth of every other Saturday, 9-9 only.

Four years worth of  "Good night son, I love you, sleep tight, sweet dreams..." uttered only to myself and the shadows in an empty room.

But last night... last night I rustled up sheets, blankets, an extra pillow.  Never mind that it was 90 degrees, and humid, I was going to make a proper bed up with sheets and blankets and pillows.  Last night I found clean towels and a bedside lamp and an extra charger for the mp3.  And then... oh God, I tucked my son into bed, in MY house, and said, "Good night son, I love you, sleep tight, sweet dreams..."

He is more than 6 feet tall now.  He has man hair on his arms and legs.  He has muscled biceps and stubble on his cheeks. He smells not of sweaty little boy, and grass, and cookies, but of deodorant, of "man".  And I hugged him and tucked him in and slept in the same house with my little boy for the first time in four years.

I woke up and made his lunch.  I nagged him to hurry, to get his book, did he remember his key, his water bottle, his backpack?  I drove him to his high school and joined the line of parents dropping off their kids.  Just like I used to do four years ago before our lives changed.  It was instinctual though, the merging into the carpool lane and inching forward little by little, the nagging...  He said goodbye as he unfolded himself out of the car, and I said, "See ya later Bud, have a good day" just like any other parent.

Four years gone... but yet this one day was heaven.

Tonight I pray will be another night I can hug him and whisper to him, "Goodnight son, I love you..."