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A Calling #fridayflash


The sun dipped, torching the horizon a familiar red-orange haze. Colleen stood on the back porch and listened. She’d put on an old black sweater before stepping out even though the Indian summer continued without sign of abatement. It draped her as loosely as it had the wire hanger in the coat closet. She held out  an arm and observed a bony wrist  before stepping down into the yard and heading for the gate.

Up the alley and lightly across the road, Colleen was soon in the fallow field, overgrown in defiant contrast to the sheared barley fields that shouldered it. She slowed her gait and began a meandering zig-zag towards the pond. The sweater was too warm as the day’s heat wafted up, caressing her seductively, but she kept walking not stopping until she felt a sudden chill that warmed her heart even as it dried the sweat on her forehead and upper lip.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Colleen squatted  and began clearing the ground cover with her bare hands. Clumps of dirt came up with each handful of grassy scrub which Colleen tossed with disinterest to either side. When she had cleared a patch roughly the size of a wall clock face, she worked to smooth the surface taking clumps and breaking them to powder with her fingers until a bare, but rough, surface stared up at her accusingly.

The air was colder now. She’d felt the temperature drop around her like a sheet of winter rain as she worked. Dropping out of the squat and coming to her knees, Colleen paused. She brought her hands together and rubbed them as if to warm them but they were colder than the air around her now. She shivered involuntarily, knowing that time was at a premium and not inclined to work to her advantage yet. Determined to have the last word, Colleen reached into the various pockets of the sweater draping her like a magician’s cloak and produced three plastic baggies which she tossed in a pattern to the ground just outside the circle she’d created, careful not to let them contact the edges.

She emptied the contents of the first baggie into her left hand and carefully spread it around the circle until the brown dirt shimmered and the sharp silica-like crystals drew blood. She applied the second baggie in a similar manner using her right hand with the same results and then clasped her bloody palms together, touching her forehead to her thumbs briefly before dumping the last bag’s contents in a pile dead center of the crackling circle. It ignited like a torch and Colleen braced herself as the flame licked at her face. Colder than the frigid air which knifed her lungs with each breath, the flames grew and expanded towards her as she stood, ready to be consumed or admitted.

She turned to face the road, realizing that the searing light was all around her or rather that she was the light because the flame emanated from her now. She lifted one arm and then the other. Delighting in the light that shimmered and dimmed depending on the bend of an elbow or the flick of a finger.

Careful not to step out of the circle, Colleen stilled her body and began to prepare for meditation. She had no idea how or when it would begin or how much time was needed for events to play out. She closed her eyes, wondering what she would see when the time came to open them again.

Rambles


Rob read my post on the whole class/teacher license thing the other day and said,

“It’s interesting that you didn’t once mention writing.”

And I hadn’t because I was grappling with the whole safety net thing – again – but also, I am not sure that a person can really make a living writing. It seems to me that there are mid-list genre writers who make decent livings and there are the sacred cows on the bestseller lists who get published regardless of the quality of their latest offering and then everyone else writes in addition to conducting workshops, running literary magazines, editing, being an agent, or teaching.

I have a writing gig at 50 Something and it pays me exactly nothing. I have an offer on the table for a slot on a new education blog which will also net me about nothing. Okay, there are bylines involved and a publishing credit isn’t nothing, but they don’t pay bills or buy stuff – not that I am much into the accumulation of stuff anymore, but you know what I mean.

Shaking the idea that marriage eventually leads all women to the food bank is difficult. Especially for me. I have never in my life not been the breadwinner. I believed all those feminists who said that a woman should always have a job because taking any time away from the workplace is the first step on the path to doom.

Now you’re thinking – how did we get from writing as a so-so career to a feminist manifesto on traditional marriages being the ruin of women?

I was reading a review of that new tv show The Good Wife and the reviewer insisted it was about the dangers women face when they buy into the idea that they can come and go from the workplace easily and without penalty. I am two years out of the workplace now. I am not accumulating points for Social Security. My pension is simply clocking interest rather than contributions from me and my former employer. I don’t have current references regarding my work ethic or ability. I don’t know anyone in the “business” here and so don’t have contacts. My logical mind tells me this is all bad. This is not what I was raised to do. I was taught better.

But, I like staying home. I am happier as just a housewife than I ever was teaching despite the fact that I am quite passionate about education and that I don’t much care for being the keeper of Dee’s schedule and the organizer of her social life. And I wonder just what I am giving up by accepting the fact that I will not attain the lofty pay heights I knew in my last years of teaching. Are feminists more concerned with the stuff of the standard of living than the living part of it? Life doesn’t lose meaning when shopping is needs rather than wants based, does it?

So, writing. I am working on the memoir. It is slow because the beginning chapters are all about Will and caretaking and how dementia kills a marriage and then it shifts to the even cheery dead husband stuff. I will finish the first half by Halloween and the second – more cheery meeting Rob and falling in love again stuff – by year’s end. Then query and look for agent and …. you know.

I don’t know if this book will make me a writer or just someone who wrote a book. I worry that it will change my life in a way I am not prepared for which is probably another reason why I focus on details like classes and licenses rather than think about being a writer.

Anyway, I am off to writing group. I finally found one that meets during the day.

This Kinda Pissed Me Off


I am not reading blogs as I used to (sorry, but I scan/read through my blog reader because I am crunched right now) which means I don’t comment much either (though I am really trying to pop over and leave a note for those of you who are friends – ‘cuz I do care to know about you and yours and stuff). Sometimes I read things still that work me up enough to actually write a comment that says more than just “hi, I was here and thinking of you”.

Mommy blogs bore me. I don’t read them. I have my own mom moments and mom stories, and I prefer to get my advice from known sources. But I read Jessica because she is smart, irreverent and herself, which isn’t always a given. Bloggers have personas that don’t often match their real life self. You would have to know me for a while to hear the same kind of honesty from me that you read on my blog. Discretion is actually one of my real time virtues.

The subject has come up before on this blog and it irked me then too. It’s the idea that DNA trumps with a sub-theme of “I could never love another as I love my spouse”.

Okay.

So I am adopted and until I had Dee, there was literally no one else in the world with whom I had a blood relationship. And I have to be honest, I didn’t love her at first sight. I was perplexed and a bit unsure because I was told I would love her with the intensity of a million suns from moment one and frankly, I didn’t feel that. She was a stranger who I thought I knew because of all the time she’d spent growing inside me. She was a little person from the start who I had to learn – just like I have had to learn everyone else in my life. As a result, I am not an advocate of the Disney Princess School of Motherhood.

I should have known this going in. I had witnessed plenty of instances of mothers and fathers whose regard for their biological children ranged from disinterest to pure duty with all sorts of cringe-worthy twists and turns in between. Biology ensures almost nothing in terms of attachment. Case in point would be Nephew1 who regularly threatens his mother (my youngest sis) with:

“If you do not come and visit me the next time I am at Grandma’s, I will divorce you when I am 18 and you will never see or hear from me again.”

This is the only thing that will rouse my sister from the reality show disaster of her life to spend an hour or so with her son. The third of four children to whom she has given birth. The other three she gave up for adoption without a second thought. The one she kept so she could go back on state aid because she was tired of couch surfing and living out of paper grocery sacks with her toothless boyfriend -who isn’t the father by the way. He wouldn’t oblige. She seduced the teenage friend of another guy – who also declined to impregnate her. Award winning mother material my sister is not and that’s my point. There are more people in the world like her that disprove the “I would lay down my life for my (bio) child” than not.

I would have taken umbrage even before I remarried (yeah, I’ll get to that) and became a step-parent. If there is any disparity in my feelings for my older girls and Dee, it’s because we are still getting to know each other. It’s harder when they are older and living on their own. We just don’t get opportunities to interact like Rob and Dee do, but I wouldn’t be able to choose among them in one of those hypothetical “you have to toss one from the boat scenarios” which are stupid anyway.

Blending fails when adults in the scenario make decisions that will ensure it does. Adults set the tone, make the rules and provide the examples, and if you go into a second marriage with children with whom your past track record as a real adult is in question, you are going to have your work cut out for you.

My Uncle Donnie married a widow who was 8 years older than he was and who had seven children – some of them already grown and married when they wed back in 1968. They all call him “Pops”. He is their children’s grandfather. They aren’t as blended into my mother’s family as they could have been because at the time, my mom’s siblings weren’t as close as they could have been – are now. This was the result of adult decisions. My grandmother didn’t like Auntie Bern very much. Different personalities. But as far as Auntie Bern’s family went Uncle Donnie was welcomed and became “husband” and “dad”. Auntie Bern passed away quite a while ago and nothing has changed.

Perhaps it’s what you are taught growing up? Dad’s family is the direct result of a second marriage after widowhood. His father’s older step-brothers had issues with their father, but they never let it keep them from integrating with their new siblings (who were the same ages as their own children really). Sometimes a certain amount of “suck it up, buttercup” is necessary to make blending work and this, I think, is what separates the true adults from the wanna-be’s and posers.

So, the nonsense about not being able to love another as much as your spouse? Crap. People fall in love after having long, short and in-between marriages to people they truly loved all the time. Often what I hear from them is that they are even happier in the second relationship. Because they didn’t love the first spouse or it wasn’t a “soul mates” thing? No, it’s because they know how to create a loving relationship. They make the extra effort because they have lost someone and know the searing pain of regrets and what-if’s and opportunities lost.

Love is something you choose to do whether there are biological ties or not. It is not magic or genetically hardwired. Believing in love as some kind of compulsion based on forces beyond our control is what allows us to not care about people who are homeless or without health care or are being imprisoned by fanatical religious extremists in parts of the world that don’t interest us because we don’t have family or first spouses there. It’s the kind of thinking that allows us to dehumanize others and dismiss them and their welfare and that kind of reasoning has never led humanity to any happy place that I know of.

I choose to believe that I am capable of  more than that.