My mailbox is totally full, so I’ve been deleting old emails from the past 22 years. I had deleted about 2,000 without reading them, when I chanced to read a couple and realized that there are some real gems there, so I’m going to share a few with you. (2,000 down, 37,000 to go! No exaggeration.). Here is one from 2010:
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Other People’s Children
I’m 57 years old and I’ve never had a child. No one would have predicted this. I’ve always been absolutely gaga about babies. When I was five, when my mother went to her Progressive Study Club, I’d spend the whole afternoon watching the babies laid out on the bed in the middle of a pile of coats. I would barely take my eyes off them. They seemed precious, beautiful and endlessly fascinating. In any crowd, my eyes fell on the babies. Whenever my much older sister had a child, I’d go to visit and the baby would sleep in my room.
So why did I never have a child and do I regret it? I never had a child because I was too busy living my life and somehow it always seemed that a child would interfere. I was selfish, yes, and last night I had a dream that adequately depicted that selfishness. In the dream, I was going to a concert. I went next door to my neighbors, who had many children, and asked if I could take one of them to the concert.
“Take me, take me!” each indicated by raising his arms or coming into my view. I took one of the smallest. It wasn’t until after the concert when I was again home that I realized that I’d left the child at the concert and worse to tell, I couldn’t even remember which one I’d taken! It was as though the minute I’d picked the child up that I’d forgotten it. The guilt was crushing but I seemed more worried about how I’d admit it to the parent than what might have happened to the child. I wondered whether to return to the concert or to go to the parent, which I dreaded. In the end, I went to see the parent and the child was there with her so I didn’t even mention that I’d lost her child. Afterwards I thought that I should go to the child and apologize, but I never did.
This dream ties in to a lifetime of dreams where I forget to feed and put more water in the tank of my fish and go down to find them transformed into fake fish lying on the bottom of a waterless tank, or have kittens or babies I forget to feed. It’s perfectly clear that this dream comes from some part of me that has always feared that I wouldn’t be an adequate caretaker over the long run. And so in the past, I always confined my caretaking to a few weeks in the summer, when I have my niece and nephews to visit, or Saturday visits from neighborhood kids for painting or singing or games.
Now at 57, I prefer to feed the child in the adults I find. To nourish their missing parts, care for the untended places in their souls. It’s like I’m a delayed parent, making up for the lacks in their pasts.
Twenty years ago, when I’d first met the man who was to become my husband, I went to a psychic to discover why he looked so familiar to me from the start, why I saw dozens of faces when I looked at him, all of those faces familiar. She took me back in a supposed past life progression, During that time, a little girl spoke to me. She said she was meant to be my child in this lifetime, but that since I’d been a mother in so many of my more recent past lives that she understood why I might want to spend this present life entirely on my self. “If you decide not to have me,” she said. “I’ll come to you some other way. So don’t worry. Just enjoy this life for yourself.”
So every time I meet a little girl or see the little girl or boy in an adult who has never resolved past issues, I wonder if that is the little girl trying to find me. And I try to respond.
This is the full extent of my mothering, and I must say that I’ve really never regretted not having a child. When I see a friend focusing her full attention and enjoyment on her daughter, I realize that I have that same relationship with my friends, and when I think of the friend whose son gambled away their retirement or the other friend who is raising her second grandchild, I know that life has turned out just right for me. Yes, I have children, but I get to decide when I see and care for them. And I get to continue to feed my own inner child. Selfish, perhaps, but somehow I think I’m just filling the exact niche I was born to fill.
—Dec. 6, 2004
Note: In lieu of the rhymed and metered poems to prompts that I’ve written and put on my blog daily over the past ten years, I’ve decided to start publishing excerpts from the journals I’ve been keeping for the past 22 years, hoping this will prompt me to transform them into a book. I welcome your comments about whether you find these peeks into my past interesting enough to warrant that effort.
I have been going through three big cartons that among them contain every letter anyone has ever written to me in my life and even a number of my own that my mother saved as I was traveling around the world in my younger wilder years. In the very bottom of one box, I found a card I made for my mother when I was six years old with the very first poem I ever wrote on it. It’s pretty beaten up but Forgottenman insists I should share it here. I’m including photos of the different pages. The cover is a doily with three dimensional flowers on it but consider that it has been rattling around in my mother’s top junk drawer or in a box with a ton of other paper things for 69 years, so its condition reflects this. Here it is. Click on each photo to enlarge and read the poem:
What is the very earliest example of your writing? Wanna share with us? If so, please link in comments below:
Since you enjoyed my other photos of Juan Diego, here are some more, along with a little girl who is dressed up traditionally for the Virgin of Guadalupe parade. If you didn’t see the earlier post go HERE to find out who Juan Diego was and to see another miniature Juan.
Why does this little boy have a mustache? For the Virgin of Guadalupe’s saint day parade, little boys dress up like Juan Diego, the man who experienced his first vision of the Virgin Mary on Tepeya Hill near Mexico City on December 9, 1531 while on his way to mass. To see more Juans, go HERE.
As usual, when I showed Forgottenman this little house I made for Yolanda’s daughter, Yoli, he insisted there must be a poem in it. Since this day’s prompt is about gifts, it seemed preordained. This is the little house fashioned by a man from clay as we sat eating our lunch in Tlaquepaque and listening to mariachi music. They were for the taking for a tip, so I chose one, brought it home and painted it. I had to add a few people and animals and flowers just to make it happier for Yoli, who always makes me happy.
Hop Scotch
Everyone should have a child around
now and then
to shake out the wrinkles
and lighten up the predictable.
That lighthearted humming on the patio,
tuneless and joyful?
That Barbie doll world
set up for the hour or so
before she goes
tripping off
to find tennis balls
in the garden with the dog?
Someone else’s child.
What gift could she treasure as much
as I have treasured this last hour’s
spontaneous distraction ?
One shoe
under the terrace table.
One cookie vanished off the plate.
One giggle listened for.
NaPoWriMo prompt: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of gifts and joy. What would you give yourself, if you could have anything? What would you give someone else?
Flying Kites
Since I was a little girl, trying to construct my own one-dimensional classically-shaped kite out of tissue paper and raw wood sticks, I’ve always been fascinated by kites. Kites were a bonding medium between my husband’s youngest son and me and I remember once taking a new boyfriend up on the hill to fly a kite after our first amorous encounter and actually, never seeing him again. I’m sure I’ve become the subject of one of his scornful “weird chick” stories.
Kites eventually evolved into more exotic shapes than those first fragile little assemble-it-yourself kites that came as paper and string tightly wound around a disassembled skeleton of unsanded sticks sure to provide a number of slivers during assembly. In my twenties, I bought a lovely cellophane kite in the shape of a jellyfish that actually traveled with me to Mexico twenty years later. It was the kite I’d sailed off the pier in Huntington Beach, in the sand of beaches near L.A. and from a campground north of San Diego.
I can’t remember what has become of it since I moved to Mexico eighteen years ago. Perhaps it is in a box somewhere or perhaps it eventually disintegrated and was thrown away, but my fascination with kites did not expire with it and so when I saw the kite vendor next to the road that runs between Ajijic and San Juan Cosala, I immediately pulled over, turned around and went back to examine the glorious three-dimensional fabric kites. They were in the shapes of birds of prey, dragons, fish, and other fanciful creatures. I chose a hawk and a dragon and bought both.
I couldn’t wait to get home and go up to my roof to fly one. Ground level at my house furnishes too many places for a kite to get tangled up in: bougainvillea vines, palm trees, roof tiles and phone lines. I went up the stairs to the second level terraza and unfurled the hawk kite. It was a windy day and it did not disappoint, but soon rose to the full extension of its string. Real birds occasionally circled around it, wondering no doubt what weird bird was this. But after a few minutes, when I looked down from the mesmerizing sight of my own kite hovering far above, I noticed in amazement a similar kite soaring high above my neighbor’s house down below.
Not one but two men were up on the high dome of their house flying a kite! Now I must say that I had lived in my house for sixteen years and had still never met these neighbors. There is an empty lot between us as well as high walls surrounding both of our properties, as is the norm in Mexico. Tall trees and weeds have grown up between us and they are just occasional weekend visitors to their vacation house. We share a gardener, Pasiano, and that has been the extent of our relationship for the now 18 years I’ve been residing here. But they seemed to spot my kite the moment I spotted theirs. I waved from my high perch. They waved from theirs, further down the hill. And I think we both felt a momentary sense of unity.
Since then, that kite has resided, rewound into a tight bundle, in my umbrella stand, along with its fellow kite, still a virgin and as a result, more tightly and professionally wound. I don’t know why I’d never thought to fly either of them since then, but as I was packing to go to the beach last January, my eye fell on the umbrella stand. No need for an umbrella at the beach, but a kite? Yes! I chose the more flamboyant red dragon kite. I would finally see it fully extended! The cord was stuck into the cellophane sheath that surrounded it–a flat plastic structure with the strong braided nylon cord wound tightly around it. Into my fully-packed car it went.
Once I arrived in La Manzanilla, the kite took up residence with my art supplies, sticking up out of a large plastic box that sat on the dining table bench behind the table, which was never used for dining but instead became my computer table and art center. There was much to do–greeting old friends, working on music for CD’s to go with my children’s books, writing groups and readings, planning art activities for friends, swimming, beach combing, dining, dancing, observing the nightly parades that streamed by my house, dealing with the all-night LOUD music from nearby bars, coping with the muffler-less motorcycles that streamed by my house at 3 in the morning.
It was a month after I’d arrived at the beach that my eye fell on my long-overlooked second kite. It was a nice windy day on the beach. I’d seen at least one other kite flying–something I’d never witnessed in the ten years I’d been coming to this relatively sleepy little town. Here were no high-rise hotels or swinging discotheques like the ones in Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlan. Here were little restaurants and night spots frequented by the ever-increasing number of American and Canadian writers, musicians, actors and artists who swelled out the population of the little town for 6 months of every year—those months before the humidity and heat grew too intense to bear.
So, finally, I took my wonderful kite out for its inaugural flight. Assembly required only crossing two long slender plastic spines and slipping their ends into pouched slots on the snout, tail end and two front legs of the dragon and attaching the cord to a center ring. The long expanse of the cord was wound around a flat plastic spindle that had been packaged up with the kite. I slathered on sunscreen and went out to my back porch that overlooked the beach, descended the stairs and began to unwind the cord. The kite rose immediately into the air, born by the strong coastal breeze. It shot upwards and upwards and upwards and––then it was soaring up and over the long line of vacation rentals and restaurants that lined the beach and I was holding the cord winder to which, it seems, the cord had not been attached!
Within seconds, my beautiful kite was gone with the wind and out of sight. I ran quickly down the beach to a small restaurant that furnished ingress to the main street of the little town that fronted the house I rented every year. I ran out onto the street, madly looking up and down for my kite, fearing to find it plastered against the windshield of a wrecked car or in broken splinters, shards and rags after being run over. I looked up and down, up and down, then ran to the center of the street to finally see it, a block away, held streaming behind the form of a small girl on the back of her mother’s motorcycle, speeding down the brick-paved street into the distance. I ran after it, shouting, creating quite a spectacle of myself, then stopped, realizing they would probably make the circuit around the plaza and come back again, as all the other motorcycles always did. But alas, I never saw the motorcycle or the little girl and mother or my beautiful new kite again. They had vanished into the labyrinthine sand streets of the little town.
For another month, I looked for it in the skies above the beach. The house I rent is only one building away from the main paved entrance to the beach and the hub of beach life, but alas, it never appeared. I console myself with the thought of the astonishment of the little girl as it soared over the rooftops and within her reach—her delight as she held it streaming out behind her, her other hand securely clutching her mother as they created a beautiful spectacle witnessed by everyone watching that day from sidewalks, benches or the inside of stores, restaurants and galleries along that main thoroughfare. Witnessed by me, standing center-road, regretting its loss. But at night, before I fall to sleep, as I look for the ten thousandth time at the paintings that cover the walls of my bedroom, I imagine that little girl in her room, my splendid red dragon kite tacked to the adobe wall in front of her bed. Her little miracle. Her treasure, perhaps, for the rest of her life.
Prompt words today were kite, scorn, labyrinthine and instant. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/rdp-saturday-kite/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/03/30/fowc-with-fandango-scorn/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/your-daily-word-prompt-labyrinthine-march-30-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/instant/
Click on any photo to enlarge all and read captions.
https://xingfumama.blog/2019/01/25/pull-up-a-seat-photo-challenge-2019-week-4/
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 